Portland is the best place I ve ever lived. I think that the way I put it once was, in New York, my editors at The Village Voice called me an anti-intellectual. And I moved to L.A., and without missing a beat, I was branded an intellectual, which is akin to a leper. In Portland, I m just a citizen. It is a more intelligent town.
People read here, and independent bookstores survive here.
Maybe Gregory Corso, the last of the Beats, the one true young rascal, mischief-making guy, poet, who wasn t precious about it at all. He s in this horrible documentary about the Beats that came out last year, but he s great in it. There s this shot of him in a bar, with, y know, his belly hanging out of his pants, and he s got a beer mug in his hand, and he just seems like a regular guy. A paragraph that is something that I care about will take me a day. Oh, a minute.