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And number ten. Which means I'm the bookends of IA, I suppose.
It feels amazing to have Boxes and Arrows regonized so young. Though for the record, it could not have been done it without Erin Malone, George Olsen, David Bloxsom, MadonnaLisa Gonzalas Chan and the rest of the staff AND the unbelieveable authors who have generously written for neither money nor fame but just a hope to reach someone with a message. The article mistakenly says it was my effort, and that is far from the truth.
Anyhoo.
Greece is cold and rainy, but still cool. Settled on Paros. I hoped to be here yesterday, but Athens had a general strike. No taxis, no metro, no ferries no nothing. We arrived at the port via an overcrowded irregularly running bus exhausted thinking we had missed our boat only to discover no boats were running at all. We stayed in a rundown hotel that looked lieke it was decorated by frank sinatra and the rat pack. The room with bright tangerine, and had many many mirrors (we all know what that means, yes?) but Tracy and I slept peacably enough (except for a lonely midnight dog) and woke at daybreak to sucessfully leave on a ferry full of teens heading for san torini. I started reading the alexandria quartet with Justine. Lawerence Durell. I wonder if william Burroughs read Lawerence's work-- Burroughs could have been seeking Alexandria in his Interzone, I think. It's written like marmelade, but it's interesting and compelling and sometimes a sentence makes you stop short like a line of poetry-- sulking youth out seeking a fellow nakedness (warning, possible paraphrase, i'm working from my untrustworthy memory). Anyhow, a pleasurable change to read one who both has a level of craft and has something to write *about* I also read a New Yorker cover to cover on the ferry, and there was a terrific article on teachign art that suggested that art was no longer about the world, but about art history and thus decadent and irrelevent. The two books, Club Dumas and Justine suggest similar things about literature. But I digress (and at how many Euros a minute, I wonder).
more to come...
I haven't read anything by Lawrence Durrell, but when I was young I read a book by his brother, Gerald, called "My Family and Other Animals," in which Lawrence came across as a somewhat overbearing older brother, but completely human, a trait you don't normally consider in great authors.
The book took place on the island of Corfu; reading it made me want to go there.