The Cool Report

August 3, 2006

another girl to figure out (2)

no reason to break here/

want to tell her kinship to it

blue save them walked past

phone legs of dead Lady

black woman save them

victim standing just inside

betrayed her gray cherry

comfortable guilty long name

configuration of all mother

beautiful shades of protective

touches head lay nose whites

know French therapy bill

college man strong enough

August 3, 2006

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

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

Again, I apologize.

Apologize

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

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

So for now, I just forget about it.

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

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

August 2, 2006

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

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

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

August 2, 2006

another girl to figure out

no reason to break here

want to tell her kinship to it

blue save them walked past

phone legs of dead Lady

black woman save them

standing just inside

betrayed me gray cherry

guilty long name

configuration of all mother

beautiful shades of protective touches

head lay whites

nose know French

therapy bill college

man gone me

strong enough heart

August 2, 2006

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

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

Re: Forward these remarks pussy ass:

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

August 2, 2006

Progress Report

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

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

Good wishes.

July 28, 2006

Cool

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

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

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

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

Popular

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

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

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

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

July 27, 2006

Error on Ron Silliman's Blog

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

July 26, 2006

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

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

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

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

June 29, 2006

Economic Messages

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

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

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

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

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

June 24, 2006

Praise to Vernon Frazer for his letter.

Thanks to mIEKAL aND for asking, "how many potato peelers and window washers are there on this list?"

Hats to Ken Wolman, a fellow SUNYionian.

Regards to the writer on SSI, the winner who worked as a custodian, and all those who write because they say they have to and feel that economic questioning, necessity, and reality make for reasonable debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 22, 2006

Dear bloggers and visitors to blogs,

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 21, 2006

re: feminists with low-cut blouses

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

sumaurer@COM writes:

> marfa and austin

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

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

May 26, 2006

Speak Then Read

What you never had

for your sorrow

for the work you do

Got you love enough

to be content?

Who but you

can argue for yourself?

I've got the troubles

of mine to suffer too.

We are in a boat alike

When we say yes

We are in a boat alike.

. . .

Speek den Reed

Wut ne had yoo

fore yer sarro

fore de work yoo doo

Gott yoo luv

eenuf fore to bee

cuntent?

hoo but yoo kan

argyoo fore yoreself

ai gott de trubbels uv

mine too suffer too

wee arr inn a bote alike

wenn wee say yess

wee arr inn a bote alike

(Madison, WI, 1982)

Subj:re:doing time ...

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

. . .

The 180-page version might include:

1. Paul Wellstone's plane crash in October 2002 shortly before the election, Norm Coleman's win.

2. My mother an election judge.

3. My absentee ballot misrouted and not counted in 2008.

4. My correspondence with the alcohol-beat reporter in Toledo, Ohio, a woman, the only reporter in the nation to cover ankle bracelet.

5. Inmates in the jail longer than nine days required to test for TB, not allowed to test if there for less than nine days. Tine test at my doctor.

6. Three-story barbed wire fence outside the window.

7. Hay mattress.

8. Inmates in line three times a day to get medications and see the nurse.

9. The nude, calisthenic, rectal search (and roadside ballet wearing sueded French black lace bell bottoms).

10. Prison blues and grays.

11. The volunteer woman chaplain who asked, "Did you go to college, Ann?" during a board game about life choices. "I finished three times," I said.

12. The beautiful and proud-of-breadwinning prostitute who asked to eat at my table.

13. Weak coffee in the morning, strong coffee at night.

14. The dirty night guard: the infrared light in the eye.

15. Sugar packets smuggled and stashed.

16. Milk for no one, pregnant women.

17. Blue ink on the ham.

18. The T.V. booming.

19. The withdrawal from nicotine.

20. Gum in the hourglass. Clock hand not moving.

21. The woman who asked, "Are you mixed?" in a room big with laughter. Scottish, English, Swedish.

22. Downturned hands and dialect: m'fuh.

23. Cornrowing and pink curlers.

24. Treatment programs cancelled due to budget cuts, so the women could not serve time and get treatment concurrently.

25. I had been arrested twice, taken three times to a police station in my hometown for drinking one beer more than the legal limit. The first time I was 15 and had returned from a school trip to Germany. I had walked out to the park with a can of beer to read Marco Popp's and Robert Raithel's love letters.

26. It was a clinical mistake to be on an SSRI (it caused haircutting).

27. The FBI report returned inconclusive when I fingerprint tested at Girls Write Now in New York in 2008.

28. One of the two charges on my record might have been dropped but the law suddenly changed.

29. Charges: petty misdemeanor for the football player with marijuana in his car who had pushed the woman meter reader half a block on the hood of his Lexus.

30. My lawyer, the former prosecutor with political ambition.

31. Vikings.

32. Vanguard Group.

33. Clay Brown's list.

34. Rollicking Irish happy hour across from the probation office.

35. "Whiskey" plates.

36. Bar soap, Bible, toothbrush in brown paper bag.

37. Stubby pencil.

38. Library shelf hour.

39. Naming the woman judges. (Judges stand election.)

40. Arrest scenes and detailed reports.

Lolita: a pyramid story

My story, paraphrased in italics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the 300th entry at Ana Verse.

Sylvia Plath's "I Am Vertical"

As an experiment I have opened to a random page in Sylvia Plath's The Collected Poems (New York: Harper's and Row, 1981). The volume encompasses four collections of poetry: The Colossus, Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees (all copyright dates 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981). She died in 1963 at the age of 30. Four of the poems in the collection originally appeared in The American Poetry Review and four in The New York Times Book Review. I opened randomly to page 162, poem numbered 143: "I Am Vertical" (28 March 1961):

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam a new leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them --
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

Two ten-line stanzas, pentameter couplets in the first stanza, mostly longer couplet lines in the second. If someone knows how to describe this metrically, or Plath's formalism, please do.

[Tiel Aisha Ansari writes, "If I had to describe this poem in formal terms, I think I'd say it's made up of two ten-line stanzas of unmetered slant-rhyme (very slant) couplets. There's a distinctive rhythm there but it doesn't answer to any metrical description."]

I wanted to see by way of this experiment, what I'd find in a randomly chosen poem. "Strewing" is the precise word. As I see it, it is a stirring but quiet nature poem that premeditates a passing -- or (past-)blooming -- death.

Here is a poem I wrote while consciously studying Plath in 1985 or 1986. I was 23 or 24 and working at a veterinary clinic after college. I remember working very hard on the poem while not approving of myself for cutting after her pattern.

Portrait of a House Guest

They stuck her there in the spare
dank corner, sheets like hers
spread out: folding roses,
winter daisies, yellow red

learned flower forms. Her
pale hair has wings,
independent movement, she has
Saturn eyes, Italian.

Reading under leafless trees
after a day grown fatter
they find her red, grazing
wool scarf. Like ashes

she catches them, stutters,
(it's part of her art),
"Let's cook when we're ready."
They never leave her,

the pale trusted nose,
but she's turning
like hookworm or maple leaf
wrinkled, trammeled, gold.

If something were suddenly to happen to end my life, and if someone going through my files put her or his hand randomly on this poem, I would (in my absence) feel reasonably at ease. The poem doesn't represent my writing 23 years later, but it represents my poetry then. There's no note to explain that I was studying Plath in the poem. What I have are letters -- sent and unsent -- not a diary. That I was studying Plath is not something I would have written to anyone then, but something my manfriend could see me doing at the (horizontal) door we used for a table. He might not recall it but like most readers recall the biography.

I avoided her biography in the sense that I was afraid to marry and have children, though I wanted to. I deliberately set out to have a career in teaching cw, based on my familiarity with another famous younger writer (not suicidal, socially or actually) who had done that.

That I felt uncomfortable patterning my work after Sylvia Plath's or other women writers' work as I later felt and continued to feel and to dodge them while reserving affection for their writing suggests their influence in a wider way. Is it a sign that a writer is "major" to wish to stay out of her path? As if being influenced by her were a proof of her magnitude. As if being influenced were in some way a show of the one's originality and the other's lack of it. There may be, even then, a depth to the reading that perceives originality.

Plath's novel The Bell Jar and her Journals further extend her body of work -- the journals alone seem "major."

[This entry is a reply to Annie Finch's query on the Women's Poetry Listserv. re: Sylvia Plath's standing as a "major" poet then under discussion at Harriet Blog.  Christine Hamm plans to include this essay in an anthology about Plath's poetry not centered on her suicide.  Slightly revised version appears at Fictionaut.]

Camille Claudel

L.H. would not remember this bec. she was not in school w/ us, but I had taken one look at B.P. and said, "no thank you" when the other graduate students urged me to believe that he would or could make or break our careers. A. says I like alcoholics best; here was one I didn't seem to like. He was an ad man from NY, and, as it turned out, not a very talented poet. I have a stubborn streak. Perhaps B.P. made it for E.W. but broke it for the rest of us. Who among us is tenured? E.W. B.P. is E.W.'s literary executor. Is T.L. tenured? Did T.L. go through B.P.? A. and R.H. say T.L. is a sociopath. Is T.L. "missing"? T.L. got A. her "job." Is M.M. still "missing"? Why did D.M. and M.M. and A.B. avoid drugs or not encounter them until 1993 – into their 30s? What was going on in 1993? That's when I met G. and saw A. there in her cocktail dress. G. was on coke in high school. A. reminds us that T.L.'s mother was schizophrenic. Am I still missing something? Was I "missing"? I was at home not writing. The therapist said repeatedly to write for therapy only, but it was counter to training, so I sat. Later I wrote about that. Six days at the psych. hospital in Houston, so I missed a few conversations. Do the women who published books remember B.P.? L.M. may be tenured. B.P. was after her time. Is my forgetting B.P. why I said the other day that I have a life, not a career -- I have a life, not a cigarette and coffee sobriety?

T. called B.P. the other day and put us on the phone together. We talked about squirrels. I told him that I was making a chapbook for someone in a chapbook collective, and he said that that sounded "creative." Does it? I'm just dropping someone else's work at the printer and paying for it. I'm not to the point of asking B.P. to read my poems.

Y'all may have heard A. say that only one of the poems in my present chapbook, my second, the one called "Borgo Was 29 on His Birthday" is glad to be female. A. likes that poem because it has the word "consumerism" in it, my suspicion, not because it is glad to be female. The female speaker remembers for him bec. he forgets -- is remembering female? and forgetting male? I thought the rememberer in "Head" enjoys watching him from his ceiling -- the man in the poem, who is stoned, yet atoned, in his 10th step, exactly where he started. A.'s husband likes my vanity poem, the one I wrote in 1983 but did not submit or buy until many years later, when I ordered in hardcover for my mother. My first published poem. I remember when I presented it to my mother, I said, "This is not prestigious." That vanity press had gotten even more flack than usual because with W.D. Snodgrass at the helm, and larger cash prizes than most prestigious grants, people might make the mistake of thinking it was prestigious. She laughed because she liked it, anyway. Touch of Tomorrow is the name of the volume.

Gals. Girls. Ladies. T. can't pronounce the plural and says "woman" for "women." L., my former "hick" friend whom A. met, says "gals." So she sings but doesn't write. She sings a drastically deep and sonorous form of the blues and tells everyone to kiss her white ass. She's 5'2" and 105 pounds – wh. is not fat, by the way. She dropped out of college at 79 pounds. She remembers witnessing the rape of her poodle when she was young by a much larger dog, a mutt. Then Coco had one baby. L.'s nose is African like my green eyes. She gets Brazilians. She doesn't like the Jewish people due to the day the school canceled Christmas. She can't forget it. She cried over it when she told the story to her Jewish woman friend, a bartender, who couldn't get enough of her. Many alcoholics in L.'s clan. Her dad was in the bar equipment and the bar business. He died at 32 of a heart attack, but some of the kids said he'd been shot at the airport. She is Catholic/Lutheran but nothing really, which is why it jolted her not to worship Christmas at school. It jolted me less, and I loved the dredel song. We went to Congregational church and had church music there, and my father was in the choir -- these two men years later, Mr. Soules, who'd had a brain tumor that had left a stitch near his mouth, and my father, Jack Bogle (not of Vanguard but of Gillette), whose prostate cancer had left him bereft but not without strength for the distance. He died in 1992, six months after my trip to the psych. ward and the same year B.P. got to Houston. His hair was gorgeous and shiny and jet black. And his father was of Scottish parents and brown.

When C. fantasized about mental hospitals, it was the gothic type that she'd seen in Camille Claudel. When A. dreams of it, it is what? The woman the AA group stoned to a pulp was Jewish. She'd been to Bellevue in high school for downers she'd bought on 14th St. after early rapes. My family went to all lengths to protect her from her violent husband. She ended up "relapsing" on drugs she'd never used before 19 years of AA, heroin for one. T. brags about heroin. He enacts shooting up. Does anyone go to NA? Is NA just plain out of style? I agreed to go once with a schizophrenic woman pot smoker from AA. Everyone was 17 years old. One man was 40. I said very nervously in that crowd something I wouldn't say today except at an AA meeting -- I was an alcoholic.

Hoss Men (in reverse)

An Essay in Prosetics

hoss: a survey that provides monthly and quarterly statistics on new single-family non-farm house sales

Oct. 31

Halloween*

My first thought of the war, then, was of "Israel," but I abandoned the thought when the war opened in favor of "gasoline." I had months before that written a short story, "Texas Was Better" -- in September 1990 before the war -- that begins with a gasoline shortage for boaters. I wrote the story within days of my arrival to Texas from New York in the vein of "what I did on my summer vacation," but I had, in fact, moved to Texas and was writing as a recent journalist in the vein of a reporter touching foot in a place and writing about it. The "news" in the story is of gasoline prices going up; the rest is a fiction, a poetical investigation of private life, especially of "daydreams."

- 30 -

Oct. 30

Garrison

New Year's Eve-to-New Year's Day, 1991.

"In Israel, a garrison unit (Hebrew: חיל מצב; cheil matzav) is a regular unit defending a specified zone such as a city, a province, a castle or fortress, or even a single building."

T.C., her mother and I were drinking champagne by the bottle. We had drunk a case of it. We were in for the night, not driving. Outside it was cold, many degrees below zero; with the windchill it was 45 below. The doorbell rang. The dogs barked. T.C.'s mother, G.C., let them in. One of the men was T.C.'s first sex partner in high school. It could take a day to remember his name, and I might confuse him with someone else in high school, create a false attribution. I could place a call to get his name, but I am no longer on friendly terms with T.C. I don't recall his name, but it was he, the same jock from high school who had broken her. She was not a jock. The nameless jock was tailgated by P.S., a different P.S. than one previously mentioned in this story, not to confuse them. P.S. had been my secret admirer in junior high. He had sent me a box of chocolates on Valentine's Day in 7th-9th grade. The nameless jock was in high spirits because he was in the Air Force, about to be deployed to fly a mission over Iraq. He and T.C. hightailed it upstairs, and I stayed downstairs saying "no" to P.S. We must have been pretty drunk. We must have sat there for two hours. I didn't want to drive in that weather at that hour. P.S. wouldn't take "no" for an answer, so I left. I drove three miles before the car stopped groaning in the cold. I thought of the word "garrison." I thought it was on her part like sleeping with the enemy. It was unclear who the enemy was. The enemy was not our military. Knowing her, she thought it was sex in defense of Israel. I thought in her horniness she had not had a choice; I thought in my lack of horniness I had had a choice. It was the first I had heard of a mission over Iraq.

Oct. 29

1991 mixed-genre multi-genre intergenre intragenre hybrid genre attention span reader multimedia audio video CD perfect-bound saddle-stitched folio alternative book fair ABR Rain Taxi innovative style form friction process product

Oct. 27

one light bed fink helmet rose

one
light
bed
fink
helmet
rose

Guidelines (1984-2008):

"old school" wait single submissions solicited unsolicited rejection slip form rejection slip written rejection acceptance word count deadline S.A.S.E. postage envelope street address postman post office contract assistant editor guest-editor genre editor editor publisher Gordon Lish The Quarterly agent William Maxwell literary journal George Plimpton Paris Review magazine nom de plume The New Yorker Daniel Menaker New York Times Book Review Harvard Publishing Institute M.F.K. Fisher's "war cake" Virginia Woolf H.D. Christa Wolf Margaret Atwood Grace Paley Adelaide Morris Nineteen New American Poets of the Golden Gate Lorrie Moore J. S. Marcus Knopf small house large house vanity press mss. double-spaced 12-pt. nlqr nlqs Times New Roman floppy disk word-processor Word Perfect cut-and-paste pencil imagination pagination margins draft revision proofs I.B.M. Selectric typewriter Writer's Market advance royalties subsidiary rights first North American rights copyright Lillian Hellman Mina Loy e.e. cummings Theodore Dreiser Gertrude Stein Theodore Roethke Emily Dickinson Sylvia Plath William Carlos Williams Elsa Baronin von Freytag Loringhoven Jane Bowles Gregory Corso Kenneth Rexroth Ivan Turgenev James Joyce D.H. Lawrence The World Split Open J.D. Salinger Beats Dada Alexander Cockburn T.S. Eliot Bloomsbury Group Anais Nin William Burroughs Stephen King Grey Gardens International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses mIEKAL aND Xerox independent press Pushcart Prize micropress L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Bruce Andrews Lyn Hejinian Leslie Scalapino Ron Silliman creative writing program Iowa Cornell Stanford Sarah Lawrence Johns Hopkins U-Mass. Buffalo S.U.N.Y. U. of H. Ph.D. M.F.A. B.A. M.A. M.L.A. A.W.P. J.I.L. Ch.H.Ed. canon theory abstract concrete ethnopoetics Jerome Rothenberg Pierre Joris Larry Woiwode MSS. Robert Bly Allen Ginsberg Robert Creeley Amiri Baraka Naropa Binghamton Community Poets Eudora Welty Anton Chekhov William Shakespeare Sherwood Anderson multiple submissions multi-submissions Timothy Liu Amy Hempel Lydia Davis Linda Gregg contest fee contest judge grant application writing retreat writing seminar writer's colony conference convention typography minimalism maximalism pomo experimental conventional collaboration text font illustration cover design author photo writer poet poem long poem series poem epic poem letters hard cover paperback soft cover anthology book release party publicity movie rights David Kay book tour poetry reading fiction reading book signing meet the author Marguerite Duras Clarice Lispector Jean Rhys Donald Barthelme bookstore independent bookstore chain bookstore Amazon Bookstore publishing collective distribution mass market trade paperback chapbook novel novella flash fiction prose poem short story memoir autobiography letters creative nonfiction literary genre "stuff" Jim Robison Rosellen Brown contacts family partners lovers friends newspaper paper weight black pen blue pen red pen PEN read submissions reading period fall semester spring semester winter quarter summer quarter trimester international translation Nobel Pulitzer Guggenheim Mac Arthur N.E.A. fellowship grant St. Mark's Poetry Project Anne Waldman Woodland Pattern Laurie Anderson Diverse Works Fiction International Harold Jaffe Washington Review Mark Wallace Black Ice Ron Sukenick The Loft spoken word slam Richard Howard Alice Quinn C. Michael Curtis Rust Hills children's books women's studies African-American studies Asian-American studies Hispanic Studies American studies comparative literature English politically correct multicultural Macintosh Apple I.B.M. P.C. name recognition full-length member dues AOL url disability Chaim Uri Bob Dylan Leo Kottke electronic submissions paper submissions email address Amazon Lulu SPD Minnesota Literature Newsletter Open Book Sid Farrar Maria Damon Hannah Weiner website weblog WOMPO Poetics Wryting-L Alan Sondheim listservs Michel de Montaigne Kathy Acker has died distribution webmaster d.i.y. copyleft download print-on-demand podcast mp3 email Facebook-friends Bowery Poetry Club Bob Holman Mad Hatters' Review Carol Novack Big Bridge Vernon Frazer DVD FC2 ebr epc Orono Rod Smith James Tate John Ashbery Jean Valentine Adam Fieled poetics prosetics vispo Sheila E. Murphy Charles Bernstein Amy King Lee Ann Brown Sean Killian litmus test barter at-cost favors fashion model commercial model community model

(600 words)

Sunday, Oct. 26:

rose helmet fink bed light one

Oct. 25 (cont'd):

rose
helmet
fink
bed
light
one

Submission guidelines:

1984-2008

[paragraph]

Oct. 25 (cont'd):

My chapbook in the underground market is a "book" at 30 pp. with color art. She had asked, how are you "there" (on the internet), not are you late, nor why are you here, nor what are you, as the square-faced lady had said on Halloween*. 56, the traveler. 22, grace. Fiction, I said, not meaning it.

Oct. 25:

Litmus

Last night a group of poets who thought my name was Alison or Susie invited me to eat with them at a Ukrainian restaurant. It was my duty as their guest to remember one fact and "divulge" it regarding my publishing assets. The obvious, though it slipped my attention, is a poem I had recited at a gallery in the Bronx that is to be translated to Ukrainian. I had momentarily forgotten it. The woman with a farmer girl's blond braids whom I knew by her name and A.S.'s endorsement let me know at table -- there were six of us -- that I have an internet "presence" that extends beyond explicable borders considering I don't "have" a book. I "have" a chapbook, I told her stupidly, joyously. Later I compared our internet presences at Google -- hers is vast compared to mine and pertains to two books that I could readily locate. She is a visual artist who is also a poet and disagrees with the academic study of poetry. I ought to have praised her for her letter and poem; instead I had praised her past revealed in her letter. I feel like telling her now about the town of La Crosse and the Tom Waits song about heaven. I feel like praising Truck for not showing; I had not shown for a reading in St. Paul and compared it to Arthur Craven's disappearance. I rarely meet someone in NY who is not a Christian-Buddhist-atheist. The poetry hidden in the underground poetry market sounds gray through a cave of filtered light. The "difference" between internet and "print" is transition.

Oct. 24:

It had been lost on me that shoes from Latin America were not available for sale but cocaine was -- this was the 1990s; or had cocaine been replaced by speed manufactured in people's houses -- pictures of chemical explosions were on the news; young people had burned their skin. One young man posed under a portrait of Jesus. One young woman's skin would never repair. Her face and body would always look like that -- an unmade bed. It was a drug war after the fact. It was the war of a generation, but who knew which generation or what the sides were? Was it Colombia flaming the U.S. with a forest fire of addiction? Was it Canada using the internet to deluge the U.S. with prescription drugs without a prescription? Had it been the C.I.A. turning its back on crack cocaine manufacture in California while Honduran exiles sent millions in proceeds to the Nicaraguan contras? Was it a war against blacks and poor whites to help stoke the military and the burgeoning prison complex? John Kerry had stood up to the Senate, but he stood alone. When I voted for him, it was with adoration. "My Crush on Daniel Ortega."

Let's talk about "academic unemployment" for writers. Free speech was porn. "I'm sure you'll have a very interesting novel about academic unemployment," the agency in Minnesota had written about the story about Frederika, the academic in the novel. "What do you want to be, a rogue journalist?" someone else had asked later when I had applied newspaper editing to writing on the internet. He had published a story in The Washington Post when he was nineteen, a white Republican -- from a political family -- at school at Howard in D.C. He dropped out of college to do drugs. Now decades later he was bullying people at A.A. in PA, a secular Republican opposed to the welfare state, to fat on people's bodies, and to bipolar disorder, an insurance salesman whose goal was to renovate his farm house and work three days a year. I never met him, but that's where I sent the beaver.

My short story collection had been returned nine times. It had had the following titles: Table-Talk in 1988; "Hymen" and other stories; Hogging the Lady; The Universal Girl for It, and in 2000, Institute of Tut. I finally stopped sending it when FC2 rejected it.

Fax the Beaver was its last, secret title. The beaver is a dirty trick, and it belongs on the index card. All the 21 stories in the collection have found separate "homes," as people say in publishing (that and "shepherd," as if publishing were a gathering of Jews for Jesus), except one about young writers called "Raisins," one about childhood called "The Hostage," and one about M.K. called "Hymen."

"Hymen" ran through workshop three times. It was another writer's interview piece; it was becoming boiler plate for a textbook. Later it was edited until it was a story about anti-semitism instead of a story about rednecks in upstate NY, egalitarian rednecks who were vigilantes for choice. That reader's fear was of the hinterlands. One could hardly blame her that she had not read much in "the paper" about redneck vigilantes for choice nor met one; in fact, she didn't read the paper, the paper once wrote.

Oct. 23:

After I had left school, I reflected that what I knew of the business I could write on an index card. I had heard about three deals.

The trails in my hometown are marked by signs with universal symbols on them, rather than words. One winter day, when it was bright like spring, and the snow was shrinking in its piles by the road, I returned from the mall on a mission: I had bought ivory gloves, a hat, and a ring. I had written a long story about a young academic in Houston who takes up with a rock 'n' roller instead of the man who had offered to marry her, the one who was more like her, because sex with the rock ‘n’ roller was better and more often. In bed with him one day, she realized that he might lie there indefinitely reflecting lyrically about China – the year was 1997 – but not buy her an engagement ring, that he would more likely buy her an ice cream. Her school, she realized, might not pay her, and she’d have to pay herself, buy her own shoes from Latin America (she said). The young academic in the story is a poet who rarely writes poems, not a novelist. By then I knew that fictions have a way of coming true -- a compelling argument for carefulness, one that teachers didn’t elaborate due to fear of seeming religious. On the index card about the business, I could have written “truth is stranger than fiction,” but even the tow truck driver might know that. Why go to expensive schools? After I had completed the beginning of the story, I set out to true it by buying items mentioned in the story – shoes from Latin America, for example, a diamond. I turned over every shoe in the women’s shoe department at the downtown Dayton’s – all of them made in Italy – when the clerk, acting suspicious, came over to supervise me. I ended up buying a shiny pair of Italian black oxfords for $163. I bought diamond earrings next, a half carat, for $285, reduced from $425. It was my lucky day, the jewelry saleswoman said, and she was almost right. Deals were usually kept private, with little mention of money; these were not listings for Publisher’s Weekly. I still hadn’t bought the ring, the engagement ring that no man in my real life had seen fit to buy, concerned as he was that it should cost two months’ salary. On the next leg of the mission, I bought a spring stone and diamond ring at the flea market at the mall. I paid $287 for it, reduced from $325. And I bought the ivory gloves and hat. Then I drove in a blaze of sun down the horse trail. I had not noticed the triangular orange sign with the picture of a horse on it. The car bottomed out at the bottom of the first hill, and I walked two miles home, wearing the hat – a woven one that felt like a basket on my head – the ivory gloves and under it the ring. The police were at my house two minutes after I got there, and I had to explain to them how I’d missed seeing the horse sign. Long story short -- I never finished the other story as a novel -- the sun down, I tipped the tow truck driver $15.

Later the same day (Oct. 21):

V., I gave version 2 (27 pp.) a rest. This is the distillation of 300 pages sans any previously published sections. It has proven to be a pliable form -- as I re-read, I'm riveted (even though I wrote it) until I get to a section about Australian birds and neurosis followed by the lake -- the whole lake at a glance or that one fish -- and "The Dream" and the rest. These are necessary passages (I assume, based on the fact that I edited cautiously in '94 in creating a distillation), but that's where I flag -- around 20 pp. or so. Is it me or did you flag there in reading it, too? I ask because I'd like to keep working it a while if there's still a little time. The other 270 or so pages are in MN, and this is the second not the first time I wrote so long and left out so much. I suppose it's a rant -- it degenerates and becomes proof of inhumility and ignorance of very large patterns in the world (induction) as a direct response to being in isolation and eventually to breaking down, etc. As a proof it is sort of interesting, I supposed then, but I doubted people might actually follow it as such and just notice "bad writing." Something reminded me of this recently when I read Tao Lin's passages from a recent book and could see how transparent and innocent and unaffected and mad the voice was -- it's not that he's a lousy writer at all but the loneness of the composition and the ambition of the project that created it. If you have a chance, please offer editing ideas for the excerpts of WOWHBS I sent you, and I'll try to shape it w/o leaping out of the chronological design underlying the full version.

Today (Oct. 21):

We didn't meet as a group today to discuss and critique the novel and long poem because everyone was writing poetics papers on deadline, leaving me to wonder about the art and practice of writers reading (again). The long poem veils its willingness to be about the poet herself, and like many novels under 300 pages (about the writer under 30) this seems like a long story.

Day of a birthday (Oct. 15):

Barthelme had picked GW as best, GW, not GWH. A group of men arranged to get the best of his seven novels into print. They invested in hardcover. His daughter was already in college by then, his ex- still the subject of controversy if his name arose: I had always thought she was "smart." All right, some of the women had been strippers, but the ones we knew were smart. There was an audience for it, for stripping. I had never been there, to a men's club; later I queried in my hometown -- no writers -- about strip joints. Four had double-dated as marrieds there. There were strict laws in MN about the width of the panty fabric. No panty, then a plexiglass window separated patrons from the stripper. I asked to go to one, and P. took me. He was from California. The drinks were expensive and abrasive. Men who looked like they'd been beaten with the pole sat ringside beside women who looked like Henrietta Stackpole. This was before I had bought clogs, shortened my hair, and grown my hips and thighs. I stood there skinny-as-a-half in "big hair," ankle boots, and black eyeliner. P. was in radio, not books. He had a sense of humor. I was researching a different man for a novel.

Today (Oct. 14):

I suggest that we discuss L.'s piece as a whole on Oct. 21 and A.'s novel as a whole on Oct. 28 (or later); that will give me a chance to get A.'s whole novel from her. I have chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 12. A. gave me chapters a few years ago in MN (wh. may have changed since then) and another set of chapters -- T. says it is chaps 1-4 -- which she suggested I pass to T. over the summer. How many chapters are there? It's 350 pp. or so, right?

I'm getting tense as I write this because I also have C.N.'s rapidly changing and unfinished new novel parked on my hard drive and T.L.'s experimental novel. I would consider referring the two of them for an experimental "group." I'm also supposed to work as editor for two journals and single-handedly publish a chapbook; I haven't heard a word from my own chapbook "publisher" in the collective, and I haven't been hired for this kind of work in years.

The method for novel that I learned from Woiwode is to write straight through once in pencil, without (you or anyone else) reading or rereading it, before rewriting -- three months or so for a 350 pp. first draft. To rewrite as many times as needed. To work on the next book while waiting to hear from editors. In the workshop at Binghamton, we met weekly as a group to discuss praxis in a highly focused way without "workshopping" chapters. Larry later read & line-edited all the novels; we heard read aloud every chap. 1 at semester's end. Then we arranged with individuals to read next drafts as we liked. It was the only novel workshop in the country at the time ('87) besides Kesey's at Eugene in collaborative novel.

Gardner had died; he was no experimentalist nor was he short-shrift. People downstate thought "suicide"; everyone upstate knew it was a fluke motorcycle accident, word spelled in Texas with an "x."

Agents, I have little idea. Woiwode supported his family in the 60s by publishing in The NYer (his friends were De Niro and Barthelme), so perhaps there was little trouble in his finding one. E.W. met his at a bar. He publishes in Paris and Texas and just got his movie deal. L.R. sold her first novel w/o an agent and didn't recommend it. B. met "my" agent at a bar, but that agent and so many others didn't want short stories or novellas.

Virginia Woolf wrote her novels in the morning and edited her morning's work in the afternoon. Also, they self-published as Hogarth Press. How much is "500 pounds" in today's dollars? A room of one's own -- with a lock from the inside not the outside as in psych hospitals -- or no lock needed? Angel At My Table.

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 fiances and a Scottish name meaning "ghost"; "fiance" 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.

The day after that (after "next day"):

The long interview referenced childbearing. A son before 30 meant two contracts.

Same day (as "next day"):

What I mean is: you -- one -- could go it on your own, research the mechanics of printing, hire or appoint an editor, see about distribution or wait for someone to ask you, someone kind with a good disposition, someone adept at handling her own affairs; you could litmus test her or more likely, she, you, about the Palestinians. "My tobacconist is one. His wife is from Jordan." Are there K-marts in Jordan? Can you see Jordan from your house? You could try a position. You could test her on "post-modern*ism*." You could try a translation. You could post it.

Next day:

A few of our compadres in Barthelme's school were "waiting" to walk through the door of the "establishment." A car from the service would escort them. Barthelme had died. Someone said talent was not enough. I said if a single thing could be enough, talent then. The quiet surrounding the elections was the quiet of a library or the quiet of the secret service. Were you with "them" or against? Were you one of them or one of the others? Were the others us or against us? Were you "for" war or against it? Were you for Israel or for the Palestinians? Were you an upstart who'd seen a thug from your car window late at night? Did you know whom "pagers" were for? I said pagers were for doctors at the symphony, but someone else -- who knew more about new technology than I did -- said pagers were for drug sales, drug, not meaning pharmaceutical.

Years pass, years without remittance, admittance to salary as a professional, years spent swallowing the pills of conformity -- I said it was like communion. What had the hoss men said? I focused on my friend's family in Jerusalem and on my early boyfriend who was from Haifa. Despite the controversy, the confusion over drug v. non-drug, a pill might be needed to balance the mind/body. But was a war needed to balance the economy? I didn't think so.

There were poets' "wars," waged with toothpicks. The front was not in the South nor in the North. Nor was it out West where the bookstores flourished nor in the East where a tree grew. In Brooklyn? where rent was a little lighter. We were guessing. And what of "the short story," literary genre that proliferated yet ceased to exist after the "renaissance" of the 1980s? A few of those writers had gone down "early." Carver had died. An epic novelist, the pre-authors reasoned, would live longer. A heart attack was reported as a suicide, despite frequent truth drilling; a suicide in an epic novelist was based on "experimental." The turnstile let one slide in beside the others; no car would await thee at the airport, but the train would arrive.

Previous day:

Sonia would quote Oscar Wilde to me, "if you can't tell a lie, tell the truth and get it over with." I wonder now whether I ought to have looked that up then, in the kitchen at 1747 Kipling, Houston. We didn't have internet yet, and the library on campus was picked over, like chicken bones, and the public library downtown required underground parking. Think of what guards once did to keep people away from the books. In high school, the "geeks," as the intellectuals were called, had to cross a line, like a picket line, where cheerleaders and their jock boyfriends sat on the steps in protest of knowledge, to get to the library doors. Call Sonia and ask, "Where did you get the Oscar Wilde quote, the one about truth, get it over with?"

We loved to yak, the truth is, in my kitchen or her living room, aware that her boyfriend may not have approved of our unsupervised pursuit of intelligence. Our books, not our books for writing (the books we thought we were and would be writing, and more than writing, but sending and publishing, a game still mysterious to us, though we meet people every day who have mastered it, their lines and pages glued together between glossy paper covers for which they did not "pay") but others' books, our reading (a fragment). The men forbade books in their non-absolutist way -- they agreed that one lesbian ought to be allowed to disseminate (word) -- and recommended the sexual life to the rest of us, to those thin enough for it, instead, as if sex were patriotic, as if the sexual life were the only life they would reward in us, not minding their anger and rage when it came to conflicting lines of ownership, the words they'd slur us with, a number, what we knew in our rental units of "zoning" and "no zoning."

The men in bidding us to lead the sexual life did not sublimate (Freud).

We didn't learn "publishing" at school, didn't learn how to turn "writing" into "books," or, if we did learn "submissions," it failed. The pupils at other schools learned more -- they learned the books, and they "have" the books. We learned it is better not to. Living, as God said, is paradise (prelapsarian) without the tree.

Save a tree than to publish a book, helper to be a ghost.

(20 pp. double-spaced max. for print version of "Hoss Men" = 14 of 21 days, 2 of 3 wks. 4,746 words)