NATHAN L. HENRY

The keys of an old typewriter given to me as a birthday gift from my dear friend Mike, and the cat fur trapped between the keys.

IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME...

What books should I read, Nate? I look around and there are just assloads of books everywhere and I don't want to read the classics because they're boring as hell, and I don't really dig mysteries or sci-fi or fantasy and I hate all this crap about vampires--what I really want is some solid hard-core shit I can really dig into, stuff about real life, written by guys who lived like hell, or at least did the best they could, guys who were clear-eyed about how the world really was and is, how of course it's all shit, and we know it's all shit, but they made it work--they didn't bullshit their way out--you know what I mean? I would say, Yes, my friend, I know exactly what you mean, and I'm going to give you exactly what you've been looking for. These guys aren't taught in ninth grade English class--hell, they're not even taught in colleges--it's like they've swept back into some kind of secret, shameful, shady corner of American literature, and when you run into another person by chance somewhere who knows about this gang, or at least about one or two of them, who's in on the secret, it's like meeting some other member of a weird intellectual secret society--why? I'm not exactly sure why it's like this. A lot of people will say they were into some of these guys when they were young but they "grew out of it." All I can say to that is that grown men wrote those books for people with open minds, so your version of growing out or growing up must be some kind of hardening, some kind of entropy--we see it all the time, you know exactly what I mean (and to be honest, I think this has a lot to do with having kids--it produces an impenetrable pretense in people). Well, I don't have any kids, and I never grew out of having an open mind and trusting that a clear-eyed, no-nonsense assessment of reality was the only decent way to go about trying to get a handle on life. My favorite writers are the guys who knew the world was shit, and by this I mean that they knew civilization was a scam, that it was all stacked against the individual--CONFORM OR DIE is what it seems to say. My heroes said, Fuck all that. I won't conform and I will not die. I'm gonna live and I'm going to insist on having a life worth loving, without any pretense, without any lies. These guys, though they may get a bad rap for being dope addicts, homos, psychopaths, atheists and misogynists, they are--believe me--the only one's I've found who've actually tried to love life, to keep their passion for life sacred even though the world tried to snuff it out--these are the true revolutionaries. So that's why I'm giving you this list. These are the guys who remind me that you don't need to accept the bullshit in order to live--you are your own reason for being here. You don't have to roll over and take it up the ass--or at least don't pretend that it's not what's happening. These are my heroes.

Sunday, October 11, 2009