I realize I haven’t said anything about my readings, so here it goes. I added some while down there, Friday on our way into the quarter we stopped at this book store that he regularly goes to to pick up a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land and One Dead in the Attic, you can read about them in the readings section. I began by reading Truman Capote. Starting with a story called Shut a Final Door; about a man who is desperately escaping New York, trying to find a way out from all the bridges hes burnt on a suicide mission to fortune through the advertisement industry. Inevitably leaving New York for the strange New Orleans, where he thinks he can never be found. After meeting an older woman with a club foot on the train, their paths cross at a hotel bar, which he has been denied a room due to a full house so to speak. The two drink and share their stories, in telling her of a poem he plegerised in a high school magazine the final line of the anonymous poem is “All acts are acts of fear”. This I felt was a profound explanation of the human being, all our acts, whether good or bad, are done because we have fear towards something. The fear I was feeling was to actually go to New Orleans, some place I have never been, under the impression I was going to be more or less doing things on my own. The man in the story’s fear was staying in New York. He found refuge in the madness of New Orleans. There was a passage about arriving in New Orleans by train and having this feeling of reaching the end of the world. Though I came in from the sky, it did feel like meeting the edge with the expectation of falling off again. The story concludes with him receiving an anonymous call from some lady, while he was in the room with the older woman from the bar, and  collapsing into the inner walls of his mind to escape while the older woman comforting him like a mother to an infant.

Another book I read while I was down there was Stranger in a Strange Land. I started reading my cousins copy but got my own on Friday. I havn’t read much since I got back but the story is of a martin from Mars who’s parents where human but he got left there on the first manned mission to Mars, roughly twenty years later he returns back to earth. Ill end my description there, other than adding his name is Valentine Michael Smith. I chose to add a hard sci fi classic to my trip because the story is about a stranger on a new planet and being in New Orleans I gotta say I cant believe were apart of it as a county, and for that matter on the same planet. It is a whole other world down there, I really want to go back and stay for a year or so, really get into that bitch and see what the fuck shes really about, I got a taste and I gotta say as weird and sad and fucked it is, I see why people love it.

I honestly didn’t write much while I was down there because I was kinda in a creative slump. I did get turned on to a lot of groovy music, and I learned Gary Numans Down in the Park and Zeppelins Ten Years Gone and Your Time is Gonna Come (Ill try posting audio but if not its gonna be part of my presentation so don’t worry). I fucked around with some lyrics and a couple chord structures and when ready will post, will also play too.. And a- yeah its been cool, I got a book when I got back that’s like the bible to the music business and how to make money in it, and I’m kinda grazing through that cause its a goddamned boat and more full of info!

My brains kinda saturated from reading the bible so until next time this is Mick Elston signing off….