The writer as pugilist - one more time
We all compete. We do.
Hemingway competed with Tolstoi, Tolstoi competed with God. Thing is, God farmed out his work to ghost writers, Moses maybe being the most prolific, Saul/Paul being the most ambitious.
Me?
I don't compete with nobody except the ghost of Richard Brautigan that haunted my last IBM Selectric, which I sold in a yard sale during a fleeting disembrace of materialism during the 80s. Long story. Never mind.
I have a literary trick.
Wear hats.
Different hats for different venues.
Wearing my pugilistic Popeye Doyle hat right now.
Makes me clip sentences, drop pronouns, crave donuts.
You know, late 1950s New York City, short brim curved up all the way around, flat top, austere, pugilistic, like the hat your bookie wore when he came to collect, no nonsense, garlic-breathed hat with attitude.
So this, then, is a riff, not a story.
Like feather stick jazz and a full-blown altro sax for the take-off. Yes, altro sax. What of it?
I'm cool. You're not. Attitude is everything in life.
If it begs a reference, there is none, Jack, do without. It's self-referential, down and dirty American literature.
It is it's own genre, Professor Whitebread, toke it or walk. I could care less. It's like James Joyce making the scholars dance to his chants, laughing while they hire Mick Priests to explain away the metaphors.
Gotcha!
Get it?
No?
How very unhip.
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Author's Note
Bringing this one back to the menu because I like it.
It wasn't really edited, but written in a single pass. Spontaneous combustion. I was feeling... pugilistic at the time and sort of mean. Feel that way a lot lately.
Don't pick your feet in Poughkeepsie. In fact, unless you got the right hat and you're armed to the teeth, don't even go there.
Other stories by James Lloyd Davis
- A grocery list found in a pocket at the end of another story
- The tenth point of possession being this... Rev2
- I fall out of love, learn not to worry, and get ready to embrace the foreign war...
- Trout Fishing in America Shorty lives on after the death of his dear friend Richard Brautigan, though sadly
- Trying to remember something else, I recall supreme and utter solitude in a far off time and place
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Oh yes, attitude trumps pulchritude any day. My favorite of your many fine pieces.
"I'm cool. You're not. Attitude is everything in life.
If it begs a reference, there is none, Jack, do without. It's self-referential, down and dirty American literature."
A strong blast, James. Good piece.
*
I wish I had learned this earlier in life. A damn fine punch of a piece. *
I always suspected James Joyce was laughing. *
*
it's American lit, jack.
The voice is all.
"And Henry, bring water, lots of water..."
Thank you, everyone. My attitude changes often, sometimes combative, sometimes softening to compassion and the clarity of self-deprecation, often difficult concepts to distinguish one from the other, but always with an eye to telling the truth as I see it... truth in fiction... more than possible. I feel it's a mandate.
**fav, just loved this piece so much, loved the purling words thru a very strong affirmative voice, cheers