ghost post

oh, i'm a posty posty post
i've got all the posty goodness
of a posty posty post

welcome all be debonair
to my bloggy frigidaire

yardwork

I haven't been much up for relating the details of my life on this blog lately. Whenever I've started to I've erased the post before putting it up.

It's cool breezy sunny.

I'm glad we've got tomorrow off work.

Did a little yardwork yesterday. Kent said he wanted to do some barbequing so I thought I'd sweep off the concrete pad and once I got that going I went ahead and snapped off or dug up lots of those tree shoots the trimmed trees have been sending up. Nice to see it tidier back there.

I'm due for a nap.

six feet under

The library bought the 3rd season of Six Feet Under and we powered through it in less than two weeks.

It was pretty good.

comments on "The Man in the Pinstriped Suit", version 2

This is not a major revision. I like that. I'm glad I decided to post a poem on this blog that seemed pretty much done.

What I've been doing up to now has been challenge myself, assign myself a poem that really needed help, a poem that was only going to be done on the other side of a long process, a process that I couldn't see into, could only find my way through with a machete and blind reckoning.

For a long time I didn't have the motivation to do serious revision, the kind of revision that requires the idea that someone wants the poem, wants whatever it's going to be after its troublesome development.

When a poem is a revelation, when it seems to rise up out of emptiness, when it's exciting and brings all its own energy, I can say it doesn't matter whether anyone wants the poem -- there it is!

Here it is, only slightly different from the way it's been for the last 20 years on the page of a booklet of writings from a high school creative writing class.

The Man in the Pinstriped Suit, version 2

The long line to the bank teller’s window won’t move. The woman before me, her black hair twisted into a bun, skin a lighter brown where the straps of her blouse have slipped, sways, one hand hanging onto her toddler as though to an anchor. Her grass skirt sways as she sways. Beside me a man clears his throat. I turn to him, and find myself squinting to keep out the brightness of his pinstriped suit. As he talks, my mouth hurts. His voice draws out, longer and longer, each word crawling past my nose in fuzzy caterpillars. I know I have to swat them or they’ll creep into my nose and I’ll suffocate, but I can’t raise my arm. The woman in the grass skirt has pulled my hand across a butcher’s block. A white surgeon’s mask hides her nose and mouth. For some moments she works steadily with a big knife, then gives me back my hand. I step away from the head of the line, my fingers wrapped in bloody bandages. “That wasn’t so bad,” says the man in the pinstriped suit.

comments on "The Man in the Pinstriped Suit"

I wrote this in high school, in the Creative Writing Class, or during the Creative Writing Class, I don't think it was a response to an assignment. I quite like it. It has that great turn where "I" try to raise my hand but find it's being worked on by the woman who'd been in front of me in line. A dream logic that you just accept when it's happening. And it was a dream. A real dream. How much it is the precise dream I had who knows but it reads like a dream. I'm happy to have run onto it again.

The Man in the Pinstriped Suit

The long line to the bank teller’s window doesn’t move. Before me the lady, her black hair twisted into a bun, her skin tanned dark on her bare back, sways, hanging onto her toddler as though he was an anchor in a storm. Her grass skirt rustles back and forth. The man beside me clears his throat. I turn to him, squinting to keep out the brightness of his pinstriped suit. As he talks, my mouth hurts. His voice draws out, longer and longer, until each word crawls past my nose in little caterpillars. I know I must swat them or they’ll creep into my nose and I’ll suffocate, but I can’t raise my arm. The woman in her grass skirt has my hand pulled over a thick wooden table, a white surgeon’s mask pulled over her nose and mouth. She works steadily for several moments with a large knife, then gives me back my hand. I step away from the head of the line, my fingers wrapped in bloody bandages. “That wasn’t so bad,” says the man in the pinstriped suit.

link

Just discovered the blog of Seth Abramson, poet & public defender. Damn, this boy writes humungous posts and puts up 3 or 4 a day. Plus he's impassioned and intelligent.

comments on "Night Poems" version 5

I've only changed a couple things. If you've seen this poem's last version you may not even spot the changes, though they are more significant than changing "haven't" to "have not" ... a simple change that would have improved the poem slightly. Instead I changed the line "the painted shadows haven't faded" to "the painted shadows shine." Should I go back and say "the painted shadows have not faded"?

The other change finds "My breath offers silence another shelter" becoming "My mouth offers silence new shelter" ...

I feel a little ridiculous reposting the whole piece when I've made such minor changes, especially since too many times when I make itsy bitsy changes the very next thing I do is make major revisions. I don't think that'll happen here. Maybe I'll even change a line back ... "have not faded" is sounding good.

Night Poems, version 5

The window is open, standing somewhere,
open to a door.



I walk the wrinkled corridor between dreams.
In the faces on the walls
the painted shadows shine.

Like trophy heads in a hunter’s jungle bungalow
lamps jut out,
all staring glass.



A mortgage locked by wet stamps
life insurance keyed to contrition

she rides a horse
wakes with car keys in her hand



Surely these clothes are blankets.
My mouth offers silence new shelter.

My hair? It won’t wake.
My eyes turn toward something they saw closed.



fingers up northern faces
of the mildly gated

lights lost in
among handles.

Happy Birthday, David!

Draw, man! Draw!

star wars episode III

"What was the part where you were laughing inappropriately?" Kent asked.

"Which time?"

"Where nobody else was laughing."

"Oh. The long, loud laughter?"

oh blue

oh blue sky oh sun oh sun oh soft breezes

Rain

rain rain rain

comments on "Night Poems" version 4

I'm likin' it. I read "Night Poems" to Kent. We discussed the final period (.) of the poem(s). It's not really ending a sentence. K liked the last few lines as independent statements. They seem to me broken thoughts. The last line of the preceding section, "My eyes turn toward something they saw closed.", might be turned toward the fading dream ... the final lines being all that remains.

I don't know. I don't really like the idea of "dreams" as something separate from what we do as a matter of course. They're not a different place, are they? Then again, yes, dreams do have different rules. I find myself using dreams to suggest something, maybe something too obvious. I've never liked the then-I-woke-up way out of fantasyland. It's how Alice gets home. But if a dream is just a dream it's easily escaped, it's not a real place. Hm. Maybe it is a real place AND a dream.

I got rid of the numbering, tried dashes instead, then decided I liked the extra spacing.

Night Poems, version 4

The window is open, standing somewhere,
open to a door.



I walk the wrinkled corridor between dreams.
In the faces on the walls
the painted shadows haven’t faded.

Like trophy heads in a hunter’s jungle bungalow
lamps jut out,
all staring glass.



A mortgage locked by wet stamps
life insurance keyed to contrition

she rides a horse
wakes with car keys in her hand



Surely these clothes are blankets.
My breath offers silence another shelter.

My hair? It won’t wake.
My eyes turn toward something they saw closed.



fingers up northern faces
of the mildly gated

lights lost in
among handles.

Info Desk Blogging

The person whose regular Info Desk hour this is is out with a bad back so here I am. Been here 5 minutes and it's not crazy yet.

Mysterious stack of Chinese books on the far corner of the desk. Did somebody intend to return them? Or did a person stop here to ask a question, put the books down and forget them? I guess I'll leave them alone for now, just in case somebody shows up anxious.

The boy-watching isn't nearly so good here as at the university, we got a much higher proportion of oldsters and toddlers, but cuties go by now & then. And once in awhile one comes up and asks me a question and I get to enjoy it. One of the benefits of public service. Of course just as I say this, Young Guy gets headed off by Unhappy Old Lady ... oh well, he wasn't cute just young and old lady was unhappy but polite.

Clouds are throwing a few drops our way. Curious series of storms we've been getting. Not our usual May in Berkeley. Overcast is typical and fog, but not rain. Fairly warm tho. I didn't bring an umbrella. But it's not really raining right now.

OK, we're at the half hour and the joint ain't jumpin'. Sure, where are the bathrooms, where's the copy machine, do we have spanish language instructional tapes, but no long involved complaints or mysteries. I'll amend that to say, none that I can help with ... I've sent a couple different problems to other desks. And neither of them has gotten anger turned my way.

I'm going to the Y for yoga class when my relief shows up at 5. Last week's yoga I was all huffy & puffy and at the end of the class the muscly guy in front of me turned to give me a dubious look, "are you okay?" To which I snappily replied, "what's not okay about looking at a hot bod like yours?" ... or I said, "Tough class!" ...

Tough class? Oh. Look. Raining. The Y is only a block away, I shouldn't get very wet.

talkin' thru machines

K had to convert audiotape to CD so he got a cable to connect a Walkman-type cassette player to the Mac. He played the tape through the Garageband program, transferred the tracks to iTunes, and burned a couple disks. It all went pretty smooth.

Nice.

All those fiddly things intimidate me -- recording levels and adjusting this or that. I want to plug something in, hit one button, and have the machines do it. I know I have tapes of some old readings. Maybe I could try this method with those. There's that tape of the interview I did with Mom, too. Boy, I remember that! We disagreed about the way the interview should be conducted -- I just wanted her to talk and let a conversation happen, she didn't like that, wanted to compose each answer before speaking it into the tape recorder. We actually got into a fight over it.

Everything

I'm going to write merely to write. No other reason. One other reason I can think of: in order not to write about other things, think about other things. By writing merely to see words appear I can avoid writing as a way to say something, that which I'm thinking about but about which I'd prefer not to. So I put down another word. I reread what I've said up to now.

out goes London

When I was going through the boxes of papers Wednesday I came across a bag of souvenirs from my 3-month semester in London. Ticket stubs and maps and ... whatever ... I sifted it through my fingers and let it fall into the recycle bag.

This trip was back in fall 1988, a program of Santa Rosa Junior College and AIFS. A group of students from SRJC (and some other US community colleges) brought along professors -- it's essentially your US community college transposed to London. (A friend's grown daughter is currently in Spain under the same program.)

My English professor made keeping a journal one of the class assignments. Thus I kept two journals in London, one for him and one for myself. In the one for myself I could bitch about him and talk about sex. Otherwise they weren't much different.

So my pre-Berkeley life is migrating to Berkeley. And some of it is getting thrown out.

throwing my life away

Yesterday I went through two of the boxes of papers that I brought home from Mom's house last Saturday.

You heft pounds of exercises from your Statistics Class and you think, "Could I relearn this subject from these notes?" What an investment. All those hours crunching numbers and writing everything out. Looks like each assignment was worth 10 points. I'm flipping through the stack and seeing 10s with "very good" in red teacher writing. Then I come to one that, beside the 10, says, "Heh heh." Curious, I looked through the assignment. The final page has me saying, "I can't finish. I'm too tired. I'm going to bed." To which teacher has written, "Don't tempt me! This is not worthy of you who has displayed such mathematical ..." what was the word he used? Meticulousness? No, but something like that.

Out went notes for my Native American Art Class. I saved my term paper. Brother David made off with the carving that I wrote the paper about. It's a fox (or wolf?) head with a flounder lid. I remember trying to jam Matchbox cars in the hollow when I was young and stupid. Mom said my sister Bernice had given it to her. It's a Yupiq carving, I understand. From Nunivaq Island. Mom said, "Bernice has good taste."

Out went the box of 1978 brochures from amusement parks around the country. I loved those things. I remember Mom encouraged me to write to all the amusement parks I had addresses for. And they all sent back their latest brochures. What treasure coming in the mail! I pored over those, imagined myself traveling the nation riding roller coasters. I'm sure all the parks have websites now. But last night I looked through every brochure before dropping it in the recycle bag. Truth? The photos were rarely anything special -- but I do remember some of them.

Last night I felt torn, like I'd betrayed a promise. But now I feel ... lighter.

throwing things away

I'm just down from upstairs where I'd taken a box of papers. The papers were recovered from my mother's house. Turns out it's mostly Oz club stuff. 15 year old order forms, the Trading Post (a newsletter that allowed you to list what Oz books you wanted to buy/sell/trade), clippings of Oz ephemera, including political cartoons. Political cartoonists seem to resort to the easily recognized Wizard of Oz characters with frequency. I tossed the clippings, the Trading Posts, kept the yearly newsletters and club secretary Fred Meyer's Christmas cards.

I always have piles and boxes of papers. Thus there will always be sorting projects waiting.

comments on "Night Poems" version 3

This is a new arrangement of stanzas. I'm still trying to figure out whether these are, as the title has it, poems so able to be read independent of one another, or if I need to tie them together more.

Night Poems, version 3

1.

Between dreams I walk,
down the long, wrinkled corridor,
shadows painted into the faces on its walls.
Like trophy heads in a hunter’s jungle bungalow
lamps jut out,
all staring glass.


2.

fingers up northern faces
of the mildly gated

lights lost in
among handles.


3.

My eyes are sore, having been pulled from sleep.
My hair sleeps yet; my pajamas, too.
My skin is dreaming or near a dream.
My breath? My breath won’t wake.
Deep in my ear there is a silence-shaped ring.
I rub my fingers together. The ring goes round them.


4.

The window is open, isn’t it?
I’m standing somewhere,
somewhere near the door.
But the window is open.
Can the door be open?
Something has long been closed.


5.

A mortgage locked by wet stamps
life insurance keyed to contrition

she rides a horse
wakes with car keys in her hand

celebrity tracking

You know how wheresgeorge tracks money, right? Chrisafer muses, "Sometimes I wish there were a resource on the Internets where you could log on and see where a celebrity is at any given time." Shouldn't that be fairly easy? Set up an interface where anyone can enter a celebrity's name, where the celebrity was spotted (in the Houston airport, in Safeway, at a restaurant), what the celebrity was doing (eating a peach, reading a Stephen King book, peeing), who the celebrity was with (other famous person, child, hobbling old lady), whether the spotter engaged in any interaction with celebrity (got photo, autograph, stamped their ticket). Of course most celebrities would hate this. Maybe William Hung, joke of the day (or yesterday maybe), might be thrilled to be spotted, or some bit player using it as evidence for the advancement of his career would be thrilled to find themselves tracked. And maybe it would encourage more celebrity-bothering, as spotters might find the excuse of their future report be reason for an interaction.

Go to the site, enter a celebrity's name, and see where they were last spotted. If Tom Cruise was spotted several times in Florida a report of him in Amsterdam at the same time is probably a false report. You might see clusters of reports on lookalikes. It'd be cool to have maps, you could see where celebrities are spotted most often, trace a celebrity's movements over the globe.

the old home

After several months of procrastination and gathering dread I at last drove up to Sebastopol to face the boxes piled in the basement. Cindy & Michael, who are renting the house I grew up in, had gathered up all our stuff (Mom's, bro David's, and mine) and stored it in the basement. I've made other trips to sort through stuff -- throwing some away, bringing some back here -- but the long pause since the last trip had me nervous about going again. Turned out OK. There was both more than I expected and less. Less because I was able to throw out more. I threw away the costumes I made for the Oz Convention costume parades. I threw away the puppet theatre troupe D & I had made. I threw away our old worn stuffed animals. And so on. When I filled up the garbage bin Cindy gave me some black plastic bags and I filled three of those.

I brought back boxes of paper -- writings, drawings, books. And a select few objects -- the dollhouse furniture Mom's father made, a ceramic teapot Mom made (it looks sort of like one of those women carved into a ship's prow, only instead of a face she has a spout -- it's actually sorta disturbing), a few strings of pearls (real or costume?) ...

I can probably finish the project in two more trips. Maybe three, as at least one trip will most likely be taken up schlepping all David's stuff to a shipping company.

Poetry & Pizza

My favorite pizza at Escape from New York Pizza where we have our monthly Poetry & Pizza night is bbq chicken. But I also like the sausage, which has big slices of sausage that are rather like spicy meatloaf.

comments on "Night Poems" version 2

What to say. What to say. Suddenly I loathe it. But I think that has more to do with other things going on. So I find myself impatient with the poem. I like the first section best. The second section seems phony. The 3rd and 4th sections are OK. They are much like the original versions, just trimmed.

Night Poems, version 2

1.

Between dreams I walk,
down the long, wrinkled corridor,
shadows painted into the faces on its walls.
Like trophy heads in a hunter’s jungle bungalow
lamps jut out,
all staring glass.


2.

The window is open, isn’t it?
I’m standing somewhere,
somewhere near the door.
But the window is open.
Can the door be open?
Something has to be closed.

My eyes are sore, having been pulled from sleep.
My hair is still asleep and my pajamas murmur sleepily.
My skin is dreaming about being near.
My breath my breath. I can’t wake it.
There is a silence-shaped ring in my ear.
I put my finger to my ear, my loud loud finger.


3.

fingers up northern faces
of the mildly gated

lights lost in
among handles.


4.

A mortgage locked by wet stamps
life insurance keyed to contrition

she rides a horse
wakes with car keys in her hand

something to say

An older woman, a poet who was going blind, who recited all her work, good poems, surprised me with a compliment, "You really have something to say," she said.

I've puzzled over that ever since.

Laurel K. Dodge, a poet whose work I got to know on a poetry bulletin board or two, has made public her blogs. One is for thinking aloud. The other is specifically for poems. Laurel writes a lot. The write-a-lot poet seems to bother people. Most poets don't. The reason books of poetry are so slim isn't just that the poet ruthlessly edits down her corpus to only the finest. Fact is, most just don't write many poems. An argument tends to erupt at about this point in the discussion: fewer poems = better poems? Or no? I'll say no and leave it at that.

As I understand it Laurel started her blog (one or both?) as a private place to put up her poetry, not sure she wanted the raw work available to any old click. But she discovered once the blog went public and she got visitors that she had motivation to post stuff. This is true for me. Even on my no-comments LoveSettlement (unlike Dare I Read where you can comment), I imagine people coming by to read what I write and that's more motivation than I get just tapping away alone at the keyboard, unseeable so unseen. (My email is easy to get to anyway, top of the page.)

Among other things I like Laurel's stream-of-consciousness prose. "There are so many things that I want to say right now and they're all crowding toward the door, trying to shove their way out all at once, fighting to be articulated. I feel overwhelmed. Perhaps it's merely hunger. And not desire, as my good friend would suggest. My good friend who thinks any thing, any damned little thing is an expression of or symbol for desire, whether blatant or latent. Exercise? Sublimation of desire. Hunger? Full blown, out and out desire."