Book chat

A lot of people are writing right now about their life experience with, or feelings about books. So even though it’s not very original for me to do so at this time I’ll take up the banner.

In my family books were balm, escape, education, comfort food and everywhere you looked. The rule was pretty much if you CAN read it, you can read it. This worked OK until the sibs became old enough to bring smut into the house then I had to steal it. Before that my biggest challenge was trying to read Ellison’s Invisible Man when I was 8. I read it but I did not at all understand it.

Then I got exposed to a bunch of really weird stuff, National Lampoon, Hunter Thompson, Xavier Hollander, FPS Magazine, pictorial journals of Viet Nam, Castenada, Kilgore Trout, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and all kinds of assorted hippie/sex/drug culture literature.
A huge dose of everything of that nature mixed with classical mythology, tons of classical art books and with a surfeit of Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Enright, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Twain and a million other childhood favourites made for one confused puppy. And that is not even scratching into the impact of film, of which I watched almost every Fellini and Russ Meyers movie made between the ages of 11 and 13. Then throw in a little John Waters and every horror book or movie I could get my hands on (especially old B/W’s and Roger Corman's). The end result is I am pretty much a sick and twisted puppy.

Luckily I’ve finally found a way to integrate all of this into a workable lifestyle, playing in bands and working on my degree in order to use art, music and writing as a therapeutic tool to teach people to become conscious co-creators of their personal mythologies, particularly people who have been involved in domestic violence and/or drugs.