Puritanical Flavors in Behavior + Combustionary Letter Writing

Fosterings of The Immaculate and The Absurd

Focus veers towards the immaculate... certain times. Where the absurd enters in thru? Relationship, with a sudden tripling of sullenness, ridiculous stubborn behavior. A kind of demonically pious sanctimony…

Does Kafka get into this in his letters? He goes there. Yes. He can be demonically cathartically pious in his sanctimony. Its kind of a blast to read… Flaubert is even worse.

I mostly found Kafka’s letters to be : byronic, in which he is blandishing others. And declaring his intent unloading declaratives with raging puritanical glee.

I myself have a letter writing pathos, that in turn, was Emily spurned, writing as ingrowth toe and nail of certain athwart maniacal puritanical behavior ?

Pun slingers languor lingers on language for a lustre gobang:

BUKOWSKI’s letters are overtly literary —

Letters selected that I read of Bukowski’s, were written mostly to editors, in which he is trying to get himself published full stop. His letters engage in a kind of mash up with all things literary, as a blessed squabble with what writing can be. Its quite lovely, impudent, feisty and determined — he too a fooking puritan.

I could see his letters as an outgrowth of what Hemingway gets into in his letters to Fitzgerald. Which I betcha he read.

I am not screaming from the balcony anymore, I am not I am not…

I try to allow for tenderness, which is a tricky business for some — One comment on my site, basically insinuated, that trying to befriend me for real as an artist, was some kinda “sissy training.”

Am I sissy — well — I cant get away from the tenderness thing, as an obligation —

So appealing to tenderness is also a form of puritanical fussiness?

No — I tend to think of it more as a place I got to with Emily — She has a tenderness that cuts through “existential” boredom with what used to be known as the divine, with shades of beauty. Which I still find relevant as part of our timelessness despite living above bar at end of the world, and begetting myself cleansed of righteous totalistic gods rigid curse, as a modern dilemma. Fem in niz fizz. Straight down street from Parker.

Bukowskis letters are not sissy letters - not at all.

But his poetry does get to tenderness — thats the thing about him, his poetry gets there, and all the time…

Kafkas books published in his lifetime: 0.

A plunger under the volcano — The metaphorical pressure of living under a volcano, but to see it also as treasure, as plunder, helps me to undisease it from the whore for resistance, and her doodling dumb show where Miss Otis regrets, again and again, certain wretchedly hunter the punter mining puritanical behavior.

Tho, in truth, I also see puritanical behavior as akin to an attenuated sense of wretchedness exhumed from under the volcano, that is like a pressure cooker in dalliance with death and horror, folding in again and again against the shock of just being another walking animal skin.

And so what.

Only to let the writing stand on its own, yes yes, and crawl all over me, day and night — let in all openings ? sure, like Beethovens variations, sure, as blood off the stone, sure - even if palpitates like a vampire endlessness - biting into audacity of perspicacity, as to say - the tenderness of others’ otherness shimmering around in pool of life - As price for having ones own. However might make y’all groan.

Letter from 1986

8–12-86

Hello John: