Click images for desktop size: "Transformers"When you have a mind that drifts along on white noise and power-chords you start to appreciate things, odd things maybe, like lists.
I like lists. an orderly straightening up and reconciliation of the things we know.
It's a measurable like how much weight you're pressing or how many hundredths of a second you cut off you 100 meter time.
I like measurable and lists are the measurements of the mind.
I like books. It stems from my life long passion for stories. I prefer true stories but I must always have stories told as if they are true.
So this is the first of my list of books, books that changed the way I saw the world, life and myself.
Powerful stuff - stories. They change you.
The best ones do it by putting you in places where you can see yourself in their filled up landscapes. Making you feel, not insignificant but as if you could own it.
Starting my list is a book that might seem a trifle: Elliott Baker's "A Fine Madness".
It's Baker's second book. His first, "Threepenny Opera" was a mildly entertaining "coming of age novel". There was a time when tripe like Knowles "A Separate Peace" made it seem indispensable for a writer's career to chronicle an inept adolescence.
To Baker's credit there's more Salinger than Knowles in his trite story. It was released in paperback after the awkward backhanded success of "Madness."
At the time Roth was the Dean of American writers and Pynchon was his Dark pope. Theodore Flicker was inventing a new film ethos in New York, movies based on life and sly observations. In this milieu, which was like the bubbling a tornado before the advent of the tempest this minor book was given a major inexplicable Hollywood greeting.
"A Fine Madness" was made into a baffling movie starring Joanne Woodward, Patrick O'Neil and, in his Hollywood debut, the number one box office star in the world, Sean Connery. It was directed by Irven Kirschner who later did "The Empire Strikes Back" and was Connery's pick to direct him in the Bond comeback, "Never say Never".
Pretty far reaching effects from a little trifle. After the sale Baker wrote a film, equally baffling that still has some effective moments, "Viva Max!" about Peter Ustinov's recapturing of the Alamo to impress a woman he loves. The film was lovingly made, has bravura performances from John Astin and Jonathan Winters and uses Pamela Tiffen's pre hippie, pre-british invasion student to mollifying effect.
This was all big deal product and it all started in this little book.
"A Fine Madness" is a novel about a poet, Samson Shillitoe. Samson has had a book of poems published - Hellebore - an ancient herb thought to cure madness. That the book was published by a prominent publisher as a favor or repayment of a debt seems to have had no ill effect on Samson's ego. In fact the book of poems seems easy enough to find. This is a core of Samson's belief that poetry isn't something you molly coddle. A poem has to stand out there on it's own, not as a little child of words but as a natural destructive/constructive force.
Samson is a poet but has to work a day job shampooing carpeting, while he cleans rich people's rugs he is fashioning his masterwork, an epic poem.

Click images for desktop size: "A Mare's Heart Rain"Samson is no effete Shelley like poet. He's a fight fan, a drunkard, a total heterosexual. He admonishes his clients (stars are fragile stuff, what I know to be true could put you out of business bub), lives only to have fun and to write his truth out.
Pursued by an ex-wife for alimony, living with an attractive but dumb waitress he struggles joyfully through life, with no dreams of fame just an epic poem burbling to be released.
He has no control over his burning need to create. After one of his skirmishes he drunkenly wonders, "why a poet? Why this need to create. Why not something simple, like a saint."
Through a set of quirky coincidences he ends up in an exclusive "rest home". A sanitarium where the rich have their neuroses treated and their psycho-hypochondria stroked.
While there Samson works doggedly on his masterwork until he is seduced by his psychiatrist's, wife.
On discovering his wife's infidelity he orders Samson to be lobotomized.
Samson is warned and he escapes but he is lured back to the hospital to rescue the only copy of his epic poem.
He agonizes over it, with the argument that poems are set out there to sink or swim on their own. They have no life or meaning to their creator other than he has sent them out into the world. But he loses this argument with himself when he says that this poem is only a morsel, an unfinished leggless child that needs to be nursed through to become the monster it was meant to be.

He owes it to the poem, not to himself to retrieve and finish the manuscript.
He's recaptured, the lobotomy is performed. Amazingly the lobotomy has no physical effect on him. He is as full of rage and as full of the muse as ever.
The conclusion being that artists are extraordinary people watched over by a God who shuns even biological imperative.

The book, while a straight-line amusing narrative also indulges itself in huge flights of Blake and DeQuincey inspired poetry. Some of it is brilliant and often one reads wishing the narrative would stop making demands and pulling us away from the musical words. Written in the third person all of the metaphors are chosen for Samson's alliterative metaphorical style.
It impacted me because I was about 12 and I never knew that writers, especially poets, could be rough and tumble men who delighted in life.
I thought men (and boys) did things while writers had some nameless pleurisy that forced them merely to observe. I was pleased to find out I was wrong.

What's not a story is the pain I'm going through. It's not like chemo but it's severe. My mouth worries me and I don't like eating. Chewing is like a knife through my head and swallowing is odd, like forcing down vomit.
Terrible cramps today in both my right and left hands. This pleased me as I've gotten so used to most of the violent attacks happening to my left side.
Got paid today. Not nearly enough but I'll be able to hold on to enough for the rent and my puppy's expenses with enough to go to a High School football game.
Who needs much more than that?