How I Create

Creating something in writing is mostly a matter of immediacy or memory. If outrages are immediate, I respond: things like Neoconservatives, they are very immediate and extremely distasteful. I visualize Paul Wolfowitz speaking about the cost of the Iraq War and he is transformed before my eyes into General Buck Turgidson. When Wolfie sez "It'll cost a billion!...Tops!", or course it is George C. Scott as General Turgidson saying that the kill rate of the impending nuclear exchange will be 10 million...tops.

All very immediate and all very clear and built upon my memory, my present, and the future...which is a difficult notion to grasp: the future and how it impends upon the present. I always had trouble with "the future" until I realized that the only difference between the past, present, and future was the tense of the verb I was using: I used to see, I see, and I shall see. Which is to say, visions of the future are the same as visions right now (if you believe in visionary experiences, that is)...the seer only uses the future tense and this is what distinguishes the prophet from the raconteur of old stories. Anyway, so we have all these things tumbled together. I read of Edward Hopper the painter. I was in D.C. recently and went to the exhibit of Hopper. In my body and mind, Hopper's paintings are the past and very tense, waiting for some megatons of foreplay that seem to be held up somewhere, possibly by a train schedule mix up, and the Transcontinental never pulls into Grand Central on time. I love Hopper...and Chop Suey.

Then I read in L'Humanite a review of a new film by Ken Loach, director, and Paul Laverty, screenwriter, called It's All Free! The antagonists (at one time, there was a good debate about whether you could have more than 1 antagonist in a work of fiction) are the heroines who are the capitalists and, hence, potential villains for the communist inspired L'Humanite: "As expected, all tricks are permitted, especially the most underhand ones, resulting in a film that is at once action-packed, realist and picaresque, full of twists and turns. Viewers are obviously struck by the fact that the two villains of the day are women, one of whom is black. There is no concern for political correctness here, but instead we witness the eternal struggle for bread and survival, irrespective of gender or race." And now I am at the 1930's. It is winter and there is steam heat. A beautiful lady comes into the Chop Suey Palace and removes her coat...her clothes have the electricity of velvet and the scent of perfume turbo-charged as the steam vapors create an aesthetic ram into my nose. The radiators rattle slightly. And we go to a room, a corner room in the Flat Iron Building in New York, when the sun has set early in this Mystery Clock production...the sky is dark...we turn on the lights and raise the shades, letting our desires be hidden by the most flimsy hijab of diaphonous curtains. Far below where the Millenium Hilton once stood, we see the almost empty Krispy Kreme shop.

It was destroyed in 9/11... The Krispy Kreme gal is the same as one of the Chop Suey gals...or they're both there and one is ordering dougnuts in the second picture. These two ladies go into business during the Depression and with their success, the communist newspaper L'Humanite denounces their depredations of the working classes... That's how it's done.