to be but not to be pretentious

Whether in one's poems, stories, daily lived attitude, or chronic consciousness, I suggest it might be a good thing to not mythologize oneself.

Even worse is when self-mythologizing takes the form of an artificial role lifted from another's persona. One Hemingway and one Kerouac are adequate as single-occurrence beings. They were already rather shallow and boring. There's no need for any literary and attitudinal redundancy of those types.

Clipped expression and beatnik style go stale very fast. The elemental and the experimental -- masculinity and radicalism per se -- are metaphysically anemic constructions, therefore more cardboard texture than living gesture.

One should aspire to be oneself. And that means scraping off encrustations of pseudo-selves, means not glorifying the banality of your situation, means acquiring a pair of mystical binoculars to spy the question behind formal, fabricated personality.

The Real is vaster and stranger than what goes on in the blinkered coordinates of modern mythy guys.