Almost Blue

With all the exuberance in the air, the early Aughts in Philadelphia have their darkness, too. Even as I ran around Center City, and Mary, Abby, and I did our famous jaunts from Logan Square to West Philadelphia and back, I was a haunted man. The progress I was making as a writer was slow, and labored. All the fluency I'd manifested in my last year in State College (1998) was still taking its sweet time making a transition into being the something else I needed it to be. This, I have discussed on Art Recess 2. The blue-balled and/or Almost Blue scenario has to do with the Heavenly literary Muses. When bathed in the starlight of all of our nights together, Almost Blue didn't matter. But at odd moments, it caught up to me that my actual creative life was very slow. The Costello tune is funny to throw in, because the way being creative on high levels works as not contrapuntal to a kind of intercourse, sexual intercourse, is very real. Things did not really get Blue again until 2005. Rather than a Rimbaud persona, I developed a tangent textual face, generated from a congeries of avant-garde related influences: Deconstructionism, Language Poetry, Surrealism, while earlier touchstones remained. As of '05, I was on fire again. But it did take seven years of slopping around in the mud of textual insolvency to get there. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, I will never get those seven years back again, but I don't need to. There may be no murder in our cathedral. And the city that makes a religion of E.C. is: Los Angeles.