This is a real quick post because I want to capture a thought I had on my run this morning and that is Paul and I are not all that dissimilar.
Granted, he wrote what is arguably the greatest post WWII novel – ‘The Sheltering Sky’ – which captured the existentialist angst of that age in an appropriately based exotic setting of the north Sahara (while I am three long books into the territory of the unpublished).
But our commonality is our frugality.
He chose to expatriate to Morocco and I chose Mexico.
I’ve traveled in Morocco, and while I reckon it was an appropriate place for the pre-Beats (aka Bowles) and the Beats (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.) to land, it is not time appropriate ahorita (right now).
Back to our commonality. Bowles and I are/were both on sojourns to maximize our dollars as well to surround ourselves with the mirror of alien culture from which to better contrast ourselves against the unfamiliar.
PS – It is most interesting that the Beats didn’t settle in Paris in the ’50s because they wanted to learn the local culture or the French language.
No. They went there because rents, wine, and life was inexpensive.
They went there ultimately to create. One of them famously coined, ” The typewriter is holy.”
That sentiment makes me positively shiver.
Spike Johan 