I told my friend Lynda that I want to read old and important books cause I'm old and being important wouldn't be so bad. I have this great book ... 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I better get going. I come upon Rosseau. I thought he was a painter, a Naive one, the one who painted the big very flat lion in profile. Rosseau the writer wrote Reveries of a Solitary Walker which is described as a wonderfully lyrical, heartfelt and somewhat obsessive account of an aging man's reckoning with his past. I'll give it a try if reading a bit of it at the Strand doesn't turn me off. They say its a vital precursor to the great novels of isolation and despair: Dostoevsky, Beckett, Salinger. Franny and Zooey is one of my favorite books.
Don
Donald Dean Kelly died on June 5th. He was my big one. We were twenty six when we met. We walked past each other in the Village late one night and both of us turned around. He was wearing a giant parka with a pulled up fur-trimmed hood. Gushing beard, big ugly 70s glasses. I only saw the tip of his nose. For me, it was love at first nose. We went to a bar and had beers and I played with the ring pulls on his pants that zipped down the front. He told me he was a conceptual artist/ live-in babysitter. He once wrote on an egg and mailed it. He slept over and in the morning, I walked him to the subway. He grabbed my arm - wait a minute . He went in an antiques store and came out and put a small kaleidoscope in my palm. And thus began our many years of promised land and civil war. Most days, he mumbled and stammered but, once in a blue moon, he landed a joke or story river stone smooth. He once found an 8 by 10 foot mirror on the street. We both bled when it shattered carrying it up the mar...
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