Thoughts on Reading My Own Books

It’s been a day of reading over old stuff for me.  Partly because we received a copy of “The This of the That” the other day.  That’s the other book that we’d been expecting from create space, the one that we’d sort of forgotten while waiting for “Uncle Willie’s Very Silly Animal Poems,” which I think may actually be a seller because of the illustrations.

Echo and Narcissus. He really was an incredible fool.

But I started reading through it and there are some great poems in there.  You’d think a person would get bored with reading stuff they had written themselves, and maybe I’ll reach that point eventually, but it’s still, to me, like narcissistically looking in the mirror.

I really enjoyed some of the short poems in the book like:

The train is always coming

the train is always gone

the line of trains along the track

goes on and on and on

or:

A dog will lift its leg and spray

each bush it passes on the way

a tactic which at once recalls

those who spray with paint on walls

and, with quite a few, reading them reminded me of the initial inspiration, where I was and what I was thinking when I wrote them.  In that, they are a little bit like photographs, photographs of a mental state.

The other thing I’ve been doing today is choosing blog entries for my book “The B.O.M.B.” (the  best of my blog).

A few observations:

1. It’s also a very narcissistic experience, I like them all and I just can’t imagine being so generous and uncritical when reading someone else’s work.

2. Once you  get back a couple of months, there are a whole lot of articles about Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry et alii, which are no longer really relevant, and it is pleasant to reflect on how completely absent they are from the national discourse lately, but some of them will still be included in the book.

3.  I don’t really obsess over 9/11 as much as I thought I did.  I continue to be convinced it was an inside job, but I haven’t written about it in ages.  (nobody really wants to hear about my theories on the Kennedy assassination, either)