Through my readings on the once-local, pre-Chico-area Indian tribe, the Mechoopda Maidu, I came across the Yuki tribe. The part that keeps sticking out for me about the Yuki was the method by which they counted things on their hands. They didn't touch their fingers to count things out, like many people do, but instead they counted things out by using the spaces between the fingers.
*
Speaking of fingers, my finger comes into play at the very end of this video that I shot of the summit of Lassen Peak, which I climbed today.
And here's a video clip, also from today, for the person who asked me what a fumarole was some months back:
May 29, 2008
[NOTE: This is not directed at the fine person who added me today on Facebook. Thank you.]
I feel like I need to explain something about my involvement with Facebook and Goodreads. I "signed up" to them, involuntarily, because "friends" of mine, who are up-to-date with these things, are actively on these places. I then get an email from the site, asking if I am indeed the friend that this friend implicates me as. What am I going to say? "No! She's not my friend!" This is where these sites get you. They prey on your need to be liked by your friends. Who needs that? In any case, this is really just part one of my explanation, and the tedious part, really. The second part is mainly about my huge ego, in that when new people request to Add Me as a Friend they can plainly see that I have done nothing to Add Friends, and that, by implication, I am rather, um, friend-light, shall we say. This bothers me greatly. I have friends, really! Please believe me Facebookians/Goodreadians! I am just lazy in this way. It also explains why I have some people listed as "friends" who I have never met, or even know in any way. There's one woman from Asia, for instance, that asked me to be her Friend. I thought for a couple seconds, and then said to myself, Why not?, and clicked CONFIRM.
I feel like I need to explain something about my involvement with Facebook and Goodreads. I "signed up" to them, involuntarily, because "friends" of mine, who are up-to-date with these things, are actively on these places. I then get an email from the site, asking if I am indeed the friend that this friend implicates me as. What am I going to say? "No! She's not my friend!" This is where these sites get you. They prey on your need to be liked by your friends. Who needs that? In any case, this is really just part one of my explanation, and the tedious part, really. The second part is mainly about my huge ego, in that when new people request to Add Me as a Friend they can plainly see that I have done nothing to Add Friends, and that, by implication, I am rather, um, friend-light, shall we say. This bothers me greatly. I have friends, really! Please believe me Facebookians/Goodreadians! I am just lazy in this way. It also explains why I have some people listed as "friends" who I have never met, or even know in any way. There's one woman from Asia, for instance, that asked me to be her Friend. I thought for a couple seconds, and then said to myself, Why not?, and clicked CONFIRM.
May 28, 2008
Mount Shasta Training update. It was my goal at Christmas 2007 to lose enough weight and to get into shape that I would be able to climb Mount Shasta by June. It seems to be working. I had planned on getting down to 165 pounds by the time of the climb, which is in a few weeks. I'm currently 168 pounds. I've dropped 32 pounds since Christmas.
Yesterday, I ran 5 miles in 46:30 minutes. That's not anything to write home about, or really even to post about, but it was the first time that I went that long, and I felt surprisingly good after it.
My training schedule has been pretty much running Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. On one of the weekend days, I will hike with a 30 pound pack somewhere. I need to spend some time in the next two weeks in some elevation with the pack. It's difficult enough to breathe in elevation without the weight on one's back, so I am curious to see how I feel and react when it's on.
I have never spent money on myself to such a degree as this foray into mountaineering has exacted on me. It's rather repulsive to me, really, but it is something that I want to do, and so one must have the proper gear. It has taken months of price-checking, deal-finding, to get the gear. This is a basic list of things--but I didn't buy these items from these places, just linking for pictures:
Hot Chillys MTF3000 Top Base Layer
Hot Chillys MTF3000 Bottom Base Layer--about the same prices
Marmot Oracle Pants with Bibs--paid $99, not $140
Wigwam Outdoor Socks
Arc'Teryx Gamma MX softshell--paid $170, not $299
Sierra Designs puffy, can't locate picture on web, but bought for $125 at local store, on sale; one day later saw it online for $69.00. Couldn't return it because of sale. The only item that I've overpaid for.
Arc'Teryx Bora 80 backpack, did not pay $375, but $100 to a guy selling it on craigslist. I could re-sell this pack for $225-250.
North Face Gore-tex gloves, paid $50, were 30% off at local store. Can't locate picture on web.
Julbo Sherpa mountaineering sunglasses, paid $44 locally.
Black Diamond LED headlight, paid $30 locally.
North Face The Cat's Meow mummy sleeping bag, paid $110 online.
ThermaRest Self-Inflating Mattress, paid $50 online.
The tent and ice-axe will be provided by the guide company. The two-day summit tour is $425. This price includes instructions on self-arrest, making camp, cooking, safety, the $30 park fee, all meals, and the use of a tent, which would've cost $150-200 by itself. This is where my stimulus money went. Plus, I'm paying to have people to go with me, as I couldn't find anyone locally. Without that, I simply wouldn't be going, period.
Finally, I will rent my mountaineering boots and crampons at The Fifth Season in Mount Shasta City. $26 and $16, respetively.
Yesterday, I ran 5 miles in 46:30 minutes. That's not anything to write home about, or really even to post about, but it was the first time that I went that long, and I felt surprisingly good after it.
My training schedule has been pretty much running Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. On one of the weekend days, I will hike with a 30 pound pack somewhere. I need to spend some time in the next two weeks in some elevation with the pack. It's difficult enough to breathe in elevation without the weight on one's back, so I am curious to see how I feel and react when it's on.
I have never spent money on myself to such a degree as this foray into mountaineering has exacted on me. It's rather repulsive to me, really, but it is something that I want to do, and so one must have the proper gear. It has taken months of price-checking, deal-finding, to get the gear. This is a basic list of things--but I didn't buy these items from these places, just linking for pictures:
Hot Chillys MTF3000 Top Base Layer
Hot Chillys MTF3000 Bottom Base Layer--about the same prices
Marmot Oracle Pants with Bibs--paid $99, not $140
Wigwam Outdoor Socks
Arc'Teryx Gamma MX softshell--paid $170, not $299
Sierra Designs puffy, can't locate picture on web, but bought for $125 at local store, on sale; one day later saw it online for $69.00. Couldn't return it because of sale. The only item that I've overpaid for.
Arc'Teryx Bora 80 backpack, did not pay $375, but $100 to a guy selling it on craigslist. I could re-sell this pack for $225-250.
North Face Gore-tex gloves, paid $50, were 30% off at local store. Can't locate picture on web.
Julbo Sherpa mountaineering sunglasses, paid $44 locally.
Black Diamond LED headlight, paid $30 locally.
North Face The Cat's Meow mummy sleeping bag, paid $110 online.
ThermaRest Self-Inflating Mattress, paid $50 online.
The tent and ice-axe will be provided by the guide company. The two-day summit tour is $425. This price includes instructions on self-arrest, making camp, cooking, safety, the $30 park fee, all meals, and the use of a tent, which would've cost $150-200 by itself. This is where my stimulus money went. Plus, I'm paying to have people to go with me, as I couldn't find anyone locally. Without that, I simply wouldn't be going, period.
Finally, I will rent my mountaineering boots and crampons at The Fifth Season in Mount Shasta City. $26 and $16, respetively.
May 25, 2008
Anne Boyer
The Romance of Happy Workers
Coffee House Press
2008
90 pages
Softcover
$16.00
Ever since Flarf™ burst onto the writing scene in all of its socio-paranoid, inter-reflective glory, the highpitched, pop-cultural, and desperate utterances of a world gone mad have been Rorshached back at us, with little mercy, with little ironic winks, and loud, vulgar Guignolian effects. It has since moved onto a Style of Writing and should, at some point, find its way into an updated version of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, completely processed, noted, and homogenized, like organoleptic butter.
Flarf probably couldn’t be happier if this would happen, as it is an artfom of authorial identity deconstruction, ultimately. Flarf yearns to be everything, and so conjoins its authors—the anonymous Google-based authors’s snippets and the Flarf authors own—into one. The premise is a kind of intentional authorial suicide, of traditional I-ness drowning out in plurality, into the totality of I and Thou-ness. The author’s identity/identities—if this/these is/are even actual—has/have died into a meta-world of collage artist, of assembler. Yet, there is an inner ruse to the whole thing, because while the content is a site of plurality (many authors), it is still, like all things written, a construct of one, unless it’s a joint construction.
Every few months, there will be a new sighting of Flarf, like the Missing Link crossing the highway, and someone will say, “Flarf is not Dead, I just saw it, crossing a highway.” Flarf is actually alive-dead, at this point, hanging out in a kind of Marienbad. But the people involved from the beginning, in the middle, at the end, have continued writing, thankfully, and in any case, with some still writing based on cut-and-pastes from Google searches, others moving on to a combination of classic Flarf conventions and newer experiments, others have abandoned it, and so on.
The Romance of Happy Workers is Anne Boyer’s first full book of poetry—she has some chapbooks. Boyer’s poetry is continually other—it moves into new words, new horizons, each one left behind for alive-dead. Metaphors pile up into drifts of semblances, into a maze of associations, until one just takes her word for things. The poetry’s basic philosophical frame is that of change, of flux, of disappearance-reappearance. Here, for instance, is the beginning of her poem, “Lob”:
Stand fast. Grief is a gondola, a compulsive
label, a root canal—not a question of a single
switch at the center of things, but billions
of neurons, endorphins, titans rubbing
their wings. Let the monster wander. See a movie.
*
Here “grief” is, singly, at least five things all at once: a gondola, a compulsive label, and a root canal; it’s also “not a question of a single/ switch at the center of things”; and it’s “billions of neurons, endorphins, [and] titans rubbing/ their wings.” The question, of course, becomes, what does one do with all of this information? Does one process each claim, check it out against the others? How is grief like a root canal? How is it both a compulsive label and yet billions of titans rubbing their wings? Should we care?
My guess is that we shouldn’t—at least not as claims. Boyer has her eyes set on other things. This is poetry of experience, of wonder, of exuberance, of immersion in textual adventure. The author herself often ends up in historical relationships, jarred from chronology, asking questions directly of Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, like where his head might be, or mentioning to him, in a breathlessly comical turn, that she’s read Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. In another poem, “The Romance of Happy Workers,” she straddles Woody Guthrie on a Bolshevik mattress, listens to his “propagandas,” however badly he might smell of pomegranates.
The book displays a heavy interest in history, philosophy, art, and the literary, with a poem involving Keats (“Ode O”), another poem, “A Reader for Those Who Do Not Live in Cities,” made up entirely of lines by Carl Sandburg and Bertolt Brecht, while others are dedicated to fellow writers. The contents of poems refer to El Cid, to Linnaeus, John Locke, Goya, Vermeer, and Hercules. However, these olden figures will be in a mash-up environment of Iowa and Kansas, where Harvester, John Deere, and Pioneer farm equipment dot the horizons. The local becomes universal, and vice-versa, all over again.
One would imagine, given the timewarping, that it would be quite difficult for the poems to be taken seriously, as something more than stunts, but they do achieve this through a palpable drive/passion/power/etc. that acts as the underlying convincing agent. The reader “goes along with” Boyer because she’s certain in tone, because she repeats her convictions, because she gets to the messier, powerful places of lust and violence that govern us, and she’s entertaining along the way. This is not an easy thing to do.
While I have made much of the brasher aspects of the book, there is also significant space given over to touching pieces, free of sentimentality, but not of feeling, like “Sunsets Off.” Here it is in its entirety:
Nothing, too, is a subject:
dusk regulating the blankery.
Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,
fill in the metaphorical smell.
The horizon leaves the same
impression as runway: jet but air.
I wake to a grain bin, the end is near:
jimson and ditchweed, hog and trough.
The first beer can is making
high hopes out of everything.
No wheat is safe from chaff of this,
hullwrecked in Hugoton, thinking of sod.
*
There is a stately confidence to the piece, right from the opening declaration and through the hope for more, for something other to be (note the double “fill in”). The author obviously wishes to be somewhere else, letting us know humorously that the sight of a grain bin is a signal that the end is near. (One can hear Berryman’s “Life, friends, is boring” somewhere beyond the ditchweed.) We note the careful sonic arrangement of “hog and trough,” and the gleeful delay after “making,” and the ringing –ing rhyme with “everything.” This is poetry of what’s in front of one, so to speak, when the texts and historical connections drop away, and one is left with one’s factual life and factual circumstances. Robert Creeley made a career of writing “states of mind/states of mind in states of place” pieces like this one, and they were somehow, amazingly, never boring. Like Creeley’s seemingly simple pieces, Boyer’s “Nothing” above is definitely “something.”
We must not end things here, though, because there is another element of the book that needs mentioning—Boyer’s playfulness. This playfulness can exist in the forms of plot, with our heroine, for instance, dining on quince paste with Woody Guthrie, or by humorously refashioning one of her pieces as similar to an Ezra Pound broadcast (“Poundcast”), or at the most rudimentary level of phrasing, with such oddities as those that fill in her poem, “You Will Want Like Cowboys,” which begins:
I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.
You will want at smallness,
also squirreling across the wire.
Wantings in the wilderness!
What did you think,
words?
*
The words themselves convulse, break apart, sidestep, loosen, run away feverishly in many poems, but mostly they want to be counted, like the humor wants to be counted, like the adventure does, like the silos do, like the nods to Marx do, like the palpable Desire does. Boyer’s poetry challenges us to not sit still, to not allow for the familiar to lose its mystery, and to be in the world, which includes her poetry, as in the beginning of the final poem “Valediction Forbidding Apocalypse,” where she says:
Dear tiny autumn of lizards,
dear pigs in attic marble,
dear pit/ quarry/ basement,
dear rock, dear stone, dear flesh:
remarkable this world
drowned anyway—a mass
transiently—this product
of the porous
The Romance of Happy Workers
Coffee House Press
2008
90 pages
Softcover
$16.00
Ever since Flarf™ burst onto the writing scene in all of its socio-paranoid, inter-reflective glory, the highpitched, pop-cultural, and desperate utterances of a world gone mad have been Rorshached back at us, with little mercy, with little ironic winks, and loud, vulgar Guignolian effects. It has since moved onto a Style of Writing and should, at some point, find its way into an updated version of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, completely processed, noted, and homogenized, like organoleptic butter.
Flarf probably couldn’t be happier if this would happen, as it is an artfom of authorial identity deconstruction, ultimately. Flarf yearns to be everything, and so conjoins its authors—the anonymous Google-based authors’s snippets and the Flarf authors own—into one. The premise is a kind of intentional authorial suicide, of traditional I-ness drowning out in plurality, into the totality of I and Thou-ness. The author’s identity/identities—if this/these is/are even actual—has/have died into a meta-world of collage artist, of assembler. Yet, there is an inner ruse to the whole thing, because while the content is a site of plurality (many authors), it is still, like all things written, a construct of one, unless it’s a joint construction.
Every few months, there will be a new sighting of Flarf, like the Missing Link crossing the highway, and someone will say, “Flarf is not Dead, I just saw it, crossing a highway.” Flarf is actually alive-dead, at this point, hanging out in a kind of Marienbad. But the people involved from the beginning, in the middle, at the end, have continued writing, thankfully, and in any case, with some still writing based on cut-and-pastes from Google searches, others moving on to a combination of classic Flarf conventions and newer experiments, others have abandoned it, and so on.
The Romance of Happy Workers is Anne Boyer’s first full book of poetry—she has some chapbooks. Boyer’s poetry is continually other—it moves into new words, new horizons, each one left behind for alive-dead. Metaphors pile up into drifts of semblances, into a maze of associations, until one just takes her word for things. The poetry’s basic philosophical frame is that of change, of flux, of disappearance-reappearance. Here, for instance, is the beginning of her poem, “Lob”:
Stand fast. Grief is a gondola, a compulsive
label, a root canal—not a question of a single
switch at the center of things, but billions
of neurons, endorphins, titans rubbing
their wings. Let the monster wander. See a movie.
*
Here “grief” is, singly, at least five things all at once: a gondola, a compulsive label, and a root canal; it’s also “not a question of a single/ switch at the center of things”; and it’s “billions of neurons, endorphins, [and] titans rubbing/ their wings.” The question, of course, becomes, what does one do with all of this information? Does one process each claim, check it out against the others? How is grief like a root canal? How is it both a compulsive label and yet billions of titans rubbing their wings? Should we care?
My guess is that we shouldn’t—at least not as claims. Boyer has her eyes set on other things. This is poetry of experience, of wonder, of exuberance, of immersion in textual adventure. The author herself often ends up in historical relationships, jarred from chronology, asking questions directly of Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, like where his head might be, or mentioning to him, in a breathlessly comical turn, that she’s read Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. In another poem, “The Romance of Happy Workers,” she straddles Woody Guthrie on a Bolshevik mattress, listens to his “propagandas,” however badly he might smell of pomegranates.
The book displays a heavy interest in history, philosophy, art, and the literary, with a poem involving Keats (“Ode O”), another poem, “A Reader for Those Who Do Not Live in Cities,” made up entirely of lines by Carl Sandburg and Bertolt Brecht, while others are dedicated to fellow writers. The contents of poems refer to El Cid, to Linnaeus, John Locke, Goya, Vermeer, and Hercules. However, these olden figures will be in a mash-up environment of Iowa and Kansas, where Harvester, John Deere, and Pioneer farm equipment dot the horizons. The local becomes universal, and vice-versa, all over again.
One would imagine, given the timewarping, that it would be quite difficult for the poems to be taken seriously, as something more than stunts, but they do achieve this through a palpable drive/passion/power/etc. that acts as the underlying convincing agent. The reader “goes along with” Boyer because she’s certain in tone, because she repeats her convictions, because she gets to the messier, powerful places of lust and violence that govern us, and she’s entertaining along the way. This is not an easy thing to do.
While I have made much of the brasher aspects of the book, there is also significant space given over to touching pieces, free of sentimentality, but not of feeling, like “Sunsets Off.” Here it is in its entirety:
Nothing, too, is a subject:
dusk regulating the blankery.
Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,
fill in the metaphorical smell.
The horizon leaves the same
impression as runway: jet but air.
I wake to a grain bin, the end is near:
jimson and ditchweed, hog and trough.
The first beer can is making
high hopes out of everything.
No wheat is safe from chaff of this,
hullwrecked in Hugoton, thinking of sod.
*
There is a stately confidence to the piece, right from the opening declaration and through the hope for more, for something other to be (note the double “fill in”). The author obviously wishes to be somewhere else, letting us know humorously that the sight of a grain bin is a signal that the end is near. (One can hear Berryman’s “Life, friends, is boring” somewhere beyond the ditchweed.) We note the careful sonic arrangement of “hog and trough,” and the gleeful delay after “making,” and the ringing –ing rhyme with “everything.” This is poetry of what’s in front of one, so to speak, when the texts and historical connections drop away, and one is left with one’s factual life and factual circumstances. Robert Creeley made a career of writing “states of mind/states of mind in states of place” pieces like this one, and they were somehow, amazingly, never boring. Like Creeley’s seemingly simple pieces, Boyer’s “Nothing” above is definitely “something.”
We must not end things here, though, because there is another element of the book that needs mentioning—Boyer’s playfulness. This playfulness can exist in the forms of plot, with our heroine, for instance, dining on quince paste with Woody Guthrie, or by humorously refashioning one of her pieces as similar to an Ezra Pound broadcast (“Poundcast”), or at the most rudimentary level of phrasing, with such oddities as those that fill in her poem, “You Will Want Like Cowboys,” which begins:
I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.
You will want at smallness,
also squirreling across the wire.
Wantings in the wilderness!
What did you think,
words?
*
The words themselves convulse, break apart, sidestep, loosen, run away feverishly in many poems, but mostly they want to be counted, like the humor wants to be counted, like the adventure does, like the silos do, like the nods to Marx do, like the palpable Desire does. Boyer’s poetry challenges us to not sit still, to not allow for the familiar to lose its mystery, and to be in the world, which includes her poetry, as in the beginning of the final poem “Valediction Forbidding Apocalypse,” where she says:
Dear tiny autumn of lizards,
dear pigs in attic marble,
dear pit/ quarry/ basement,
dear rock, dear stone, dear flesh:
remarkable this world
drowned anyway—a mass
transiently—this product
of the porous
May 23, 2008
This video clip was taken on 9-3-07, on the true summit of Lassen Peak, which I refer to as Mount Lassen in the clip. The summit is at 10,457 ft. The "Lis" I refer to at the end is my wife, Lisa. I may be going to Lassen again this weekend in preparation for climbing Mt. Shasta in less than a month.
May 18, 2008
Today marks 10 years sober. It's quite difficult for me to think that 10 years have passed since I was getting drunk nightly, but there it is.
Being born and raised in Wisconsin positioned me quite substantially in becoming an alcoholic--that seems quite plain to me. Wisconsin is routinely the state with the highest binge-drinkers in the country. It also is the state with the fewest sober people. Of course, these end up being excuses for one's own personal decisions, but the drinking environment, the atmosphere, in Wisconsin is a thing onto itself. I've lived in New York and California now, and these states are extremely mild in drinking atmospheres by comparison. In Wisconsin, it's always right around the corner. The topic is seemingly always in the air. When I was a drinker, I never noticed it; but now I see and hear it all the time.
My own iniation into the ritual of drinking began certainly and basically with being in the room of drinkers, of my family and relatives, all of whom drank to greater and lesser degrees. (The only relative who didn't drink was a recovering alcoholic). This normalized the experience. Further on, I would be given the task of fetching beers for relatives and neighbors, and therefore positioning myself as alcohol delivery person. It moved from a part of the environment to being directly in my hands. I would give these bottles to people I knew and who were friendly to me. It thus seemed to be no problem. Alcohol must be friendly as well, logic implies, if friends and neighbors liked it.
I was also distinctly raised in a German-American household. (We're also a little British and French, but the community was 95% German). Germans like to drink; it's a certain part of the culture. This culture was transported to America, to the heartland, where I grew up. I had my first sip of beer when I was quite young, probably around six or seven. I didn't drink a full beer, though, I don't think, until I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I remember getting drunk with a friend in his father's homemade wine cellar on the 4th of July, my birthday. We emerged from it, stumbling, grabbed the sparklers from our parents, and went running around on the sloping backyard hill. I remember falling down continually, and also the stray light effect of the sparklers.
High school was just a four-year drinking party, full of constant drinking and driving, blackouts, pillow vomit, headaches, parties, sullenness, sexual frustration, depression, addiction to allergy medicines (I liked feeling spaced out), virulent sarcasm, and general distancing from people. It was no surprise then when I was ticketed by the police for drinking on school property during halftime of a girl's volleyball game (another excuse to drink). The news quickly ran up to the school section, and then I had to inform my folks. All of this landed me in an eight-week course for problem drinking. I just laughed it off, unlistening to all the sobering news and statistics. The teachers who led the course must not have been amused--I'm sure they weren't being paid much to run the courses.
What followed was really just more of the same, only more alcohol was needed. I didn't realize, for instance, that I was actually having blackouts, though, until I quit drinking. It just seemed quite normal to not remember anything but compressed seconds--perhaps non-consecutive seconds--from the night before. I ended up with a frayed head eventually, which seems, of course, "normal," because the alcoholic isn't ready to say to him/herself that he/she isn't well. So, frayed head, full of disjunction, full of paranoia, full of suspicion, full of shit, with cowardly sarcasm in tow. Hi, how are you?
Attending the graduate program in creative writing at Syracuse University just continued the same behavior, with the added benefit of being around some people just like me. It was like heaven, at least for awhile. But my alcoholism was really growing by leaps and bounds during this period, which came to involve drinking and getting drunk nightly, a pack and a half cigarette smoking habit, one memorable night where I was afraid to actually walk down a flight of stairs, inexcuseable behavior with women, considerable blackouts, and so on. I began to worry a lot about my sanity--this, unfortunately, isn't a joke.
During my second year at Syracuse, I met a professor who was a recovering alcoholic. He took over for a professor who had gotten ill over the winter break. Little did I know then, but this chance encounter helped change my life. At first I couldn't stand listening to him talk in bits about his sober life. It pretty much drove me nuts, to be honest. But because I was enrolled in the course, I had to sit and listen to him. He would talk about poetry mostly, but there would be side areas of his own personal life that would come through. After a few weeks, I began to like him more and more, and my initial defensiveness fell away. I would end up taking six courses with this professor, and he eventually became a good friend outside of class.
There were many more struggles to come from simply putting the bottle down, and several times I've said to my wife that if I knew life would be so difficult after putting down the bottle, I probably never would have. But most other days I'm fine, and thankful.
Being born and raised in Wisconsin positioned me quite substantially in becoming an alcoholic--that seems quite plain to me. Wisconsin is routinely the state with the highest binge-drinkers in the country. It also is the state with the fewest sober people. Of course, these end up being excuses for one's own personal decisions, but the drinking environment, the atmosphere, in Wisconsin is a thing onto itself. I've lived in New York and California now, and these states are extremely mild in drinking atmospheres by comparison. In Wisconsin, it's always right around the corner. The topic is seemingly always in the air. When I was a drinker, I never noticed it; but now I see and hear it all the time.
My own iniation into the ritual of drinking began certainly and basically with being in the room of drinkers, of my family and relatives, all of whom drank to greater and lesser degrees. (The only relative who didn't drink was a recovering alcoholic). This normalized the experience. Further on, I would be given the task of fetching beers for relatives and neighbors, and therefore positioning myself as alcohol delivery person. It moved from a part of the environment to being directly in my hands. I would give these bottles to people I knew and who were friendly to me. It thus seemed to be no problem. Alcohol must be friendly as well, logic implies, if friends and neighbors liked it.
I was also distinctly raised in a German-American household. (We're also a little British and French, but the community was 95% German). Germans like to drink; it's a certain part of the culture. This culture was transported to America, to the heartland, where I grew up. I had my first sip of beer when I was quite young, probably around six or seven. I didn't drink a full beer, though, I don't think, until I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I remember getting drunk with a friend in his father's homemade wine cellar on the 4th of July, my birthday. We emerged from it, stumbling, grabbed the sparklers from our parents, and went running around on the sloping backyard hill. I remember falling down continually, and also the stray light effect of the sparklers.
High school was just a four-year drinking party, full of constant drinking and driving, blackouts, pillow vomit, headaches, parties, sullenness, sexual frustration, depression, addiction to allergy medicines (I liked feeling spaced out), virulent sarcasm, and general distancing from people. It was no surprise then when I was ticketed by the police for drinking on school property during halftime of a girl's volleyball game (another excuse to drink). The news quickly ran up to the school section, and then I had to inform my folks. All of this landed me in an eight-week course for problem drinking. I just laughed it off, unlistening to all the sobering news and statistics. The teachers who led the course must not have been amused--I'm sure they weren't being paid much to run the courses.
What followed was really just more of the same, only more alcohol was needed. I didn't realize, for instance, that I was actually having blackouts, though, until I quit drinking. It just seemed quite normal to not remember anything but compressed seconds--perhaps non-consecutive seconds--from the night before. I ended up with a frayed head eventually, which seems, of course, "normal," because the alcoholic isn't ready to say to him/herself that he/she isn't well. So, frayed head, full of disjunction, full of paranoia, full of suspicion, full of shit, with cowardly sarcasm in tow. Hi, how are you?
Attending the graduate program in creative writing at Syracuse University just continued the same behavior, with the added benefit of being around some people just like me. It was like heaven, at least for awhile. But my alcoholism was really growing by leaps and bounds during this period, which came to involve drinking and getting drunk nightly, a pack and a half cigarette smoking habit, one memorable night where I was afraid to actually walk down a flight of stairs, inexcuseable behavior with women, considerable blackouts, and so on. I began to worry a lot about my sanity--this, unfortunately, isn't a joke.
During my second year at Syracuse, I met a professor who was a recovering alcoholic. He took over for a professor who had gotten ill over the winter break. Little did I know then, but this chance encounter helped change my life. At first I couldn't stand listening to him talk in bits about his sober life. It pretty much drove me nuts, to be honest. But because I was enrolled in the course, I had to sit and listen to him. He would talk about poetry mostly, but there would be side areas of his own personal life that would come through. After a few weeks, I began to like him more and more, and my initial defensiveness fell away. I would end up taking six courses with this professor, and he eventually became a good friend outside of class.
There were many more struggles to come from simply putting the bottle down, and several times I've said to my wife that if I knew life would be so difficult after putting down the bottle, I probably never would have. But most other days I'm fine, and thankful.
May 10, 2008
May 6, 2008
Recently, we watched Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. The plot unfolds in an annoying back and forth manner, from before the accident to after. It's become a standard issue plot arranger for the past twenty years especially--except the arrangement needs a viewer to actually care about the chain of events that occurred before the after. The style causes a viewer to spend more time with the film than a straight narrative because there's less immediate information. It nearly broke my heart to see the great Albert Finney in such a tottering role. I had just watched his Saturday Night and Sunday Morning the week prior and was blown away.
*
Something in the above reminded me of what I had been thinking about yesterday. I was thinking about how much I would like to read an avant-garde/experimental writer/poet writing honest criticism of other avant-garde/experimental writers/poets. I don't mean to suggest that one should tear another down for sport, but to actually test the writing's thinking out, to not just sit there and say, "Oh, it's great--it's experimental writing." I mention this, because I almost always get this feeling of disappointment when I'm reading, for instance, the man from Philly's reviews, especially of his friends. The reviews write themselves under the simplest of grids--I know the person, they've published with the same presses, etc.
If one does criticize sacred poetry cows, one then almost always--and quickly--gets lumped into an awful lot of reactionaries, of people truly disinterested in experimentation or, really, just writing in general. This is a false move with bad mojo. I believe it takes more kindness, more subtlety, more honesty, to explain why an experimental piece doesn't "work" for one, than to just champion the work blindly because of various attendant, non-textual issues (who they are, where they went to school, who they know, etc.) An adult should be able to speak to another adult and explain what's bothering them--and this should include experimental writing and experimental writers. But be kind.
*
Something in the above reminded me of what I had been thinking about yesterday. I was thinking about how much I would like to read an avant-garde/experimental writer/poet writing honest criticism of other avant-garde/experimental writers/poets. I don't mean to suggest that one should tear another down for sport, but to actually test the writing's thinking out, to not just sit there and say, "Oh, it's great--it's experimental writing." I mention this, because I almost always get this feeling of disappointment when I'm reading, for instance, the man from Philly's reviews, especially of his friends. The reviews write themselves under the simplest of grids--I know the person, they've published with the same presses, etc.
If one does criticize sacred poetry cows, one then almost always--and quickly--gets lumped into an awful lot of reactionaries, of people truly disinterested in experimentation or, really, just writing in general. This is a false move with bad mojo. I believe it takes more kindness, more subtlety, more honesty, to explain why an experimental piece doesn't "work" for one, than to just champion the work blindly because of various attendant, non-textual issues (who they are, where they went to school, who they know, etc.) An adult should be able to speak to another adult and explain what's bothering them--and this should include experimental writing and experimental writers. But be kind.
May 4, 2008
Nothing Moments is having a book launch and reading
at Printed Matter In New York.
It is on June 7th from 5-7pm. Please come if you are
around or forward the info to New York Friends.
Annie Buckley, Mark Kamine, Jamie Schwartz, and Lynne
Tillman will be reading that evening. It should be a
really fun event!
Thank you all,
Nothing Moments
Printed Matter
195 10th Ave
New York, NY 10011
(212) 925-0464
www.printedmatter.org
*
I will be reading from my collection Work Book (Nothing Moments, 2007) sometime this summer in Berkeley/San Francisco/Oakland. Details to come.
at Printed Matter In New York.
It is on June 7th from 5-7pm. Please come if you are
around or forward the info to New York Friends.
Annie Buckley, Mark Kamine, Jamie Schwartz, and Lynne
Tillman will be reading that evening. It should be a
really fun event!
Thank you all,
Nothing Moments
Printed Matter
195 10th Ave
New York, NY 10011
(212) 925-0464
www.printedmatter.org
*
I will be reading from my collection Work Book (Nothing Moments, 2007) sometime this summer in Berkeley/San Francisco/Oakland. Details to come.
Not all literary magazines need to have plans, but I tend to like them more when they do. I like literary magazines that have focus, that stand for something, anything, that have specific interests and reasons for those interests. One magazine that fills that bill is Antennae, edited by Jesse Seldess. I reviewed Antennae several years ago--you can go here, if you care to--and my admiration of it hasn't changed. I just received an email letting me know that Antennae is now online, with pdfs of the older issues now available. Here's the link.
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