Peter Lucas Erixon: NOTISER; anteckningar, annat

"[The writer] He has to keep traveling intuitively. He has to get off boats and planes to keep looking for new scenes he will need to write twenty years later. He may need to spend weeks in bed with the covers pulled over his head."

William Burroughs in Victor Bockris' A Report From the Bunker (1981)

This morning: jogging on the High Line, the restored old railway one level above the streets, eighteen blocks long or something, now made into a beautiful walking path with plants of all sorts on both sides.
   Had breakfast.
   Walked slowly downtown, taking pictures for the movie. Watching people. Thinking. Thinking about Allen Ginsberg, I just finished reading one of the last interviews he gave. He should've had the Nobel Prize in Literature, of course. What a great mind.
   Why didn't I meet him?
   I didn't.
   Wearing my black very cool sunglasses. Thinking of work I'll soon do.
   Walked down to Washington Square Park. Made a couple of drawings. Sun shining. Walked down to MacDougal. Patti's daughter came out of the café just when I walked in. She's thin, beautiful, same age as my daughter.
   Had a light lunch: omelette and a cup of coffee.
   It's warm.
   Walking all the way back, after going in to bookstore after bookstore, I had a wonderful icecold Budweiser and the guy behind the bar told me, happily, that Carlos Santana just walked out the door.
   Ah, a Budweiser.

I'm at home. I should be living here. Maybe I really should. I've seen apartments in abandoned houses. I could stay in one of those for the summer. M:s laughing at me. I say: or I could just live out in Central Park, behind some rocks, it's big you know. Mr. M. keeps laughing, just a little bit. He don't think it's a great idea.
   They should let artist's and poet's and musician's stay in those dark, empty spaces and let them work there, for free. Three months at a time. I could stay with a couple of hundred of cockroaches for a summer. I saw the really big one's in South America when I was traveling there when I was eighteen. That's some big roaches.
   I would write a couple of books.
   I would write some psalms too.
   I should have a piano too and record my improvisations.
   I would start every day with jogging for an hour, very early in the morning.
   I could invite some friends every now and then.
   I could invite Mr. Sandstrom from the Symphony Orchestra to come and play some clarinet.
   I told someone the other day: there must be a small dark closet somewhere where I could stay for a period. Tell me when you hear about any such place. A closet would be fine.

At Strand Books for a couple of hours. I bought so many books! I could for sure be alone in a closet with a lot of books for quite a while.
   I asked for some signed copies by a favourite American author. I looked through all their poetry. Nothing by Jim Carroll, who I once met in the green room before a reading. He was thin and pale. 

I love books. I carry them around. I read them, fast or slow. I admire, always, people with patience enough writing them. The serious ones, that is. Not the crap. Not the crap. 

One day I might get me a Green Card. Who knows. I might just do that.
   It's a thought, anyway.

" --- to hold up the totem pole of ever-expanding profits, there has to be a 'nigger' at the bottom."

                                                            Al Young (in the preface to Major Jackson's first collection of poems   
                                                            Leaving Saturn (The University of Georgia Press, 2002) 

Had breakfast. Bagle, that awful tasteless cheeze, some marmelade based on colored sugar.
   Feeling extremely bad all day long about not meeting my old friend Ben yesterday. I was exchausted. It was late. I was a bad person. But I was tired. Well -

Walked. Been to Roosevelt Island, did I tell you that already? Saw the ruins of the mental institution where Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith once, well stole, a baby foster in a glas cylinder filled with cloroform. I saw the ruins. I thought about Patti's book, Just Kids. What a memoir. What an instant classic.

I walked barefoot. People stared. I didn't mind.

Have been eating too many bagles, it's bagles every morning.

Been to Ground Zero, seen the new buildings under construction. I saw that place only a week after the disaster in 2001. Now it's a new scene.

Reading some stories by Cooper, good but cruel and nasty and grim.
   Been looking at art by Picasso, the great, and Dali (also great), David Hockney and many others at the Met. Saw Gertrude Stein's Last Will. It had a very funny first line! I will read more Stein, although I read quite a lot.
   The Met took hours. Every big museum takes hours and eats you alive, so to speak; but you always go from one or other museum with a great deal left in your mental bagage.

Had lunch right across from The Cathedral of St John  the Divine, where Allens Ginsbergs Memorial Service took place back in 1997. I imagined all the buddist munks chanting over his soul, leaving this world. I remember Patti and Philip Glass and their performance.
   Then walked around for a while in my old neighborhood in Harlem, Madison Avenue/125th Street. Had a nice coffee at a place where I had to joke and laugh together with a bunch of men and women who talked about marriage and stuff.

And then, agan, best, from, always yours - 

Dear friends and readers,

I'm so enjoying myself here. Today: been interviewed by Swedish freelance journalist Catarina Astrom. So maybe you'll see a nice little reportage in, let's say, Svensk Damtidning or Allers or some other weekly magazine. We had a nice chat. She was great. We sat for quite a while. One of the guys at the restaurant filmed the photosession for the upcoming movie about the people and situations arbound this life that happens to be mine.

Reading Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

Going to meet my oldest friends here in the City tonight.

I'll walk the streets, listen to the police car sirens, enjoy the noise, enjoy all the many voices, enjoy it all. As soon as I'm home again it'll br work work work.

Dont forget that the limited and signed sound recording of Silversnoret will be out in the end of May/early july. Be sure to get your copy.