Pomegranate juice thief walks home

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

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

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

Tilly Artaud

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?

Inaccrochable

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.]

Work on What Has Been Spoiled

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

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

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.

These females take no prisoners

Reading posts I've noticed that sometimes Women's Poetry Listserv members use the word "female" to designate "woman" and "females" for "women."  An adult female human being is a woman.  Woman is the generic.  Newspapers have ruled in style in favor of "woman" for decades.  I've noticed that many women avoid saying "woman" or "women" in favor of "gals," "ladies," "girls," "grrls."  Sometimes these women are poets.  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 designates a philosophy they are seeking not to define?  It seems while concerns over "essentialism" have increased in feminist poetics, a return to "female" as a noun has also increased.

My sentence-maker went out for lunch

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.

Discourses in public life

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.

They do if you pick them

"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.

"My weird"

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?

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.

Suffering is true to their gender

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."

There but for the grace of God go they

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

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

Country without a name

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

... 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.