Blue Threads to the Soul, Obscured Americans and Kafka, Anti-Semite!

[reader in Virginia with a copy of a Blue Threads express delivered!]

Busy with self-publishing books on Amazon, I haven’t had time to write articles. With sunset near and a body already falling apart, I must give my writing more definite shapes. Who else would do it? I’m already canceled. Writing on SubStack, I have an audience smaller than your average crowd at a girls’ highschool basketball game in a comatose town in the middle of the desert half a day’s drive from the nearest airport with tumbleweeds skipping across its cracked runway.

It’s painful to examine your younger self, so editing my collected poems was an ordeal, but it’s done, so Blue Threads to the Soul is available as a $19.99 paperback and $9.99 kindle. The print version has 653 pages. There are sample poems at Amazon.

Obscured Americans is subtitled as “Self-portraits by Joe and Jane Sixpacks--2015-2018.” Here, you’ll meet ghetto teachers, bartenders, cooks, a taxi driver, a mortician, a sidewalk preacher and a Camden whore, etc. Lots of legwork went into that project. It’s a miracle I didn’t get killed.

On its back cover, “Chatty enough, I’ve talked to a lot of people. Curious about what each must go through, I ask basic questions, then listen. No one is uninteresting. Their speech is also fascinating and charming. Needing to please, amuse or impress, folks are often playful or creative with language. What we have, then, is a complex portrait of a society, as painted by those routinely obscured. Besides its dark or even horrific aspects, there's also sweetness, toughness, humor and a bitter pride derived from having survived, if only for another moment. In 2018, I left the US for good. In 2024, I compile this book from a tropical, seaside city on the other side of the earth. Had I stayed in the US, these accounts would still seem alien, for everything has changed, seemingly overnight, for the worse.”

There are also color photos, so you can see many of these survivors’ faces. Kindle is $8.99 and paperback is $20.

Knocking myself out, I finished compiling and editing Kafka, Anti-Semite and other artsy fartsy essays last night. The kindle is $7.99 and the paperback is $11.99. My pitch at Amazon, “Post-Covid and Great Reset readings of Hemingway, Orwell, Sebald, O' Connor, Bao Ninh, Norman Lewis, Ghenghis Khan, Bebe Rexha and Die Antwoord, etc. Though rather bleak, this pseudo erudite book by just one more college drop out ends with an ecstatically hopeful essay, ‘Namibian Peace Corps America's Last Hope.’”

For a better idea of what’s in it, here’s the table of contents:

Kafka, Anti-Semite
Hemingway’s Castrati
White Flight: Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
Flannery O’Connor’s White Trash
Breece D’J Pancake's Quiet Magnificence
Democracy of Violence
Rockiest Horrors
Apocalypse Now
Capa's Moments of Death
Scitan in Mind
Shithology
Norman Lewis’ Blind White Girls Starving
Frontiersmen vs. Wusses
Jack London?
Orwellian Love
Architecture of Cruelty
Dying Thoughts
Fred Reed, Joe Biden and John Cassavetes
Marveling, Again, At Paul Bowles' "A Distant Episode"
The Sorrows of War
Trần Vũ, Gore Envy and Trauma Fulfilled
Brian Keenan’s Horrific and Wonderful Beirut
Evelyn Waugh’s Hippo, Die Antwoord’s Lion and White Malice Disguised As Charity
Henry Trotter and Billy Monk in the Tavern of the Seas
Room 666
Musical Omens
Crumbling Sewer On The Hill
From Caruso to Bebe Rexha
Genghis Khan vs. Thomas Jefferson
Reflecting on Jing Ke, Tian Guang, Fan Yuqi and Gao Jianli
Eating Your Children
Christian to Death
Namibian Peace Corps America's Last Hope

Now, I go back to editing more books. Time is short!

[Vung Tau, 1/28/24]

[Vung Tau, 1/28/24]

[Vung Tau, 1/28/24]

[itinerant seller of lottery tickets in Vung Tau on 1/27/24]