An email to a friend

[Slightly altered for a more general readership...]

Thanks, ... You are the voice of sanity and wisdom here.

I will "link" to yoga sites or yoga people. Georg Feuerstein, author of a dozen or so books on yoga, who is the foremost American academic authority on yoga owes me a favor. I've reviewed enthusiastically three or four of B.K.S. Iyengar's books. He's the biggest name in hatha yoga, considered the greatest yoga teacher in the world. I doubt he's read my reviews or maybe he has, but he's in India, and bit older than I am and no doubt retired. But maybe I could make contact with somebody on his staff…

And so on. As to your suggestion of a title, "Dennis Littrell's Experience of and Understanding of Yoga" that's not arrogant. It's modest and the truth. But it is entirely non-commercial.

Here's the rub, and here's where Howard Bloom fits in and why his experience is important. Right now he is counting down the days to the publication of The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine. Twenty-nine days left. It is gut-wrenching to read his missives. He spends all day writing and telephoning everybody he knows and everybody they know in the media, and no doubt cold calls and what have you. He nags them: "Bear with me while I try out another angle on you…" He's in the manic stage. It is so desperately important that this book be a success.

What kills me is that it's all about the publicity today, not the writing. Or perhaps it's always been that way. His book is wild with rhetoric and metaphor and analogy and stuffed with information and nouveau terminology. It's brilliant, but for me with all that I have read, it's familiar as he uses biological cycles to inform the reader about economic cycles. It's 167,000 words long, over 800 pages in double-spaced manuscript. There are hundreds of footnotes.

He's probably headed for a psychological fall, and I feel for him. He's 64 or 65 years old. His emotions are out there, and his personality is manic-depressive, like the cycles of business. (His book projects his personality.)

I do NOT want to go through this. I am learning from his experience and that is why I have chosen "to give it away on Seventh Avenue" (so to speak), a reference he would appreciate since he was in the pop music biz. And this is why he inspired me to start the blog. I don't need the fame and fortune. I don't need the anguish of reaching for it. I just want to say, "Here I wrote it. Read it if you like." Send me a note or not. If I were a young man and/or needed the money it would be different. But I'm not and I don't.

This is a ten-year-project like writing reviews turned into a ten-year project. I'll be 78 when the ten years have passed. I'm going to put all my work on the Web in various places, and as you say, I'll learn from the process. My stories, maybe a couple of novels, maybe even some of my poetry. And I'm not going to worry about it.

And it has, as you say, an element of "future shock" to it, this Internet business. The world is changing. Everything's accelerating. The world is zooming by. I was in the supermarket yesterday. There's this old guy, all white hair and pink skin, face moist with the work, checking groceries. It's an assembly line with the constant beep, beep, beep. He's punching in prices and remembering and not remembering produce numbers. I always exchange some chat with him. He has recalled a produce number without having to look it up. I tease him, "You remember the numbers!" I exclaim. He laughs. "Some of them." Then he says, "I can't even remember what I had for breakfast." And of course neither can I.

I am thankful that I do not have to be a cashier in my old age. But I admire him. He likes talking to the people and the job keeps him vital. He's almost too old for the work and pretty soon people might be saying he's too slow…

The last part of life is coming to grips with not only death but with the decline in our abilities and with the realization of who we are, since most of the evidence is already in.

Your friend,


Dennis