Incapable of the Atrocities of Men

4-23- Tues.

Think: What is a good continuing metaphor for Jim?

The Montreal Canadiens are vying with the New York Rangers to advance in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

But what am I trying to think about here? What humanitarian insight am I working to expose? On the way home, I was thinking of the beggar Jaun Tan, he of the Mexican/Chinese descent, his cardboard sign, his inestimable age, his camp under the overpass--does he have a huge bank account? a condo in Vegas? a laptop? Microsoft stock? cousins in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Monterrey? How will he and Jim meet? Perhaps a tie between Juan and Pete, a money tie...He will give his sign to Jim. He sends money home...?

I've begun transcribing my old journals onto the computer. It's good exercise and I expect I'll uncover material for Jim. I had wanted to keep his character and situation sparse, but I'm not sure that'll work. I'm considering fleshing out his home life~~~~I don't know.

It's been a tough spring for breathing. It's just hot enough today to be uncomfortable. If it was all-out hot, I would be able to resign myself to it.

I read a short story by Margaret Atwood called "Rape Fantasies". It used a flaky, gossipy tone which characterized the women as too ditzy to seriously discuss the topic of rape. It was somewhat funny as satire in the women's casual romanticization of such a violent and degrading act. They were so naive, it seemed. It didn't do much to bolster my opinion of the intellects of the women I attract, but the fact that they could have some compassion for the desperation that drives the attackers I think underscores that they are the gentler sex, nearly incapable of the atrocities of men. Their atrocities are different, at any rate.

I've been playing my guitar a lot lately. I think I'm getting better.
I'm in a very short mood, like my breath. Fucking smog. Seinfeld and the Simpsons are repeats. I'll go take my walk when I get to the bottom of this page.
I want out. I want change. I want to live in Alaska.
I'll do some internet letter. I should take back the $100 worth of fucking software that doesn't work. I might even have the receipt.

A Lit Conference

4-22-96 Mon.

I missed writing in her for a couple days. I don't know how. Friday night I stayed in like a good boy and listened to the Dodgers and watched the first half of Lawrence of Arabia. Saturday I went to a conference at UCLA on developing literacy for the new millenium. The general gist of it was how to make literature more accesible to an increasingly splintering culture against the technological competition of Nintendo and MTV. I wasn't sure I agreed with Raymund Paredes view that we need to restructure the accepted literary canon to appeal to Latinos. He says that demographic data suggest Latinos will be the majority population in California in the next twenty years. Does that mean one group should be pandered to? Or has one group been pandered to for too long? Good writing should be "canonized", no matter it's culture of origin or subject matter. Applying "affirmative action" may (or may not) be fair in hiring practices, --but in determining what is art or literature? Come on. Anyway, it was a good day, just the environs my insides have been pining for, a literary community and forum for discussion. I did a dramatic reading for The Giver. I read well. Talked with Maryanne Gagliano and a high school AP teacher about books and movies. After the first session, I sat in the billiards room at the Faculty Club and waited for the next session and read the paper. The second session promised to discuss Huck Finn and Farewell to Arms and to examine the social climate in which they were written. Finn is probably the greatest American novel ever written. Halleluejah. When Huck decides at the end not to send the letter that would return Jim to slavery, he believes, he has been taught, he says, that he will burn in Hell; that passage is offered as one of the greats in all novels and I agree that this triumph of Hucks humanity is especially stirring. After the session, there was Risa calling my name ?! She had for whatever reason, singled me out, more joke than anything, I guess, to give me a bowl she'd made of clay in our art class. We fell to blabbing and walked to the luncheon together. Maryanne found me and had saved us a couple of seats. Risa told me about a California literature project in which they discussed Love in the Time of Cholera and how much she enjoyed it and used what they had talked about in her own teaching. It was a gift to be talking to someone who loves what I love. We talked all through lunch. I told her about the stalker incident and she laughed and was pretty. Uh, pretty entertained, I mean.
We said we'd meet at the Shakespeare session after Harriet Doerr spoke to the luncheon. Harriet Doerr--I wasn't expecting anyone so old! She's eighty-six and very funny and inspirational. She didn't start writing until she was sixty-five years old, proving it's never too late. She mentioned how Capote had said he "just threw words in the air and they always seemed to come down right," however she said her philosphy was more akin to Bob Gibson: "Just hum it in there, baby." Risa didn't show up at the Shakespeare session, dashing the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We'd planned on walking over to the Book Festival to see Dennis Miller on "Writing Funny", and she said she liked beer, so I figured we could go for a beer, and I'd tell her some more adventures. I thought I might find her at the festival, but there were 35,000 fucking people there and it was too nutty so I drove home and had a beer with the Swamp Thing and Shirelle, and played gin rummy and my guitar. Frodo called. She's bummed cuz she and her boyfriend split. I invited her up and we went to El Coyote and had very strong margaritas until Oliver was yelling loudly asking loudly, "You wanna fuck me, boy!" He was on coke or something. We went to the Derby and I waited all night to get the pool table and won the game, but then they announced last call and the bouncer took the balls away. I had just one beer GIP brought me, an Amstel Light. Sunday, Dimona made some scrambled eggs and diced potatoes with tortillas and salsa and avocado. I hung out on the stoop playing Dimona's boyfriend's guitar. Slept through the second half of "Never Cry Wolf." I've seen it. It's great. I also wateched "Devil in a Blue Dress". Kind of a black Philip Marlowe.

The Literary Fool

4-19-96

I just finished a short story by Alice Munro, published in 1994 called " A Real Life", told from a prudish, small town, farmwife's point of view, about her ruggedly reclusive neighbor, a stocky woman named Dorrie who who lives alone and hunts rabbits and traps muskrats, living a generally manly lifestyle.
When a wealthy Australian falls in love with Dorrie, Millicent, urges Dorrie to marry him. Millicent makes all the arrangements: the dress, the cake, the invitations. It never occurs to her that Dorrie may be happy enough with her indepndent existence.
The interesting thing is that with the story filtered through Millicent's narration, her interference in Dorrie's life seems innocuous, almost helpful, but really she's a frigid, hennypenny bitch trying to impose her own standards on everybody else (reminds me of Lardner's technique).

I wonder how Jim will be perceived with the narration wired through him as it is, compared to what he's really like. I want him to do wrong things, shocking, stupid things without entirely losing the readers' sympathy. As they read, they should side with Jim, even if he's wrong from a social standpoint.

Tomorrow I have some business at UCLA. I might even be glad about it. There's a conference called Literature for a New Millenium: Engaging Readers, Engaging Texts. It's at 8:30 at the Faculty Center. Then there's that Book Festival and some other conferences to check out, but I threw away the program and don't know the names or times of the ones I want to go to.

What else? There's a lot on my mind canceling itself out to nothing--Shirelle jsut got home. She asked me to have dinner with her at Dimona's. I'd like to just rent a video and hit the hay, read a half a chapter from the Hall book. I had to fight off a massive craving for a drink, a trip to a bar, something that's been begging to be done all week.

-

"Lawrence of Arabia" is on. I just finished watching "Double Indemnity". The Dodgers lost a chance to make up some ground on the Padres. I've now switched to the "X Files".
Tom brought back some Genuine Draft Light in cans from Ralph's.
-
I read that bit on dialog in the Hall book. What did I learn? Dialog should move the action along. Does it say anything about filling out character? Can't it do that, too?

I really ought to do three more pages to make up for yesterday.

Yeats, Williams, and Sincerity

4-17-96

Where to start? Randomly, guided divinely, I plucked Yeats and W. C. Williams* from the shelf. I read the Yeats intro and then the Williams intro. Both concerned themselves with the question of sincerity in art. Yeats was, by this account, a man of many contradictions: "Afraid of insincerity, he struggled unsuccessfully to fuse or to separate the several characters by whom he felt himself to be peopled." p.2
Yeats himself wrote, "The individual man of entire sincerity has to wrestle with himself, unless transported by rage or passion; he has so much mind to make up, with none to help him and no guide except his conscience; and conscience afterall, is but a feeble glimmer in a labyrinthine cave of darkness."
Gregory answers that "The difficult question of sincerity in art...should be referred to the continuity of [the writer's] imagination and the speech that gives it meaning...the question may arrive at a fruitful, if partial, solution by observing the triple unity of speech, and imagination, and emotion, and their relationship to each other in a book...The clear evidence of sincerity in Dr. Williams' work is...one cannot divorce its theme from the voice that speaks it."
And finally, Yeats said, "A poet by his very nature is a man who lives in entire sincerity. The better his poetry, the more sincere his life...to achieve anything in art, to stand alone for many years, to go a path no other man has gone, to accept one's own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it...to give one's life as well as one's words, words which are so much nearer to one's soul than to the criticism of the world."

-

How do I apply this to myself? I am more like Yeats than the steadfast Williams (no, I'm not). My identity has spent its time churning noisily around and around the blender to the point where I have doubted the sincerity of my every thought and urge and action. I have been paralyzed with indecision. This identity scramble makes it intolerably difficult to stake myself to one voice. According to Yeats' formula, if one maintains his own path, "stays close to home", one's art can be accomplished. The key, I suppose, is identifying oneself and resisting the temptation to stray from it. The implications of this frighten me. My very nature is to wander around, take up different characters, and be and do all there is to be and do, unlimited. How to reconcile my sincerely restless soul with my desire to create and the necessary "stay at home" discipline to do so?

Balance.

Balance, which is instinct, which you've got to survive.

I can do this.

*Yeats, The Man and the Masks Richard Elman 1948
In the American Grain Intro by Horace Gregory 1925

Buzzcuts, Blowjobs, and Naked Circuses

4-16-96

Cheap beauty all over the TV and in the palm of my hand.

Begin

I'll try some cursive. Lord knows nothing was coming the other way. Sometimes I hold my pen between my thumb and index finger, resting on my middle finger, sometimes it rests on my ring finger.

I'm buggin out scatterbrained. Dodgers are playing up in San Franciso tonight, if it's not too rainy. One day a long time ago

A long time ago

In second grade I used to draw circuses with naked people. I drew the vagina on the fat woman as a circle with a vertical line down the middle.

In sixth grade I didn't know what a blow job was. I confused the term with buzz job. Mike O'Neill teased me after I'd gotten one of my dad's homemade police-son buzzcuts (in the 70's when only dorks had short hair). Somehow O'neill figured out my confusion and asked me in class if I had gotten a blow job and who gave me that blow job and I said, yeah, my dad.
He fell apart laughing. Then he asked me in front of out teacher, Mr. Webb, probably figuring Webb would understand the humor, but Webb grabbbed him around the back of the neck (ah, the 70's) and shook him around and cussed him out. And who knows how many months it was before I figured out what the big deal was.

I'm signing off. No! Let's not stop until I've done the required three pages. I ought to make a pact with myself against using space mentioning how many pages I need to fill.

I dreamt of Big Bear. I had been speaking of going fishing there with my grandfather, and he begged me not to go because some fisherman asleep in their car were shot and killed last summer.

What about selectivity?

I'm starting to think roast beef sandwich or peanut butter and jelly. I've done three sets of ten curls of eighty-five pounds this afternoon. I'll do at least one more set. Maybe I'll also do 4 sets of 15 pushups, too. I don't like to do them when anyone else is home though.

Shirelle came home while I was in the bathroom and grabbed some pot and left.

The kid whose mom smoked and drank while pregnant...

I read an essay from the Best of 1994 collection, "Trucking Through the AIDS Belt". A writer rode along with some commerical truck drivers through Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi, the supposed birthplace of AIDS in humanity, the cradle, the infestation capital of the world. It reads as a pretty harrowing journey.

I'm a lazy writer today. "Today and every day."

I'll be reading the Dialog section of the Hall primer for novel writing. I think I should pay close attention.

I gave an inservice today.

Jim Says

What's Jim's compulsion? Make a contract. Foreshadow - a reversal and a recognition

April 15-
Tax Day! I just came from dropping my forms off at the post office at Wilshire and Detroit.

I can't think because my toenails are too long.

I used a clipped toenail to dig the dirt out of my fingernails.

I almost sorta sympathize with Kacinzky and McViegh and their fight against technology and government oppression--if only they could make their points without murdering innocent people. Ugh.

Maughm makes the point that spiritual pursuits run counter to the idea of America. Church is just a place to go conform once a week while you spend the rest of the time making money or being looked down upon. For the first time I notice the decadence of capitalism. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall has not greed won out over sharing?---Ah, but sharing can only be enforced by fascism, which is a greater evil than greed.

I read last night several chapters of Leviticus dealing with the identification and treatment of leprosy. Does this foreshadow one of Christ's miracles?

I watched a very good movie last night, "Clockers". I'd been put off of other Spike Lee movies like "Do the Right Thing" because of its obnoxious, in your face, racism. The biggest feat of "Clockers" is its delicate portrayal of very strong characters: Strike, Strike's family, especially his brother and mom, also Rodney and Tyrone and the two cops, and the rest of the projects' bench gang--They were real people. This subject matter is usually dealt with so coarsely in rap videos and other media that glorify murder and drug. To see Strike on the train at the end was the most poignant cinematic moment I've seen in a long time.

Que mas?

Jim says, "I know what you mean, man. I just want to get out of here, get away from all this bullshit, all this concrete and fumes and insurance and paychecks and shit. I want to hunt buffalo and stew roots for a living. Build a cabin somewhere and plant turnips and cook up squirrels and porcupines and read books and write poems and fuck all this meaningless bullshit. Grow a little bud, find me a wilderness chick, pop out some little ones, teach 'em to ride horses and fuck Henry Ford."
Aaron narrowed his eyes. "Did you take your pill today?"

Duh

4-13-96
The Blues Brothers is on this morning. 4-14-96
She walks in and the room goes blank. Greg Norman has just blown another Masters. The Dodgers are beating the Marlins 5-0. I've just returned from UCLA. There was supposed to have been a book festival with some writer's conferences with Amy Tan and Digby Dahl and others at 1:30 in Kinsey Hall room 169. The first class I was interested in, Delving the Imagination, was not there. And now that I'm home writing this, I glance up and notice that I have the date wrong. It's not until next weekend. And I skipped going to the Long Beach Grand Prix to go the class.
Duh.
Shirelle and the Thing are out and there is room to think upstairs here. I cleared my head some walking around the university. I read the news and sports * the telephone rang. It was the GIP. He was excited because Suzette the Stripper had left him a message. Did he want to go to the beach? Or a movie some time? She's from Australia. I once paid her twenty-two dollars at the Wild Goose to undulate her butt in my face. She has a good bawdy sense of humor. ~~Now I can't think again. That didn't take long. I was going to tell about my day, but just like that, I don't care anymore. Stevo rang the bell before going into the Insanity Pepper's downstairs.

So anyway I had a cup of Hawaiian Macademia Nut coffee by the open window of a little cafe and then crossed the street when I'd finished the sports and went into the Press Club Diner and had a Westwood omelet with egg beaters and hash browns and iced tea and sat at the counter eating it, and I read the Opinion section and the View where there was a story about "theory of mind" in parrots which is "the ability to fathom what another person or creature is thinking" (like when you're shrooming and you can read your dog's mind?) and a gal sat on the stool alongside me, and there seemed to be an unspoken flirtation, she indicated would I pass the jelly without ever saying "jelly". Huh. I left, though, without ever talking to her other than the jelly. I walked up to Hamburger Hamlet and drank a Bud Light and did the crossword and watched the Angels and the Tigers and the Bulls beat Cleveland and I killed time until one thirty when I thought the class was supposed to start. I was dismayed at the lack of people as I walked through campus. I went to the library, but it's closed, still being repaired after the earthquake two years ago. I asked an Asian kid sunning himself on a bench, where do you go to the library around here? and he directed me to an interim library which wouldn't open for another hour. So I went to the bookstore passing a fraternity function with a loud band and bikin-clad co-eds. I bought Leaving Las Vegas and Dog Soldiers and browsed long enough for the library to open, and then I walked over there, but it wasn't the library with the tax forms I was looking for, so I was directed to another library across campus where I found the forms down in the basement. Then I went to Kinsey Hall 169, but the class wasn't there, and I finally left assuming it had been cancelled due to no interest. Then I drove here and figured out I had the date wrong.

4-12-96

Shirelle has a delicious-smelling roast in the oven. The Angels are playing in Detroit. Shirelle's friend Dimona stopped in. Shirelle made her a sandwich. Dimona told me about some books she was reading, James Baldwin and John Irving and how she couldn't get through The Sound and the Fury with it's retarded first person narrator.
My mom just called to make sure my brother didn't stiff me for the Dodger tix last Mon.
I was reading in a journal last night from leap year 1992 and I wondered in the entry of back then how much my writing would have improved by leap year 1996 which is now, and my writing has only gotten less energetic and less imaginative.
If I give it up, though, what would I do?
Read more, watch TV and go to more movies and exercise, act, play baseball, make more money--why am I such a slave to my pathetic writing?
I think I'll get up early tomorrow and take my pole up to Perris Lake and then go see my grandparents. But there's also this LA Times sponsered Festival of Books at UCLA and the Long Beach Grand Prix is going on, too.
My writing used to have more dialog and characterization then this drab reporting and whining I do in here now.

"How will I get to the bottom of this page," Wink wondered worriedly. It was as if his corpus collosum had been severed; if he had any ideas, they weren't making it from the cerebrum to the cortex, and so he was unaware of any EEG activity that might have been going on. He put the tip of the pencil to the paper and waited. Perhaps some random animus would visit upon his fingers, seize his pencil and fill the page. There seemed to be a neutralization in him, though. He didn't know if he wanted to enlighten or entertain; each urge froze out the other, immobilizing him. Maybe if he alternated his effort each day between the two, he might move forward like the alternating steps, left and right, of his slowly atrophying legs.

-

"Guess what, dude, I quit my job," Adam informed Jim without giving him any chance to guess. I'm going back to Utah and leave all this sh-I mean parties behind. You don't know what went on the other day, man. I really fuc-I mean messed up badly. You know I was balancing on the wall at the beach again when..."