Dreams from the Station in Gargoyle 60

The Gift, short story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1991)

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

Triptych

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

Dreams-in-Progress with Art by Daniel Harris

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

Broadside 3, SfNE, Watermark Washout

Story for Ned's Edit

The Code is on the Street

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

Meryl Streep Laughed at That

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

Necessary Heat

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

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

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

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

Letter to John Berryman

Letter to John Berryman

by Ann Bogle

for Christa Maria Forster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Keratin Experience

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

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

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

Item: Fleurette Duffle Coat with Genuine Fox Fur Collar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, Ann

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

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

~AMB 

A later version of this letter appears at Fictionaut:

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

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

Happiness in Love

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

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

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)

Irish Salad

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

March 16, 2007

She lets her intentions guide her

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Brock & Cheryl: Comp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your car,” Cheryl pried.

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

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

~mIEKAL aND & Ann Bogle