The Diamond Noodle

First Edition, 1980. 131 pages.

Book measures 5.5 x 8.5 inches. Illustrated with drawings by Francis Butler. How is one ever going to find happiness by countering one illusion with another? asked Su Tung-Po in 1088. And here almost a millennium later, Whalen sets out to discover what happens to pleasurable and unpleasurable moments after they are passed. He does so in a poetic rumination on events in his life that is neither a novel nor autobiography but a series of prose poems woven together. Recurring themes are dreams and childhood flashbacks as well as Buddhist observations on this world and our place in it. He began it while living in a cottage in Berkeley (with Snyder and Ginsberg) in January 1956 and revised it in 1965, a year before he went to live in Japan for the first time.

Fine in printed wrappers.