pile of reading

diary

poetry notebook

The M Word: writers on same-sex marriage

The Best Spiritual Writing 1998

issue of The New Yorker from 2005

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The Best American Poetry 2005, guest editor Paul Muldoon, series editor David Lehman

Ox-cart Man by Donald Hall

my booklog which was supposed to / may someday provide the source material for this blog

The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson

Choteau Creek by Dudley

Song of Rita Joe: autobiography of a Mikmak poet by Rita Joe

Walden / Civil Disobedience by Thoreau

Bitter Fame: a life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson

Fadeout by Joseph Hansen

World Poetry edited by Washburn, Major, Fadiman

The X-Men, nos 1-10, a volume in the Marvel Masterworks reprint series

The Tedlocks

Dennis Tedlock and his wife Barbara Tedlock came to Black Oak Books last week. They both have new books. Dennis's is a translation of the Rabinal Achi, a Mayan text for performance. Not much Mayan literature survived the book burnings of the Spanish priests. The Rabinal Achi is a play depicting a sort of trial, said Dennis. A nobleman whose city & family have been traditional allies of the City of Rabinal has been captured. He led enemy armies against Rabinal and the trial is a dialog between him and his disappointed captors. Eventually the traitor is executed. "Europeans want him 'sacrified' by having his heart cut out," said Dennis. "That was the Aztecs. The Mayans typically used decapitation. Europeans don't find that exotic enough. Decapitation is too ordinary, too European. Capital punishment, after all, means cutting off the head."

Dennis spoke softly with many vocal pauses (uh, um), presented as the quiet academic, sincere and so full of knowledge that he couldn't say one thing without having to lead up to it from two or three directions.

Although I was very interested in what he was saying I found myself getting sleepy. Barbara Tedlock was much more dynamic, her excitement & delight bubbling out in her voice and gestures. Last year she published a book on women shamans, even finding out in her research that sources that had been represented in previous works as examples of male shamanism actually referred to women.

I'd planned only to buy the Mayan book but ended up getting both. Rabinal Achi: a Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice by Dennis Tedlock, 2003, Oxford University Press. The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine by Barbara Tedlock, 2005, Bantam Dell/Random House.

Afterward I got both authors to sign their books. Both also dated them. The date was the first day of the Mayan New Year, 7 deer / 7 kiej.

In his presentation Dennis said last year was a wind year, which is a difficult year. This year ought to be a little bit better.

Best American

So the Best American Poetry series is not published by Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of Best American Short Stories, among other Bests. BAP is so obviously modeled after the 80s revival of BASS, when BASS instituted a series of guest editors after its longtime editor retired/died (although there remained a series editor who would lighten the burden for each year's famous author/guest editor). It was with BAP's success that Houghton Mifflin realized what a good brand they had going ... and by the late 90s they had started annuals for spiritual writing and science writing and sports writing.

I like the idea of these anthologies. One wants a convenient sampler of recent words. And now one can refine the choice to words on a certain thing. I worked my way through several BASS anthologies back in the 80s (plus some O. Henry Award annuals). When I discovered BAP in its second year I was thrilled as I had very little access to literary magazines in Sebastopol and there was no such thing as the internet. Here was my opportunity to read what was being written NOW. Being a baby poet I wanted to see who my contemporaries (or contemporary elders) were.

I don't think, even then, I was buying the notion that what was contained between any particular Best's covers was objectively the BEST poetry (or whatever) that had seen print that year. I did like the notion that I was being exposed to what that year's famous poet thought great. I've found poems I like in BAP. And poems I don't. BAPs are better than any single issue of your average literary magazine. And you get to know the well-published names.

Houghton Mifflin even registered Best American as a brand. I guess they didn't think of it till after BAP was a going concern at another house. But to anyone who rails about the imprimatur of Best that these anthologies confer I say only: Best American Nonrequired Reading?

Cook's Illustrated

My sister gave us a subscription to Cook's Illustrated. Kent has said how he enjoys watching the PBS series, America's Test Kitchen, which is produced by the same people.

We got our first issue last week. Kent made use of one of the magazine's suggestions when he was making soup last night. When he added an egg he first mixed some corn starch with the egg. "Adding just 1/2 teaspoon of cornstarch to the egg that's drizzled into the soup at the end of cooking seemed to have a tenderizing effect," says a sidebar to an article on making hot & sour soup.

The nerdiness of America's Test Kitchen is more appealing on TV than in print. Whenever they make something they always wonder if they're using the best utensil for the job, or the best brand of vinegar, or whether the casserole cooks better on the upper shelf or lower shelf of the oven, or whatever. So they get together the different brands and test them. You want your bundt cake to fall easily out of the mold? There are spray on nonstick coatings that work better than the others (Pam for Baking and Baker's Joy). They put together panels of tasters who sip gallons of vinegars. Or they cook 18 casseroles, 3 on the top shelf front, 3 on the top shelf back, 3 on the middle shelf front, 3 on the middle shelf middle, and so on. It's like Consumer Reports devoted to cooking. The only color photos are on the cover. Gourmet this is not.

"In barbecue circles, the fat cap is almost always left face up, and many recipes repeat the same admonition when the meat is destined for the oven. But does it matter?" The short answer: Yes. The long answer: Three paragraphs. They cooked two briskets, one with fat on top, one with fat on bottom then compared. The fat, by melting over the meat, sealed in moisture.

where you're coming from

I added a new utility to my links column (on the right), "Web pages referring to this page". I've seen it on Avoiding the Muse and Dale gets lots & lots of referrals. The referrals utility has been up since last week and so far the only referral it's recorded is the one I did as a test.

I had a referrals utility before (which I'd also picked up from AtM) and I'd always been dubious about its statistics -- was I really getting 90 referrals a day from LoveSettlement (my other blog)? The new referrals utility seems not to agree with the old one. But are no search engines leading people here?

2/3/06 update: I deleted the referring links utility.

interview question II

In prep for an interview for a position in Children's Services I checked out a handful of books. The interview was today. Last week I was on an interview panel myself and on this blog talked about the answers candidates gave to the What've-you-read-lately question.

The question came up today, too. How did I answer?

The books I checked out were ones I'd picked from the lists of recommended books the librarians have drawn up. Bunnicula by James & Deborah Howe, My Father's Dragon by Ruth Gannett, Two Bad Bears in the Big City by Daniel Pinkwater (actually this is a sequel to the one the librarians had listed), The Not-Just-Anybody Family by Betsy Byars, and poet Donald Hall's Ox-Cart Man.

I read none of these as a child -- but then only two were available when I could have read them "as a child". Besides, there being so many interesting books I haven't read, I didn't consider rereading any (even if it's been decades since the first time).

I often find Hall's poetry dull but liked Ox-Cart Man for its simple details and slightly stiff (old fashioned?) structure. Hall wasn't in pronouncements mode the way so many a contemporary poet goes wrong; he was just saying, this is what the farmer & his family did and this is the order they did those things.

I enjoyed Betsy Byars' Not-Just-Anybody Family, though in a short book swinging back & forth between the distinct points of view of five characters in five different places I got a twinge of whiplash. I think the story only takes place over two days, but the boy whose legs got broken seems to wake up & fall asleep enough for three or four days.

Bunnicula was cute and a bit overly joshy. Still, gotta give 'em points for a vegetarian vampire.

I read a Daniel Pinkwater book every few years, just to keep up. He's a funny guy.

In the interview I only talked about My Father's Dragon, having taken it from the shelf partly because of the striking stripes on the dragon. I liked the folktale (hero's journey) structure of the tale. It's told as something that happened to someone else (the narrator's father), in a (relatively) distant time, the hero goes on a quest, taking with him a bundle of objects that only prove their utility in unexpected circumstances (as when lollipop-loving alligators make a bridge across a river when the boy attaches a lollipop to each alligator tail, the boy able to cross on the alligaors' backs as each 'gator licks the lollipop tied to the tail of the next), the boy is clever without being obnoxiously brilliant, and the dangers seem real (the wild animals have a taste for boys). I thought it would read aloud well. I recommended the book to children 6 to 11. It has a great beat, you can dance to it.

and

The interviews I discuss in the post below, by the way, were for a 15-hour a week job affixing RFID tags to items in the library's collection -- not the sort of task that requires (or invites?) intellectual engagement. So the answers to the book question probably made no difference one way or the other.

interview question

At Berkeley Public Library nearly every job interview includes the question, "Tell us about a book you've read recently that you enjoyed. Who would you recommend it to and why?"

What with my recent promotion I guess I'm of a high enough rank to join interview panels -- I was on one today. The two other people on the panel have been supervisors for years and years and have hired lots of staff. I think I was there more to gain experience myself (& to provide a warm body) than for my expertise in sussing out the great workers.

We interviewed five people. None of them did very well on the what've-you-read-lately question.

One actually said she was enjoying the work of a poet. Sadly, she blanked on the poet's name. "She lists nonsense syllables that, as you read them, make a musical sense." I made one guess at the poet's name, but didn't hit it.

Another, after biting her lips, said she'd been reading to her kids a lot lately and could recommend The Cat in the Hat. "It's fun to read," she said. "Last night my son kept telling me not to sing as I read."

Our youngest interview mentioned Guns, Germs, and Steel, but the best he could offer about it? "It reaffirmed a lot of my ideas." Nice! Which ideas were those?

One of the other members of the interview panel went off, after this candidate left, about how poorly written the book is. Curious, I quite liked it. I don't recall thinking it at all poorly written.

The Historian has "an engaging plot", said another candidate. I thought the title vaguely familiar so prodded, "Is it a thriller?" "I guess you could classify it that way," she said. "The hero chases Dracula around." Who would she recommend the book to? "Probably to my best friend."

The Screwtape Letters. When my brother and I read the Chronicles of Narnia as kids we got interested in C. S. Lewis. I remember David talking about reading The Screwtape Letters. What did our candidate say? Our candidate alluded to the subject being "theology" and (like the young man who liked Guns, Germs, and Steel) found it a good book for "starting discussions".

"None of them gave good reader's advisory," said one of the other panelists.

"What were these books about?" I said.

Wicked

Gregory Maguire seems to have wanted to explore the nature of wickedness. So he wrote Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Contemplating the project I thought Maguire would use his novel to explain how the witch became wicked and, incidentally, explain other things, like why a pail of water melted her.

But it turns out Elphaba (the name Maguire gives "the Wicked Witch of the West", basing it on the initials of the author of the Wizard of Oz) is neither wicked nor a witch nor from the Winkie Country (Oz's western province). She did some things that could be construed as bad -- sicced a swarm of bees on a man, killing him (but the command seems to have been unconscious -- the bees did her will without her realizing it) and she neglected her child (she treats him like a stranger). Though, oddly, she seems to have been born with some evilesque characteristics -- like sharp teeth that make breastfeeding hazardous for Mom. She never studies witchcraft (though her sister, the WWotE, does) but powers seem to manifest nevertheless -- as when she races across a river to rescue a monkey and the river freezes under her feet, saving her from dampness -- but maybe this was coincidence, as even the text suggests, since if a river can freeze instantly why not a pathetic little pail of water? But, and this left me most dissatisfied, what was the basis of Elphaba's allergy to water? No explanation is ever offered -- other than it being inherent, I guess.

At least L. Frank Baum gives us this: "Once the Witch struck Toto a blow with her umbrella and the brave little dog flew at her and bit her leg in return. The Witch did not bleed where she was bitten, for she was so wicked that the blood in her had dried up many years before." One may decide that her dryness had become essential to her in some way. Thus the deadliness of a spot of water.

Though born in the Munchkin Country Elphaba ends up in the Winkie Country because that's where the father of her child lived. Elphaba is seeking forgiveness from her dead lover's widow (forgiveness for having seduced the husband). The widow seems uninclined to give it mainly because it's boring and lonely in Winkieland and if she forgives Elphaba the woman will go away and make Winkieland more boring & lonely than ever.

While Maguire's prose can be well-wrought the text is frequently grim. This is an Oz with a fascist ruler (the Wizard tortures people, has secret police); famine stalks the land; the weather kinda sucks; and amoral capitalists engage Elphaba in tiresome arguments about the nature of evil.

Dorianne Laux's breasts

As I read poetry I keep a stack of placemarks handy. If I read a poem I'd like to return to I pop in a placemark. If after repeated reading the poem remains one I don't wish to leave behind I hand copy it into a notebook.

I copied out three poems from Dorianne Laux's What We Carry, a book I bought when it was first out. I think part of the reason it took so long for me to get around to reading it was that I liked Dorianne's first book so much. I guess I was saving What We Carry for a special occasion. This fall I booked a few days in Calistoga, wanting to try a mud bath and get away from Berkeley. Kent often pines for a massage so I booked us two massages in three days.

Anyway, I brought along What We Carry and read it on a lounge chair on our room's private patio. We had a tiny triangular pond brimming with reeds and roses and blackberries and fresh tendrils of wisteria swooped down from the roof. I would read a few pages, then close my eyes.

And I liked What We Carry so much I decided, rather than mark particular poems for rereading, I would go back through the whole book.

When, about a month later, I picked it up again the poems had settled more and I started noticing where Laux would repeat herself, poem to poem, where she would soak in a warm theme, what she liked to talk about.

I note that all three of the poems I've copied into my notebook (& even a third I read several times before choosing not to copy) contain the word "breast". In the poem, "Aphasia", the woman who has lost the power of speech (but for one word) opens her blouse for her husband, "fumbling / at her buttons, her breasts, / holding them up to the light / like a gift."

In "Twelve" Laux describes herself (one presumes) and her friends secretly reviewing girlie magazines in the woods. I like the poem particularly for the motherly way one of the boys attends to his baby brother, retrieving the child's pacifier and cleaning it when it falls from his mouth. That alludes to breast anyway, but of course "the turning / of the pages began, ceremoniously exposing / thigh after thigh, breast after beautiful, / terrible breast ..."

And in "Late October" Laux late at night drives scrabbling, yowling cats from her driveway, "a broom handle slipping // from my hands, my breasts bare ..."

title

I have titled my latest poetry notebook:

I

gay marriage in 101 Dalmatians

When Mr. Dearly marries Mrs. Dearly (her maiden name is not given) they move into a house together with their dogs and the nannies they grew up with.

"Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler met and, after a few minutes of deep suspicion, took a great liking to each other. And they had a good laugh about their names.

"'What a pity we're not a real cook and butler,' said Nanny Cook.

"'Yes, that's what's needed now,' said Nanny Butler.

"And then they both together had the Great Idea: Nanny Cook would train to be a real cook, and Nanny Butler would train to be a real butler. They would start the very next day and be fully trained by the wedding.

"'But you'll have to be a parlourmaid, really,' said Nanny Cook.

"'Certainly not,' said Nanny Butler. 'I haven't the figure for it. I shall be a real butler -- and I shall valet Mr. Dearly, which will need no training as I've done it since the day he was born.'

"And so when the Dearlys and the Pongos [the dalmatians] got back from their joint honeymoon, there were Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler, fully trained, ready to welcome them into the little house facing Regent's Park.

"It came as something of a shock that Nanny Butler was wearing trousers.

"'Wouldn't a black dress with a nice frilly apron be better?' suggested Mrs. Dearly -- rather nervously, because Nanny Butler had never been her Nanny.

"'You can't be a butler without trousers,' said Nanny Butler firmly. 'But I'll get a frilly apron tomorrow. It will add a note of originality.'"

The first illustration of the book shows Mr & Mrs Dearly walking arm in arm, followed by the two dalmatian dogs with Nanny Butler & Nanny Cook bringing up the rear, Nanny Butler in her jacket with tails, striped trousers, and a frilly apron, her hair pulled into a bun, Nanny Cook in a dress, round glasses on her face which she turns to Nanny Butler. The chapter title, which seems to act as caption to the drawing: "THE HAPPY COUPLES"

Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain"

What with the opening of the movie version I figured I wouldn't be able to find Annie Proulx's short story in the library. The New Yorker, the magazine in which the story was originally published, briefly had it posted on their website but it looked long and I'm not much for reading long on the computer.

I searched the library catalog and discovered Still Wild, an anthology of short fiction set in the West edited by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry wrote the screenplay for Brokeback.

The story is a bit muckier than the glistening cleanliness of the movie, "The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey ..." But there's not much that happens in the movie that isn't already in the story. Some scenes are fleshed out versions of the story's summaries. "[A] short dirty fight" is all the description Proulx gives but the movie has Ennis punching the driver of a pickup which has just avoided running him down, the driver getting out and putting in his own series of punches.

My favorite scene, where Jack & Ennis have been carrying on this semi-annual affair of the mountains for twenty years and they finally have an are-you-being-faithful-to-me moment, is in the story almost word for word what you hear in the theatre. When I said that to Kent he asked, "So what does Ennis say?"

Ennis, as depicted by Heath Ledger, is a mumblemouth. He's getting lots of critical praise for his performance. But I liked Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack better. Or maybe I just liked Jack and didn't like Ennis.

When Jack suggests they go to Mexico, somewhere not so damn cold as these mountains, Ennis gets suspicious. Maybe Jack has gotten same Mexico tail? Boys? "'I got a say this to you one time, Jack, and I ain't foolin'. What I don't know ... all them things I don't know could get you killed if I should come to know them."

"foolin'" and "killed" were, I think, the only words I caught in the theatre.

Nice to see Jack not put up with this shit. "'I'll say it just one time. Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life.'"

another excerpt from Kafka's diary

He feels more deserted with a second person than when alone. If he is together with someone, this second person reaches out for him and he is helplessly delivered into his hand. If he is alone, all mankind reaches out for him -- but the innumerable outstretched arms become entangled with one another and no one reaches him.

[Rereading this I decided I'd miscopied some of it, so I just took the liberty of making a couple corrections. Makes more sense now. Hope it's accurate! Aug 26, 2013]

Conduct Unbecoming & Family Values

I was reading Conduct Unbecoming the other day. The narrative is right now in the early-mid 70s. The movement for gay civil rights is having amazing success, toppling sodomy laws, an out gay man speaks at the Democratic convention, even a few antidiscrimination laws are being or are about to be enacted. Gay service members are fighting back and up to this time the fightingest they got was fighting the accusation that they were gay -- not, as Leonard Matlovich did, because they were gay and deserved to stay in the military. The justness of the cause was self-evident (still is) and all it took for some to get it was to have it pointed out to them.

I have Conduct Unbecoming at home. The book I have on my desk at work, which I carry off to read at lunch, is Family Values, a nonbiological mother's fight to get the state (California) to allow her to adopt her lover's biological child, a child the nonbio mom has helped raise since birth. The narrative takes place in the early 90s. But at one point the author recalls being a schoolteacher in 1977 when Anita Bryant led her "Save the Children" crusade to kill an anti-discrimination ordinance in Dade County, Florida, and her terror when the following year the Briggs Initiative was placed on the California ballot. The Briggs Initiative would have required the firing of all homosexual teachers -- and any nongay teacher who protested.

I had a moment of cognitive dissonance, trapped in the 70s between unrealistic optimism and crushing pessimism.

Well, Dade County has an anti-discrimination ordinance again (enacted in 1998) and it even survived a repeal vote in a general election. The South African Supreme Court today told the government it has to rejigger the laws to allow gays to marry (being as discrimination against gays is explicitly prohibited in the new South African constitution) -- though in typical courtly cop-out fashion it gave the government a year to change the laws. Meanwhile by two to one margins in state after state here in the US voters go for family-attacking anti-marriage laws that purport, as Bryant did, to "save" something, the sort of saving epitomized in such warisms as "we had to destroy the village in order to save it."

David Leavitt

I've read Leavitt's fiction, though he's come out with several books since I picked one up. Tonight I went around the block to Black Oak Books to hear Leavitt give a talk based on his new biography of Alan Turing called The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Leavitt brought transparencies and used an overhead projector to throw the images on a screen. Oddly, he didn't seem familiar with the properties of an overhead projector, the way to enlarge the image, for instance, being to physically move the projector farther from the screen. When the bookstore clerk didn't get it either I hopped up, mumbling something about grade school, and helped drag the table with the iffy legs far enough from the screen to give the people in the back (or the older people in the front) a better chance at seeing. Leavitt's transparencies were from the biography and were illustrations of Turing machines.

Leavitt wrote the book having become fascinated by the creativity of mathematicians, a creativity very different from the fiction writer's, a mathematician's way of thought, Leavitt said, being at once baffling and intriguing. I like that.

I didn't buy the book. I did buy some used copies of Leavitt novels.

more excerpts from Kafka's diary

There may be a purpose lurking behind the fact that I never learned anything useful and -- the two are connected -- have allowed myself to become a physical wreck. I did not want to be distracted, did not want to be distracted by the pleasures life has to give a useful and healthy man. As if illness and despair were not just as much of a distraction!

...

An endless, dreary Sunday afternoon, an afternoon swallowing down whole years, its every hour a year. By turns walked despairingly down empty streets and lay quietly on the couch. Occasionally astonished by the leaden, meaningless clouds almost uninterruptedly drifting by. "You are reserved for a great Monday!" Fine, but Sunday will never end.

Dead but still among the best poets writing today

Elizabeth Bishop had been dead nine years by the time the annual anthology series Best American Poetry began publishing. I read BAP every year as a sort of penance for caring about poetry, the most irrelevant artform on the planet.

Jeff Bahr has a chart that logs how many times a poet has had work chosen for BAP. John Ashbery, it seems, is America's Best poet. Donald Hall is America's second Best poet. Charles Simic is America's third Best poet. And so on.

Each new BAP culls poems from magazines published in the preceding year. They have to be American (or Canadian) and written in English -- no translations are eligible. Even considering the years of backlog at many literary magazines you could be forgiven for assuming that the appearance of a dead poet in BAP would be unusual. So how many times has Elizabeth Bishop had a poem in Best American Poetry?

Four times.

Conduct Unbecoming

I always have several books going. When I sit down to read I often read a page or two from one, then move on to another and so work my way down through the pile. Conduct Unbecoming is Randy Shilts' book about the US military's ongoing assault on gay Americans, specifically rooting them from the ranks and impressing upon all those nongay that to be gay is the worst thing one can be.

The book has been on the bottom of the pile for months, maybe as long as a year. The placemark sat in place about a hundred pages in. Yesterday I picked the book up again. It's well written. But I quickly figured out what had caused its stay at the bottom of the pile to have remained unrelieved for so long. This book is fucking depressing! It tells the stories of people whose lives are destroyed by the US's crazed notions of manhood (& womanhood). Or rather, by the agents assigned by government to enforce those notions. Drill sargeants, doctors, military police ...

The Man Who Tasted Shapes

The Man Who Tasted Shapes is Richard Cytowic's investigation of the phenomenon of synaesthesia, a conflation of senses wherein one sees sounds or, in the case of his subject (& friend) Michael, feels a flavor.

But I want to talk about something other than the book's purported topic. In a review on Amazon.com of George Takei's autobiography the reviewer notes, "George never mentions getting married or wanting to get married. He never mentions going out on dates. ... He never says he was too busy for a love life. He mentions that other Star Trek actors and other relatives are married, but he never says anything about himself." The reviewer asks, "Is George Takei gay?" This was back in Sept 2003. Now we have it from Sulu himself.

Reading The Man Who Tasted Shapes I also noticed that Richard Cytowic never mentions a love interest. (Though the book is not a biography, exactly, Cytowic talks a lot about his personal history.) Surely if he were married with children that would at least be included in the five paragraph bio in the back of the book. We all know there are straight men (or asexual men) who never marry. But my gaydar pings when Richard describes hanging out in the new neighbor's kitchen. The neighbor, Michael, is preparing dinner. Says Richard, "I sat nearby while he whisked the sauce he had made for the roast chickens. 'Oh, dear,' he said, slurping a spoonful, 'there aren't enough points on the chicken.'

"'Aren't enough what?' I asked.

"He froze and turned red, betraying a realization that his first impression had been as awkward as that of a debutante falling down the stairs."

... excuse me? A debutante falling down the stairs? How gay!

Later, when the scientist is trying to talk his subject into submitting to an elaborate test procedure he says, "'This is your big chance for the fame you wanted,' I cajoled him. 'I can't bestow the Tony Award, but I can promise when you're all wired up that you'll look better than the Bride of Frankenstein.'"

... better than the Bride of Frankenstein? It'd be a rare straight boy who'd feel enticed by that kind of cajoling.

No, Richard never explicitly outs his subject or himself. But how many clues do you need?

Here's an interview with Cytowic. You gotta love how he describes meeting gay artist David Hockney, "Well, David, he is so sweet. He’s brilliant. He was big news because he was painting the opera sets at the Met. And everybody was saying how totally fabulous they were, and how totally different from his painting style that everybody had been familiar with. And in these interviews I’d read, he was talking about the fact that the music had a certain shape and color. So I wrote to him.

Five or six months went by, and I finally got back a hand-written letter on a yellow legal pad in red ink which said: 'I’ve been carrying your letter around with me for months wondering whether to answer or not. Would it tell me anything that I really want to know or would it be better not to know? I’ve never heard of synaesthesia. At first I thought you were just trying to scientifically analyze what I always thought of as artistic. But, anyway, curiosity has the better of me so let’s get together and talk about this.' So we did. I went to Los Angeles and spent two days with him, a highlight of which, for me, was swimming nude in his pool. His famous pool painted with those blue marks. So I thought 'Oh, boy! I’m in David Hockney’s wavey pool.'

So that’s how we met. We did some experiments there, and sure enough he was genuine. And for him it’s the melody, it is the sequence of things that gives him the impression of size, shape, color, and form as well."