“Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.”

I had bought my ticket and was waiting for the L.A. bus when all of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks come cutting across my sight. She was in one of the buses that had just pulled in with a big sigh of air brakes and was discharging passengers for a rest stop.

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

Louis Ferdinand-Céline was a general practitioner in the poor quarters of Paris. He was also highly sensitive and actually a kindly doctor according to my instinct as I read his angry accounts of the senseless suffering of some of his clientele. The sweet little boy coughing to death...the beautiful young girl bleeding to death...the old landladies long dead.