what’s new

Last night I went to Moe’s to hear Paul Vangelisti. He read with Debra Di Blasi, who I don’t know, but I liked her reading well enough. I bought Vangelisti’s first book, air, which is either back in print or the publisher found a full box in his bedroom, I wasn’t sure which. It was published in 1973.

I also picked up 6X6, a poetry mag out of New York. I think I have another issue or two of it around here somewhere. It’s bound with a rubber band. Good until the rubber decays. Maybe that’s when the poetry expires. There are six poets, each poet with six poems.

And I’ve had my eye on The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, an anthology of non-Japanese manga (Japanese-style comics). I felt like buying things so I took that from the shelf, too.

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

States of Desire

from the diary: “Thursday 8/28/86

“Still reading States of Desire.”

The following day: “Finished States of Desire, which was good but faintly depressing.”

Edmund White traveled the country, finding sex with men in every region. I like White’s prose style. I continue to read his work. But the gay identity that consists not of loving men but “tricking”, that is, sex sex sex, mostly with strangers, I still find, at best, uncongenial.

White’s adventures did not thrill me with the possibilities. On the other hand, as this description at Edmund White’s own website suggests, the book probably exposed me to a range of gay life I hadn’t yet much seen in those sociological tomes: “gay engineers, gay computer experts, and gay cowboys … a gay timber baron from Portland and a ‘big-wig’ (literally as well as figuratively) in the Florida drag world. Here are: handsome lifeguards in Chicago—those ‘bronzed demigods . . . who lord it above us on their white wood towers’ [ellipsis in orig]; a Hollywood host who has just spent ‘a typical L.A. day, driving 150 miles assembling the twelve ingredients for supper’ … gay Cubans in Miami, a gay lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and even a self-appointed gay Mormon prophet in Salt Lake City …” I’m sure they all didn’t sleep with (sleep with?) Edmund White.

Tom Jones

from the diary: “Wednesday 8/27/86

“Pretty much spent the day at home. Started Tom Jones and States of Desire.”

Two days later: “… reading s’more Tom Jones, which is good but which I can’t read great portions of at one sitting – oh, well, I planned to renew and renew it. The library’s not likely to yank it from me cuz someone’s requested it.”

9/13: “Still reading Tom Jones.”

In my memory the library had instituted its renewal limits by this time. Guess not. Once I started the fall semester, however, I saw there was no way I would be able to keep up with Tom Jones. I remember contendedly chuckling away over the book while soaking my feet before bed (conquered athlete’s foot that way and learned to like it). There are essays Henry Fielding throws in at the beginning of each “book” (the text is divided into sections, which, I suppose, were originally published as separate volumes). Fielding even says if you don’t like your narrative interrupted just skip the essays. But they were fun. Some of the easiest essays I’d come across. So I didn’t want to skip them. Yet they stopped the story dead and it was hard to get myself into the swing of the narrative again. It was a fat book besides, and I was a slow reader. I don’t remember how far I got. Not halfway, I think.

Published in England in 1749, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling is often called one of the first novels. Not that I really know what people who say that mean. The full text is available online.

A few years ago I found a cheap paperback. I much prefer a hardcopy book to scrolling along on a computer. So someday, soaking my feet before bed some chilly winter night, I’ll chuckle along to Tom Jones again.

Talking Animals and Other People

from the diary: “Friday 8/22/86

“Been reading a good book, Talking Animals and Other People, autobiography of animator Shamus Culhane.”

I was a big fan of animation. It seemed to me the place where you could realize things that could never be in real life. If the Oz books were made into movies I thought they should be animated movies. A gangly pumpkin-headed man built from sticks? You wouldn’t have to plump him up to make him a costume for a meat person. A sawhorse brought to life by a sprinkling of powder? No need to built a puppet to dangle in front of a blue screen. And animals talking? It looks natural.

Since the images depicted are limited only by what the artist can draw an animated world seemed the perfect place for exploring unknown regions of the mind. Such is rarely the case, of course. Typical animated films are no more interesting than your typical live action films. How much this has to do with the inelastic imaginations of the creators, how much to do with the expectations of the money men and their wish to sell the product to an audience – too weird and nobody wants to buy, right? – how much it has to do with something else I haven’t thought of, who knows?

The review in the NYT praises Culhane’s look back at his career (only a glance at his personal life, it says), “Much of what [the book] reveals is disagreeable, and one of its great merits is that it offers such an unsparing view of a world that was all too often subject to strain, squalor, brutal internal politics, harsh labor relations.” Not unlike the sweaty shops where comic books were cranked out, I suppose. I understand there’s long been an overlap between comics artists and animators. Culhane “has the knack of explaining technical matters clearly … [and] is equally concerned with esthetic issues, from the use of backgrounds inspired by Victorian illustrators to the lessons to be learned from the movie-making innovations of an Eisenstein or a Pudovkin.”

Culhane worked for Disney and claims credit for the “Heigh ho, Heigh ho” marching dwarves sequence in Snow White. “He had good reason to resent Disney's authoritarianism, and to know how unfair he could sometimes be, but he admires his dedication and his abilities too much to let fly against him.” And who knew that “toward the end of the making of Snow White … [the animators were so keyed up for a week they poured out an] avalanche of pornographic drawings in which Snow White, the dwarfs and even the old witch performed feats ‘that Krafft-Ebing would never have dreamed of.’” What private collection has those drawings?

African Short Stories

from the diary: “Thursday 8/14/86

“I lay around today reading African Short Stories.”

This probably is the anthology edited by Chinua Achebe & C. L. Innes. Can’t know for sure cuz I didn’t list author or publisher in the diary. Nor did I say anything about it, any of the usual critical commentary like “good” or “liked”.

I was trying to write short stories and I was reading short story anthologies in hopes reading stories would help my own. If you want to be a writer, declared several advisors (mostly how-to books), you should start by writing short stories. Short stories not only are good training for building a narrative, capturing character, developing a style, but they are a lot easier to sell than a novel. If you grow a career in short fiction publishers & agents will come calling. We see you can write, they will say. Show us your novel.

Aphrodisiac

from the diary: “Tuesday 8/19/86

“Jeff came over. That is, I met him on the way to the library (to return Aphrodisiac: fiction from Christopher Street -- a good little collection of gay fiction) … [Jeff] wandered around with me, came back here. We played a couple [board] games.”

I was both embarassed by and defiant about carrying this book around. Cover pic showing man’s bare torso (stopping short of the pubes), and with that title, didn’t it scream? It was literary fiction, not porn. I don’t remember anything about the stories. What can I say? Christopher Street was a gay literary magazine out of New York.

The Front Runner

from the diary: “Tuesday 8/12/86

“I went downtown. … Got The Front Runner (a novel about a gay relationship) on Chris’ recommendation from the S[anta] R[osa] library.”

Chris was the leader of a gay youth group in Marin that I had recently connected with.

Two days later: “I’m reading The Front Runner, a 1974 novel by Patricia Nell Warren about a track coach and his star runner who fall very in love. And it’s a good book, too.”

And then: “I finished The Front Runner. But Billy had to die? And Delphine committed suicide? Oh, come on. The ending was semi-happy, but the endless tragedy of gay lives gets awful tiring. Actually, Delphine’s suicide irked me the most because he seemed more a stereotype than a real character. At least there was important, relieving resolution to Billy’s death. Oh, well. The book had me in a powerful grip, and a book has to be purty dern good to do that.”

A lot of people love this book. Rave some Amazon reviews: “truly remarkable,” “very much the right book at the right time by the right author,” “heartbreaking, insightful, beautiful, painful,” and so on. I had asked Chris if she knew about good gay novels. Everybody loves The Front Runner, she said.

Author Patricia Nell Warren maintains her own website. She has written two sequels, neither of which I’ve read. Many times Warren has been asked why she, a lesbian, wrote a gay male love story. “She started outlining The Front Runner as a story about a lesbian coach and one of her runners, who became lovers,” says an Outsports interview. But, “’When I finally looked around at real life I thought, nobody will believe this because there aren’t any women coaches in track. … [I]f you were going to have a cliff-hanger story about being outed on the way to the Olympics, if you were a woman athlete, you’re automatically suspect by many people anyway.’”

The last New Yorker

In 2004 I sent in a subscription to The New Yorker. Kent had said he would read it, I’d read and enjoyed the magazine in small doses (though there was one point a friend had passed her subscription to me and I let the issues gather dust in my room for a year or two before finally throwing them out), and the subscription offer was real cheap, the “professional rate”. When the issues started showing up I would flip through them, look at the cartoons, read a poem, scan the movie reviews, then they would fall into this pile or that pile and the next issue would crowd in.

When I switched to a parttime job last spring I began to clean up some piles and in doing so collected the New Yorkers. Was I going to throw them out again, lightly read, as I had that friend’s batch? I decided to give reading them a try. I could always change my mind. I didn’t read them in chronological order (unusual for Glenn, typically obsessive about that sort of thing) and I let myself skip or skim articles, particularly ones about the 2004 presidential election (we know how that depressing thing turned out), and the Iraq War (I never wanted to be an expert on Iraq), but I read all the fiction, and most everything else.

Kent never did read much (though I see the last two I read are serving as bathroom distraction right now). As I finish with them I dump the issues in the recycle bag. I finished the last issue of the subscription. The Oct. 18, 2004 issue. It’s not, as I said, the last I received, the subscription ran out in 2005, it’s just the one that was on the bottom of the pile. It calls itself “The Politics Issue”. Yes, I mostly hopped over the article on “How George W. Bush reinvented himself.” I like Clive James’ poem “Exit Don Giovanni”; am thinking about copying it out. It would be the second poem I’ve copied out from the subscription issues (the first appeared in an article as an example of a song by an Eskimo tribe).

In this last issue there’s an article on a Boston charter school that tries to give the extra to students struggling. One of the students profiled is Rousseau Mieze, a goodlooking, smart black boy whose struggles with school seem more to do with boredom and the difficulties of living poor than with understanding the assignments. He writes poetry, which seems primarily influenced by rap music, and there are excerpts in the article.

My life yo I’m thankful
On the real I feel I’ll tank though
I feel like death is hangin’ on my ankle.

Mieze tortures language for his rhymes here. The subject is serious, isn’t it? But I get the feeling the language is enjoying its torture and the seriousness is shot through with humor. Humor helps, people.

You be the minority, preferably black?
The new social profiling is green in fact.

Mieze is worrying about college. If you can’t show the school that you’re a consistent high achiever then the financial aid that makes school possible won’t come through. Mieze’s grades are middling.

He’s stepping with some newness
What problems? He can do this.

I find that couplet utterly charming.

Solstice

from the diary: “Monday 8/11/86

“Reading a novel by Joyce Carol Oates: Solstice. It’s good.”

Joyce Carol Oates writes a lot. Many of her stories have a fantastic or magical realist flavor, and they are often dark, even creepy. I think this is still the only of her novels I’ve read. I have read several short stories, mostly as I’ve run across them in anthologies. I probably read this one for the gay aspect. “Imperceptibly, hardly aware of what is happening to them at the deepest level of feeling, [the two women] move, or are moved, toward love, and ultimately beyond it, arriving at last at a near-fatal obsession with each other.” (That’s from Celestial Timepiece.) Doesn’t exactly sound life-affirming. Probably will never be an Oprah choice.

The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies

from the diary: “Friday 8/8/86

“The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by Rito Vusso [sic] came in from the Solano Library an’ I bin reading it tonight.”

This was the third book on gay subject matter that I had to get via interlibrary loan. Like the other two (Reflections of a Rock Lobster and One Teenager in Ten) The Celluloid Closet came from the Solano County Library. What was it about the Solano County Library? It’s not like Sonoma County’s library had no gay books. Huh. They did tend to be rather more … sociological? … than cultural. I read a lot of dense texts trying to figure out what the gay thing was.

I suspect Vito Russo’s reading of the queer killer stereotype informed the protests in San Francisco over the filming of Basic Instinct in 1991. I refused to see Basic Instinct for several years. Yes, I did succumb when I was bored and the DVD was kicking around. By that point, I figured, nobody was making money off my eyeballs.

If you want to read a review, here’s one.

Christmas in March

My s’mom sent me an Amazon gift certificate for Xmas. Amazon has much more than books these days. But I knew I was going to get books.

I’ve been working my way through unread Baum books. Recently I read John Dough and the Cherub and I’m in the middle of The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. I’ve had Santa Claus for years and the time just never seemed right. Twenty years ago I got Twinkle and Chubbins and late last year I finally read it. I’ve been thinking about rereading the Oz series. I’ve read all the Baum Oz books more than once; yet there are non-Oz Baum books that I haven’t read. Oughtn’t I read them first? I mean, if I ever intend to. Twinkle and Chubbins is a collection of fairy stories set on the prairie, the main characters being a girl, Twinkle, and a boy, Chubbins. The Oz Club did a nice hardcover. But they didn’t bring back into print the sequel, Policeman Bluejay. The University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books imprint has remedied the situation, bringing both the short stories and the full length sequel into print in a paperback, calling it Twinkle Tales. I figured I might as well get that.

I’ve been curious about the small poetry presses I’ve been watching birth on the internet. Steve Mueske’s Three Candles. Reb Livingston’s No Tell Motel. Both have recent anthologies. I was leaning toward The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel. But I guess I decided to go with Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World because I’ve been following a few more of the poets in it. I read Seth Abramson’s blog, for instance. And Paul Guest’s. Both are on my blogroll. (As are Steve Mueske and Reb Livingston, by the way.)

The books arrived yesterday. Twinkle Tales is nicely done. Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World isn’t quite. All of the design seems just a bit off. I like the colors and the cover photo but the fonts clash and the text inside seems to have been captured as it floated by. It’s a print on demand book. Print on demand books don’t look as good. But then it’s always been a struggle for a tiny press and p.o.d. offers opportunities that just weren’t available before. Not for us working stiffs. Anyway, I’m happy enough to have it in hand and am looking forward to the read.

I Never Loved Your Mind

from the diary: “Thursday 8/7/86

“Mom and I exchanged animosities tonight. She was pissed at me for not turning over the paper to her right when she asked for it and I was pissed at her for crabbing at me. According to her I ‘had no right to be offended.’ Since I’d had all day to read the paper I had no right to be reading it just when she wanted to be reading it. I don’t think she would’ve cared if she had known that it would’ve taken me four minutes tops to finish and hand it over. She just wanted to be petty. She was looking for something to grouse over and found it. So I threw the paper on the floor, said, ‘Here! Read it!’ and fled into my room with Paul Zindel’s I Never Loved Your Mind. Mom came to my door as she was going to bed and said, ‘Good night.’ I, of course, still feeling offended, despite my having no right to the feeling, said nothing. So she said, ‘Don’t do this.’ Sounded like something I could’ve said. When she told me I had no right to be offended I told her to leave me alone and I’d do the dishes tomorrow. I wasn’t actually as angry as I tried to make myself sound. She was lighting into me because she had no one else so I returned the favor.”

I loved the title: I Never Loved Your Mind … and I liked Zindel’s The Pigman. The publisher’s description at Amazon: “At 17, Dewey Daniels is fed up with his boring high school and decides to drop out, taking a part-time job at Richmond Valley Hospital. One day he catches fellow dropout Yvette Goethals stealing hospital supplies, and it's lust at first sight. But Yvette and Dewey are like night and day: she's a vegetarian and couldn't care less about a romantic commitment; he loves cheeseburgers and can't get Yvette out of his mind. By the time these two get through with each other, will true love ever be the same?”

I was probably disappointed the book was completely het. If it had had a hint of queer representation I would have made note? Truthfully, I remember nothing about it.

Helliconia Winter

from the diary: “Sunday 8/3/86

“I’m reading Helliconia Winter, the third and last Helliconia book.”

When I wrote about Julian May’s The Many Colored Land I may have been remembering the Helliconia books. Now that I’m faced with writing about the Helliconia books … uh … I don’t remember anything about them. Except maybe I found them kind of boring? Yeah, I remember subdued landscape covers …

Crisis in American Institutions

from the diary: “Thursday 7/17/86

“I’m going to the JC library tomorrow to study the book that Linda (Collins, our instructor) has on reserve: Crisis in American Institutions.”

Friday: “I checked Crisis out of the JC library today. They let me take it out over the weekend. It’s due at 9:00 on Monday. Good thing the bus gets there so early, I guess.”

The college course I signed up for summer of 1986 was not my first college course – I’d taken a Creative Writing Workshop and a Sign Language Class, both of which met in the evenings at the local high school – but it was the first at the JC campus and was an experiment – would I, could I start going to college? That is, would college be a way out of the hole I was in? Mom was hopeful. I was dubious, having always hated school, but there were plenty of things I wanted to learn and people told me college was different and what did I have to lose? Maybe I could even get a job on campus? Mom had a buddy who was an instructor and, should I decide to enroll in the fall, she promised to put in a good word at the library.

What was the course? Social Deviance. As I would tell people, “I figured I knew something about it.” The instructor thought a better name would have been “Social Variance,” which does sound nicer. Crisis in American Institutions was the text and it was my first exposure to textbook pricing. The current 13th edition retails for $75.00. I’m sure it seemed similarly steep in ’86. According to the “card catalog” description at Amazon, This book “[p]resents articles on such social problems as corporate power, economic crisis, sexism, racism, and inequality.”

I quit Day Treatment to go to school. I was told I could visit and I did. But I think I only did that once. I liked the class well enough. One day there was a panel of homosexuals talking about homosexual stuff, available to answer questions, la. I don’t think I asked any. On the day of the panel I brought a bouquet of daisies and handed out a daisy to everyone in class. A couple of the boys refused theirs. It was, like, totally obvious I was coming out, eh?

For my term paper I interviewed the pastor of the local Metropolitan Community Church. He said I had pretty eyes. He said I would hear that a lot. I haven’t heard it since. Teacher gave the paper an A- (A+ for content, presentation “variable”).

God Save This Honorable Court

from the diary: “Friday July 4, 1986

“I read God Save This Honorable Court by Laurence Tribe.”

End of June the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled (in a 5-4 decision) that sodomy laws were not unconstitutional. Laurence Tribe was the lawyer arguing before the court that sodomy laws should be struck down. Back in the 80s he was frequently mentioned as a likely Supreme Court nominee should the White House go to a Democrat. In the Wikipedia article on Tribe there's the assertion that when “he testified against Robert Bork, [Tribe made] lasting enemies in the U.S. Senate”. Had Clinton chosen Tribe, the article implies, Tribe would not have been confirmed.

Of God Save This Honorable Court the NYT says, Laurence Tribe “combs the history of the High Court for a set of interesting but unstartling propositions … A single Justice … can affect the Court profoundly. The narrow literal interpretation of the Constitution prized by conservatives is largely a myth. Most Supreme Court Justices … turn out to be pretty much what their benefactors wanted. ... And, perhaps most important, the Senate has both a long tradition and constitutionally mandated duty to scrutinize all High Court nominees closely.” These remain true, don’t they? Truisms, maybe? One might tack on a couple more. Howabout: Conservative judges are activist judges.

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk

from the diary: “Thursday 6/26/86

“Just finished The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.”

I remember Harvey Milk. I grew up 50 miles north of San Francisco but our TV stations were SF TV stations so the news tended to be SF news. And Harvey was telegenic. There’s a TV news report that appears in the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk in which Harvey, an SF supervisor, highlights the need for his pooper-scooper legislation by marching across the Civic Center lawn and stepping in dog poo. He lifts his foot, aghast, as though it all happened spontaneously, the offending poo half-squashed against the sole of his shoe. I saw that report as a kid when it first showed and I totally fell for it. Wow. There must be poop all over the place in San Francisco!

I also remember the Briggs Initiative, the first time one of the religio-right’s coffer-stuffing take-it-to-the-voters ballot attacks on the queers made it into my consciousness. Dangerouscitizen.com says, “In crafting the initiative, Briggs had used extremely broad language. Any teacher found to be 'advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting' homosexual activity could be fired. This meant walking in a gay pride parade, assigning a book by a gay author, or attending a meeting about gay rights could cost a teacher his or her job. Casting the issue as a matter of free speech, opponents pointed out that a teacher could be fired simply for opposing the Briggs Initiative itself.” While I wasn't owning up to gay feelings at the time (I wasn't yet 13) I was a confirmed free-speecher and was appalled that one's thoughts, one's mere opinions could get one fired. I remember walking around my paper route fuming about it. Harvey Milk, was the most visible out-gay elected official and he traveled the state fighting the Briggs Initiative, even facing John Briggs in live debates. I probably saw one of those -- ours was the kind of household that tuned in to things like that. I'm pretty sure Mom was solidly against the Briggs Initiative, though I can't recall any particular incidence of voiced opposition. She was a schoolteacher and had to sign a loyalty oath (instituted during the McCarthy era and still required) to work in the California public schools. She wasn’t impressed with that, I know.

The Briggs Initiative was defeated. Three weeks later Harvey Milk was assassinated.

I remember watching the silent candlelight march that took place that night. (The mayor, George Moscone, had also been gunned down by right-wing supervisor Dan White.) I remember the White Nights riots after Dan White was patted on the head by the courts and given a token five year sentence seven year sentence (of which he served five). Police cars were set on fire and their sirens screamed and screamed. The City Hall’s glass doors were bashed in.

The Mayor Castro Street is a good read. I’ll read it again sometime.

The Seven Mysteries of Life

from the diary: “Thursday 6/5/86

“Am reading The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie. Engrossing but long.”

6/12/86: “Still reading The Seven Mysteries of Life.”

6/13/86: “Finished 7 Mysteries. Liked it. Synthesis book.”

OK. What do I remember about this book? I don’t remember much about this book. Had something to do with science … Helpfully, there are reviews on the net.

At Amazon Bugs Patrick helps out with “the *seven mysteries*: Abstraction, Interrelation, Omnipresence, Polarity, Transcendence, Germination, and Divinity.”

P. K. Paraskevopoulos says, “Firstly, you are led to realise that your concept of life is too narrow and prevents you from realising that life pervades everything - from particles and atoms to complex organisms - and that the Earth itself is a complex live organism. Then you see that all life is interrelated. For example, you realise that the most distant relationship among people is, approximately, 50th cousinhood, which means that all people are related and gives a new meaning to concept of `the brotherhood of man'.”

Another reviewer says, among the other explanations is “how sand is deposited on beaches.” Huh. I wonder if it’s from Guy Murchie I got the beach formation idea, rather than The Blue Planet. Twenty years on it’s hard to tease out where I picked up one thing or another.

At Thymos.com Piero Scaruffi has a more thorough overview. Among the things Scaruffi picks out (and I remember some of this) is this bit about the non-inertness of nonliving things, “Life is inherent in nature. Murchie describes sand dunes, glaciers, fires, etc as living organisms, the life of metals and crystals. The question is not whether there is life outside our planet, but whether it is possible to have ‘nonlife’. … The laws of Physics describe the social life of particles. Electrons obey social laws that we decided are physical laws instead of biological laws thereby granting their behavior a different status from the behavior of bees. But this is an arbitrary decision. Mind is a universal aspect of life and energy.”

I do remember being asked about it while I was reading it. Have you ever tried to describe to someone a third person’s argument and having the person to whom you are describing start to protest, to pick holes, to disagree? This was one of those books that taught me not to try. No way could I do justice to Murchie’s ideas. I didn’t want to be put in the position of advocating for them, but I did like thinking about them. After much frustration I learned to say, “If you want to know, read it yourself.”

I’m now reading through the diary that covers 6/6/86 thru 10/14/86.

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

Endless Enemies

from the diary: “Tuesday 5/6/86

Caught a cold so “I lay around and drank peppermint tea, threw back vitamin C tablets, and kyolic garlic capsules, read Endless Enemies -- all about the U.S.’s shitty foreign policy.”

The next week I wrote: “Finished Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World by [Jonathan] Kwitny. He argues very convincingly by just showing that the best foreign policy is noninterventionist, in which the U.S. supports the principles that make it great rather than worrying endlessly about the latest dictator and whether he’s a ‘friend’. We’re the biggest economy in the world, he says. Everybody wants to be our friend – if only we (our govt) didn’t make itself such an asshole around the world.”

In his Amazon.com review Robert Carlberg says, “Jonathan Kwitny, a former NYT reporter, describes in excruciating detail U.S. foreign policy disasters in Zaire, Angola, Iran, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Cuba, The Philippines, China, Lebanon, El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Ethiopia and elsewhere -- and frankly after a couple hundred pages of this I was simply too dispirited to continue reading. I'm probably naive or idealistic or both, but I want to believe my country stands for the principles expounded in our Declaration of Independence. Reading this exhaustive, carefully-researched, emotionally-detached and factual account to the contrary turned out to be painful and destructive to my civic pride.” Another reviewer adds, “Although this book is over 15 years old, everything it states still seems … to be true.”

It hasn’t gotten better, eh?

Says William Blum, “The section on U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 was largely excised from a 1986 Penguin Books edition due to a libel suit brought against Kwitny by former New York Times reporter Kennett Love.”

And, finally, and you might call this ironic, Kwitny, the NYT review insists, is no leftwing socialist. He’s a free market purist! “[W]hen a free-market economy is allowed to compete openly with a Socialist one, the former wins the battle every time. … But the United States won't let that competition happen … For a variety of complex reasons, mostly having to do with either misguided ideology or sheer greed, this country keeps obstructing the free play of developing economies.”

Kwitny’s thesis would be one of the supporting documents for my contention that even if what Iraq really needed was Democracy at the Point of a Gun, the U.S. government (especially the Bush regime) was not going in there for democracy’s sake. After all, if Bush believed in democracy he would support it here.

The Redundant Male

from the diary: “Saturday 5/3/86

“Reading The Redundant Male. ‘Is sex irrelevant in the modern world?’ asked the subtitle. Halway through the book the answer seems to be, ‘Yes.’”

Before moving on to humans authors Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin review reproductive strategies among other animals. Russell Bell summarizes thus, “In some genera asexual species dominate and, in many environments, have displaced sexual species entirely. They find the illustrative examples such as the Jacana, a tropical American bird whose females mate with multiple males, the males incubating the eggs (the males build nests to encourage a female to give them an egg.); hermaphroditic snails and fish (they switch between sex as their relative population warrants, or do both at once.); an insect like the Ascaris Lumbricoides, a parasitic worm whose male lives only in the cloaca of the female; the stickleback, a fish whose male makes the nest and chases the female away after she lays her eggs and raises the fry alone; crocodiles and turtles whose eggs develop into males or females depending upon their temperature (but with an opposite relationship between the two.)” I recommend another review of varieties of reproductive strategy that appears in Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, pub’d in 2004.

Then they ask, with the advent of effective birth control (& female autonomy) what is the advantage of having men? Men don’t help much with rearing the kids. Women could make the gecko’s choice, just make more of themselves. What with all the wars, graffiti, and missing the bowl, aren’t men just not worth the trouble?

Lionel Tiger in his review in the New York Times asks, “Does the apparent shift in the sexual balance of control condemn the male sex to a kind of shiftless and baffled exclusion from committed participation in the central biosocial process? To paraphrase Marx, have men become alienated from the means of reproduction? In strict behavioral terms, the authors' answer is yes. Given the broad evolutionary canvas on which they draw their picture of contemporary sexuality and kinship, the threatened self-sufficiency of females for reproductive purposes might be expected to drive men wild.” Poor things.

writing group

Sunday evening I had two poets over for workshop. Haven’t done workshop in years. Kent opened us a bottle of chardonnay and that probably helped loosen the ol’ tongue. I’m not a fan of workshop, really. I like it for community but I’ve never felt it returned value commensurate with the effort, time, anxiety put into it. I’ve learned what I’ve learned about revision through reading poems I like, yes, but mostly by sounding my poems, thumping them and shaking them, reading & rereading them, and allowing myself to cut them and mend them, to graft to them unwieldy limbs, to force march them down muddy roads, to let them take over and ride me. I’ve seen so many poems subjected to workshop that in reatction to critique only seem to get worse (mine included). I can’t remember any that improved. Such an event ought to stand out.

There were three of us working the shop. Alan Bern (who brought his new book, Waterwalking Berkeley), John Selawsky (a poem of his is here), and myself. I had more fun that I expected. I think the key was that I got to talk poetry. The particular poem didn’t matter so much. I would read the poem and talk about what I saw there, what I liked and disliked, what I thought clever, what I found tiresome. Did I do most of the talking? Probably.

When I searched for poems by John online I was amused to see DIR appear among the search results. Was invoking his name a summoning? Who knew the man would walk into my house eight months later?

God’s Bullies

from the diary: “Tuesday 4/29/86

“I’m finishing God’s Bullies, all about the ‘New Right’. Jerry Falwell and his cronies. Good book, icky people.”

On his website author Perry Dean Young writes, “I have to recall with some embarrassment and a little humor that I pushed my publisher to get this book out before the 1982 elections because I felt the religious right was a passing phenomenon, a mere blip on the national political scene. We needed to get the book out because the religious right would no longer be a force in future elections and my findings would no longer be relevant. Boy, was I ever wrong. Twenty-two years later, the religious right is now more powerful than ever. It is no longer a mere radical lunatic fringe, but a force that has quite literally taken over our government.”

Yeah, a lot of lefty commentators & bloggers seemed surprised by the ascendance of the Religious Righteous, as though they were some new phenomenon. I remember them clearly from early in Reagan’s reign. They never went away. Having deified George W. Bush one may hope the Rightites will crash and burn with him. Of course, Bushie hasn’t quite crashed & burned, has he? The steady downward march of positives in the opinion polls haven’t done much to thwart him. He sure as hell ain’t gonna resign.

Coming up to the 2004 elections I was predicting his ouster. After all, Gore didn’t really lose in 2000. No way would anybody who voted for Gore vote for Bush, and I was sure Bush hadn’t won more friends. As Young says, “We simply could not believe that a majority of our people had fallen for the lies and misrepresentations of George Bush and his administration. What made this defeat all the more painful was the fact that [we are] faced with one of the most immoral administrations in history. … And, yet, the people clamor for more of the same.”

Part of why I knew the Rightites never went away? I’ve been reading the gay press. The gay community has been the particular target of the Rightites all along. The homos seem to scare money out of the pocketbooks of little old ladies right into the sweat-damp pockets of the preachers. I guess most of the nongay left has been oblivious. Who cares about this gay stuff? As the relatively liberal Charles Barkely, in responding to the latest contretemps over gay men in the locker room, put it, “Gays don’t bother me.” But, then, he doesn’t much bother about them, does he?

Spencer Selby

Spencer Selby is a poet. I’ve seen his work around and he maintains a helpful list of publications (many of them ezines) that feature “experimental poetry”. (I use the quotes because it’s the term Selby uses and because there always seems to be argument about what to call poetry other than the rhyming/conventional/mainstream/accessible sort; or, maybe, any sort?) It’s called Selby’s List.

He lives near the Claremont branch and one day while helping him at the Circulation Desk I mused aloud about how familiar the name seemed, “Spencer Selby … the poet?” And he did a doubletake, for what poet expects to be recognized, and we’ve since been nodding acquaintances. He has a new book, Twist of Address, and he left a copy with me Friday. I hope to get the library to buy it. We talked about having him read as part of Poetry & Pizza but that hasn’t come together yet.

You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown

from the diary: “Sunday 4/27/86

“Dropped You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown in the library book slot.”

I loved Peanuts as a kid. I learned the word “depressed” from Charlie Brown. These were kids not involved in hilarious hijinks but ruminating about life. I bought lots of the mass market size reprints and they always said the strips inside were “selected from” some larger volume so I tried to find the larger volumes and sometimes succeeded. At one point, my ardor cooled and eager to get my hands on the new fave, I sold off my shelf-load of Peanuts to buy B.C. reprints.

A couple years ago I saw a batch of the Peanuts books in the Friends of the Library book sale, many of the ones I’d owned long ago, so I gathered them up. No, I haven’t reread them. But I see Fantagraphics has embarked on a project – reprinting all the Peanuts strips in a high quality format. Good for them.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

from the diary: “Saturday 4/26/86

“Biked to [Rohnert Park] to see [David]. Sat around all day. Readed hiz copy of DARK KNIGHT, Frank Miller’s new batman comic. eh. Glad I dint shell out the bucks fer it. Ceptin’ it’s worth three an’ five times the coverprice now.”

The Dark Knight Returns was Frank Miller’s rehabilitation of Batman (or, The Batman, as the supposedly more serious formulation has it). I’ve never liked Batman. OK, that’s going a little far. I was always disappointed in Batman. He didn’t have any superpowers, just, as Jack Nicholson’s Joker said, “wonderful toys.” His villains didn’t have superpowers either, just goofy costumes. And lots of henchmen. Yeah, so I mostly knew Batman from the campy TV series. I liked Frank Miller’s noirish version of Marvel Comics’ Daredevil, a blind lawyer who ran around at night fighting crime. Daredevil has superpowers, but they are fairly mild – no rays shooting from fingers or eyes, no superduper strength, no ability to teleport or burst into flames. Daredevil has enhanced senses. Though he’s blind, his sense of touch is so extraordinary he can pick up the patterns of ink on paper so read, his hearing so acute he can judge the shapes of objects by the sound that bounces off them. Stuff like that. I hadn’t cared about Daredevil till Miller took him on.

The Dark Knight Returns is set in the future. Bruce Wayne is old. Yet still in fighting trim, it seems. I found I didn’t really care. Tim Burton’s movie rehabilitation of Batman seemed to owe a good deal to Miller.

If you want a minutely detailed synopsis ofBatman: The Dark Knight Returns there’s one here: Dark Knight Storylines

Reflections on Gender and Science

from the diary: “Saturday 4/19/86

“finished Reflections on Gender and Science by [Evelyn Fox] Keller – good book, dense. Couple stories into Ward Six and other stories by Anton Chekhov – very contemporary, good stories, hundred years old but not dated. Began The Ape’s Reflexion by Adrian Desmond.”

I didn’t remember a thing about Reflections on Gender and Science until I googled it. A review in Psychology Today says, “Keller argues that … scientists tend to choose dictatorial rather than interactive models of nature.” Science is objective and pure; it is unemotional and gives one control over the phenomena studied – these are male gendered notions. We ought to be able to think up other ideologies of science.

“Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”

In an essay about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Amos Oz makes an aside, “[A]s the poet Robert Frost reminds us, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’” Considering that Oz’s essay is about misunderstanding (as much as anything else) it’s a touch ironic that he attributes the good fences good neighbors sentiment to Frost. “Mending Wall” is at least as much a critique of it. Not an attack, no, but when Frost and his neighbor walk along the half-wreck of a stone wall that marks their property line, picking up fallen stones and putting them back, Frost gets to musing aloud about the purpose of the wall. “He is all pine and I am apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. / He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.” In response to his neighbor’s unflinching refrain Frost says, “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence.” It seems to me the actual content of Frost’s poem (the whole here) would have borne Amos Oz in better stead than the quip.

Reflections of a Rock Lobster

from the diary: “Thursday 4/10/86

“I just read Reflections of a Rock Lobster, Aaron Fricke’s story about growing up gay in Rhode Island. It also tells how he came to take a male date to his senior prom. I remember seeing him and Paul [the date] on DONAHUE. He appeared on DONAHUE again, I think, a couple years later, this was after his book was out, also after One Teenager in Ten was out, cuz I remember Donahue holding up the books. I got [Reflections] today from the library – it belongs to the Solano County library so I got in on an interlibrary loan. It had a big paper on the front hiding the cover, just like One Teenager but I took that off.

“[When Mom came home] I had Rock Lobster open in my lap and after she finished [telling me what she’d been up to] I said, ‘I’m reading a book by that guy who took a male date to the prom.’ I showed her the cover. I said I empathized with the way Aaron was treated in high school gym class.

“… Mom and I talked more really openly about sex than we ever have.”

Wonderful Cut-Outs of Oz, part III

from the diary: “Monday 4/7/86

“Got a letter from [Baum Bugle editor] Doug Greene – bawling me out about [Wonderful Cut-Outs of Oz] review. I wrote back today, saying, ‘it was all my fault for sending the thing in late. Though I still like my original version better than your indented one.’ His mucked-up, junked-up one. I hate the stupid thing anyway. Hated it before he diddled with it. So I guess it doesn’t matter.”

The Baum Bugle is the main publication of the International Wizard of Oz Club.

Just seven days later I quote a letter from Doug Greene, “I thought we were corresponding amicably.”

This review remains my only contribution to The Baum Bugle. I am still an Oz Club member. I’m no good at writing to order.

Earlier posts on writing the review are here: part I and part II.

The First Time

from the diary: “Friday 4/4/86

“Speaking of fucking (and we weren’t) today and yesterday I been reading The First Time by Karl and Anne Taylor Fleming. This should be required reading in high school. It helps to know that a lot of famous successful people had a hard time with sex. Dr. Benjamin Spock was a virgin when he was twenty, too. And coming (unfortunately no pun intended) right after For Your Own Good I pick up a lot of what Alice Miller said about children being the dumping grounds of their parents’ problems. We repeat our parents. Not always, and never exactly the same way, sometimes worse, sometimes better, but we get an incredible legacy.”

I’m not a big one for dumping secrets. I’ve read memoirs/personal essays in which the author seems to be telling all, and that’s fine, I can be shocked and amazed, and I can wonder what reaction others in their lives are having to seeing/hearing these stories told. I’m not a big one on keeping secrets, stuffing them away in boxes. But then at most my secrets are embarrassing, nothing criminal, no big betrayals or addictions, diseases or accidents or violations.

I didn’t really know enough about my mother’s story to be able to say with authority, “We repeat our parents.” And I knew a good deal less about my father’s story. It’s a pretty banal statement, though, isn’t it? We repeat our parents in so many obvious ways, what’s unreasonable about saying it likely our sexual lives are not without precedent? Mom, it seemed to me, was uncomfortable talking about sex, uncomfortable with the idea of sex, let alone the actuality. My sister, who knew Mom when Mom married her father, sister already eight years old, remembers a woman who wore form-revealing dresses, drank cocktails, and went out dancing with her handsome father. Sister did not consider my mother repressed.

For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

from the diary: “Thursday 4/3/86

“I spent a couple hours of the afternoon reading Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. She traces Hitler’s early childhood, and says that children often act out the neuroses of their parents. Finished reading the book this evening.”

I remember this book in the office of Don, the therapist Mom was paying for me to see.

Dream Makers

from the diary: “Sunday 3/30/86

“I lay around all morning. Finished reading a book of interviews with sf authors -- Dream Makers. I’m now reading vol. 2.”

4/1/86: “I find I don’t like the interviewer. I don’t like his attitude. I enjoyed reading the words of the authors but I got more and more frustrated with Platt’s opinions. Maybe I’m glad there won’t be a Dream Makers 3. The [Santa Rosa] Library had another copy of the second volume so I was able to read from the book even though I hadn’t brought it with me.”

I used to read a lot of interviews. These days I tend to avoid them.

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.

One Teenager in Ten

from the diary: “Wednesday 3/26/86

“Just read straight through a book called One Teenager in Ten. It’s writings by gay teenagers. Wow. Some of them were very intense. One sixteen year old girl wrote some pretty good erotica in recounting her first sexual experience with her dance teacher. I wasn’t turned on – but almost! Got the book from the library. I requested it and they got it from the Solano Library. Has a big paper wrapped around the front cover saying, 'NON-RENEWABLE, Interlibary loan' and such-like, also very conspiratorally hiding the book’s subject. In the back they offer to forward letters from gay people under 21. I qualify. Maybe I’ll try.”

I did send letters through Alyson Publications' penpal service. I'm sure I'll write about what happened as I read through my diary. Anyway, it also turned out Ann Heron, the editor of One Teenager, was an editor/writer at Nolo Press here in Berkeley when I got a job there after graduating Cal. I didn't work with her, exactly -- I was in customer service not editorial -- and my telling her that I'd read the book didn't lead us to much intimacy, still, it was kind of cool happening into her orbit like that.

Fit or Fat

from the diary: “Tuesday 3/25/86

“I’ve been reading Fit or Fat, a very interesting book that says that fitness should not be based on how strong you are or how fast you can run, but on how fast your heart beats. (Mine beats very fast – I took my pulse – which means I’m not in good shape.) You’re supposed to do an aerobic exercise that makes your heart beat 80 percent of maximum heart rate and sustain that level for 12 minutes.”

Since I read Fit or Fat the target heart rate has become orthodoxy. Everybody makes sure they include aerobic exercise in their healthful routine (don’t you?). Frankly, I find most specifically aerobic routines so boring they drive me crazy. The treadmill? Please. I like to walk, however, and if I have a destination in mind I can walk at a good clip, which presumably raises my heart rate to the aerobic. I long since stopped checking my pulse because, what, I’m going to walk faster & faster if I’m not at the optimum? And I’m already walking so fast my feet hurt? When I started walking to & from work at the Claremont branch (a 2 mile jaunt) I would get sweaty and, especially climbing the hill north of UC campus on the way home, would feel some strain. Now I breeze up the hill. And it’s not like I walk all the way every day. Usually I take the bus part of the distance.

One idea I picked up from Fit or Fat: you can be thin and fat. It’s one of those nicely contradictory notions that makes sense after the explanation. Y’see, you’ve got skinny arms, right?, but the muscle, because unexercised, is permeated with fat molecules. Strength-training isn’t enough to banish that intra-muscle fat because your daily meals typically provide enough fuel for muscle growth, especially if the exercise makes you hungry, eh? But if you build your heart muscle through aerobic exercise then even when resting your metabolism is higher, requires more fuel so burns up the stored fat. Fat is the lowest quality body fuel and during exercise your body burns sugars and proteins. It’s when you are resting that your body harvests the fat.

Other Women

from the diary: “Saturday 3/22/86

“I started Lisa Alther’s third novel yesterday. Other Women. Finished it today. About a woman trapped in depression and the therapist who helps drag her from the ‘Dismal Swamp.’ I got engaged with the characters and was never bored. But the therapy sessions didn’t ring any bells and I couldn’t altogether relate to Caroline’s depression. I guess I got a different type. Just having my shitty patterns pointed out to me doesn’t help, the way it did for her.”

I'd read Lisa Alther's Kin Flicks (I thought the sex scenes hilarious), and I liked her second novel, Original Sins. Nothing in the bio at her website mentions Alther's sexual orientation, but one may suspect she's lesbian being that there are prominent sympathetic lesbian characters in each of her novels. In an interview she gets this question:

"Do you think people now tend to think of you as a lesbian novelist?

LA: I don't know what people think. I would imagine probably by now that's the conclusion some people are drawing, yeah."

Well, that's not exactly a "Yep, I'm gay" moment.

Alther elaborates:

"I was fortunate to have KINFLICKS be a best-seller. It meant what I wrote after that would be published even if it did have lesbians in it [laughs]. ... In OTHER WOMEN, I was writing about lesbians as people who love women but who also have this whole full life of paying their mortgages and raising their children. One aspect of their lives is that their partner is a woman. I've been a wife and mother, so I've done it all, so to speak." [I guess that's as close as she gets to coming out.] "Again, for centuries we've had to read about the heterosexual view of the world. Homosexuals can read heterosexual books and appreciate them, and I don't see why the opposite can't be true. [One] thing about writing about lesbians is that it's exciting to do because it's an area that hasn't been dealt with. And when it has been, it's had to be concealed in various ways. So to be in a position to be able to write openly about it is very challenging -- and not just about lesbians but about women in general."

theory of series

from the diary: “Friday 3/21/86

“I checked out from the library Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia Trilogy. I don’t like reading a series unless I have all the books – if it turns out I don’t like ‘em, I can return them all at once; but if I love the story I can’t wait around for book three to become available – some year.”

Am I more patient than I used to be? A little. I intentionally took breaks between volumes of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books.

Waiting: the Whites of South Africa

from the diary: “Thursday 3/20/86

“Finished Waiting: the Whites of South Africa tonight. Was an okay book. Kinda dull.”

The premise of the book, if I recall aright, was that the Whites of South Africa knew they couldn’t stay on top indefinitely, knew, in fact, that their time would pass soon. What was soon? Nobody knew.

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.)

The Panda’s Thumb

from the diary: “Saturday 3/15/86

“Finished Stephen Jay Gould’s Panda’s Thumb.”

I loved Panda’s Thumb. Over the years I’ve read each of Gould’s collections of essays not long after they came out.

The thumb of the panda is not an articulated digit. It’s a wristbone that juts out. It’s rigid. But it makes the panda’s paw that much handier. The panda’s ancestors were meat eaters. At some point the panda switched to its famous bamboo diet. And the pandas who could most easily manipulate a bamboo pole in order to strip it of its tasty leaves were fatter and handsomer than those who were all clumsy-pawed. Fatter and handsomer means more kids (which, in panda terms, must mean two in a decade rather than one). Over time all the kids had handy paws. But why not a real thumb? Why a jury-rig thumb? The articulatable digits had all been spoken for. A jutting wristbone was an easier fix than reversing the fusing of the digits in that hefty bear paw. Nature/natural selection prefers the easier fix.

(OK, these guys say the thumb is not rigid; plus which they have pictures. And here is an interesting sequel of sorts, that includes a link to a pdf of Gould’s original panda’s thumb essay.)

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.

David Bromige & Kate Braverman

from the diary: “Tuesday 3/17/86

“Marianne [Ware] hosted [the reading at the Russian River Writers Guild]. … The readers tonight were David Bromidge, a [Sonoma State University] professor, and Kate Braverman, who’s a Southern California poet studying at SSU. Bromige read a couple immense ‘meditation poems.’ Basically free association in complete sentences. I kept expecting the poems to resolve themselves into some kind of point, but they never did. I liked Kate’s work much better although all the pain and hate was too overwhelming for a longer reading. Mom came, too. We walked home together. Had another fruitless discussion – this time about poetry, sort of.”

new mags

Yesterday on the walk to work I stopped at the Sather Gate Mall, which is under a parking garage, and browsed the literary magazines at the magazine shop. I’ve started buying lit mags again, partly because I have a place to put them when I’m done with them (I add them to the paperbacks collection at the Claremont library), partly because I’m actually reading them (I guess The New Yorker got me in the lit mag habit), and a little bit because I’m again thinking about sending work out via snail mail (don’t rush me).

So I stuffed the new issue of The Atlanta Review (that's a remarkably ugly website; the magazine, on the other hand, looks good), which is all poetry, and Saint Ann’s Review into my back pack. They join the pile by the bed. I’m trying to keep the pile realistic ...

Best Poems of 2006

When I’m reading a book of poetry and I read a poem I want to revisit I slip in a placemark. If, after 4 or 5 rereadings I decide I don’t want to leave the poem behind, I copy it out. I have been doing this since 1989; I have four loose leaf binders filled with other people’s poems. At the beginning of the year I sit down and read aloud all the poems I collected in the previous year. This year I collected 38 poems. 26 of those were haiku. All the haiku were from one anthology. I don’t think I’ve saved that much from one source before. What I kept (in alphabetical order):

Anselm Berrigan ….. “Mercy Flight”

Todd Colby ….. “Labor Day Picnic Poem”

Jordan Davis ….. “Fire Barns”

Amy Fusselman ….. “Journal”

haiku by Jennifer Brutschy, Paul O. Williams (2), Jane Reichhold, Jerry Ball, Mary Fields, Mary Hill, Garry Gay (2), Brent Partridge, Margaret Molarsky (2), Tom Tico (2), Christopher D. Herold, Jim Normington, Steve Sanfield (4), James Luguri (2), Robert N. Johnson (2), John Thompson (2)

Nicolas Guillen ….. “Wake for Papa Montero”

Aime Cesaire ….. “Ex-voto for a Shipwreck”

Allen Cohen ….. “Traveler”

George Green ….. “The Searchers”

Celtic prayer …. from the Carmina Gadelica

Paul Celan ….. from “BREATHCRYSTAL”

Eyak song/poem ….. “Lament for Eyak”

H. C. Artmann ….. “An Optician Has a Glass Heart”

Ko Un ….. “Drunkard”

Judy Grahn ….. “What do I have …”

sources (in parentheses # of poems collected from the source): Heights of the Marvelous c.2000, edited by Todd Colby, St Martins Press, NY (4); What We Carry c.1994, by Dorianne Laux, BOA Editions, Rochester NY (-); Smoke c.2000 by Dorianne Laux, BOA Editions, Rochester NY (-); Poems for the Millennium, vol 1: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude, the University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry c.1995, edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris, University of California Press, Berkeley CA (2); The Season on Our Sleeve: selected short poems c.2004 by Bill Knott, published by the author, Boston MA; Book of Hats c.2003 by Allen Cohen, drawings by Ann Cohen, Regent Press, Oakland CA (1); Parthenon West, a San Francisco literary magazine (1); The San Francisco Haiku Anthology c.1992, edited by Jerry Ball, Garry Gay, Tom Tico, pub by Smythe-Waithe Press, Windsor CA (26); Song of Rita Joe: autobiography of a Mi’Kmaq poet c.1996, by Rita Joe, with the assitance of Lynn Henry, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE (-); The Best American Poetry 2005 c.2005, edited by Paul Muldoon, series editor David Lehman, Scribner NY (1); Poems from the Coffee Lands c.2004, “prepared for Starbucks Coffee Company by Tidbitbooks” (-); Well-Versed: poems for the road ahead c.2005?, editor uncredited, chapbook produced for AIG, an insurance and financial services group, shipped with an issue of The New Yorker (-); Beeswax Magazine, number one, Winter 2006, Oakland CA (-); The Best Spiritual Writing 1998 c.1998, edited by Philip Zaleski, HarperCollins NY (1); Ice Cream c.2005 by Lelyn Masters, self-published chapbook, Oakland CA (-); City of Buds and Flowers: a poet’s eye view of Berkeley c.1977 edited by John Oliver Simon, Aldebaran Review, Berkeley CA (-); The Work of a Common Woman c.1978 by Judy Grahn, The Crossing Press, Freedom CA (1); West Branch, sp/su 2006, #58, Bucknell University, Lewisburg PA (-); Afterbeats c.1991 by D. Jayne McPherson, Norton Coker Press, SF (-): The New Yorker, from a year’s subscription between 2004 and 2005 (1); Poems for the Millennium, vol.2 c.1998 edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris, University of California Press, Berkeley CA (2)

And if you’re curious:

Best Poems of 2005

Best Poems of 2004

Ann Landers

from the diary: “Friday 3/14/86

“I wrote to Ann Landers, not asking for advice, giving it. A familiar comment of hers upon acknowledging a mistake is to say, ‘fourteen lashes with a wet noodle.’ Well, today in response to a criticism of some hospital-visiting etiquette advice that she flubbed she said, ‘twelve lashes with a knotted bedsheet.’ I was so horrified by this image – Ann Landers being whipped with a knotted bedsheet! – that I had to write to her.”

The Ann Landers column and the Dear Abby column were written by identical twin sisters. Ann was the more conservative of the two. Abby was the sassier – she never had to be educated about the truth about gay lives. Ann, however, counseled counseling toward cure. She eventually saw the error of her advice – after much thwapping with a rolled up rainbow flag, no doubt.

letters page

from the diary: “Thursday 3/13/86

“I just … read the letters page of Ms. Tree and … [ellipsis in original] Anyway there was a letter that really made me angry – this asshole moralist who claimed that homosexuality was immoral and that homosexuals are created by older men. He was also down on pornography. He then proceeded to express his indignation at a perceived case of prejudice in the characterizations of the anti-abortionists in a recent story.”

When I started reading comics I didn’t read their letters pages. Tell the truth, there were times I barely read the writing in the word balloons and just liked flipping the pages. By 1986, however, I was reading everything printed in the darn things. They weren’t 25c a pop anymore. And some had lively and entertaining letters pages. I recall Ms. Tree (a hardboiled female detective) and Jon Sable (a freelance secret agent) hosted arguments about gay rights in their letters pages because both dared to introduce gay characters. There were the usual haters and, naturally, I got exercised about their cruel and nonsensical screeds; but there were also compatriots – thank yous and personal testimony. No gay kisses allowed in the actual art, not for awhile. I’d say comics were still aggressively het. No superhero, certainly, was allowed to be out. John Byrne introduced a closeted gay superhero in his Alpha Flight (a Canadian version of the X-Men). But that character was so closeted not even the readers knew. (Though I remember a friend vehemently laying out the clues for me.)

Gopnik on wine

In the September 6, 2004 New Yorker Adam Gopnik reviewed a couple books on recent wine history.

“Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing … would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk. To read wine writing, one would think that wine is simply another luxury food, like smoked salmon or caviar or chocolate; the one idea that is banished is that it is a powerful drug, which can wash away, in a few minutes, the ability to discriminate at all. … For it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol makes us happy without one. … The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language – without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished – it would all be about the same, or taste that way. … A good fruity bottle of a Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, with a pretty label and a decent story, makes us happy, and happier than that we don’t really deserve to be.”

more rumination on diaries

from the diary: “Tuesday 3/11/86

“I [see] in the stores, in libraries, published journals and I read them and they sound so interesting. They describe the landscape poetically, they detail the physical features of friends, relatives, dash off brisk lines about how ‘Mama tamped her pipe with her little finger and fixed me with one clear eye as she said –‘

“Am I too self-centered to see all that? It never sounds right on paper to say that about real people. I can have fictional characters run through my motions, but I feel uncomfortable doing it with real people.”

And with that I filled the last page of the spiral bound journal in which I had been writing.

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.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins

from the diary: “Sunday 3/10/86

Mr. Popper’s Penguins “irritated me because the characters wondered, ‘Gee, why aren’t there any penguins in the Arctic? Wouldn’t it be a great idea to make up where silly old nature was deficient and plop some penguins down there?’ Sadly, the [flightless] great auk, the first to hold the name ‘penguin,’ was just as delightful and fearless as the southern penguin. Nature was very generous in her supply of great auks. Mr. Popper’s ancestor’s (and mine, more’s the pity) took their liberties with the auks, wiping them completely from the face of the earth. I find it hard to ‘wow’ over Mr. Popper’s good-heartedness and awesome ignornace.”

The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals

I checked out the book in January but didn’t get started reading it till March.

from the diary: “Sunday 3/10/86

“[I]n The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals there isn’t a lot of ‘oh my god’ eyewitness stuff the way there is in Jewish histories because there just aren’t the eyewitnesses – they’ve been killed or just driven underground by the vilification of gays that never stopped – gays were hated just as much after the war as during or before. They are still afraid in Germany – especially East Germany – to speak out. It’s a devastating irony that Jews can condemn recognition of the homosexual agony, as ‘a travesty’ as one prominent Jewish historian is quoted in the book, as though there was some hierarchy of suffering, with legitimate and illegitimate claims to pain, a more-pitiful-than-thou attitude that stinks of hatred and prejudice in a way that calls to mind the Nazis themselves. Of course I needn’t mention Kahane and his Arab-hating in modern Israel to further highlight the irony of oppressed people becoming oppressors. Gay nazis (before they were purged) hated Jews. Jews hated/still hate (as do gentiles, moslems) homosexuals. It’s a disease of the human species, I suppose, this emotional violence toward a group of its fellows mainly on the grounds of difference.”

Heidegger v. Miller

Jason Epstein, a longtime New York editor, in his Book Business: Past, Present, and Future, is speaking about the spread of literacy: “Greater literacy will not reduce the human capacity for mischief any more than Martin Heidegger’s philosophical learning kept him from supporting the Nazis, a dilemma that philosophers might explore further.”

The book is dedicated to Epstein’s wife, Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter that did so much to sell the Iraq war (as mouthpiece for Dick Cheney’s version of the world) via the pages of the Gray Lady. How many deaths should she be held responsible for? Heidegger?