The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

It's late to be reading it. I could have been more inspired reading it back when I was 18 and reading Kerouac as well and trying a lot of that shit for the first time. But still. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. What it makes me think about now isn't so much 'Man, how do I open those doors for myself and prop them open for a while?' but more just about sub-culture. The newest thing on the edge. How did the Beats turn into the Heads, and what was before the Beats? Who is on the edge of the edge right now, and pushing further? Even at the turn of the century, there must have been that group of people taking it where it hadn't been yet, doing something different. But if the current sub-culture is technology-based, if it's about metal implants and genetic modification, I'm not so interested. Maybe that makes me the same in a 2007-type way as the suburban work-a-daddies horrified by the Day-Glo bus driving through their neighbourhood. I don't know. The kind of edge I want to push towards involves free living, directed by intuition. Going where it goes. Where is the most current sub-culture on the literary and intellectual edge, and going further? That's what I'd like to know. Maybe if I take off somewhere warm for a while, with my backpack and sketchpad and a novel-in-progress, find a good surf beach to kick back on and throw around a lot of ideas with whoever's there, maybe that's my Day-Glo bus. I'm hoping. Discipline leads to prolificacy. Prolificacy leads to innovation, and that, ultimately, is what I'm going for. Innovative expression of the things everyone already knows but hasn't put into words or pictures yet.

Which Brings Me To You

I'm reading this book I found on the library display shelf, Which Brings Me to You. I was pretty skeptical checking it out yesterday. Couldn't quite tell what kind of book it would be. It's fiction, a series of confessional letters between two people who met briefly at a wedding. Looking at the premise of the book, and the cover, and the two authors' photographs, I thought maybe I was checking out a beach read by mistake, like one of those Shop-A-Holic books or the Nanny Diaries or whatever.

But this book is great. The writing's really fresh and funny. At one point the woman's describing her parents' perception of university culture. She says, "A pair of art professors lived on our street. My parents treated them like they were giraffes. If they didn't mow their lawn or take their garbage around back, my parents forgave them with a kind of shrug that seemed to say: Can't blame them. They're giraffes after all. God bless 'em, they only have hooves."

Describing his first time at a shooting range, the man writes, "It shocked me how much the gun wanted to move. It leapt about in my hands, like a heavy fish." I can feel that gun even though I've never held one. He tells the woman "Beauty is the cure of the weak." Not a cure for weakness, but the cure of the weak. I like that.

These two authors have given me way more than I was expecting. It's still light reading, for sure, but crafted and funny.

Happy Canada Day, or . . .?

In Wayson Choy's book about life during the 1930's in Vancouver's Chinatown, he brings up a little-known fact about July 1st. I think it's best told quoted exactly as written:

". . . Thousands [of Chinese] came in the decades before 1923, when on July 1st the Dominion of Canada passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and shut down all ordinary bachelor-man traffic between Canada and China, shut off any women from arriving, and divided families. Poverty-stricken bachelor-men were left alone in Gold Mountain, with only a few dollars left to send back to China every month, and never enough dollars to buy passage home. Dozens went mad; many killed themselves. The Chinatown Chinese call July 1st, the day celebrating the birth of Canada, the Day of Shame."

Celebrate It or Ignore It

I'm reading my roommate Lennie's copy of Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. Lennie's a good buddy of mine, and we used to work together guiding sea kayak trips. I came across a part in the book where Switters, the main character, gets mad at himself for whining about the heat. Weather, he explains, ". . . ought either to be celebrated or ignored."

So I kept reading, thinking that was a quote I should really write down. I work in weather. Kayak guiding, bike couriering, it's all weather all the time. May as well celebrate it or ignore it.

A few paragraphs later, I find Switters' weather philosophy mentioned again, and this time, it's underlined in pencil. Could only be Lennie; it's his book. Lennie works in weather, too. Something to quote for the kayak clients during the next downpour. He probably already has.