Outer space, comin’ in. Got some Joycean interminglings here, I’m gut at it. Get rugged again, ruggged and tough like Miller and Hemingway and thick-fingered writers with a typewriter in a suitcase with a strong smell of leather. I want more words, more sounds, braid and weave them to a napkin of language you can blow your nose and blow your mind. What is the strength of prose? I mean not its effect on society, its influence as a text that may becomes be canonical. I mean cramming words and connections and associations, commas, dashes, transliterations of sounds, lulls, cramming it all into a few sentences to leave the reader stunned and to change him. To tore his identity as a reader to pieces and challenge him to build it up again. To make him jump smile cry laugh and be good.
In one of the many coffee place I write here, I see a jacket on a chair and think some guys left it there. I see them walk out the door, think not a second, pick up the jacket and follow them, “hey is this yours?” Another guy comes running at me and grabs my arm. I am wrong. It is not the jacket of the businessmen who left. It is the jacket of that other guy who was just ordering his coffee. I apologize and – he apologizes too. Remember I am in Asia. We have a short conversation about cultural deference and difference, about working in coffee places and reserving your seat by putting your jacket on it.
I have a delicious dinner and then a long walk home, enjoying a detour through Namsan park with its soft green road made of rubber. I am singing Michael Jackson songs because he died yesterday.