Sneezing, such exquisite pain, so I eat cake standing up

Today was a good day, at a friend’s birthday, when my back began to hurt, I ate cake standing up. All I care about at this point is that I didn’t hurt sitting down in a chair, but I had to stand up by dessert time.  Sneezing brings such exquisite sorrow. We won’t mention coughing. Or trying to sit on the pot.

I went to Lucky’s to get some food. It was a bit of a stretch, the heat was unbearable. I probably should not have vacuumed the rug yesterday. What was I thinking? 

I had planned to go see Billy Collins today, I even had tickets for this amazing triple feature all star conjunction with Isabel Allende, and Dave Barry in the town of Sonoma. But since I could barely get out of bed, I couldn’t even imagine trying to drive there.

I was already wavering, and on the fence about going because of the Delta Variant, even though it was outside, on the Sonoma Plaza. But when I woke up with my lower back and hip still hurting from having done too much the day before, most likely, I knew I couldn’t handle the hour drive to Sonoma, then to sit on the grass for two hours, and then the hour drive back. 

Also it was over 100° and incredibly smoky. It was a hard decision to make. Or an idea to let go of. The smoke is positively hazardous. Shallow breathing is the ticket.

Envoy: Well, it took almost a full month to get to the other side of this stupid lower back injury. My back still gets tired when I drive, I definitely hurt after a half-hour of sitting. A dull ache that won’t go away, and aspirin does little to ameliorate the pain. I need rest for a few minutes in between chores, and be careful when I do housework as it still twinges when I mop or sweep. 

Hardest retrain of all is to not leap out of my chair like a startled rabbit after I sit down to rest my back. Caught myself doing just that yesterday. Boing! As Andy Giddings said, "You need to eliminate Jump from your vocabulary." Not an easy thing. I am the original energizer bunny, sans batteries.

Stoned off my ass for the duration (translation: I strained my back)

Get Lucky

After reading some of my Amazon reviews, a writer friend asked: What happened to the great writers? Good question. I keep thinking I'll get lucky. Living writers: who do I admire?

I do like Pat Conroy, but he's a tough read all the way around, I adore Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, V.S. Naipaul, Isabel Allende, Paulo Coelho, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, John Nichols. 

 Notice that most writers on that list are not American writers. Gabriel García Márquez is dead (I'm keeping this list to living writers, so Edward Abby, Peter Matthiessen, and Bruce Chatwin are also off list). I guess I should toss in Barry Lopez too. But that moves me off fiction and into another realm...

I really don't like Dan Brown, and many other "famous" or best-selling living writers. I will read John Grisham in a pinch, but I can't say I enjoy his work. Nor Mario Vargas Llosa, or Annie Dillard. Has she done anything since Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Or Michael Cunningham's, The Hours, what a struggle that was to read; AS Byatt, and Milan Kundera, I felt cheated by them. Paulo Coelho could easily join that cheatin' list.

What do I mean by cheatin' list? Author's use of deux ex machina to get out of a story, too much reliance on godtalk—that includes new age spirituality bytes, etc. Sometimes a book is just a chore to read, despite good craft and metaphor.

I don't seek out Stephen King (I hate horror, and most sci-fi). Ditto Ursula le Guin and Margaret Atwood. Hated Earthsea Trilogy, and Handmaiden's Tale. I read Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, enjoyed them but I would never revisit them.

Yeah, yeah, I read all of J.K. Rowling's Harry Pottery tales, and was momentarily enchanted, but this is supposed to be a list of great writers. Popular, best-selling, or top 100 living writers does not equate to great writers. I used Ranker's Best Living Writers List Criteria: writers who are still alive, in order to compile this list, and then I diverged. It got me to thinking about the process of how we construct lists. So, other types of lists evolved. 

There's the List you need to read for Grad School: Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, John Irving, Tom Wolfe, and the ones I'm supposed to like: Neil Gaiman, Nicholas Sparks,Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, etc. This list is thankfully short as I'm limiting it to living writers. Otherwise, there's no telling where this blog post would end.

And then there's the uncategorized list of writers who've jumped ship, the poets I've known, who later became novelists (vs. novelists who became poets:  Edna O'Brien): Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Sherman Alexie, Michael Ondaatje, Colm Tobin, Dave Eggars, etc.

Thank Gawd I'm not compiling a list of 100 best poets. Would I have to limit it to poets who are famous, poets I don't know, poets I've read, poets I've read with, poets I've worked with, poets I've slept with? Now there's an incestuous list. Better to stick to dead poets for that list.

And there are the pulp fiction lists of popular writers I secretly read: James Patterson, and Dick Francis (didn't he die? I know his son's been co-writing books with him, perhaps they've a special arrangement. Adds another dimension to ghostwriting). 

Jim Patterson's a thoroughly nice guy, I like what he does with his money, and long ago, and far away, I once read with him at Book Passages, and because he was interested in young writers, I gave him a CPITS anthology of student poetry.... Not sure of his hack partnerships, they read fast and furious (three-page chapters), but I do love his Maximum Ride series.  (See, I do like some sci-fi.)

I hurt my knee a few years ago, I've had a lot of down time, laid up, don't like TV, and then I discovered free ebooks on Amazon, I devoured them, then had to get the bad taste out of my mouth and wash out my eyes, so I began to write rather warty reviews.

I've read so much utter dross, it's frightening. I'm afraid it will rub off and then I will become complacent, so I hone my skills by reviewing ebooks. As penance, perhaps. Sometimes it's purgatory. More like hell. 

But then, I'm a poet, not a novelist, what do I know? We take leaps of faith with obscure metaphor, nobody reads us, we don't even write in complete sentences...

There are only a handful of "new" Amazon writers, whose serialist work I admire, and will actively seek out: Jinx Schwartz, RP Dahlke, R.E. Donald, Chip Hughes, Mike Faricy, Brian Meeks, MZ Kelly, Steve Gannon, Jennnifer L. Jennings, Bev Pettersen, M. Ruth Myers, Abigail Keam—but her books have gotten sloppy as of late. Children's author, D. B. Patterson's adult novel, Perdido River Bastard, may be a one-hit wonder. Ditto Auburn McCanta's All the Dancing Birds. I'll keep my eye peeled for work by Florence Osmund and Ellis Shuman—they both are writers of promise.

As to how much I read, I read fast, furiously fast. Most of what I read does not require much by way of grey cells. That is not to say that I haven't read most of the classics, I've read most of those too as well. Grad school sort of ruined me for reading escape fiction, in order to escape, as it were, so the review process is my penance for reading so much poorly crafted writing. 

Every little once and a while I get lucky and am sucked in by the storyline. That's what it's all about, isn't it? 

Choose Three Famous People

Molly Fisk asked on Facebook: Name three famous people you'e known.

Mine would be a litany too long to post. How do I choose just three?

Then there's "what kind of famous?" Do I choose from writers, poets, actors, musicians, public figures, etc.? By how well I knew them—an actual event vs. a one-off? 

Writers: I shared a wee drop of whiskey with Seamus Heaney in an elevator in Rotterdam with the African poets. Rita Dove was my partner in the Breyton Breytenbach translation sessions. We did not drink whiskey.

I went drinking and sang Irish songs with Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver at the Port Townsend Tavern in Washington. Let's just say alcohol was consumed and I was a lightweight. They weren't.

I hung out with Maya Angelou and her son Guy at National Poetry Week. We sat backstage with Lucille Clifton waiting for Maya to come offstage. They talked about the gravitational speed of their breasts reaching to their waists.

Chilean Miners

When Copiapó Valley miner, Florencio Ávalos broke surface from the penance of his underground dungeon, the collapsed San José copper-gold mine, ten minutes after midnight, Chilean time, everyone cheered and applauded. I couldn't help myself. From another hemisphere, another time zone, I too clapped and cried for The 33.

Los treinta y tres—a fortuitous number in Latin American history—the equivalent of freedom—the 33 liberators of Uruguay, Jesus's age, and his 33 miracles. But this is indeed a story of miracles. Though I suspect Roger Ebert would take umbrage over my fast and loose use of the word miracle or milagro. Mea culpea. And he's right. But I love the sound of miracle in Spanish. Let's just say it was a miracle of technology and tenacious know-how.

I don't have TV & it blows my mind that I can watch in real time this Chilean rescue mission. Amidst a covey of balloons against a backdrop of inkdark lapis Chilean sky, a tinabulation of church bells and the braying of  zuzuzuelas, or Genesis alarms, on CNN, they're saying their minds are blown… All our minds are blown. And it's a full-blown media circus—imagine 2-3000 media hounds at full bay. Though the media is literally being held at bay some 300 feet from the emerging miners, I can hear fragments of nasal American English twang rising over the din. Izzat Larry King?

The first miner to be rescued, "Florencio Ávalos came back to us on the 13th day of the 10th month of the 10th year of the decade —which adds up to 33," President
Sebastián Piñera said. It's also the numerical equivalent of AMEN: 1+13+5+14=33.

David Eisner on Mapplethorpe NEA and censorship

Yesterday, at the California Confederation of the Arts conference in San Jose, I was taking photos of David Eisner on the NEA panel on censorship and controversy, and he was so insidiously sweet—almost primping for the camera. I wanted an engaged photo and when he refused to answer a question—how much does the government spend on art versus the military budget—like a good politician, he prevaricated. So I yelled at him to answer the question—and then I took his photo. He and I had a stare-off. I got the enemy to drop his cute little mask just for a second. Unveiled, he glared at me with pure venom when I flashed the photo.

Eisner was steadfastly ignoring me as many people do, assuming the photographer is a non-entity, or a non-person. Brainless. He looked at me is if I were violating some unwritten code of conduct. Maybe I was. Ken Larsen said a good photographer will engage his or her quarry anyway he or she can. He wasn’t concerned, and noted that Eisner wouldn’t address any of my questions. Eleanor, from Artists in Corrections said, oh, you were editorializing a bit there. But she and I have jumped into many of fracas when no one else would, so it was more of a pat on the back than a reprimand.

When they opened up the panel for questions from the audience, there was a stampede to the open mic. Many angry artists and arts administrators vented. Portent of things to come. All this because of the Mappletorpe controversy.

When Eisner got graphic, describing the photos in detail, someone yelled, You really like those photos don’t you? Homoerotic phobia. Jackie Baas of the U. C. Art Gallery, said, you have to see the work in perspective, 150 photos, it’s a retrospective. These so-called offensive photos amount to less than 10% of the exhibit.

Eisner’s hard line was that there should be no NEA funding at all for art. He said, let artist just do what they want (no censorship) on their own dime. Does the public taxpayer have the right to dictate what is art? What qualifies John Q. Public, or Jesse Helms, for that matter, to dictate what is art? We are about to lose what few rights we have when these insidious bills get passed. 

Over and over, the CCA panelists Pat Daverra and Chuck Mark said, don’t let them put language into your mouth. They’ve won the battle. It goes back to definition. The outcome depends upon some concerted fighting from the arts communities.

I brought 30 copies of my article on the Rohnert Park gallery censorship of a photo of a young naked child in a meadow—a photo taken by her mother—which quickly disappeared. It was too bad that I didn’t have copies to give to the panelists, Pat Daverra and Chuck Mark, and Charles Christopher did receive copies. When censorship begins, it knows no limits, and erodes our freedoms. If this takes a hold, where will it stop?

Keynote speaker, Isabella Allende said, the moral majority has burned books just as the Nazis did in Germany. Books don’t burn easily. It takes them a very long time to die.

11/19

• Censorship; Art or Obscenity, The Paper

Isabel Allende

Isabel is holding our chapbook, Falling to Sea Level.