So you think you have a gift!

Comes to reading, I'm so busy with the blogging these days that I am like the Champion Oyster Eater out of old Bob and Ray radio.

....They are interviewing a man on a very early prototype radio show of something like "Man Versus Food."

They ask the champion oyster eater, "How many oysters did you eat today?"

He answers, "Three"

"Three?...I though you were the champon oyster eater!"

Champ:

"Yeah, but they're slippery little devils!"

Well, to do a one-eighty, I must admit that I have read one, count it, one novel this year.

For a writer, that's unconsciable....Sure, there were lots of shorts stories and articles, lots of blog read. But one novel?

It was called "The Communist's Daughter" by some Canadian writer, and after myself having married Red Rosie at one point--I didn't want to view another old Ninochka film with Greta Garbo. But "Daughter" was different...an old Commie's excuses for having to abandon a daughter whom he'd never seen. He had to go and find the Way!
It's almost a familiar quest with talented people.
Genius songstress Joni Mitchell did the same thing. Some tabloids said, "Bitch genius abandons daughter," but then don't we all sometimes give it all up for the beautiful songs, or, in our case, what we think are beautiful songs...Compared to those of Joni Mitchell, why in hell did we run off to Tahiti or somewhere e, only to find, after losing everything, that our songs were more like Barry Manifold.

"How many oysters did you eat?"

"Three."...because the oysters of creativity are slippery!

The god has a price, and it might well be your teeth...and even hair...I mean come on, have you ever tried to write a novel? It's impossible!...so you write stuff like I'm writin' now!
For sure I should be reading more, certainly reading more novels. The beast has to feed!
But no, only one novel read all the way through this year.. About the Commie's daughter....He doing a Leon Trotsky and almost getting hammered out, as he explains to his estranged daughter. Got the Trotsky trots. Went for a dump.

Familiar story...Samson, Intending to meet lions on the path. And he finally knowing that he was a mouse. Squeaking his excuses.

Don't he seem a little like you and me?
The gradiose plan, the calclulated risk;
And wham! Rumpelstitskin.

Somebody will call your name.

Asshole?

You'd better get back to reading, would-be Shakespeare. Read some real books besides your clumsy scrawls.

Somebody has already done you, but better.
Hard to top the noble wop.
Dante Alleghieri.
Ya should have read him/her before you started out on your journey to Tahiti.

But then, you are secretly like a mainland Italian:

No future.
...But like Dante's compusive sinner in Hell,

what a past!

This is the strangest of all secrets.

"In the middle of the journey of our lives..."

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