A love that’s love - not fade away

Picked up Not Fade Away by Jim Dodge last week and read it in a few days, and now all of a sudden I’ve read all his novels. I’ve got to say that Fup is still my favourite, and I’m not sure whether this book or Stone Junction

should be coming in at number two. I think the only other thing out there is a book of poetry and I might get that before too long. What Jim Dodge does with the rest of his time I don’t know, I kind of surfed about the other day and gathered from skimming not reading interviews that he lives a woodsy kind of life, similar to Gary Snyder and the character who frames Not Fade Away’s narrative.

Gary Snyder… now his last book was good. Did you read it? Danger on Peaks. After I read it, I thought it kind of fitted in with some other recent-ish senex work from America’s grand old men – Burroughs’s Last Words, Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear, Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country , maybe Heller’s Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, Mailer’s Why are we at War?, Hillman’s A Terrible Love of War, Ram Dass’s Still Here (or that great documentary about him Fierce Grace – which also puts me in mind of Maybe Logic – the Robert Anton Wilson documentary…). So, anyway if you prefer the sage advice of your elders to whatever some radical young buck is telling you – there’s some elders for you to check out.

This reminds me of Neil Young’s comments in the LA Times recently about how he had to go out and speak against Bush with his Living with War album, because “I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up, I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the 1960s generation.” I’m not sure how aware old Neil is that there are plenty of voices in the younger generations as vitriolic as him about Bush or the war, but if he’s looking to hear them on MTV or Clear Channel stations or the Billboard charts then he’s looking in the wrong places. The 60s youthquake that opened up a seam in mainstream culture that could be entered by contrary voices got sewn up a long time ago. Neil may not notice so much sitting on top of the seam there; he’s going to have dig the underground again to hear what he wants to hear.

But I love these old guys, and these old guys love and loved and helped manifest LOVE, so as they age and die off, I think we should listen to their final words.

a love that’s love - not fade away