Norse’s Catullus

Harold Norse started translating Catullus (the old Latin poet) while in Rome. Norse’s versions from the 50s attempt to duplicate Catullus’ rhyme schemes. Norse’s versions from 20 years later, written in San Francisco, don’t bother. Here’s one of those:

XV

Commendo tibi me ac meos amores

I am entrusting to you, Aurelius,
all I love most in the world, this boy, and beg
only a small favor, if you’ve ever valued
something beyond price, to be kept chaste and pure,
then guard this boy for me. I don’t mean from strangers;
it is not the man in the street I fear; he’s busy
about his own affairs. It’s you,
you and your big prick
lusting after boys, molesting good and bad alike.
When you’re outside you may waggle your erection
as much as you please at anyone you please, but spare this one,
it’s not much to ask, but if lust
runs away with you, if your dirty mind runs amuch
and you betray me and my lover, you’ll suffer,
I promise you, a terrible fate.
Before the whole town’s eyes, with your feet in chains,
I’ll shove radishes and mollets up your ass.

Norse on Mariah

Working my way through Harold Norse’s collected poems (In the Hub of the Fiery Force) and on page 269 I find a poem dedicated to my old poet teacher, Paul Mariah.

Blood of a Poet

they sent him up for 5 years
set bail at 100 grand
& he did time in the hole
for making love
to a boy of 18
who wanted it
both lonely in Illinois
& he came out with an education
in pain
& breaks down when he tells it
& you feel ashamed
& dumb.

-- San Francisco, July 1972

I don’t know if the poem is completely factual but it tracks Paul’s life. Paul never laid out for me the whole story. I learned more from what appeared in his books than I did from him.

Raymond Luczak

Some time ago I read Raymond Luczak’s anthology Eyes of Desire, which collected writings by & about gay & trans D/deaf people. It seems he has put together a sequel, Eyes of Desire 2.

You can watch him describe it in American Sign Language here.

Josh Simmons

Recently read the first issue of Josh Simmons’ self-published Jessica Farm, a comic that he will be working on, a page each month, until 2049. Looks like he won’t be self-publishing any more as Fantagraphics has committed to producing new Jessica Farm volumes every eight years. That’s 96 pages each volume.

Sadly my copy of Jessica Farm was peed on by one of the cats. I threw away the other things that the cat pee seeped into. But I hadn’t yet read Jessica Farm, and it looked too interesting to just toss. I’m glad I gave it a chance. Having enjoyed it, I still couldn’t keep it. It smelled.

If you visit Josh’s website you can read a God adventure. I snagged page 2 to get you excited.

I hate tipping

In her collection of comics, I Love Led-Zeppelin, Ellen Forney includes a number of single-pagers, most of them non-fiction, even instructional. She devotes one to “How to Tip Your Server”, basing her suggestions (commands? requirements?) on interviews with two longtime servers, “Alianna is a dancer/choreographer, and Gary is a musician and ‘zine writer,” both of whom have been wait staff for years.

“15% is the minimum.” For “crappy service, a really irritating combo of bitchiness and condescension, totally ignoring your table, really, really inedible food,” among other things, a tip may be drastically reduced to “say 10%” – but no lower! Ever!

I tip. I tip because I’m supposed to. I hate tipping.

Restaurants get away with a price on the menu that ignores both taxes and service? Why don’t we tip at the grocery store? Why don’t we tip at the DMV? We could put out a tip jar at the library.

Frankly, I can’t think of any good reason for tipping. Because the servers are paid a shitty wage? They’re not the only ones. Far as that goes tips are a disincentive to unionize, least so far as poor pay leads one to get together with one’s peers.

“Remember,” tuts the book, “if you stiff your server, you’re also stiffing the hostess, busboys, bartenders, etc.” Yeah, you’re the one shortchanging all those folks, not the owner of the business who has no obligation to pay the workers what their labor is worth. If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat out, right?

“To Insure Prompt Service”? You mean, without the tip I’m gonna get slow, crappy service? Apparently I’ll get that anyway (see paragraph 2 above).

If you get bad service, Forney’s informants insist, you tip anyway, then punish the restaurant by never going back. Yeah, right. Suppose you just had a shitty server and the next night she’s fired? How would you know? Check the restaurant’s website? Suppose there’s only one restaurant in town? I guess you’d quickly gain a rep among the servers as a bad tipper and be punished with even worse service.

Suppose you just want to be treated well; after all, you are a paying customer. If you get bad service you should complain to management? No way. According to Forney & friends your only recourse is depriving yourself.

A lot of wait staff make good money on tips, cash tips, which often aren’t declared so aren’t taxed. (Doesn’t the government assume now that wait staff get tips so require them to declare something?)

I understand that waiting tables has traditionally been women’s work, one of the few decently paid women’s jobs, and I can’t but sympathize with the idea that people ought to be paid well for good work.

But I still hate tips. And I resent waiters for expecting them.

beautiful beautiful beauty

I’ve been reading Dick Russell’s Eye of the Whale to learn about the gray whale. Next spring we will be visiting Baja’s San Ignacio Lagoon where the grays breed and give birth. During research for the book Dick Russell became fascinated by the former whaling captain, Charles Scammon. In the 19th Century Scammon wrote the first book on gray whales and many of his observations remained until very recently the best testimony on their behavior.

I grew up in Sebastopol. On page 593 I learned Captain Scammon was an early resident. After he retired from the sea Scammon, “his wife, and two of their sons moved more than seventy-five miles away from San Franciso not long after [his whale] book came out. Scammon had purchased a small apple farm in Northern California’s Sonoma County, in the rural hamlet of Sebastopol.”

Russell quotes an 1888 history of the county: “Among the noticeably beautiful residence properties in Analy Township is that of [Captain Scammon] … Captain Scammon purchased the land in 1874 and commenced its improvement in the same year, building a beautiful and convenient cottage residence and suitable outbuildings. … The view from his study window is one of surprising beauty, overlooking as it does the Laguna with its placid waters and the beautiful meadows on the lower plateau. … In fruit culture he confines himself to a family orchard and vineyard, in which he has some of the most valuable and improved varieties of fruit and table grapes grown in Sonoma County.”

Eventually he sold the farm and moved to Oakland.

Sebastopol is still known for apples. And for grapes, though wine rather than table. My mother participated in efforts to preserve what remained of a Laguna probably much reduced by drainage and landfill from what it was in Scammon’s day.

mixed metaphor

Every so often UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies sends me their magazine. The one I’m reading now was actually published in Spring.

In an article about the rocky first year of Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet analyst Kirsten Sehnbruch writes:

As long as her brooms continue to sweep independently of each other rather than being reigned [sic] in to some sort of order, the sensation in Chile will be that of a government adrift.

Brooms? What’s that about brooms? In the article Sehnbruch was likening President Bachelet to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Mickey Mouse?) who loses control over the brooms he has magicked to clean the house. You use reins on horses (whereas you reign as a sovereign or king). And boats drift. So. Bachelet’s gotta grab the reins on the brooms before they drift away on the spilled water (Mickey is, after all, washed out the door by the excess water the magic brooms have hauled and thrown on the floor). Splash!

out of town

I’ve been immersed in planning two vacations: one to Disney World & surroundings (supposed to be quiet there ‘tween the holidays), the other to Baja to see the gray whales at San Ignacio Lagoon in the spring, which trip may take us across the Sea of Cortez to the Copper Canyon.

Other than poring over guidebooks and websites like Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree (where travellers share tips) and tripadvisor.com I’ve been slowly drifting through Dick Russell’s Eye of the Whale and just began Harry Crosby’s Cave Paintings of Baja California.

One trip resource that’s proved valuable is the blog search. Lots of people like to blog about their adventures.

pile of reading

Ah, faithful readers, I work on through books, yet don’t talk about them! These are those whose pages turn:

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson
I have been reading ED’s Complete for some years now. Nine times out of ten she leaves me cold, baffled. When I don’t understand a poet there can be compensations of another sort – word music, play, surprise. With Emily I’m mostly surprised when I can figure one out. Lately I’ve been reading two pages a night so I can move the placemark along. Otherwise I keep rereading the same page, having forgotten everything about the poems there.

The Mouse and His Child, by Russell Hoban
Not sure quite why but I’ve long wanted to read this book. Because I like the title?

Poetry International #11, 2007
Literary annual of San Diego State University.

Eye of the Whale: epic passage from Baja to Siberia, by Dick Russell
Am making plans to visit the gray whales at their nursery lagoons in lower Baja California.

Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust, C.K. Scott Montcrieff translation
Yes, I am 20 pages into the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past.

Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American Poetry, edited by Walter K. Lew
Pretty good so far.

The Book of Boy Trouble, edited by Robert Kirby & David Kelly
A best-of selection (with new material!) from the mini-comic anthology series, Boy Trouble.

Sunflower Splendor: three thousand years of Chinese poetry, edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo
I finished the poetry part of the anthology and thought I was just going to skim the biographical material in the back. But I’ve been enjoying it too much to skim.

In the Hub of the Fiery Force: collected poems 1934-2003, by Harold Norse
Am acquiring a taste for Norse. Not loving these, but sometimes I find myself liking a 3-page poem on page 2.

what's new

On my home from the dentist today I stopped in at Pegasus Books on Solano. They had a nice copy of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, 1947-1997. For a long time I’ve been thinking of reading Ginsberg. More out of curiosity than affinity, though lately I’ve encountered poems in anthologies that have made me more interested.

what’s new

I was going to wait for a paperback edition but last week I felt flush (selling used CDs!) so I went ahead and bought the hardcover of John Porcellino’s King-Cat Classix, a best-of compilation from his self-published King-Kat Comics. I’m sure I have a good chunk of these in their original photocopy, saddle-staple versions. Now it’s high quality paper & printing! Sewn bindings!

As long as I was buying new stuff I also picked up I Love Led Zeppelin, a collection of “panty-dropping comics” by Ellen Forney.

pile of reading

The Complete Peanuts, 1950-1952 by Charles M. Schulz
This is the Fantagraphics reprint of all Schulz’s Peanuts strips in chronological order. As a kid I owned several reprint collections. I remember resenting the fact that they were selections. What was I missing?

The Poem Behind the Poem: translating Asian poetry edited by Frank Stewart
I wish I knew another language well enough to feel comfortable attempting translations of poetry.

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
Finely crafted prose, colorful characters, a story without surprises

Asian American Poetry: the next generation edited by Victoria Chang
I was searching for a book with work by a particular poet. She isn’t in here but when I came across this one I thought, there are poets in here I’d like to read.

Muelos: a stone age superstition about sexuality by Weston La Barre
This was a library discard. The cover copy doesn’t tell you what the stone age superstition is. What a tease! There’s a photo on the front of a corpse’s heavily tattooed head. Rather gruesome. Having read a few pages into the Introduction I find the superstition to be the belief that semen and brain are composed of the same material, which notion explains the idea that spending your semen depletes your brain. Fun!

Southern Poetry Review 45:1
When I bought this at the student union on campus the clerk cracked, “Is this real poetry?” He flipped the pages. “Yes,” he said, “I guess it is!”

Sunflower Splendor: three thousand years of Chinese poetry edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo
When I find myself equivocal about three thousand years of poetry I begin to wonder.

Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, 1980 edited by Alan F. Pater
I read this more than twenty years ago before I’d begun my copying-out project. When I was reading it the first time I put a placemark in when I read a poem I wanted to read again. Then I went back and read the poems I’d marked, took out the marks, and returned the book to the library. It always seemed to me something was missing. I’ve long wanted to come back to this book and see if there are poems in it I want to keep.

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
These are all poems Hughes wrote to his wife Sylvia Plath, all written, I believe, after her death. They are rather over the top. Which makes them charming.

In the Hub of the Fiery Force: collected poems, 1934-2003 by Harold Norse
After hearing Norse read in North Beach (& after finishing his memoir) I felt committed to working my way through his collected poems. So I’m doing that.

Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American poetry edited by Walter K. Lew
I like the look of this book. Nicely designed object. I haven’t checked to see where it overlaps with Asian American Poetry: the next generation.

The family, part III

Everything in this diary was written during the London semester. As I work my way through my diary I find myself curious about people who appear in it. Sometimes I don’t leave myself many clues to follow up. I have the first names of many people but few family names. I didn’t record the last names of Chris or Shawn or Tanya or even Julie. Unless I want to do more serious research than Google that’s where it’s going to have to stand.

Since the father of the family I stayed with was an elected official I thought he would be easy to find. I knew him as “Robert” but a BBC page has him as “John Atkinson”. Still, that’s his picture!

Wikipedia has “Robert Atkinson” running (or, as they say in the UK, standing) for election as member of Parliament for the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in 1997. Say the anonymous writers, “It is one of the safest Conservative seats in the United Kingdom.” In the 1997 election Atkinson (Labour) got 10,000 votes to Conservative Alan Clark’s 20,000. Tch.

Daughter Catherine seems to have gone on to a career in politics herself. I can see the eight year old girl in that face.

Mrs Dalloway

from the diary: “Wednesday 12/7/88”

During a class discussion: “Lulie cries incredulously, ‘Virginia Woolf must have been thinking about it [suicide] back then [when she wrote Mrs. Dalloway]!’, I go huff! like How silly of course she was. And I commented on the temperature of the water in the Serpentine when V. Woolf drowned herself. Was it summer or winter?” (clarifying []s in orig.) The Serpentine is a man-made lake in Hyde Park. “[Prof] dint dignify that with a reply & everybody seemed to think I was horrid but, I mean, Septimus in the book worries about dirtying the bread knife – everybody who contemplates suicide worries about such relatively trivial details. As someone who has considered suicide I thought the temperature of the Serpentine was relevant.” Then I add, “Of course, I was sitting in the back of the room next to Brent quietly making snide remarks about everything.”

reading for class

from the diary: “Sunday 12/4/88

“Didn’t even leave the house yesterday. Read Guide for the Perplexed [by E.F. Schumacher] from begin to end. Oh, I guess I did leave to mail postcards but that’s all.

“Finished [Schumacher’s] Good Work this morning.”

E. F. Schumacher was an economist exploring ways out of our destructive exploitation of the world to a more creative, symbiotic relationship. His books were assigned for the Economics & Environment class.

“I’m lying on my bed tonight reading Mrs. Dalloway [by Virginia Woolf]. P’raps if I have time I’ll start that essay for Eng 1A.”

12/6: “I borrowed the [British Life & Culture] textbook, Modern Britain from Julie & holed up in Maria Asumpta library this afternoon. [Julie] only loaned it to me for the afternoon. Fortunately it’s short. Read it all the way thru. Not sure how much I retained but I feel a little better about the BLC final.”

Major Great

from the diary: “Wednesday 11/30/88

“[English Prof] went on about how there aren’t any major writers in English now. Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s got something to do with there not being any grand arbiters to annoint ‘great writers.’ Lulie (Beulah) was protesting, ‘Why don’t they write poetry like this anymore?’ Because, dear Lulie, it sucks. Nobody reads it because it’s boring. The only reason anybody does read this crap is because it’s assigned in English class.

“Oh fiddle. What makes anyone think they can extol one man or woman, say man as it’s usually a man – almost always, shall we say – as a Great Writer or Poet or Dramatist? There’s lots of damn good work out there. There’s lots of crap. And who cares? The English teachers have to teach somebody.

“Everybody thinks Shakespeare is the best thing since the world poked her head between the thighs of the sun. Gack! Everybody thinks Shakespeare is great because everybody thinks Shakespeare is great.”

Imper

from the diary: “Tuesday 11/29/88

“I’m sitting in the main room listening to the tape of my last [radio] show. [The family’s] tape player component is fucked up, so I have to hold the play button depressed in order for it to work. I sit on the couch, my right leg crossed over my left, my right big toe on the button. I have a pillow stuffed under my right foot to keep it moderately comfortable.

“… I had to return a book to the library. While there I found a book of E.M. Forster’s ‘unfinished’ stories. Contained a story, ‘Imper’, in which men are a scarce commodity. Women just aren’t giving birth to them anymore. So this old guy comes to this village of women doing his duty – he’s gotta get ‘em to begat, y’know. Well, the central committee screws up and sends this young fellow named Imper to the same village. [The two men] tussle in the ‘Birth Room’ and their spunks mingle and begin to … grow! [ellipsis in orig.]”

I had checked out books from both the university library and the public library and even bought a few but I was not listing their titles nor commenting on them in the diary. Which makes the book project part of DIR a mite problematic.

“’I have a cousin who’s a lesbian. Do you think I could use that?’

from the diary: “Friday 11/11/88

“I went to a gay youth group meeting in Westminster. And it was pleasant enough, altho’ I wish it’d had some kind of focus or direction. We were all just s’posed to sit around and get to know each other.

“The fellow on the couch next to me was named Andrew. We got to talking. He’s 19. Not really ‘out’, thinking about it, though he doesn’t seem to have all that much problem finding lovers and sounds like he’s ready to try cruising – rather likes the idea. I walked him back to his place after the meeting, then he asked my advice.

“How did you tell your parents? [he asked me.] Should I come out?

“I gave him the usual It’s-your-decision-to-make. I-personally-felt-better-feel-better-as-out-of-the-closet. blah blah blah.

“’I have a cousin who’s a lesbian. Do you think I could use that?’

“’Oh, yes. The next time someone makes a faggot comment, you could say, “I don’t like words like that. I have a cousin who’s a lesbian.”’

“Oh, but he couldn’t do that. ‘This may sound snobbish to you, but I wouldn’t want to say that, and, you know, lower the family name. Soil it, maybe.’”

a week in England, 10/31 – 11/6/88

October 31 is my birthday. I was awakened at 6:40am (the family was away?) by a ringing telephone. When I picked up, my mother sang “Happy Birthday”, then spent most of the call complaining about how hard it had been to get ahold of me.

Dragged Chris to Drowning by Numbers, my first Peter Greenaway movie. “Lovely weird little black comedy.”

Kept up my journal for English class and was bored to tears in class. Following the advice of classmates I began bringing letters to write and textbook reading to catch up on so when Prof droned I had somewhere to turn my attention. I had two English classes. The nonEnglish classes were British Life & Culture (I remember one visiting lecturer who said he loved real American names like Massachusetts and Narragansett; was contemptuous of such nullities as New York and New Hampshire. Too bad the names he preferred are sometimes all that’s left of the people who owned them.); and a class on Environment and Economics. Small is Beautiful was one of the texts for that class. It was a consistently interesting class. I got the highest score (an unamazing 94) on the midterm. Prof McP had me “read aloud one of my answers. So, with a lot of throat-clearing and in a monotone, I read it.”

Chris & I visited Parliament and listened “in the strangers’ gallery while the MPs debated the new govt policy of denying airtime to the Northern Irish Sinn Fein Party.”

I bought more 45” singles at the used record store in Camden Town – 10p apiece. Also stopped in at Forbidden Planet and “bought AARGH!. It’s another one of those benefit comics – Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia. Pretty high quality. Edited by Alan Moore.” Margaret Thatcher’s government had instituted something called Clause 28 (or Section 28, once enacted) that directed schools to say nothing positive about gay people, so there was noticeable activism over that.

I raised my daily budget from 2.50 to 5 pounds.

Took a coach tour to Avebury, a town build inside an ancient stone circle. It was cold but I liked the place. “Bath wasn’t so exciting, though I did enjoy the Roman bath. Wish we could’ve jumped in, the warm water was so inviting – they told us not to touch as it’s untreated.”

On Saturday the usual group of us took an independent trip to Hampton Court Palace, mainly for the hedge maze. “I managed to get pretty well lost, which was what I wanted.” That night was Guy Fawkes fireworks and bonfire at Battersea Park. The bonfire was huge. I remember feeling the heat far back from it.

I got some DJ training at the student-run Imperial College radio station. Started planning playlists.

a history of Bath

from the diary: “Sunday 10/30/88”

We got back to London at 9:00am on Saturday. The family was away for a few days so I had the house to myself. I invited over Shawn, Tanya, and Chris, the girls I’d been hanging out with. I played them records I’d been buying in Camden Town and we ate ice cream. Chris had gone to York “and nearly froze to death. ‘Everything was closed,’ she said, ‘like a ghost town.’ Shawn had fun in Ireland, she says, but for her traveling companion. … Tanya [had visited] the Soviet Union [and returned] bearing trinkets. She unwrapped everything and let us look. She got a couple packs of small propaganda posters. She says everything was colorless. ‘You look out the window of the hotel and see gray and white and a statue of Lenin.’”

“Am reading a book of the history of Bath in prep. for going there this Friday.”

It was a rather dry book, as I recall.