Publisher postcard

I once had a poet friend who traveled like a madman and would write postcards from wherever he was in the world to his friends back home using only one word, the word "Hi."

Hi.

I'm in Victorville, California, the high desert of California, where the sight of the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains leads me to believe that Victorville must once have been a beautiful place. It's tempting for a stranger to believe while in a place like Victorville that everything that was once beautiful is beautiful no more and never will be again, but this, of course, is an old, tired belief, dating back to the industrial revolution.

The postmodern is so tantalizing. The ultimate postmodern literary position is retrospective, novels for instance that either revive the strategies of the literary giants of the past or reject them so self-consciously that a reader finally drops to his knees begging for a good old-fashioned story with beginnning, middle, and end. Poetry wears its postmodernism much more lightly than prose, being more compact, that is, than prose, using far fewer words. But one can also argue that not a word of successful post-modern poetry has been written since the time of Rimbaud. Memoir is a far better fit for true, straightforward postmodernism, in which the writer applies literary lessons learned in the past in the service of a story that he or she hopes will live forever.

These are what I call, "roadthoughts."  Road thoughts aren't really thoughts at all; they're more like the back formations made from driving long distances by oneself, looking ahead more than looking backward but looking backward as well.

Hi. I'm leaving for Las Vegas in a little while. My younger postmodern little brother lives there.