Sixty-Nine

Brian Jones’s harpsichord.

we walked around toward the back, I found myself thinking about the power of culture.
“Hey, Adama, culture’s sort of an awesome thing, don’t you think?”
“Why?”
“Look at Iwase. If all this foreign culture had never come to Japan, he’d be a plain old button seller all his life—he wouldn’t know about Led Zep or Verlaine or tomato juice or anything. It’s sort of scary, isn’t it?”
“Well, hell, you could say the same about me and you. You’re ju

Complete Sartre; Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; Joyce’s Ulysses; the World Classics and Masterpieces of Oriental Literature series published by Chuko Books; Kawade’s The World’s Great Thinkers and Sacred Texts of the World; the Kama Sutra; Das Kapital; War and Peace; The Divine Comedy; The Sickness unto Death; The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes; The Complete Lukács; The Complete Tanizaki… I knew the titles of all these books by heart. But the works I really loved and actually read and underlined in red ink were the great comic-book serials “Joe Tomorrow,” “The Way of the Dragon,” “Muyonosuke the Ronin,” and “The Genius Bakabon.”

Rimbaud had drunk when he was writing A Season in Hell

draw attention to myself.

The Angel’s Entrails, The Fetus Poachers,and Inflatable Wives in the Wilderness.