SOON ENOUGH

                  a start in some fashion of something on a Tuesday in May

                 SOON ENOUGH

 Saul Bellow wrote two good novels, but come to think of it, really only one: The Dangling Man.  I was going to include Herzog, even taking it down from a dusty top shelf but Bellow’s nerve left him and he had to put in a lot of filler between the letters Herzog is writing…  you know?... there was this guy George Garrett who had plenty of nerve and wrote two books that for me live on: Double Vision and Poison Pen… but it is Poison Pen that’s still jumping and shaking, being mostly letters from either Garrett or a guy he has stand in for him to people who are famous or once were and probably will only survive because they got mentioned in this book… and I won’t bother to mention their names, right now, as you’ll probably tell me how they do actually live on and all the rest of it but I will get to the rest of it soon enough.

But the thing that both Bellow and Garrett has:  each of them was interested in writing about “real” people… of course they made up “characters” and all the rest of it... but as Ginsberg dreamed of Kerouac’s books being published in heaven... for then, a moment, a more plausible place though the accident of being published by a so-called real publisher was actually Kerouac’s death warrant and it was only time before he would bleed to death in a Florida hospital…. like a friend of mine, Charlie Conklin sitting on a chair with a towel filling up with blood wrapped around his crotch, outside Foley’s, over there in the West Village, thanks to the kindness of the bar owner who provided the chair as he didn’t want Charlie to die in his bar since the cops would shut the place for weeks… a dead guy is never good for business…

So I turn to this question: does Europe exist?