A Personal History Of Books

War and Peace
is something I was pressured to read
way back then
but instead I meandered through his ruminations on some long forgotten Afghan war
from the nineteenth century
and decided that Tolstoy was not that asinine (or very problably was)
so it made him a bore.

I wish I had wasted the fourteen dollars
at the bar,
which brings me to some distant memory
of seeing some short sleeved man
reading a hardcover book at The Matador
for everybody to see
regardless that he was in a bar
with no light.
I felt like throwing his book,
the apparition of the image
made me want to vomit in disgust,
as is often the case when I am in public
and without spirit,
just looking through pictures of faces
and their stupid get ups
that they buy for kicks, I guess
(I refuse to call them "hipsters"
whatever that means for us here
and the rest of the world).

I liked Vonnegut
when I was in high school
but I realized later
that all Holy Hell
and Beauty
was lacking from his work,
there was nothing but just Shit
and some misbegotten "Damned if You Do"
mentality about the whole affair
that made his work seem fascicious later
until I realized that he was writing for famous monsters
that would later prove that they couldn't read
when they were burning his books
twenty odd years after their publication.

Dostoyevsky
Fyodor
had some quacky hand
when he kept saying stuff
and I thought I loved it when I was nineteen
but I realize that he was a gambler
and just in the profession to get published
so he would cram garbage about anything anywhere he could,
like Rashkolnikov's bloody sock
that I had a dumb conversation about once.

Celine I think I liked
because he had compassion
even though he was completely nuts.

There are many more,
Krauss writing plainly but without heart about Love
and as someone is probably my witness,
she could have just been John Dillenger with a pseudonym.

For awhile there
it seemed like all American writing was about Family
only (and I don't want to be arrested by some Literary Felon/Cop)
but Sedaris seemed to sum it all up with his pinch faced
lack of awareness
about what supposedly makes people
quirky
and I realize in retrospect
how unintentionally sad and familiar his stories were,
especially the one about him doing meth and pretending to be some visual artist
which he crammed into Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Palahinuk or however you spell 'em
was some weird enigma
that ended up seeming worse than anal sex
because he wrote about some of the dumbest and grossest things
that have been committed to paper,
like that Fight Club where some Jackass Forgets that He is In Charge of A Fighting Club
or whatever happened
in the other one where the Jackass is Choking Himself In Restaurants For Money On A Premise Devoid of Reality and Meanwhile He Has All This Sex As A Homeless Prostitute.
But really what takes the cake were his other two,
something about Jackass Telling A Story On A Crashing Plane and Trying To Make It Raw for the Audience,
and then the other one about Jackass Forgetting That He Was Not A Woman and Will Not Have A Baby, or something just as seemingly Idiotic.
What I liked about him
was that he was gay,
so I didn't have to compare myself to him
when I was young and writing
not for an occupation
but merely to see all that language begin to pour out
through natural adult developmental stages
and how odd it is
to try to chart the psyche of an adolescent
who wrote forty page short stories.

Dreiser was another Bore,
he was up there with Cheever
and you had Mailer, Sartre, Bukowski, and Philip K Dick
using Meth
to get their work finished
but I guess Hunter S Thompson never overdosed
so there was that

Orwell seemed ominous
but now it is more transparant
that all he saved were political allegoires
as a weapon
to sound high fallutant.

Then there are all these Modern Authors
who write like Advertising Campaigns,
trying to through in something for That Sweet Housewife
along with Strange Over Educated Billy Who Read So Much That He Became Delusional.

Don't get me started on the science fiction,
but to tell you the truth here
maybe Ray Bradbury ended up being the only author I ever really liked.