Life Drawing a novel by Michael Grumley

This book was just given to me with the words: "You might like this." I looked at it. The cover was plain. The illustration was a half naked man (or he might be totally naked, the picture stops before you can find out) draped in swirls of orange and yellow (not my colors). But I WILL read anything. I've started a new book, which is the part I love the best, where anything is possible, and characters are shady at best as far as wants and dreams and worldview. Somewhere, this book is tied in with that start, and I have to acknowledge it.

This book was amazingly penned. It is a love story between two people set in Mississippi to start and then branches off to Hollywood and so forth and so on. It is the story of a boy who grows into a man and finds the kind of love that he can appreciate. He gives that love away in favor of more obviously carnal things and then finds that it is all that he could want in the world. It is a highly sexual book without all the naughty words and phrases. This fool (don't take that wrong we are all the self-same card in the deck at one time or another) goes to Hollywood and finds that all that glitters most definitely isn't gold...and that love is the only real thing that is golden.

The book was good. The author of the book, learned in forward and afterward, was far more interesting. I don't really care who an author is as long as they write a good story. However, this man's life was so fascinating, his love so deep and strong, his death so sad and sudden, that I found myself more engrossed in it than than the haunting words of his novel. Add that to the fact that his love published the book after his death and then died ten months later...

I do enjoy the rare, but marvelous people, and I found Mr. Michael Grumley and Mr. Robert Ferro to be both rare and marvelous.

Th-tha-That's All Folks...

NEXT...Ice Skating Up Hill...The Fall (cause people keep stickin' their big feet out) and the after thoughts of one sexy ass writer with a broken leg, shattered collar bone and dual fractures of the heart...

*thump-thump*

ON READING




I was skulking around some used book store as I am wont to do and ran upon a copy of Tarzan the Ape Man. Immediately realizing that I have seen the movie in a thousand different ways, I have never read the book, so I made the purchase and took that bad boy home with me. All I'll say about it is...it was an experience--beautiful, exciting writing. I read it in the same vein that I read anything by H.P. Lovecraft. Sometimes absolute, stunning brilliance is tempered with 'other' things. It doesn't make the work any less amazing. It does, however, make me sad...no sadder, though, than the taking of unemployment checks and the casting of hardworking families into abject poverty, which was the state of the nation on the news the other night. [I guess they'll be opening up workhouses in this mofo soon enough, eh? And the Bumble will be selling children in the streets].



"Booy, for sale--!"



Anyway...



I have just learned to appreciate the beauty...to 'try' and understand what's ugly and to go back to the beauty again...Speaking of beauty...



At the same time, I purchased: The Prisoner of Zenda, because it had that Count of Monte Cristo, Man in the Iron Mask thing going on. This was beautiful. The main character was a pompous ass. But when he flinched, in the beginning, by being rebuffed for the color of his hair, I felt his soul and fell in love with him a little.



And Black Boy, which I read for school forever ago. I can admit that, although I loved the book, I didn't understand it then the way I understand it now. I saved this for last because it had the most profound affect, but I can put into words what that affect was. It was similar to that which I got from Tarzan, but different...In Black Boy, I felt an aching beauty that had little to do with the story of the writer, but had everything to do with the writer himself...I touched that person and was not rebuffed.



ON WRITING



The business of writing I have found is complex and intricate. The thieves in the forest of the business are legion. They have no shame and there is little justice.



Do not let your heart be broken. And do not sell your soul.