Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

An old friend from San Francisco, the tough-guy actor and outspoken gay activist J.E. Freeman, just sent this poem to me and asked if I could repost it for National Coming Out Day , which I am very glad to do, as the suicides of those young  people are also weighing heavily on my mind: Unfortunately to be free requires sometimes that one fight back The most expensive quality in life is freedom. Freedom is never free. Never without cost. The price is not caring what the price is The price is to dare to be unafraid. Or if afraid to stand any way in fear and to take what comes. For what else makes courage? How else are heroes made? It is by facing that which we fear and surviving. It lies in requiring in demnding the haters to stand exposed in the light of their hatred which is only their own fear lashing out. To kill one's self is to become one's own executioner. It is to buy into the verdict of the hater. If one must die for one's freedom make the h...

Jack Kerouac died forty years ago today at the age of 47, in many ways an alien to my generation. But was he a free man? About as free as any of us can be, I suppose. And he could write like an angel. Kerouac’s technique, which he called Spontaneous Prose, was a subject he loved to cover over and over again. Here’s his list of thirty essentials under the title “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”: 1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside your own house 4. Be in love with your life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove l...

Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine... Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man—he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought—I must write, I must write, I must write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth—I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can’t help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it’s a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I don’t forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano—I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope, I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the color worn by widow...

J.D. Salinger in his later years. J.D. Salinger hasn’t published much fiction in the last half-century, but the guy can still crank out a lawsuit when he needs to. The latest: Salinger, 90, has sued to enjoin the publication of a sequel of sorts to his most famous and celebrated novel,  Catcher in the Rye . The sequel, called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye , is written by a purported American living in Sweden named John David California. The novel portrays a 76-year old Holden Caulfield—the famed protagonist of the original work—wandering the streets of New York after having escaped from a retirement home.

About a week ago I had to opportunity to view again, after twenty years, an arty but satisfying film by director-documentarian Jill Godmilow, called Waiting for the Moon . Plotless and rather devil-may-care when it came to realistic chronology, it depicted the lives of Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, as they spent them in the artistically rich atmosphere of pre-war Paris and their peaceful country house in the French province of Ain, near the Swiss border. Their days spent in Ain hold a particular glamour for writers. For who among us has not longed for that quiet place, where nothing is heard but the rustling of the leaves, the whistling of the teakettle and the steady scratch of pen on paper? And who among us has not longed for that ever-present companion who understands and fulfills not only our bodily needs—in kitchen and bedroom—but our fundamental need to get the words down right, and in order, the way we see them in our head? And, of course, how many of us...