Triptych

These stories can be found at Fictionaut: http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/hobos-pastor; http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/story-for-neds-edit; and http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/purple-iv

Dreams-in-Progress with Art by Daniel Harris

Story by Ann Bogle and illustration by Daniel Harris titled "On Wellbutrin I Only Dreamed of Sex" appear in Country Without a Name, forthcoming from Veery Imprints, and the story is included in "Dreams from the Station" in Gargoyle 60, 2013

Broadside 3, SfNE, Watermark Washout

Story for Ned's Edit

The Code is on the Street

Published as a broadside in slightly different form by Altered Scale, 2012.

Meryl Streep Laughed at That

Published as a broadside and at Altered Scale, Jefferson Hansen, Ed., and Fictionaut.  Named in Wigleaf Top 50 in 2013.  Special thanks to Barry Basden at Camroc Press Review.

Crazy Later, my selected comments, second half of May

To Bill Yarrow: Crazy. Do you hear someone like me while driving? Furry phantom, face it, FUZZ. _Silo_ is the word I'll R.I.P. applying. I never address another, as near as possible, a cardinal lesbian sign of respect. Addressing one other, to the nearby side, rings, as in this crazy poem. 

To Katha Pollitt: My neighbor is brooding. Brood is the word. Yet she may be without child, as things stand. Pronouns are going out of fashion, yet I know from routine linguistics, that pronouns were the decision of our language in favor of inflected gender, masculine, feminine, neuter in its early roots. Thing in Old English _Niedersachsen_ is a phenomenal word. In your earlier writings, you were the best voice for choice. A year ago, my neighbor was a sexy graduate student in fashion design, sounds perhaps shabby, yet if it is, then we in the Middle West are all shabby. That girl's father graduated from high school with Bob Dylan in Hibbing, not entitling her to a child. What might? Are you, is Margaret Atwood, the voice for wandering into motherhood, awares? No. Christa Forster is at her weblog, Texta. Not that she is gegen Choice. Danke sehr. Einmal. 

To Bill Yarrow: A cataclysm, a swivel. All praise due, delivered. Orchiectomy, Orchestra, root cellar. Would the men and why-would-the-women thinking of Orch pirate the $45 M, misteer the renovation, the lobby, dismiss the musicians?

To Forum concerning Story ("Mr. Kunitz, Mr. Lowell, Mrs. Craig"): If this story does not rise to 45 faves on Fictionaut, I shall not leave Fictionaut. I feel that the Lady, yet alive, who wishes she were us, needs to keep the further higher, fave location. Her story, “Church Cancels Cow,” that I read in the middle of Fri-Sat night, caught me laughing sincerely, guttural laughter, as if dying were worth these narrow lines (of the story she authored). The end canceled cows and churches. Until I bought a sack of vinho verde two days later, but I was canceled already, no matter. Sudden stop, end stop, hockey stop, hit the boards, cemetery, running.

To Christa Forster to Charlie Scott re: James Franco's As I Lay Dying: Ever since Etgar Keret's reading and spontaneous occurrence in delivered story, that I anticipated for months, if not weeks, at the Saint Louis Park JCC, I threaten to jump out the first-story window if I have found disfavor with something, not that he even suggested doing or suggesting that. Each time I threaten it, I decide against it, in favor of not curving the well-formed mosquito screen.

At NBD re: Liz Rosenberg's essay about her childhood depressions: I enjoyed working as editorial assistant under Liz Rosenberg, editor, at MSS., the literary journal started by John Gardner, Rosenberg's once-husband.  It distresses those of us denied full-time and even part-time employment in our field, despite our full and even covetable credentials, to read that salaried English teacher/writers, never not salaried, are claiming their heritages as the mentally afflicted, as if their mental afflictions now account for a type of genius that during school days could only have served to disqualify them, and so were denied or hidden or in fact not felt in the privileged and protected environments they occupied.  Laws of Gravity as a title concerns me, given a distinct echo to my own unpublished, unprotected, and pioneering work at University of Houston in the very early 1990s.  Though I am certainly glad, in a Scottish-writerly sense of that word, an inborn, unshakeable thoughtfulness on my part, to see that Rosenberg is writing and publishing fiction after a long hiatus.  Gifted and talented is or is not disabled?  I'll be waiting to hear.

To Sharon Mesmer at Fb re: literature as self-help in Daily Mail Online: Tolstoy's War and Peace, early pages, Constance Garnett, translator, contains a description of feminine beauty to serve as a bar for beauty, a physical measure to hold in mind in preparing for the Beauty Bar Exam, higher than that found in almost any snap photography. The Flarf panel at AWP Denver uplifted my spirits, in part because the panelists, as we once noted about diagnosed bipolars in an article cited in our group, attended mainly by displaced liberal lawyers with farm and ethical law backgrounds: presented as SNAPPY DRESSERS.

To Susan Lewis, managing editor, et al. at MadHat group at Fb: Literary journal conquistadoros (anti-socialist?) are thriving and keeping internal communication to a barest minimum. I realized that I had earned in literary caregiving .0140 per academic subpoint per hour, compared to $1 per academic subpoint per hour as earned by a high-school D-average student working in the technical field in 1998. $1 per academic subpoint per hour in my case would amount to an annual regular full-time salary of $1,780.000.

At LA Review of Books, Andrew Scull: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1677.  The history of these men's, including the reviewer's, careers in dominating understanding of psychiatry, though admirably well-woven here, is not of interest, I hope, to anyone. It is doubtful that Sigmund Freud is “a fraud”; it seems to have been needless to take a single step further, for any of us, in reading. Freud in German, as Frank Kermode wrote in The New York Times and reprinted in a later collection of essays, may very well be (Mayberry R.F.D.) better, a wildly hopeful possibility for further rehistoricizing the social science of narrative classification of imaginary human categories. As a non-expert, I might certainly be more interested in a book about The Test, why there is none and has been none for physiological illnesses treatable by psychotropic medications, the development of which has been markedly profitable for certain researchers and scientists. A book about how Big Pharma finances the humanities might also appeal to my pedestrian sensibilities. A perfect book about the long psychiatric study of elite creative writers, rather than of fine arts painters, musical composers, classical and modern dancers, art dealers, or rock ‘n roll musicians is one I might most like to read. I hope that Johns Hopkins, the best of the writing schools, medical schools, and university publishing houses can one day publish it.  The spelling genie post-suggested Kermmode, captcha.

Re: Chris Hedges at Truthdig: Thanks, Borg, dined with apparently very wealthy attorney and his career-active woman spouse.  I felt about him that he was very probably a phenomenal storyteller.  I liked her as well, in that I typically like people.

Still, I wonder how or why it is that to find out what a law is might cost a small fortune or net one.

Love, Borga, looking forward to receiving one of my new grammars, not new, yet new to me.  The book I bought about prepositions in English will serve as a great guide.  Seth Lindstromberg is the author.  Johns Benjamins Publishing.

Alexander Cockburn would not tolerate Chris Hedges' hallucinations well, nor do I.  For one thing, poverty is not an ill, experienced properly.  If AP writers' loss of professional privacy is his concern here, then he might have earned a stripe by breaking the story.

May 22 to May 29, 2013

Jeff, is the bookstore yet possible? June 29, Saturday. Keep me notified. The only good woman's suit in years was body paint, Demi Moore covers. This year I mostly abstain from shopping. The year I shopped suits in earnest, nothing available, so I wore a “boyfriend jacket” and black jeans though they were only so-so. Now I have black jeans I like better that were snug now loose. Disincluded from the disability poetics anthology, that grew out of that AWP panel, not due to my lousy approximation of a good women's suit, skirt OR pants, but due to my creative response to disability itself, as if the panel TEAM had not been notified, though I had processed it in emails, that creative response could be possible. I am still mystified that, in conversation, I could understand every word Jennifer Bartlett spoke, though I could not understand a single word a different woman in a literature seminar spoke, who did most of the speaking that semester from her position at the end of the seminar table, opposite our kind professor, where the woman's wheelchair most naturally fit. I can never forget my gratitude in reading Jennifer Bartlett's essay at Delirious Hem, round 2 fourth wave feminist poetics. Nor fall off in appreciating her poetry. Intellectual is one of three types of disability listed at the government disability employment website. Physical is another type. The middle type is either mental or emotional, word I have not remembered. Intellectual is also a status, conferred sparingly. Disability is in not seeking advantage? Disability is in not seizing advantage? Disability is distractibility? Empathy best routed to characters, as I had hoped and thought possible at 19. Shaped blouses that conform to my lines, four hand-spans from the toe to center crotch, four more from there to the nose.

To Gloria Garfunkel at Fictionaut, Butterfly Writer piece, May 26, 2013: There was a poet I met in the late 80s in Binghamton named Jerome Washington.  He had served a prison sentence for killing a man in a bar fight perhaps in the 60s.  While he was in prison, not as Marcus suggests, for no reason other than writing, and here in the U.S. not abroad, he wrote poetry and arranged from his position there to have not only his but other prison poets' writings published.  In addition, he fostered ... if that is the word ... legislation that went through and passed as law called Right to Write.  After he visited Binghamton and gave a poetry reading, he flew to Huntsville in Texas to meet with a man on death row who had refused to meet with lawyers and would only meet with Jerome Washington.  From there, Jerome Washington flew to Boulder to teach a course at Naropa.  Years later, I remembered Jerome Washington and visited Google to locate him.  He had died by then at the age of 64 at his mother's house.  There was a substantial Wikipedia entry about his work and in particular about Right to Write.  Some time later, I looked for the entry again, and it was not there.  Another website carried some of the same information about him, as if it had been rescued, yet the website was less official, more low budget, one might say, more seemingly temporary, though the Wikipedia entry had certainly been temporary.  Though I have met many other writers and poets who have been through Naropa, I have not heard anyone mention or seen in ephemeral writing on the Internet or in lists of African American literati his name or work.  The comment I left at Gloria's posting from yesterday I ought to have saved for my own file but forgot to do so.  Now it seems to have been removed if not deleted from the website, perhaps by Gloria.  I'll be in the habit more often of self-saving comments.

May 31, 2013, to Chris Okum at “Volonte” at Fictionaut: What is to enjoy?  The beginning about use of Vicky's name, which is what I wanted it to say, won my interest instantly.  I can use her name on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, my misreading, one that would lead to a very different story, one about kidglove damage by spies inf(t)ernal.  The story it actually is, emanating from use of Vicky's _house_, gets pretty violent in its projections, hers (the female persona narrator's), of his behavioral suspicions.  Pretty much “yuck” where it follows, but I suppose “yuck” is where it often does follow, why there are so many “courts” and split families and decisions and why marriage is boss.  So, for me, not a pleasant story to read, and yet worthy of a telling if I remember it as fiction about things American (it seems American) that I dislike.  The word cuckold stayed on my mind for a long time after I almost titled a long short story “The Cuckold” and the story had no cuckold, so it would have framed a question had I titled it that.  Here cuckold is not in the title but pressed in the book like a flower to dry.  It caused me to think of men and their divorce arrangements and even of women who played their hand and of whether any of those men had turned up in short story news or elsewhere, in cafes, as cuckolds and I decided that no, those men had not.  The woman I thought of in particular who had played her hand got very rich in the process.  The story at hand, by Chris Okum, though presumably not about rich people, with its word “cuckold” in it, raised a new question, for me, about transfer of a husband's inheritance as cuckold hush money.  She, a salesman's daughter, got his inheritance after it had had a few babies that resulted in her being awarded one or two of them.  Their five millionses multiplied until each first five million had had six babies.  The servants in the family earned a market-rate wage based on their positions in relation to the permanent wife's, now remarried, interpretation of her role, very different from his as or as not a cuckold.  SAD story! now that I think of it.

To Therese Svoboda at Fictionaut, May 31, 2013, about her poem in The New Yorker, 1989, called "Pink": Marcus gets a finder's fee for finding this poem. See Marc Vincenz or Jeff Davis for fee. I watched and admired your [Svoboda's] AWP reading from March. Here is probably no place to note it, but I want to see a march of women in cities around the U.S. wearing pink burkas. I want to see out the pink burka without ourselves being able to see in one anothers' burkas. Women only. Women only women. I do not want to carry up under a pink tent burka but rather under a private or personal burka or burka of one's own.  Pink not as a cancer color.

Necessary Heat

Jane Vanderbosch told me before Pastor Santo hid in flames then perished that I was spiritual and hid my strength. Liz was blue-eyed, naturally frizzy-blond, honey-tanned in summer. One day, a pleasant semblance took accord. It was Liz and somehow John Lennon around her face, at her piano, her fingers tiptoeing middle C, ebony to ivory, like goldhips. What is writing, Rick B.? You appear in your photo to be more handsome than your first brother. Sudden memory: ”Question mark? Curly cock. Exclamation! Stiff prick.” Eric deserves a position in this/our native country. Next I’ll suggest he go home to Oakland—a call for imaginative conduct—no mere white man living near here in the Middle West, west of Milwaukee. Mne Sota Makoce. The Land of the Dakota. Poet Anonymous lives in America—harped miscegenation, once, to Dr. Poetry, Ph.D., whose master’s pay was unrelated and horrid. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory fired the word, too, in Black Women Writers, the first I’d heard it—shuffleboard puck down center aisle, seminar table, into the net of the door. Hockey was my favorite sport, early. Trailing my father’s walking lesson, he conducted me in hand, north along Williston Road to the Ice Arena behind our City Hall. During the game, I rose in the stands, with all-out alarum, in favor of my future high school team. Liz startled, egyptically—then resumed. Not a soul or spirit could have predicted it, my enthusiasm. Hover-seeing, the hockey cheerleader jump-split it.

This story appears at Fictionaut.  First composition, February 14, 2013, revised off and on since, as is my present practice with stories I have written this year sur les amis.  Original version(s) may be available to those interested.  Latest revision, October 30, 2014.

My mother has shared, with enthusiasm, the plot of a non-fiction account of the Church's view of curiosity before and during the Renaissance in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in nonfiction. ~AMB

Flash Mob 2013 entry: http://flashmob2013.wordpress.com/

Letter to John Berryman

Letter to John Berryman

by Ann Bogle

for Christa Maria Forster

Maybe we'll try elevator music again. That would appeal to the senses. As the book begins to close, Normandberger appears as sister speech, endearing term for summer friend.  A friend of a deep friend, a serious secular religious poet living near Chicago, Bill Yarrow. Festshrift my favorite writer. Jane Bowles. Feminine wiles. I'll go Scottish on my oath. An escort from Moscow inspired my friend in writing his novel on bedding. Deep set women laboring deep set men. I thought of Stephen Dunn's poetry about divorce in the bookshop in St. Paul.

Based on a photo: Evie Shockley is protected, a garden herb, better than hosta. I met her mid-flight in a windowed elevator in Atlanta. I met Dunn in the same elevator at ground level going up. Hilda Raz's son's speech on the panel where Dunn described his date with Liza Minnelli left me disconcerted.

Hilda Raz had lost a daughter. Her son gained a persona, backed by biological components. His male-pattern baldness impressed me. In the elevator Dunn said he'd seen that I had cried at it, the loss to female pride, as I experienced it.  Dunn said he had known already about Raz's son.

Leo Kottke and I happened to go to lunch the same day in Excelsior. I ate like a man, soup, as I always do. I tend to be thin yet eat unapologetically. He flickered rue when I said I had bipolar, as if saying so would not go well. It was a publisher who released Janet Frame. As I put it, “Fat chance.” He said he was in a correspondence with Kay Redfield Jamison. Creativity clears sinus, a middle path,  a moral resistance to flight and melancholy as savored by artists, so knock on stove for Sylvia Plath, whose nature poems outstrip mirth.  We are fluent in English not at the roots.

My doctor, Faruk S. Abuzzahab, is polite about Jamison, who renamed the illness bipolar disorder without taking a medical degree. I wonder how they corresponded. Depression appears in Kottke's trombone piece: 

(By the time I knew depression was free, and that I didn't have to play trombone to be depressed, I'd imitated its “mood” for so long that I couldn't refuse the Damned Cloud when it did arrive. If you've been imitating the seeming cool, the detachment, and the languor, genuine depression won't be noticed until you tire of your pose. Bored with oceanic despair, you reach for the ladder back into the boat and you drown: no ladder.)

My old dad died of cancer in 1992. He gave a grateful noise unto the Lord. He trod the Earth's surface to file for me. He loved me, and I loved him. “I did it with my dad. I did it wearing plaid and now I'm glad”—I thought of quipping smartly, after one could, to Beauty in the Lounge. Did it by avocation, not meaning sex—activities that clear the way to Personality, such as fishing in the row boat on St. Alban's and near the channel at Gray's—we tied a blue-and-black fly to plant a seed in Time.

Seven years after he died, I sat in A.A. at St. Luke's Presbyterian, where Reverend Hudnut had baptized me, a glad-tidings girl, who grew to belonging, too soon to miss by ugly design.  Cattle resembling my grandmother's family rolled by meekly in a row, orienters to a future past. I said my father had died and rested in the cemetery near the church and school. I wasn't healed, though the therapist in Houston had allotted one session for grieving.

My dad was an Army Reservist stationed in the U.S.—New York and Texas—the bugler in his corps. He golfed on summer weekends in the course of his career. I had seen houses watercolored prettily within the lines on L.S.D. after noticing nothing in particular twice. He called at nine on a Saturday morning to hear my review of that picture. Wisconsin Synod and Episcopalian became hard of ringing part of one day. Christa was from San Juan Capistrano. A story is a nest like a small wooden boat set as a hymn in the slanting tree.

Whosoever befriends, let friends believe free feeling. Christa would say, “Offer it up!”

I drove once, not expected, to my boyfriend's house in Sugar Land. Twenty-five miles. He acted amused when he opened the front door. I said, “I'm not stalking you. I love you,” and he said, “Come in. What are you doing standing outside?”

Published in Wordgathering, Reading Loop, September 2014: http://www.wordgathering.com/issue31/reading_loop/bogle.html

On My Pantry Shelf

"The Bigots On My Bookshelf," Among Other Things, March 7, 2009, by Marlon James:

http://marlon-james.blogspot.com/2009/03/bigots-on-my-bookshelf.html

Bigot, definition, Ana Verse, May 28, 2007:

http://annbogle.blogspot.com/2007/05/bigot-def.html

big'ot, n. [O. Fr.; prob. from Sp. hombre de bigote, lit., man with a mustache (bigote, mustache, ult. from L. biga, span of horses), hence man of spirit, firm character, obstinate person.]
1. a person who holds blindly and intolerantly to a particular creed, opinion, etc.
2. a narrow-minded intolerant person.

big'ot-ry, n. [Fr. bigoterie, from bigot, a bigot, hypocrite.]
1. obstinate or blind attachment to a particular creed; unreasonable zeal in favor of a party, sect, or opinion; excessive prejudice; intolerance.

—from Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, deluxe 2nd ed.

Online Etymology Dictionary:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bigot

1590s, "sanctimonious person, religious hypocrite," from French bigot (12c.), of unknown origin. Earliest French use of the word is as the name of a people apparently in southern Gaul, which led to the now-doubtful, on phonetic grounds, theory that the word comes from Visigothus. The typical use in Old French seems to have been as a derogatory nickname for Normans, the old theory (not universally accepted) being that it springs from their frequent use of the Germanic oath bi God. But OED dismisses in a three-exclamation-mark fury one fanciful version of the "by god" theory as "absurdly incongruous with facts." At the end, not much is left standing except Spanish bigote "mustache," which also has been proposed but not explained, and the chief virtue of which as a source seems to be there is no evidence for or against it.

In support of the "by God" theory, as a surname Bigott, Bygott are attested in Normandy and in England from the 11c., and French name etymology sources (e.g. Dauzat) explain it as a derogatory name applied by the French to the Normans and representing "by god." The English were known as goddamns 200 years later in Joan of Arc's France, and during World War I Americans serving in France were said to be known as les sommobiches (see also son of a bitch). But the sense development in bigot is difficult to explain. According to Donkin, the modern use first appears in French 16c. This and the earliest English sense, "religious hypocrite," especially a female one, might have been influenced by beguine and the words that cluster around it. Sense extended 1680s to other than religious opinions.

Online Oxford English Dictionary: 

http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/18890?p=emailAAScdPm9BJKhA&d=18890

Alas, Alack

Housekeeping at Ana Verse (Page)

Entries de-posted at Ana Verse (saved in draft form):

75 titles or sub-titles in Texas Was Better (1985–1999) and Clarity or Enough (2000–2012).

02 entries related to The Argotist Online and OtherStream Facebook groups, August 1, 2012, posted at Ana Verse on August 10 and 13, 2012, and later de-posted at the request of Bobbi Lurie.

29 self-censored entries, as partly defined in "Writing in the Open," excerpted below.

07 entries of poems included in dog barks up a tree at the apple left in it under a deerslim moon, Dusie Kollektiv, 2008 (2009).

02 Index and List of Publications, now available as pages at Ana Verse.

Entries taken out of draft form may, depending on the age of the posts, republish to the top of the weblog.  I note the original posting dates in republished entries if the order shifts.

Posts that relate to my de-posting (saving in draft form) entries at Ana Verse, past and present:

¶—"Housekeeping," July 16, 2007:

http://annbogle.blogspot.com/2007/07/housecleaning.html

¶—"Writing in the Open," November 4, 2008:

 http://annbogle.blogspot.com/2008/11/writing-in-open.html

Excerpt:

 My reasons when I de-post:

1. Exigencies of print and online publication in journals and books
2. Distinction between self- and other publishing where other-publishing offers more esteem, privacy, and closure, closure in more than one sense: internet self-publishing is even more like hiding in the open than underground print publishing -- print books and journals have to be special-ordered or purchased at readings and book fairs and are therefore much more difficult to access
3. A quest for writing in privacy
4. Fear of revealing too much personal information
5. Hesitancy to identify people except in a formal way
6. Self-censorship of other types
7. Job seeking regardless of type of job
8. Timing and placement with regard to other posts
9. Other aesthetic considerations
10. Proprietary guardianship of writing as work

¶—"May is MeHeWriMo," May 1, 2009:

http://annbogle.blogspot.com/2009/04/may-is-mehemo.html

The Keratin Experience

In a message dated 2/9/2013 8:20:26 A.M. Central Standard Time, ljt@com writes: A Message for You from [LJT]:

Ann, I think this coat is totally you!!  It's so cute, wish they had my size!

Check out the following NORDSTROM.com selection(s) hand-picked by [LJT]:

Item: Fleurette Duffle Coat with Genuine Fox Fur Collar

http://shop.nordstrom.com/S/3333569?origin=sendtofriend&cm_ven=OrderCorrespondence&cm_cat=TEXTNORD&cm_pla=FriendEmail&cm_ite=575747

Click on the link(s) above for more details on the above item(s).

 
Dear Lena (first reference at Ana Verse) or Lana (second reference about a year later, my mistake), not her real name or names, LJT:

I tried on a Fleurette coat in Aubergine at home (shipped from Nordstrom) and even called the company in New York before ordering, regarding size, and the woman who works there (or owns the company?) said the coats run "true to size."  I was between a size 8 and 10.  I ordered both ($795 full price, no fur or leather trim) and returned both to Nordstrom at MOA.  The wool is nice, but the cut ran short in the waist on me and felt a little baggy at the small of the back, regardless of size.  I am surprised by the prices of wool coats (suddenly, this year?), quite high.  [My Nina Ricci pretty brown Merino wool original car-length coat with sheared beaver collar cost $450 on sale from $900 at Lord & Taylor in Houston in 1995.  My L&T charge card survived the b'cy in 1997 with a zero balance but expired without a L&T store here.  Lisa Pottratz's mother illustrated fashion for L&T from home in the '70s.  There is more to say about fertility, naming, and diabetes.]  I am so glad I kept the charcoal wool UGG coat (shearling collar), $385 on sale [November 2012], with its great quality and fit.  I guess manufacturers want a lot for fox fur trim suddenly, too?  I bought two thick cotton knit hats last year at Hoigaard's with little fox tufts at the tips: about $49 each.

How is it going?  I got a new haircut at Metropolis Salon.  Here's a pic I took of myself (in the middle of some night, after two dozen attempts to capture a nice photo):

That was before I cut my hair further myself, in the front (on both sides) including  bangs.  I left the back almost entirely alone.  Keith charged $108 for the cut and style (including my $20 tip) and to remove the chemically-mysterious-yet-I-believe-related-to-the-Keratin-treatment BEEHIVE that formed on January 4-6, 2013.  I did not ask Kelly for a whole or partial refund for the treatment application of November 21, 2012.  I saw her a week ago, the second time I went to the salon one full hour late for a consultation.  She had told me on the phone she had never heard of a Keratin beehive.  [She said a change in medication might cause the hair to knot.  I ran out of coffee early in January and didn't drink coffee, except one cup, for several weeks.  I also lost weight, not dieting, upon leaving my long-term service companionship.  That wall to the East formed of iron along the CST line.]  Only I, and to a lesser extent, Ned, know the exact details of what I did with my hair, shampoo, conditioner, water, diet, geographical location(s), social circumstances, medication(s), coffee, beer, glass or two of wine at Christmas, etc., that took place then.  Medical records kept by the psychiatrist (M.D. by definition) and pharmacist could establish a detail or two as well.  Let's assume that my stable regimen did not go to my hair at the exact moment a beehive hairdo started to form.  I think Keith may have claimed to somebody or other at Metropolis [not to me (objective form of the pronoun required there)] that I had not washed my hair in seven weeks, not true if so.  I washed it every week and a half-to-twelve days (as usual) and brushed it every day.

I may try to write an essay about the Keratin experience [including a passage about the white woman (prostitute, Jeff Hansen said) whom he and I saw at Red Dragon in Minneapolis in 2011, whose "bun" stood about sixteen inches or so above her head.  I would not have known then how she might have achieved "that look," but I was impressed.  A physical fight with other ethnically-divided women ensued indoors and may have escalated outside, away from my witness]. I have no photo of my beehive (six inches at its tallest, measured from the top and back of my head).  I felt there was no way for me to get a photo of what the bun felt like to the touch—a permanent bun I could neaten with clips.  Worn "down," it looked ragged (damaged color and texture, both).  Fully written, it might be a 3,000-word story of hair sacrifice.

I tried but could not get a good shot of my hair as it looks today (February 9, 2013).  I look fine in the mirror and window reflection and haggard in digital Blackberry shots.  Richard Avedon has been quoted as having said or written, "The camera doesn't lie."  It Mayberry R.F.D. that Tina Brown lies, however, since evidence that Avedon said or wrote that line, printed in The New Yorker, alongside a photo of him some year before he died in 2004, is now not easy or impossible to locate via Google.  My photogeneity is uneven in digital and film photography, both.

More a little later, hope your February is melting slowly.

Love, Ann

P.S. With your permission, I would like to post this email as an entry at my weblog, Ana Verse, subject to my own minor editing.  I will not use your name or email address, if so.

"I'll get back to you" I'll interpret as a "yes."

~AMB 

A later version of this letter appears at Fictionaut:

http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/the-keratin-experience

[I prepared this story post prior to LJT's response.  I sent it to her as an email 2/9/2013 4:44:57 P.M. Central Standard Time, and I know, by personal experience, that she checks her email rather infrequently.  Since today may be the only day I feel likely to fuss over this piece of writing, I called her, and she said, "Sure, honey."  I feel concerned by the charge of "self-plagiarism" leveled at Jonah Lehrer, a professional writer and journalist, by (named?) members in and of the mainstream press. For my purposes, I have practiced and believed that stating a dual-context (without identifying my email recipients by name) might be enough, and, to note, I do not expect writing or plagiarism, including of oneself, to be paid.]