nblinks

[email fragment] Finished [Woody Guthrie's autobiographical novel] Seeds of Man this afternoon. Thanks (again) so much for sending me the book. I don't know how much you got a chance to look at it along the way ...

Anyway, what thoughts? I guess the thing that struck me (not too surprisingly) is the overwhelming (though in places patchy) exuberance of the writing. Nobody strings together 14 or more adjectives like my man Woody. And of course the willingness to write pretty much as his interests lay, which means that sentences or paragraphs that start out being about one thing wind up being about another -- sort of like the song on "Mermaid Avenue" where he starts out about the ten hundred books he could write you about her, but by the end of the verse he's talking about union-organizing, and at the end of the song about the thousand-years-distant final blurring of all creeds kinds and colors. Of course exuberance, particularly without the benefit of much editing or selection, has its downsides -- in this particular case unevenness and pretty much no discretion when it comes to writing about sex (let's just say there were lengthy sections made "Walt Whitman's Niece" sound like Mr. Rogers).

Still all told a rollicking, dusty, rocky, paint-brushery, thistle-daggery, skattlerakery, catamountery, gila-monstery, burnt-rubbery, sour-whiskery good time.