I am still thinking about the books that young men read/should read.

Of course, I am also thinking of this in a limited sense.  I am a heterosexual white male of generally upper middle class background. Economically, I spent a certain amount of my childhood closer to the lower class than the middle class, but culturally, my upbringing was always that of the solidly liberal bourgeosie. I am, in fact, very close to the socio-economic ethnic group skewered by the website Stuff White People Like.

This is all a digression by way of an excuse for the limits of my recommendations and criticisms. The young person I am modeling is someone like an idealized memory of myself and product of my class and ethnic background.

But to continue…

The young man fascinated by Hemingway is an enduring image. Whether it is the young frontiersman with a copy of Nick Adams Stories in his backpack or would-be, ex-patriate, Euro-sophisticate with A Moveable Feast or The Sun Also Rises sitting next to their coffee.

The image is always, in my mind, of the works of the young Hemingway (except for A Moveable Feast, which was written by an older Hemingway, but is about the young Hemingway’s days in Paris).

Not being the outdoorsy type, I was always a fan of the Parisian Hemingway.

When I was in Paris and then in Madrid, there was a small coterie of us – young, white, and reasonably well educated – who followed Ernest so far as to develop a taste for the spectacle of bullfighting.

This would surprise those who know me now as a vegetarian. They would also be surprised that I cannot, even now, bring myself to condemn my youthful fetish for this particular form of animal violence and cruelty.

We stuffed copies of Death in the Afternoon in our pockets and defended the styles of matadors who died before we born and who we only knew in the pages of books. We even read The Dangerous Summer.

These were the days before Amazon.com, so we were forced scoured bookshelves for whatever we could find to feed our interest.

It’s been over fifteen years since I ate meat. It’s been over seventeen years since I saw a bullfight – and nearly that long since I read Death in the Afternoon (though I still read The Sun Also Rises, with its bullfighting sequences, once a year).

I now longer know where I’m going with this. Just mining my memories, now, I suppose. Perhaps I’m still asking what happened the canon? Why don’t young people read the same books I did? Why aren’t the influenced, moved, and motivated by the same things as me? But, I suppose, my parents looked at me and asked themselves the same questions.

Some time ago, I came across a reference to a pamphlet that purported to rank poets by the weight of their beard.

While I would not subscribe to that particular taxonomy, I will confess that I have been a member of the clan of bearded poets for fifteen years – more or less the entirety of my adult life. In truth, my beard is something of an object of pride for me.

Typically, I lean towards the Jean Reno/Clint Eastwood as the “Man with No Name” style of stubbly beard. Close cropped, but a little rough around the edges. But every so often, I decide to go off the reservation.

After seeing some pictures of Allen Ginsberg in the local paper (promoting a staged reading of Howl), I decided to grow myself the sort of monstrosity that Ginsberg rocked from the sixties on out.

Like the Beat poet, my hair tends to be curly, so growing it long is a not a quick process. And aesthetically,  I am not sure what I think about the enormous white patch on my chin. When my beard if short, the white and gray hairs blend seamlessly with the red-blonde-brown stubble. Longer, the white hairs stand out like a foamy white waterfall (how’s that for a poetic metaphor for ya! I know – both corny and unenlightening).

I find myself torn between wanting to continue the process through to the end and just wanting to take this whole thing back down the heavy stubble. In some ways though, it feels like the situation has been taken out of my hands. Mainly because, from experience, when it gets this long and thick, you need an industrial strength trimmer, not the little toy sitting in medicine cabinet. No, I probably need a professional for this. And I’m not due for a haircut for at least another few weeks (and just going to get one’s beard done seems like a waste – particularly in the absence a good, cheap barber shop that will do it right – and I don’t feel like dropping $20 to get my beard done).

If I were still in Pennsville, New Jersey, I could go back to that little barber shop on Broadway. The woman there charged as little as $5 and did the whole thing right – shaved my neck and upper cheeks with a straight razor to shape the face hair, as well as the back of your neck. Cut your hair and would even take care of your eyebrows and the most extravagant hairs growing out of your ear. It was an elegantly and quintessentially masculine ritual that ever man should experience.

Here in Washington, my favorite place is in the basement of the Rayburn House Office Building, but now that I don’t work in the Capitol any more, it’s difficult to find time to go there. Downtown DC has some excellent places inside some of the office buildings, but the prices can be a little high. When I’m in Dunedin, the fine folks at McGuire’s Barber Shop on Main Street are my establishment of choice.

So for now, in the absence of tasty alternatives, I will continue to work on my “Ginsberg.”

The instrument matters.

Or, at least, it matters to me.

I confess to doing a most of my final drafts on a PC – usually in Microsoft Word (I’m too cheap to buy a Mac). But the first drafts and the sudden onset of inspiration needs something more visceral.

For more than ten years, I used a fountain pen that was given to me to by two friends in Spain – Nico and Jose. The pen was compatible with Waterman cartridges and I only wrote with black ink.

Sadly, it died in December of 2009 – the section (as it is called) broke at a point that made repair impossible. I still carry the pieces with me in a black shoulder bag given to me by my Uncle Buddy and Aunt Anna on my graduation from college, but is no longer useful as a writing instrument.

These days, I use a Cross Century II with a medium point (I still use only black ink). I chose it because it was of conservative, rather than flashy design, with a relatively narrow build for a fountain pen (my old pen was unusually narrow – contrary to the recent trend towards fatter pens), and also because the part of the section that broke on my old pen is made of metal and not plastic.

I am hardly alone is having affection for particular instruments.

Ted Joans, in Honey Spoon wrote about using a “black warrior pencil.” I am far from clear what exactly that is, but to me, the idea of commitment to an obscure instrument rings true to me – like a tennis player who insists on using a type of racket no longer produced. The instrument may have been surpassed, in the technological sense, by latter innovations, but carries with it certain resonances that make it the best instrument for the job.

I also have an old fashioned manual typewriter with the classic “suitcase” carrying case. I confess, it is more for show than for use (though I would like to point out that Hemingway used to conspicuously keep a typewriter in  his Key West writing room, despite writing most of his works in longhand and having it transcribed later.

A manual typewriter is a demanding instrument (in this, the movie Naked Lunch was spot on). The keys do not respond if you are tentative. It forces you to write forcefully and to consider carefully what you are writing, because each letter must be addressed individually (particularly if, like me, you remain a two fingered typist) and aggressively.