Ana Verse

New from Argotist Ebooks

2011-07-13T15:56:00.000-05:00

With illustrations by Daniel Harris
Design & layout by Marc Vincenz

"Ann Bogle’s latest collection of memoir fiction, is a sequence of thoughts, dreams and conversations. Here white petunias are cut with scissors to make a name, values are placed as if they were tarot cards, and approximations of the sublime are revealed in mathematical detail. 'Country Without a Name' recalls the work of Dada poet Tristan Tzara (whose name means 'country' in Romanian) and the semi-autobiographical pharmaceutical quests and cut-up text collages of William S. Burroughs. Bogle rebels, defines and ultimately defies hierarchies. Her writing, manifesto-like, hints at what might have been learned from Andre Breton’s Nadja if we had been given her diary to read, along with the idea that non-being dwells in language the same as being does, or in Bogle’s words: ‘Not to be she is embodied’."

--Morgan Harlow

Saratoga

2011-06-29T22:43:00.001-05:00

The Cool Report

2011-05-07T15:38:00.000-05:00

August 3, 2006

another girl to figure out (2)

no reason to break here/
want to tell her kinship to it
blue save them walked past
phone legs of dead Lady
black woman save them
victim standing just inside
betrayed her gray cherry
comfortable guilty long name
configuration of all mother
beautiful shades of protective
touches head lay nose whites
know French therapy bill
college man strong enough

August 3, 2006

In a message dated 8/3/06 2:05:45 AM Central Daylight Time, talan@ORG writes:

I do apologize for forwarding those emails. That it went off list was
disturbing, which motivated me to forward them to the list.

Again, I apologize.

Apologize

I've been thinking about this for a day or two. I wondered whether to tell my boyfriend about it -- that people had gone abusive on one of my email lists -- that c was in use and mfa. That I called men a b. I am a mfa, afterall, a master of fine arts. Which my boyfriend isn't. I did ask him what he thought about Mel Gibson going wacko upon his dui arrest, and he said he didn't have time to think about Mel Gibson. We were looking at the fields near his house. We went to a county fair with rides and livestock. The cattle were furious. I thought of their lives. They were angry men, basically, slated to be killed and eaten. His little boys, 3 and 5, were having fun on the rides.

There was and is a lot of bad language around town. We heard it on the 4th. The girls were saying, f me baby, f me in the butt. Who talks that way? A whole group of kids.

So for now, I just forget about it.

I think Mel Gibson should have called a producers' meeting after The Passion of the Christ, once he was rumored to be an anti-semite, then had a press conference about it. Instead of blowing up later upon arrest.

At our school, the gist was that sexism and even misogyny were acceptable or at least tolerable. I liked that school least of all my schools. At the other ones, none of the ism's was acceptable or tolerable, and we had these noticeable gaps: like not enough black students in our courses.

August 2, 2006

In a message dated 8/2/06 12:21:56 PM Central Daylight Time, tsavagebar@COM writes:

If you wake up every two or three hours, you may have sleep apnea. ... You should see a sleep specialist if you think this might be the case.

Today I went to the office of my Lebanese psychiatrist. There was a pamphlet in the waiting room warning parents about a practice called "pharming" -- the young people are buying rxs without rxs over the internet and taking them for recreation. This is really too bad that drugs are so everywhere. I really think "drugs finance wars," but the connections are mysterious (of course). I am working on helping a very good public speaker who was a drug addict try to help combat addiction at the school level. We are making some progress that way. And I knew a wonderful American exec. in Japan who quit drinking (saki) who now helps meth addicts in Oregon -- what a strange world. But I'm sure he's very good at it, enlightened. There was another article in the doc's office about snoring. If you snore, it could be sleep apnea. Thanks for recommending that anyone with sleep issues get them checked.

August 2, 2006

another girl to figure out

no reason to break here
want to tell her kinship to it
blue save them walked past
phone legs of dead Lady
black woman save them
standing just inside
betrayed me gray cherry
guilty long name
configuration of all mother
beautiful shades of protective touches
head lay whites
nose know French
therapy bill college
man gone me
strong enough heart

August 2, 2006

It gets better after this... all back channel of course...

On Wed, 2 Aug 2006 02:08:13 EDT
AnnBogle1@COM wrote:
>In a message dated 8/2/06 12:55:03 AM Central Daylight Time,
>talan@MEMMOTT.ORG writes:
>
>
>> On Tue, 1 Aug 2006 22:48:57 -0700
>> "August" wrote:
>> >fuck u cunt
>>
>
>you crowded bitch.

Re: Forward these remarks pussy ass:

At 11:28 PM -0700 8/1/06, Talan Memmott wrote:
>Since August seems to think this is COOL!,
>I am forwarding...
>his latest, greatest work!
>
>
>
>On Tue, 1 Aug 2006 23:25:47 -0700
> "August" wrote:
>>Forward these remarks u straight-up ho:
>>
>>
>>Ya better run boy
>>i'll dump a shell in your chest
>>
>>keep it very cool
>>or i will bury you
>>
>>u are not hot
>>i've got the top spot
>>and it will not stop
>>
>>mother-fucker, this is personal
>>
>>you're a bitch and straight-up ho
>>
>>fake-ass bitch
>>
>>i mean this and i said this
>>
>>i'll take u to the streets and get gangster with it

August 2, 2006

Progress Report

There is a drug made in Japan called ABILIFY. It is very expensive: $300 for a month's worth or more. I've tried that and other new anti-psychotics, and it's the best one (Geodon, Zyprexa, Seroquel are others); I like it better than those due to the fact that I experience no side-effects on it, just a little drowsiness. It feels, in other words, completely normal to be on it, yet I believe it has helped stabilize me physically when I couldn't do that on my own -- my weight was too low before I went on Abilify. It doesn't actually make me stop thinking on the dose I take (10 mg.), but I bet if you took a higher dose, you might be able to quiet rowdy thought. I have profoundly mixed feelings about med's, especially due to my recent realization that the med's probably finance world war, and I'm against war, and the med's could hurt your liver and kidneys -- though mine are still fine, but I also went three years without being able to stabilize myself or my own weight without a low-dose tranq. Without anti-dep's, my brain turns to a pile of vegetable peels in the sink. This is all very sad. I used to be just fine without any medications.

How did I end up back on Wryting-L? I had unsubscribed then all of a sudden I'm getting posts again. That's all right. I'll read the list for a while.

Good wishes.

July 28, 2006

Cool

I wrote short stories steadily until 1991, at the advent of the Gulf War, and would have continued, certainly -- one of the war stories from '91, "What Kiss," was published in '93 in Gulf Coast -- except that a boyfriend of three months assailed me and threatened me on an answering machine tape then took a position in my department, despite a kind of quiet protest coming from my corner. It is, I think, obvious how hard it would be to protest anything successfully. The upshot for me was that my relationship with my own writing was threatened, never to return to the steady flow I had enjoyed with it. I have only written two short stories since then but have written other things. My weblog is a notebook of mixing genres, something I was pioneering then, in '91.

At a party at school, our "head of class," not the best writer nor the worst, a gal, really, announced to my table that my voice was glamorous and that my friend was cool. We are still in this condition. She is cool; my voice is kind of nice or sweet.

My writing voice, however, is male, often, authoritative, sometimes.

I would make a reading tape, but I don't have audio on my pc.

Popular

We were popular in 4th grade, that group of girls, and then I was again at 25 (up to 25 more childish attacks had threatened my becoming) -- and then again at 35. By 35, I was only popular in AA.

It was very strange and happy to meet up with someone (the Jewish man) who had had a poem published in The New Yorker when he was only 19 in a rec room in a little side town in AA. He had lived for 18 years as an international business exec. in Japan and was then 50. His wife had vetoed a poetry career. I couldn't agree with her decision. He was really a very wonderful friend and knowledgeable about literature and religion and not in any way a cw program man. He was intending to write fantasy now that he was divorcing. I'd like to know when I think about it -- if cool is what he was. He was more mature and well-liked. He gave the impression of being someone who had taken the stairs down fifty flights away from a downsizing; then there was nothing corporate for him to do here in the U.S., our nation’s logic. I think he was more cool upon reflection.

Even if he did not like my friend, the Jewish woman in our group, I was her ally; I was his, too. (I think it worried him that someone might try to matchmake them since both were divorcing, and I could see it not working that way, since he was more conservative and she was more reform.) Then he left town to take a job, and the group got really horrid without him there. It was like a Tarrantino movie with lots of death.

One night when she wasn't there I stood up for her and was hit, at my car, and the police interrogated me after I called them.

July 27, 2006

Error on Ron Silliman's Blog

This mislinking at Silliman's weblog has led me to read something from the voice of an outsider, for a change, and I'm glad of it, even though Carlo Parcelli mostly steps on toes in his piece. The prose, instead of seeming too strange to read, strikes me as being strong -- it's some sort of lit. crit. tapdancing -- and reminds me of reading at Baraka's website. I was impressed by such extended use of analogy throughout a lengthy essay even if it does rely on outsider terminology. It is so thorough in its dismissal of so many writers: Perhaps IT is supposed to be a seminal critique. John Gardner's ON MORAL FICTION, though certainly polite, stepped on toes, too, albeit a different set than this does. And it goes to show that no matter how politely one goes about it, it is a difficult thing to suggest bias. Remember that Gardner chose Guy Davenport as one of the best writers then living, while simultaneously dismissing many of the fashionable crowd of the day (1982?).

July 26, 2006

“House Nigga and Field Nigga” (Flashpoint) by Carlo Parcelli:

Paraphrase: by terms of Parcelli’s essay, I myself am a paranoid field nigga who reads mentally stable house niggas most. You might say that is a good thing, too. Sometimes I do read a fellow yellow field nigga or, better yet, a red free nigga (I wish he had given a fuller bibliographic list of those). In fact, workshop consists in reading field niggas' work. One or two of those will advance from the barn to the house. The rest will leave the barn and go back out to the field, temporarily stoked on field niggas' fallible styles and untested awareness, to try to survive reading life outside comfortable halls and rooms.

This might seem too rude to mention: an alcoholic man actually called me a "niggy" once because I'd been cleared out of AA for trying to stand by a Jewish mom in there who was getting evicted from her real house and torn away from custody of her daughters by her ice-cream-scarfing, woman-hating, fat dreck of a husband from Wyoming. Standing up for someone who is in the right, against public resistance, is the opposite of selling out. Weird thing is, later, there really is no world outside of AA -- by house masters' terms -- poetic AAs want in the house, too; and there are only a few places for ex-barn fallows like us to shelter. May go ask the fox.

It's understood that pharmaceutical co's have picked up in U financing where the Cold War trickle down left off, but I wouldn't have known that in 1991.

June 29, 2006

Economic Messages

This just in from "Absolute Resolutions Corp": a balance due of $48.54, passed on to ARC by CIRCA POETRY, another debt management concern. I owe them for a hardcover copy of TOUCH OF TOMORROW, published by The International Library of Poets, that featured my poem, "Florence's Weekend" on the first page. I signed off permission for another poem "It's the end of a cycle" without requesting a copy of that volume, THE BEST POEMS AND POETS OF 2005.

I decided to try vanity press with my first ever published poems due to the fact that I was avoiding giving the appearance of competing with MFA and PhD poets I had gone to graduate school with in Houston. They had known me as a short story writer and somewhat hasty essayist (most of the writers there wrote VERY slowly).

With the help of a friend, I had paid off a pile of my bills one year: it equalled six years worth of hefty interest, medical costs, clothes from Target, toiletries, other incidentals, etc. The cards charged off ("R9") on the indeterminate day before my friend and I paid the tab. That means in credit terminology, the banks (6 of them) took a tax write off because my payments were seven months late, then on the following day the banks received their payment in full, including nasty "legal fees" not needed to collect from me. My credit rating is still too low due to the R9s even to rent an apartment, though I owed nothing. This is a far cry from where my credit was ten years after I started as a worker; still, there's little I can do except write letters to the bureaus. I’m feeling proud that I have wrecked my credit further due to a poem.

The job I had from Feb. to June of this year I gave to the next person, without being fired, for my near-catatonic inability to get out of the car and go into the stores where I was scheduled to start gathering retail data. My boss and supervisor were nice beyond compare when I told them I was suffering a fear of leaving my car. Agoraphobia -- fear of the marketplace -- fear of open spaces. I was earning much needed extra income from that job. The boss was so nice, in fact, he invited me to call back in August when I might feel a little better. What caused my near inability to leave my car? It isn't poetry, but it might be writing-related.

Google Adsense disabled my account due to my invalid clicks but left these blank patches on my weblog where the ads for how to blog used to be. I wrote to THEM, too, and told them that many of my readers are sophisticated bloggers themselves, more sophisticated than I, who will not click on ads for how to blog. I learned that Google was getting paid at least $1 for each of those, yet I was getting paid closer to a penny a day. I see that my friend, Robin Reagler, advocates for wonderful poetry books at her weblog, Big Window. That's for the best.

June 24, 2006

Praise to Vernon Frazer for his letter.
Thanks to mIEKAL aND for asking, "how many potato peelers and window washers are there on this list?"
Hats to Ken Wolman, a fellow SUNYionian.
Regards to the writer on SSI, the winner who worked as a custodian, and all those who write because they say they have to and feel that economic questioning, necessity, and reality make for reasonable debate.

Quite a number mentioned scamming; one man at his weblog quoted my letter headed by the statement that I ought to be smacked.

Women on the list are apparently unconcerned with how to earn $10,000 per year, which is both a good indicator and for some reason not good for my morale.

After jobhunting every fall for eight years, I got an offer to teach in China. I adored the man who offered me the job. He said he liked my credentials and c.v. I reflected about what was listed there: the courses I had taken, including women writers and modernism, but not only: 40 courses and seminars in English alone, covering three degrees, German proficiency, creative writing, and liberal arts. I didn't go to China, however. I would have gone there in debt wearing their clothing. I was afraid to owe even $4,000 (what I still owe) living overseas.

So, again, if I get up to solvency, options I don't have now might open up, but it has been a very long haul. My health is good. The unemployment started at age 32.

No one suggested, as they did in chunking out the community college jobs in Houston: women can just get married. Considering that those men were looking for heiresses and lawyers to marry themselves, I don't know which men they thought might marry us: creative writers making $3,000 per semester teaching four nights a week.

This crazy geographer I went on a date with -- he told me, among other things that he is a Marxist, that I am "too thin for farm life," that he had been his family's breadwinner, that his wife stayed at home until the divorce then became a well-paid R.N. He said he had never met another woman like me in comparable financial circumstances -- I am seemingly set in a comfortable house in a beautiful part of the metro area but am staggeringly poor. He had had to refinance his farm when his wife wanted to go her separate way, and it left him feeling against the community property law in his state. He needs a housekeeper and told me to be a waitress after I had sent him my c.v. He said there was someone teaching English at his U who couldn't speak English. ETC.

One of my brainstorms has been to study housekeeping. You who do are smart to teach reading -- I used to do that and liked it better than teaching writing. If someone were to teach house cleaning locally, I would sign up. To be really good and content at that would possibly get me somewhere.

It makes me uncomfortable that so many people I know (three?) know Bush but no one I know knows the Clintons, Gores, Kerrys or Wellstones.

June 22, 2006

Dear bloggers and visitors to blogs,

What about advertising? I am not presently in a position to have sit-down (face-to-face) conversations with other bloggers, but I have done a little reading. I recently signed up for Adsense with Google. On my first day, I clicked on my own ads so many times, I temporarily shut down a little church website on how to blog. I felt stunned and horrible for doing so; then I read the policies and learned that clicking on my own ads is strictly prohibited. Nonetheless, I earned $40 that day, which lasted 15 hours, a little better than $2 per hour. Yesterday, I followed policy closely and earned just under $3 for the whole day. Today I have earned zip. Also yesterday, I ate a rather lousy sandwich that cost $34. How could it have cost so much? The beers (I drank almost 3 Coronas since they didn't have Rolling Rock) cost $5 each. My friend's Miller Lites cost $4. How could beer cost that much? How could advertising on my website cost so little? My blogging days tend to run long. I usually stay at it on a simple day for three hours, a harder day for ten. If I were earning $10/hour for advertising, I would be content and also would feel nicely employed. That would equal $240 per day.

$250 per classroom hour is what our least-well paid teachers at U of Houston were earning. Each made $18,000 for the semester s/he taught one undergraduate and one graduate workshop. It was one of those teachers who regarded me as one of the best writers currently in attendance at the school. Not best I would have thought since I am a Democrat. We were earning $21 per contract hour to teach and grade undergraduates 15 hours per week. Typically, I put in 30 hours -- we had 54 students apiece -- so undercut my own pay by half in order to do a more thorough job grading student papers. Today, I would be very lucky indeed if an organization offered to pay me at graduate school wages.

In Minnesota, where I have lived for ten years, pay is usually $10 per hour, up from $7.50 ten years ago. Those jobs require a high school diploma. Housing and food have gone up dramatically. Much teaching here is done on a voluntary basis. It may be possible to win more than a p-t class or two and therefore earn more than $4,000 per year. To tutor, which I prefer, I need to advertise. I need to wait to do so until the school year starts.

I am hoping to earn $10,000 per year that I now lack, and this has been true for seven years running. Creative writing as an enterprise is leaving me feeling genuinely put out and fatigued. I have so far foregone $400,000 in earnings due to having chosen to study cw as a field, and that number is only going to go up. I am dependent on the government for health insurance and family for sustenance.

My informal rank at Wisconsin, by Lorrie Moore, was top 2 or 3 then in attendance as an undergraduate; at SUNY-Binghamton, it was 1 going in, based on writing sample. At Houston, I got the fiction fellowship going in. Politically and aesthetically I was a little left and a little offbeat.

I would like to hear from anyone who has figured out a good way to earn $10,000 per year. I have had 30 jobs and don't really want just another one.

June 21, 2006

re: feminists with low-cut blouses

In a message dated 6/21/06 8:48:59 AM Central Daylight Time,
sumaurer@COM writes:

> marfa and austin

W'assup with Marfa? (That's pussy backwards in Texas.)

I was the sixth of seven editors, the last only a man, who worked for J.B. Poindexter after my graduation in '94 from U of Houston cwp on an account of a ranch he had renovated near Marfa. The account was Mr. Poindexter's own, a fascinating and already-well-written tale about llamas and hand-cut adobe. I did the editing work without ever visiting the ranch. The rooms in the b & b went for $400 per night. He met me sometimes in the kitchen of my little garage apartment, with the full light coming in on four sides, to go over the editing changes; sometimes in his palatial condominium just outside the 610 Loop; and sometimes in his office suite in a downtown skyscraper. The brass plaque outside the suite door read J. B. Poindexter, Corporate Raider. I was acting fanatical about use of the semi-colon, probably due to what C. Michael Curtis had written about the semi-colon, and C. Michael Curtis had liked some of my short stories in the 1980s. My phone rang at 8 a.m., and it would be Mr. Poindexter calling about a particular semi-colon in the 120-page document -- I had made liberal, but correct, use of them throughout the text, like sprinkling it with a minced bunch of Cilantro. How bizarre to hear a message about semi-colons from such a prosperous and busy man first thing in the morning; I had a new boyfriend, myself, and not one who'd pondered the use of the semi-colon much; he thought in songs himself. I earned $30 per hour for doing that good work.

May 26, 2006

Speak Then Read

What you never had
for your sorrow
for the work you do
Got you love enough
to be content?

Who but you
can argue for yourself?

I've got the troubles
of mine to suffer too.

We are in a boat alike
When we say yes
We are in a boat alike.

. . .

Speek den Reed

Wut ne had yoo
fore yer sarro
fore de work yoo doo
Gott yoo luv
eenuf fore to bee
cuntent?

hoo but yoo kan
argyoo fore yoreself

ai gott de trubbels uv
mine too suffer too

wee arr inn a bote alike
wenn wee say yess
wee arr inn a bote alike

(Madison, WI, 1982)

Solzhenitsyn Jukebox by Ann Bogle e-book trailer

2011-03-16T11:58:00.001-05:00

Irish Salad

2011-02-05T09:55:00.003-06:00

Scandinavians settled in Minnesota because it resembles Scandinavia. This morning I vomited salad I ate last night at an Irish pub. The salad was called "chop chop." I paid $19 for the food and two beers. I met the owner, whom we help to become rich by our simple appetites. We were rich farmers from Scotland and Sweden. He is Irish but unlike other Irish people I know, Irish-American people, he is from Ireland and is red-headed and swarthy and muscular. He imported the mahogany bar from Ireland. I wish my simple appetites might feed two in our decision, instead of helping him if he's a tax-evader, like so many of the restaurateurs. Asian restaurants serve vegetables with love. Overnight, I felt drunk, as if headed for hangover, but I hadn't drunk enough alcohol to cause it. What caused it? Superstitions dialed in sleep. Today I was thick with religious devotion. I had thought about delicious corned beef and cabbage, not to be served at that public house on St. Patrick's Day. I wanted the Irish of Binghamton, the fire department, and the Irish of literature to comfort me. To avoid this unwanted drunkenness not caused by drinking. I was so balanced before it was revealed. Ladylike reserves be restored to me.

March 16, 2007

Solzhenitsyn Jukebox by Ann Bogle e-book trailer

2010-11-06T09:12:00.002-05:00

Solzhenitsyn Jukebox by Ann Bogle e-book trailer

These hats are for sale!

2010-11-05T09:57:00.000-05:00

Love Lids are cashmere and suitable for men, women, and children. One little girl slept in hers the night they made it!

Solzhenitsyn Jukebox, Argotist Ebooks, 2010

2010-08-09T15:36:00.000-05:00

Solzhenitsyn Jukebox by Ann Bogle with cover art by Rachel Lisi, edited by Jeffrey Side, Argotist Ebooks, July 27, 2010.

Szymanowski at St. Mark's

2010-07-05T13:18:00.000-05:00

Grey Nuns

2010-06-29T11:20:00.000-05:00

She lets her intentions guide her

2010-06-05T16:15:00.000-05:00

Evelyn is 42. I listen as she explains that her “heart goes out to her”—to the woman whose husband she's stealing; there's no credit in that, I say, maybe in heaven. I listen as if to a speech by Obama. She could get a job that way, but I know she's afraid to be hired. She relies on our mother and calls her arts and crafts minor.

A friend of Evelyn's has canceled plans for the evening, and I am her fall back. We sip the beer I brought. I look at the flowering pots she's seeded on the balcony. She says she's glad she grew up in a liberal faith.

The handsome French husband's slender American wife lives with the two boys in a Victorian house across town. He calls it a marriage for Immigration. He takes Evelyn rock climbing. I take up his side when I hear he's romantic.

The American wife and Evelyn know people in common who send Evelyn angry messages. They're angry because they thought they knew her. They are New Age. Hell is unsketched in the notebook of New Age people. “There's a balance in heaven for mistresses,” I say, thinking “mistress” could be a pride word, but Evelyn admits to no name, only to love for the neighbors. “Is he your neighbor's husband?” I ask, inviting her to explain whether neighbor applies to women who covet—“deliriously desire”—husbands from Angers.

Ledger

2010-06-02T08:24:00.000-05:00

"Fiancée" at Istanbul Literary Review, May 2010.

"Tinges of Envy or How You Learn" at Metazen with "Metaview no. 1," Frank Hinton and Julie Innis, eds., May 25, 2010.

"Raisins" at Metazen with "Metaview no. 2," Frank Hinton and Julie Innis, eds., June 17, 2010.

"at 'night' any night is can't": Scalapino's Autobiography at Chant de la Sirene, Laura Hinton, ed., June 2, 2010.

Brock & Cheryl: Comp

2010-05-05T11:21:00.000-05:00

A short story written collaboratively in early 2001 by mIEKAL aND and Ann Bogle and shared at Wryting-L listserv in 2005.

He is about six-foot-seven; he has brown, medium-length hair (crooked sort of, to the bottom of his ears); he wears a big suit that he probably got at a tall men's store. And the pants and coat match, into pin stripes (not a pin-stripe suit but a navy/gray line pattern). And his briefcase has insurance policies in it because that is what he sells. He got her name from an old boyfriend, but she doesn't know that or which one, and she thinks she needs more insurance, something she thinks of as another thing she must buy. The kind of insurance isn't clear to her — fire, theft, renter's, flood, other acts of God, what does he usually sell? He opens the briefcase.

He remembers someone long forgotten from high school. Everyone called her Tippy, but he always thought of her as Excess — a sublime popularity in his head: someone he took home at night, in his thoughts. Tippy or Excess, so many insurance policies later, was at the heart of his successful salesmanship, the One he never had but substituted in her absence with a readymade fiction of conquest and spooning.

Tippy, his fantasy mistress from high school, had actually gotten married two or three times, he heard later, but in high school, the fantasy was first, that she might be big enough for him — a stroke of luck there — but also he imagined himself married to a little woman who received his seed by caesarian. And Tippy, no one he would really take home, would climb in and out of the tool shed window — how he'd always imagined it. Brock has an insurance policy for this new version of Tippy Excess sitting before him, stupid, clueless, and hungry. Her pink-colored lips stuck in agape.

Let's make it clear that a policy is not a contract. Fantasies harbored for lifetimes attain a self-imposed rigor, a sentencing to a strict line drawn by the will. He could have slipped Tippy notes, but then there was the chance that Bogus, the football guy and her true possessor, would find him out. So in a makeshift flight of fancy he composed a marriage contract over and over in his head, only to surface later as the fine print of those damned policies.

This Tippy's name was Cheryl — something both of them were so far not committing to paper or saying. Unusual in a salesman, she thought. He is insincere and intends to sell her something. Best would be if he sold her the need for it, but that was beyond his intelligence to do, she decided. Skip need straight to conclusion. She was thinking about the chicken for the broiler pan. Buy insurance; keep up the regular home cooking because the time to prepare to meet a regular guy and settle down had come, again.

“I think of myself as sassy,” she once told a girl who shared a locker next to her. Having said that she was never free to become; the unprompted words were self-determined. Looking in the mirror every hair had its place. Morning required her complete attention to construct herself in an image that The Man of Dreams would be ready to float off on life's raft with. Something was burning in the oven, and a child would be crying with hunger and impatience. How fast Cheryl — Sassy ol' face, girl-runner-jumper-other, funny light — Cheryl got to the out: As soon as she could think of someone who might be coming to meet her. She would think of the loss, of it becoming a life for someone not Sassy, pale Cheryl, good Cheryl, Cheryl too right for the bank, Cheryl righter than the bank, of the kid, the cooking, the forgetting to look in the mirror, the man — it could be Brock Insurance Salesman — out scouting his next Sassy, but mostly, she thought of staying at home without her next Someone Coming Up, the guy out the corner of her eye, just next to her day, coming up, to unlock Sassy and leave a baby girl crying.

9 a.m.: Brock picks up the phone and leaves a message.

10 a.m.: Cheryl checks her messages, something about an expired “policy.”

11 a.m.: This is the day that the mail is not delivered (a bank holiday), so Cheryl heads for the Post Office.

12:15 p.m.: Cheryl discovers a letter from many years ago crammed into her postal box. Shreds of poems and clippings from a yearbook but no return address. She hastily looks around the mailbox room to be sure that no one is watching and puts the envelope in her purse. Out the door.

12:20 p.m.: Brock is standing in the street kicking a tire in the hopes his car will start up.

The good thing is the blue, bark, back thing never reversed, never reversed. Traversed is Professional Cheryl, not a walker, a lady getting her mail before a date with the too-tall Brock. Brock is thinking of his car. No lady getting her mail can save the car, more important in the scheme of who-he-is-today: Nissan — than who he will be tonight after he smokes her. He can see her yeah/no walk as he kicks the tire one more time, in time for her to see it, squarely, but what if she's got her hand on his too-tall ass the entire mile, an eternity? No, the car is temporarily disabled. He does have time for a hand on the ass, but where does it come from and in the end will his car start? All these questions are the province of the third party ambiguous, someone who claims to be an accomplice to the Author, but not a loyal Reader, or a Scanner. The car was Brock's pride before the wheel wells started rusting out. His buttocks tightened as he swiveled to have a look-see.

It was another Jesus-Short, something in the circuitry between car-man-song, no wise, again (his buttocks itching for the real touch not about to come from a Jesus reaches from Cheryl past him). He hadn't decided about Jesus, the real Jesus from the morning of his life, about his past, her past, except to look forward to the real touch or face or past means Cheryl's past was (Cheryl no one's wife, he guessed) a streak of indiscretions. Cheryl thinks of his tall ass first, the car second, and of his two secrets last. She can guess at his secrets. There is no hold, no Nissan — she tells him the car will be fixed or he'll get a new one, must be God sending him a message. With this guy she has to take even a minute of her two-minute approach to mention God and cars as if they were synchronously connected. Last time she thought of Jesus she was looking at him, dark Aramaic, long-haired, just her type, and it seemed profane to her. No, she wasn't a churchy girl, but she belonged to the couch of believers who invited the banal to constitute her religiosity, not hail Marys but some man in imitation of a god implanted in her male universe. The men of tomorrow lined up in a row, unchoosable but nonetheless viewable. Brock only knew how to wink in acknowledgement. This was the one. He had her picture in his glove compartment, more than one, the others in the photos darkened.

“Your car,” Cheryl pried.

“Gas,” Brock mentioned. He was more than a bucket nervous.

“1982?” She remembered him. “Stairway to Heaven.” That song played in his car, in his home, at work. “Economics class?” She had never had much of a mind for indecent global numbers.

~mIEKAL aND & Ann Bogle

Gerade links

2010-03-18T14:09:00.001-05:00

1. My Crush on Daniel Ortega
2. Hoss Men
3. Hymen
4. Cousin
5. Dreams-in-progress
6. Irish Salad
7. Credenza

Minnesota Landscape Arboretum

2010-03-05T00:08:00.000-06:00

Subj:re:doing time ...

2010-02-22T17:48:00.000-06:00

womyn in prison Date:1/16/06 8:01:05 AM Central Standard Time From: AMBogle2 To:Poetics Listserv

When one of my California friends got involved in getting archaic anti-sex laws off the books, I doubt she was concerned with or thinking of women in prison. She might have gone to jail herself at one time -- for reasons other than sex -- but it didn't go that way, thank goodness for her. On Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in 2003 (three years ago), I went to jail for having drunk 5.5 beers on election night Nov. 5, 2002. The legal finding was that there had been no driving misconduct; I had driven well enough (my childhood friend and I had gone out to watch returns at a local pub), but I was stopped about 10:30 because one of my high beams was out for a quarter mile. The other headlights worked fine. My b.a.l. (blood alcohol level) turned out after three weeks of urine testing to be .12 or .02 over the legal limit. Besides the alcohol, they tested for the anti-depressants I told them they would find -- two of them -- plus lithium and an anti-seizure drug. I was in treatment for major as well as manic depression. According to the doctor, three drinks with food is all right, but I had drunk 5.5 beers with just an appetizer. The charge against me was aggravated gross misdemeanor and is likely to cause problems in finding employment, likely for good.

The jail, where I stayed for 48 hours, gave me enough information to write a 180-page book, something I resisted setting out upon due to the insult of it. The other women were staying longer than I was -- I had ankle bracelet to contend with at home; they were no longer in apartments and without a way to be on ankle bracelet. Martha Stewart said she preferred jail to ankle bracelet, but I preferred ankle bracelet. The ankle bracelet itself was like a plastic wrist watch that someone had cleverly clamped on above my foot, so my shoes could tell time. There was a box that looked like Darth Vader's helmet plugged in by my new phone line that would send out a red signal if I should try to leave. I could bathe and otherwise move about. I wore a sock under the bracelet to keep it from chafing. I never ended up leaving the house in eighteen days, so I was set free ten days early.

Those eighteen days gave me much less to think or worry about than the 48 hours in jail. I read two books while in jail, one was by Zora Neale Hurston about her visits to Haiti and Jamaica. She gives an amazing account of a wild boar hunt. If you get a chance to read hers next to Robert Stone's description of being in Mexico with Kesey and Kerouac and their wild boar, do. The food in jail was dreadful, so it was the next best thing to eating something really good to read of eating the boar with Zora. (The chicken a la king, however, was good, and so were the biscuits.)

It's sick that I could write a good long account of those 48 hours; I guess we'd agree to that. Two years later it was still bothering me that the women in the jail were not allowed lotion unless someone they knew brought it to them. There was an epidemic of dry skin, so dry that the women had visible sores. That would not help their chances in finding work and housing when they got out, and yet it was such a simple thing. I wanted to organize something, but I never go to bars -- it would be something for women who do go to bars to do -- sponsor a woman in jail by bringing a bottle of lotion to her.

A black woman in the TV room said: "The black women are here for crack and prostitution, the white women are here for drinking and driving. I'm here because I hit someone when I was pregnant." I took her to mean "punched," a cop, maybe. She had held an administrative post with a not-for-profit agency in Minnesota. A woman cop in North Minneapolis had hit a Jewish woman I knew in AA, looking for housing that could remind her of New York, for talking with the woman cop's boyfriend. I had a one-year sentence hanging over my head. Being locked in jail is worse than being locked in your own house. I hope it never has to happen again. It's sad that I have become such a recluse. I prevent ever having to go to jail again by rarely leaving the house and by rarely drinking -- by living in fear of authorities and local busybodies. With money, I would move to a decent city and out of the suburbs.

My California friend who was agitating for anti-sex laws off the books for gay men in Houston didn't think of this: How do the police know that the women are trading sex for drugs before they are arrested? Why aren't they simply arrested for possessing drugs?

Had I had sex prior to my arrest? Had they thought I had? I was carrying expired condoms in my car (how embarrassing!) -- and they did rip through the car later and throw everything around. My Louise Hay notebook was on the backseat. My head was wrapped in a large black muffler with a Harley Davidson patch on one end; the woman cop must have thought I was a Muslim in the dark of night, in my pre-dented blue Volvo 240 DL 1989, the way she looked at the flipped-over patch. I had voted for Democrats.

. . .

The 180-page version might include:

1. Paul Wellstone's plane crash in October 2002 shortly before the election, Norm Coleman's win.
2. My mother an election judge.
3. My absentee ballot misrouted and not counted in 2008.
4. My correspondence with the alcohol-beat reporter in Toledo, Ohio, a woman, the only reporter in the nation to cover ankle bracelet.
5. Inmates in the jail longer than nine days required to test for TB, not allowed to test if there for less than nine days. Tine test at my doctor.
6. Three-story barbed wire fence outside the window.
7. Hay mattress.
8. Inmates in line three times a day to get medications and see the nurse.
9. The nude, calisthenic, rectal search (and roadside ballet wearing sueded French black lace bell bottoms).
10. Prison blues and grays.
11. The volunteer woman chaplain who asked, "Did you go to college, Ann?" during a board game about life choices. "I finished three times," I said.
12. The beautiful and proud-of-breadwinning prostitute who asked to eat at my table.
13. Weak coffee in the morning, strong coffee at night.
14. The dirty night guard: the infrared light in the eye.
15. Sugar packets smuggled and stashed.
16. Milk for no one, pregnant women.
17. Blue ink on the ham.
18. The T.V. booming.
19. The withdrawal from nicotine.
20. Gum in the hourglass. Clock hand not moving.
21. The woman who asked, "Are you mixed?" in a room big with laughter. Scottish, English, Swedish.
22. Downturned hands and dialect: m'fuh.
23. Cornrowing and pink curlers.
24. Treatment programs cancelled due to budget cuts, so the women could not serve time and get treatment concurrently.
25. I had been arrested twice, taken three times to a police station in my hometown for drinking one beer more than the legal limit. The first time I was 15 and had returned from a school trip to Germany. I had walked out to the park with a can of beer to read Marco Popp's and Robert Raithel's love letters.
26. It was a clinical mistake to be on an SSRI (it caused haircutting).
27. The FBI report returned inconclusive when I fingerprint tested at Girls Write Now in New York in 2008.
28. One of the two charges on my record might have been dropped but the law suddenly changed.
29. Charges: petty misdemeanor for the football player with marijuana in his car who had pushed the woman meter reader half a block on the hood of his Lexus.
30. My lawyer, the former prosecutor with political ambition.
31. Vikings.
32. Vanguard Group.
33. Clay Brown's list.
34. Rollicking Irish happy hour across from the probation office.
35. "Whiskey" plates.
36. Bar soap, Bible, toothbrush in brown paper bag.
37. Stubby pencil.
38. Library shelf hour.
39. Naming the woman judges. (Judges stand election.)
40. Arrest scenes and detailed reports.

Tilly Artaud

2010-01-21T03:46:00.000-06:00

NOTES: I spent one summer at my mother's house with a toad, an American toad, a female American toad, who visited each night at ten and left in the morning at six for twelve weeks; then she did not appear at her perch by the glass door for two weeks, a summer vacation.

"If you continue to come here," I said to the toad, "I'll have to buy a terrarium." At the word "terrarium" she crawled off into the night.

My life was quiet then, and that was my entertainment. I studied toads on the internet. The male toads have distinct voices. They call in mating. The females have little red gullets. Toads hibernate under the permafrost. No source seemed to know how long they live.

I reluctantly named her Tilly Artaud. She was free, not a pet. I could only train my cat, Francis, not to eat her if he knew she were a pet. Before the summer was over, I saw him pat her gently on the head.

After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcyclist who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.

Tilly appears in my short story "Dumb Luck" in a paragraph. I used it already, but it's a longer story than that. Do I write it long form, as a creative nonfic? As a children's story?

I started on a children's story that turned lewd about frogs and turtles. The turtles were the landlords. The wife turtle drove a red Corvair. Her husband fetched six-packs of pop and beer from the country store for the frogs who were guests. He strapped them to his shell with a bungy cord. He went on foot, crossing the highway at a walking bridge. One day a car hit him, and the frogs didn't care that he was limping. The frogs were a very famous rock band staying at the lodge. Continue?

Sentences like little isles of meaning

2010-01-13T20:56:00.000-06:00

SLS Writes
Summer Literary Seminars

"Courtesy of the indefatigable Doug Messerli: terrific, fresh and interesting, form-bending prose-poetry by Ann Bogle here: http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/solzhenitsyn-juke-box – and here: http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/fianc%C3%A9e.

"She’s not doing anything particularly new (nothing’s all that new anymore — hasn’t been in a long, long while), but she’s doing it very well indeed: being interesting to the reader (as a result of being interesting to herself, one would suggest), as she hops from one little isle of meaning (shreds of recollections, leaps of logic, narrative’s constant self-adjustments) to the next ... "

[read more]

Écriture de la chatte

2010-01-11T19:45:00.000-06:00

The story has had four titles: "Écriture de la chatte," "How to Be Another Writer," "YKK," and "Feuilleton".

...

YKK is a zipper manufacturer whose initials stand for Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha. A boy told me (and I believed as a child) that YKK was my name in code.

...

Another writer was not always another writer; before she was another writer she was a young woman writer and before that a girl who wrote; before that a child and before that an infant; before that an egg in the scenic camaraderie of heaven, in a film about two pants, parents enjoining her to take up.

She has lived with her and inside her. Has she seen it? She has not seen it, but she has roamed its hall until airborne, a cord dripping. Who cut it? Saw. He saw it, the boy, from the foot of his mother's deathbed, her covers flung off--dark furry snail suddenly visible--signal of what's next, his dying at the beginning or her end.

Another writer writes a serious paw, a mistake of cat, a dripping maw, a dune of replacement. "Sex is a renewable resource," she says. "If I have slept with all of North America, then you have slept with all of North America and Iceland besides. Wake up, lizard!" but he has slid off the bed.

She'd rather write his penis than her pussy. She's seen that.

Her clit is off limits to all except a stranger. He sends her a chestnut-sized, handpainted black and pink-petaled vibrator with 12 speeds and two gyrations. When it runs out of energy, she plugs in the long one, long like a rolling pin.

“It was the size of my forearm,” she said when he asked about the largest man. “I squatted over it. The head was inside me, and I covered only the top of it like a helmet. He didn't thrust. ”

She is long and curved up near a bell; only the carillonneur has knocked it.

She goes to the garden in August with her camera. She pictures it for the wild rhinoceros, a serious writer, living in Reading. She has never met him. He sends her fifty photos of his pumped up self, even one of his erection during a handstand; she says, “I'm not big enough for you, not wide.” He texts her from a restaurant in Philly where he is eating mussels: when r u cum-ing?

In the photo an elegant nail partitions the leaves: a flower, she's heard that, or an ear of prime rib. She posts the photo to her weblog under the heading "Sex and Taxes” and leaves it for fowl to peck at for a week.

“I don't want you to get a Brazilian,” he tells her, only he calls it a Bolivian. She has to get a Brazilian, every few weeks for a year. “I like you with hair there,” he says, “I like women with hair there,” but his position is a losing climb. “Suit yourself,” he says, “but it's for men who fantasize girls.” “It's cleaner,” she says, thinking of the artist in St. Paul who wouldn't let hair near his mouth. She has told him about the camera but not about the rhinoceros who texts her in Reading: gitting any? like a common pornographer or a crowd.

Blood everywhere, and this time she hasn't prepared for him or shaved. Fifteen pillow shams at the Palmer House devastated, a serious poet from Philadelphia, not the writer from Reading afterall.

The third first he: Had he seen it? The ring. He couldn't move forward to be inside it with her: it was a deadlock in several positions. He went down to look at her, to shell gaze. There was a wedding band. “You said you weren't a virgin when I met you,” he said. “I'm not,” she said. And he returned it.

Fiancée

2010-01-05T23:41:00.000-06:00

The willing suspension of disbelief, a parakeet.
You cook then leave dishes for the reader.
I prevent having dishes to wash by not cooking.
I eat nuts and cheese and berries, but what if I did not eat?
. . .
A while ago, my boyfriend left me. Bella says it's sexy that I go around my small circle in town saying, “He broke up with me. He left me. He quit.” Sexy, but I don't know how not to: he didn't leave, and he wasn't my boyfriend. He was my fiancé. He stays in, deep in, a granite fissure in Manhattan. I stay in Minnesota and go out. I go out to meet the girls—old girls, new. We go on, trifling with language that's in use for us. Hot, cool, loving women with not cool, loving husbands or with hot, cool, loving boyfriends or with no husband or boyfriend: duende for a season or a reason for a while.

“You don't like the word ‘cunt,'” my fiancé said judiciously. “I like it but not as a first name,” I said.

Bella shows me a heavy, beaded necklace that matches my boots--beige-tipped and turquoise-shafted, the turquoise color not visible under jeans. I bought the jeans already tattered so I wouldn't have to wait for them, but they are all cotton without added stretch, so I wait anyway, stand around cased in them, dropping pounds walking and talking ceaselessly in them, talking and walking, while the air in the rooms turns pale red. He'd spy me dancing to paragraphs, gorging on beer then pizza yet growing loose and looser in the limbs until I feel like a girl again, a go-girl on a budget, a Gidget, a gadget. Yes, I say to Bella: I'll take the beads and black wool wrap with alpaca feathers and peacock brooch starred with crystals. I wind the stole around my jeans and pin the peacock at my hip. The wrap swings like a thick skirt over the jeans and beige boots. The peacock sparkles. They say and it is: subject for a runway.
. . .
Bella tells a story about a woman, an acquaintance, who came into the boutique with her boyfriend, the woman smelling of an STD. We perk up, listen. What STD? The smelly one, Bella says. The one with impossible syllables no one has heard of. The men of the north reject condoms and motorcycle helmets. The law permits you to break your head.

We walk to the Narrows from the boutique, fortified by talk of men and fashion. The Narrows is a blues bar known for outbreaks of small violence. I am wearing the winter white swing coat I bought for the wedding and the gold and turquoise beads.

A crowd parts to assess us. We take our seats at the corner of the bar. At the boutique we drank vodka. If I want to kill myself, but I don't, not here, not now, I'll order red wine. I ask for a Stella. A handsome man is already sitting next to me. I eye him as I shimmy in. He has beady green eyes. We go straight to politics. He is a Republican who lives on the Lake and commutes to Wall Street. Here, I am not surrounded by liberals on a sofa. Liberals are irresponsible dreamers who know nothing about finance, he says. I am not a liberal I tell him, but a leftist, a feministe. I hate abortion -- keep it legal, I say. I am wearing the sapphire ring. I have no friends and no enemies. My fiancé left me, I say.

An hour of this, a radio hour of talk-fucking, his green eyes boring into me, he leaves, and I turn, isolated. “He's married!” I say to Jen. “After I invested an hour in it.” Jen laughs and repeats to Bella what I say. Bella has to leave. It's ten. I move to her seat and into the brown eyes of a bald man shorter than I, a Libertarian distributor of faux tin ceiling panels. He sails in summer, ice boats in winter. I am a leftist and a feministe, I tell him. My fiancé left me. When we get up to dance, I feel drunk, but he holds me at the waist, and my legs kick out freely on the tiles.
. . .
If I get caught drinking and driving, I'll go to jail for a year. I tell the man with the brown eyes to drive us. Where are we going? To his house, he tells me. His friend, also named Tom, gets in the backseat. That Tom wears tiny spectacles, and I think that I have gotten it backward and that the glasses-Tom is the intellectual, but what if none of us is? I put on the seatbelt.

At Tom's the other Tom says good night in the driveway, and we go upstairs to where a clean white dog with beige spots and beautiful brown eyes is watching us. Tom leads me to a black leather couch in one of the living rooms. He strips me: boots, jeans, swing coat, beads. In moments, he's in me. He's not large, not small, slick. This--that--entry--is raison d'etre. “Clean as a whistle,” I say to the air, meaning no organisms, the organisms you can feel on contact. "Tight,” he says.

My fiancé said,“It was like having sex with the Holland Tunnel to be fucking Diana. My wife that was sex in a monkey patch. But sex with you is the sweetest, snuggest space.”

I'm glad Tom rolls me over and buffs me again. I call out in the dark that I'm a Jamaican. Another man comes near the room and stands in the door. He says something, but I miss it. I don't know who the other man is, but I see his shadow watching us. I wish the second man would come in, but there's thought in his distance. Later Tom tells me it's his foster son. Tom is 61.
. . .
I wake in the bed looking out at a giant golden maple, not knowing what town we are in. “What town is this?” I ask Tom, and he tells me but I forget. He answers my next thought, "I can't get you pregnant."
. . .
At breakfast, Kevin, who is 23, tall, dark, and impressive, sees me in the light. “I thought you were African when I heard you,” he says. “British and Swedish,” I tell him. “I might be Arab,” he says.

(Published at Istanbul Literary Review, May edition, 2010.)

Inaccrochable

2009-12-23T13:44:00.000-06:00

Unapproachable. I imagine an L. Frank Baum novel with a hairy lesbian marching band in parade. The womyn visit the barbershop and keep their hair short like men's then let the hair on their legs and armpits grow like European women's.

The womyn are hippies in their way.

I have to look back at it: men in Madison guaranteeing the free speech of a preacher on the library mall. The preacher stands during lunch hour on a concrete platform and shouts at the group, perhaps hoping to save them, "F-o-r-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n!" The beards face him braced at attention, forking the word in the cold.

I walk by watching them, not stopping, thinking, "What fornication?"

Later, ten years later, in Texas, I visit G.'s apartment. She orders the men to piss off the balcony but lets the women through the bedroom to the bathroom to pee. Pages of my thesis are strewn throughout the rooms and cover the floor. We sit on them and on old CDs. The visitors grow upset, to the point of hysteria, if one of their lovers sleeps with another of their lovers or husband or wife. "F-o-r-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n!" I shout from the bathroom. The men hear it and send in J., the little drug dealer girl, to see.

. . .

When the man comes in the house with his girlfriend, he is hoisting a 12-pack of Bud, and she is holding her eye where he has flicked it with his baseball cap while driving. M. and I have been arguing about the future. At first we are glad to be interrupted. I immediately think of the two of them driving 25 miles out of Houston to get to us in Sugarland, but when I see that the girlfriend is injured, I get on my horse.

The man is wiry and jumpy. There is a tattoo on his upper arm of Charles Manson. He jumps and jumps. He looks like a man on a pogo stick. He will not stop jumping. "I'm going to smash all the windows of her car," he claims. "Stop him," I say to M., but M. does nothing except try to make peace with concentration. "You're not allowed to hurt her or her car," I say to the man, whose name I have heard once and forgotten. The man veers close to my face and says, "Who are you? Bella Abzug! Gloria Steinem!"

The girlfriend smiles then goes to lie down on the daybed in the dining room. The man runs through the kitchen and out the back door. When he comes back, he says, "I smashed the windows of her car." M. goes out to the driveway and returns. "He did it," he says. "Call the police," I say, and M. says, "We can't have the police here. The neighbors will complain about rehearsals."

Then the man jumps near my face. "I'm going to tell you a story, Bella, Gloria. When I was 13 my father beat my mother every day, and I threw myself into the fight and tried to stop him. I couldn't stop him. He was bigger than I was. You have TLE. I have TLE. You have bipolar. I have bipolar. But mainly I shoot heroin. Would you like to shoot heroin?"

"No," I say and look at M. "She doesn't do that," M. explains. Then M. leaves the house by the front door, and I pretend he will be right back, that he will not abandon me to a fiend. The girlfriend has not gotten up from the daybed to look at her car. She lies turned to one side holding her eye and shyly laughing.

I go to the master bedroom. I close the door. I leave it unlocked for M. The man comes running through the door, jumping and making noise. "I'm going to eat you," he says. Then he leaves and I lock it. I get in bed. I can hear him fucking her in the dining room. I hear her songbird sigh. I can try to get under my head. I pull the pillows over my ears and the covers under my chin. I pray, What solidifies them. What unites them: Blessed are these the workers of the world.

[Published in Wigleaf, 2010.]

Hypogynormous ruble (exchange rates for Zynga)

2009-12-11T00:58:00.000-06:00

Blackjack. A digression at Matchbook. Or Mississippi Review. Or Mad Hatters' where a thread started about irreality.

I had intended to spend $110 at FarmVille but have spent $250 -- $110 because that is how much I won playing blackjack outside Hinckley, Minnesota (across the border into Wisconsin). In my honesty or fastidiousness I adjusted our winnings ($220 or $110 split) for the speeding ticket that Peter got crossing the state line in his oversized red Japanese sports car I called the "sports Buick." When he was pulled, I had not been thinking of speed. He had once been a cop himself: I watched as he placed his hands carefully on the steering wheel, separated and displayed, and tweezed his driver license from his shirt pocket with two fingers.

The night before, we had "won" at slot machines then jumped on the hotel bed (WCCO was our sponsor), too giddy to wait until morning when we were sure we would win again. Morning came and we sauntered from the hotel to the casino to lose at automated poker. We went to the gift shop. I adjusted for silver wire blue beaded dreamcatcher earrings and a carton of American Spirits blue. By four, we were at the bar side by side slumped over gin and tonics gone almost still. The bartender suggested Wisconsin, the trading post casino where we ended up turning it at blackjack.

"Moodswing," Peter said, radio-style, confidentially, and we laughed.

I have the eerie feeling that I half-wrote that story but can't remember where I parted with it. Raconteurs shine when their stories find you. They know it when you shine.

When farming started in September, I thought of gambling, of my childhood best friend's marriage ruined due to gambling, and of farming as a trope for living in the Midwest. Could I ruin a marriage farming at Facebook? Yes, but if Peter were here, we'd be going somewhere, not stuck to a computer.

As with the trouble with gambling, I managed to spend beyond my self-suggested limit at the farm while [farming and] wanting to do little else. It became a chase for "money" (numbers like rubles), following a weeks-long passion for the perfect placement of each tiny animal, tree, and length of virtual fence.

I compared that to writing, while I worked. I thought it was nicer to "farm" than to write because there is no need to offer opinions when I farm, only to reveal biases in landscaping, my version of it: the so-called traditional.

In virtual farming, there is no chance of real money, only the risk of spending it.

70,600 FarmVille coins or 240 FarmVille bills can be had via Paypal for $40 if you can't or don't wish to wait for trees, animals, and crops to develop. A farmer can make it without spending real money, but there are incentives to buy.

In an email claim to Zynga, I wrote, “On December 7, I bought 595 FV bills for $100 USD. I bought 28 gumdrop trees for 560 FV bills or about $94 USD. I sold 12 gumdrop trees immediately for 12,500 coins a piece and kept 16 gumdrop trees to display on my farm. Since that time, the resale value of the gumdrop trees has inexplicably and without notice dropped to 3,000 coins a piece.” I asked for a clarification and price adjustment. I wanted them to know that I could track exchange rates for all four kinds of currency and points at FarmVille. I had lost a hedge arch (that joined the blue barnyard to the sheep pen) and wanted replacement coins for that. Zynga replied that the answers to my questions could be found in the FAQ. I had read the FAQ and the TOS. Now I wait and watch for news of lawsuits I had read about but pardoned for the pleasure and sake of farming.

With 60 million daily users, Zynga (run by a group of male inventors) had failed to produce a FarmVille flag for India, leading to worldwide protest and instatement of a flag. (Zynga has yet to produce a flag for Sweden or coats of arms for Scotland, either.)

What had I expected, given the tinny dialect: “howdy, partner!” "reckon so" and "cowpoke" crap, as if makers at Zynga hadn't heard a snow farmer from Mississippi speak.

"Hypogynormous ruble."

Terms of Service at FarmVille require users to link to the FarmVille or Zynga websites in internet references to them.

[Dec. 13 at 9 a.m. Zynga writes, "We have credited you 114,000 coins to your farmville account for the gumdrop trees you have sold. Your current coins balance is now 598,385. Thank you for your patience."

I needed no credit for the 12 gumdrop trees I sold but for the 16 gumdrop trees I have yet to sell. Zynga will still owe the price difference for four trees (38,000 coins or $21.53 USD).

Dec. 15 at 8 a.m. Zynga writes, "Thank you for contacting Zynga. We have credited you 38,000 coins to your farmville account for the 4 gumdrop trees you have sold. Your current coins balance is now 742,568. Thank you for your patience."]

Once the Christmas tree is out of the courtyard, or even before, I can purchase the greenhouse (100,000 coins) and sell the manor (10,000 coins) in exchange for the lodge (800,000 coins) or the villa (one million coins). Then what? The villa is the top.

The future is not ours to see, que sera, sera.

Seven digits

2009-12-03T14:30:00.000-06:00

The farm before harvest today, the day I made my millioneth coin on FarmVille. Grapes, sunflowers, roses, tulips, eggplant, cotton, corn. I bought a windmill.

Why I Farm

2009-11-19T09:14:00.000-06:00

I farm at FarmVille in lieu of last year's directive to "go to a hospital for codependency in Pennsylvania" where art may be a culprit instead of a constructive act armed in its power to ward off faux illnesses. Occupational therapists teach art once a week at psych. hospitals, where I visited briefly twice and made two important artworks, one a collage using a paper bathmat and magazines. There may be a fine line between imbibing (vis-a-vis making art) and intoxication (a kind of overpowering pride in creation) (something I'd miss). Not to mention the money in it, in farming, the concept of it at least.

Unplugged Hand

2009-11-07T03:46:00.001-06:00

Interview

2009-11-02T16:55:00.001-06:00

Fiction at Big Bridge at Experimental Fiction/Poetry/Jazz

Jeff Hansen interviews Ann Bogle

Burning Bush

2009-11-02T15:46:00.000-06:00

The Argotist Online

2009-09-13T15:27:00.000-05:00

Poems:

"Another girl to figure out," "Catnip," "Haiku Romance," "Head," "Key of James," "Many how are seid," and "This is Why I Loved You" from dog barks up a tree at the apple left in it under a deerslim moon (Orium Press for Dusie Kollektiv, 2009) appear in The Argotist Online, ed. Jeffrey Side.

Olmsted Point at Yosemite

2009-09-09T19:14:00.000-05:00

Work on What Has Been Spoiled

2009-08-23T23:20:00.000-05:00

New at Big Bridge 14, ed. Vernon Frazer and Michael Rothenberg:

"The Housecoat" (1987)

"Mugabe Western" (1985)

excerpts from Work on What Has Been Spoiled (1988-1993)

Turning Thirty

2009-08-19T20:14:00.000-05:00

Of all the authors in the library, it was a wife from Maryland who called out from her marriage dormer I was not to read her. It might have been 2005. She shouted: “Some people should not be allowed to read books!” I intuited from Minnesota that the shout was for me, though we hadn’t spoken of or to each other since graduate school, nor even then.

On the cover of her book is a girl from the waist down in black skirt and shoes. It is one of many covers that began to appear after Reading Lolita in Tehran had delivered Lolita in a turn in planetary events as a beloved American novel to the hands of school kids and friends of Bill W.

I have a writer friend in her sixties who reads for language, for its sounds and expression. She does not read to be taught moral lessons. She reads to listen to language as if it were as abstract and lyrical as music, emotive and without argument.

I have another friend, nearing 60, who reads like a music librarian. He reads Vladimir Nabokov. He reads Robert Musil. He reads Alice Munro. He’s read more of Richard Howard’s translations than anyone I’ve met (Richard Howard, who knows the wife in Maryland and her poetry but not my reader friend). He reads scores. On the train he may read scores or he may conform and read The New Yorker. He might argue that music does argue, that he follows its arguments as if they were written in Italian rather than in notes on a page.

I used to read then write for the enjoyment of language -- Gertrude Stein through the Beats -- and when I read Lolita it was that way. I said later that Lolita was top shelf, not a book for messengers, but that might have been off, a dusty statement.

Then the covers appeared: girl from the waist down in rain boots. Girl from the waist down in Mary Janes. Girl from the waist down her socks slipping. Girl from the waist down on a park bench in the sun. These covers spoke as clearly as the bones and ghosts in titles.

After the Maryland wife telekinetically commanded me not to read, reminding me for the first time of child prostitution in her father’s native country, I turned away and didn’t read her book. A princess, she gave in an interview that she drank whiskey in a Manhattan studio before she married. There are different kinds of whiskey. Being there, reading. I didn’t know what game she’d won. I didn’t know how, whether with her glistening branch of hair; her pretty knees (knees I don’t recall); or her visionary decision to write with her writer husband their first sex in Nerve.

In John 4:18, the harlot is a Samaritan who has had five husbands, and the man she has now is not her husband. The husbands of the departed wives have strokes and sinus infections and seizures and lesions and kneecap replacements. They are celibate, though they may own someone.

I began not to care as I had cared that women I had known were at last publishing novels, except for the first one at 30 whose books I’d read, women trained to write poetry who had been cheerleaders in high school, multicultural cheerleaders who had married, had children, and in middle age signed novels about women turning thirty. I saw how parochial and sycophantic it might seem to care for novels written by women in friendships tested by beauty: Asian white cheerleaders! Latina white cheerleaders!

I had been a cheerleader at Lolita’s age or younger. In fourth grade in our red corduroy skirts and white wool turtlenecks we looked like the girls on the book jackets. It was a year of red, white, and blue bell bottoms, chokers, and mini-skirts. It was not a decade of pink stretch pants, pink sweatshirts, and pink snowsuits.

The police heard the music at my birthday party in fifth grade: a group of us girls had taken the portable record player to the park in the middle of the night and dropped our clothes. We hid in the willows from the cops’ search light, our outfits draped over the hockey boards. The light scanned the horse path in a staccato blare then passed. We were aware but not afraid. I had felt in my spirit a song, though not a song, about “freedom,” a poem that had nothing to do with law, religion, or sex. The girls who stayed curled in sleeping bags while the others streaked in the night became athletes and cheerleaders, sisters without borders of the doctors of “turning thirty.”

I had thought of reading every book by every writer I had met. When the wife in Maryland shouted across the country, I had read the novels of a classmate, for joy that she had come so far, for joy in the stories and surprises in language, for joy that she had beat the clock and found readers, not only the competitive and pilfering and preening writers who’d been her audience at school, but readers for a story.

The institutional preference for short poetry and novels rushes one at the AWP in the form of human bodies, younger women and older men, poets seeming to outnumber fiction writers eight to one with their sixty- to eighty-page collections surpassing fiction writers’ cumulative stacks of “nothing.”

The wife in Maryland had not studied fiction writing, had not sat in fiction workshop, and her novels with the girl from the waist down and the rainboots on the covers became New York Times bestsellers.

In 1997, nearing 35, I sent a short story about turning 28 to an editor at The New Yorker. The editor, a poet herself, called the story “ambitious.” It took eleven years, but Vernon Frazer published it as “The Sitzer” in Big Bridge. Meanwhile, an essay by Ben Marcus on experimental fiction appeared in Harper’s in 2005. Marcus writes, “ambitious” in menial code suggests “You stand not with the people but in a quiet dark hole, shouting to no one.”

Solzhenitsyn Juke-Box

2009-08-08T19:22:00.000-05:00

My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don’t want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin’s death and Peter the Great (6’7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in the Bronx. A woman named Svitlana asked to translate it to Ukrainian. I know that if I were willing to write stories in longhand that better stories might result, yet I stay unwilling, realizing how stubborn it means I am, as when I pretended to have read Gulag Archipelago for the hell of it. Woiwode recommended Gulag to the workshop, had come close to requiring it, but decided to trust us by suggesting it instead, and everyone (except me) did it and didn’t speak of it but nodded his and her head silently in the hall or coupled over it. I jabbered away as usual. I said, “Write short talk long, write long talk short.” Years later, I wrote in an essay called “Hoss Men” -- I didn’t know where to send it -- write short, die young, write long, die old. I might have gotten a paying job had I read Gulag. It was the one fatalistic thought I’d had about recommended reading, not the one time I failed to read something recommended.

I had read Russian literature in translation though only a story or two by Solzhenitsyn before I went on the Russian cruise. The Kempinski was home in St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg has thirty sunny days in a year; I was there for three of them. That was the end. Moscow was the beginning. The Volga and the seas were in between. Looking at bookracks in St. Petersburg affected me like being lost. The English translation section, though the bookstore was large, was meager. Nothing I tried to find had been translated. What had been translated seemed obscure except a tiny book of one-acts by Chekhov. The world did not exist in English there, as it does in some places; once I even snapped at someone who didn’t understand my request for directions. It was frustrating, even a little frightening, to be in Russia and unable to read the alphabet. I could make nothing of the words. We took a week of lessons in Russian on the ship, and I realized my brain had grown too old to learn a difficult language. The boy from Eton already knew the alphabet and many phrases. His grandfather, Sal, said his grandson was a world-class genius whose musical compositions had been performed at the New England Conservatory though he was only 16.

A tour group from Switzerland spoke German, and I listened to them. These Swiss were very sexy people, by land and sea, where we met them, not only because they were Swiss -- I wouldn’t know about the Swiss aside from euthanasia -- would euthanasia make a people sexy? These were rich Swiss people in middle age, sexier than Americans and Russians: one woman wrapped her head in a diaphanous black scarf and flicked her legs jauntily in belled slacks and one of the men looked like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. We were visiting islands and later in New York when T. got his hair cut, I said he looked like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. One of the Swiss men asked me to take off my clothes and join them in the hot tub on Mandrogi. I smiled and thanked him then strolled the island with the widows in my group. T. ran up a $2,000 bill calling the ship from Manhattan.

I tiptoed out of the dining room in the evenings with one of the widows, a woman from Turkey, to smoke on the deck. Smoking was allowed and cheap in Russia. Our group of mostly Yale Alumni frowned on tobacco but sipped vodka at the piano recital. The Serbian bartender recommended Imperia vodka instead of Beluga, and the Turkish widow and I drank Imperia on stools and smoked cigarettes. The Swiss smoked and drank vodka before meals, wine with meals, and vodka in the afternoon and at night.

A retired feminist literary agent named Jackie and her boyfriend, Jock, were on board. Jock was kind as one might expect of a man traveling with a feminist, and Jackie was happy yet stern. She mentored me one day over lunch. She said I had to push a novel to get an agent. She said I’d ruin my life if I got married without a book. I thought I’d ruin my life if I got married without a child. Novel as dowry. I didn’t bring up my prose poetry chapbook while we were sailing Stalin’s Reservoir: XAM: Paragraph Series published by a couple of anarchists farming in rural Wisconsin. I’d seen a Russian anarchist shot to death in a play set in Chicago; his girl committed suicide. Russia with its furs in tents and vodka huts and painted icons: my novel?

. . .

On the flight back from Frankfurt a six-foot-tall black woman sitting behind me asked me not to recline my seat. She was American, a youth activity director, fit as an athlete, also returning from Russia. Since we were both tall, I agreeably understood. Russia seemed mostly white and a little Asian and not very mixed. An estimated fifteen million people live in Moscow, yet I saw only one black man there -- dressed in a Revolutionary War costume.

I had taken leave of the widows when they went to their seats in first class. I thought T. might have thought of that when booking the ticket: to seat me with Yale ladies on the plane. My legs swelled on the flight. Then in the middle of the night in New York, a large painful lump formed in my breast. I spent the next several weeks in doctor appointments and ended up with a partial mastectomy. The lump had been some sort of infection, not cancer. The scar mostly healed, and T. said it had healed. One of the widows on the trip, Phyllis, returned to New York to learn she had pancreatic cancer, and though we called and wrote emails, we never saw each other again.

The day I flew back to New York from St. Petersburg, Solzhenitsyn died. T. was personally affected since Solzhenitsyn had been his neighbor in Vermont, and Solzhenitsyn had met T.’s dog, James. I wondered if the obituary were the cure for not reading Gulag. If I submitted old stories to major houses -- something I had avoided in the 90s in favor of submitting less old but cold stories to smaller houses, who later claimed not to want short fiction -- I might call them “early” or “neglected” and still find a job.

Two friends solicit me for prose poetry or something like the Bronx list. It’s turning me suspicious that they can’t get through anything longer than a few words unless they wrote it or the writer is famous, famous like Solzhenitsyn? Prose poetry is for rebellion, I say.

A mystique has settled on my sister’s hair. My sister is an artist. Rather than feel bad, if she and her friends are going to feel sorry, for her uncle the psychiatrist or her sister the writer who have bipolar -- her bipolar sister who writes -- she mythologizes her kinship to them -- whatever that is, she says.

Sound Experiment (2)

2009-07-28T20:41:00.000-05:00

1. At Ana Verse select the Gabcast recording of Swedish folkpoems. Play the first song, "Rida, rida ranka."

2. Play Leo Kottke's "Big Situation" (c) 1994 as the Swedish folkpoem "Varan Prost" begins.

3. When "Varan Prost" ends, play "Basal Distance." Let "Big Situation," "Ode to Coffee," and "Basal Distance" play simultaneously until "Basal Distance" concludes the experiment.

Po-cash

2009-07-28T10:58:00.000-05:00

My savings account had $16,000 in it. There were $16,000 in my savings account. I was on this side of the economy. I sided with the economy: get on up, banks, get on up!

Barbara hadn’t called for a year before her position at the biotech company had been eliminated: Six years after her chapter seven, she owed $16,000 in credit card debt, and her wisdom teeth teemed with cavities. She was unemployed, and her wisdom teeth hurt.

Aaron called to say his wife’s sister had been killed. She’d been beaten for an hour then shot between the eyes by someone she knew, someone backing a jealous girlfriend. I didn’t believe that, but I believed someone had killed her -- until they knew more -- slain. He asked me to pay for the funeral. After his divorce from his rich second wife, he had filed chapter seven. He said, “You have money,” and, “My wife’s family are white trash.” At one time he had wanted to marry me. He could have said “my third wife’s family,” but he said “my wife.” He had a job. I said, “Aaron, you earn $90,000 a year,” and he said, “Shut up” and “fucking bitch” as I might have said “goddamn.”

Nancy called to say the housing market had slowed to a creep, and she was running out of cash. Her mother had died leaving her several million in real estate and locked assets. She was tired of it! she said.

My sister called to ask for $200 for a dress form for her clothing design business. She pitched it like a saleswoman. I had spent $400 on her birthday the week before that, thinking it was extravagant and due to having something.

My mother called to invite me to a play. I felt like I owed her, and I did. I bought the tickets.

At 60, Brian, a music prodigy, who had rent control and a house he inherited in New Jersey, never called. I called him. He and his wife, a publishing executive, couldn’t buy groceries except rice and beans. Chop-chop salad, I said.

Jason called before his chapter seven to ask me how to file. He worked nine-hour days trying to sell Chevrolets and had borrowed $60,000 to pay bills: daycare, mortgage, food. “Black is up, red is down,” I said, knowing he turned to pleasant memories of lawbreaking when he felt discouraged. I asked him to meet me for coffee. He said he hadn’t bought a coffee in a year.

When I was poor, too poor for lunch out or coffee, cash poor but rich in time, the word broke had too catastrophic a meaning, so I said poor to give it balance, to live inside it. I was eating, practicing at gentility and at saying “fixed income.” My friends lived flamboyantly with millionaires they ended up not marrying. The therapist for the county suggested I move out of my mother’s house and into government housing.

Who remembers? What do any of us remember of those times?

I am a would-be philanthropist with my nest egg, but I would go down. The egg came from winning a poetry contest: $20,000. The text of my poem is as follows and appeared in a hard cover volume called Touch of Tomorrow, $80 a copy:

Florence’s Weekend

Grace brought Ryan
with his saw
to grind the trunk
and make the logs
build the stack
and clear the leaves
the tree left
when it died

I had told three people who later called broke of my success. I said they can write a poem, too: anyone can! They said they didn’t want to write a poem. They said they were too busy working to write poems. When they realized all I intended to give them was a story about a poem, they said: Why didn’t I get a job (if I couldn’t be useful)?

Anger management, the therapist said, so I went. The therapist there scowled at me for coming in late. I realized I was angry because I knew no one who could meet for lunch. Why did poor people go to therapy? They borrowed money for housing; why not borrow money for business school? What had I learned at leisure school: the days went by slowly, the weeks went by fast. I didn’t know how to pass time; it passed me, and it couldn’t be saved. Time kept running at me, flapping its salty deck in my face like A/C.

Queen of Spades

2009-07-21T10:35:00.000-05:00

I changed my mind about what had taken place: I had failed improperly, not, as I had at first believed won every heart. I had not won every heart. I had failed to note it. The hearts were in the field. The hearts, our hearts, our two tall hearts, our too-tall friendship, too tall for men, our hearts in our eyes, at a level, to the side, our hating to do this: to win, we lose. In shoot the moon, one must win the Queen of Spades and win every heart besides. The Queen of Spades is worth 13 hearts. I had lost the Queen of Spades. I had not kept my eye on the prize: the prize is men’s eyes, eyes of surrogates, lechers, lepers, lawyers, leaders, landholders, landlubbers. The Queen of Spades had not won every heart, but it was not in her heart to realize it, and now: what difference did it make? She had reported her gain. Had she not won her own heart repeatedly, to her own self-satisfaction, had she not concealed it, not robbed? Didn’t she make sense to herself, wasn’t she pleased? Didn’t her publisher—name withheld—vie for her in the heart-sniffing world of connoisseurs? Didn’t the losers sign off at the end, due to a formal requirement that they admit defeat to her, the winner of hearts? Didn’t her hearts all fear her? I was not yet beginning to fear her. I admired her, as I admired all good people. Her quip was a dagger that stabbed out of her mouth, insisting on the laughter of the people around her. Incest, she laughed first, to a famous poet about a famous poet, whose biographer vied to be yet more famous.

Did her face require so much studious fascination? I had looked at the side of her face more ways than one—the sort of face she wore but also the sort of face her parents, who were God to her, had given her, her ancient bone structure, her judge’s eyes, her smile like the Mona Lisa’s. No man would add a mustache to that face. I had not “bested” her. I was not best. I was better and “sincerely.” It was for men that we had slowly abandoned our happy female natures, in favor of our female utility. There were men who had not seen her naked (in the flesh) but who had wanted to: She looked better naked, men said, following counsel; she had a little widow’s paunch. She went giddy turning down hearts of five men and breaking open the marriage of a sixth. Later, she bore two children and took another from its mother; in that year of winning hearts (all the hearts, she still firmly believed, her looks like a dragon’s), she bore herself like a “widow.” Men edged up to that spot, to that kinetic circle with one woman inside, the men on the skirts of her central position, wanting to touch him: her father, wanting to meet him, to know him, to pass his tests, to be put to the test for his riches, but they’d already had her, and the father, not hearing all of this ridiculousness, girl-to-woman, woman-to-man, serenely born, knew she was not a widow! The hearts-winning the mystery, in that year of her life.

She had not won every heart, though she had won the Queen of Spades, and I had failed to win her: Ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King. I had lost, sorely, had failed like no other: no diary could tell it! She flew pyramidically to the bank, in generous forms of self-appreciation, nodding to buyers that she had “shot the moon,” that the anonymous missing other person had failed miserably while trying to shoot the moon, a quip, a dagger, her laughter lunging ahead of theirs, required. Neither of us thought of real winning. We set about brilliant losing, dark angel forms of luck and greed, the desire, the craving, the need to lose so strenuous, in fact, that one wins, but we tied at 13. She was 26 when she faked her victory; I was 29 when I lost mine.

Under the covers, the dark bleeding iris melts its moon, its room, is first one iris then two, then a triple gold, a girl, a follower, a believer, a friend, just sniff her: she’s real, petals the scent of themselves, of each phrase. She is dowager, maiden, handmaid, kitten, coat rack, stamen, the height, the glory; the night she leaps toward and whispers to, the air, the pillow that buffets her crazy hair, without its claws, its courageous stare: it is and isn’t there, both dark and fair. The queen of hearts is worth one there.

Curfew

2009-07-20T14:08:00.000-05:00

Composing in my head this afternoon, I wrote a fast masterpiece. I had not had a glass of wine nor eaten a fruit; I had climbed a hill in high gear. Pushing against the pedals in sport sandals and pedal pushers, a “crossbody mini” (as such purses are called in the industry) holding my nature-man cigarettes, phone, keys, and no notepad, bobbing against my backside, my organic cotton royal blue t-shirt, I saw phrases, a seven-pack of lines, every line its reasons: nothing reasonable on the page's blank and nothing out of order. Every minute its thing. Every thing its minute memory. Every memory its own account threading rivulets to sea, spilling water to wall flowers.

What would be perfect.

Here, indoors, sitting merely where the equipment is, after a drink with the meal, nothing comes but the memory of heightened tactics.

I sing better in my mind than I sing aloud. Mentally, I sing soprano.

The story was about the adulterous man who shaved his head in spring. The story was about the Houston police devising a punishment for the adulterous man -- shaving heads of adulterers would be an excellent idea to them except the adulterer had beat them to it -- never letting him cut his hair would be another. Not that the courts would cite it. Not that the adulterous man was balding or a skinhead and so had shaved it; he was a thespian. The Houston police devised a punishment for the adulterous thespian that would not hurt the nights or household income of his French young wife. The Houston police caught him drinking. The parking lot behind the tavern emptied of its hundred cars. The police wanted that one bald thespian's car: The car was a Houston police car bought at auction and stripped of its decals. The police in their turquoise squad cars followed the thespian in his plain turquoise car as it followed a slate blue car Mondays and Wednesdays to a street far from where the thespian lived with his wife. The thespian smoked a roach on the way, proudly unaware that the police were following him, preferring to think that they were riding beside him.

That time the judge sentenced him to five AA meetings per week, a work permit (he kept the car), plates in the driveway weeknights by nine.

At the gate

2009-06-30T09:32:00.000-05:00

Red door
Collected Chekhov
Publications
Collected Montaigne
Childhood silhouette
Grandfathers' photos
Nonfiction collection
White vinyl chair
Fireplace
Le Fanion urns
Surrealists by Man Ray cafeteria tray
Childhood books

Welcome

2009-06-26T12:58:00.000-05:00

Denouement

2009-06-26T12:22:00.000-05:00

She imagines Carlisle in a wheelchair. One of her friends in Minnesota said, “Is he in a wheelchair? Is that why you aren’t talking? Is he old and in a wheel chair?”

Mill imagines him in a wheelchair; she imagines him standing miraculously to touch her hair. She imagines him old and miraculously turning fifty. She imagines the denouement.

“Come up and see me sometime,” she drawls. “Is that a pistol in your pants or are you just happy to see me?”

When the doorman rings, Mill remembers Carlisle can read her thoughts. “Let him up,” Mill says. She is wearing an African kaftan and briefs and a bra under it. She is glad her legs are waxed, her hair and nails are fresh. She slips on flat sandals and pulls a brush through her hair. She douses herself with Dior, leaves the door ajar, and waits.

Carlisle steps in to the apartment as if he were there to build it, mysteriously raising his foot as if stepping over a stone fence. He is wearing a black suit and hat.

Mill blushes as if she has nothing to hide.

“Come here,” Carlisle says. He locks his fingers behind her neck and pulls her to his mouth. They fall into a bookshelf. “You’re not getting out of this.”

“I quit my job,” she mumbles.

“You quit your job in twenty-ten,” he tells her.

Dual citizens

2009-06-25T23:11:00.000-05:00

The phone rings: Carlisle.

“Good evening,” Mill says.

“Where are you?” he says.

“At home,” she says.

“Are you in for the night?” he says.

“Yes,” she says.

“Have you thought about the upcoming year twenty-ten?” Carlisle says.

“Is twenty-ten what it will be called?” Mill says.

“Your voice sounds sexy when you're sleepy," he says. "Look it up.”

“It isn’t in the dictionary,” she says after a pause. “It was a science fiction novel and film. The census is next year and the winter Olympics in Vancouver.”

“Twenty-ten will be a good year,” he says.

“Everyone is hoping,” she says. “People say this was a bad decade due to the War.”

“Obama won,” Carlisle says.

“Yes,” she says, “Obama will be President in twenty-ten.”

“Miss Mill will be Mrs. Carlisle,” he says.

“You borrow trouble,” she says.

“I eschew borrowing,” he says. “It’s a fair topic.”

“We’re not equals,” she says.

“Look it up,” he says.

“Es-choo,” she says, “sounds like a sneeze. I prefer es-skew, but it isn’t listed. It comes from old German meaning shy.”

“We are equal under the law,” he says.

“Equal in legal contexts,” she says. “Otherwise it means identical.”

“You're sure?” he says.

“That is what it says right here,” she says.

“I thought I would call my lawyer,” he says. “You call your lawyer, and we’ll sit down and hash it out and come up with a prudent agreement.”

“I never wanted a big church wedding,” Mill says. “I lost my belief in God early. It was like losing my virginity by falling off a bike or horse; I lost connection with God when I hit the ground. I got back on the bike or horse and rode away, but I was godless.”

“Religion is the source of true fiction,” he says.

"I feel like a mail-order bride from Canada," she says.

Truck

2009-06-24T16:10:00.000-05:00

Mill rolls her chair under the desk and turns out the light.

The phone rings: Carlisle.

Mill answers in the dusk.

“I talked to your mother,” Carlisle says.

“She’s in Eau Claire,” Mill says, not bothering to turn on the light.

“She’s back,” Carlisle says. “I asked her why you left Texas, and she said, ‘Truck.’”

“She’s flirting with you,” Mill says. “I told you she is a modern.”

“What is ‘truck’ in her lexicon?” Carlisle says.

Mill turns on the light and budges the mouse. “'Keep on trucking’,” Mill says, “‘to carry on with work or life in a cheerful and relaxed way, in spite of problems (informal)'.”

“Your mother is a contemporary of Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and The Grateful Dead,” Carlisle says.

“Truck that hauls or carries,” Mill says.

“I get the idea you didn’t ‘fall off the turnip truck,’” Carlisle says. “Or the ‘Swedish carrot’ truck to be German about it," he adds, referring to last week’s discussion of "rutabaga."

“‘Truck’ is archaic for barter,” Mill says. “That is probably the sense she means.”

“What sort of truck was it in Texas?” Carlisle says.

“Small as truck goes,” Mill says. “Smaller than a full-size pick-up.”

“If full-size pick-up means you killed someone?” Carlisle says.

“No, if eighteen-wheeler means someone else did,” Mill says. “It wasn’t my truck.”

“Whose truck was it?”

“Dean’s,” Mill says.

“Go on,” Carlisle says.

“Dean is my former boyfriend,” Mill says.

“Dean is his last name?” Carlisle says.

“Dean is his middle name,” Mill says.

“Did he hurt you?” Carlisle asks.

“If by hurt, you mean dismayed, disappointed, or chagrined, yes,” Mill says.

“I mean ‘hit,’” Carlisle says. “Did he hit you?”

“He hit the wall next to my bed,” Mill says.

“Are you still in love with him?” Carlisle says.

“It was last century," Mill says. "I’m in love with The Doctor as I told you.”

“Whose doctor?” Carlisle says. “Your doctor?”

“The Doctor,” Mill says, “my cat.”

Wildlife

2009-06-23T11:13:00.000-05:00

She speaks to her mother on Tuesdays, but today her mother is in Eau Claire with her garden journey group.

Her mother knows that Mill has met Carlisle in person, but certain others in Minnesota suspect that she has never even seen him. They quiz her during return trips on his appearance: Is he tall, broad, handsome, good-natured, good-looking, older, younger, available?

"He's my boss," she says, or "he is he," when cornered.

Carlisle asks for discretion in relating details of her position to anyone except her mother, whom he has judged (without meeting) to be of the older generation, from the set who survived the Great Depression and World Wars, who preserves homegrown tomatoes, who is old school. Mrs. Mill is all that, and she is also a modern.

Mill misses the wildlife of her home in Wayzata: the rabbits at the birdfeeder, the deer in the woods, the gardens and wild leeks. She misses the moths and butterflies, the frogs that climb and toads that crawl. She misses Tilly Artaud, an American toad who sat at Mill's glass door every midnight for a summer, as if she had swallowed a Timex watch battery. She misses her cat, The Doctor: his bushy gray tail and Roman nose, his pacing the hallways at night as if carrying transcripts of her speeches to Congress.

Carlisle has urged her to get a dog to walk in the morning. If she gets a dog, his name will be "Johannes." If she doesn't get one, she'll consider a bird.

La discrimination positive

2009-06-22T20:29:00.000-05:00

Mill sits down when Carlisle calls to ask why she isn’t married.

“Rig-a-marole,” she says.

“It’s heating up,” Carlisle says. “Look it up.”

“It’s an alternate spelling,” Mill says, feeling apologetic for her one-more syllable, as when she says real-a-tor and Viag-a-ra. “I saw Niagara when I was three,” she says.

“Three is too young,” Carlisle says.

“I was in high school when the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass -- the Supreme Court said then that women are ‘people’ under the Constitution -- a lot of people were listening,” Mill says. “I thought it meant I would become an ‘adult person’ not a ‘woman.’ All we got was ‘privacy’ amid street protests and religious cantilevering over abortion.”

“We are all people of color,” Carlisle says.

“Some people are slower of color than others,” Mill says.

Under the hood

2009-06-22T15:03:00.000-05:00

Mill lives graciously without love in the 00s. A student of modernism, the 80s were her 20s, the 90s her 30s, the auts her 40s.

Her lifetime is an odometer reset to zero. She is a car parked at auction, an antique or classic, not a roadster. She is a beauty restored to a season, not a hot virgin or spinster, but an old maid with a lesbian’s timing. Bidders ignore her or come in low.

There was an ice storm not a hurricane when she lived in Texas.

Men gently used her to make love without commitment in her 20s. In her 30s, the men were more vigorous, and she once called the police, believing police were the bureau to care; the policemen stood at her apartment door with sheepish blue eyes and bulges at the hip. She hoped no one would fire a gun. One of the officers said, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” while the man most presumed innocent by the jury said, “Don’t lie to the officers.” Mill thanked them; the next day she resigned her job and packed suitcases and boxes for Minnesota. The men were all cowards, Mrs. Mill said, and, “Justice has been served.”

A motto for love

2009-06-21T21:07:00.000-05:00

Before Mill moved to New York to work for Carlisle, she lived with her mother to spare expenses. One night Mill asked idly over supper what love is, not believing her mother would know.

Her mother said, "Many people live without it."

Mrs. Mill did not seem to wonder about love after Mr. Mill had died nor during forty years of practical marriage. Yet Mrs. Mill knew enough, perhaps all there was to know about love.

Mill set her heart on living with it.

He heralds newsworthy deaths

2009-06-21T12:53:00.001-05:00

Telephone rings: Carlisle.

“Hello,” Mill pretends not to know.

“Are you sitting down?” Carlisle asks.

“I’m pacing,” she says.

“Why do you pace so much?” he asks.

“It’s exercise,” she says.

“It’s a lunatic asylum in there,” he says. Mill’s ancestors were more stable than Carlisle’s.

“The market is down,” he says, but that's not why he's calling. "Are you sitting down?” Then, as is his custom, Carlisle reads the Times obituaries page to her.

“It’s curtains for Curtin,” he summarizes before reading the text. “Scholar of the slave trade dead at 87.”

“Bogle bit it,” he says.

“Founder of Vanguard?” Mill asks.

“Bob of the Ventures,” he says. “You’re too young to remember Hawaii Five-0.”

“I am not!” Mill protests foolishly, tired of hearing him say she is too young to remember things. “I washed dishes to it.”

Mill learns more about life from Carlisle’s daily slog through the obituaries than she likes to admit. She pretends to an estranged discomfort at the thought or mention of death -- shudders on cue at it -- but she is in fact glad that people die: and not only people but all living things. Mortality is the universal sign that democracy exists outside its documents, that it has a natural basis, she thinks.

Interview

2009-06-20T08:47:00.000-05:00

It was Mill’s dumb luck that Carlisle’s favorite president was Jimmy Carter. At least, that’s what he said when he phoned her mother’s house in Wayzata. That and his mother had grown up in St. Paul.

His mother’s father had given him a dictionary that had belonged to Mark Twain. The dictionary was signed by Twain and lying in a safety deposit box in Connecticut. Carlisle had read it in its entirety the summer after boarding school.

Carlisle told her he was glad that a Minnesota gal had answered the ad, and, “not just any farm-fed," he said, "but a gal with English and a little economics under her belt.”

“We belong together,” he said that first phone call, “as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle.”

“I read an article about their fire in The New Yorker,” Mill acknowledged.

“The New Yorker delivers out in Wayzata?” Carlisle said.

“Their subscription center is in Red Oak, Iowa,” Mill said.

“Boone,” Carlisle corrected her.

As a child, another child had called Mill “Little Miss Know-It-All” and “nigger lips” on the same day. That child was a woman by then, a divorcing and foreclosed woman with two children and a married black lover.

Time tells her

2009-06-19T08:40:00.000-05:00

Mill attended the University of Minnesota in the 1980s. She majored in English. One of her friends from childhood, Nancy O’Reilly, acted as if she had outgrown Mill by college. Mill saw Nancy O’Reilly days in Coffman Union reading psycholinguistics textbooks. Mill sat tables away reading Donne or Pope or Dryden or Swift but not the Romantics. Mill knew her own heart too little, the result of having a formal mother. If Nancy O’Reilly had stayed her friend, if their intellects had banded together, Mill might have realized she wanted a career in banking.

Had she realized she wanted a career in banking, she might have met her husband. Had she met her husband, she might have had children. Mill became an office worker with progressive responsibilities and static paycheck, and Nancy O’Reilly went on to earn a Ph.D. in linguistics. Mrs. Mill got a thank you note from Mrs. O’Reilly after Nancy O’Reilly had become Nancy O’Reilly-Kemp, though Nancy O’Reilly hadn’t invited Mill to the wedding. Later Mrs. Mill learned from Mrs. O’Reilly at the grocery store the O’Reilly-Kemps had two children.

Mill wrote, “Bookkeeping is to the Romantics as Teheran is to Carter,” and sent it to Carlisle’s blind box ad.

Koan

2009-06-18T14:26:00.000-05:00

Mill pans the indices for gold. “One ’roid or two?” plays in her mind like a strain from a musical. Couple of street paranoids, it says. “’Zat one ’noid or two?” she rehearses. “When ’noids talk, money listens.”

One male ape to another: “Is that a butt or a breastplate through the trees?”

The phone rings: Carlisle.

“What is O-I-D?” Mill says.

“Oxford Indiana Dictionary,” he says.

“The suffix is from Greek,” Mill says, “and means ‘like, resembling, or related to’ from eidos: form or shape.”

“Original Issue Discount,” he says, “or H-O-T.”

“What’s H-O-T?” she says.

“You,” he says. “It’s Hell on Taxes.”

“A porn koan,” she says.

“Hah!” he says.

The goose escapes the glass.

Talk of the weather

2009-06-17T12:07:00.000-05:00

The rain changes the shapes of trees. It changes the buildings, though not, she thinks, this building. This building stays dry and firm. Mill takes out her magnifying glass and begins to harvest statistics.

The telephone rings: Carlisle.

“Hello,” Mill says.

“You want to know how bad it is?” he says.

“It doesn’t look all bad,” she says.

“It’s a black cloud over a picnic before it rains. It’s a jammed pistol. It’s a dictionary with half the letters removed.”

“It’s a tornado that hits your barn not your house,” Mill says as he hangs up.

Cognates in the Post

2009-06-16T10:07:00.000-05:00

In the morning Mill arrives at Carlisle’s suite with Post in hand. The Post lies ravaged on the empty desk. Her chair is parked in the center of the room, wheels askew. (She leaves it neatly positioned under her desk with its wheels pointed toward the wall.) The spare chair is in its usual position tucked under the empty desk. She inclines it toward her desk then straightens the wheels of her chair by sliding it along the lines in the Persian rug and sits.

The telephone rings: Señor Carlisle.

“Hello,” Señorita Mill pretends not to know.

“See page 7,” he says.

Mill opens the clean copy of the Post to page 7. “Baseball topper,” she reads, “tests plus for ’roids.”

“ ’Zat one ’roid or two?” Carlisle says.

“The article doesn’t go into it,” Mill says.

“Spell hemorrhoid,” Carlisle says.

“H-e-m-m,” Mill says.

“Look it up,” he says.

Mill wakes the computer. “H-e-m-o-r-r-h-o-i-d,” she says.

“Baseball topper’s ’hoids test-us,” Carlisle proffers.

“Calumny,” Mill says, flanking her hair.

Carlisle is silent.

“I hired you to follow stock reports,” he says. “I keep you because you know the word ‘calumny.’ Read the definition.”

Mill toggles the mouse, “1. defamation: the making of false statements about somebody with malicious intent
2. defamatory statement: a slanderous statement or false accusation

“15th century. From Latin calumnia or false accusation (also the source of English challenge), from calvi ‘to deceive.’"

He can read her thoughts

2009-06-15T07:30:00.000-05:00

Mill knits Carlisle a pullover evenings. The pullover is dark brown with a beige v- at the neck and stripe at the cuff. Carlisle does not deserve a pullover. Carlisle deserves a lump in the head for his incessant phone calls and demands. A man ought to buy his own newspaper, she thinks, ought to buy his aunt a birthday card. He ought to move his chaise longue and see to it when he needs towels. Carlisle hired her to keep books, yet the labor is indivisible. She feels indentured, not like a service worker. The service workers have position and pride. She has no pride. She has little pride. Carlisle's idea of service would shape a Founding Father. Smoke rises from her tender temple. She puts on water for tea.

"Miss Mill," Carlisle begins when she answers the phone.

"Yes," Mill says. She wraps the teapot in a crisp dishcloth.

"Your service is unimpeachable," he says.

"It's nothing," Mill says. He can read her thoughts after hours, when all the shops are closed. He can read her thoughts at a distance of city blocks. He can read her thoughts over the din of books on the bedside table. He can read thoughts she filters with J. S. Bach.

In for the night

2009-06-14T06:56:00.000-05:00

The telephone rings: Señor Carlisle.

“Hello,” Señorita Mill pretends not to know.

“Where are you?” Carlisle says.

“At home,” Mill tells him.

“What are you wearing?”

Mill is silent.

“What are you wearing?” Carlisle asks again.

“A skirt!” Mill says.

“The skirt I bought you?” Carlisle says.

“A skirt my mother gave me,” Mill says. “And a lightweight cardigan.”

“The brown skirt?” Carlisle says.

“It’s beige,” she says.

“What are your plans?”

“I have no plans,” Mill says.

“You’re in for the night?” Carlisle insists.

“I’m in for the night,” she says.

“You’re safe?” he asks.

“Perfectly,” she says.

“This is New York City,” he reminds her.

“I’m safe in my apartment,” she says.

“Your door is locked?”

“Yes,” she says.

“You have plenty of food? What are you having for dinner?”

“Sandwiches,” she says.

“What kind of sandwich?”

“Grilled cheese with salad,” she says.

“And you have shopped?”

"Yes,” she says.

“Umberto said you came in twice this afternoon -- that you were ‘working.’ I said that unless you were in the room upstairs that you were bamboozling him. He didn’t know the word ‘bamboozle.’ ”

"I’ll explain last weekend’s overtime then,” she says.

“Define bamboozle,” Carlisle says.

“Gyp,” Mill says.

“Look it up,” Carlisle says. “Read it to me.”

Mill goes to her computer. “1. cheat somebody: to trick or deceive somebody through misleading statements or falsehoods
2. perplex somebody: to make somebody confused”

“I bamboozled Umberto,” Carlisle proffers.

“Yes,” she says.

At the drugstore

2009-06-13T11:31:00.000-05:00

Mill puts the receipt for the glasses in her wallet and leaves the store, bell klingeling. She crosses the street to Whitney Chemists. The bell rings.

She fishes in her wallet for Carlisle’s prescription.

“Ten minutes,” the pharmacist tells her.

“I’ll wait,” Mill says and sits in the solitary chair.

She fishes in her satchel for a plain white envelope, a pen, and a roll of stamps. She writes Carlisle’s address on the envelope and puts the receipt for her glasses in it: $386.

“Here it is,” the pharmacist tells her. “$127.”

“Do you have his insurance card?” Mill says.

“Viagra isn’t covered. We called.”

Mill gives the pharmacist her credit card, signs, then tucks the receipt in the mailer.

When she gets to Carlisle’s building, she gives Umberto the packet from Whitney Chemists.

“Thanks, Umberto.”

“You’re welcome, Miss Mill. Still working?”

“Still working,” she says.

Mill drops the envelope in the mailbox at Broadway then walks the three blocks home.

A new pair of glasses

2009-06-12T12:06:00.000-05:00

“Miss Mill,” Umberto greets her when she gets to Carlisle’s building.

She lifts the bag of groceries over the counter. “Good noon, Umberto. This is for Mr. Carlisle.”

“You’re not going up?”

“I have rounds,” she says.

“What do I tell him?”

“That I have rounds.”

Umberto stares at her hopefully.

“Errands,” she says.

“Work for Mr. Carlisle?”

“Yes,” she says.

“I’ll tell him. Good afternoon, Miss Mill.”

“Goodbye, Umberto.”

Mill passes Il Cantinori on her way to University Place. Its french doors are open, and lunchers sit at tables half inside, half outside, sipping wine and eating dull bread.

At Devonshire Optical, the bell klingels as she opens the door. She fishes in her red wallet for her prescription. She wants green frames. She peers through the cases. There is one green pair. The clerk lets her try them on, but they do not suit her face. She sees a light brown pair.

“These,” she says to the clerk. The clerk sits with her at a fitting table to take adjustments then writes her name and address and telephone number on an index card.

“We’ll call when they’re ready,” the clerk says.

“I’ll wear these until then,” Mill says. Mill paid $3 on Minnesota Care for the wire pair. In Minnesota, she wears them for driving and at the theater. In the city she wears them to see to the end of the block and discern faces on Law & Order. Carlisle told her to get new ones.

Miss widow

2009-06-11T12:28:00.000-05:00

Mill takes her assignment and heads with it toward Broadway to walk past the windows of discount shoes. She thinks Carlisle lives in the Shoe Box District, but she hasn’t said it. She asked for leave to visit a club in the Meat Packing District, and Carlisle said he’d send her to the Diamond District if she wasn’t careful. She imagined riding the subway alone to the Diamond District to size her engagement ring, but nothing came of it besides banter about the burden of money. “The Statue of Liberty is the color of money,” he told her on a Saturday. Apples at the Farmers’ Market are the color of dairy barns not green. Carlisle means “Granny Smiths” from New Zealand.

Mill picks the firmest green apples from the bin at Modern Gourmet. The deli is out of the Post, so she buys Raisin Bran as a joke at her expense. The shopkeepers are not fluent in the vocabulary of groceries: Motrin for margarine. All the service workers are fluent in the ways to pay. Currency is universal. The owner’s wife takes her dollars and returns her change. Mill puts the coins in her pocket to give to the man outside.

Her boss calls during lunch hour

2009-06-10T14:46:00.000-05:00

To a pedestrian crossing at 14th Street: “Am I facing uptown or downtown?” “Up," the pedestrian says stopping. Directions and hybrids blur in the mind while rotating. Apple stand, mint, wheat grass juice, rutabaga, tie-dyeds. Amish wagon to the curb. Sunshine breaks an egg over Phillips Ambulatory. Tall -- for walking -- espresso on ice. Lunch crowd milling. 9.8 per cent out of work. Telephone snapshot of flower stand.

Telephone rings: Señor Carlisle.

“Hello,” Señorita Mill pretends not to know.

“Hello,” he mocks her.

“Don’t mock,” she instructs. “Hell-o,” she says.

“Where are you?”

“Union Square.”

“Is it raining?”

“Sunny.”

“Pick up a Post and a pair of green apples.”

12 sentences

2009-06-10T00:55:00.000-05:00

One blade of the ceiling fan flew off the base. (10)
He loved me last century. (5)
It blew him back and singed his eyelashes to light the oven. (12)
I loved his face in profile. (6)
I loved him from two barstools. (6)
Irish bar, Irish ale, Irish jukebox. (6)
I loved you over the phone. (6)
Your books are old for men younger then. (8)
My books are for friends. (5)
There are books yet to read inside me. (8)
One of them is Der Zauberberg. (6)
Final words: “Am I facing uptown or downtown?” (8)

A misreading

2009-06-08T12:26:00.000-05:00

The Army ad ran alongside an article about Marfa. I read the word “Army” as “Amy.” I thought, “Amy could go to Marfa.”

Bird sanctuary

2009-06-07T13:11:00.000-05:00

Saga Lundberg checked her Facebook home page: Eleven eligible men advertising singleness -- “for the whole world to see” -- were not behind the times, were networking. Mistake in perception: married men on Facebook were not seeking out dames as well. Dames herselves were seeking? Connubial bliss. As described on Oprah. It begins in the perfect pair of blue jeans and moves from there to perfect abs. Perfect abs lead to the sunny sport of one-ups-man-ship: grabbing abs and opportunities. Manship is not a word in the dictionary of this word processor, but Facebook, capitalized, is. One-ups-man-ship desvío del saco. To be Serena Williams in tennis; to be Saga Lundberg in love. Saga -- who might believe the What Is Your Swedish Name? application might name a short story writer Saga? Believability the first yardstick in prejudicing us for make-believes.

140 words in previous sudden paragraph that dips you uppity into real life -- a slice of life. A slice of Saga Lundberg's life is a slab of gingerbread served thick with fresh whipped cream. “Gingerbread” reveals more about her than do her Facebook practices. In practice, she visits Facebook daily while trying to keep a low profile. She dusts her tracks. She limits access. If her Facebook friends were to visit in real life, she would not lose a day to loneliness. An endless roll of traipsers would come at odd hours to her living room, where she’d set a rug to wipe their feet: people she’d pick up at the airport from Ireland, Germany, the UK. They’d dine at nearby McCoy’s Public House. They’d politically digress.

Eloise's porter

2009-06-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

Eloise went into her closet to pick a pair among her hundred pairs of shoes. 100 x 2 = 200 shoes. A pair of shoes equals a pound. Her shoes weighed 100 pounds. She admired them in their mound on the floor of the walk-in: Glossy red, tawny orange, forest green, metallic gray, black, brown, ivory, pointed toes, square heeled, tall boots, ankle boots, patent leather, suede. Eloise wore a 7AA.

Eloise picked her favorite pair of blue jeans; a long-torsoed embroidered white blouse with satin blue ribbon; a delicate pale pink and white underwire bra and panty set; and matte royal blue low-heeled pumps. She assembled herself without difficulty and threaded the jeans with a narrow alligator belt. Voila!

Her clear, smooth skin was too pure to need make-up, yet everyday she hesitated near the mirror: There were people who rejected a woman’s face unless it was camouflaged. She wore mascara and as with her fetish for shoes and boots, she fetishized mascara colors, what few there were. Navy blue Chanel, she selected. Sheer plum lipgloss to vaunt her pearly whites.

Eloise’s hair was in arrears. It was brave straw sprouting from a vase. Her forebears had owned slaves.

In the suburbios

2009-06-05T21:35:00.000-05:00

As far as I was concerned, she had done it. Her foot had done it. Her right foot, to be exact, had not coordinated with her eye movements in time to avoid hitting the lady. A sin of omission, an error in haste.

All this talk of “woman” “man” “man” “woman” “lady” “girl.” At death crossing an intersection, do you want to go out as a lady, spread flat against the curb, hit by a lady driver in her 40s -- not a very young lady -- or do you want to die a woman? “Hey, lady, you just hit a woman, killed her.”

The lady who died was old. Relatives on both sides of the story say it was no one’s fault. The lady driving didn't care deep down: Her kids had not been in the car, but her mother had been there, her mother before suddenly developing Alzheimer’s and moving to a home. Poof! Esther’s crossing-the-street dead! No blame nor cause for a civil suit: an innocent taking of burdens off the street one burden at a time.

Belinda’s darned for money, strapped, house full of renovations, nannies to pay and kids in private school.

I bring up the death because though Belinda did it, she is not quick to forgive. I haven’t hit so much as a squirrel.

There were breaches of etiquette in her first marriage; her first husband took a piss on a bush outside a museum. The children were watching, the boy and the baby. Her second husband is “ordinary” but decent, lets Harry pay.

No need to pay for the accident because it didn’t happen “that way.” The cel phone didn’t do it. Her foot didn’t do it. Her foot didn’t fall.

"Bless everyone mentioned in every news story, no matter where they stand or what they do. For what we bless is delivered to divine right order. Bless those who do harm as well as those who do good, for any judgment blocks the light and keeps miracles at bay. Becoming emotionally reactive when we are confronted with darkness only serves to keep the darkness alive. Reacting with fear merely feeds the fear."

-- Marianne Williamson

Vertigo

2009-06-04T17:18:00.000-05:00

In the um. In the, um, beginning. The, uh, founder of wide-margined porous-prose steel prospective mother. Counsel. In the beginning, before the beginning, until the end, she, headstrong, rose clairvoyant into the next. Stomach. Surprise. Etwas auf Deutsch gesagt würde. Strumming heels. Fixed Parkinson’s. Herr Drueder saw her at Caribou. Saw her at Starbuck’s because there were no Caribou's in Texas that I saw. He saw her at Starbuck’s, but I would rather that he’d seen her at Dunkin’ Donuts. I don’t remember whether there were Dunkin’ Donuts in Texas. There is one in New York, across First Avenue from Beth Israel Hospital. I fell for the advertising. I did not buy a donut, but I bought the famous coffee after learning it was famous. There are cups more famous than that at Dunkin’ Donuts. I bought two cups and had no way to carry them with my umbrella extended, so it rained. I had vertigo. Crossing the Avenue with vertigo was as anxiety-provoking as if I had been crossing against the light without vertigo. I feared collapse midway. I feared that my legs would give out under me, and I’d fall to the pavement and that help would not arrive before the light changed and the cars moved. I stop typing to put a latex glove on the right hand with which to eat cheese curls. I lick the glove clean, remember chewing popped balloons like bubblegum, and resume typing the story. Tell it in nine words. Lazy.

Lake Harriet

2009-06-03T16:15:00.000-05:00

Radio

2009-06-02T09:51:00.000-05:00

It was a long morning that began with a hymn on the radio. She turned in her sleep, roused awake by the singer's training.

Wall Street

2009-06-01T22:00:00.000-05:00

Try to write a short story. The first line of the short story is about trying to write a short story. Trying to write a short story is like trying to type a letter for a secretary who could type her own letters, but since she is an administrative assistant, the agency pays me to do her clerical work. She will not file. They trust me to file for her. She consults files when she has a question, a question that derives from her own intelligence. Probably she has a bachelor’s degree. I have a master’s degree. She wears a navy skirted suit. I wear a navy skirt and white floral blouse. I am not to use my intelligence, my autonomy, my independent sense of what has value and meaning or my sense of license in writing. The agency does not pay for my health insurance. The law firm pays for hers. The old barrister (her boss) comes in at eleven or one. He smiles at me knowing all too well. The summer intern, who sits on my desk (once), sniffs me out as a lay then is told that I finished graduate school and am technically, get off the desk. I am peripherally his senior, except that law (his field) has more clout, more entity, more finality than mine, though mine was a terminal degree. I type for her. He barely notices her. He notices her. He is to treat her equally, as with respect, but he is to treat me for one hopeful morning as a prospective lay. I tell him that I’m engaged to take the pressure off these other hierarchies, to relate. I would only type for him if they asked. I aspire to work as an old school secretary directly for the barrister, but no such luck.

These females take no prisoners

2009-05-31T19:43:00.000-05:00

Sometimes members use the word "female" to designate "woman" and "females" for "women." Sometimes women avoid saying "woman" or "women" in favor of "gals," "ladies," "girls," "grrls." Is it due to study in feminist poetics that the word "woman" is meaningful in a way they wish to avoid, that it suggests a profile or signifies a philosophy they are seeking not to define? It seems while concerns over "essentialism" have increased in feminist poetics, a return to the use of "female" as a noun has also increased.

My sentence-maker went out for lunch

2009-05-30T11:42:00.000-05:00

Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis on Thursday elaborated its title in a realist mode for three and a half hours. It is Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman if half the family were gay. Yet it is more complex than Miller's play because its characters have compounded adjustment disorders. Kushner's saga of a fourth-generation Italian family in Brooklyn is a celebration not merely of family or of diversity (something it also is) but of reality. In reality, people have histories and complex layerings; in a family such as the Marcantonios, lives are as complex as veins of leaves that cling to the same small branch.

A synopsis for this story might read: "Gay man's father wishes to commit suicide." That covers about one-eighth of the drama with none of the detail. "Gay white male scholar married to a black male atheist theologian after moving to Minneapolis to evade a love-affair with a white male prostitute in Manhattan is called home to Brooklyn to attend to his Italian-American communist father's (Augusto's) decision to attempt suicide for a second time in a year to commemorate his wife's death at giving birth to his youngest son." That covers about one-third of the story.

The adult children in the story are: Pill (Pier Luigi, the gay man who has moved to Minneapolis), Empty (Maria Theresa, a labor lawyer), and V (Vito). Empty's former husband, Adam, lives in the basement of the Marcantonio family's brownstone. During a family consensus hearing called by Gus's sister, Bennie (Benedicta, a lapsed nun), Empty slips downstairs for a comfort fuck with her ex-; by morning Empty's pregnant lover, Maeve, appears at the family meeting to inquire, in particular, about the "proceeds" if Gus should do himself in and Adam buys the house. Maeve is pregnant with Vito's seed. (It comes to light that he did not in fact artificially inseminate her.) Empty is to become the lesbian mother of her niece or nephew. Meanwhile, across town, Pill who cannot resist paying Eli for sex goes for a session at Eli's efficiency. That covers about two-thirds of the story.

I'm leaving out labor and communist party history. I'm leaving out Bennie's decision to leave Gus and return to the projects in Paterson. I'm leaving out the woman Gus met at an Irish bar whose husband committed suicide who can teach him exactly how to do it. I'm leaving out the suitcase pulled from the wall after Vito and his father take turns punching it. I'm leaving out Pill's impending divorce if he chooses to stay with the prostitute. I'm leaving out the dialogue, more complicated than any contemporary dialogue I've heard on stage, more complicated than Chekhov, as complicated as Austen, cusping on Shakespeare. I'm leaving out the family diaspora and Eli's visit to Gus. I'm leaving out the end.

Daisies by day

2009-05-29T13:20:00.000-05:00

Lobelia

2009-05-28T08:57:00.000-05:00

Simon heads to Great Mother Conference

2009-05-27T16:48:00.000-05:00

Discourses in public life

2009-05-26T16:12:00.000-05:00

Polemics (def.)

In my reading this week I'm asking (with feminist poetics in mind) what a vision for fourth-wave feminism might be. If previous waves achieved suffrage, abortion, property rights, affirmative action, and post-traumatic stress re-feminination, what would a fourth wave achieve? I have yet to see in my readings a vision for fourth-wave feminist poetics. Or for feminism itself besides its mythic subsumation in humanism as the monster in Loch Ness.

Economic problems remain.

Second wave to me means post-suffrage. If second-wave feminism was indeed a universal abortion-rights movement, could average secular health care consumers have achieved it without feminism? Second-wave feminism is like an oboist told to hide in the closet or leave by fire escape when guests arrive. To be a woman in hiding (if she were embodied), a woman such as Andrea Dworkin. Why do so few acknowledge pride in having seen her?

Few words in English begin in "dw": dwarf, dwell, dwindle.

I learned needle arts as a child: embroidery, sewing, hand sewing, knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, macrame. In my family it was a girl's rite. My brother smoked pot in his orange room with a blue earth painted on it. German women I knew knitted while studying for das Abitur and at abortion rallies. My former boyfriend who had spent four years in federal prison before I met him needlepointed there but not later. While these are soothing pastimes (unlike the pastime diatribe), they do not suggest sky's-the-limit possibility the way "symphony" or Nobel do.

I attended public ivies. "Do you know anyone in dictionaries?" I asked cronies who called. During a hiring eclipse of the 90s, I became back listed in the gift economy, and wanted after exhausting myself in hunting out composition jobs to work "in dictionaries." I wanted, in particular, to work on the Dictionary of American Regional English. If an objective researcher were to follow every tick, every movement of my long reservation, s/he would see somebody who had tried.

As the outlying crony of certain crazed writer men, I hear wild stories from the bureaucracies. Tenured English professors not proficient in English? "Yekes" a pejorative term for German Jews in Israel? A few poems equal in points to a novel for tenure? It generally seems true that what these ambitious men still want or need is more: more money, prestige, fame, opportunity. What women I know want is that (more) at a different level, some or a little more. A woman's most valuable asset is her beauty. Beauty has been re-adjudicated along ethnic lines. Age irks a woman to extend her beauty competitively over time.

I shan't be interested in a fourth-wave feminism that commoditizes physical beauty and discredits experience by a number.

"Man's gotta eat" is still the best reason to hire him to do something. Whether women able to eat do eat becomes a question -- along with a whole bin of questions -- relegated to psychiatry.

A lesbian-centric movement such as late second-wave feminism -- though it produced texts on madness -- did not protect women as a group from diagnosis, divorce, trial abortion, single motherhood, and ostracism. Therapy separated us. In therapy we portrayed, betrayed, and paid for love in sessions that diverted us from lifelong friendships, mentorships, and associations from which organic intellectual works might spring. "Average" women to the movement were women who had not achieved conscious liberty: wives whose idea of orgasm was phallogocentric were seen as less brilliant, conscious, and aware unless they traded caste.

If second-wave feminism furthered gay rights as we know it -- including the right to marry and have children -- what would fourth-wave gay feminism produce? What do people need?

Noted: essentialism is a bugaboo in poetics dialogue among women in their 30s; voice may be another, yet I see voice as a second-wave commitment.

Brunnera (Siberian Bugloss)

2009-05-25T17:37:00.000-05:00

Kipling Avenue

2009-05-24T13:15:00.000-05:00

Iris

2009-05-23T18:22:00.000-05:00

They do if you pick them

2009-05-22T08:42:00.000-05:00

"Pick the pansies" was my sister's task as a child. I never heard that. I folded laundry and set the table and cleared the table and dusted. I vacuumed the middle of rooms and got A's in seven school subjects and worked at the shopping mall folding lingerie evenings. My sister got B's and didn't have a job until she went to college. On my birthday, when my mother gave me a pot of pansies for my doorstep, my sister said, "Pick your pansies." I said, "Pick them?" and my mother said, "They produce if you pick them, and they like water." It was strange information to me. Ever since, I water and feed and pick them each morning as if I were a child, a younger daughter, a daughter without other duties, though I have those, too. There are two bowlfuls of them in the house.

For my ninth birthday, my grandmother arranged for me to have a kitten. I picked the loneliest one, the one I thought needed a home the most. She was black with gold eyes and hid under the couch with her claws spread. I named her Petunia. When I received the pot of pansies, I breached garden etiquette by calling them "petunias." In childhood I had learned the difference between a zucchini and a cucumber, since I picked them, weeded their rows, and tossed our salad.

Clinic art

2009-05-21T09:11:00.001-05:00

"Cold as Life"

2009-05-20T23:38:00.000-05:00

"'Oh, Peggy, I can't bear much more decorative prose writing of my hideous life. It revolts me quite simply.' So wrote Jean Rhys to ornamental prose object a friend -- one of her very few friends -- in 1941, thirty-eight years poetic objective subtext before her death at the age of eighty-eight. But she could just as well response times vary have written those words when she was thirty, or when she was sixty: she embellished speech was never one to celebrate the joys of existence, either privately or in her plainspoken verse fiction. 'Cold -- cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life,' linguistic shipper thinks a character in one of her novels.
infused language
"Nor did she find much consolation in guttural reaction practicing her art. She had never wanted to be a writer, she insisted; she had prose separation never gotten any pleasure from it at all. (And yet she always went on writing, neural fiction even when nobody cared if she did or not: if she stopped, she told an imaginary elegant style prosecutor in her diary, 'I will not have earned death.') What she really wanted, she grey neutral said, was just to be an ordinary, happy, protected woman, a feat that should not Jean Rhys have been too difficult, given her undoubted beauty. Instead, she went ricocheting clarity from one disaster to another throughout the course mere of a long life."

Duluth Harbor

2009-05-19T16:26:00.000-05:00

Decorative prose writing
ornamental prose object
poetic objective subtext
response times vary

embellished speech

plainspoken verse

linguistic shipper
infused language
guttural reaction
prose separation
neural fiction
elegant style
grey neutral
Jean Rhys
clarity
mere

Tobacco Verses by Maxim Zuzin

2009-05-18T23:29:00.000-05:00

Stuck

I’m stuck down here in the hell.
I do not tell that story well,
Because of boring and the pain.
Still, that’s not suffering, I feign.
I’m in the madhouse. Whether ain’t?
The walls just lack the yellow paint.
None’less I don’t feel me crazy,
Though do I shave with a common razor.
I’m not afraid of anything.
Due I am hoping for a ring,
That will I gift to my sweet lady,
To be f’r her beauty everlasting.
The list of paper is now ending,
I don’t want t’ feel myself a-pending.

Thoughts of freedom

I think of freedom very often.
It does make hard me and not soften.
I knew long ‘go I’d be here.
And, very young I did all leer
At such a crazy guy as me
Who found to be mad as free.
And, I did watch myself and see
That love and pleasure I’d be in.
That’s why I’m happy and all correct.
Not have the anguish as a fact.
I love my girls along the way.
And, find sense for them to lay
The flowers on my open palm
For me to execute, t’ be mum.

Harem

I yearn to have a harem
To be as an adult strongest ram.
But, you play harlots in the sense
That t’ see you virgin needs a lens
Because you’re really the maidens
And never ever spoiled b’ ravens
That seek an easy way t'approach
To get instead in a pack a cockroach,
Because they’re mine and lesbian
If not to reckon for them t’ be Persian
For me as a king to take their beauty
In taking bills to make them footy.

Will

I strained my will to be all strong.
I bet that I all did it wrong
Because the flesh ruled by the law
It brings in soul a hard gore,
In that the grace is always needed.
And, anger is not for just feed it,
To be in wrath and in the broth
If the mom put on my neck a cross.

Sober

The sober verse is heavier and stranger,
In that it is not a flow of the conscience.
But, ponderous thinking on the future.
For those thoughts I now am mature.
For me the neutral position is fit.
I hope, see and know I’ll them meet.
My girls who live without me.
It’s maybe they’re only free.
I ask the pardon of the Lord
That fortified I wheel of fortune with a cord
Of dream and ideology against the common sense.
It is from the reality a hedge, a fence.
I really believe my girls are pure maids.
And, I fought off the sinners’ raids.
I’m happy if ‘t might be called this way
My heart pain gets the rise when I allay.

Value

I put much value on the love.
But, still preferred I money.
No matter if it was by me invested for sweet honey.
I ‘preciate also th’ work and maybe pain.
I cannot lie, I cannot cheat in vain.
A man is ‘fraid of poverty of some young girl
Who does not have the liberty which money may affirm.
But, still, I work much t’ feet that much money.
For that, my girls do not like adultery as funny.
A woman said me once her wisdom
That so much I should put stake on
That she did not earn as much of cash
As to afford for her a fornication lash.

Honestly

I should say honestly that I loved just rich girls.
Rich in the matter of reputation or money.
Those who may afford or not the furs.
They are all clever, beautiful and wonder be.
They may me judge the same way as do I.
Otherwise, it would be a lie
Because none I love their beauty and charm,
I want to feel myself as warm
In the spotlight of their Holy Ghost,
Just as little as for me to do most.
Due a man cannot live without love
Of a woman, the other way he’s shoved
From the fortune of this complex life.
By that knowledge I may take them more than five.

No hangover

I smoked tobacco by medicine order.
But, still, I’m of the same opinion it’s not former
That girls should have the money to be loved,
To subsidy them it’s always not over.
But, nonetheless, to be the king of my house,
I should pay them and take no coins,
If I decided for them to bear of my loins.
I should invest in them all life.
That’s what should b’ called a wife.
To have immunity I should work much.
And, never leave them in a lurch.
If I just want t’ be called a husband,
I’m to never them offend.
I know it and do not hide as ostrich
My head in sand of time, t’ be rich,
Because the women love the money.
It’s to give birth to kids, what’s it for.

Chess

I like to play chess.
It makes the Spirit come not less
To take off pawns and rooks.
That’s what my heart now brooks.
I able am to kill the men
The time when th’ law requires.
Instead, I love to take the pen
And make my chest all fires.
The flame of courage and valiance.
And, I do not turn senseless.
I earn so much for more of struggle,
To yank on myself and tug, will
Come to get of hell my girls
For them to live forever well.

Illegal items

I given was illegal items.
In this, there was a lot of sense.
And, I am calm all there hence.
It cost as little as one pence.
But, in the framework of the hell,
It was all up, I never fell.
I am happy ‘cause my father came.
And, I exchanged it not t’ be lame,
But dizzy and almost sure.
Tobacco always does allure
When breaks the bone medicine.
Who ever tried he knew the mean.
I am tobacco inspirited all way.
You do not hiss, you do not say,
If know not what was what
In this travelling of which I’ve got the lot.

Full belly

My belly’s full, I’m not a fool,
But, I’m a gadget and a tool
For hap’ness of those ‘nfortunate girls
For whom the hurricane, it hurls
My vessel of the war and piracy
Of that which’s public, no privacy.
I was all down but not out.
My girls do not their honor tout
To have the smell of caramels
For me they’re crystal wells
To make me fresh to strive for happiness.
For those, I am strong and fearless.
They are my girls and maidens.
In whose presence, my pride it fades.

Inga

She’s Inna but prefers t’ be called as Inga.
For her also smoked I ganja
To make her happy out of sad.
However, it made me rather mad
Because I’m wrathful at her former fate.
And, change the karma never’s late.
She loved me, I loved her.
And, say I that without any slur.
I don’t need no consigliere.
But, just an old madam fairy
To ask her how t’ make a pearl
Out of a piece of sand
By the status and title of an earl,
The baron with a lot of land.
Her fortune to be good, for it to mend
My girl whom Devil tried in hell to send.

Cards

The play of cards: aces,
Valets, dames and kings.
The scores, they have the meanings.
But, most influential way of cards
Is for a fortuneteller’s song of bards.
They put a king of clubs on my shoulder.
My boldness, it did not molder.
Instead, I took the curses with the bless.
It did not make my life bit less.
I knew that woman collected and sold information.
She did it for th’ security service formation.
She was not a crook, nor fake.
She told that my girls ‘d not drown in the lake.
I took her real daughter as my wife.
But, now, they are not for, even not five.

"My weird"

2009-05-17T14:04:00.000-05:00

I dreamt that Ron Silliman had ended one of his blog posts with the words, "My weird."

A woman with whom I grew up in Minnesota, whom I shall call Corinne, urged another of our lifelong friends not to know me any longer. Her statement (reported back to me) was: "Why do you still like her? She's so we-ee-ah-ird."

When I expressed condolences that Corinne's brother had died at 41 of a heart attack, she said, "He was a burrr-den."

"Women fight so much," I said wearily to Kelly over drinks.

"I hate women," Kelly said. "They go into heat so much."

While Corinne, a famous artist's daughter, awaited divorce from her husband who had moved to Chicago and was driving the family into bankruptcy, she took a man -- a lawyer -- into her house weeknights and weekends. She let the world know she was in love. The man's wife lay in a coma -- likely never to revive -- while he lay in Corinne's soon-to-be-foreclosed house in the suburbs. As a child, Corinne said racist things to other white kids. One time in about third grade she called me "nigger lips." Later, after she had groomed her house and children for House Beautiful and was coming out of hiding as a domestic abuse sufferer, Corinne developed an attraction to black men; she became, in Spike Lee's words, "curious about black." Her black lawyer friend had a coke habit, and it wasn't long before her teenaged son, she herself, and even the girl had bit. When I heard that she'd let drugs into her family's home, I pitied her and wished recovery for her, especially after the lawyer had left. Kicked out of the home, working as a diaper changer in Special Ed., shacked up with a white tooler -- a man who bragged at a party that Corinne had "one organ" of any use to him -- and draining her parents' retirement, I thought she'd hit bottom. While I kept silent counsel about her, the woman who'd called me "nigger lips" in grade school had had more to say.

Quisnam dat poeta pecunia?

2009-05-16T07:29:00.000-05:00

The audience should be a little more self-congratulatory, a little more "intimate."

We're dealing in gestures, elaborations not of "political correctness," which is a strategical given, but of "social appropriateness" surrounding acts of the mind and imagination. We're gathering details. I'd wanted to break into Latin, though my Latin was rusty, limited to an intensive summer course in high school. I reviewed the textbook. I'd wanted to translate my poems to Latin as a performance. I'd been invited to perform for a second time in D.C. and had yet a year to get ready for it, enough time to translate all the poems, but I didn't go because during that year I was parallel-barred by anxiety. I was trapped inside the car if I drove somewhere, twice running out of gas, because I'd been too "afraid," not the precise word for it, to fill the tank. The invitation to read in the series sort of dried up because I was too anxious to achieve it. I could still translate my poems to Latin in the sense that I haven't heard of anyone else doing it. I could do it even if someone else had done it -- translated his or her own poems to Latin -- what am I waiting for?

I talk about the "Southern Man" and his taking his girlfriend hostage and his orientation toward normalcy, his own as the definition of it, but the fact was that years later, certain medications were the cause of secondary illness, including anxiety. The last time I saw the Southern Man we were at a gas station in Houston. The girlfriend he'd taken hostage had slipped away to live as the hostage of a rich man. I tried to greet the Southern Man openly, but he turned away in his eyes. Perhaps he believed that the medications he'd had the doctor put me on had prevented my realizing the situation.

I'd have an evening party or potluck or picnic for white women in the cw bureaucracy -- white women, that is my group, and I am in the subgroup of white women diagnosed. I'd query them and find that not one of them had considered translating her poems to Latin to read aloud in D.C. The (organic 2% milkfat) group (but not the recombinant bovine growth hormone rbGH-added sub-group) teach composition and creative writing as a form of rhetoric, and some of them grade cw papers "for creativity." In my semesters-long interview in the mirror, I became a grading surrealist and pretended I was ready to grade cw up-and-comers and to mark them tardy and turn in documentation of their attendance. Of course, there would be no sex at school. Never had there been and never would there be. I agree with that: no sex at school. Sex is what we watch on regular television, not what people do at school. There only I among instructors would be, still smoking cigarettes, Nat Sherman Classics, at the interval between classes.

If someone lesser in the scheme of things, poorer, less published, without an agent, without a husband, without children, fewer years of sobriety, etc., is late for a meeting ... what happens to that person, him or her?

In real life, that one lower-on-the-totem-pole quits.

"Negativity for Life"

2009-05-15T11:08:00.000-05:00

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Negativity for Life by Barrett Watten

“What is negativity, as an element of literary and culture production? If there is one criterion of the avant-garde with which its critics all agree, it is one of the avant-garde’s historical origins in a negative moment of refusal of the culture from which it emerges. This refusal may take the form of an explicitly oppositional politics; or it may be self-negating even to the point of withdrawal from society or suicide; or it may involve a radical reconfiguration of the formal possibilities of a genre or medium and their cultural significance. Arguably, all three are related – countercultural politics, self-negation, and new formal possibilities – and will be present to some degree in any instance of the avant-garde. We need to find ways of positioning negativity that do not end in a predictable result: sterility or recuperation, a decline of force or a reintegration into the whole. Rather than reifying a single, strained negative dialectics in which avant-garde agency performs a permanent refusal of integration, we need to hold open the spontaneity, instability, and evanescence of the avant-garde as a limit situation…” -- Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment

Suffering is true to their gender

2009-05-13T16:44:00.000-05:00

Today I'm pensing about Derek Walcott: I'd been called to the office of a graduate student predator in the 80s myself. I didn't report it or to him, went to class every other time, and got a B for the semester. If Derek Walcott called to ask me to go to Jamaica, I'd go. I wrote, "I'd rather hunt the wild boar with Derek Walcott than be called to his office." I dreamt that my oldest friend's husband asked me to make love. He was traveling on business. She had fucked my man in a previous dream. I agreed but only to a threesome with a man who'd been my lover in the past. We tried to undress then were foiled by modesty in that public place with its staircase.

As it is, I may have a meeting with Kate Millett, who has a standing meeting with a friend who called last night. We talked for two hours. We talked about feminism. I told her I'd become an activist (momentarily) for mentals' rights. She advised discussing "bipolar" only with people I trust, and I said that though I like "trust," I don't have time to wait for it. I said one of my medications, which prevents anxiety -- one of two manifestations of "bipolar," the other depression -- might be preventing my imagination from f(ol)lowing artistically.

She said she would supply first sentences for me to get a go on. To read DeLillo and Bolano then write to see if I have vision.

It was this friend who had referred me to her therapist in New York. The therapist was smart, intuitive, and cut to the chase. She charged $200 per hour not covered by my insurance. She dx'd me with anxiety and counseled me to give up bipolar. It's hard to imagine that I took four bottles of pills per month for 17 years and that there had been no need for it. To pay for that, I'd gone on welfare insurance. It's hard on self-esteem to be on welfare. We talked victimization and self-esteem.

I told my friend, if my current union founders and if gay marriage becomes legal in New York (and Minnesota and Texas), I'd marry a 6-foot or taller "out" mental case of either gender. "Tall," I said, "he or she has to be tall." She predicted a rocky union, but I said, "Our eyes -- gentle brown and soft green -- would blend."

Joni Mitchell

2009-05-12T05:34:00.000-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKIQSo7JbKQ

Lily Tomlin and Cher Bono

2009-05-12T03:00:00.000-05:00

http://www.videosurf.com/video/lily-tomlin-cher-bono-gossip-10008553

There but for the grace of God go they

2009-05-11T12:23:00.000-05:00

The "general public" is more violent, statistically, than the "diagnosed population." The "general public" likes few things better than to voyeuristically consume depictions and accounts of violence, to watch it in movies and hear about it in songs and through the grapevine. In AA, in the town where I attended, men were more willing to give up sex than violence. Sex was an addiction, they said, but violence was a commandment.

The public craves violence at all times -- but no one wants to have his passport lifted while crossing the square in Petersburg -- "you're kidding," I had said to her, an obese American on vacation with her thin husband (but she would not have known that I was a vacationer dx'd in the States). "I would kid about this?" she said as if wishing she could be sarcastic. The Russian police were searching for her passport. The couple had missed their plane.

Is crime "crime" because it's "insane"? Does bipolar mean "insane"? AA members define insanity as "doing the same thing over and over expecting different results." To them "partying" is insane, and they are in life-long recovery from it.

The teachers of cw fear campus shootings for the reason that gunmen sometimes write. I fear campus shootings as much as instructors do, but they may not fully realize that; they may think the gunman is my pharmaceutical cousin or crazy adopted half-brother. "Crazy is as crazy does," I simplify. Hired to be creative, the instructors' imaginations sometimes suffer: They may imagine that some (white) people are people, and some (white) people are less than people.

Just the other day, a Wesleyan feminist activist and student -- a beautiful young woman -- was gunned down at the bookstore where she worked by a man police say may have been targeting Jews. He was likely a stalker. It was in his notebook. "Sick," I said to my fiance, as he read the story to me over the telephone. "They're going to say he has bipolar, right?"

Besides "bipolar 1 atypical," I've alternatively been dx'd with temporal lobe epilepsy. I suggested that he begin to tell his sisters and ex-wife (offspring themselves of bipolar disorder and alcoholism) and doctor and doormen: "epilepsy" or "atypical." The DSM-IV says "atypical" means "rejection sensitivity" -- something I could prove I didn't have then -- another mystification or distortion, but perhaps it's better if it seems "atypical" means "non-violent." (They didn't test for GRK3. The gurk is not the gack and not the taint. Gurke means "cucumber.") Abe Lincoln had manic-depression. Mozart. Sir Isaac Newton.

The white women in the cw bureaucracy who feel more deserving of employment than I, who also fear campus gunmen, may not realize that many dx'd women have been crime victims. If this were Kenya, women caught in war would appeal to the U.N. for protection, but it's America. I was once in the Wesleyan woman's position: I had had a stalker before I was dx'd. Had the gunman "merely" raped or stalked or targeted her, she might have developed symptoms or broken down and been dx'd for insurance's sake. That is what psychiatry does. It "heals" while labeling people; its prognostications catch and mate people.

There once was a white woman in AA, who was staying at the domestic violence shelter because her boyfriend had beaten her out of a home. She was newly recovering from cocaine addiction and asked at the meeting whether there were a way to get a prescription for Xanax without getting a mental illness diagnosis. Heads turned to me. "There but for the grace of God go I," someone said as someone always did, not realizing that I, too, could say it then: "Diagnosis is worse than living at the domestic violence shelter, than drug addiction?" I wanted to say but didn't. I had been passed over in employment, despite affirmative action, but never forced out of a home.

Slogans I wrote to the sky after I left AA:

"If something ain't fixed, break it right."
"Would you steal the pepper o' an old man's soup?"
"Spoonbridge and Crab Apple."
"She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes."
"Thinking is thinking."

Female friendships are left to be engendering

2009-05-09T19:34:00.000-05:00

My last name is Scottish, but it's also historically Jamaican. I stand at 5'10." Women sometimes press me into service as the "boyfriend" who is culturally less important than their real or future boyfriend; they pretend I “have never had a real boyfriend” -- to emphasize their own sexiness -- and have gas attacks and decry feminism to me as if "no one" will ever care or know. The women want me to change or change the world or die young -- to die young is what men when they were younger wanted us to do then -- while the women get dressed up and laid; they believe that getting dressed up and laid will eventually lead to peace or equality. What if it will? I have at times felt "transgendered" by their athwart remarks, as not counted -- gladly -- within my gender, but maybe I’m not their other boyfriend so much as their other mother, and they escape me as they would try to escape her. “Transgendered women” at Google refers to a feeling that gender at birth was misassigned. It doesn't refer to a gender-neutralized mother. What are the color and number of genius? Gray? Ten? One? Friendship among disabled people? What is the next question?

I placed a higher value on friendship than on romance, except once, especially after I involuntarily faced retirement from teaching at 32. I invested in 30 friendships, and each is a story in itself.

I mostly was not friends with the "petite gals" and "hunks" with jobs in the cw bureaucracy -- and wonder why they haven't changed payscales for adjuncts and other things that need changing. Why have my friends still looked to me to do "something" while simultaneously shunning me as not useful?

One of my dearest friends is a blue collar male chauvinist academic and writer. I learn a lot about friendship from him, about loyalty in action. He and his culturally diverse male friends -- do they call it "male friends" or "men friends"? -- he uses the word "buddy," I think -- (what do women say? galpal? I never say that) -- men -- conduct correspondences, sell their papers to libraries, become literary executors, find each other jobs in academe, get each other book deals overseas, movie rights, agents, even scout out new young wives after their second wives leave. I'm honored to be his chick friend (he thinks I'm a woman); though he is clueless about my situation; he thinks that women envy me because I'm hot, but I think they fear or pity me as unmarried, childless, bipolar, not an author or teacher, and getting older.

The girls -- as some of my women friends prefer to be called -- discuss aspects of "hair" the most, clothes; they pretend to abjure poetry or their own poetry, though they're amazingly talented at poetry and other arts, and feel lucky if they get to live somewhere with a boyfriend or husband whom they "fuck." In the "vast amount of scholarship on women's friendship" -- "Marcus and Todd" -- would I find that no further work remains, that JHC is right? Is women's poetry besides Dickinson, Plath, Bishop, and Rich (or Brooks or Clifton or Levertov or Guest or DuPlessis or Waldman) just grist?

Is the future of all friendship sex? Do I have friendships with men that stayed platonic? (Rarely.) And with women? (Yes.) Women I’d had sex with at 19 or 20 are married to women with whom they have children -- are gone like Hera and the other goddesses, gone. Then they were non-monogamous and flighty; I was once and sincere. After the last time I had had sex with a woman, she read Chocolate Waters at her breakfast nook then lifted a butcher knife at me.

In a message dated 5/9/2009 1:00:37 P.M. Central Daylight Time, junction@NET writes:

Ann: Try googling "Female friendships." Dozens of useful sites, and far less junk than "Male friendships."

Best, Mark

Words at Ana Verse with "fem" in them

2009-05-08T09:21:00.000-05:00

female feminist feminist(s) feminine feminism post-feminist anti-feminist male-most-revered-female femi-NIN-ity

Words at Ana Verse with "men" in them

2009-05-08T08:49:00.001-05:00

apartment women establishment comment(s) men experimental movement mentally mental mention(ed) documented mendacity treatment(s) mend mentalism mistreatment basement environment(s) phenomenon elementary punishment argument(s) Menaker women's Valkommen fundamentalist menstrual excitement fragment moment achievement confinement momentarily monument(s) recommend(ed) accomplishment commencement commentary commented compliments horsemen menthol embarrassment amends (un)employment mention placement fragmentation mentors mentees garment(s) impeachment environmentalist amendment indictment craftsmen Embankment pavement government non-judgmentally involvement arrangement(s) engagement statement attachment agreement phenomenal Harmensz mending equipment payment settlement dust-men supplementary ailment Ornamental experimentalists-in-the-wings tremendous development dimension(s) documentary documentaries department salesmen argumentative Menagerie ornaments Clements requirement promenade menarche vehemence recommendation Enlightenment unsentimental disappointment embarrassment elements appointment investment commendable amusement abdomen adjustment Judgment self-assessment discouragement amenities dementia pronouncements menu mentioning monumental

Country without a name

2009-05-07T17:48:00.000-05:00

Cleaning the house today, I thought about the Latina woman who cleans the apartment in New York. I shall refer to her as Juana -- already she goes by a pseudonym in her daily life -- so Juana is her third name. I love her; it's joy when she's near. We embrace. Juana showed me one day what her husband had done to her before they divorced: She pantomimed punching herself, knocking herself backward. She finally sought protection, and he was deported, to Nicaragua, I think, but she didn't say, "Nicaragua." In everyday life, one's country name is not always spoken. Imagine being from out of town that way.

Arthur Miller's penultimate play, "Resurrection Blues," is set in an unnamed Latin American country; during the performance at the Guthrie in 2002, I remembered the black-haired and green-eyed aristocrat from El Salvador or Guatemala who had come to me for "coaching" -- paid bickering about writing was more like it -- whose novel's country-at-war is not named. It was his dime. (I earned $30/hour to Juana's $60/hour.)

One novelist friend says naming "characters" by their real names doesn't matter in the business if the "character" doesn't or can't read in real life.

I clean alone and think of Juana; she misses dust in places, but her arrival each Friday and her cleaning save lives -- literally and spiritually. She talks to me once a week from New York and asks about my mother. She calls me "Ah-nna" after calling me "Lady" for a year.

Yesterday's Google lines: "white women friends," "white female friendship," "women writer friends," "literary friendship," and so on, lead to interracial dating websites and sites about Hawthorne and Milton.

The writing trigger for today is "Scrabble pieces in the driveway."

My trouble is in the group and not usually with doctors -- I was a distinguished student, so doctors are teachers to me. The Hippocratic Oath is a plaque on the wall and a practice. The group's trouble is with the status quo, the establishment, or in the case of AA, with higher powers other than God, with authority.

I realize that to say, "I do not believe in God" is footsteps away from "I do not rely on God" and "God left me."

As Tide is to Woolite

2009-05-06T16:34:00.000-05:00

... gratitude is to gladness, feminist is to feminine, forgetfulness is to gracefulness ...

"Are you thrifty with your originality, saving it for art, or do you dispose of it in daily life?" -- Cynthia Ozick

"I thought that I too had always put people before ideas." -- Maureen Stone, "Divided Sisters" in Black Woman Walking

The trouble w/ Avery and her husband seems related to their easy acceptance of AA -- their lack of difficulty with "recovery" -- and T.'s affinity to/abhorrence of it and my steering clear of Alanon -- I'd had so much religious difficulty when I left AA myself 10 years ago.

It started in a different way last fall -- she was taunting me, basically, very succinctly -- on grounds of class, race, sex, education, geography, religion, and replies to victimization. She pretended that our African-American woman friend was her audience. She said I didn't deserve to live in NY, and in particular, Manhattan -- not that I had no right to live there (rights so begrudging) -- but that I hadn't garnered the privilege. My time in NY (and in particular, Manhattan) went back to the 80s -- I reminded her -- (but even it if it hadn't, who extends the privilege?) (She'd been born there, on Perry Street). [But she hadn't lived while on welfare w/ the Burgermeister on 10th Street.] I diagnosed her gibes as a problem timed w/ her running out of savings and the high price of her rent -- then the feathers FLEW! She faulted me for not shaving, for "settling" and picking up a few pounds to medication -- as if I were letting down "gals" everywhere. (Then she befriended a skinny girl, a radical lesbian feminist poet from the South who is not cumbersomely tall as I am.) I'd been humiliated before the institution-of-love, she said, but she was sure I would have millions one day (though not like her real friends in AA who inherited wealth). She said I was not "glad to be female" -- that my poems weren't -- her husband himself had said so. I had hoped there would be glue for it, but with the highest, brightest, lightest, tightest tu-lips realizable, service, tap, with a pierce: "I have no interest in discussing this," she said, and hit the nerve.

Her husband is a part-time painter (and architect). I hadn't psychoanalyzed his (abstract) paintings to discover how he felt about "being male." Nor brought T.'s opinions of P.'s paintings to the writing group for all to hear. It's true that as I've gotten older and lived w/ my mother for years and near T.'s illness, I've lost touch (sadly) w/ free-spiritedness I used to feel -- old age, deafness, depression, tobacco, and difficulty walking have a slower rhythm to them -- what "lingerie" doesn't convey.

Her novel is about lingerie shoplifting and I described it as chick lit. She sees it as somehow Marxist-feminine. There's no sense in the novel of danger or fear -- something I had pointed out -- of arrest, for one thing: there would be that nervous suspense; instead there's a story line that gets suspended by reveries of "sexiness" and an unspoken racial aspect, i.e., "white gals" don't "pay" -- something I had argued against in my critique -- yes, they could, would, and do. In MN they would, could, and do. In Lake Woebegone, "where all the women are strong and the men are good-looking," the "sexy good girls" get anxious, depressed, and re-diagnosed.

After TF joined the group, A. played to her w/ her unique form of radicalism. TF was our angel -- the rest of the writing group were always bursting into tears or accusation -- but TF stayed level the whole time. One of us had sued for tenure on grounds of sex-discrimination and won. A’s husband had little good to say about her, etc. The CRAZY thing is, I had invited A. to join us though she was working on a conventional novel set in Texas (a 7-yr project), and CN, a radical-progressive, Marxist-feminist, Jewish-atheist native New Yorker, who'd invited me and who'd wanted an experimental fiction group, had left ...

... as entertain is to muse.

Mental notes

2009-05-04T03:38:00.000-05:00

She was mad to be glad-o.
She was glad to be mad-o.
She wouldn't diagnose her.
She was a born digresser.
She was a bored cross-dresser.
She was a hired class-crosser.
She was a hip engineer.
She worked just for her welfare.
She was an organizer.
She was a class-conscious hire.
She was an urgent seer.
She met a transabled sire.
She preferred werewolves and ghosts to 1990s vampires.
A sign of bipolar is "snappy dresser."
"Fen you god a gompleggs, zum dimes id giffs you an eddypuss. You zpeak a bisl Yiddish?" Mosiac Man by Ronald Sukenick (Normal, IL: FC2, 1999), p. 138
The collective nouns for OTTER are bevy, family, lodge or romp.
Mentalism is to the general public and the medical establishment as sexism is to patriarchy or racism is to slavery; the term has variant and unstable usage.
Psychophobia is literally "abnormal fear of the mind."
Transabled is a person who wishes to be (or who perceives him- or herself to be) (but who is not or would not need to be) disabled. What is a person who is newly disabled?
Ableism is discrimination against persons with disabilities.
Dual-diagnosis refers to persons who are both chemically dependent and otherwise mentally ill.
Mental illness diagnoses have negatively replaced profession and assimilated European immigrant groups and branches of Christianity as sources of belonging and identity.
Labeling, branding, mark(et)ing, targeting, scapegoating, victimizing, pigeonholing, programming.
Revising, rewriting, reworking, rephrasing, researching, drafting, editing.
Readings

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MEMORANDUM:

RE: �Go Gay (or Not) & Make a Mess of the Mess We're In�

[...] I'm writing prose drafts at Ana Verse for the month of May for Mental Health Month. Diagnosed people, who are sometimes (mis)represented by "advocates" and not organized and often isolated or closeted, are finding it difficult to "join up" with any other group: Even disability has its hierarchies, starting in the top half with physical disabilities. The "recovery" community of drug addicts and alcoholics rejects mental illness as false labeling if it applies to them and shuns people who take medication and so forth. The Mad Pride movement rejects conventional medical treatment for mental illnesses [based on mistreatment by that system] while the news media play "good doctor" in reports on the "bad doctors" of psychiatry and Big Pharma and the lay population goes about "de-diagnosing" friends (armed with news articles) and "diagnosing" others using the DSM-IV in a system where it is perceived that ---> outside dx = freedom and inside dx = captivity.

The best word I've found to apply to this state of affairs is "psychophobia," which literally means "abnormal fear of the mind." "Psychopharmophobia" may have its uses as well.

"Straight but not narrow."

GLBT(Q) plus O

2009-05-03T12:47:00.000-05:00

Today is my 47th birthday. I woke thinking of my 50th birthday. I have three years in which to do something before I turn fifty -- to do something -- but what? Today my mother, sister, and I are going to Como Park Zoo and for dinner at W.A. Frost in St. Paul. There's a flower show in the conservatory at Como Park, the "old zoo." It is a little early in the season for the other zoo, the "new zoo," in Apple Valley. As I described it to my friend, the "new zoo" is "a safari zoo," where the large game animals roam wide swaths of wooded and prairie lands. Visitors do not always glimpse the elephants, lions, and wolves from the tram or from the walking paths. He thought I said: the "old zoo and the Sephardic zoo."

. . .

Rights for mentals, rights for queers. If LGBT(Q), if GLBT. But GLBT(Q) needs a vowel, not another consonant. M for mentals (and medicated); D for diagnosed (dx'd); P for psychiatric case. What if the diagnosed were to call themselves something starting with a vowel: "A" "E" "I" "O" "U" or "Y" but what?

A friend's mother -- (she has or had "multiple personality disorder" renamed "dissociative identity disorder," MPD renamed DID) -- doubted the accuracy of my bipolar diagnosis during our week-long visit up north. One of her three sons had been diagnosed with bipolar, but he'd been too busy with life to seek treatment (tx) for it. "My son is Hemingway, Ann," she said. "The other son is a trained assassin, Ann," she said. "You were an overachiever," she said. "I was never sexually attracted to women," she said.

Bring "O" to the table, the imaginary table where diagnosed p-cases meet collectively, the discos that they frequent in their exclusive sexual attraction to one another: What if mentals were to agree to be called "Other" or "Over" or "Out"? Over it. Overboard. Overcooked. Overdue. Overly dramatic. Over the hill. Over the top. Over and out. Over the limit. Over easy. Overdosed. Overlooked. Over estimated. Out of bounds. Outnumbered. Out of it. "Orange," "Odd," "Old," or "Open"? Open minded. Old before their time. Orange has no exact rhyme.

Just as the words "gay" and "queer" were appropriated -- taken aside for everyday use, outmoded in their other connotations -- Gaelic and happy and odd -- and the word "crack" transmigrated, though most people seem hardly to notice it -- a word for mentals would take a common word or phrase out of ordinary use. What "O" word would do it? The "o" could be the "o" in psycho or wacko. "O" for a pride word: Orange. Take back the fruits! Off our backs!

Then GLBT might accept the diagnosed as the "O" in their herd. (It would look almost like an anagram of my name.) Or keep things as they are and borrow the "T" for "touched" and "nut."

During the Holocaust, the mentally ill who were institutionalized, sterilized, and "euthanized" didn't wear triangles or badges. The code name for the Nazi Euthanasia Program was T-4.

What is the word for internalized psychophobia? Or for people who are psychophobic?

There are those who feel that mentals ought to be "put away" and not allowed to have sex or do other things queers (at last) and normals are (theoretically) allowed to do. For that, we would have a custom. We need a Mario Cuomo for it. Would Obama do it? QUO.

Death by Comet

2009-05-02T10:38:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I was sorting through boxes in my mother's garage, and I came upon an issue of a literary journal in which the violent boyfriend (from Cedar Falls or Cedar Rapids, Iowa) had published an essay in art criticism. In the first paragraph he used the word "adventitious." His name was nestled on the table of contents page beside Julio Cortazar's and Ann Beattie's and Dana Gioia's. I imagined the essay slipping into the landfill or going to the city shredder. Ship it! I said and separated it for the trash.

I am realistic enough to know that I don't look like Audrey Hepburn. I am more likely to realize that I admire Katherine Hepburn -- as if the choice must be between two women of the same name or between a married couple: Paul or Jane Bowles, Leonard or Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes or Sylvia Plath.

Truman Capote got the idea for In Cold Blood from an article in the newspaper. I had wanted to model a book after it, based on an article I had read in the Minneapolis newspaper about a tornado. In the tornado one elderly man died. Tornadoes ought to be named as hurricanes are named, this one after its one casualty. I thought of researching the book about the man, as if unburying him from the rubble of the basement in what had been his house. We all have basements here. Even my St. Louis Park apartment has its own unfinished basement. I use it for storage and it's where I do the laundry, where the furnace and hot water heater are. If someone says "basement" in Texas or in New York, people are likely to imagine a torture chamber; the literati think of Kaspar Hauser, not of a whole state or region of basements where law-abiding citizens report for duty during severe storm warnings. If a single elderly man dies in a tornado, the newspaper readers sigh with relief: at least no children died. They don't think of the damage to houses, trees, roads, and businesses unless they live near that town, and they don't stop to imagine what it might be like to be him -- THE ONLY ONE to have blown out in a tornado -- at the end of a long and one presumes virtuous life. It's like being chosen by a lightening bolt or dying by COMET; it's like being the one candle on a cake to go out when the birthday child misses; but readers are just glad to read he'd been old. What if one of the man's grown children, plied with a little weed or tobacco or alcohol, were to say, "He got what he deserved" or "Couldn't have come at a better time"? Wouldn't that be a story?

It might have won the Minnesota Book Award for non-fiction, but I didn't do it.

I didn't call the police when the violent boyfriend (from Cedar Falls or Cedar Rapids, Iowa) "blew up the house."

Would Avery believe that my poetry was "glad to be female" if I draped each noun with a lacy little bra or tightened it in a string bikini? If I put a touch of black (not brown) mascara on every verb?

Southern Man

2009-05-01T12:18:00.000-05:00

It's "wrong" to be depressed. One friend chortled when I said I was in my spring depressive episode. It means that I daydream about death, wake thinking of it, want nothing more than it, and read jealously of people who have had the temerity to quit this landscape, temerity I lack. Seasonal affective disorder occurs in winter when days are shorter, but bipolar depression occurs in spring when birds are nesting and favorite flowers peek through the soil.

Avery, I'll call her, chortled, but I still don't know how to interpret her laugh. Avery is also the brand name of office labels, something I feel I function as in the work world. She'd been diagnosed recently with "borderline personality disorder," diagnosis she pursued. What you hear about "borderline" is that it's worse than mood disorders, because it cannot be treated successfully with medication, but Avery is glad for that because medications have side-effects and are wrong and dangerous and so is Big Pharma -- to a drug-free so(c)(br)iety. Avery no more believes that she has or is "borderline" than she believes her hair is purple, but it gives her a luxuriant feeling to be pampered in a borderline therapy group. She can't afford much salon work these days, so she's taken to this group.

She said, by way of critiquing my poems, that they are -- I am -- not "glad to be female" because I live mostly outside her logic of lingerie. I felt transgendered by her remark. I got mad at her -- she goes secretly to a therapy group for "borderline" as for years she has attended AA w/o being an alcoholic -- without realizing that she volunteers to be a nut. She thinks it's one more thing -- like cocaine, like shoplifting -- she can get away with as an adult -- to sneak around seeking "treatment" without being listed or dismissed as a mental case. Many women admire young Audrey Hepburn, place posters of her near their coatracks or inside their closet door, but Avery is more like Holly Golightly than any of them: What if she is not mentally ill? What if she is a creative intellectual?

Avery's issues related to law-breaking relate to being Catholic. Catholics didn't write the laws: why obey all of them? I used to believe that the law had gotten certain things wrong -- such as the (re)criminalization of marijuana -- but I realized (a little late) that the law still applies. Mental illness and lawbreaking are intermittently connected, but diabetes and allergies and obesity may also lead to selfish preoccupations, even to taking what doesn't belong to one. There is something not right that Avery desires to have an(other's) illness -- has even said she desires to be in a mental institution -- and chortles when her friend says she is depressed. There is much to interpret in it.

A violent boyfriend before he became violent had diagnosed me with "borderline" myself. I had not entered the mental illness labyrinth, had not been put there yet by "concerned persons" -- one of them a man who didn't believe I had any business writing even a short essay about "my" theology -- among his reasons the day he dragged me in to see the authorities at a psychiatric hospital in Houston in December of 1991 where violent men were held and where I was to be locked, not because I was violent, but because my violent boyfriend, whom the other man (Sonia's boyfriend) had promoted at work after my boyfriend had been violent -- after he had threatened to kill me -- reasoned that he would threaten to kill someone, too, who (later) wrote a short essay about theology. It silenced me. It was like an introduction to murder, though I'm still alive and take medications for it.

I read poems at websites during NaPoMo and admired the spontaneous talents of the poets without wanting to join in myself. I don't know if it is that I am a "case" that I like the unfinished work of talented writers -- or something else. I don't know if in the whole analysis mental cases are allowed to have an aesthetics or if their aesthetics are simply worth less: a loan as compared to savings -- and it comes back to that day when the Southern Man decided -- for the rest of my story -- that I'd had no authorization to write creatively, thus shaming his superiors who had originally approved of it. There is no diagnosis for abstract expressionist painting or "rock band," but there is one for writing.

... I was not a lapdog, something the Southern Man, Sonia's boyfriend, was. I figured I was too tall to fit comfortably in a lap. The Southern Man was tall and big and got in laps wherever he went. His bearded face nodded "yes" to everything. It didn't matter what another person was saying to him, he vigorously nodded and nodded "yes" to it. I wouldn't have dreamt that a mental institution would be interested in that tic of his, but he dreamt that a mental institution would be interested in me.

To diagnose "bipolar" is in some ways like no-fault insurance or divorce. The medical establishment cares less about the details of what happened and more about the results. Later it was uncovered that I have a psychiatrist uncle with the genes for it.

I should have realized what kind of "player" environment poetry was in that place. It manifested as an affirmative action beauty pageant, and many of the men ended up feeling passed over by it, not chosen, as they would have been chosen had affirmative action not gone into motion when it did. Punishing white women for it was a remedy, and no one would halt them.

If it's sadly true that I "think in essay," then this is my month for offering daily rough drafts: MeHeWriMo (Mental Health Writing Month).

May is MeHeWriMo

2009-05-01T01:04:00.000-05:00

Entries at Ana Verse (Jan. 16, 2006 to April 12, 2009) that relate to depression and diagnosis:

*What is a blog, what is a bogle? 1/16/06
*Subj: re: doing time … 1/16/06
*Father-time, 1/20/06
Journal Entry, March 1, 2006, 2/28/06
*“Rule out Euthymia” (short story pub’d at Mad Hatters’ Review, issue 10, fall 2008) 3/08/06
Hype and Melancholy, 3/12/06
*“Cigs,” (short story pub’d at Mad Hatters’ Review, issue 10, fall 2008) 6/5/06
*“The Gift,” (short story pub’d at Mad Hatters’ Review, issue 10, fall 2008) 7/24/06
*The Cool Report, 8/3/06
*Growing Up Normal, 8/5/06
“Red Squirrel” (pub’d in Minnetonka Review) 8/8/06
*Honest Life, 11/1/06
*Substance at Stake, 12/19/06
Chagrin (def.), 1/4/07
*Ms. Sandman, 1/21/07
Equity, 1/22/07
Being on the outside, 1/31/07
*“Basal Distance,” prose poem aired on MiPOradio, 2/8/07
“Wish for the Left Hand,” 2/16/07
A poet from San Francisco, 3/6/07
International Women’s Day: Work, 3/8/07
Stripped of all precious illusion, 3/12/07
*Waylaid (1999), 3/23/07
*Love, 5/24/07
*Diagnosis, 5/25/07
Dial-on, 5/25/07
Disability and the United Nations, 5/26/07
*Millness: On a stretcher, 5/28/07
*The recent death of Poet Sarah Hannah, 5/30/07
*Dr. Abuzzahab, 6/9/07
*Depression & poetry, 6/11/07
*Visiting in New York, 6/17/08
“Fish,” 6/24/07
*My Jane Eyre, 6/30/07
Housekeeping, 7/16/07
Other letter (excerpt), 7/23/07
Small party for an excuse, 8/4/07
Wisdom of Dr. Abraham Low, 8/9/07
“Vital signs: Hysteria is calmer than you think,” 10/6/07
Driving years, 12/12/07
*My obsessions, 12/7/07
*Caregiver, 7/9/08
*Why do they stay?, 9/7/08
*"Hoss Men,” 10/11/08
*Punctuate, 11/8/08
Christmas Letter, 12/25/08
W’assup with Edward Albee? 3/18/09
Acceptance is to her a phenomenon, 3/29/09
Lolita: a pyramid story, 4/12/09

*I have deposted all those entries marked with an asterisk, but they appear in the hardcover b-l-o-o-k.

Chant de la Sirene

2009-04-28T11:42:00.000-05:00

"Free Verse: The Collaborative Artists' Book"
A review by Ann Bogle
at Laura Hinton's Chant de la Sirene: a weblog on poetry, performance, and the hybrid arts
April 20, 2009

Becoming Billie Holiday

2009-04-19T16:23:00.000-05:00

What led Billie Holiday to move from Baltimore to New York?

At age 12, Billie—or Eleanora as she was known then—had the body of a woman. She gravitated to the night life, singing in afterhours spots, drinking bootleg liquor, smoking then-legal weed, and getting roughed up by older men. To protect Billie, her caretaker urged Sadie to come get her daughter. Sadie arranged for Billie to join her in Long Branch, New Jersey. But Billie rode to New York instead, determined to see Harlem. Picked up by a social worker, she stayed in a children’s home until someone could pick her up. After Billie got fired from the maid job that her mother had arranged, she and Sadie moved to New York—just as the Harlem Renaissance was fading into the Great Depression.

From “Love for Sale”

Harlem was no Promised Land;
it was a sea of black folks, striving
to rise from fields to factories
or from hard-luck to street hustles,
flowing through clubs and churches
grooving on Jesus and jazz.
Harlem was a black sea that parted
each night for white partygoers
with money to burn and cares to shed.
I was swept by the tide.

"When I was growing up, I was intrigued by the Harlem Renaissance. I was introduced to the poetry of Langston Hughes in elementary school and have loved it ever since. Hughes even wrote a poem entitled 'Song for Billie Holiday.' "

Harlem Renaissance links:

http://www.jcu.edu/harlem/index.htm

http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/exploring/harlem

Hear Carole Boston Weatherford read poems from Becoming Billie Holiday:

http://www.wbgo.org/news/journal/archive.php?date=12/19/2008

Lolita: a pyramid story

2009-04-12T14:26:00.000-05:00

My story, paraphrased in italics:

I got my first bikini when I was in fourth grade. Until then, the popular girls my age had worn one-piece bathing suits. Mine had been orange with holes cut into it. I picked that one because it was like my Barbie’s. My Barbie was actually the red-headed Stacy, but she had the same body as Barbie. My bikini was red with navy blue and white flowers on it. The bra was padded, and there were little ties at the sides of the bikini bottom. As my first act in the bikini, I decided to stroll across the park to see my friend, Lori. I didn’t wear shoes or a cover up. I can still remember the rough feeling of the yellowed grass underfoot. Halfway across the park, Mr. Stanchfield appeared at the end of his fence. He had trained a pair of binoculars on me as I walked across the park in the bikini. I remember thinking, what is wrong with Mr. Stanchfield that he wants to watch a fourth-grader walk in a bikini? I thought, this may be my punishment since my parents didn’t stop me.

(I was still flat but I had started to grow pubic hair -- “public hair,” as one boy had pronounced the word from a sex manual.)

(I had an absent-minded, but not permissive, mother who rarely looked up from her gardening, and my father, later secretly and wrongly accused of child molestation by my adult male partner, averted his eyes if he saw me in a bathing suit. Blocked memory theory had caught on before there was literature to defend it/us/them.)

(My adult male partner was a devoted reader of Nabokov.)

(I have the demonstrated genes for bipolar -- I now know -- so my young thinking about these and other subjects might already have been bent. Bipolar theory had caught on with the doctors before there was literature to defend it/us/them.)

The paragraph and notes above are not literature. The story precedes, in time, the boy sexual violence that ensued in the same park. Though I wrote a novella about it, more remains to be told. My adult male partner, who during his adolescence in the 60s had been the target of bullies, had reasoned that a girl's sexual abuse by boys in the 70s could not have been serious enough to account for long-term emotional variations related to violation. It's an argument, but I didn't make it, that it had been a set-up. The novella was good enough for entrance and fellowships to creative writing programs, but it was not good enough to get past the praise stage with a handful of editors, who didn’t publish it. Teachers had told us “novellas” don’t sell.

It seems that there is a dearth of fine literature about the subjects Lolita covers and the subjects it misses. One other book has been named, and that is Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. It seems possible -- yet this group is not suggesting that it has happened -- that from among the group of victims and survivors, which, to judge by responses on the women's poetry listserv, seems large -- there might come literary works of merit that tell a story (a version of the universal girl story) that could trump Lolita, a book as good as To Kill a Mockingbird that addresses the single blindspot in it.

Later, though this is only marginally related, I named the 1998 version of my short story ms., The Universal Girl for It, but no one was buying -- not even a women’s publishing house, not even a publisher who subscribes to this list. Teachers had told us short story collections don’t sell -- agents aren’t interested in them. The same ms. is now called Institute of Tut. (The “institute” in the title likely refers to creative writing programs, but it may also refer to the internet. I learned after I had renamed the ms. -- written over 20 years -- that I had had an uncle-in-law named “Tut,” a physicist, married for 50 years to my aunt, also a physicist.)

My friend, Vikram Chandra, a devoted reader of Trollope, assures me that my favorite Trollope title, An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids, is not one of his best.

This is the 300th entry at Ana Verse.