"On Writing" admonitions or SK don no nuttin

I don't really have a problem with the body of "On Writing". It's better than "Danse Macabre". I just got hold of a nice first edition cheap. I never wanted to be a writer anyway so I really don't care. It was pretty good and Stephen is a drunk and diseased like me, whatever. He's funny too.
What I have a huge problem with is his list of great books at the end of the memoir. Granted, this is only a (opinion) list of the best that he read around the turn of the century. No excuse. At first I looked at THE AUTHOR'S LIST and I thought "I didn't like many of these!". To Stephen's credit "Tortilla Curtain" is on the list-good one there. And I know that he loves "Grapes of Wrath"-one of the best books ever written.
So I decided to try Bowles "The Sheltering Sky" because of SK's recommendation. Not only is this book a best but it is also mentioned in the text of King's newest Oswaldian, JFKish novel.
"The Sheltering Sky" is the biggest bunch of egotistical, existential, rambling, pretentious garbage ever I read. Shouldn't it be "Skye"? This is a book that is short without being short enough. A Harlequin novel for us literati I guess. Oh, and Stephen, it's loaded with stinking adverbs.
It is a given that the Paul Bowles is much better than the reader, trying to teach. Well I didn't learn. I get much more out of Eminem singing me cock-a-Doc. At least it's not in French and I know who Doc is. No, I'm not 20, I'm 60ish. Paul, some people don't understand that great French dialogue throughout. "When I'm reading English are they talking French?" he asked angstly.
In fairness, there is a great passage in this book: "How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." Prefaced by: "...precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well." There was one other good phrase somewhere but I can't find it right now. I'll bet that there are plenty of great things in frigging French too.
Here's one not so swell: "And although he was aware that the very silence and emptiness that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that." My problem could be that I have never had that exact profound thought. I'm an imbecile.
Or how about: "Nor did it occur to her how she once had thought that if Port should die before she did, she would not really believe he was dead, but rather that he had in some way gone back inside himself to stay there, and that he never would be conscious of her again; so that in reality it would be she who would have ceased to exist, at least to a great degree." Well, that goes without saying. Would that be the nth degree then?
And Paul, there are better words for "inimical" we thinx say. Ich habe Weltshmerz!
C'mon, be a book! My Constant Reader wife couldn't even finish it.
Good old Paul even explains what the death experience is really like as if he were a Death scholar. I have not read what he wrote as he actually died 50 years later in 1999. In the "autobiographical novel" vision or version there is a mixture of blood and excrement, as though "Port"er sees his physicality unfold and turn inside out at end game (maybe?). How nice. Though fluids may be a fundamentally physical death response, for my mind's eye I might prefer the "white light" theory.
Thank you so much for allowing me to read this book, whoever is responsible. Thankfully I was sick in bed when I read it or I might have given up and missed some of it. Garbage! A visionary indeed.
Sorry Gore V. GV loved it.

Oh, I have a good companion book for Steinbeck's masterpiece. It's called "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan. Like "On Writing" it is non-fiction. The best complement I can give a book like Timothy's is that it read like a novel. It is a great companion to "Grapes of Wrath" because it is about the people who stayed, unlike the Joads. Many of the families highlighted in the book still live in this impossible environment. There are quotes from descendents of the "Dust Bowl" survivors. A few survivors are still alive as of the book's writing. Pickled tumbleweed anyone? I mean 3 meals a day and seven days a week. What could compel these way-past-logical stubborn Scandinavians to live like they did? It's compelling. Read it instead of Paul Bowles.

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