Saragun Springs, Latest Triumph

(Dale Williams Barrigar has big news to deliver. I for one am looking forward to hearing from the Drifter–Leila–The image provided by DWB)

Thirty-eight Years

I have wanted to write a weekly column ever since I first heard of Charles Bukowski and his Notes of a Dirty Old Man thirty-eight years ago in 1987.

I first heard of Bukowski himself through Roger Ebert’s television review of the 1987 film Barfly, for which Bukowski typed (his word) the script. And congrats to Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway for having done a wonderful, memorable job in the lead roles. (Buk supposedly didn’t like Mickey as Buk but I think that’s because he wouldn’t have liked anyone as himself or his alter-ego-persona.)

I lived in Chicago at the time and was aware that Roger was sitting somewhere else in Chicago and he was talking about this raw, experimental, underground writer I’d never heard of. God bless you too, Roger Ebert, for all the things you taught me through the television back in those days. I never agreed with everything you said, but I learned volumes, and you were always an inspirational figure and your ghost shall haunt my new weekly column in a number of ways, on one level especially because I still live in Chicago, your home turf, and you are inescapable in that way.

After I heard about Bukowski from Ebert, I ran out the next day to my local bookstore. In those days, many of us did that a lot. I lived within easy walking distance, literally, of at least half a dozen bookstores back then.

I bought all the books by Buk which they had, and devoured (almost literally) them all before I saw the movie. One of the books was Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

My column, at least for a while, shall have this title: Postcards from the Drifter. This column, while influenced by Buk, will not include regular graphic descriptions of sex, one reason being that I’ve been celibate for over a decade. I subscribe to the famous quote by Carl Jung: “When the body is silent, the soul speaks.” I don’t know if this condition will last for the rest of my life or not, but for now it seems to work out wonderfully for me.

SO my column shall not have lots of graphic physical sex descriptions like Buk did. BUT it WILL have lots of personal revelations, and confessions, like the kind I just made in the above paragraph.

I’m a drifter because I never sit still, metaphorically and symbolically, and sometimes literally. But any good drifter needs to have a solid center. You can’t just shift your personality for the latest political winds so you can make lots more money when you’re already loaded. To be a good drifter means to have a solid center that will keep you grounded while you’re drifting.

My center is THE ARTS. I’ve been obsessed with the arts since kindergarten when I decided I wanted to be a painter, and was influenced by all the religious art around me at the Lutheran school I attended in Michigan. Before that, I had also been obsessed with The Arts, I just didn’t know it.

So my weekly Sunday column will focus on two things: personal confessions of a universal nature that will be useful for the few, and reflections and deep recommendations on the arts that will include thoughts and other ideas about writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, actors and actresses, and other artists, like those who are artists of life itself.

I don’t seek now, and have never sought, vast quantities of drone readers, casual and/or transactional. Instead, I seek the few who can understand me in this dehumanized and dehumanizing world.

My first column will be about the stroke I suffered last year at the age of 57, what caused it (as far as I know) and how I was able to almost miraculously recover from it so fast (at least some of the doctors have told me it was almost miraculous). This column will also include a description of a knife incident that left me bedridden in my youth for a while, and a true description of leaving the body (not dying, just leaving the body) during surgery.

This column could never have happened without Irene Leila Allison. Everything I write now, including all of the above, is written for her first. This will continue to be true from now until my dying day. This is because I’ve never found another artist (except for my kids) who gets me in the way she does. She is my inspiration; and then it’s meant to move on outward from there, to all of her readers on this wonderful and inspiring site called SARAGUN SPRINGS.

I hope you can join us starting soon for these weekly columns called POSTCARDS FROM THE DRIFTER. It promises to be highly interesting if nothing else.

Sincerely,

The Drifter

21 thoughts on “Saragun Springs, Latest Triumph”

  1. Dale

    This is a great introduction to what I am certain will be a wonderful trip. Sort of like the start of the yellow brick road, in a way. I recall Bukowski pissing off some people who filmed him by ragging on them in his column–to which he said, “Hey baby, I’m always the star of my show.” Or something like. I like that–you’d many try to appease instead of inform, or, worse, conform instead of say.

    You have an anniversary coming up on Fahter’s Day, I believe–but better yet you are a father–so it is win/win.

    Leila

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    • LA

      Thank you! And thanks once again for creating this great site and literary Universe/s, Saragun Springs. I believe Mr. Buk is sitting next to his typewriter somewhere, bottle and Indian cigarette in hands, looking down at us all and laughing, not at us, but with us. He was aware someone else/s would take over the reins after he passed on!

      I also want to quickly mention a writer who will be an even bigger influence on this column than Buk (sorry Buk) if that’s possible, and that’s Dr. Samuel Johnson.

      For me anyway, Johnson is probably the wisest, widest, deepest, and smartest writer in the English Language except for his great hero, Mr. William Shakespeare.

      Johnson’s two columns – THE RAMBLER and THE IDLER – have already had an influence on mine, and will continue to.

      I also want to acknowledge one of my favorite musicians, Mr. Hank Williams. As L. Cohen said, “I hear him coughing twenty floors above me all night long – in the Tower of Song.”

      Hank’s Luke the Drifter persona has an influence on my THE DRIFTER title and persona, and especially Hank’s great song, loved by Sam Shepard, “Ramblin’ Man.”

      All of the above was also selected because I thought it would impress you, Irene!

      Thanks again, looking forward to all!

      Dale

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      • Thank you Dale

        I never am able to take a compliment, but I always appreciate them. Mainly my life is like right now, avoiding making eye contact with my big Black Cat because that means he will expect a brushing.

        Leila

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    • Leila

      Lucky Black Cat!!

      Being a wolf-like creature, Boo will often go long stretches without much caring whether he gets petted or not.

      But when he decides the time is right, he has this hilarious habit of crawling across the floor toward you then batting at you with his big fluffy white paws like a cat, and it’s so cute you can’t avoid petting him even if you wanted to, and I know this is true because I’ve seen people pet him under these conditions who are otherwise scared of him because he looks like a wolf.

      And he’s a bit bipolar, because other times he becomes such a snuggle bug I’ll end up petting him for two hours nonstop, usually in the late evenings while watching you tube things about John Milton, etc etc…He also enjoys watching you tube late at night…no joke!

      Dale

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    • Thanks, Hawley!

      Leila is a truly amazing writer and, while I’ve never met her in person, I also know that she’s an amazing person – or she wouldn’t be able to write that good.

      I also admire your writing style. You have a pungent way of putting things. Keep it up, as the saying goes!

      And thanks again!

      SINCERELY,

      dwb (the drifter)

      PS,

      I’m a big fan of detective fiction, especially Chandler and Hammet, but also James Lee Burke (who I was introduced to in person by a good friend of mine, and drinking-smoking buddy, Stephen Hathaway, in Wichita, Kansas, back in the ’90s, a memory I treasure), John D. MacDonald, and Jim Harrison, who, while not a detective fiction novelist, did write several novels that can be classified as idiosyncratic detective fiction. I also admire the hardboiled crime fiction magazine BLACK MASK, edited by H.L. Mencken back in the day.

      Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler (in her multiple incarnations) are two of my great heroes…Even (or especially) Holmes’ drug-taking has been inspirational…

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    • Doug

      I forgot to mention THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, by James M. Cain, which is one of my favorite novels of all time, really more like the length of a novella but with the heft of a novel for sure.

      Also ROUGHNECK by Jim Thompson. It’s the “real” story of his life, but it reads like a crime novel in every way.

      Thanks again!

      Dale

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      • Highsmith is best know for the Hitchcock version of Strangers On A Train. She was a twisted sister. If you can’t wait for my commentary check Wikipedia. Because of her association and the name similarity, sometimes I think of her as Hitchcock.

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    • Doug

      I’ll definitely be checking out the Wikipedia entry on Highsmith now; but more-so waiting for your further commentary on her. Thanks for the heads-up on this writer – she sounds fascinating – and I love Hitchcock, as well.

      Dale

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  3. chrisja70778e85b8abd's avatar chrisja70778e85b8abd says:

    Hi Dale

    I like the idea of “Postcards From The Drifter!” Very cool!

    Your definition of a drifter with a solid core is almost like an oxymoron, but it makes sense.

    The ghost of Ebert…That was a good show.

    Sounds like a hit already! Good luck!

    Christopher

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      • chrisja70778e85b8abd's avatar chrisja70778e85b8abd says:

        Hi Leila

        That’s a very kind offer. Alas, I think my poetry is kind of an old fashioned rhyming verse that has gone way out of style (if it was ever in style). Even though I’ve written a lot of poetry I missed the critical step of reading it first. I would be half afraid of embarrassing myself. I couldn’t put much together in the essay department either. lol.

        Thanks for thinking of me.
        Christopher

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    • Christopher

      Thank you!

      I had kind of forgotten about Ebert for a long time, then one day he just returned on me years after his demise…and it was kinda like seeing a ghost from out of the television set. In a good, haunting way.

      It was like Freud’s uncanny return of the repressed…Except I hadn’t really repressed him I don’t think, just forgot…but he was still in there somewhere.

      Ebert liked to party with John Belushi, because Roger was an alkie like so many of us (who also quit and got sober)…I attended the same high school as John Belushi did…literally right after he died, so his legend was everywhere in the halls. And an inspiration.

      YOU have an unbeatable, uncanny ability to understand my work, and to get the nuances of it, and to offer it back to me in poetic words of clarity with zero bullsh-t involved…

      Your writing style in your short stories, and my writing style in my poems, especially the way the English language is used, almost mirror one another, in an uncanny way…

      I’ve only read one of your poems, but it too was like mine, and I bet you have at least four others and probably more that are just as good from that book you wrote!…

      More later!

      Dale

      PS, Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver also wrote in a similar style with their own unique worldviews, of course…

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      • chrisja70778e85b8abd's avatar chrisja70778e85b8abd says:

        Hi Dale

        Wow that’s cool going to the same school as Belushi!

        I really enjoyed Siskel and Ebert. They drifted away from my memory, too. The past gets further away.

        I like Tobias Wolff–a great writer!

        Christopher

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    • Christopher

      What they said about Belushi at the school was that he was a polite troublemaker; in other words, someone who would wreak havoc and apologize about it afterward! I entered that school in ’83, and he’d passed on in ’82; so he really was very fresh news at that time; not that his legacy hasn’t lasted, it very much has.

      Yes, Tobias is a great writer, who’s perfected his own brand of the lean and mean, American prose style; and a Hemingway scholar as well.

      Dale

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