“This is a life different from anything I had imagined.”

Excerpts from “None, I think,” a poem by Lise Menn:

“This is a life different from anything I had imagined. 

You are not here, you will never be here again.

There is no point in waiting for you.

You are, of course, everywhere, 

In this house full of our lives together.

But all thoughts of you are recollections.

There is nothing more to anticipate.

Everything about you is back, back, in some past, dreamed or remembered.

I live in a strange, quiet place.”

These are fewer than half the lines of Lise Menn’s poem about life after her husband died. I recognize in them my own experience. I did not know how to imagine a life without my husband. I did not try. Despite the oncologist’s dire prognosis, Kent seemed to be doing okay. He was alive. I wanted to live with him while he was alive. Even now, I don’t know what I could have done to prepare for his death. 

When Kent was first diagnosed with cancer 14 years ago, he found an estate attorney to make him a living trust. In the early weeks of this year Kent asked a lawyer friend for current recommendations so that I would have someone to help me administer the trust. Because of the trust no court had to get involved. That was Kent looking out for me. 

Kent and I were together for 30 years. Kent was my only long term relationship. We met when I was 28. Back in my teens and twenties I was mostly alone. I didn’t have a series of boyfriends. I wanted one. I wanted a lover very much, and I felt terribly lonesome. I did make friends here and there, and I didn’t live a sexless life. But I didn’t get the intimacy I yearned for. Not until Kent. 

I’d been going to a board games night at the LGBT community center in Berkeley. The people there were nice enough, but I wasn’t spending time with them beyond the games. (I was surprised when I’d hear others laughing about going sailing together or some other outing.) When Kent showed up he was taken with me right away. Six years older, he was close to my age. He displayed a sharp wit and I liked looking at him. Kent had had boyfriends before me. I don’t know how long he was with any of them, but I got the feeling he was the marrying kind. Relationships break up. I think my longest was three months, but if you add up all the time he and I were actually together it was more like two weeks. 

Kent liked to tell a story about how we met. We were playing Trivia Pursuit. We may even have been on the same team, and this question came up: “In the 1980 election who was the dream team?” Kent was bowled over when I knew the answer. Some politicos thought it would be amazing to have presidential candidate Ronald Reagan choose ex-Pres Gerald Ford as his running mate. That would be a dream team! I was fourteen at the time, but I was paying enough attention to politics that I picked up this tidbit. It didn’t seem to me a president would want as his VP a former president. You want the vice president (and everybody else) to be clear on who’s in charge. Ronald Reagan had the same thought, I guess. 

30 years of memories is something, isn’t it? I feel lucky I had all that time with him. He is everywhere in this house full of our lives together. But Kent is not here. And I have to figure out a new life without him. You may hear me saying the same thing next month or a year from now. I really don’t know. I am the one in the present, the one who has to look to a future. I want a lover. I want company. It seems so strange that any person coming into my life will be wholly different, not Kent at all. 

source: 

The Widows’ Handbook: poetic reflections on grief and survival

edited by Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn

2014. Kent State University Press, Kent OH

men dying in their 40s

I remember as a kid hearing about men dying in their 40s. I never thought of that as old. My mother had me at 43, after all. Nine days later she celebrated her 44th birthday, thrilled, no doubt, to be changing the diapers of her early birthday present. 

This week I was reading two books that happen to describe the deaths of two men in their 40s. 

In his memoir Insomniac City Bill Hayes writes about his partner of sixteen years, Steve, dying beside him in bed, and not peacefully: 

His death had been as swift as it was inexplicable: He had been only forty-three and remarkably fit, with no history of heart problems. At first, I thought he was having a nightmare, but he was thrashing so violently and unable to speak. I called 911, began CPR, EMTs came. I remember how they kept asking me if we’d been doing drugs; the question seemed absurd; Steve was so clean-living, so wholesome really, he never even drank a beer. They got him to an ER just a few blocks away. But by then he was gone.

In The Grand Piano, a collection of autobiographical essays by poets associated with the Language Movement, Carla Harryman writes about the theater director Philip Horvitz: 

[At] forty-five years old … his heart stopped beating while he was on a plane between New York and San Francisco, where he was headed to attend his brother Bill’s wedding in Sonoma County. Because of heart trouble, the San Francisco engagement [of Harryman’s Memory Play] following the wedding would have been his first solo performance in many years. 

My father had a heart attack at 49*. I am well past 40, and 50 is rather behind me as well. We’re getting to those years where the risks to life arise at least as often in the body as through misadventure. All my life I’ve tried to eat well. I walk regularly; I do yoga. Yet last year during an angiogram I was diagnosed with a blocked artery — 80 to 90% blocked. I don’t know how close a heart attack was lurking. In lieu of major heart bypass surgery the doctor inserted a stent. The stent re-widens the artery and keeps it propped open. I have since learned I have friends who have multiple stents. The stent has reset my capacities by a few years — as far as my subjective experience is concerned. No more angina symptoms. Those were, in case you're interested, a gripping tension in my upper back, which would subside when I stopped walking uphill (I never had any problem walking downhill!), and bad nighttime leg cramps, which made my legs ache deep inside and jerk and twitch. Although I still get mild body aches, there’s really no comparison.  

Odd to think one has made it past the years one could get credit for dying early. 

sources:

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and me

by Bill Hayes

2017. Bloomsbury, New York

The Grand Piano, part 3

an experiment in collective autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980

by Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson, Ted Pearson

2007. Mode A / This Press, Bloomfield Township, MI

______

* My sister, who has a clearer memory for these things, corrects my original guess, which was 50. 

The road that didn’t get here

I’ve been dealing with bouts of envy. This is not new, exactly, but I am old now (55) so it just seems more critical. I want my writings collected in books, which are available in bookstores and libraries. I want to go on a book tour. I don’t want to have to do it all myself. My ambitions seem pretty modest. I don’t expect to write bestsellers, or have Terry Gross suck my Fresh Air or sit on a panel at the Big Book Fair (none which I would scorn, however).

When I came across Jesse Browner’s How Did I Get Here?: making peace with the road not taken, I thought, maybe he’ll offer some consolation, this successful writer offering up an essay about how unsuccessful he is — like me, minus the successful part. 

And some of it just made me roll my eyes. Really? He’s complaining about a life that sounds similar to one I dreamed of as a kid. Polyglot, in his 20s Browner got a well-paid and intellectually stimulating job at the United Nations, married and had two daughters and is still married, and is regularly publishing books. Browner thinks he’s a failure because his books don’t pay his bills, he never sees anybody reading his books on the subway, and he’s not a bohemian living only for his art. Browner’s romantic views of poverty are not mine. I always hated being poor, whereas I used to dream of being an interpreter at the UN. That job seemed so important, if unsung. I have studied other languages, not to no avail but well shy of fluency. I don’t know that I ever had particular dreams about kids of my own, but I like kids, and in one of those alternate universe versions of my life (the kind of musing Browner does quite a bit in the book) I imagine myself as a father. 

But I did end up liking How Did I Get Here? Like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, “On the one hand … but on the other hand …”, Browner tries out different ways of thinking about his situation. The essay is framed by a discussion of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and Browner does a good thorough reading of that poem. It’s a far more ambiguous poem than its reputation suggests. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” I like the way Browne even allows that the outcome of that fateful decision might have been terrible. The poet doesn’t really say. The mood of the poem seems wistful and satisfied rather than anguished and regretful, but no concrete result is described. Wealth? Love? Good drugs? The monastery?

So let’s say you are an artist, and underappreciated. What advice does Jesse Browner have for you? Fortunately, it’s less advice and more example. Here’s what I wrestled with in my head, kids. Maybe it will mean something to you?

My favorite line in the book is this one (by “work” he means his writing, not his day job):

My work was there to keep me alive, and it was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, but I was asking it to make me happy, and that was not its job.

With all big dreams of capturing the world’s attention unfulfilled, how then does the work serve? With commitment to one’s art not bringing satisfaction and contentment as one had expected, is there any point in doing it? To live. Really? To live?

Rereading the quote out of the context of Jesse Browner’s argument I see that “work” he’s referring to could also be the day job … so long as it keeps you alive. (Browner does explore this idea when he discusses Franz Kafka’s oft-voiced distaste for his day job, one at which, Browner says, Kafka actually excelled, moving up in the company and garnering much praise from his supervisors.)

And here we come upon one of my rare insights into the notion of the Blues. Why indulge sadness when you could strive to be happy? Well, there’s sadness in everything because nothing lasts forever. Happiness is great. I much prefer it. And I have a nagging tic of suicidal ideation. But for me the writing of a poem is the visiting of a place, and in that place that feels like a nexus many a disparate thread comes together into a cloth, or a poem. Browner also wonders what “meaning” is in the search for meaning. And I think we agree that the meaning is in the meaning, that is, meaning is an action, meaning is in the making of meaning (or maybe the searching). 

Live while you’re alive. 

source:

How Did I Get Here?: making peace with the road not taken

by Jesse Browner

2015. Harper Wave / HarperCollins, New York NY

I’ve started a notebook

from the diary (1/3/89, Tuesday):

I’ve started a notebook in which I comment on books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen, plays, too, I s’pose, tho’ I hafta see one first.

So there it is, the first mention in the diary of the book log. I started Dare I Read with the idea I was going to expose the book log to the world. Here was all this writing already done. Content! as they called it back in the dizzy days of the Internet Bubble. Rainbows everywhere! All you had to do was color them in, and it didn’t really matter what colors you used. People were so desperate to get into the filmy web that anything would do. Just throw it up online and cash the checks as the eyeballs stuck.

Not that I had a mercenary vision for Dare I Read. I didn’t enable Google Ads for years. (I still haven’t made enough to get a check. Google doesn’t send you money until the ad click-thrus generate $100. DIR’s current balance? $14.04. That’s the entirety of the “earnings” for the lifetime of the blog.)

I was writing pretty regularly on my first blog LoveSettlement at the time I started Dare I Read and I wanted space between the creative noodlings and life musings of LuvSet and the book discussions of DIR. Looking back maybe I should just have added the book log to LuvSet and used labels to give the different kinds of posts their due. One blog is more work than I’ve usually managed. In 2009 I wrote all of 149 posts across both blogs. That’s respectable. But with the blogs separate the numbers come out to a less impressive 67 for DIR and 81 for LuvSet. After a big project ended in January 2013 LuvSet went into hibernation; 2014 saw only 2 posts.

My first idea for the book log was ambitious, record everything — books! movies! plays! comic books! When that proved overwhelming I decided I could still keep up the log if I stuck just to books. That is what I’ve done ever since, more or less.

On page one of volume one of the book log: Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh … OK. I guess there will shortly be part II posts on DIR for those books.

The Forgotten Forest of Oz

I’m sitting down to write on Christmas Day. It’s been a long time since I quoted from my diary. In the diary I was mining it was December 1988; I’d just gotten back from three months in London, a college semester. I was gradually readjusting to being in Sebastopol, the town I grew up in. Back under Mom’s roof!

On Friday, 12/23, I “bought Eric [Shanower]’s latest [graphic novel] The Forgotten Forest of Oz.”

On Christmas Eve I wrote, “I think I’m a bit stir crazy. I have been inside all day. It’s been raining most of the day. I feel buggy. I finished catching up with my comics. … Eric’s latest is, I am pleased to say, his best so far. Considering my attitudes toward the others that might be faint praise except that I think he really did a creditable job on this one. I only groaned at one or two bits of dialog. It did have me going. Dorothy & the other familiar Oz friends were pretty much superfluous to the story.”

I didn’t leave the house yesterday either. And it wasn’t raining so hard. Ah, 25 years, you haven’t changed me. I read Eric Shanower’s prose novel The Giant Garden of Oz this year, also his collection of short stories, The Salt Sorcerer of Oz. Now I just need to find my copies of Eric’s Oz graphic novels in order to reread those.

I was sick for Christmas in ’88. “Becky called tonight [12/26]. When I told her I’d been sick, she said, ‘Oh, the stomach flu?’ … She said three other people she knows have had it.”

I called a friend from the Gay & Lesbian Student Union and got updated. While I was in London a new member named John wanted to get more involved but Janet and her lover Celeste found him abrasive and seemed to want me to ally against him. I’d been co-president before I left. My ex-co-president, Donna, was “as good as married” to Carol, Janet told me. But Janet “doesn’t think it’ll last. ‘They have to get into a fight before they make love.’”

12/28: “Eric Shanower and David Maxine came to visit today. We got into a rather silly argument about whether a woman can rape a man … We did have some fun talks. About Oz, about what we’ve been doing, about publishing Trot of Oz. I’ve been reading and editing the manuscript tonight.”

Eric & David seemed “good as married,” too. As of 2014 they’ve been together more than 26 years. “The Forgotten Forest of Oz is dedicated to David,” I noted in my diary.

Details, details

In 1977 I turned twelve. My parents had divorced when i was three, but Dad came to visit a few times despite the distance - my mother and brother and I lived in California, Dad in Alaska. Dad remarried, choosing a woman with two sons roughly the ages of my brother and me. Then he had another child, a daughter. For two years running Dad sent me and my brother tickets to join him and his new(er) family for a vacation in Hawaii. I have fond memories of the experience, even if my stepbrothers and I didn’t always get along; the little sister was five years younger, if I remember right, and a charming bundle of energy.

Lately I’ve been reading Barack Obama: the story, which is less a biography of Barack Obama than it is a collage of details, all sorts of people and places, with Obama (and his ancestors) weaving through them. Obama was born in Hawaii and spent most of his childhood there. He attended an elite school on Oahu called Punahou. This passage about the graduation ceremony connected with a couple of my own life’s details:

[S]eniors had to sing for their diploma. Since the end of April there had been six weeks of rehearsal for the entire class, mandatory … Classmates had written some of the songs and chosen the others. … One of the contemporary songs they performed was “This Day Belongs to Me” by Seals and Crofts, from the soundtrack of One on One, a Robbie [sic] Benson movie about Barry Obama’s favorite sport.

One on One was shown on the plane to (or from) Hawaii. I remember not wanting to see it because it was about sports, the sort of thing I hated at school and was quickly bored by as a spectator. A whole movie about basketball? Ugh. Plus wasn’t Robby Benson kind of funny-looking? But I remember liking the movie all right. I just looked up the song “This Day Belongs to Me” and it doesn’t sound familiar but it’s a pleasant ditty. I would have liked it as a kid, probably more than now. I bet it sounded just fine coming out of teen throats at Barry’s graduation.



Robby Benson is better looking than I remembered, but this scene I found on youtube makes me uncomfortable now with its calculated bullying by the authority figures and I’m sure it enraged me at the time. Surely Robby got his revenge?

source of quote: Barak Obama: the story by David Maraniss

remember to write your memoirs

Three memoirs I’ve lately liked:

A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska.

Chasing the Sea: lost among the ghosts of empire in Central Asia by Tom Bissell.

The Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler.

I suppose I should say something to convince you each is worth a try. A capsule review. A summary sentence even. I started to. I swear.

Instead let’s wish my brother many happy returns of the day:

Happy Birthday, David!

Almost six and a half years of Dare I Read, too.

3 years of DIR

Dare I Read had its third birthday yesterday.

Three years of working my way through my reading life.

I’ll get back to mining the diary. I’m one post away from finishing with the 1988 diary in London, the summing up post. As has happened before, I just got tired of going over it. The old stuff.

I’ve lately been responding to whatever strikes me in current reading. When I have something to say about it. Sometimes when I just want to pull something out and point at it.

The “notes toward an autobiography by others” is growing faster than I’d expected. I could imagine it turning into a separate thing, a book maybe. (One can imagine all sorts of things.)

How long have you been reading Dare I Read? Any favorite moments?

the diary, 2/25/88 – 10/9/88

The diary opens with the Spring semester at SRJC. I had just been elected president of the Gay & Lesbian Student Union. I roped a young lesbian, Donna D., into being co-president, “welcome to call herself President whenever she wishes,” because I didn’t like the idea of being called the president of anything and because we were the Gay and Lesbian Student Union and I knew seeing men running things always scares off the women.

Got my first parking ticket in March. Expired meter.

More unsatisfying dates. Which had me down. Shortly before I flew off to London for the fall semester a boy developed a big crush on me. I wish I had been into him. Maybe it was just as well. He wasn’t yet 17.

Late in the summer I got a job at McDonald’s. Not the one in Sebastopol. I didn’t want anybody to recognize me. I needed more money if I was going to London. A friend from the GLSU was working at this McD and I was looking forward to working with someone I knew and liked. She quit the day before I started. Four weeks into it I gave my two week notice. Which led to some disgruntlement from my supervisors. Who were nice enough. It was an easy job. I didn’t like the uniform but the work wasn’t bad like I’d expected. I preferred it to other jobs I’d had: dishwashing in a Sebastopol restaurant, flunky at a butcher shop (no, I didn’t do any butchering).

I’ve been quoting a lot from my London diary. Talking more about it would be repeating myself.

TV:
Shoah

movies:
Hairspray
Phantasm II
Married to the Mob
Bringing Up Baby (on TV at home)
Big (on the plane to London)
I’ll Take Manhattan (in London, on the TV at friends’ flat)
3 Men and a Baby (in London)

performance:
stand-up comedy with Robin Tyler & Linda Gerard (in London)

music:
Mr. Dog (live show in Santa Rosa)
“A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)” by Momus (a song I liked on a sampler album from Creation Records; bought at Tower Records in London)
singles by Big Pig, Housemartins, which I bought from a bin at a street market in London

diary, 5/18/87 – 2/16/88

Some dating (mostly unsatisfying), a few parties.

Summer I took a swim class. I remember shivering in the pool – got my first leg cramp!

A friend attempted suicide. Pills. I phoned him at the hospital. “I don’t remember you,” he said, “but my diary says good things about you.”

Attended the Winkie Convention at Asilomar. When I asked David M if he would give a congratulatory kiss to Eric S after the “Woggle Bug” play performance – all the girls were getting kisses, the boys handshakes – David said, “He’d probably deck me.” Surely not!

Signed up for fall classes at SRJC: Review Algebra, Spanish Conversation, Critical Thinking, and American Sign Language … And got a 4.0 out of the semeseter.

Was taking driving lessons, got my learner’s permit. Paid for driver’s lessons because when it was Mom trying to teach me she would cringe or snap at me and we would end up shouting at each other. I think Mom helped pay for the lessons, though. At the end of August I got my driver’s license. I looked at cars but did not find one I liked & thought I could afford.

As documented on DIR (here, here, here, here, and here) I initiated a poster series for SRJC’s Gay & Lesbian Student Union. As always the club dwindled over the course of the semester and I pitched in to keep the club going.

movies:
Room with a View
Children of a Lesser God
Swimming to Cambodia
The Untouchables
Man Facing Southeast
Screamers
Prick Up Your Ears
Snow White
The Lost Boys
King Kong vs. Godzilla
The Living Daylights
La Bamba
Superman 4
Animation Celebration
Monster Squad
Parting Glances
Desert Hearts
Pink Triangles
Maurice
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing
Tampopo
Robocop
Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Theater:
Talking With …

TV:
The Jewel in the Crown
Miami Vice
America’s Top Ten
Star Trek: the Next Generation
Agronsky & Co

music:
Camper Van Beethoven
Madonna
Culture Club
Steeleye Span
Jimmy Cliff
The Wiz soundtrack
World Party
George Michael
Los Lobos
INXS
Blondie
“Reggae Dance Party”
Bob Dylan

selling the book

When I got to the end of the diary I’d been working my way through back in June, I stalled. I didn’t want to reread it for a “story so far” post. Going over that period of my life … I’d just done it, hadn’t it? How many times was I going to have to?

A couple nights ago I got through it the second time. And this try wasn’t so tough. The DIR memory project. Bring up old emotions, stir old pots. Let them settle. Some incidents came clearer in my memory this time, others more distant, documentation of something that might as well have happened to someone else. Tomorrow I’ll put up a post on the 5/87 – 2/88 diary. Then I’ll get back to the chronological book log.

The Word document DIR occupies on my Mac is 343 pages long. That’s a lot of writing. It may be something to turn into a book. Who knows? It’s not something I’d try to sell a New York publisher on. But with the new print-on-demand technology (see yesterday’s post) selling isn’t so damn necessary.

the diary, 10/16/86 – 5/16/87

I wanted the notebook to be for short stories as I’d had success with poetry-only notebooks. The stories stalled out. After a period of mourning I decided to switch the notebook to diary. Prose is prose.

I liked the job at the campus library. I was doing well in my classes – Spanish, Biology, Political Science in the Fall, Creative Writing, Spanish, Death & Dying in the Spring.

I was finally dating. I fell in love. Or wanted to so badly I imagined I had. It’d seemed to me all my love affairs had been one-sided (unrequited!) and here was a boy who wanted me! Or not. I got to write moony giddy diary entries about him for a few days, then philosophical fuck-him diary entries when he called it off. I also found myself the unrequiting one. Hard as it is to say no, it’s easier than being said no to. Funny thing, in two instances (or four?) I fixed up a boy who wanted me with another boy who wanted me … and these dates, I got reports, were not disasters.

Lots of new people coming into/going out of my life. Visits to Marin, SF, as well as the usual SoCo haunts. I joined efforts to create community institutions for gays & lesbians in Sonoma County, mostly because I was under 21 thus could not go to bars (the main gay meeting places) and, after I attained my majority, because bars were boring, dark, smoky, and loud. I kept up with a pen pal in Alabama and another in Oregon, having found them through Alyson Publications’ young gay penpal service.

I broke my arm for the first time. I refused to say, “I broke my arm.” I would say, “My arm got broken.” I was at a gay rollerskate night and tried to keep up in a group skate, though I knew I couldn’t, ended up being thrown off the end of the chain and, as I fell, tried to stop myself with my left arm. I guess I stopped. The bone cracked and I wore a splint for a few weeks. And in another more serious incident an old friend of my mother nearly choked to death in her kitchen. I performed the Heimlich maneuver. Have you ever done it for real? Did it work for you? Me, it just felt like I was abusing the poor woman – nothing popped out of her throat. She collapsed to the floor. When the paramedics arrived they said she had been getting enough air. She would survive.

Yes, I was getting along better with my mother. I wasn’t around the house so much, for one thing. And I could contribute a bit of money to expenses. And I wasn’t so fucking depressed. Depressed people are no fun to be around.

Now that I again had money coming in I started buying used records, even went to a couple live shows. I’m no big fan of live shows, tell the truth. They’ve got a high noise to melody ratio.

movies:
Peggy Sue Got Married
Aliens
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Blue Velvet
Nobody’s Fool
Swiss Family Robinson
Little Shop of Horrors
Personal Best
Moby Dick
Animation Celebration
Burglar
Where the River Runs Black
Walkabout

TV:
Town and Country music videos
Rocky & Bullwinkle

music:
Bronski Beat
Joan Armatrading
Talking Heads
David Bowie
Bonnie Hayes & the Wild Combo
Paul Simon
Prince
General Public
Thompson Twins
David Lindley
Depeche Mode
Pretenders
Simply Red
The Clash
Club Nouveau
Romeo Void
Bruce Cockburn
Grace Jones
Howard Jones
Culture Club
Camper Van Beethoven
REM
B-52s
Love Tractor
Limbo District
Pylon
I-World
ABBA

The diary, 6/6/86 – 10/14/86

This journal is a stenography notebook. The spiral binding is at the top of the page. Every time you turn a page you have to flip the whole book over. This makes it hard to browse. A lot fewer books mentioned in this diary.

What happened? I quit Day Treatment for college. A friend from DT convinced me I didn’t need to take that antidepressant anymore (though I would occasionally dip into the bottle when feeling overwhelmed). After a decent experience with the summer school class I got a job at the SRJC campus library and took on a full-time load of classes during the fall semester. I joined the campus gay club, which was quite small, and seemed always threatening to evaporate. I also began attending a gay youth group in not-very-nearby Marin; this involved long busrides &/or carpools, as I had no car. And, yes, I had nongay friends and we would hang out, play boardgames, watch movies, go for long walks. Still going to poetry workshops and Russian River Writers Guild readings. More things going on, less time to read. Plus, of course, much reading time having to go to reading for school.


movies mentioned:
Labyrinth
Piranha 2: The Spawning
Return of the Living Dead
My Beautiful Laundrette
The Fly
Return to Oz
Club Paradise
Legal Eagles

TV:
People are Talking
America’s Top Ten

The diary, 3/12/86 – 5/24/86

I can’t talk about the diary the way I talk about published books, other people’s books. When I read the diary it fires emotions that cloud what’s on the page; there is much, in other words, that is going on in my head that is not going on on paper where others can see it. I have thought about using the diary as material for a memoir or novel; I doubt that will happen. Working with the diary would be like trying to groom Sutra – he turns and bites the brush, then the claws come out.

The diary covers a lot of ground for a two month period. I got on an antidepressant, I started going to Day Treatment at Community Hospital in Santa Rosa. I made some progress toward escaping from my “mind-forged manacles” (Blake). But I also did a lot of rattling of them and moaning as the hard cuffs dug into my wrists. In my mental image of the time I rarely left the house; yet the diary records friends who drop by and parties I go to, poetry readings and town wanderings.

movies mentioned:
Pretty in Pink
Prizzi’s Honor
Mrs Delafield Wants to Get Married
The Naked Prey
Kiss of the Spider Woman
The Last Picture Show
Harold and Maude
THX 1138
Teen Wolf
Eddie and the Cruisers
Altered States
The Brother from Another Planet
Brazil

TV shows:
I Love Lucy
Donahue
Hill Street Blues
Austin City Limits
MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour
St Elsewhere
Washington Week in Review
Leo and Liz in Beverly Hills
The Last Precinct
Miami Vice

what's new

I went downtown Wednesday afternoon to work out at the Y. I haven’t been in about a month. Every time I’ve stretched and exercised lately I’ve ended up with a headache so I’ve been rationing my exercise pretty carefully. Shorter stretches, longer recovery periods. Last two strong stretches did not result in headaches so at last I was able to muster some enthusiasm for a trip to the gym.

After an easy yoga and weights session I stopped at a café for a sandwich and coffee and read the latest East Bay Express, the feature article being about a real estate writer who got sued for saying allegedly defamatory things about one of those inspirational get-rich-quick real estate gurus. Turns out the critical things our writer was saying was nothing compared to what he uncovered during the lawsuit – a hit and run that left its victim brain-damaged, a robbery that resulted in prison time, an affair with an employee that had him admitting paternity of her child. Guru time!

Half Price Books had a couple carts loaded with clearance literature so I picked up Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn, Russell Edson’s The Song of Percival Peacock, Sylvia Molloy’s Certificate of Absence, and the 2006 issue of New American Writing, edited by Paul Hoover & Maxine Chernoff.

The Mishima is “the third novel in The Sea of Fertility tetralogy” (that’s one more than a trilogy). I know I have the first two. I didn’t think I had this one, anyway it was 50c. And I’m pretty certain I don’t have the fourth. Years ago I read Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and thought it interesting and intense, plus Mishima’s life is its own kind of interesting. I’ve enjoyed Russell Edson’s prose poems. This is the first time I’ve seen anything under his name promoted as a novel. I don’t know Sylvia Molloy at all but the book’s from the University of Texas Press which pushes it as an Important Work of Latin American Literature (Molloy is Argentinian) and I would like to be well-read in Latin American literature so for a dollar I figured I could throw it on the growing pile. I have a few issues of New American Writing but none recent. Time I bought another, especially if I read it through. As I’ve said before I am buying (and actually reading) literary magazines again. I like the idea of adding them to the paperbacks collection at Claremont after. I’ve gotta bag up a bunch of ten and fifteen year old lit mags that I bought new, donate them to the Friends group or something.

trying to cut back, part II

from the diary: “Tuesday 3/18/86

“Bot a couple comics at 7-11. Avengers and X-Men. Avengers was fun junk. X-Men was a long downbeat fight scene. Dreary. The X-Men is a comic full of great characters, too bad [writer Chris] Claremont doesn’t know what to do with them. I’m getting tired of X-Men. I’m close again to dumping it. Also close (closer) to dumping New Mutants. Especially since NM’s latest issue provides a great stepping-out place. Also very close to dropping Nexus and Masked Man. The comics I enjoy reading are dwindling to a depressing few. … I still reguarly buy 23 comic books and magazines (the mags being Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Twilight Zone). … Avengers is still a ‘BUY’ because I’m loyal to it; it’s the first comic I ever collected. I enjoy watching the silly boobs put through their paces, it’s an adventure without too much pseudo-intelletualizing.”

In the diary I make reference to a “categorizing” list. I can sort of picture this. It was, let’s see, yes, it was a list with different categories, like “BUY FOR FUCKIN’ EVER”, “BUY ONLY BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T YOU WON’T KNOW HOW THE STORY TURNS OUT”, “BUY BECAUSE YOU’RE LIKE THIS ROCK ROLLING DOWNHILL AND THIS COMIC BOOK IS GRAVITY GRAVITY GRAVITY”, and “TALK ME OUT OF THIS, PLEASE!” I then sorted all the comics I was buying into these categories. I guess it did help me choose which ones to hold back on, the default position seeming to be BUY, provided I’d already been buying.

When I cleaned out my mother’s house I threw away all the stacked up Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Twilight Zone. I hadn’t read many of their stories. Mostly I read feature articles and Asimov’s monthly editorial. When I had to contemplate jeeping them back to Berkeley and piling them all in a corner, there to hulk like some guilt monster waiting for me to get around to reading them, I knew the best solution was just to let them go.

I brought home all the comics though. And I do plan to reread them. But then what? I don’t want to hang onto them all forever. There’s no market for back issues anymore.

These days I only buy the occasional comic. King Cat Comics, American Splendor … I check out graphic novels from the library. Recently I read the first volume of Young Avengers. That was quite good.

(By the way, I don't think the X-Men issue pictured is the one I "bot" at 7-11, but it's within an issue or two.)

origami

Kent and I walked downtown Sunday and had lunch at a taqueria and stopped in at a used ink cartridge store – or tried to; it was closed. For no reason I can think of (other than the nefarious) the brand new black ink cartridge that came with our Epson printer, the Epson announced (after printing no more than 20 pages), was empty empty empty and that was that. The stationery store downtown was closed, too. So we gave up on the errand and stepped into Games of Berkeley where we squeezed rubber duckies, gazed dully at the in-progress Star Wars board game, and wound up a somersaulting monkey. I bought an origami book because it was cheap and it was Dover and I don’t think I have one. Origami is one of those things that looks more fun that it is. I remember folding a snail, which ended up looking pretty impressive, but on the way I got so frustrated I hurled the instruction book across the room. Nevertheless I would like to be able to have some simple forms memorized – particularly how to fold a drinking cup and the ever-popular crane. At Half Price Kent did not find the newest Pynchon and at Comic Relief Kent said he preferred I didn’t buy him the book of illustrations inspired by Gravity’s Rainbow.

Dover, by the way, is a publisher that specializes in returning to print in inexpensive paperback books that have gone out of copyright. There are two Dover books that were significant to my childhood. One was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Dover edition put up with a lot of abuse (I carried it around a lot) and is still intact (though some of the sewn signatures – sewn! unusual for a paperback – are a tad loose). The Dover edition was the only one available with the original Denslow illustrations. I loved that the Cowardly Lion was a giant cat, not a dude in a costume. The other book was It’s Fun to Make Things from Scrap Materials. It was a book sent to me (probably to me & my brother) by my dad. The book fascinated me and I would take it down from the shelf and study its old-fashioned looking drawings and read over the instructions and not quite want actually to get to work on making the crafts. I loved imagining the making though.

Don Emblen books

Yesterday Kent & I went up to Sonoma County to visit a couple friends. We stopped in at the home of Don Emblen, a professor of mine at SRJC. Since I left town he’s served a stint as Poet Laureate of Sonoma County and he continues to produce small print runs of books and broadsides on his clamshell letter press. I got from him three of his books. Dozy, poems about the cat that was rubbing its black length against his ankle, By the Dozen, a collection of short poems, Notes from Travels, which I think I read twenty years ago when it was new but probably a library copy, and Want List, which was published by Running Wolf Press when Don was enlaureled.

new stuff

I looked at the new comics adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and found it strange and not Ozzy. But as I looked at it I realized that the drawings which seemed to be made of smears of glass had a flowing yet jagged quality and the illusion of movement began to impress me; also the text was often lifted right from L. Frank Baum’s original. I didn’t buy it. I probably would have but at the time I was already late for an appointment.

I thought about it a bit more and decided to give it another look but when I inquired at Comic Relief found they’d sold out. I was assured a reorder would be placed. I stopped in yesterday and it was again on the shelf. The art is by Enrique Fernandez; it was originally published in France. At ten dollars it seemed not a terrible extravagance so I picked it up and on my way to the checkout counter my eyes lit on Mike Ploog’s comics adaptation of Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, discounted to ten dollars. I haven’t yet read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, although I bought a copy long ago. I ought to get through a first reading of Baum’s works, if it really matters to me. Anyway, now I have two new comics versions of Baum.

Today I went for a walk in the late afternoon light. It’s been quite chilly the past few days, so I bundled up. On the loop home I stopped in at Black Oak Books. While browsing I remembered the news that Black Oak is for sale. As I’ve been carrying around a credit slip for the last year I thought I better use it up before it becomes useless. I confess I didn’t think of it till I was holding Elizabeth Macklin’s translation of Kirmen Uribe, a new book, Meanwhile Take My Hand. At $4 it was an easy sell. Then I remembered the credit slip. It was an $8.50 credit slip. The challenge: could I find a book for $4.50? I did not. In fact, the more I looked around, the less I wanted anything. Being as these days I’m working in the library, buying books merely to read them (rather than because there is some personal connection) seems excessive. Or did so at that moment.

Eventually I came across a copy of Allan Gurganus’s The Practical Heart. Kent has enjoyed Gurganus books so I thought I could bring it home to him. At $7 it was not $4.50. On the other hand the two books together came to less than $4, which, as I noted in the last paragraph, did not strike me as beyond budget.

Kirmen Uribe is a Basque poet. I included one of his poems in the issue of Hogtown Creek Review for which I guest-edited the poetry section and was tickled to see the magazine listed on the acknowledgments page. Ah, the reason there is an acknowledgments page – for the magazine editors! I recall I solicited poems from Elizabeth Macklin and besides her own she sent along some Uribe translations. I chose one of hers and one of his. Not long after that Uribe and his band came to town. We hung out with them at La Pena, talking mostly with the one who knew English.

books bought

I walked downtown about noon to go to the gym. I was feeling kinda blue but physically felt pretty good. When I have a day without obligations and I’m not sore & worn out I get to the gym. That’s about once a week. I did the FitLinxx routine on the weight machine – I punch in my code and the computer tells me when last I lifted weights then at each station tells me how much weight I lifted that last time and how many reps. It’s nice not to have to remember.

I ate lunch afterward at Panini -- an artichoke hearts sandwich, a cup of coffee, and one of their rich chocolate cookies. I wrote in my diary and read a couple pages of The Ohlone Way, a book about the lifeways of the people who lived in the SF Bay Area before the arrival of Europeans.

I haven’t been to Comic Relief in two or three weeks so I figured I’d poke around there on the way home. First I stopped at Half Price Books. I checked out the clearance shelves and there were a lot of mildly interesting books filling the clearance shelves. A worker was boxing up books that had sat too long and refilling the space with new clearances. I drifted by the children’s section and there was a new Oz thingie, something called, I think, Everything Oz, which quotes from various Oz books and Oz-related sources and features illustrations & doodads from around the world. I slid it back onto the shelf. Since I read Born Free last year and since I own the third book Joy Adamson wrote about Elsa the lioness, Forever Free, I’ve had my eye out for Living Free, in which Elsa gives birth to and raises a litter of cubs. A handsome hardcover was waiting for me today. I flipped through it. I’d been hoping for a cheap paperback but just yesterday I’d been wondering if I ought to fill out a want slip at one of the town’s used bookstores. What, I’d asked myself, was I willing to pay? Ten bucks? This copy was $5.98. I tucked it under my arm and made a final swing by the graphic novels and DVDs.

At Comic Relief I let myself be seduced by De: Tales, a collection of “stories from urban Brazil” by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. The artists are twins. Long heads and bodies and big facial features. The drawings match. And I like the way the perspectives are often looking down from above or up from below. I recently read an anthology called Autobiographix that included one of their stories (the story also appears here). I also bought Alixopulos’ Mine Tonight. Alixopulos is a local and I first became aquainted with his work via a self-published mini-comic I picked up at Comic Relief. His art is scratchy and hungover-looking.

A block later I did a doubletake at the stationery store which is closing. Big signs announced, “50% off marked price.” One can always use office supplies, right? Cheap blank books are good, too. And I found a cheap blank book with an “ostrich print” cover. Plucked ostrich skin? I also bought a spiral notebook for my book log and a USB cable. I saw Joyce Jenkins, who had some new pens in hand. She says she’s putting the finishing touches on a new print issue of Poetry Flash. “There’s always something more to do,” she said. I told her I was working on the Poetry & Pizza calendar for the fall. She said she would try to make it to a reading.

For the last paragraph Sutra has been in my lap. He seems to be tolerating my typing. But he pokes my arm with his nose; why aren’t I rubbing him up?