And what he did last just
before his personal power
rose and surged
then tweeted out
was check his e-mail.
“Heaven will be full of spam,”
he decried, “because
everyone wants to be there,
while hell will be whiteout,
an empty inbox.”
“Or the other way around,”
I replied.
“Oh, that’s pithy,” he said.
“And there’s nothing I dislike
more than an epiphany poem.”
Climbing bolt eyes tightened so tight the threads
strip, and the tongue, a dirty oiled belaying bolt,
slips and slaps, and the whole edifice collapses,
as if a plumber has grabbed the head by the ears
and sucked on the nose with his plunger.
The smith smites a bass anvil,
hammering
the hot steamed milk face
forging
the steel bridge nose,
sculpting
terrible white teeth,
drawing and cooling
the pendant tongue,
punching
eyes opaque blue,
curling
thick creamy hair
around the handle of his hammer.
This hyperbolic happy acid oozing
cold blue face bowl of plum pits,
bonbon pate of goose liver.
“Don’t look at me!” cry the eye bolts expanding,
lips stressed taut, ears hung like life rings.
Far back on the tongue, a bitter spot to nap.
The old couple lives now in a window box.
The sash opens and a hand appears.
A palm with a long curved neck
pours water clear and concise.
An electrician comes to replace the eyes.
He breaks both sockets unscrewing the cold bulbs.
Memory starts to flicker, the call of a far-off bird.
In brackish blue eyes the tiller tongue feels spaces,
loosed from its mooring, and on the sail of the nose,
beating upwind for a kiss, ripples of sound,
the soupy surf ringing in his ears,
snores an old surfer paddling about
on a dinged, wax-worn, sun bleached board,
wanting to swim with you.
Embers of a partially burned ocean
In a box in a dank basement molting notes
A weathered surfer slowly descends the creaking
Worn stairs like dark swells yawning
Fish eyed and barnacle knuckled he climbs
Finds and opens the box, peers in, smells the pages
Runs salted fingers over the raised words
Rusting paper clips, chiseled letters in Courier font
Fading like beached seagulls washing away in an incoming tide
Wires spiraling like journaled waves
Bleaching across the page like ink in water
Blistering like sun burnt tattoos on old shivered skin
He can no longer read without bottled glasses
He chuckles like the tide receding washing scouring
White out rocks across words stuck buried in red tide pools
Like breathing into a snorkel
The surfer leers over the smoldering sea
Takes up the seaweed soiled waxed manuscript
And paddles out of the basement
Walks down to the beach and what remains
Of the water and casts out the paper like fishing net
Into a set of scaling waves
Lit with a lustrous industrial moon
The waves curling like letters in blue neon.
(Click any photo to view gallery)
| facebrick | facebuilt | facebroke | faceblind | facedearth |
| faceboss | facetomb | facepop | facedough | facetious |
| facestitch | facetouch | facebotch | facebach | faceberth |
| facestill | facestone | facequiet | facepiece | facemirth |
| facebush | faceface | facephone | facespill | facer |
| facecross | facetoss | facemoss | facetaste | facemill |
| facevalve | faceback | facade | faceplay | faceout |
| facetone | facemoan | faceme | faceyou | facepull |
| faceposh | facerush | facemush | facebrush | facetilt |
| facsimile | factotum | facecap | facemask | facetome |
| facedrone | facetill | facetree | faceroad | facelift |
| facesky | facefront | faceit | facebuck | faceroam |
| facethis | faucet | facet | facetrick | faceroom |
| faceless | facemuse | faceup | facestop | faceboom |
I pitch my brother a tricky slow
curve that floats warbling past the pink
hibiscus and slides away under
the Chinese elm, but he goes with the pitch.
The yellow plastic bat darts
like a startled fish, and he sends
me back, back, to the wall –
and the white, holey ball
whiffles over the roof,
landing in the olive tree.
Happy Birthday, John!
A seeking breeze softly slips
under the sleeping cherry tree
a cursory note, “I am too busy.
Too, too, toodle-loo,”
smiles, hushes, and sounds off.
A branch snaps, and a cat recalls the night
when the owl, the nightingale,
and the toad went out walking.
The moon follows the trio into the tea garden, pulling
behind the sounds of the rollicking ocean waves.
In the garden, two women sit talking:
”I wrench or hammer or pull or push
To disassemble and repair
To build in empty air
The sound truth that is not
Sound enough.”
”I don’t believe the truth
That there is no truth
There are two truths
The one you reject
And the one you embrace.”
Drowned out by the singing waves slopped with frothing beer,
An old, lost surfer takes a hearty long piss on the briny rocks
At the water’s rough edge and mutters a half assed poem
To pass the night in song outside walking the dark beach
While the women sit talking with the cat in the cove of the garden
Under the cherry tree awakening and petals falling all
In one great breath the ocean waves belly laughing full.
Last week, I saw a guy wheeling a couch down a sidewalk over near SE Woodstock. He had the full size living room couch balanced on an office chair on wheels, and was pushing the makeshift vehicle along the sidewalk, away from a garage sale, a clear sign summer is in the offing in Portland. I mentioned the couch on wheels to Susan, and she said let’s set sail for the new garage sale season come Saturday morning, foraging afield, stopping whim-whamfully, burying our treasure in the back of our little wagon. Yes, I added, and thence to the basement to add to our pile of previously purchased garage sale items that we will no doubt put out in our own garage sale later this summer. There you go again with the negative vibes, Moriarty, she replied, but come Saturday morning, off we jibed, cutting a course from Mt Tabor zigzagging northwest through uncharted garage sale waters.
Never mind, for the moment, why we keep stuff; why do we acquire the stuff to begin with? But what did we acquire on our Saturday garage sailing adventure?
Our first disembarkment came just a few blocks out of harbor. We looked at an ironing board (does anyone iron anymore? I asked Susan). We looked at a large, thick piece of glass and considered it for a table top. There was a DVD player for sale, a few books, and a treasure trove of old, vinyl albums, out of which I picked, for 50 cents, a Peggy Lee with George Shearing recording. I would have brought home a few more old, folk albums I saw, but most of them looked like they had served as scratching pads for a family of catastrophic cats. While I was thumbing through the albums, Susan picked out a shoe tree for her closet, and I wondered if this was a portent of an organized summer. Our garage sale hosts were themselves disembarking for adventures elsewhere, pulling up anchor, moving.
We stopped at a church rummage sale over on Burnside. Susan picked out a tiny, wire jeweled Christmas tree, though Christmas seems an ocean away to me. Things were half off at the church sale, and I showed Susan a lemonade sign leaning against a rail outside the vestibule. We could hang it somewhere, I said, assuring her I had no immediate plans to sell lemonade. The sign was marked $2.50, so we got it for $1.25, and Susan said churches often have the best garage sales.
But even half price was no match for Susan’s find at our next stop, an old, maple director’s chair at a garage sale off of Stark – in the free box pile. It had no seat nor back, and was missing the dowels that hold the seat fabric under the arms. If you can find any logic to buying a lemonade sign at half price, you can understand having to lug home the priceless, broken director’s chair. But on the way home we stopped by a specialty store where we got a director’s chair seat and back fabric replacement kit, on sale for three bucks. We were in favorable trade winds.
We stopped here and there, browsing more than buying, listening to a seller’s story here, a buyer’s tale there. Then we landed at the most enjoyable sale of the day, where three ladies joyfully called our attention toward multiple kitchenware items, a mirror, homemade stuffed toy animals, blankets and quilts, dishes, knickknacks, tools – these and more sundries arranged neatly on tables and blankets and leaning against a tree in the front yard. And I made my third purchase of the day. For 50 cents, I bought a little Singer box of sewing machine parts, but I got it for the tiny, specialized screwdrivers it contained.
I’m the kind of garage sailor who vows every voyage is his last, though it’s not the long run on the open sea I want, either, instead of tacking through neighborhoods, but I’ll probably sail through the summer stopping at garage sales if I see books, albums, tools, or guitars. The sailor on land wants to walk. And if I find myself some distance from the mother ship wanting to haul a garage sale item home, I can always ask if they happen to have any office chairs on wheels for sale. The garage sale offers a unique barometer of local economic conditions, windows of interest into local communities, and the stories one hears surely fill part of the void left by the disappearance of newspapers. In any case, there’s always the chance of the odd lemonade sign showing up.
Click any photo for gallery view:
Lettuce make someone happy souperfied. Greens and reds raised and cooked in summer sun. Old gourd melon face turn round and around. Squash straighten out cute little zucchinis. Carrot tops fuzzy green pointing poking. Turnip cold heart don’t be rutabaga. Radish reaction thistle never do. Wilt silly salty pinch potato eyes. Watching. Asparagus more of this stuff. Spears dollups thin slices of pink water. Peas take your jackets off and stay awhile. Ouch cucumber splinter onion oils mix. Tear drops sea salt keeping with tradition. Corn fits in hand like a hammer handle. Colorful beans leggy for you and me. Chives purple heads and slippery mushrooms. Tomato baseball radio garlic. Bread olive oil hot green jalapeno. Pepper corn and squeeze curve of lemony raspberry wild balsamic vinegar. Tossen flip thistle make summerone happy.
The cryptic cat her cautious criticism
of the green salsa garden plot proffers:
“Are you a nested poet, then?”
the hoity-toity cat simply asks.
“I have my cri cri critics,”
the Pine Jay stutters,
pouring herself another glass
of mock orange soda syrah.
“Are you going to mix
silver with orange, then?” asks the cat.
“I would rather arrange the orange
against this blue windswept evening.”
“That would encourage a paraorange
gown,” cynically suggests the cat.
“Scr scr scree!” the Pine Jay screes,
her voice trailing off like a jet’s vapor.
“Mock, mock!” the cat converses,
though alone now. “I never did like orange peel.”
On the road again,
and on the car radio,
another Country Music song:
I’m 44 now, soon 45
The way I been livin’
Lucky alive
So much has been given
And taken away
Who knows what will happen
Today
Late summer, almost fall
Red rust brushed peaches
Dark dust green grape leaves
Swelling purples under blue blouse sky:
Woke up this mornin’
Didn’t know where I was
Wrote a letter to Heaven,
Reachin' out for you
But you weren’t there
And Heaven didn’t answer either
Signs along the road,
wood weathered grey,
in the Yakima Valley:
Antiques
Fresh Cherries
Walla Walla Sweets
Later at the Grey Inn Motel
Eating maroon cherries from a bottle
Drinking brown beer
Thinking one thing is clear and sure:
Nighttime falls
Lento, Largo, Larghissimo
Yes, darkness comes
Slow like snows,
Like muted yeses,
Like mouth harp nos,
Like in Country Music songs,
Driving through the Yakima Valley.
Note (in response to one reader's question):
The Country Music song lyrics in the poem
are taken from an original song I wrote in 2004.
So, no, I didn't hear the song on the radio,
though I did often find myself
driving through the Yakima valley,
and I wrote the song on one my Yakima trips.
I've explained the age range used in the song
in a comment below.
He feared drowning. He fell asleep on the bus,
sleeping past his stop, and on down to Redondo Beach,
the waves breaking, hard on hearing.
He slept past the beach break at El Porto,
his head bouncing against the beach-side window,
his tools jiggling in his toolbox at his feet,
past the Manhattan Beach Pier,
the Hermosa Biltmore Hotel,
the Hermosa pier, on down to Redondo.
The bus driver would have to speak up.
The evening water was glassing off,
the Strand bars filling with surfers,
their cream yellow and orange and blue surfboards standing
against cars, walls, wet, dirty sand waxed.
He dreamed of fish, bottled beer, oysters.
He dreamed of broiled eel,
of yellowtail garnished with scallops,
dreams he did not understand.
A giant squid rose from a thick gelled water
and reached up for him, and he quick stroked
in his sleep on the bus to dog paddle away,
back to Shively, the house near the railroad tracks,
where he’d built out the basement room in knotty pine.
He awoke on the bus in Redondo Beach,
at the end of the line, foggy out now,
the sound of the surf muffled
in his ears. Flying fish eggs
surrounded his tired and dozed head,
his hair closely cropped,
his clothes dirty from the day’s work.
He’d returned the car, a ’56 Plymouth,
and salt filled his ears.
Selections from Phonebook for Foulings Neighborhood of SE Portland:
1: Foulings Tavern: 33 Foulings Street, Eastgate-3218.
2: Jack Foulings, 33 Foulings Street, Eastgate-3218.
3: Foulings Car Repair Shop: 20 Third Ave. No phone.
4: Foulings Music: LP Specialists. Fourth and Foulings.
5: Foulings Grocery: Corner of Foulings and Third.
6: Flowers by Joyce: Sidewalk outside Foulings Grocery.
7: Joy Number, 19 Foulings Street, Apt. F. Eastgate-3550.
8: Foulings Cafe. Breakfast Daily, 5-11. 27 Foulings St.
9: Foulings Books. Call for Appointment. Eastgate-1022.
10: Foulings Plumbing, Repair and New: 9 Foulings Street.
If the color from today's flowers
weeped with sound,
this quiet evening on the avenue
would crash like some big bang gig.
The colors condensed the winter over,
distilled and drenched and dumped
into cavernous, smelly whiskey barrels
swarming with bees.
A yellow jacket searches
for a place to pitch her tent,
for the long hot busy summer ahead.
The spring rain fills every bowl,
brews and broods.
The yellow jacket screws her mud
to a camellia branch.
The water slows to vinyl,
the beach wood logs tattooed.
Waves like empty wine bottles fall
breaking into the fitful trash truck.
“Bury My Heart in the Muddy Mississippi”
A Country Music song
Guitar Chords: GAD
(Slow intro with a little lilt)
G A
I took my girl to the Friday night dance,
D G
But she said, “I really don’t like to dance.”
(Lively now)
(G) Then some handsome fella
with the (A) swagger of Godzilla,
(D) asked her do you wanna (G) dance,
(G) and the next thing I knew
(A) away they flew.
(D) He’s got her in a (G) trance.
Chorus
G A
Hey, Baby, don’t drive me crazy,
D G
I thought you said you didn’t like to dance.
G A
Well, bury my heart in the muddy Mississippi,
D G
I thought she said she didn’t like to dance.
So I walked on down and I put my money down
On the counter of the mausoleum,
And I asked the mortician how much it cost to die
But he said I was a buck too short.
Repeat Chorus
Late one night I was stopped at a light,
Revvin’ up my hot rod Ford.
Along comes a Chevy, at the wheel’s my Baby,
Askin’ do I wanna dance.
I took her off the line, pink slips on a dime,
And the rest I’m happy to tell.
The moral of this story,
The letter of this tale (D – G…)
Repeat Chorus
X thinks Y imperfect.
Y thinks X exaggerates.
X tells Y, “Why can’t you be more like me?”
Y replies, “You have no balance. You don’t know how to share. Life is a teeter-totter.”
“I’m walking down to the tavern for a beer and some darts. Want to come?” X asks.
“I think I’ll stay here and practice yodeling and yoga,” Y says.
Y Y = Light _ _ _ _ /\ = Teeter-Totter /\ _ _ _ _ X X = Heavy
Yes yes yo yes yah yes yep yoahza youp
Yo yo yes no nope never over my
Yes no yes no yes no yes no yes noup
Not nape nip empty nix obnoxiously
You not yes no not no yes but don’t say
Buttresses yeses yeses yeses but
No nepe no nupe no nipe no no no yea
Yes yepe yes yupe yes yipe yes yes yes what
Butting do note chairs yes accidental
Dominoes goldeneyes moonglow eyes no
This will never do we are losing ball
Ants ants ants ants ants ants ants ants solo
So long stays yes and yes gives no to this
So long goes no and no takes yes amiss
Turtle butterfly rock Petunia seashell ceramic pot candle wire stand Gas meter downspout blue slate red bricks green hose Blue wall with painted white wood door with window of six small glass panes framed Electric meter "Nutone" metal stove exhaust fan duct double spotlight wall fixture no bulbs wires grub green fern blue green blue fescue grass.
Chain link cedar planks Redwood boards bamboo Flower trash cans green yellow and grey Sheets glossy green laurel hedge golden chain bench Grapevine clothesline Wire pool cues hall chalk Ivy baseball bats raspberry Green wine bottles in yellow bin. Azalea if you've read this far. Canvas sails to you gentle reader and happy Fish nets. And may your day be free of commas and other fences.
Imagine Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man with a laptop…
“‘Why you’re . . . just like a book,’ she said, and I thought I caught a sarcastic note in her voice again.” Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is with Liza, a prostitute, but what he wants is to talk to her. He finds her ellipsis revealing. She pauses, and she’s caught the mouse in a trap, even if she didn’t mean to. He mistakes her uncertainty for sarcasm: “I didn’t understand that sarcasm is a screen – the last refuge of shy, pure persons against those who rudely and insistently try to break into their hearts” (174), he says. Four pages of rant follow, and he makes her cry. But she’s his perfect audience. Had he a laptop, he would have pulled something up to show her. But was she being sarcastic, or was she reading him literally? What she says is accurate; he is just like a book.
“It goes without saying that both these Notes and their author are fictitious,” Dostoyevsky says in a footnote to the first page of “Notes from Underground,” which begins with “Part One, The Mousehole” (90). If it goes without saying, why does he say it? Another paradox. The typographical man develops a voice, even if he has nothing to say. Online, we feel a part of something, but of what? It’s enough to feel connected. In any case, these men do exist, in spite of this one being fiction, Dostoyevsky wants to make clear, and he wants to mark the difference between narrator and author. But in trying to distance himself from his narrator, Dostoyevsky adds another note to the pile.
I’m online again, going with the flow, superslow though, gliding, electri-gliding in the cerulean world of blues. “I’m so lonesome I could cry,” Hank Williams sang. But does he cry? He doesn’t tell us that he cries, just that he feels like crying. If only Hank had a laptop. How high the moon? He could look it up.
“Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness” (118)*, the Underground Man says. Later, Jung takes up this theme, that consciousness is born in regret, in memory. But how does man express his regret, which is his suffering? “The fall is into language,” Norman O. Brown said (257). What do we think about if we can’t remember anything? After reason, the Underground Man explains, “All that’ll be left for us will be to block off our five senses and plunge into contemplation” (118).
We were talking about the possibility that online culture diminishes memory because the “onliner” (i.e. someone online, not necessarily a reader, since one can go online without reading – but what is reading?) is constantly looking things up, one thing leading to the next, seemingly random. Nothing is memorized; the bookmarks are endless. If the fall is into language, browsing is free falling. But why all the notetaking in book culture? Can’t the readers remember anything? Non-literate people, McLuhan explains in “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” have much better memories than those born to books. Is there suffering being online? “The most obvious character of print is repetition, just as the obvious effect of repetition is hypnosis or obsession,” McLuhan says (47).
“I was so used to imagining everything happening the way it does in books and visualizing things falling somehow into the shape of my old daydreams that at first I didn’t understand what was going on. What actually happened was that Liza, whom I had humiliated and crushed, understood much more than I had thought. Out of all I had said, she had understood what a sincerely loving woman would understand first – that I myself was unhappy” (197). The Underground Man is stuck in a literate view. McLuhan: “The new collective unconscious Pope saw as the accumulating backwash of private self-expression” (308). The Underground Man’s literacy has turned him into an individual, and he’s nowhere to go. This is another reason he appears when he does; his point of view is his own beacon.
The sufferer comments. This is why the Underground Man “has appeared, and could not help but appear” (90), to explain why he has appeared. The browser joins the Internet commute, changing lanes compulsively but leisurely. Summer is near, and in the distance one can hear the Internet Highway and superfast modems melting across asphalt desks backlit with electric candles. A commenter interrupts the flow, but for the Underground Man with a laptop, comments are closed. Go start your own blog. I’m in the slow lane here. Go around me, he signals out his laptop window. Go around.
“I knew that what I was saying was contrived, even ‘literary’ stuff, but then, that was the only way I knew how to speak – ‘like a book,’ as she had put it” (179). The Underground Man is literate; Liza is not. But Liza intuits what the Underground Man must read. McLuhan explains the difference: “The visual makes for the explicit, the uniform, and the sequential in painting, in poetry, in logic, history. The non-literate modes are implicit, simultaneous, and discontinuous, whether in the primitive past or the electronic present, which Joyce called ‘eins within a space’” (GG 73).
“Enough,” the Underground Man says, but the closing footnote says there are more notes. “But we are of the opinion that one might just as well stop here” (203), Dostoyevsky says.
* My text (Signet Classic CT300, 1961, Seventh Printing, translation by Andrew R. MacAndrew), reads, “Why, suffering is the only cause of consciousness.” But I exchanged just this line for the Constance Garnett version of the line, which I prefer for its sole (solo) and soul homonymy (not to mention the suggestion of the sole of a shoe).
I’m online, browsing. I’m cruising for a new pair of slippers. I’m sitting on the love seat, in the living room, slouched down, my feet docked on the ottoman. My location is public, living room, slipping down, gliding for a new pair of slippers, my purpose public.
I enter “cruising slippers” into my search engine. I feel good. I’m plugged in, lit up. I’m online. My socials are open. The drones are swarming. I’m not alone. I twitter something fast: “Online slippers, what? Come on back!” Immediately, there’s a response.
I’m in a mood, an online mood. Mood indigo. What’s that? I enter “mood indigo” into my search engine. Oh, yeah, the Duke. I jump over to JazzStandards.com and click on the song, give it a whirl. Oh, yeah, the melody comes back to me, haunting. The piano notes sound like ice cubes clicking coolly in a cocktail glass.
“The Duke of Earl.” Who was the Duck of Earl, anyway? I enter “The Duck of Earl” in my search engine. It ignores the typo, corrects my search, thank you. I click on Urban Dictionary and start to scroll down. Some nice peer reviews going here, mostly thumbs up, a few down. Then an ad pops up: “Have you ever been arrested?”
I don’t like ads. I try to ignore the ad, but I can’t. I feel arrested. My mood shifts. I’m like a boat on the open sea, at the mercy of variable breezes. I open my facebook, enter “variable breezes” in my status and click. I get a few likes. Someone in Dansk says, “Breezing?”
Yes, that’s it, I’m breezing. I shift back to Twitter and enter “Breezing,” just the word, not even a period. No response. I’m not surprised. I don’t have that many followers on Twitter, but what’s a lot? I change lanes, back to Facebook, and enter “Breezing.” I have 500 friends. What time is it in Dansk, I wonder.
There’s a new tweet, from some cat in Belgium. I enter “slippers” into Google Translate: “pantoufles,” if I want a pair of French slippers, which I don’t, necessarily. I switch Translate into Dutch: “slippers.” Slippers in Dutch is slippers, same as English. Who knew? I enter “Slippers in Dutch is slippers in English, too” into Facebook. I get a bunch of likes and a few comments like it’s a joke or something, but I’m serious. I get a bizarre comment from some kid I went to high school with I haven’t seen or talked to in years. She claims she’s a lawyer of some kind. Probably under some kind of house arrest.
I open my search engine and type in “ottoman” and poof comes the story via Wiki: “Thomas Jefferson’s memorandum books from 1789.” Now there’s a trip, speaking of high school. I parachute out of Wiki and land back in my living room. I’m thirsty. I’m thinking of walking down to the coffee house. They have Wi-Fi there. What’s Wi-Fi? I don’t understand beyond having a general idea. I enter “Wi-Fi” into my search engine. What if we could see radio waves? I Tweet, “waves, pulsing.” I was going to tweet “radio waves,” but I didn’t. We can’t see these waves, at least I can’t, but I think I can feel them. Sometimes songs just pop into my head. That ever happen to you? Suddenly I’m singing some song in my head, not singing it, really, but it’s there, playing, playing in my mind, like my head is a transistor radio picking up the wave of the song. But if I try to sing the song, out loud, the words won’t come. A few might, but not the whole song, not unless it’s a song I’ve gone to the trouble to memorize, to commit to memory. This paragraph is too long for its purpose.
Location, living room. Purpose, slipping through time online for a new pair of slippers. Open: socials, check; three search engines, check; Wiki, check; my word processor, check. All systems go. Where does that term come from? I enter “word processor” into my search engine. What ever happened to WordPerfect? Do we process words? Do we perfect words? Mot juste. The word frozen. Justice.
I enter “All systems go” into my search engine. The dictionary calls the phrase cliché. Really? I don’t hear anyone using it much anymore. I enter “All systems go” into both Facebook and Twitter. Nothing, no response. Interesting. Maybe I should have typed, “All systems are go.”
I saw “Argo” not too long ago, on the Big Screen. What a trip. I had not been to see a film in some time, not in a big screen theatre. I had forgotten how big the screens could seem. We sat in the first row of the second section, not too close, in the front middle, so to speak. I like the front row. I like to slouch down and stretch out my legs. A message filled the big screen just before the lights dimmed: “Please put out your cell phone.” No, not right, “turn off,” it said. I did. I turned off my cell phone. I had thought I might maybe send out a few tweets during the film, but I thought better of it.
So to speak, thought better of it, all systems go. I should look these up. I’m bored with all that. I check out the news. First, the weather: slight chance showers. Slight, what is slight? Parse. Can you parse the showers, please? I tweet, “Parsing showers.” No one’s on Facebook. 500 friends and no one’s on. That’s a first. I check the news.
The news. I type “the news” into my search engine. I’m reminded of the scene in the Steve Martin film “Roxanne.” Charlie is strolling down the street and stops at a newsstand to buy a newspaper. He pulls one out and glances at the front page. A look of shock and horror pops up on his face. He scrambles back to the newsstand and fumbles in his pocket for another coin. He opens the newsstand and sticks the newspaper back into it and continues his stroll, his calm smile back on under his big nose.
1987, the year “Roxanne” was released. I just looked it up. But the thing is there are no newsstands anymore, no phone booths either, and mailboxes appear to be disappearing.
+++
Notes: This post is part fiction, part real. It was inspired by a conversation I really had last Friday afternoon over at Stark Street Station with some colleagues. I do have a Twitter account, but I’m not on Facebook. I didn’t think of tweeting during the movie. That’s not something I would do. In any case, my cell phone can’t do that, tweet. And I’m not really in the market for a new pair of slippers. I don’t even have an old pair of slippers. I don’t wear slippers. Meemin retweeted “Parsing showers,” over an hour ago. A good post takes time.
“A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world,” Heini tells Algin in Irmgard Keun’s “After Midnight.” Algin is considering writing a historical novel that will satisfy the stiff submission requirements of the Reich Chamber of Literature. The historical novel might be relatively safe because the players have passed. They’re not around to censure, and their story has likely already been told, documented, accredited. But one doesn’t always know what might get “a writer in the act of writing” in trouble. And a mistake is not an act of courage but of naiveté, inexperience, or foolishness. Writers may work with all three simultaneously, whistling while they work, no fear.
But “a writer who is afraid is no true writer,” Heini insists. But a writer unafraid might simply be risking nothing, have nothing on the line, no skin in the game, nothing to lose. Being fearless is not necessarily the same emotion as having courage. And Heini’s not talking about craft, because “perfection renders words unnecessary,” he says. Indeed, what the writer should fear is perfection, because “once criticism’s no longer possible, you have to keep quiet,” Heini explains (98). Perfection is only achieved through the destruction of all opposing values. But at that point, there’s no more discussion.
I don’t know if Keun was afraid or not while writing “After Midnight.” But she was certainly courageous. “After Midnight” has an interesting publication history. Irmgard Keun lived from 1905 to 1982, achieving early success as a writer in Germany only to see her books quickly burned. “After Midnight,” Keun’s fourth novel, was first published in 1937 by a publisher in the Netherlands. It was republished in German in 1980, and in English with a translation by Anthea Bell in 1985. I recently bought the Neversink Library edition issued by Melville House Publishing in 2011. It’s a short book, 169 pages including an afterword by Geoff Wilkes that provides both a brief but detailed biography of Keun and a short critical analysis that draws on research using letters and reviews from the periods discussed.
“After Midnight” is not a historical novel, and illustrates some of the strengths of fiction over documentary, of literature over reporting. Its tone is primarily satiric, but the narrative is realistic, looking at its own time, with some, but not much, looking backward, unable, of course, to see clearly into the future. If the writer knew no fear, the young narrator knows it: “My heart always stands still when I hear those speeches, because how do I know I’m not one of the sort who are going to be smashed? And the worst is that I just don’t understand what’s really going on. I’m only gradually getting the hang of the things you must be careful not to do” (63). This is the plight of the writer. The situation is urgent, a constant state of emergency on the dire road to perfection, a place not there.
The local nurseries and flower markets are loaded with starts, but I can feel the pink of the hard orange rose hips still sleeping, snoring in thorns, and hear the tiny golden broach just touching the iridescent crimson of the humming-bird’s throat.
Spring came yellowing in a green coach, wavy red-orange hair billowing out the open windows, the coarse driver spitting and spurring the horses to spirit, but the horses needed a rest already, apparently, and Spring slowed to a walk, not even a trot. Slug, slug, slug. One evening, a few weeks ago, we ate dinner outdoors – a false spring. I had lugged out the wooden table from the basement into the backyard, and we lit candles – it’s been covered with a vinyl table cloth since, to protect it from the rains.
And still the going is slow, the soil too wet to work, but I work it anyway, and the only birds following the hampered whirlicote, and a few Mew Gulls (never saw them before this far inland), sensing a lost trawler on restless water. Still, the apple tree is in fine form, drenched with blossoms and besotted with a few skittish bees. A little early for besotted bees, but there it is, Spring.
- Did you get my email?
- What email?
- I sent you an email.
- I delete all email before reading it.
- That doesn’t make any sense!
- Welcome to the world of Postmodern Poetry.
- But I sent you an email!
- Must we go through this again?
- Joe’s post titled “Notes on Experience, Story, and Voice” that was “Freshly Pressed” here has now been reposted at Berfrois!
- I think I need a nap.
- How many naps do you take in a day?
- As Dylan so eloquently put it, “Any day now, any day now…”
- Why does he have to say it twice?
Day One: A trance of rain, ear churn momute.
Day Two: Slide high noontide, sundersthorms plate.
Day Three: Moistly scattered sneers and a few frizzles.
Day Four: Chants of wrinkles, dartly cloudy and chowdery.
Day Five: Humility Poor Boy Talls, Barometer IPA 75%.
Day Six: Moggy, very low viability.
Day Seven: Topical air mass pew point, wind clam.
Extended Forecast:
A beast abuzz amidst the clovers: A is for Always Anxiously
Bees besieged in Beelzebub’s circles: B is for Bunched Bop
Ceding the bee’s sting: C is for Cut Care
Denuded dazed drone doodle: D is for Drilled Daffodil Dust
Each easy flower glowers, going crazy: E is for Eating Earwigs
Felled flies found in forged gyre: F is for Flounder Flour
Grease hopping aground bottom: G is for Goaded Garlic Gear
Heliotrope: H is for Standing Erect at High Noon
M ss ng n Act on: I is for Idling Slowly Down the Mississippi River
Jived, joed, and jellied: J is for Jump to Comments
Kitchen kelp: K is for Krilling
Los Angeles lovers afloat: L is for Lost in Ballona Creek Lowlands
Moneyed, honeyed, and schooled: M is for Marriage
Nonesuch wiser the nuncio nun: N is for Nauseous Napkins at High Tide
Only one occupied optative mood phone booth: O is for Obnoxious Ontology
Peeing peregrine on ice plant spears: P is for Pilled Paper Piece Work
Queued quacks: Q is for Quick Quiz
Read in rows: R is for Rubric Rust
Sew seven scarves: S is for Subsumed Existential Snow
T is for Tremulous Titbirds Telling Mother Father Will Be Late
Undertow: U is for Until Unction Snore
Vexed voice: V is for Verisimilitude
Who When What Where Why: W is for Wasted Window Father Watch
X’s not and no O’s
Yellow harrow and black and yellow bumblebees: Y is for Yielded Yelp
Zonked zone: Z is for zooming in and zooming out, buzzing, zooming, walking, talking, doodling at poems, scratching names with dates in wet concrete, riding the bus to the metropolitan zoo
- It’s spring! Don’t you just love spring?
- Winter will come again. It always does.
- The ice has melted. Like e. e. cummings said,
“in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious”
- It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow.
- But this is today! And we’re alive in this spring moment!
- A more responsible view is to remain mindful that the seasons are in constant motion, and anything can happen and usually does. In any case, from a universal perspective, there is only one season, a murkiness that lends itself to a contemplation of a dark void.
- Yes, but it’s spring! And I feel like hop-scotching and jumping rope!
- It won’t be long before the hurricane season will be upon us again, to say nothing of tornadoes. As Robert Frost pointed out, “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice.” And he should have known; he was a poet. But I don’t see how it much matters, an end is an end is an end is an end, but all these literary allusions are just illusions to wile away the time until winter comes again and we cry out, “Winter is icummen in,” and you know the rest.
- Oh, you’re just an old goat!
Look at this wonderful picture I took last night with my cell phone of the moon glowing through the cherry blossoms!
- Reminds me of the time we went to see “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!,” and they burnt the popcorn. Besides, you can’t fool me; that’s not the moon – that’s an electric spotlight in the parking lot of The Old Spaghetti Factory.
- Listen! I think I hear a whistle!
- I’m going to write a memoir!
- You’re speaking of flash fiction, I presume?
- No. I want to tell your story.
- My story?
- Yes, Joe says it’s the writer’s job to tell the stories of cats without voices, and you don’t seem to have a voice.
- Joe? Who is Joe?
- Joe is this really cool cat hep blogger at The Coming of the Toads, all about cool cat lit cult stuff, poetry and jazz, the ocean and deep silence. You would dig it.
- And is this Joe cat credible and reliable? What does this Joe do for a living?
- I don’t know. I think he may not have a life, so he doesn’t need to worry about all that. I think he might be a fictional character.
- And who is behind this fictional Joe?
- I’m not sure, his memoirist, I guess.
“The idea that everyone has a story to tell (which underlies the notion that anyone can write since all a writer needs is a story) is strictly correct,” Jenny Diski said, writing in the London Review of Books (7 Mar, 21) about Marco Roth’s memoir, “The Scientists: A Family Romance.” Well, Henry James thought so, anyway. Continued Diski, echoing James, “If you were born, you’re in there with a story.”
“Every talk has his stay,” James Joyce said. But does every story have a voice? Is the writer’s job to tell the stories of those without voices? Is the critic’s job to decide how long the voice’s stay is welcomed, if at all? Not if Joyce had anything to stay about it: “Why? It is a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze. Why? Such me” (FW, 597). But even if one has a story with an illuminating voice, should one talk? And once one starts talking, must one tell all? Well, maybe not all, there are time and space constraints, after all. Ah, and there’s the rub, what to tell, and what to withhold.
Memoirs, like all forms of writing, have narrators: is he, or she, reliable? What have they left out? And even if they’ve tried to put everything in, there’s the problem of point of view. Would the story tell of the same experience related from another’s point of view, someone else who was witness? A memoir doesn’t contain fictional characters, but real people, but to the reader who has never met them, they may feel and sound like characters. The characters speak, but are their words reliable? The memoirist creates a set, described, composed, like a family photo album, and adds tone, the attitude toward the experience, all drawn with words that suggest as well as denote. And there is that slippery, mercurial ball of memory we always seem to be chasing after. We might call that ball ambiguity.
And writing in the March 18 New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says, “Thanks to the Internet…anyone can write” (21). The assumption is that not everyone should. All these amateur bloggers serve up knuckle balls to the professional writer, though the proliferation of adult amateur softball leagues doesn’t seem to hamper the work of pro baseball players. How many family garages or basements sport bands? That they don’t all reach Nirvana doesn’t invalidate their experience, as much as it might hurt our hearing. Why is the amateur spirit more tolerated, if not enjoyed, in music, arts and crafts, gardening, cooking, and sports (golf, anyone?) than in writing?
Henry James, in his essay “On the Art of Fiction” (1894), talks about experience, and answers a question about whether or not one individual’s experience might be more valid and valuable than another’s when it comes to writing about that experience. James is speaking of fiction, Diski of memoir. But memoir might be the most flagrant of fictions, since it attempts to disguise its narration as truth. But what makes any experience worth writing and reading? For James, the more cloistered a life’s experience the more opportunity for close reading of that experience. The only requirement is that one pay attention: “The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military…The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience, and experience only,’ I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’”
Maybe everyone has a story, but not everyone has a voice, but through certain kinds of experience one might discover one’s voice, the expression of which might be realized in writing. But the expression of one’s story might also be realized in music, nursing, or plumbing. Maybe the writer’s job is to tell the stories of those without voices. But a more instructive way of thinking about experience, story, and voice might be to say that the writer’s job is to reveal voice where story is found in any one individual’s experience (not necessarily the writer’s), so that a reader might enjoy a kind of reading epiphany, realizing it’s the significance of their own experience being reflected. The reader hears her or his own voice. One need not be a writer, or a reader, to experience one’s own voice. But first we must find our voice, and where will we find it amidst all the wrack and ruin, the dry brine, the commercialism and the consumerism and the garbage sloughing like wax dripping from our ears, and deep in our ears a muffled sound like gigantic iron church bells echoing? But if indeed that’s our experience, how should it be voiced, or should we keep it silent?
We might read something and question the author’s authority, the authority of his or her voice. But the author of the writing should not be confused with the speaker of a narrative. Even if the writer who tells us the “I” of her poems is indeed her own voice, and that is the reason she writes, to describe her world, her reality, using her own voice, we still might think in terms of author and narrator, not necessarily the same. How does the writer decide what to put in and what to leave out of her poems about her reality? That decision making is the process of narration. Because as authors of our own narratives, our own stories, we still create characters, even if we call those characters ourselves, as in the memoir. This is why I said above that the memoir is perhaps the most flagrant of fictions.
Maybe no one has a voice, and we are all voiceless. We might all have stories, but we are all helpless, writers and non-writers alike, to voice those stories. This is why we keep writing, why there is no end to storytelling, amateur as well as professional. Earlier this year, a couple of houses on our block replaced their sewer lines to the street. I watched the workers and the job progress. I had done this kind of work with my father, years ago, and I marveled now as I did then at the simplicity of the technology, which has not changed much over the years. “Just remember, shit runs downhill,” my Dad said, handing me the shovel to dig a sewer pipe ditch. “That it do,” he said, concluding his short story, the voice of experience slowly dripping off as he walked away to more complicated, but no more important, matters on the job.
Related Post: Correcting, Grading, and Commenting: Right, Wrong, and Indifferent
The Toads piece “On Prayer and Poetry” (upriver, Mar 2) has been picked up by Berfrois. Grab your missal and surf on over for a look-see. There’s also a heady essay posted today at Berfrois that opens linking James Joyce to Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
The Reader
and the
Paywall Poem
The Reader
and the
Wally Moon Foul Ball
The Reader
and the
Pool Hall Doggerel
The Reader
and the
K of C Third Degree
The Reader
and the
Professor Who Knew It All
The Reader
and the
Screwball PCH Big Sur Rally of 1972
The Reader
and the
Walled Out Surf Cove
The Reader
and the
Beer Hall Jukebox Sing-along
The Reader
and the
Union Hall Layoff Sign-up List
The Reader
and the
Baloney Sandwich with Mayo&Mustard on Rye and a Glass of Milk
The Reader
and the
Red Clew of Yarn Mystery
The Reader
and the
Fans with the Giant Red White and Blue Beach Ball
The Reader
and the
Short Tell It All
The Reader
and the
True Tall Tale
The Reader
and the
Tall Boy PBR
The Reader
and the
Plumber's Helper
45th Street, El Porto, mid-1970′s, looking north toward El Segundo’s Standard Oil Pier.
Behind this wall of paper lives a poem no subscription will reveal. The poem is invisible. No journal can hold this poem. There is no log-in, no fee, no access, yet the poem is free. The words spill into the paper like seawater over a levee. This poem must be imagined. Later, after the reader leaves this book-less library, a pinch of dry salt will be enough to recall this poem.
Moonishnessly
We were children then, when we settled on the moon, amid drifts of silver shadows. Our parents were still alive, down on Earth. We had no fear of flying, outside of airplanes, no fear of flying on the wings of birds, daily flights to the moon, one-way flights. We walked on the moon all night long, moonishnessly. And in the morning, covered with moondust, we climbed down to the blue ocean for a salt-water bath.
Today is International Women’s Day. A few of the books pictured above go back to high school days and were given me by my two older sisters (I grew up in a family of six girls). ”The River,” by Rumer Godden, was required reading at SBHS; the copy in the stack has my sister Shirley’s name in the inside cover. Shirley passed away a few years ago.
Susan and I lived near the beach in some courtyard apartments across from the writer Sylvia Wilkinson. I was in my first two years of teaching, in Venice. I showed Sylvia something I had written, and she said to Susan, “Tell Joe not to quit his day job.” But I never gave up on the idea of the novel and reading and literature and the whole idea of being a writer, whatever that was to come to mean. I got a corporate job, cementing the idea of a day job, but I don’t think one’s occupation necessarily prevents one from writing. What is writing? In any case, 30 years later I finally did quit my day job and finished the novel, having reworked it several times in different formats over the years. Interested readers can find a link to excerpts in the sidebar.
Sylvia had given us a copy of her 1977 novel, “Shadow of the Mountain,” thanking Susan for proofreading and the title. If I were to suggest books by women for International Women’s Day, I might suggest any of Sylvia’s books (I think she may have thought “Cale” was her best), and also “The Solitary Self,” by Mary Midgley. Both Sylvia and Mary warrant wider reading.
- I said a little prayer for you.
- Where did you send it?
- I tied it to the leg of a bird.
- Not how did you send it. Where did you send it? To whom did you send it?
- Oh, I leave that up to the birds.
