Dear John

I think it's pathetic, given my training in the short story, that I can't think of a story! I went to Soho today. Is that a story? I wanted to go inside Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, Giorgio Armani, Eileen Fisher, the others, but Tony didn't care to shop or watch me shop. At Oilily he found the "man couch," so named by the woman who worked there, and sat down. It was a beautiful day after yesterday's cold rain. We took a cab to an Italian place named for two men. Jimmy was one. Danny and Jimmy's, something like that. I said to Tony, who avoids the internet and thinks Facebook is a suspect way to spend an hour, that I was trying to think of a story to tell you. Later, we were walking, and I thought we'd been pick pocketed while being trailed too closely by a young blind man -- I thought he wasn't really blind -- but I was happily mistaken -- though that doesn't make sense -- and then embarrassed because I had placed a blind person in such a light.

Poem by Linde Brocato

MEMORANDUM

Re: The thing that must be remembered
Date: September 11, 2001

Poetry wants to be written
it’s there in the web of things
the veins in the leaf
the metal frame
it will out, like a story
which wants to be told
set loose

Poetry works to be written
it hums within the day
energy waiting to be transformed
kinetic to potential
rhyme lifted into steel
stored stone by stone
that waits and sings

Those stones sing and wait
even if the wait ends in a fall
transformed again
doors and windows, bodies and stones
unbuilding themselves
steel unframed and flying

Then poetry aches to be written
tumbling stone and shard
uncounted things, uncountable pages
corresponding to the course of life
sing and sigh and sift to the ground
Things that must be remembered
things that must be done
because lives must be remembered
and deaths

Poetry wants to be written
Even in the black ink of loss
even that dark song
is there beneath the integral web
of things

(March 2002)

Blog Reader Appreciation Day

April 16, 2008


The Madonna Option: Write a post thanking your readers for putting up with your foibles, mistakes, and eccentricities (a list) and being loyal to you (your blog) no matter what.

Foibles, mistakes and eccentricities:

A. Always
B. Begging
C. Clarinet
D. Daring
E. Effort
F. Forgiveness
G. Gratitude
H. Wearing hats too much
I. Ingenuity
J. Jesus-talk
K. Kindness
L. Love
M. Miles without a map
N. Nuisance
O. Openness
P. Politics
Q. Quizzicalness
R. Remembering
S. Safety
T. Texas
U. University
V. Veils
W. Wax
X. Xenophoria
Y. Yes
Z. Zig zagging

Yet readers might enjoy reading it. Thanks to the reader!

En(gag)ed

Didn't less. Borrowed mute. Frank discoverer. Lead trumpet. Fingers tux. Car stole. Friends rounded. Simile pervaded. Song decanted. Seller broker. Boston number. Teal parrotlet. Frog queued. Rain ignited. Gray developer. Sand track. Imperial whiner. Father surface. Life feminine. Hooker streaming. Misogyny effects. Black castle. Swiss uncle. Storm shelter.

The housekeeper, Cheyenne, lost her son to a trainwreck, his lie. The housekeeper, Cheyenne, fishing for a rich man at Love Happens lost her son to a trainwreck, his lie. The mother, Cheyenne, fishing for a rich man at True.com lost her son to a trainwreck, a lie. The fishwife, Cheyenne, fishing for a rich man at a dating website lost her son to a trainwreck, a lie.

Tell the pastor the trouble is. 4/18. The trouble is the missing son. The man going missing is powerful -- he is powerful -- as powerful as sun -- sun strokes a tree just once in the early morning; he strokes the nieces' lives all day. "Just stroking me." Like Woody Allen, only kinder, marries his niece: which one? Sun strokes the same branch he sees her seeing. He marries Sheldon's grandniece. He marries Edward's niece. He marries Jack's daughter. The lesser niece steals cooking from the elder niece. Steals patronage. He sees his place in things. He is a Catholic grandheir. More powerful than sunlight on a young branch in lower Manhattan.

He would have her evicted, he tells Cheyenne, after inviting her here to be wed. He tells Cheyenne no niece of mine. Cheyenne says our sons died in wrecks. Let's marry. Cherry Blossoms frill the trees. He reaches for his glasses. Spitzer, he says. Bruno. Ha, ha, ha, Cheyenne says. Then -- moment, she hushes him, a sound from her family. Bring them with you, he says.

Cheyenne collides with Saint Ann, the bellwether, on the receiver. You're out, I'm in, Cheyenne warns her. Saint Ann tells herself, here comes a little chickadee to eat a husband. The chickadee eats the husband. The husband eats the Saint. The Saint vies to be let out of the husband's sunblock. The Saint holds nothing against birds. The Saint cherishes truffles au phon. The Saint's sister takes $20 to her dossier. This is her bouvier. The Saint's sister is mortal, Careen. The Saint says there's a car wreck in the story, just not that one; Careen counts the electronic cash. By me, she says distinctly when he calls, her sister the Saint in his belly, a health complaint. The chickadee au grave.

Take it or leave it

Everything is not a disease. Even if you hyphenate it, and suggest that everything is or leads to dis-ease, it isn't accurate. I have decided that I look for others who can (in their adult maturities) "take it or leave it." A man who can take a drink or not take a drink, at will, or who can attend or not attend an AA meeting, who may feel a duty to it, but who can distance himself from the cultish aspects of "the program," and not need it, either. Who has self-determination with or without it, with or without that drink or those six drinks, who pays in hangover, not in housing and divorce, a moderate perhaps. Alcohol is not a disease. It is a beverage and solvent. Prune juice is not a disease. It is a beverage and solvent. Wanting your old boyfriend to come back to you is not a disease; it is a decision. Wanting to go to your church is a goal, a position, a decision. Voting for Obama is not a disease; it is a viewpoint, a set of wishes. Walking in the rain is not a disease. Sustaining damage might be a disease. This is as innocent as contracting cancer, which is a disease. The disease caused by sustaining damage is trauma; the body reacts. The mind is part of the body. The body is part of the mind. The self is part of the mind. The heart is part of the body. The heart-body-mind live inside the decisions. The decisions are adjustable. I am tired of hearing that everything is a disease. It is a repudiation of religion that produces that error. To be self-representing, one might repudiate religion without abandoning science. Love is a decision.

Grandfather, George A. Bogle (1892-1962)

The time has come (to talk politics)

Dear E. and all.

I'm sorry I didn't write back to E.'s real letter as I've been busy, and spent Valentine's day at an aunt's wake in Boston. Then one thing and another came up. Thank you for writing fully on it.

Obama does have charisma, but that usually only makes me suspicious of a man. Seriously. As Bertold Brecht said, Woe to the country that needs Geniuses and Prophets!

Hillary does not have charisma, needless to say. And the truth is, I've never believed she was electable, so I don't know how I've ended up in the position I'm in. But in the past year(s) of her running, I've had to wonder why does she elicit so much enmity? Is it because she doesn't have charisma? (How could she have charisma? I remember when Vogue did the cover on her; the interviewer was looking for a newspaper in her office and asked Hillary's assistant what papers she read. The assistant explained that Ms. Clinton did not read newspapers. She read position papers from our government and others. I've never forgotten it, and I find it wholly believable.) Maybe it's because of those position papers, or maybe she doesn't have a persona that is interested in charm. What does it mean to be uninterested in charm, anyway? She married charm and knows about its dark undercurrents. (I've been reading a lot of poetics theory lately and it is well established that the death of the author is a good thing, like the death of an entrepreneurial authority full of quaint romantic values like "genius" and "charisma.") (Has Hillary been postmodern all this time and we never knew?)

Yesterday morning I woke up remembering my friend Andre's words about 9/11. It was the next month, and we were having breakfast at a cafe around the corner from my house, which was around the corner from the towers, and we were talking about the towers, of course. We didn't talk about anything else for months, it seems! He was raised in Soviet Russia, and is an architect and a professor, just our age, and he said, "We won't know what these towers meant -- maybe ever. Our children will know, but we won't, not really."

I thought that was so wise! And I still like it I certainly had a quite fixed idea of what the attack meant from the very beginning, but I was willing then and I'm still willing -- even happy to believe I'm wrong, and (what's more) that I can't be right, I'm too close to be right. But lots of people walked around like I did, dazed, taking the whole thing personally, whether they were on Wall Street or in Vermont, California, Peru.

So yesterday I thought (hoped) that must be how it is with Hillary. I've been rendered stupid on the subject by some proximity -- a proximity which isn't real at all! I just can't understand why she was so thoroughly rejected (and demeaned) by all the world's mouthpieces. Ten years from now I'll look back on her campaign and say, What the hell was that all about? Of course, I think I know -- I think she's complicated, I think she's a Clinton, I think she's taken politics too seriously. (Whatever the hell that means.) (Well, it means that she hasn't been able to play at politics, like you sense Bill did, and like you sense GWB did -- until the towers, the war going on and on -- and like Obama has come to look.) But I'll never believe that this damn thing isn't riddled with misogyny.

I've been thinking about when Diana died. Diana, princess of Wales! I can't recall if it was just after mother died or just before, but I was flabbergasted by the outpouring of insane identification from every magazine-reading chick in the country. Black, white, green, yellow, everybody was devastated about her. As if Diana represented some part of them, the princess inside who had been hounded through the French tunnels with a handsome billionaire boyfriend, and died. Oh the tears. Oh the drama. Psychologists had to write article after article about why Diana was so important, about why we connected so deeply to her.

And now we have an American woman who helped organize migrant workers forty years ago, registered Hispanics in the Rio Grande valley to vote, who worked for Civil Rights and for the ACLU and graduated at the top of her class then went to Yale Law -- the law school which has always had the reputation for churning out the best professors and philosophers of law, not the best practitioners -- a woman cheated on and humiliated by her husband whom she rightly saw, back in 1969, would be the president of the US -- but nobody identifies with this woman. Nobody cries when she works her ass off to make a health care plan that will work, to run for three years -- maybe she's been running for all 7 years she's been in the senate. Maureen Dowd, a self-hating misogynist if there ever was one, writes columns that repeatedly refer to her ankle size. If anyone was ever hounded by the press, it's Hillary Clinton, She made one crack about not staying home to bake cookies and she's been crucified ever since. Her hair has been a topic of much conversation since the 80's. (I've had about 45 colors since then.) I'm sure that some nights lately she wishes Rush Limbaugh and Dowd would go ahead and drive her into a nice thick wall and put an end to it all.

A day before the New York elections, a group of feminists including Katha Pollitt came out for Obama. I have been speechless ever since, and unable to write you back. Seriously. Every day I want to write the letter -- I had the stuff below in the drafts file in my computer -- and every day I could not. My husband of course voted for Obama, like almost everyone else I know in town. And still I'm walking around like I have personally been attacked, certain that the whole damned thing smells like misogyny, like our system's powerful hatred for a strong woman, our system preferring women who think they're just like Diana. Keep them thinking that way, racking up the credit cards, driving their SUV's. Our world loving the women eager to faint before Obama's Camelot talk.

A president like the Beatles, great. I just hope he's John or George -- Or Martin, maybe he's Martin.

I enclose the bit from Robin Morgan that I originally wanted you to read, and something a Republican friend sent about Obama in N.O.

I feel better having gotten some of this out. God bless America, babe,
love, Alexis


----- Original Message -----
From: "Alexis Quinlan"
To: "E."; "Kate Parrish"
; "Victoria Jones"
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 9:19 PM
Subject: the time has come

to talk politics.

I've been sort of upset about Hillary and unsure about Obama. I can't help feeling that if Obama were the descendent of slaves there's no way he'd be in this position -- we can only stand him because he won't ever throw slavery/lynching at white America. I also can't help but think that 90% of Hillary's problem is misogyny. Peter voted for Obama, as did many of our friends. I voted for Hill, of course. I'd have done it with a little more pride if I'd read this article by Robin Morgan ahead of time.

Check it out as it is full of amazing comparisons and insight.

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/020108.html

love, A

Ann Bogle (c) 2008 by Beez Johnson

Power & Control v. Equality

V = Violence
E = Equality

1V. Using Intimidation

Making partner (ex-) afraid by using looks, actions, gestures; smashing things; destroying property; abusing pets; displaying weapons

v.

1E. Non-threatening Behavior

Talking & acting so that s/he feels safe and comfortable expressing herself and doing things

.....................................................................................

2V. Using Emotional Abuse

Putting partner (ex-) down; manipulation; name calling; making the partner think s/he is crazy; playing mind games; humiliation; creating feelings of guilt

v.

2E. Respect

Listening to her non-judgmentally; being emotionally affirming and understanding; valuing opinions

.....................................................................................

3V. Using Isolation

Controlling what partner (ex-) does, sees, talks to, reads, where s/he goes; limiting outside involvement; using jealousy to justify actions

v.

3E. Trust and Support

Supporting her goals in life; respecting her rights to her own feelings, friends, activities and opinions

.....................................................................................

4V. Minimizing, Denying, and Blaming

Making light of the abuse and not taking concerns about abuse seriously; saying the abuse didn't happen; shifting responsibility for abusive behavior

v.

4E. Honesty and Accountability

Accepting responsibility for self; acknowledging past use of violence; admitting being wrong; communicating openly and truthfully

.....................................................................................

5V. Using Children

Creating guilty feelings about the children; using the children to relay messages; using visitation to harass the partner (ex-); threatening to take the children away

v.

5E. Responsible Parenting

Sharing parental responsibilities; being a positive non-violent role model for the children

.....................................................................................

6V. Using Privilege

Treating partner (ex-) like a servant; making all the big decisions; acting like the 'master of the castle'; being the one to define men's and women's roles; rigid gender roles

v.

6E. Shared Responsibility

Mutually agreeing on a fair distribution of work; making family decisions together

.....................................................................................

7V. Using Economic Abuse

Preventing the partner (ex-) from getting or keeping a job; making partner (ex-) ask for money; allocating an allowance; taking partner's (ex's) money; not informing or limiting access to family income

v.

7E. Economic Partnership

Making money decisions together; making sure both partners benefit from financial arrangements

.....................................................................................

8V. Using Coercion & Threats

Making &/or carrying out threats; threatening to leave, to commit suicide, to report partner (ex-) to welfare; making partner (ex-) drop charges, do illegal things

v.

8E. Negotiation & Fairness

Seeking mutually satisyfing resolutions to conflict; accepting change; being willing to compromise

.....................................................................................

This list is adapted from two wheels (pie charts) distributed by:

Domestic Abuse Intervention Project
Duluth, Minnesota

Fortunes in cookies, 2007

"One should always be in love." -- Oscar Wilde
(at Palomino after wedding dress shopping in Minneapolis, 2/17/08)

Fortunes gathered from cookies since last year:

Success won't taste so good, without failure as appetizers.
Your career is moving more and more towards service to others.
Your present plans are going to succeed.
Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you may diet.
Do onto others as you wish others to do onto you.
Your goal will be reached very soon.
Your courage is like a kite; big wind raises it higher.
The only rose without a thorn is friendship.
Someone is looking up to you. Don't let that person down.
You will be extremely successful in business.
A good deed will make you feel good.
You find beauty in ordinary things. Do not lose this ability.
You are courteous, diplomatic and affable and find happiness in serving others.
You are a gentleman of outstanding wisdom.
When you speak honestly and openly, others truly listen to you.
You will receive fantastic support from someone who truly believes in you.
When one must, one can.
Business trips bring excellent results, especially for sales.
A clean conscience is a soft pillow.
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
A small incident will develop to your advantage.
Your worries will vanish if you face them bravely.
Be careful and systematic in your business arrangements.
No real excellence can be separated from right living.
People will find it difficult to resist your propositions.
Happier days are definitely ahead for you. Struggle has ended.
A big fortune will descend upon you this year.

Bliss

From Robin Reagler's blog:

She Was Really Saying Something

... I mentioned last week that I wanted to throw a blog party, carnival, or harmonic convergence. Here's the idea. It's easy and quick. If everyone does it, it might be a lot of fun.

I'm not big on weddings. Never had one, except for this little bit of blogging. For the rest of the week, if you're game, follow this theme. You can post a photo, memory, poem, music, or a combination. Try to surprise us.


Tuesday 2/12 -- Something old

2/12 is the birthday of my favorite old lover, which sounds as if I mean he is old, but by which I mean our love affair is older. He asked me, please, not to refer to him on my blog as my "ex-boyfriend." I shall never be your ex-boyfriend, he said, but am your loving-friend.

Wednesday 2/13 -- Something new

212 is to be my new area code. 2/13 is the birthday of a beautiful man I met last year. He is not my old lover nor my new one. My new one is my old one. His old one -- her -- left a year ago. A year ago, the beautiful man was my new one, new then.

Thursday 2/14 -- Something borrowed

I borrowed a lot of money in my day & repaid it in paper wads and time. But let's not forget that I repaid much of it in hard-earned money, too.

Friday 2/15 -- Something blue

My engagement ring, a sapphire, see below (inset). I have become a mute woman since he gave it to me on January 15. Love is a very decent word when. We.

January was in New York

Here I have been in New York for five weeks. Today it's raining. In Minnesota it doesn't rain in February. Here the women walk by wearing black boots to the knee. For weeks, I shopped stores in Minnesota looking for the perfect tall boot. I found them, but it took effort. I looked out the window there and saw evergreens and birdfeeders and the cat. I look out the window here on E. 10th St., and it's as good as looking at the pages of a fashion magazine. There are, many of them, NYU students. The women's legs are pencil-thin! The dogs are family members. The taxis whisk by, as today, kicking up rain behind their tires.

Yesterday we heard from "the Doctor," our name for our good friend, Marty, in Denver. I hadn't talked to Marty in more than ten years, but once we were on the telephone, it was like today that yesterday was. He has married and has a beautiful little boy. We expressed mutual happiness for one another. We carried on a three-way phone call with T. Marty is happy to be teaching and to be a dad. I am happy because my depression, suffered years ago, following our experience in Houston, has abated. The absence of depression is, like happiness, palpable. We read poetry out loud and a scene from a new play Marty has written. Marty called T. the "new Ashbery." We praised each other lavishly and justly and noted still missing Houston after all this time.

Tomorrow I'll go to the AWP bookfair & then join AQ & Robin for supper. I can almost not wait!

Sunday Salon Reading

New York City
January 20

Named by New York Press as The Best Writer You’ve Never Heard of But Should Go Read Right Now, Ellis Avery is a Sunday Salon veteran and the author of a first novel called THE TEAHOUSE FIRE. Recently out in paperback from Riverhead Books, THE TEAHOUSE FIRE won two awards last year and is being translated into six languages. Ellis lives in Manhattan and teaches creative writing at Columbia.

Carol Novack is a former criminal defense/constitutional lawyer, an occasional instructor in lyrical fiction writing, and the publisher of Mad Hatters’ Review. She’s also a former grant recipient, and the author of a chapbook of poetry, a play, and several collaborative projects. Carol’s been featured in many reading series in NYC and elsewhere. Recent writings in print may or will be found in journals including American Letters & Commentary, Fiction International, First Intensity, Gargoyle, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Knock, LIT, Notre Dame Review, and in the anthology, Online Writings The Best of the First Years. Links to online publications are accessible via Carol’s blog.

Nicole Fix lives, writes and plays softball in Brooklyn. In 2006, she was awarded a scholarship to attend the SLS Kenya Writers’ Conference. Her screenplay Toy Fair and short story "Fish" were finalists for The Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project Fellowship. As a producer with Page 73 Productions, she has presented the critically acclaimed show and Pulitzer finalist Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue. She is currently working on her first novel and will be traveling to Eastern Europe and Israel to complete research.

Ann Bogle’s short stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Fiction International, Gulf Coast, Washington Review, Black Ice, Big Bridge, Submodern Fiction, among other journals. Her prose poem chapbook, XAM: Paragraph Series was published by Xexoxial Editions in 2005.

When & where do you meet?
You'll find heady prose on tap at the cozy Stain Bar in Williamsburg every third Sunday of the month at 7 p.m. Check the homepage for the latest times.

How do I get there?
Take the L to Grand, then go 1 block west. Stain Bar is located at 766 Grand Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211. Bar opens at 5 p.m. Call Krista at 718.387.7840 if lost.

The Quarterly

Letter from Gordon Lish

In the spring of 1987, on April 3, a month before my 25th birthday, Gordon Lish accepted my first published short story, "Chinese," for The Quarterly. I had already changed the title to "Chinese" from "Table-Talk" in the hope of using "Table-Talk" as the title of a short story collection. He subsequently accepted two more short stories, "Fairness" (one I had originally called "Hieroglyphics" and "Domesticity") and "Hors-d'oeuvre." In the course of a year, we wrote notes to each other about contracts for the short stories, proofs of them, and editing suggestions. I was already writing like a minimalist, so editing suggestions were rather minimal, too. Then, in the letter below, which must have followed a sudden, plaintive burst from me -- and which might be in one of the banker's boxes in my office; his to me are in a blue-dot file marked "Lish, Gordon" -- he writes that he would not be interested in publishing a book of mine.

25 April 88

Dear Ann,

I'm at your service, but what to do? Sure, I'll read, but my guess is that I am only going to see two or three entries that would make for a book I'd do. But always happy to counsel if that is the thing you want. Damn shame you wasted time schooling yourself as you did, for I am guessing that you would have profited rather considerably from time in my classes--if only in the context that you would have ridded yourself of these doubts, wantings, keenings. You are never going to survive as an artist if you are not entirely self-sustaining. I am even understating the matter--by a lot.

As for the small prose here [rev. as "Almanac"], it is its weakness that makes me say no, not its brevity. If you keep watching Q, you will see prose fictions as short--I believe several show up in Q10.

Look, Ann, you are breaking my heart. Call me if it will help any to shoot the breeze. I am always tickled to meet with you if you come to NY. Please know that my heart and mind are wide open to you. As for making it with me with your writing, the solution is simple: get the work as strong as it is in you to get it--and make certain that the surface writing could not be more exactingly made.

This was a shitty letter. No time--and nothing to say, really, to the matter before us, given that your shrei was too general for me to mount a useful statement in reply.

Be well, feel good, thrive,

Gordon Lish

P.S. My God, Christa Wolf! Does take me back.

Happiness in love

The wedding was to have been at the spout, at the fish mouth of the fountain, where the ice had stopped its tumble from the bubbler, that in summer entertained the old & the children and caused the others to look for pennies in their pockets & wallets, pennies to cast to the feet of nudes of the seas, the women, the young men, the voices of unity. The parish priest or the pastor gives the order of service, and the man, the groom, a handsome daredevil of rectitude -- gives his hand to the woman, the bride, the statuesque caregiver of whispers. G. had had this in mind the entire time, s/he asked how does this, wearing white mink for winter, before supper. Given savings. The running arm of love of one man for one woman who saves him, each day mattering a little more than the next; each day mattering a little more than the last. Each day mattering more than the thirst. How in this loving matter only loving matters. The man, the woman, the footpath. The lovers heard early in the morning at their water. Pouring water for coffee from the tap. Arrived graciously, cautiously, warily, safely to this nest. There was talk of love on the phone. It was an easy conversation. The love was a bumper crop. The love was coming out noodles through the receiver. He loved her more than he had ever loved anyone. His happiness was complete. She let him more than she had ever let anyone love her. The happiness was a tablecloth for a picnic; the happiness was the carpet in the hallway; the happiness was the wall behind the painting; the happiness was the sky behind the cloud; the happiness was the seating in the Volvo; the happiness was the carrier, the weekend, the chimes. The happiness was not among the people or the women, who couldn't see it, couldn't be clear about it or without it, who without being there to witness it, were in it, without being there for it, whose own happiness was phrased in book order, she, whose happiness was a seal within eternity, in the Wednesdays of life.

Presidential candidates

I visited www.speakout.com and took a test that indicated my choices in presidential candidates. Before reading all about each issue, going on gut and memory, my candidates are, in order:

1. Barack Obama
2. Dennis Kucinich
3. Hillary Clinton

After that come Gravel, Dodd, Biden, Edwards, and Richardson. Then I read all the way through about each issue and the summation of the candidates' views. For viewpoints, I came out liking Kucinich better. He is my candidate if we, the people, must decide everything for ourselves. Clinton is my candidate for leadership on issues; I found I trust her to play politics more than the others, and I have an emotional attachment to hiring a woman leader. Obama is fine; some people I know feel he is too young for the position. On the first round, I ranked slightly closer to him on issues than to the others. When I read the report in detail, however, I found closer agreement to Kucinich and Clinton. Obama is a little more prison-happy than the others. I like the others' idea to have separate drug courts and treatment for those offenses. I like Kucinich's gun control and moratorium on the death penalty with DNA releases. I like Clinton on reproduction. As for the war, all three are against it. Kucinich favors impeachment of Cheney. If the primaries were today, which candidate would I vote for? Hillary Clinton. If it were another world, a future, a better world, I would vote in Dennis Kucinich bec. his policies, enacted, would give us a finer civilization. If I had the chance to meet him in person, I'd probably like Barack Obama.

First snow

Driving years

In a message dated 11/30/2007 10:26:33 A.M. Central Standard Time, BL@.COM writes:
Steve---frustrating to be narcissist in diseased state--for isn't it a diseased state, this need to make in order to...?...(however that manifests) with or without drugs the voices come and Conrad think: no Muzak (sp?) anymore: i cant be on the streets this time of year anyhow...and non-existent journals are always the best as are non-existent poems paintings/ isn't that why we keep making them? our anonymity is our freedom i believe--why careerism is the real disease (narcissism: isn't that just looking into lake searching for reflection of what's inside?)--but think: to finally be free to speak to nothing but the earless air?--BL

BL, as I think I might have indicated to you, I have been this person alone for months at a time, without the usual constraints of time placed upon me; I suppose it was a deep luxury, but it came about through poverty in its ironies. I had to learn not to be angry at financial limitations, galling stops, and to become soft about it, my poverty. I played to an audience of one, but the more convincingly I did this, the more it started to feel as if there were listeners. No, I did not plug in a camera or turn on a recorder. I suppose, as it heated up, I ought to have written or something, but I didn't want to write. Call it dream, but it was physically active. It reminded me of acting. I was a statesman, too. I was men; I was women. I looked like certain people. My looks, never studied in much detail before, became plastic. By attitude, I could enact anything. I pretended to be John Stuart Mill on an errand to Carlisle's house, with his woman waiting in the carriage. I was Rod Carew. Harrison Ford. Julia Roberts. I wasn't on drugs. Or alcohol. My mother, who is partly deaf, and w/ whom I live, didn't know this or what was going on for a very long time, years, I suppose. Local friends saw me as in hybernation. This is what they saw or else they were polite about it; I was so together, yet so alone. The aloneness was a magic barrier. I talked to myself incessantly even in stores, and passersby seemed never to notice. Thinking of books, much, and doing a kind of architectural drawing of them w/ my steps. Two years I quieted and read constantly. Once, driving, I was outlouding to myself that certain women make more money at marriage than Mailer makes at writing. All these goons came in the car then, novelists. It was like a poker game, and I was a gal in it. This is the imagination. I called "Help!" feeling friendly out of my league, to a writer I know in Pennsylvania. I was driving east, and he's east of here. Then he came, in presence, to guard me for a night. It was phenomenal. I called him on the phone two days later, and told him what had "happened" and what it was about, and he seemed to realize something. Another time, art punks from Houston were driving the car, wh. was riveted to the road, to the orange signs by it and the lines. My imagination was perfectly open. There was a form to it, not reproduction. I wanted to write Moby Dick w/o a man in it. But I didn't do it. It's like a seven-year diary, and it did happen. I might write it as memory then.

So, for you to imagine the diaries unwritten as the best ones, or the real moment when there is no audience as the ultimate in freedom, I salute you.

This is not what I put on a women's list.

My mother likes me much better now that I'm more normally sociable. Not just laughing too much. It's really due to her that I ate or slept at all. She is a civilizer, a strong ark. I was taking med's for bipolar while my years rained on me. It must have blown over, bec. I feel creatively ordinary now and misunderstand people's sense that I have written anything yet, you know, bec. ... did I?

Cousin, short story

This old man stays in bed all day reading a book of Polish poetry, trying to remember what he’s heard about Venus Fly Traps. He knows they grow nearby, in a nature preserve, but he can’t remember which one, and his car is unremarkable—he can’t go from preserve to preserve looking for fly traps. He can ask Aldo. Aldo is his best friend, married but separated, with the heart of a hunter. Cousin can say, “It’s cold out here, old boy,” and Aldo will reassure him, as he always does, that Cousin’s indecision is the right one.

Cousin is a solitary, and his proper heart beats hard against his chest. He regulates it by running five miles a day. He drinks hard liquor in his white, empty living room. He has work to do, articles to write.

“It’s cold out here,” begins one article about hauling his married friend’s car from the shoulder of the highway to the nearest repair shop. Afterward, the two men drink shots of tequilla and shoot pool. They play for the married man’s wife. The narrator wins the game but goes home without the wife. Moral: Some things you don’t do. A job well done. He made it all up. He got $900 for it on the first round and $400 or so from seven other newspapers.

Cousin dials Aldo and gets his machine. He buzzes into the receiver while Aldo’s message plays.

“It’s cold out here, old boy,” Cousin says. “Call me later. I’ll be here drinking.”

Then he calls Aldo’s wife, Marietta, the editor, ready to ask her about his latest piece. Her machine picks up. “Marietta. Cousin. Haven’t heard from you. Thought I’d give you a try.”

. . .

Darkness comes early in December. Cousin flicks on the light, picks out a tape. He slices open the boneless chicken breast and chops enough garlic to starve ten fevers. The phone rings. It’s Ellen, the woman he’s been screwing since September. She says she’s hungry, but he doesn’t want to feed her. He tells her he’s already eaten.

“I doubt it,” Cousin says. “You two go out so late. I’m an old man. I can’t stay out late anymore.”

“You’re no old man,” Ellen says. “We’ll be at Thirsty’s.”

Cousin’s indecision fills the universe. “Call me later,” he says. “I’ll probably be here.”

“What do you expect with a name like Cousin?” Petra says and hands the cue to Ellen. Marlboros dangle from their lips. They’ve plugged the jukebox, and men hover over it and in the doorway.

“His sister called him that,” Ellen says. “Significant because he likes his sister.”

“How can you stand it? I would have killed him by now.”

“He tells me I don’t know how to suffer properly.”

“Ask for a revolution, get Summer of Love,” Petra says.

“I told him we could just have sex, but he said that wouldn’t be right. Once I said, ‘I love you,’ then ‘sorry’ right after because he stopped. I said, ‘I love you’; he stopped. I said, ‘sorry’; he continued.”

“Faggot,” Petra says, laughing.

“The beginning was good. That’s what he likes. The moment when you’re driving in the open air and your hair is flying and your skirt is whipping up around your knees, and he’s smoking, of all things, and happy and looking at you. The first date. Don’t know what might happen. I tell him you don’t know what might happen once it’s started either, but he doesn’t believe it. Is he a womanizer or does he fake it?” Ellen shoots and misses. “Says later she seduced him. ‘Really hard to do that,’ I say.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed. He always laughs. It means he can do what he wants.”

“You need vegetables,” Petra says. “We’ll cook for you, give you vegetables.”

“Then you can tell me what it’s like not to be hated,” Ellen says.

“Ben is sweet. He’s really sweet, but I haven’t been alone for two months. He’s always there. Always touching me. I feel like his mother. I can’t stand feeling like his mother. I want to scream, ‘Don’t touch me. I’m not your mother.’ I told him that, one day, told him I was feeling cowed. He says he doesn’t want a mother, doesn’t know how I got that feeling.”

“It sounds good to me,” Ellen says. “Remember chaos?”

“I miss chaos. I miss coarseness and stupidity. I want violence.” Petra crescendos and misses her shot. She grinds the cue into her foot. The men near the jukebox shift in a herd. They seem aroused, but wary. Petra and Ellen are tuned to it, like a station.

. . .

“You girls out turning over dumpsters again?” Cousin asks. He has called Ellen’s machine to tell her he’s going to bed.

Petra and Ellen stop at Cousin’s on their way home from Thirsty’s. His light is out. It’s not like either of them to drop by without calling. Petra goes to his bedroom window. Ellen wonders how Petra knows that it is his bedroom window. Then she remembers that Petra went to his Halloween party.

Petra taps on the pane. “Wake up. You lug,” she says. “Get up. You do nothing. Two women are at your window, and you don’t even get up. You don’t even move.”

Cousin lifts the corner of the blind away from the window. It is dark in his room and at first Petra can’t see him.

“Not dumpsters,” Petra answers. Ellen can’t hear him. “Lawn signs. Get up.”

Ellen watches Petra talk to him then moves to the window herself, full of dread. He’ll be unhappy to see her. When she sees his face, he surprises her by smiling.

“Fine,” Petra says. “Who needs you?”

Cousin lets the blind fall back against the window, and the women go to the car.

“He needs a lobotomy,” Petra says.

“He’s had a lobotomy,” Ellen says.

“I’m glad you’re not talking about me,” says a man who passes them on the sidewalk.

“One lobotomy is rarely enough,” Petra says.

“But he’s good in bed,” the man says over his shoulder.

. . .

Cousin jots down notes for the fly trap story, “Flying Too Close to Venus.” Venus Fly Traps in the Bog. He can make it scary. He can tell it from the fly’s point of view: getting suckered in, lured in by juices. It’s involuntary, a trick of nature, survival of the species. He only thinks he likes it. He should remember from the last time what really happens, zap, you’re dead, wrapped up like a mummy before you can blink. Gotta keep your wits about you, visit other plants, avoid the dread Venus. Moral of the story: a great place to take the kids for a study of nature and of things to come.

He calls Petra. “You,” he says. “Out turning over dumpsters again.”

“You missed it,” Petra says. “Not everyone would forget to inhale.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Taxes.”

“Again? You’re always doing taxes.”

“End of a quarter.”

“How’s Ben?”

“He’s fine. Want to talk to him?”

“No. Just wondering.”

“Ellen and I think you need a lobotomy,” Petra tells him. She chews on the end of her pen and uncaps it to cross out a line.

“Thanks,” Cousin says.

“We said, at least, that there’s hope for you.”

“That’s good. Glad you decided that.”

“Well, maybe we can pound on your window tonight. Right now I have to finish this schedule. I’m really behind.”

“Talk to you later,” Cousin says, his finger on the button.

“There’s the other hooligan,” he says when Ellen answers the phone.

“I’m on the other line. Are you at home?”

. . .

Cousin hoists the barbell to his chest and hovers it. Think fly traps, he tells himself. Fly Traps in the Mist. He does twenty reps, and the phone rings.

“So what did I miss?” he says.

“Do you want to do something or not, because if you don’t, I can do something with someone else. If you do, I can think about it.”

“Tonight I might actually want to do something,” Cousin says.

“Very precise,” Ellen says.

“Call me later,” Cousin says.

. . .

Fighting with a woman is the essence of life, Cousin writes. He slices open a boneless chicken breast and opens a package of spinach. Chicken ala spinach e garlic. He knows a little Spanish, a lot of English.

The woman in Seattle is not the communicator that Ellen is, but she is a fornicator, and she rides horses. She says that anyone who would jump into something the way Ellen has is unstable. Ellen has a problem.

When he tells Ellen this, they are lying on the sofa. He has just returned from a second trip to Seattle. Ellen mulls it. Finally she says, “I see it.”

“What’s the prognosis, Doctor?”

“The woman in Seattle is normal. You like her because she’s normal. She’s never been to a shrink. She’s an equestrian. She has the same friendships she’s had since high school. And she has you, man with a tan.”

“Don’t be nasty.”

“That’s what you want.”

“What is?”

“That.”

Cousin mixes their drinks before slinging her over his shoulder and carrying her to bed. Ellen rides out her hatred and his. She erases her mind with the back of her hand. She slips around next to him, backs into him with her ass. He gets behind her and in. She arches, dodges, clamps her eyes wide, bites his wrist, arm, hand. He nearly strangles her. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, she thinks. This goes on until he stops, the only sign of his coming.

“Couldn’t you fake one,” Cousin says and rolls over on his back.

He stares ahead without seeing, unaware of having seized the sweetness of his time.

(First written in 1991; published in Submodern Fiction in 2003.)