When I was a teenager, my then best friend Lisa DiGennaro proposed that in life there were two things to be aware of, colors and sounds, and circles. I thought at the time she sounded very erudite – I did not then know that she was under the influence of the post-beat writers, Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test) and Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion, and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

I understood what she was getting at because I was reading like-books, such as The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary by James Simon Kunen and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, and Ray Mungo’s Total Loss Farm and In Watermelon Sugar.

Circles and colors

These all are excellent books, and if I live long enough, I will reread them. Tops on my list, of course, is The Strawberry Statement. Then, people were railing against communism. Now they are railing against socialism. A line comes to mind from this book – “Communists make love and have babies, I swear to God they do.” Wow, this quote is still in my head, fifty years later. I remember it, but not where I put my glasses. (I found them, I’d put them on my head).

Colors and Sounds – after being under the influence, what we still see, feel, hear, sense. Circles – history repeats itself. Yes, history is circular, not linear. Of this I am sure. And if one is fortunate to live long enough, then one can make causal connections between what was happening then and what is happening now. I remember Kent State. I remember the Flour City Seven. I remember the 1968 Chicago Convention. I remember the then cries against corporatization – then it was “the system.”

Its important, of course, to not dwell in the past, because supposedly it’s a fiction. But it is important to make the connections between past and present, literary and otherwise. And it’s important, in conversation, to bring these causal connections to the attention of others.

I am glad to have read as much as I have, and to be able to articulate my thoughts to others. Some listen, some don’t. I suspect that if I was younger that younger people would listen. As it is, I am preaching to the choir, and the choir is singing pretty loudly. We are all sitting under the cobalt shadow cast by the stained glass windows in the cathedral. This is undoubtedly reducing the carcinogens in our bodies.

Today I resumed work on the Bright Lights Book Project. In two weeks’ time, elves and sub elves, all with their own agenda, moved innumerable boxes of books around. And they also filled the shopping carts and Gaylords with books to be sent to the mill and shredded. I briefly panicked and then got a grip on myself.

I picked up a copy of Kurt Vonngeut’s Slaughterhouse Five and I thought, huh, colors and sounds. I immediately grew calm, in realizing that I am at the eye of a literary hurricane. Yes, many books that bespeak of the past history of the 1960s and 1970s are going to be shredded. But I can save a given few and pass them on to others who then will be able to make their own causal connections.

Next: 265. 9/25/20: Ryder’s Shadow