three Glenn Ingersoll poems

The poems were just posted, I think. I ran a google search for my name (which you just gotta do every now & then) and found them. Knew they were coming soon but the editor of Wired Art for Wired Hearts didn't notify me that the site had been updated. Naturally the long lines in "Palapa" got screwed up. Email seems to hate long lines. Or the web does. Or computers. From now on I'm only sending out poems with really short lines.

I like the site's featured artists this month. And there are some interesting dispatches from Iraq.

Speaking of. You know. Here's the pro-war crew's slogan that currently bugs me most:

PEOPLE DIED TO GIVE YOU FREEDOM OF SPEECH
SO SHUT UP!

Not that there isn't plenty to shake one's head at in every of their utterances. Some NPR story has a goofy lady leading an organization to shut down celebrities. No more celebrity pundits! she squeaks. Our president has access to all sorts of information that those Hollywood types will never see. So we gotta trust him!

The information that justifies an invasion is being kept secret, she suggests.

In other words, the information the administration has actively given out is, even to this lady, insufficient to justify an invasion. She did say that, right?

Naturally if the celebrities were all giddy gung-ho for the war she'd not have an opportunity to be interviewed for an NPR story.

Oh, and you've heard, no doubt, about the brouhaha over the Dixie Chicks' criticism of our idiot President. When I read Natalie Maines' apology in a weblog I thought it was brilliant. Too good to be true. In googling for a link to share I discovered the apology at a satire site. Still, it's what she should say: "I'm just supposed to sing and look cute."

Sadly, if you're curious, this is what she really said: "I love my country." Bleh.

Bombs are falling on Baghdad. Cool, huh?

Yeah. Those of us who think about death always like to hear there's more to think about. It gives us purpose.

Who I'm reading to get war stuff: This Modern World and ... well, Tom Tomorrow at This Modern World has lots of links on a links page if you're interested in following this sort of thing. I get OD'd on this quickly but go back and back anyway.

Here's Kent's dispatch on war protest in Walnut Creek, CA:
one tubby guy with a "peace is patriotic" sign with flags attached is sitting on a busstopbench in front of the police station, using a long plastic NFL-style trumpet to toot back the honk patterns offered by sympathetic motorists (e.g., motorist: "toot tootle-ly-toot" peaceguy: "murph murffle-ly-murp"). i wasn't sure how i felt about the "protest" (i looked, i scoffed, i looked again, i reconsidered, i looked away...), but the murff-ly murffles of his horn soon won me over.

I'm listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a South African vocal group most famous for singing with Paul Simon on his "Graceland" album. I think this song, "Ujesu Wami," will be on my second library mix CD. It's quite captivating.

After saving and listening to it a few times I've deleted "Weird Al" Yankovik's parody of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". I like the farm animal sounds but Yankovik's lyrics are just a tease about how the original's lyrics are difficult to understand. The song sounds good because the Nirvana song sounds good. I included Weird Al's "One More Minute" on my last library mix CD and I still like to hear him say he's going to jump into a swimming pool full of double-edged razor blades.

I've been discovering great stuff on CDs from Arhoolie Records and Shanachie. Yes, I'll admit some disturbance in my conscience about not paying for this stuff. In a new book of essays Aram Saroyan, notorious among the anti-NEA set for getting a grant on the basis of his poem "lighght" (that's the whole poem), grumps that maybe writers would have an easier time of it if they got a snippet of royalty every time one of their books was checked out of a library. In an interview with Acoustic Guitar magazine Pete Seeger says he portions out the earnings from his songs to those who had some part in creating them: "All around the world, songs are being written that use old public domain material, and I think it's only fair that some of the money from the songs go to the country or place of origin, even though the composer may be long dead or unknown. That's why 50 percent of [Seeger's earnings for] the story-song 'Abiyoyo' is going to South Africa, because 'Abiyoyo' is an old lullaby."

Now Percy Mayfield's "Please Send Me Someone to Love" is playing. Bluesy crooning. Sweet melancholy song. "Just because I'm in misery, I don't beg for sympathy. But if it's not asking too much, please send me someone to love." Yeah, man, I been there.

I just learned that CMJ, the magazine that keeps me up with the music of today, charges to put a song on its sampler CD. $3000? Oh. I find this disappointing. I thought the music was a result of editorial choices. I guess I really have to listen to college radio if I'm going to hear the college radio sound. I don't like radio much. Not for music. I usually don't like what's playing and when I do hear something great that I'm not already familiar with I can rarely figure out who it was.

Sarah Byam, my sis-in-law, in her latest column, says she's frustrated by her lack of productivity. "When I was in my twenties, I promised a friend of mine I would produce '6 feet of red' before I died." The measurement refers to designers who fill up bookshelves. You've seen those nondescript books in furniture stores or catalogs, right? Stephen King, she says, made his six feet. If only she could sleep less there'd be more Sarah footage. I don't think I'm a writer. I used to think I was. Or I wanted to think of myself as a writer. Now I figure I'm a poet. That means I write poetry. Nobody's seen the great bulk of it. Once in awhile a poem gets published. I have some footage on the shelves here at home. The poems and diaries I've kept in bound notebooks. There's some good stuff there. And I do derive some satisfaction from the quantity, from the bookliness of these gathered works. I gotta admit that every time I read a book I'm frequently checking to see where am in it -- 1/3 of the way through? halfway? only ten pages to go? I do the same with my notebooks. It only really provides usable information when I'm a handful of pages from filling the book and might write a poem too long for the available space. I'm not a writer because that suggests I write something other than poetry, something that people will read maybe. Essays, right. Stories or novels. Columns of inches. Inches of columns.

Going on about productivity. Whenever I've taken a creative writing class I've been the most productive. Or the second most. I haven't taken any classes in awhile. Nice thing about a class: getting credit for something you'd do anyway. An audience. Of other students, yeah. An audience. Am I ambivalent about having an audience? Am I not ambivalent about something?

The forthcoming attack on Iraq. Yes, I'm even ambivalent about that. Frankly, I'm looking forward to the appalling death and destruction and misery and the failure of the U.S.-installed government. And would much prefer it all remain my own skull-bounded fantasy. Where it can cozy up next to my fantasies about global justice, love, and sharing.

I'm listening to John Cale's "Hallelujah", though the CD will have moved on to the next song before I finish this sentence. The CD is a mix of songs I plucked from CDs I brought home from the library. It's sure nice to snag the one song I like from an album.

This is only the second CD I've burned. My first was mainly selected from the sampler CDs that came with CMJ New Music Magazine. It's sure nice to have every song a winner. No more tolerating songs because I can't be bothered to go to the CD player and hit the skip forward button. The songs I like I like better when they're surrounded by other songs that please me. Seems logical that one would like the good songs more if they were surrounded by songs one disliked, the liked song seeming that much better judged by its company. It doesn't seem to work that way for me.

For several years I've been doing essentially the same thing with poetry. As I read a book of poems I keep a stack of placemarks handy. If I read a poem I want to read again I pop in the placemark. I revisit the poem, rereading it until I decide whether I'm done, ready to let it go, or I'm not and I want that poem to be around. It's then I hand copy the poem onto binder paper and add it to a collection that's probably hundreds of pages. There have been a couple occasions I've changed my mind about a poem, upon coming across it in this personal anthology found it unbearable. Mostly I honor what captured me at the time I copied the poem originally. I date each poem when I copy it. I want to be able to look back to 1994 and see what I was reading, what I needed then. My tastes have evolved some but I like the poems I copied out ten years ago, 15 years ago, though I've read them a zillion times. Those couple occasions where I changed my mind radically enough to dread coming across a particular poem I have allowed myself to remove it. Over 15 years I can only recall doing that two times. Pretty good.

I 'spect I'll continue to like these mix CDs as the years go by. "Ra Ti Ra Ti Ra Ti Ray" sings Eddy Grant and his back-up singers.

I began copying out poems to take care of some problems I had with reading poems. I didn't like most of them. When someone would ask me who my favorite poets were I didn't have much of an answer. Even the poets whose work impressed me -- William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman -- wrote poems that annoyed me. And annoyance would too often be my main memory. If I were going to know which poets were the poets (of the hundreds cramming the shelves) to whom I wanted to return I had to have a clue. What better than the poem?

I had figure out some things right at the first. Was I copying out my favorites? Or was I copying out poems I admired, wanted to learn from, great poems? And was I copying the poems out by hand or was I typing them or photocopying them? I did all three but settled rather quickly on copying stuff out by hand. Part of it was the added affection I had for a poem when I saw it in my own handwriting. Suddenly that poem really was mine. I had written it. I had a new permission to use the poem in my own writing. When the poem was typed or photocopied it retained a foreign feel. Yes, this meant that long poems really had to prove themselves. If I were going to cramp up my hand transferring them from the source to my own anthology I was going to have to agree with every word. This is easier in a short poem. The longest piece I've yet copied is Lewis Carroll's "Hunting of the Snark". It took a few sessions of copying to get it all. But it was a kick. I didn't regret the decision at any point. I've not copied a large percentage of the poems I've read. 1%? And this is from published books. Not saying the other 99% was wasted time. I do enjoy reading poems, even many of those I know from the first line aren't going to go through my ballpoint. Because I don't copy out great poems or poems I admire. I copy out poems I personally connect to. I've come very close to copying out poems that blew me away but that, ultimately, I didn't look forward to reading again. Usually the subject matter isn't the big thing. But I must say poems that bear down on cruelty and violence have to have a real undercurrent of compassion to be keepers. My criteria were I editing a magazine or anthology would be different. I'd be more open to the poems that do things that startle, the ones that show amazing craft or try things one seldom sees. The personal anthology is where I come to share good company. It's not a collection of poems that prove anything to anybody. Except to me. And what do they prove to me again and again? That there are poems that work, that are wonderful, that are places I can go to and stay. After I've forced myself through the latest Best American Poetry and despair for there being anything worth reading I can retire to the anodyne. By no means are the poems always about cozy comfort. ... But the next thing is to talk about some of the poems I've saved in this anthology, isn't it?

I'm typing this at the new Mac G4. Last weekend K and I took the components of desk that we'd picked up at Ikea the weekend before, flipped open the wordless instruction booklet, fetched the tools they so helpfully pictured (two screwdrivers -- one regular, one philips, a hammer) and one brief spark of frustration, a paper cut, and a packet of good feelings later and we had a desk. It looks pretty sharp. With the flat screen atop it. The keyboard on the sliding tray below.

Worst thing about the G4: it roars. Louder even than the old PC. The one thing it has over the PC in fan noise is the option to put the computer to sleep, which shuts the fan off but allows you to power back up in a flash.

It's late. Kittens are pouncing on each other. I've gotta go clean their litter boxes, refill their food & water dishes and shut them in their luxurious night time accomodations.

OK. I am goosed to post because another friend has started up a blog: Blake

Yes, cats, I'm coming.

There's a bent toothpick on the desk by the keyboard. Uh. Yuck?

Have a subscription to CMJ New Music Magazine, which comes with a sampler CD every month. Just listened to "Here and There" by Homunculus. Sweet song. It's in the issue that came today. There was a pile of stuff on the floor when I got home. We have a mailslot in the door. Among other things was a report on the status of my 401k. I fully expected more negative numbers and was surprised to see every one positive. Not to say I've made back all my losses. As if! Someday I'll graph the thing's progress.

We're going to San Diego at the end of the month. I emailed Eric Shanower about getting together with him and David Maxine for dinner or brunch or something. He says he's attending a science fiction convention that weekend. But he figures a dinner-sized hole can be found in the schedule.

Kent has talked about driving down to Ensenada and I like the idea. Worrying a little bit about the border crossing. How long does it take? Waiting hours in a car is never fun. Wonder if we can cross via train or foot or something and pick up a rental car in Tijuana? I'm going to try to look into that.

I know Bush's antics aren't helping my mood -- from our sucky economy (yeah, I'm blaming Bush, but I ain't letting Gov Davis off the hook either) to, oh yeah, THE WAR. Gosh, maybe it'll be easy like Panama and Grenada and kicking Iraq out of Kuwait. As we all know, those adventures made us proud to be Americans and had no negative consequences. Well, if there were one or two dead civilians, they weren't ours. Whew. I hate these shits in Washington. I hate them!

Is this the sort of rage Clinton's nemeses were feeling? Kent asks.

I fail to see the parallel.

Frustrations. A part of living, eh? Oh little dewdrop, here comes the sun! Gonna warm you right up! Mm MM. Warm you right up. The chill of the night birthed you, little wet, now here comes the warmth of day.

OK OK.

While we wait to evaporate

let's ruminate

on the press notices of friends. Michael Martin emailed me a link to an article in the Gainesville Sun about his literary magazine The Hogtown Creek Review. First picture I've seen of his co-editor, Elisa Maranzana. Google hits on "Hogtown Creek Review" are growing. Used to be you'd get one or two. A call for submission posted on a bulletin board perhaps ... Now poets are naming it bios! How fun. I'd happily edit a literary magazine. If somebody else would do all the business stuff. Consult me on design, sure, but fund it, call the printer, shlep it around to bookstores -- ugh. I do enjoy reading slush piles. And discovering good stuff. I do like that part quite a bit. I don't mind reading lots of bad poems because when you get to the good ones they seem so much better! 'Course one can lose one's head. But one feels intimate with the poems one discovers. And reads over & over in the process of choosing, typesetting, proofreading, flipping through the finished magazine. One takes a proprietary interest. And looks for the poet's further success. That's how I looked at it. When I worked on Berkeley Poetry Review at UCB. And my few other brushes with publishing.

You know, I still have a few copies of the issue of Berkeley Poetry Review for which I served as Ed-in-Chief. If you'd like one, I'll mail you one. Just write me with your mailing address and I'll put one in an envelope and send it to you. Free. Yup. It is a few years old. And I have zero contact with the kids who are working on BPR now. I don't even know whether somebody is working on BPR now. So don't assume you'll learn anything about the sort of poem BPR publishes these days from reading my old ish. This offer is while-supplies-last, you know. Which may be forever if nobody asks. So don't be shy!

Isn't that dewdrop dry?

I don't know. This is going to be one of those frustrating entries. So read no further. My advice to you is. Because what can you gain? I'm not going to say anything. Nothing comprehensible. I have various unhappinesses about me now and I'm not going to be specific about them. Why? Why why why. Yes, that's the reason. The very reason. The one you've thought of.

Let's say you are a dewdrop. And the sun comes up. What are you going to talk about? What a lovely morning it was before the sun came up, and here's the sun to steal your life away? Praise the sun! Oh thank you, sun, for having peeped over the chill horizon, bringing your drying rays to my evaporatable body. Though the heat feels nice, it is my death! Or rather: my death feels so nice. Fuck life. Ah, but the dewdrop is not alive; it is a manifestation of a process. The cooling of the night that brings the water from the air, the day that warms the air again, water becoming vapor that will, upon the recurrence of darkness and chill, settle once more as dew. This is the daily dew cycle. To say a single dewdrop has an emotional investment in the outcome is one thing, but to insist the dewdrop's emotion is unhappiness, why?

The dew metaphor is all purpose. It has nothing to do with what's going on with me. It's just a way of talking about subjectivity, the feeling that one is experiencing being an unpleasant one, regardless of its cause. If the cause is an injustice, a cruelty, then one may curse it and picture its banishment as the return of happiness. If the cause is undetermined or if the fault is one's own or something else. If what. If in the end of it.

The ifs will make you sneeze.

A teacher once told me that people took snuff because they liked to sneeze.

Which makes me wonder if people smoke because they like to cough.

Kent says, "Alan Watts." Referring to my posting yesterday [though I wrote this Wednesday, blogger was down for maintenance when I tried to post]. "You remind me of a Taoist," he says. "The Buddhist and the Taoist are sitting, meditating. The Taoist gets bored, stretches his legs, scratches his butt, goes his way." Then he says, "The cat watches the bird in the tree intently. Watches it with acute concentration. Then the cat figures out that there's no way he's going to get that bird so goes on to the next thing."

K is down on my lack of discipline. He lectures, this man. He has these firm ideas. And firm ideas always take me aback. Like they must be important because the voice that declares them is certain and knows. I don't know. That's what I am. An I-don't-know, an uncertain. And that's what my voice comes out like. With pauses. Hesitating.

My mother got exercised once about her sister having left some Reader's Digest-like Christian tract in her house after a visit. The little book was held open, face down. I remember my mother showing me the article thus marked. "Demonstrate by your way of living the Truth of Christ's teaching, so that they will be impressed by your serenity, your purpose in daily life and will ask about it." I'm paraphrasing of course. Anyway, Mom was incensed, as though Sister had been proselytizing Mother, had been doing the hard sell. Well, thought I, this seems the softest sell of all. Leaving a book face down. Maybe Sis forgot it? Altogether innocently? And the whole example thing. Means one has to be the example others seek to emulate. Live the life others envy.

Mr Discipline? Hello?

It's always at first I feel inferior. Stupid. OK. That's the way my brain works. After awhile. The accrual of things. I am this. He can think his things. And prescribe, taking out his you-should pen and scratching oughts on my forehead. Which will fade. Or perhaps he will read them once writ. And take them to heart. Take them back. Into his heart. And live in accordance with his precepts.

OK! I copied all my blog to a Word file. Now blogspot can't just oops away all my precious whatever.

I am not going to write every day on this thing. Not a goal. Not.

I've done the poem-a-day thing. David Lehman has talked about writing a poem each day. I guess he titles them by the date he wrote them. So has Robert Bly. It's not a bad idea exactly. It's an interesting discipline until it's not. And that's the thing. When I've set myself to doing a poem every day getting something on the page is the goal. OK. One has to have writing on paper in order to have written. Otherwise it's dreams, right? No novel ended up bound in covers that hadn't first been word by word put to page. Ditto the poem. Shorter. So my problem is: I resent it. The page becomes a wall. Fine. Throw a stone at it. But that's interesting only a couple times. Goal: every day throw stone at wall. You forget one day. Redouble your determination to make sure you strike wall with stone every day without fail. Another day you forget. Or you think, What the --? I don't want to throw a stone at a wall and that's that.

And that's that. I stop writing the daily poem. I come back to the page when the acquaintance needs renewing. We're interested in each other. The blank page does not intimidate. The blank page is wonderful. It is more interesting than anything put on it. It is a welcoming thing. It does not want or need or dislike, complain, urge, or insist.

One of the ways the yoga teacher tonight was talking about the body: reach out, we're reaching until we're putting our hand through the post office window across the street, he said. The page is where the body ends. But we reach out beyond the body. With the body? Yeah. With the body. So the page is a screen that catches a record of what has reached beyond it. Cloth. Cloth through which smoke has passed, the cloth retaining the color of smoke, the smell of smoke.

Uh oh. Cat on desk. Imminent danger of return of blank page. Friend? Foe?

K's watching Boston Public and here I am with my blog. I'm gonna go to the store and get something at the deli for dinner. I'm not, like, way excited about that, but oh well you know it's better than Corn Pops.

Last night I looked over the Fact manuscript. I printed out the bulk of it some time ago and put it in a loose leaf binder. Last night I put a divider in and hid in the back the poems I came across that I think don't work. Which wasn't many, really. I like these poems. There are a few more I need to print out. It'd make a respectable book. I just have to get over those I-am-not-worthy feelings. You know, because I wrote it it must be stupid. I wrote the poems nearly ten years ago so when I read them I read the words on paper rather than reinsert myself into the memory of the making, the place, the Glenn-specific emotional history. And I think they're good. Hey. Y'know?

oh yeah? What's the point? Is it that toward which our path recedes as it digs into the horizon?

Called my mother this morning. Dutifully. I was fine with it in a way I haven't been when she's called repeatedly during the week. She wants me to want to call her Saturday morning. I can't remember a thing she said. Except that it made her feel good that I called.

Went last night to the home of Clive Matson and Gail Ford. 2nd Friday of every month they host a Poetry Salon ... they now call it a Poetry Saloon, though there's never been a bar that I've seen ... A nice group of people. You read a couple poems by some poet you've lately been reading. Read a couple of your own. No critiquing. Sometimes applause. I read a short poem by W.B. Yeats and another shortie by Tristan Tzara; read one I'd written about my mother and one I'd written in response to Joan Crawford's Sudden Fear. Nice to have an audience. I got there late. During the break. So I put a teabag in a cup, poured hot water over it, and chatted with a person or two. Martin fumed, as seems to be typical for him, this time about "tourists" (he spat the word) who travel the world and come back exactly the same. "Why bother travelling if you're not going to learn anything?" We were talking about another poet, one neither of us thinks is very good, Martin more willing to listen than I, except, he says, when she reads poems about how great it is to live in Paris or Athens or wherever. "Maybe I'm just bitter because I've never been anywhere," Martin said. He shrugged. "But when I hear poems like that I just tune out." The whole thing about how stupid people are. Sure. "Some people live forever in one place and never learn a thing about it," I said. "They might as well have travelled the world."

Gail read poems that consisted mainly of conversations with her six year old. I liked them. Not sentimental, rather recording what had been said. And they were about death! The death of Gail's mother, the illness of an aged cat. After the boy had said, matter-of-factly it seemed, that it was time for "your" mother to die, "not his grandmother", Gail talks about meeting an older woman in a grocery store. When the woman moves on, Ezra says to Gail, "Why does everyone keep leaving?"

Yes, there was one man who reads in a monotone over-written paragraphs that he seems to think deep and important. After the first sentence I heard nothing.

Gaa. I'm sleeeepy. K just strolled by with cat on his shoulder. The other cat is on the couch where he was sitting on my lap. I pulled myself out from under him, leaving him apparently satisfied with the blanket.

David says he's going to write on his blog every day. And that it's fiction because if it weren't fiction he'd have to write about his friends and some of his friends are CIA hitmen so wouldn't appreciate having their habits exposed to the gleaming light of the world wide web. Then there are the prostitutes, the mafiosi, and various other liers-low. Naturally their names all escape me at the moment. Not that, I'm sure, D has introduced me to many of them. Or, if he has, he's faked me out by calling them software designers and waitresses and comic book artists and suchlike. But we know the truth now, eh? They are skulkers! Although perhaps they think of themselves as living in the plain light of day. The tiger doesn't think of himself as a murderer and he only takes to the shadows cuz otherwise he'd go hungry. Hungry is hungry and not comfortable! One can die of it certainly. And the pre-death wasting is unpleasant as well.

Sadly there are no more tigers. No more tigers in China. No wild ones. And the few in captivity have lost interest in humping so the Chinese zookeepers are going to be sneaking Viagra into their food. Did you know Viagra is a sanskrit word for Tiger? The poet and translator Andrew Schelling said he translated William Blake's "Tyger Tyger" into Sanskrit and got snickers when he declaimed, "Vee Ah Gra, Vee Ah Gra!" Chinese wildlife officials insist that there are tigers in China, really. That the thousands of dollars Japanese will pay for tiger penis has not removed said penis from said tigers in every single corner of China yet. Not really. The Chinese official charged with saving the tiger would be out of a job were there no tiger to save. On the other hand the article I was reading this morning (if it was in the New York Times it's not in the online version) says the Chinese govt is putting together big tracts of land for tiger-friendly parkland. Even if there aren't any tigers I'm sure there are other animals that will appreciate the gesture. Some people, too. And some who will be pissed off, relocated, etc etc.

You know what I wish? I wish every company, every sports team that had a tiger or wildcat as a mascot would tithe a tenth of their income to efforts to keep the animals they so admire and want to bask in the reflected glory of really actually alive and not really actually purely historical. Like the grizzly bear on the California flag. There were grizzlies in California! That's how one got on the flag. Now we all look blankly at the critter like it was a unicorn on an English earl's coat-of-arms. Exxon could pay back the poor tiger for putting him in your tank.

My brother, David, has started a blog. Skook. Why is it everyone chooses the same damn design? No no, okay, not everyone, all right. But still. I was thinking of changing that nice bold red to a cool sky blue or something. But get around to it? Have I? Blue! I see blue!

And it is a blue hiding stars.

Been seeing movies lately, haven't I? No, haven't gotten to the theater. Home video. The Candidate starring Robert Redford, Traffic for which director Stephen Soderbergh won an academy award, Reefer Madness the prequel to Pleasantville though neither movie is worth seeing really, Sudden Fear a surprisingly effective thriller considering that the damsel in distress (Joan Crawford) is as creepy as the villains who threaten her, and finally last night we saw our first DVD movie, The Count of Monte Cristo. Kent recently finished the original novel, reading it during his lunch breaks. So he was dying to see the latest movie version, the one starring that Memento guy. Was rather surprised to find he was the baddie. The movie was good with popcorn. But K was shaking his head about how little the movie was like the book. We had to watch those DVD extras, you know. The deleted scenes, including the main love interest's best acting. Kinda funny how the pieces were themselves incomplete -- no sound when a metal dish gets knocked to the ground, dialog swallowed. But was the movie the worse for having been so unkindly cut? No! God no. Never knew how glad I was that so much ends up on the cutting room floor. The interview with the screenwriter was weird; after admitting much of the movie he'd invented out of whole cloth he described watching a 16-year-old girl at a screening, his eyes sparkling like pins, as he described her perched on the seat, leaning rapt toward the flickering light -- "That's Dumas!" the screenwriter cried.

We rented The Count of Monte Cristo at a video store on the way to our friends' house in San Francisco. Surprised at the smooth ride over the Bay Bridge. Since when is the Bay Bridge passable? Especially in the early evening. Had a nice dinner with Neil and Jeff. They have a home theater set up. Tiny living space. But even that place has a bigger kitchen that our house.

At work the Technical Services Dept has been moved out of its room into the Electronic Classroom. The storms we had over the last months had snuck water in, which led to mildew. Seems mildew is the new sick building villain. Big money's being paid out to workers claiming incapacitating illnesses brought on by exposure to the stuff. So the admin folks wanted us out of there while the wall was torn open, the mildew dug from its lair, sprayed in the face, and dumped twitching in the dumpster. Two weeks it'll take? Maybe. The Electronic Classroom was intended as a place for teaching computer skills. Big windows. So there's lots of nice light. Very stuffy. We prop the door open. One patron peaks hopefully in at the door, "Are the computers for staff only?"

We tried to get to The Two Towers today. K wanted to see Gangs of New York. I'm willing but rather more excited about Towers. The theater in downtown Berkeley that's showing Towers is crappy. Crappy! They play a stupid self-promoting slide show, and canned djs hype piped-in pop music. When the lights go down the commercials start. Unlike in Europe where the commercials shown in theaters are clever mini-movies these are the same 30 second time wasters that fatten up skinny television shows. Then the previews. Several. Then the movie! Last time we went we vowed not to go again.

I thought it might be fun to try the new megaplex in Emeryville. No other city around here likes buildings like Emeryville. We left in plenty of time and got lost. Emeryville seems to squeeze itself between freeway and railroad tracks and it's always amazingly hard to figure out how to get from the one side to the other. We spotted the AMC sign but were on the wrong side of the tracks with no obvious way to get where we wanted to go. And when we did find throughway, traffic was way bad. By the time we found the place we were a couple minutes late and K, who was driving, was majorly stressed. I knew he would not be able to get into the movie. So we bailed.

Well. I did hope we could see The Two Towers at Jack London Square. But I thought it would be a nice place to hang out yes or no. At first Kent just wanted to forget the whole thing, go home, but acquiesced, and Jack London Square proved to be a balm. Lovely sky layered in blue and strips of white. At the dock by Scott's two Oakland firemen were handing out fliers asking folks to protest the closing of the Jack London Square fire station. My fireman in his overalls and tshirt was middle aged, some lines on his face, his tan reddish. A ball of a bicep showed under his sleeve, blond hairs on his forearm. "The critical time for a non-breathing victim is 4 to 6 minutes," said the flier. My fireman gestured at the train that was passing, cutting the docks off from the city, and expanded, "That train doesn't always just pass on through. Sometimes it stops or backs up. There's no way to get an emergency vehicle by."

They had to go then. Tromped down to the fireboat, untied it, and pushed out into the estuary. As they got out midstream they turned on three nozzles -- one on the front deck, one at the back, the third on the cabin's roof -- and great jets of water arched in the air.

Pity to lose that, eh?

The fireboat gone, K & I sat for awhile on the slowly heaving concrete dock. Three mallards paddled by. A gray and white gull with black feet and legs and a red-orange beak stopped on a corner of the dock and eyed us, first one eye then the other. The gull was quite pretty, clean and bright.

We ate at Scott's. I had a glass of wine. Seven dollars. And the food was neither inexpensive nor impressive. But the setting was pleasant and we felt taken care of when someone came by and twisted the pepper grinder over our servings of fish.

The theater at the square wasn't showing anything at a convenient time. We decided not to hang around another hour or more. So we came home. I have to go throw laundry in the dryer, I guess. Oh, yeah. I finally resurrected the Poetry & Pizza website.

I'm feeling a trifle melancholy. I suppose I could write something. But what? About what?

K has gone to bed early. He fell asleep midst of The Ladykillers, a British caper movie starring Alec Guinness, a young Peter Sellars (he looked about 20!), and some other British character actors. It was comic, I suppose. Guinness's fake teeth looked terribly fake, distending his upper lip. Not that it was a bad movie. K falls asleep to most of the movies I bring home. But it did seem longer than its hour & a half running time. I wanted to go to a matinee, Pedro Almodovar's latest maybe or The Two Towers. We went to brunch at our usual brunch place, Chester's. The break in the rain gave sun to their deck. The rain had cleaned the air so the Golden Gate was sharp in the distance. We got home to a message on the machine: seems Dolores, the library general services supervisor, was wondering where I was. I'd entirely forgotten I was to work today. Sunday work rotates among the staff. Though I'd written it on the calendar and reminded myself and everything, well, nothing worked, and I clean forgot. K whisked me downtown in the Jeep, so I missed an hour of work. I don't know if I'm being written up. Perhaps so. Then I get so rusty at working with the public. All day I plug away at my little desk in the Order Dept, how'm I to remember whether there's a bathroom on the first floor or how many videos one is allowed? I do like it. Checking books out to people, helping someone figure out if she's saved her work on the word processor. But it takes me awhile to get up to speed. I 'spect Dolores will look a little less kindly on my transferring to her dept if at some point in the future there's an attractive opening. Ah well.

After Christmas dinner at my mother's place in Sebastopol we walked up and down the block viewing the art. There's an artist who's moved into a house down her street. He assembles goofy characters out of scrap metal. And many of the neighbors have elected to provide space in their front yards for hosting these creatures. Not everyone is enamored. Mom goes on about how ugly they are. Sometimes good-humoredly, sometimes irritated. She's not the one, however, who's written to the City Council to complain. It's not a busy street so there's not much trouble when a car slows to view. We passed another group walking the neighborhood for the same purpose.

There's still a counter filled with dirty dishes. With Kent gone to bed the banging of kettles and crashing silverware is too loud. So the dishes will have to wait again. I ought to wash out the cats' litter boxes. I'm not going to do it tonight. The crystals we've been using last surprisingly long, but nothing keeps working forever. It's late, isn't it? 11:30ish. I was thinking as well of taking dog for a late night stroll, just around the block. But. Oh. Doesn't look like that'll happen either. Maybe this writing is making me sleepy enough slip safely beneath the covers and into dreamland. Maybe.

Love Settlement
When sexy Monique Hall finds that her husband, because of a job injury, cannot sexually satisfy her, she takes her complaints and her body to his boss.

Triple XXX fun! Sheesh. Me, the Rev Moon, and hardcore sex!

"The only true settlement place is 90 degrees. The original love settlement is always 90 degrees. This pillar connects at every level all the way to God."

Who knew I was cribbing a phrase coined by Rev Moon?

"Thomas Love was born Jan. 4, 1813, in the Parish of Mortimer, Berkshire Co., England. He emigrated to this country ... and settled on a half section of land on the south line of the town of Marion. This has since been known as the Love settlement."

No, that link is not worth following.