Status Updates From Writing across the Landscap...

Forget the old Europe, the Europe of the tourist guidebooks. It exists only in the old buildings submerged in traffic and in the minds of the guidebook writers and the tourist industry (the latter being a real plague). Modern Europe is like modern America with a surface of crenellated battlements and decaying cathedrals, the whole thing a "grand Camembert pourri."

Woke up very early, hearing voices thru a wall, and thought of a woman's deep Spanish voice heard thru a wall in Málaga, years ago. She was moaning and moaning, coming in the night. She was a long time coming, now still heard on great Southwest plain in the heart of another world. And will go on, the primitive inchoate nightlife of the world: life against the night....

One of these nights you stay awake hour after hour, after an early sleep, thinking of everything, sea sweep, old men and women, early remembrances, bad deeds, wash of time, terrible the toll of it, on and on. Flesh cargoes, motionless, horizontal, coasting through sleep, gunwales awash, into eternity....

Sometimes it is better not to know anything about a country when you visit it. Especially it is important not to know its language. Thus every sound, striking the ear like a small bell or animal cry, without any associative meaning, takes on the immediate quality of poetry, the quality of pure color in painting, with the percussive effect of pure sound in a void.

Florida a thousand miles long, a hundred miles wide, and a foot high....Straight highway down thru it. Young new pine forests, clay side roads -- American flag waving on a post -- Colonial gas signs -- Swanee River crossing, overhung with live oaks heavy with Spanish moss....

Came upon Los Angeles by bus at night... Ah the crazy hotels, crazy streets, sad signs of America—Jesus Saves!—Tom's Tattoo—"The Electric Rembrandt—Snooker Parlor—"Acres of Autos"—Hotel Small—Ice Rink—Greyhound—Los Angeles Street—TV in Rooms—EAT—Barber & Beauty Supply—PAWNSHOP—"Shave Yourself"