 Cultivating the Texas Twister HybridPaperback: HiT MoteL Press, December 28 1998, 1st Edtion Buy the paperback on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. See the other books in this sextet HiT MoteL Press. SummaryCultivating the Texas Twister Hybrid is a coming of age novel, in the spirit of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Marijuana Grower tradition. Table of Contents
Writing Notes forCultivating the Texas Twister Hybrid from the AuthorI started writing Cultivating the Texas Twister Hybrid as a more or less straightforward crime novel / memoir about crowing marijuana in Texas, back when getting busted with just a couple of seeds could get you a couple of years in Huntsville. Returning from trying to become a professional poet in Berkeley back to Austin, I couldn't find no work and was basically "couch serfing" among friends. So when an opportunity to get my own place in a rural setting where I could grow a garden and work on my writing presented itself I was relieved. All I had to do was be a sharecropper with an old friend who had turned me on to the farm. He was a master grower, and our patch was on a place where an old barn had burnt down so apparently it was the best dirt in the world and we kept putting plants into this good earth, trying to stay ahead of a plague of locusts knawing on the leaves. And did we ever get ahead. Soon we had hundreds of huge plants growing and I began to have some hope about breaking the endless chain of knock around poverty and get a better start in life. One chapter in the book, The Background Hisss of Summer, started growing and growing and became about this physicist on peyote seeing how the world worked, and the poetry in there go so far out I had to break it out into a separate book titled The Secret of the Cicadas Song. And too, we had to institute a Pot Rustler Interdiction Program and that chapter in the book unrolled out into a huge book about learning tai chi, and consequently understanding the Tao. This too became its own book, Knight of a 1000 eyes amplifying out from the novel into the 3rd book of a trilogy. Both of these two books dilate out as they take place in a compressed time: The Secret of the Cicadas Song is about the length of time of a peyote trip and Knight of a 1000 eyes is about the lenght of time it takes to do the Yang Long Form, but also the years of study to understand the Tao and the study and mastery of your physical being in the long form. I majored in physics in college, and even though I took graduate classes in group algegras and the vector space theory of matter, I did not go on to get a Ph.D. because I realized I was not of the right stuff. I graduated from UT Austin in 1972 and started drifting down the downward path to become a writer. Because I didn't have an advanced degree I could only teach and run labs in trade schools and junior colleges. I coiuld work as a technician. Subsequently I worked as a mathematics professor for a number of years—eventually switching to being a professor of computer science at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley. Two activities that we did on the farm, 1. using the barbed wire fencing as an antenna to pick up low frequency radio signals called loafters, written about in chapter 8 Loafers of the Kandinsky Sound Museum, got written up into a radio playscript an recorded and is inclued in the CD. <link Soundscape>. This story imagined a Kandinsky like art gallery of sounds. And 2, the ther activity was dealing with locusts, and Ruth built a huge metal sculpture of old car parts and machinery around the place into a god like image of a cricket. This kind of grows on you like a symbol. This work started out mater of fact and got way out into deep considerations. Enough to fill a lifetime. |