my memoir/expose will be called ‘i hate gurdjieff: a memoir of the 4th way.’

I am fascinated by these book store snapshots, what’s with that?

‘why i am not a moslem’…sounds like a good title for a sufi shark expose.
(bad joke.)

did you hear about, maybe you know the story? of when salman rushdie’s satanic verses came out and book stores were getting bomb threats from islamic fundamentalists if they so much as carried it? jeannette watson, owner of books & co (you probably shopped there?) in new york, and her staff, decided, after receiving the bomb threats, to order a huge amount from the publisher and do a ’satanic verses’ window display–right there on madison avenue! (i think it was madison avenue? next to the whitney museum?) luckily, they were not bombed. on one rainy afternoon though, a tall man with a beard, wearing a trench coat and a low-brimmed fedora hat, stealthily entered the store. maybe no one even noticed him? he wandered over to the mountainous stacks of rushdie’s satanic verses and took out a pen. patrons of the store soon noticed that the mystery man was discreetly SIGNING each book: ’salman rushdie.’ the legend goes that rushdie stayed like that for hours, quietly signing until each and every book was signed. books and co quickly sold all the copies of ’satanic verses’ they had bought.

rimbaud
james baldwin
richard brautigan
thoreau
kenneth patchen
van morrison
william s. burroughs
jack keruoac
thomas pynchon
thomas de quincey
charles baudelaire
anne rice
oscar wilde
allen ginsberg
norman mailer
frida kahlo
mary oliver
edgar allen poe
sebold
gregory corso
william shakespeare
chelsea quinn yarbro
marianne faithful
the rolling stones
bjork
nick cave
maya lin
martin scorcese

an incomplete list from a bad memory…only open five hours!

if anything will save us, poetry might, math never will (?????)

the place poetry comes from doesn’t go away–unless maybe you make some really bad life choices (sell-out) like i’ve always thought rimbaud must have???. i think it waits. do you feel it more in spring? did you ever come to california? l.a? are you making up the details of a phony bio? that would be very sufi of you if it were true…..i used to write short stories before i met x. he moved in and the computer promptly went broken. literally! didn’t turn back on ’til 3 monthes after x was gone. by then the urge to write seemed like narcissitstic clap-trap. i shut it way down and haven’t been able to start it back up again, ten years later, even by wishing and trying. mysterious. please don’t stop…

most of all maybe…i wonder what you mean by this:

‘I mention all this because the issue of poets, or being one, was, more than some narcissistic art trip, a means to discover the dark side of the ’sufi hyenas’, on the prowl to vampirize some unsuspecting dupe of sufism.’

i wish i knew what you meant, but i don’t.