War and Remembrance

From the diary: “January 19, 1985

“Well, I actually finally finished The Lost Queen of Oz. I typed ‘The End’ this afternoon. Some year I’ll do a second draft, make it really good, but I’ll be doing other stuff meantime. Am just now starting War and Remembrance. Watched all 6 Thin Man movies on Channel 2 this week. The last of LQofOz has me kinda bummed.”

So it took me three and a half years to write The Lost Queen of Oz. Hm. I still haven’t done a second draft. I think about it now and then. I have made a couple attempts, but those didn’t get past the first chapter.

In the next few diary entries I mention War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk’s sequel to his Winds of War, I’m reading it, I’m reading it, then, “I spent so much time reading it I dint write. Good book. Sad. sigh.”

I remember being disappointed in War and Remembrance, but maybe I wouldn’t have said so at the time.

These days I’m always reading several books. Back then, if I remember right, I didn’t. Usually it was one book until I got all the way to the last page. Naturally there were exceptions and I certainly read other things – newspapers, comic books – but I felt I had to give my attention to the one book.

I remember fondly watching all the Thin Man movies night by night as though they were a mini-series. The quality gradually goes downhill until by the sixth movie the only reason you watch is the charm of Nick and Nora. It helps that the first two movies are quite good so the series has real heights from which to fall.

Pet Sematery

From the diary: “January 16, 1985 – Finished Pet Sematery.”

This wasn’t the last Stephen King book I read, but it was the one that made me think his editors no longer had any power over him. It had its creepy parts but most of it (and that was many many pages) was the unhappy mundane life of a father who loses his child. I didn’t find that fun. Vampires! (Salem’s Lot) Killer car! (Christine) Girl with super psychic powers! (Carrie) – All much more fun.

Mandate

Jan ’85 I bought my first gay porn mag, Mandate. I’d started the diary up again in my poetry notebook, writing brief one-paragraph diary entries between poems. In those paragraphs I kept pushing myself to buy a Blueboy. Blueboy? I liked the title.

Maybe the store didn’t have any Blueboy. Of Mandate I remember huge close-ups of penises. I still don’t find such things erotic. Frankly I think the penis looks absurd. Objectively there isn’t anything about the male body I find preferable to the female (except maybe the lack of breasts, which seem to me rather in the way). I also didn’t find the fiction erotic – the pumping and gasping and jerking, often in a public (or semi-public) place. I was taking home from the library drier sociological reading (which was hard enough for me to get to the check-out counter). I was on the look-out for what fit me.

Porn still makes me uncomfortable. Because it’s dirty? Yes, I suppose. I don’t want anybody to see me looking at it. They might think badly of me! Philosophically I have no problem with porn, but it’s always been the case that my emotions have been stronger than my reasoning mind. Intellectually I knew how ridiculous it was to think I’d die if I asked at the counter for a porn mag (or an employment application) but the part of me that knew better was in control. I almost said, “in firm control”, but firm isn’t the word -- hysterical, trembling, panic-stricken maybe.

What a struggle!

comics

I bought a lot of superhero comics. Some favorites: Avengers, Defenders, X-Men, New Teen Titans, Firestorm, Nova. As the 80s unfolded independent publishers started up, offering their books primarily to the direct market; there were enough comic book stores to support such non-superhero fare as Cerebus, Elfquest, Love and Rockets, and much else besides, including undergrounds like Gay Comics, Zap Comics, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. I bought more than I probably should have. But, as entertainment goes, comics were pretty cheap.

Winds of War

I watched the TV mini-series and liked it so decided to tackle Herman Wouk’s novel. Wouk was a Pulitzer Prize winner so he had to be literary, right? Here’s what I say about Winds of War January 2, 1985: “The only sex scene so far fades to the crashing waves, flowers, and a treatise on the vagaries of human, etc. Quite humorous and very prudish, not even the fainting, veiled purple stuff of modern romance novels. And precious little violence for a war novel, wouldn’t even know about the fighting if they didn’t keep mentioning it.” Curiously I added, “but I’m hooked and thrashing.”

By the way, I didn't really know anything about "modern romance novels," having never attempted to read any. I still can't say I've actually read one, not all the way through. But I have happened onto a sex scene or two browsing and those weren't so subtle as "fainting" and "veiled" suggests.

Seventeen

Shortly before I got the job at Books Inc I started sending my poems to Seventeen magazine. I read in a publishers-of-poetry listing that they published poems by poets under the age of 25 or 23 or 22 or something. I’d never read the magazine but I knew they’d published early Plath. After two or three submissions an editor started scrawling notes on the rejections, “Don’t be discouraged!” I remember I wrote back saying I couldn’t be discouraged!

HA!

Eventually they bought 4 poems from me ($15 apiece) and published two. Have I been paid for a poem since? I showed off the magazine to all my Books Inc coworkers. I really am a writer, see? The first poem was published just after my 20th birthday.

I had to sign a contract giving away all rights. This means if I ever want to republish one of those poems I’m supposed to ask Seventeen for permission. I didn’t like that, which was one of the reasons I stopped sending them poems. But I’d conquered Seventeen! Following in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath. My poems appeared on newsstands across the country. I even got a couple letters from readers.

Asimov’s New Guide to Science

from the diary: “December 30, 1984

“Bot Asimov’s New G. to Science at Books, Inc. today. Last day. Not on the new schedule. No more money. Damn. Oh the injustice of it all.”

Books Inc was my first and so far only bookstore job. Mom knew one of the clerks and this friend said Books Inc was hiring for the Christmas season, so got me an interview. I remember bragging that I already knew the layout of the store. After I was hired and the manager asked me to go get a book from a particular section I said, “Where’s that?” And she said, “I thought you knew the store’s layout.” To which I replied, sheepishly, “I knew all the areas I was interested in.”

They didn’t want me once the Christmas buying season was over. I took advantage of my employee discount to buy the Asimov book, thinking it one of those fat reference books that was really going to come in handy one imaginary future day that would turn out never to happen.

I didn’t dislike the bookstore but I was surprised to discover working there didn’t require one be bookish. For all the literary knowledge it required the inventory might as well have been widgets or shoes.

First Leaves

In April of ’84 I started a WANT LIST notebook. The first page consisted of things I wanted to own or see or do and included such wants as “my poetry in various magazines” and “a driver’s license” and “a new typewriter” and “an ongoing intimate relationship.”

For a month and a half I recorded my progress toward these goals.

On May 6th I wrote, “First Leaves accepted one of my poems. Yay! Now I know why they took so long. They took ‘Tea for Two.’”

First Leaves was the literary magazine of Santa Rosa Junior College. This was my first literary magazine publication. What a thrill. They accepted the poem knowing nothing about me, just because they thought it was good. I hopped about the room, I rolled on the floor. I kissed the cat.

Russian River Writers' Guild

As far as a social life goes I didn’t have much of one. Besides the rather distant Oz Club I did get to be around people at the Russian River Writers’ Guild reading series which ran for several years at a senior center in Sebastopol. It was in easy walking distance of my house and people would show up from around Sonoma County, mostly the west county, that is, west of Santa Rosa. Guerneville, Bodega Bay, Graton.

I would read at the open and had a few features. There were good poets and mediocre poets and crappy poets, like in every scene. Do I remember any names? Jayne McPherson, Joe Pahls, Marianne Ware, Ann Erickson … I have the RRWG anthology around somewhere. I’ll get to it in another post.

Paul Mariah

I graduated from high school in 1983. I was depressed, closeted, and felt trapped. Mom tried to help. She helped me get a parttime job here and there but the money didn’t last long. I was practically agoraphobic, only going out of the house to the library or bookstore or to wander the town. I remember drifting about the aisles of stores trying to pluck up the courage to ask for an employment application.

Zara connected me to a poet who was running a poetry workshop in Santa Rosa. I didn’t know anything about Paul Mariah. But I needed company and Paul seemed to enjoy my writing. Though he lived near the town of Sonoma, Paul led the workshop at the home of another older poet, Helen Luster. There were typically five or six poets each time. I didn’t have a car and Mom wasn’t going to teach me to drive until I could pay the insurance, so Mom always came to the workshops, too. If she hadn’t would Paul have told me he was gay and had founded a press to publish gay writers? I don’t know. It sure seems like a missed opportunity. I’m not wishing he’d published me (I don’t think he was still running ManRoot) so much as wishing … something.

Paul would start the evening by reading poems by a famous poet – though usually not one I’d heard of. At first the workshop was the standard bring-a-poem-to-critique format but I held out for writing exercises. Man, I gotta write!

nervous habit

So I’ve brought home boxes of stuff from my mother’s house, right? In some of the boxes are books I’ve mentioned on DIR. I flipped through The Many Colored Land and I thought, Maybe I didn’t actually read this. Then I looked at the paper edge opposite the binding. You can tell whether I’ve read a particular book by whether the pages are darkened. I fiddle with the pages as I read, which deposits oils from my skin, thus leaving a record of my progress, especially if my fingers have gotten inky from the text. I squinted at the book. Yes, there’s the smudge line. It’s about 2/5 of the way down the page. I must’ve read it.

I have the sequels. I could start over from the beginning. I could read the series all the way through.

Undecided

Undecided is the end-of-the-semester collection of writings from the Creative Writing Class I’d lobbied for, which was created in time for half my senior year, and which, I was told, didn’t last beyond that. Too bad. The class was taught by Amy Glazer Connolly, the drama teacher. (What she’s up to now.) She was a lousy teacher, I thought. I remember comforting one of the sweetest girls in the senior class when Amy made her cry. Amy didn’t think much of my acting when I was taking her drama classes – I remember she tried to talk me into cutting my hair for a one-act, using the example of Vanessa Redgrave who’d shaved her head for Playing for Time, a movie in which Redgrave's character performed music for the Nazis at one of the death camps.

Amy was a teacher who had pets, the student(s) who could do no wrong. Everybody else got short shrift.

When I heard who’d been signed to teach the Creative Writing Class I almost didn’t take it. Amy didn’t have many ideas for the class, was impatient with students, and would often ignore us and conduct drama business. I became a sort of assistant teacher. I remember one time a student went to Amy for help and Amy, busy with some drama thing, waved the student off with, “Go talk to Glenn.”

I’d become her pet. Having been on her shit list in drama class, being her pet, I discovered, was much easier but rather creepy. I was glad enough to become a sort of assistant teacher because I thought at least I cared about the topic and listened and tried.

Of my own work in Undecided -- a short story, a couple poems and prose poems – there is one I still like, “The Man in the Pinstriped Suit”. I’ll probably post it over at the LuvSet blog for revision.

Newsflash

I’m cleaning out my mother’s house. Everything that isn’t thrown away or given away has to come back here. (There are boxes I’m to ship to my brother in Seattle.)

I’m seeing again books I described in the high school diary. Newflash is one I didn’t mention. It’s the end-of-class anthology for the poetry workshop. The copy I’m looking at was Mom’s. She attended a couple class meetings and wrote a couple poems. Here’s one:


Arctic Nostalgia

Huskies howling, wailing,
Piercing the sharp, clear Arctic blue.
Ice floes smashing, crashing,
Roaring through the midnight freeze.
Northern lights dancing twirling
Flipping, twisting with the lightning speed.
Leaving the eye dazzled in awe.


-- Helen Ingersoll

talent

Are writers born or made? I don’t know. Are chess players? I think we have talents. Some of us are born with abilities that make us great at certain tasks. This doesn’t mean that the top of every profession is peopled with those born with the most talent.

To write one has to achieve literacy. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that there are excellent storytellers who have not mastered literacy (even when given the opportunity) – could dyslexia be considered a negative talent? Once one can speckle a paper with a language comprehensible to others one can write. Can one write a story? a poem? a screenplay? Is it a story, poem or screenplay that works for other people? Then, do you have the stamina (or luck) it takes to get that written thing in front of all the eyes necessary to get it published, distributed, reviewed, sold, passed from hand to hand? There are lots of steps between the writing and the making a living off the writing. I write poetry. There isn’t money in it. Thus my steps don’t lead to the writing paying my bills. (A lot of poets earn their way teaching.) Still, it’s not unreasonable to think I could get a little more published, distributed, reviewed, sold (even!), etc. What I seem to have a negative talent for is marketing. I kind of laugh to myself about it. The key is doing it. Like writing. You don’t get a book if you hang back afraid of the page.

Yesterday I talked about my high school classmate Diana Hennessy. She planned to be writer. And she certainly has the talent for it. She hasn’t applied herself to the writing. Thus she hasn’t produced a manuscript and without a manuscript there’s no way to get to the book. I think she could write a book – novel, short stories, even poems. Every so often I get a card from her that says she’s thinking about writing again. She’s run a few marathons. Those are harder on the knees.

Diana Hennessy

During my senior year Diana Hennessy and I arranged an independent study class in which she and I worked on a novel. We alternated sections, which meant we each had to wait for the other to finish a part before getting to work again. How many pages did we make? More than a hundred, as I recall. I wonder how the manuscript would read today? Eventually I’m going to come across it as I clean out these boxes of papers. We didn’t have a plot or plan. We just made it up as we went along. I don’t think there were any fantasy elements in it, other than the fantasy that a poor writer could get his own apartment in New York City.

Though Diana and I had worked on the school newspaper since we were freshmen and both of us planned to be writers we had a fairly prickly relationship until the after school poetry workshop with Maureen and Zara. Then I know I really came to appreciate her writing and began to enjoy her company. We probably bonded most, however, in Consumer Ed, where we were part of the laughingest table in class. We’d failed the challenge test that would have let us skip the class. I remember staring at the test’s problems and forgeting how to divide. Anyway, it was okay. If I hadn’t ended up in Consumer Ed I might’ve had to take some AP class or something. I don’t mind having escaped that fate.

Trot of Oz

My diary writing stumbled to a stop. I wrote only once more that summer, tried to cram everything into that entry, got tired, but promised I’d finish the next day. The next day didn’t come for two years.

In that last 1982 diary entry I mention Trot of Oz, which was an Oz book Eric Shanower and I had decided to write together. I was to produce the first chapter, Eric would write the second, and so on to twelve chapters.

It took a few years, but we did finish Trot. Eric even published it in his OzStory magazine.

If you want to read my first chapter, it’s online.

When we finished the book I thought it turned out pretty good. Later I soured on it, convinced it needed a major overhaul before I could allow anyone to see it. Eventually Eric prevailed upon me to reread the thing and I decided, yeah, it was fun and I didn’t need to be so fussy. In fact I’m up for another one. Eric suggested Polychrome in Oz (Polychrome is the Rainbow’s daughter, or one of them anyway, and appeared a few times in Baum’s Oz books).

Having just done a web search I see a Nate Barlow has produced a book (unpublished?) called Polychrome in Oz. I don’t know anything about it.

Well. Titles aren’t that hard to come by. What say you, Eric?

Oziana 1982

I wrote two more Oz stories, “The Piglets’ Revenge, or How Eureka Became Pink” and “The Vultures and the China Milk Maid”. I managed to type them up in time for the summer’s Winkie Convention. David even produced illustrations for them. To my delight and surprise (nobody’d told me it was going to be published) that year’s Oz Club annual Oziana included “The Cowardly Lion and the Courage Pills”, the story I’d taken to Winkies in ’81.

The “Courage Pills” story. Any good? Um. Probably not. Last I read it I remember being disappointed. According to my diary Eric Shanower, friend and critic, allowed, “It was all right.”

Eureka, by the way, is a kitten Dorothy brought to Oz in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. Presumably the cat (always referred to as Eureka the Pink Kitten) came to live in Oz permanently with the rest of the family a couple books later. Eureka was described as white in Dorothy and the Wizard, although at one point the characters are visiting an underground world where the light producing “sun” gives off rainbow-like light and Dorothy notices that the light makes Eureka look pink. No suggestion is made at the time of this effecting a permanent change in Eureka’s color. I liked the idea of writing stories that would explain apparent discrepancies in the Oz books. In Dorothy and the Wizard Eureka is put on trial for eating one of the Wizard’s mouse-sized piglets. She is not guilty, though she admits attempting the kill. In escaping the piglet becomes trapped in a vase so can’t speak up about its continuing to be alive. Since Eureka came to live in Oz likely unrepentent about her desire to make a meal of one of these tiny piglets I thought the piglets had to have figured out a way to put her off the hunt. They tricked her into a pool of pink dye! Thus Scarlet Letter’d Eureka decided to leave the piglets alone in the future. That, anyway, was what I wrote.

With the other story I decided to revisit one of Baum’s tiny Ozian countries. Lots of these odd little places are introduced and then are never again mentioned. The China Milk Maid lived in the China Country mentioned in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the China Country all the inhabitants are living porcelain dolls. Somehow the Milk Maid gets tangled up with a couple hungry vultures and, as Kent would say, “hilarity ensues.”

“Words, words, words.”

From the diary: “June 9, 1982

“My shoulder aches. I get too tense when I play video games. [I was mildly addicted to Ms Pac-Man.] Dad arrived today. …

“We went to Cattleman’s tonight as per tradition – we’ve gone every time Dad (almost every time) comes down [from Alaska to California] for a visit. He’s [here] for David’s graduation.

“Mum and Dad danced to the music of the same organ player who’s been here ever’ time.”

The title for today’s post is something Dad said to me while I was scribbling away in the diary. I agreed, “So true.” Then reconsidered, “Who asked you anyway?”

The man who played the organ at Cattleman’s, a restaurant just north of Petaluma, cut a couple records and Dad bought them. Honky tonk, ragtime. Jolly enough. Today I was in Sebastopol again cleaning out the basement of my mother’s house. Yes, there were the records by the Cattleman’s organ player. Maybe if they were on CD I’d have brought them home. But they weren’t. So I added them to the trash can that was filling with old jigsaw puzzles, a broken chair, and video game magazines.

The next day (June 10) I wrote, “Dad bought me a book, got a book for himself and we got some ice cream. … Dad’s talkin’ about philosophy.”

The California Poets-in-the-Schools Statewide Anthology

from the diary: “June 6, 1982

“I went to read poetry at Copperfield’s Trading Post mezzanine [in Sebastopol]. Four other students from Analy [High School] signed up to read but only Christina [Kalvin] appeared. [Poet-teacher] Zara [Altair] was inspired to arrange the reading when she met Christina at Coddingtown [a mall in Santa Rosa] and Christina said, ‘I’ve written that much since poetry class!’

“The reading was fun. Christina and I read a few of our poems and some girls from Bodega Bay and Harmony [school] and some other school which I don’t remember. At first the girls were very shy about reading and would speak softly or quickly, but once they got warmed up they started reading other students’ poetry from their anthologies. … [Poet-teacher] Maureen [Hurley] got up and read some miscellaneous poems from our anthologies, which just happened to be Diana [Hennessy]’s and mine. Coincidence. Maureen started out by reading my poem, ‘Dear Aunt Jane,’ and said, rather off-hand, ‘This poem was chosen for the statewide anthology.’”

First I’d heard about it.

And, uh yeah, I drew big ecstatic faces and yippees and stuff in the diary.

Yearbook

I bought the high school year book every year. It seemed like an important document. I decided I needed to have it. For the future!

Last weekend I brought the yearbooks home from my mother’s house. God, they’re heavy. I guess I could flip through and google a few names. Otherwise, what the hell am I doing with these ugly things?