[PEN-L:11813] comments

[MIKEY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Friends,

I applaud the efforts of Michael E. in posting all of the info on the UPS
strike.  These are very useful to anyone interested in the strike and/or wanting
to make public comments on it.  Keep up the good work.

I also applaud Louis P's recent posting on his visit to the jazz club.  Louis
may think of himself as a misanthrope, but his feelings surely are not.  He
longs for a true society and don't we all.  Should not thelabor movement be
asking the question: what kind of society do we want.  The alienating
money-driven one we live in or something better.  I vote fro Louis as the best
writer on pen-l!

Some of you may be interested to read William S. Burrough's final journal
entries in the last issue of the New Yorker.  My oldest son mailed them to me.
Burroughs says "How I hate those who are dedicated to conformity."  "Allen
gnawed a hole in the Lie." (I can only wish that someone would say that about
me).  His last entry:  "Love? What is it?  Most natural painkiller.  What there
is.  LOVE."  I think that Burroughs like all of the beats wanted community,
love, some anodyne for the loneliness.  Maybe they were not good Marxists or
feminists or whatever, but they moved me powerfully and my young son too.  I
remember one time listening to a record by Ornette Coleman.  I was, as usual in
those days, high on drugs.  The piece hit me hard.  All of the artist's
suffering, all of humanity's suffering, in a few notes on the saxophone.  I
don't know a thing about Coleman's personal life.  But I know what I heard.

michael yates