Monday, April 21, 2014

I remain, humbly, a jerk


The "I am a jerk" trope is one I've been using for years , the intention being to remind me that lurking under my heavily worded pronouncements is an otherwise sensibly guy who can indeed take himself too seriously. It's my way , I suppose, of interpreting the admonishments of the 12 Step program I'm a member of that I ought to exhibit a genuine humility. It's a grounding principal, I suppose. I am a writer/bookseller living in San Diego. 

I was a literature major at the University of California, San Diego where I met, took classes from with a good number of poets and writers, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Davidson, Paul Dresman and Rae Armantrout among them. I had the stupid good fortune of collaborating with some of them, and fell into a great fellowship and larger community of  writers that included Steve Farmer, Shelley White, Richard Astle, Melanie Nielson, David Sternbach, Tom Marshall, the list is long and filled with  amazingly diverse and brillant men and women. Butterfield Blues Band (featuring Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop, Mark Natfalin and Sam Lay) at the Chessmate folk and blues club in Detroit , Michigan sometime in the late sixties. 

The club had no age limit, and I consider that one of the luckiest breaks I've ever had.Personally, I think I'm an affable sort, with a clear head most of the time, a good heart, not entirely modest, with a good sense of my talents and my deficiencies. My on going project is to continue to learn how to write and to become a better harmonica player. Over all, I would like to remain engaged with the world I am blessed to be alive in. I wrote music reviews for a number of years for the San Diego Reader, The Door, Revolt in Style, Kicks , I was the arts editor for the UCSD Daily Guardian, I've been active in various poetry and prose projects locally, and I have worked as a bookseller around the San Diego area for the last thirty three years. I have written reviews, short stories and poetry since making the decision to be a writer of some sort in high school and I have, I think, managed to compose a few decent pages since those fateful days of 1969. I am also a musician,a blues harmonica player of forty years experience, having been inspired by the original Paul

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