Pomegranate juice thief walks home

http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/title

Elizabeth Karlin, M.D.

Hobby Lobby

Praise to Civil Liberties News, publication of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. I am scheduled to volunteer at the ACLU-MN booth at the Minnesota State Fair this year and am looking forward to it. Nevertheless, I feel out of the loop re: Hobby Lobby, a craft store chain. I read in an interfaith newsletter that Hobby Lobby had fired a woman worker who had requested unpaid leave when she was four months pregnant. That case was described by the interfaith newsletter as Hobby Lobby's religious hypocrisy. In general, I have had the question: Are employers required to pay for the birth of newborns? Birth is much more expensive than any form of birth control. In my days as a low-paid employee, $5/hour when minimum was about $3.50 and $18K/year, one job offer I received in the publishing industry in New York, two single-owner business employers informed me that their insurance premiums were $2K per year higher if they employed fertile women than premiums they paid for men. I wish the debated subject could focus on condoms, in frankness. Condoms are instantly reversible as birth control; they prevent the potential spread of sexually-transmissible infections; and they are mutually consensual. Users of condoms are aware that no conception has taken place. In human rights, a man and a woman may marry and bring forth a family. It is a civil right in the U.S. but not a human right (as far as I know) to raise a child singly without the knowledge of the other parent, the father in natural circumstances or either parent in clinical circumstances. I see Ruth Bader Ginsburg's photo floating the Internet. One wonders if she is actually agreeing to be represented in venues such as Salon or if her photo is merely in use as a symbol of "women's right to choose." Women's right to choose is rather bogus. Choice, as I think of it, has turned out to be suitable as the brand name of a dog food. Women disallowed to have children may be more like pets. Roe v. Wade means that the doctor decides and it seems unrelated to abortion's legality; it has been a form of gag order for women, who it is presumed have zero interest in bringing forth children. To me, belonging is a better basis for understanding how a natural family comes about: Two people meet and feel belonging, and a child takes place. Under the Affordable Care Act, must companies finance child birth, that is very expensive and may involve surgery and hospital stays? Is contraception merely a cheap way out of comprehensive reproductive health care? Is it truly the case that women are disinterested in becoming mothers? Is it truly the case that employers welcome women employees' opportunity to have children? Should the costs of child birth only be attached to the mother's health insurance policy with her employer? Please submit your ideas.

The Gift, short story

That's it. The rest is history. And history is never as interesting as what your imagination can give you. History is what you get when the projector gets stuck.

It turns out that art, like everything else, is what some people do for a living. Art, what passes for it, is a commodity. It is just one more thing to pay for, lug home with you, borrow, or steal—hurtar para dar por Dios, as it says in the dictionary.

If I could rouse any interest, I would start a support group for people committed to art. I would circulate a petition, start an internal movement to bust people out of the art hospital. I would get a witness to say that I were healthy enough to live on my own, to make a decent living. What is stopping me is thinking that I am bound to the commitment I made to art as a child.

One way to make something real is in solitary confinement. Some people walk with God and honor their commitments. Those people may live anywhere on Earth except in the limelight.

Lock-up, I queried. Where is lock-up?

I would not have asked where lock-up is had I known it would seem forensic. The first thing you find out in lock-up is that God exists. In other situations you could just dismiss this information. In lock-up that is impossible. The second thing you find out is that God is everywhere, even in you. Your job as an artist is to come up with a reasonable gift to present to God.

Most people who go into the art hospital never get out. They just get moved to more comfortable quarters. Some of them, the invalids and life-long convalescents, live on the deluxe wing. The worst thing is knowing that deep down I want to stay. I would show no sign of resistance if they offered me a room with a view. "Put the trophies over there," I would tell my students from my comfortable bed.

For about one month out of solitary I would have appreciators. There would be no question about it—I had served both God and man. After that, if I managed to do anything more, they would give me students. It is very strange, these students. They come from miles around to be put in the hospital with you. Most of them are starving and craven. Usually it is because they had a parent or step-parent who belonged in one hospital or another themselves but who managed to hold on by sheer will power to the world outside. Then values changed, and these offspring lost the wherewithal to define their own existence. There are millions and millions of them, and their numbers are growing. There will never be enough beds.

The easiest wholesale solution is for everyone to drink their gift to death. That way is the most popular, but it is not the only possibility.

If people were willing to open their minds a bit, they could find constructive uses for creative energy. They could leave the hospital, even for day trips, and no one would blame them for changing their minds. They could write to their congressmen. They could volunteer at shelters for the homeless; better yet, they could go on the road with Jimmy Carter and build habitats for humanity. They could sing in the church choir. They could grow a garden. They could raise their own children. We do not need as much art as we are making. There are many other things we need more.

Some people, women especially, go the sex route. They devote their ingenuity to making themselves as sexy as movie stars. Artists can never be worshipped as mindlessly as movie stars, but some of them come pretty close. Other artists, the men especially, sleep around or mulch up their brains on fame.

The very lucky few get shipped back to solitary confinement. Most of these do not know they are lucky, chosen. They think they are being punished for bad reviews. They think bad reviews cheat. They think good reviews tell the truth.

There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.

Of the inmates with windows, every year, one or two of them, the purest at heart, beg to be let back into the cell. They are afraid they might jump. That would be going beyond the call of duty, something no one might say. They say that they have learned their lesson, and they promise all the real powers-that-be that they will work harder this time. They sign statements to that effect and they apologize to their loved ones for the emotional and financial turmoil they have caused and will continue to cause until death. (In some of them, the very exemplary, this bad behavior will be held up as customary, even as tax-exempt.) They say goodbye to them and vow never to look outside themselves for companionship or diversion again. Of course, it does not last. Pretty soon someone or something better comes along.

They all have one thing in common. They discovered their gift in the first place because they needed a friend, so they made one up. They kept on making things up until they had a world. Now that they have real friends, and sex, you would think they could just let it rest, but they can’t. They still have something to prove, so they put their name on the waiting list to perform their very own, original talent shows in the seasick cafeteria.

Most of the shows are the same, except in detail. It is rare indeed when someone gets the wind whipping through your grapevine. These days most anything is acceptable as an offering—a stick of wood, a drum roll, a shitty conversation ya had with a friend. The ones who feel ashamed of their limitations almost quit.

It was better in the days before promotion, when having a gift meant something in Latin. In God, a token to His allness in your smallness. A simple nest egg.

(1991)

Published in Mad Hatters' Review, issue 10, 2008.

Strobe Genre, Utah!

Okay

Chibard dibu Niborth, the reason I love my homeland is cold weather. Thanks to Tiboniby's largesse, which toward me has been modest, the equivalent of $5 per hour as compared to Libindiba Feibeydiber-now-Sibullibiviban's base pay of $114 per calendar hour of that marriage, not counting her expenditures and property, and to Ibolgibae Kaybimibashnibikiboviba's (Gibolibodibets's) pay by Tiboniby of $1.3888 per breathing second of her pleasing and complete in-person company, her modest presence, even as she watches news on Russian-language cable TV at Tiboniby's apartment, and thanks to my ability to create plenty in a conscious yet frugal environment of equality, that to me is measure itself—es ist mir egal—I have established myself as a renter near Minneapolis. I lived too long and now must owe myself. Hispanic real estate brokers in Manhattan all refused to let me rent an apartment near Tiboniby. Ibolgibae Kiba and Kibathribine Cibi Diba Mibatribe already had apartments due to their Russian mob aliases. I had no famous lover. I feared famous people. As was wise, but due to no counsel, I had kept an avoidance of wealthy people but not of professionals. My favorite wealthy person, after I consented to let Tiboniby near me eleven years ago to ask my hand in marriage was not Tiboniby Sibandibers himself but Jiboe Fibox. Who is your favorite woman poet, or, to put it a different way, what is your favorite poem by a woman?  My favorite poet is H.D. A close and important American cousin of H.D.'s is Emily Dickinson. I used to sleep in a urine-soaked bed with Tiboniby. I loved Tiboniby more than I had loved even my grandmother Hazel whose den became home for my grandfather's speculative talk about the societal and familial subject alcoholism. John Berryman in his novel Recovery called Hazelden Howarden. My mother tells me, and I take her word for it, that Howards End is boring to read. My mother kept it in her car in case she had to wait. My mother graduated Phi Beta Kappa, U.W.-Madison, 1952. Sibam Chibauncibey said in his speech in the library at the Yale Club where I first met him that Wisconsin is one of the five great American universities, ahead even of Princeton. I supposed reluctantly that Princeton is soft as Macalester College is soft. A person could die just for having attended U.W.-Madison or Yale. Tiboniby denied knowing Manhattan kids Jibohn Wibendiber or Mibichibael Wibagniber or his childhood neighbor, Libisiba Fibox (not her maiden name). “What you have in common with these women,” Tiboniby said: “You and” Ibolgibae Kaybimibashnibikiboviba, Tiboniby's escort from Siberia married to two men concurrently, and one other of his 125 escorts since his marriage to Ibel Ibef Ibes rocked in 2001 and ended in 2003 when he got ill once, so that Ibel, of Mexican-American descent from California, could experience wealth independently, Kibathribine Cibi Diba Mibatribe, of Sydney, Australia, “... are smart.” As we lay together last, he spoke of his love for the 125 women, and my uterus prolapsed.

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

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.]

Happiness in Love

Slightly different version posted December 11, 2007, 00:26:00 CST:

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

Waylaid (1999)

Friday, March 23, 2007, 05:31:00 CDT:

Examples of fears I live with: You are a traveler. When I returned to my hometown, I started going to A.A. This was preprogrammed in me by a therapist who due to her religious background tried to require it of everyone in her clinical office who drank. I had been asked to go to a therapist due to “bipolar disorder,” something I was told I had though I didn’t have mood swings—rapid, horizontal thoughts followed by slow reactions. I had vertical liftoffs and low electrolytes. At its peak, I felt like a helium balloon that had stopped at the ceiling in my living room and drifted downward but did not deflate.

When you first learn of bipolar or other mental disorders, you are hit: The doctor believes you have a major mental illness for which there is no test or cure. Later, you realize more. Therapists make money, doctors do, pharmaceutical companies do. With one or two strikes against one and credits easily erased, could I—could anyone—emerge not-parked from that economic-underground-airport-tunnel system? Having friends helps, but what if you have low-balling, Hollywood-style friends? What if you or your friends have moved?

A.A. presupposes that newcomers to the group have done bad things to other people. They think it makes a better story instead of a worse one. On the whole, my life, as only I could have known it, defied drinking stereotypes. It had pleased me in remarkable ways. Once you agree to begin A.A., it is expected that you will stay amongst them for life. Here, except for pockets in the Midwest, people in general are TV-heads who rarely read except self-help and who show little appreciation for the arts.

There, meaning South, my drinking (mostly beer) was in the spirit of friendship. We went to an evening actor’s bar that was not violent and not a pick-up joint. Actors met there after rehearsal. There was a pool table, a jukebox, lit candles on small tables. No one had a car accident until once. Hardly anyone was stopped by police. I went there too often: That was what I had done. Worse, I didn’t know it might be lowbrow to go out more often than my friends or to go out alone. My friends didn’t know that my therapist disallowed boyfriends except hers. She expected me to desert my life for 12-Step rec rooms even before anyone had introduced cocaine. Celibacy was her idea of birth control, something we had had excellent instruction in as teenagers at the teen clinic where I had lived. I didn’t suspect her of these subtexts, but I felt vaguely defiant. I didn’t feel like watching TV after a day of grading papers and writing. In that mix of sports and religion, TV was what there was of virtue. I thought bars were nicer.

There were a few other “wrongs,” depending on how far A.A. wanted to take it. I had ever had sex without being married. Some of the A.A.s were having divorced “sober sex.” One of those, a self-regarding sex goddess and mother of two Asian-American children, had started dating a retired African-American football player while still married to her Chinese doctor husband. She had a friend in Hollywood, whose publicity photo she flashed at women’s dinners while urging sex on everyone. I believed her coaxing us was healthy, and she needed a team to keep her culturally challenging life as a single mom going; besides me, her team were single moms without teams. She was a realtor, who, like lawyers, made money at divorce. I was not a landowner. At first they pitied me for it. Later, they wanted to skewer me for it. Sex, as I realized not without embarrassment, was the privilege of divorced landholders. The group’s few marrieds slept in separate rooms.

Outside the story: my feminist approval of the realtor as a woman in business; my later sense of her pretense as Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct; my feelings of friendship for her and the other members of the group; my affair with a man whose wife had suggested it, who was herself, as I left out then, attracted to black men; his later decision to have children with a woman who was next in the group; my caretaking propensity for alcoholics, heightened after I left the meetings fully programmed; my failure to find other or paid work. (Writing is not work.)

The women, including me and except the sex goddess, had fallen to domestic violence. Those women were fat. Violence, including spiritual violence, was protected in the A.A. meeting. The men were universally passive about reports of it, and the women tried to be serene. I started to realize that the schisms between sex and sex and violence had contained hypocrisies related to being Catholic or to inter-religion, when I tried to leave. Without relapsing, I had a serious breakdown in my isolation. Many of my friends had been Catholic, and I had left myself little place to turn. My best friend, speaking long distance, called me a loser. She and her boyfriends—numerous and simultaneous—would be more successful and married. Her drinking would not lead to A.A.

When people demand a bad story, one with murders and suicides in it, ordinary sinners who had liked church as I had, might feel caught as under a lamp. I postulated that in our places, Jews and Catholics had been like the ink on the page, the words, the lines. Protestants had been like the spaces, the paper, the page. Protestants watched in the setting but not each other in the setting—we got to the point of staring straight ahead—quiet and forgetting to tell the story to our page. We were sheets. Some of us were trees that fell in the woods. We would tell the middle of the story, stories about purpose and the quiet in life, about age, about the long span between birth and death. They would tell stories about birth and death. They—?—would live well day to day, even happily, and had many friends, but nothing compared in pleasure to the day the switch came, a day to ditch friends.

My writing teacher wrote that the Holocaust (what I thought of) is not the only or not necessarily “the disaster” in Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. I learned from attending A.A. that recovery from A.A. is never possible.

A woman feels burdened to spend an hour with her friend since they are not men. Now, to write that with all the artistic command of language I ever thought I’d had.

Appears in slightly different form July 8, 2011 and April 20, 2014 at Fictionaut

WπHπAπT 2

by Ann Bogle

Could someone msg. me? I am lost. Gioia is establishment. My agreement to review Side/Berry's Outside Voices came before Berry's essay and companion responses appeared, that were met mostly with quiet. It occurred to me, as a reader, that the essay itself is quiet. Now it seems Side/Berry are closer to naming names than Berry does in the original essay and as Perloff does (to my content) in her response. I am not a self-identifying poet and not a poeticist. Argotist has issued my ebooks. Does that position my name or my writing against the avant garde poets and poeticists who Side/Berry say are to blame and for what? Prosetics is my term I put to use in 2001. Poets who formed the New Narrative in the 70s include writers/poets whose work I value a lot, yet they are in a type of poetics group surrounding narrative that seems to include writers/poets other than or unlike me. My idea of prosetics, since it turned out I was alone in it, is in practice and not a theory.

New Narrative I think is Acker, though it joined her more than she it [and] it seems she was friendly to it, and Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles?, and others, poets and poeticists, included in Gail Scott's edited essay collection called Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, published by Coach House in 2004, based on the archives of Narrativity, where I had posted a call for essays on prosetics in 2001, that went unanswered except by a graduate student studying fiction at Naropa. Mark Wallace had asked to co-edit, but the prosetics essay anthology I had envisioned stalled.

Later I started a movement to define experimental fiction called WπHπAπT, and the two men I invited in an email to join did not reply, and I did not follow up. The blog post I titled WπHπAπT is based on that email and [was] shielded from view at Ana Verse. It is not a manifesto but asks whether experimental fiction must include territory besides "nonlinear marginalized sex writing," as described in many reviews online of Biting the Error, reviews that turned out to be perhaps sales-sexy but incomplete in describing the book. WπHπAπT with its pi signs denotes the way the inquiry felt and follows in strategy those inventors in language I estimate highly. The Buffalo &Now had no panel on fiction. Eudora Welty as innovative writer I wanted to place first in my volume. It's on the notecard in "Hoss Men" in my ebook Jeffrey Side pub'd at Argotist in '10. Belladonna had a conference in NY in '09 including 100 participants and turned down "Hoss Men" for inclusion, saying that it had sparked lively discussion (in email? in person?) on the panel, who decided that I (Ann Bogle) didn't know what the essay was about. I wrote it in New York in '08 and moved in '09 to my birthplace in Minnesota. Ben Marcus wrote about experimental fiction in Harper's in 2005.

July 24, 2012

Appears at Fictionaut:

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Hoss Men at Fictionaut

Excerpt from Hoss Men at Fictionaut:

Yesterday (the day after “next day”):

           The hoss men selected one natural light blonde and two Asian-brunettes for young motherhood and timely publishing.  I was a dark Swedish blonde—not gone gray—with a total of four fiancés and a Scottish name meaning “ghost.”  “Fiancé” could land a redhead a teaching post, but could it land her a son-book on deadline?

            It came down to fathers and schools, to alma mater and Dad.