Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer

"Oh, all of it ... being alive ... having something that thinks in us, that makes us have silly and wonderful thoughts ... like we were somehow important ... like maybe what we do and can't do has an importance which if we understood or felt deeply enough about would bring us nearer to - "

Kenneth Patchen - Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer

I was working until 4am last night, and having gotten up at 11am I feel as if I shouldn't have stretched myself so hard because I needed to face a full day of more work.

Anti-erotica is a strange sort of thing and I think I found an example in Kenneth Patchen's "Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer", it reminds me of some short surreal Spanish novels of the 1930s. This novel was written in 1945 and as an influence on the Beats I find it much more interesting to peer into the minds of the "lesser" known originators of style, form and content then to learn off those who refined the ideas and therefore closed the gaps on method - more useful I say, indeed more interesting, but not necessarily better.

For my own work anyway, that's why I ended up reading James Joyce's "Stephen Hero" and not "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", "Stephen Hero" I found to be far more interesting because it was intended for publication as was but got rejected by so many publishers that Joyce threw it onto the fire but his wife rescued it. Now there's a good companion for you. So "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was the dupe work, refined and full of spoofing readers who suffer self-adoration at solving ambiguous riddles that aren't. People feel good about themselves if they feel they "get" something even if there is nothing there to be had.

Kenneth Patchen's novel is anti-erotica, the central character Budd is thrown by deceit and through having his writing vandalised, endures a perverse and deep stink of depravity to those surrounding him, he himself is kind of virginal. I guess like Kosinski's Chance, the misunderstandings that seem to be understood in all the right ways.



A threesome as written by Kenneth Patchen in "Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer".

Last night I was convinced by a friend to meet up for a few beers, just one or two, at a pub over the way - of course one or two beers always ends up being about ten and a few wines. I had already drunken a nice bottle of Shiraz at home and felt weak willed enough to accept the invitation, it was only a few beers with a good friend. So the night ended at 4am in the morning, we ended up at our favourite smoking bar where the law is evaded, and wine drunk and cigarettes can be puffed away at inside as musicians are still making Mediterranean music on the stage well after all the other pubs and clubs have shut their doors.

Before that however we were busting a few moves at a local establishment after we had left the other pub over the way whose beer garden license shut at 11am, something to do with the neighbours wanting quiet Saturday nights, and a lackluster atmosphere began to pervade the joint, we had to flee, to flee to a pub closer to home that in comparison when we arrived was over flowing at the brims with boozy folk, live music and a beer garden that was crawling with people. We sat down on a couch and spent a good hour transfixed by a girl reclining, half passed out, with her short dress well hitched beyond the smooth round half of a naked buttock. Our heads must have looked like a pair of lighthouse beacons in her peripheral vision because she made the necessary adjustments to cover the exposed bit of relish we were admiring.

After the beer garden dregs had been rounded up to spend the rest of the night inside. My friend and I took to the dance floor for some hip wriggling and feet bopping. I left my book on a mantel shelf near our pints and upon returning from the dance floor noticed a group flicking through it. The chief of the group was a saucy lass with a neon belt that had words flashing across it. It turns out she had bit of sexual oomph, and was I pleased to have my booked flicked through, but unfortunately that was the best I got. It turns out a book club is being formed at the pub, and I may just dog ear my presence there.

I might choose something raunchy to bring to the group, you never know what a book might inspire.