in america volume 22 part 5 - 2011 april-may

work & days: a lifetime journal project

14 April 2011 AS Byatt 2009 The children's book Knopf an audience the watchers, wide-eyed and greedy, distracted and supercilious, preoccupied, uncomfortable, tense, must become one, as a school of fishes becomes one, wheeling this way and that in response to messages of hunger, fear or delight. the wonderful movement from comfort to freedom and back spirit lonely and meager She never got used to owning these things, never saw them simply as household stuff. He was slightly knock-kneed, and he walked circumspect and hunched, unlike Tom's habitation of all the air around him. This book full of draw on account of the settings and the children. It's almost 700 pages and I could happily read it end to end. It's full of fantasy that interests me not at all, Olive's fairytales and the art described, "capering grotesques," but she describes her characters physically, and she has Victorian England backing her, its established cultural wealth. She tells what people wear and what they eat. She had one of those faces that in repose looks heavy, but can be transformed by an eager sense of interest. The only person who understood the glamour and terror of work was Philip. The book has strongly the arc of lives whole and round, young parents with young children, and then splintering and disordering, wearing out, shredding. When I opened the back sleeve I gasped to see the complacent pig face she has now earned. She's 74. 15 [more detailed log of audio card] Went to talk to Daniel in DC Computers about a Mac Pro tower, which he'll sell me used for 2610. Then there's software, maybe another 1200. I'm waiting to hear about the grant but could probably pay for it 400 x 6 pay periods, before the end of the semester. How to be an old lady - Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey and Eileen Atkins in Upstairs downstairs, imperious, vulnerable, wise and reckless, very touchingly present. Jean Marsh interviewed about the show. I also need another tent. Canon XA10 $2000 Gianfranco Sony Z-1 1080i full HD used 3600 and computer 3600 = 7200 What I need in a camera Full HD Manual control Out of focus background capability at macro and other Good low light Disk or card recording, internal drive Full editing software support for the codec - FCP or Premiere XLR audio input Changes in speed? Image good enough to project big in festival 16th Frank's birthday - I was in Balboa Park this morning - mid-morning, I guess - and saw a film again by the lotus. The concrete tank and the water are clean, the water lilies just beginning to grow. There happened to be something going on just where I dropped my bike in the SE corner, water shapes sometimes boiling into existence off the concrete edge, maybe inflow from a source I couldn't see, maybe some thermodynamic effect of water in that corner. It was very cosmological, sudden boilings from a shadow edge, drawn in gold and black on a grainy tea-colored floor. Tiny dimple whirlpools on the surface were throwing perfect slowly traveling black circles with rotating gold outlines. There were changes in rate of motion, in scale, in form. I was imagining seeing bits of it slowed, bits of sound like it, bits of language, a lyric. By the lotus. Maybe a carp and its shadow come through. Sitting watching I was feeling the shift into soul time that can come with art attention, the way I am given or gather magic confluences in time - is that the way to say it? Being at liberty in the fine spring morning and stopping just at the place on the bank's edge where that cosmos creation diagram was in progress. (I checked the rest of the tank's edge, it was nowhere else.) I was just at one end of it and it sometimes boiled/bloomed out of the side of my head's shadow, thought influence sailing slowly away. Oh the possibility of making. Will it be there when I go back later with my camera? It needs sun from the right direction and height and a day still enough for a sleek surface. Something close to the viewer's dim thought, intimate, a voice that is almost one's own. Does shift into soul time always come after an ordeal, and was this illness that, and maybe the tent collapsing? I haven't said it's also a brain dynamic diagram. [tank 1] [tank 2] [tank 3] 17 I called Ondine a moping vampire, probably indirectly enough. Also a handless maiden. Her work is childish, shallow, lazy, a pose. She's vampiristic in her lack of you, she gets into love affairs in which she has no care or clue. She's held up waiting for something from her dad, palely loitering. Jody meantime has married an old man who's not smart, has three little children, and is hungering for her boss, who is closer to her age, and smart, and alas investing in a younger woman. She's wanting to learn to cut stones - - Heath Ledger in Brokeback mountain charismatic manliness. 18 Carried the movie into the night, lay awake remembering it. Sex, love, between men moves me more, why, because it seems more real. As if men aren't enough themselves with women. The two men riding together, or punching each other out. Innis's true-hearted sudden violence, Jack's yearning looks. The scene where Innis goes to see Jack's folks after he dies, the weathered bare house, the two old people with pale, pellucide eyes. Innis going upstairs to Jack's room, propping open the window. The kind of room Al Morrison had, a cot, a rug, a desk, a box to sit on by the window. Two bloody shirts on a hanger, one embracing the other. It's Frank and Marvin, it's Tom and Lou, maybe; Tom certainly. It's the way I loved Tom when I loved without despairing for myself, seeing him overwhelmed in his story, wanting the story, grieving for him. I can go days without thinking of Tom. When I do it's still a pocket of sorrow. I was pushing a cart in Whole Foods and for just one step my right leg dropped out, nothing there. I'm wondering whether sometimes when I fall it's that, not tripping over an edge. I'm down so fast I don't notice how it happens. I fell once in Borrego Springs, coming into the energy fair parking lot. A woman cried Are you alright? I got up and stared her in the eye for a moment and then said coldly and briefly Yes. I want people to shut up and observe, am I alright? Well then. Don't make a social drama of it. Was it a thrasher not a mockingbird? They are both mimidae. Mimidae. When I woke at four I got up and washed the dishes, and then because I had hot water warmed the glass rod and got back into bed in the dark. I'm sometimes now thinking of a dress I made, at 15 maybe, a sleeveless cotton sheath in a print the pink-brown color I thought of as like a fescue field. I had smooth brown arms and shining hair, and in my run-up fantasy he is stroking my skin saying Sweetheart you are so beautiful. But then, I don't know why it is, what I need to get deeper in is for him to bring a second man. It is Monday morning, raining. There's a dove. Nasturtiums in a glass. They're blooming in the 4th Avenue canyon now, have just begun. Hoo'-hoo-hoo-hoo. - Blue jean thigh, blue flannel shirt with sleeve rolled up. I look down at myself with boy pleasure - boy-girl pleasure from another time. Lean 30s. 19 Baroque duet writing. - I'm done with the packets I have - except neurotic Kay - went through James paragraph by paragraph telling him what he'd need to do to make his essay cogent. And Clar - tried to push her further into a reading of The matrix trilogy. She doesn't know why it gripped her and doesn't know she could find out. She's constantly inconsequential, off, in what she says, I think because she hasn't braved family and religious facts. And James doesn't know what he doesn't know, he bluffs, he patches over with blind quotes. Is demonstrating helpful to them? It's what I do for my own exercise with their material but can they use it? - Processing 1. Gain - subtle volume shifts to accent something in a long sequence, or discrete bits 2. Noise reduction plug-in - but test 3. Equalization - low or high freq and then can boost gain after 4. Multiband compression - adjust apparent vol across multiple frequency bands 5. Limiting - increase vol of all Understanding self-noise 24-bit usually provides no advantage - exceeds the range of the mic What is the self-noise level of my mic? Rode 78 db Wind basket windshield with hairy cover high-pass filter hold mic close to ground Higher signal-to-noise ratio Vegetation is acoustically reflective Handling noise 21 Transiting into my own time by finishing transcribing Again 4, ie last vol before this one, and now this one. Sean yesterday - I love to look at him - he takes good care of himself - he's kept a young man's beautiful flat chest - and I love being with him, I come into his back yard and he hears the gate and steps onto the porch and we're instant friends in relation to the garden. I have the naturalness with him that I have with smart people. We were deciding what the garden needs now. I asked him about the flu and he offered to listen to my lungs so I was in the kitchen taking deep breaths with his stethoscope on my back. That was lovely somehow, a friend's easy favor. Another project too, graveled wild garden in his side yard. 23 Woke at 5:30 from a nightmare about an exam. It was supposed to be a math exam but the questions were some kind of fantasy history in pictures and there was a child at my table, a chaotic room full of noise. I couldn't do anything. Woke tight with worry and lay wondering what the stress is, why I lost it with eating yesterday and brought home four bad novels from the library. Is it waiting to hear about the grant. It says no. The photographs Adam sent? Yes. I was lying there feeling the ways Windsor, Montreal and LA were socially hard - that from transcribing too - the ways I feel ugly, crippled, frightened, and personally unwanted. The photos - I'm looking at them again - are not so bad, though the first sight of them shocked me. It's mainly the right side of my face twenty years older than the left. I remembered what Thy found about bloodflow and I can see it. The look on my face is sad? Hopeless. I was expecting to look ugly. Do you want to talk about this   Did I zonk yesterday about the photo   Will I hear from CC before the end of April     no Were those appearances as bad as I feel     no Okay     act, (Kc), fight, delay Is it bloodflow into the R?   Can I fix it     YES (Kc)?     brilliant courageous child Do something about it   Anything else     no [plant lists] 24 Sunday. Working on Again 4 and 5 because I want to review the last year, pick up anything in it I should - last summer so glum, not there now though there are crashes. I pull up the gmail page with sick longing, nearly always disappointed, but today there was an instant like a small burst of light in my chest. Greg at the end of a letter said: I have now read your journal entries from the period just after your long stay in the hospital. You saw your home life with new eyes when you came home, and the tone is radically different ... you felt yourself being dragged down; you felt like a frump, after all those exciting interactions and the sense of new possibilities with people you had met. I found these entries sad and quite touching. I liked where you listed all the names you could remember of your friends at the hospital, memorializing them. I carefully read each name and description. 25 Toward the east, looking out the kitchen window, the sky begins to deepen and cool. I watch as another little eternity rolls by, one day blown in and away, and after, the same, and so time gathers again, and we begin another beginning. 142 Susan Froderberg 2010 Old border road Little Brown She has a PhD in philosophy and her first novel, besides a lot of how-to and place, keeps pulling back into wide view. "We're moved in our repose through currents, caught within the eddies of westerlies ...." She has MacCarthy's liking for uncommon words. Vega, brecha, pedicles, frapped, mulligrubs, varve, whiffling, bolsoned, gigging, waddy, justins, shoggled up, borascaed, walters, eyot, slived, clonic, hames, pedregal, habra. - Denny's on Pacific Highway Monday. I'm here for steak and rye toast. Wide table at the window, little strip of bay, blue, grey destroyer hazed over behind it. Small wind, slant lines of glitter in the esplanade palms. Cruise liner showing blue shadows on its, what is that thing, Froderberg wd have a word for it, large bobbled finned white thing on its aft deck. - So good, hot steak in toast. Walter Anderson's later, scouting. A scare this morning, the college instituting a new 9-year comprehensive review process on top of the 3-year review they already have. Letter asking me to volunteer to be on committees. I check the rules. I don't have to be reviewed because I have more than 9 years. Can I ignore the letter? Probably, for now. The college is getting always tighter as our program at least gets more mediocre. - Before I read the rules I was checking my current contract - it's 2011-2014, enough. 27 Sean's garden yesterday and today. Four yellow roses to edge the vegetable bed. New plants to fill the bare spot next to the fountain - peppermint geranium, salvia apiana, salvia sagittata, cosmos, gaillardia, other plants for his potager - romaine, basil, parsley, black cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, more strawberries. Campanula as ground cover under the *. Tied up the almond onto its espalier, the fig too. Pulled some of the passiflora off the bougainvillea. Measured the side yard. Talked to Sean about an island in the center of the potager, to work from. Sat on a chair and stared at the robinia moving, the whole graceful little yard. Sean came out in a muscle shirt and a red baseball cap, very dishy, there was that too. Lingered. 28 It's Jerry's birthday. All the significant birthdays I've had in April, Frank the 16th, Rob the 14th, Olivia the 23rd, Tom the 30th. Jerry so dull a pen pal, doesn't want to tell things or reply to what I tell. - Scott's palo verde is blooming! Looking for a lysiloma for Sean. - Scott's gravel garden this aft, and then weeds in the edge beds. I came home with roses and a couple of pomegranate flowers, happy all evening because I was with plants. The salvia apiana putting up long flower stalks, indescribable, behind the fountain. The athanasia with huge yellow flower heads catching light on its silver stems, the toyon bright at the gate. The pineapple sage in new growth from the base. I took the stakes off the palo verde, which didn't die. The African sumac needs to be thinned. I shaped and weeded and smelled the sages, saw the back light over the fence filling the slot, picking out the gentry. Then the back, where the green white and silver, grass wood and stone make a remarkable peace. Scott said, I go back there and can't believe I have something like this. 30 Le Guin 1995 Four ways of forgiveness Harper I've read it before but the stories didn't stick though I recognized the passage about whisper music when I came to it. Now I'm looking at the back cover: "In recent years, no writer inside the field of science fiction or outside it has done more to create a modern conscience." He clapped his long hands very softly once, then began to brush the grey-blue palms in subtle rhythms. As the table fell silent he sang, but in a whisper. On such plantations the slaves had developed this almost silent music, the touch and brush of palm against palm, a barely voiced, barely varied, long line of melody. The words sung were deliberately broken, distorted, fragmented, so they seemed meaningless. Shesh, the owners had called it. ... voice after voice joined, almost at a whisper, increasing the complexity of the rhythms till the cross-beats nearly, but never quite, joined into a single texture of brushing sibilant sound, threaded by the long-held, quarter tonal melody on syllables that seemed always to be about to make a word but never did. The soft, rushing, waterlike music with its infinitely delicate shifting rhythm went on and on. She often writes someone with local knowledge moving to global knowledge. "We were enslaved by the present time." the balance of power between men and women, on which depend the lives of children and the value of their education - I bought Tom a French press coffee pot / thermos for his 65th birthday. He had on new white tennies and a new watch strap and a new phone, and had been working down his belly to be in shape for the Cove this summer. I took him to a café at 59th on El Cajon for breakfast. We drove back to 30th and University because he wanted to take the #2 bus through South Park to show me the neighbourhood. On the way back we sat on a curb talking in the shade, waiting for the bus in a breeze he called ambrosial. He told a good story about a black bus driver woman and a ten dollar bill. I told him about falling in LA. Then I brought home a black and silver suitcase for the audio equipment. [page of lysiloma-hunt tree nursery inf] 1st May May Day morning, Sunday morning quiet and brilliant. One dove circumspect at its dish, one house finch, nervous. The sycamore barely stirring. What to do in this last day before packet 3's. - Since 9 pm public radio gloating about having killed Osama Bin Laden after ten years. "No Americans were harmed." His oldest son and "a woman" also killed. They are gloating about murder, whatever their reason. Obama was gloating. That was wrong and dangerous. He should be announcing it with grief. He's gloating for political reasons. Does it guarantee his second term? "America has custody of his body." "America can do whatever we set our mind to." He actually said that. 2 Do you have any comment     the Work, community, mourning, war The proper work of the community would be to mourn war   It's a victory of patriarchy   Prestige victory   Helicopters and tech warriors in heavy armour with extraordinary training, an extraordinary intelligence bureaucracy. Then champagne bottles spraying ejaculate at Ground Zero. Britain does a wedding the day before May Eve, the US does a bloodbath on May Day. Luke on Facebook sneering at the wedding, Louie too. I don't agree. It's archetypal, it's deeper than politics, it's celebrated by the masses as hope for what the pageant shows, though embedded in hideous ideological text, a young woman standing with a young man both promising loyalty and care. What it is in the tarot, the Lovers, whose free and conscious union brings an overmind. So I stare at Kate in her perfect dress, historically perfect, and feel her as my own love woman. Ritualistically she did well, her public self stately advancing, lower half very covered, but covered by the heavy inverted trumpet of a white flower, followed by her own love woman in a white dress that shows every curve walking in a crowd of children, holding the hands of two little girls. There was stupid commentary about Pippa stealing the show because she was wearing white, but in fact the color symbolism was correct to a ritual function better understood than usual. The groom solemn with his mischievous shadow beside him. And then the two of them flying home to their cottage with no servants. In herself she is nothing special, she smiled blankly through the event, and he did not, she starved herself to be willowy in her dress, she spoke in a small voice, she wore a lot of makeup. She knew herself to be scrutinized for suitability at every moment. Her position has glamour without power. She could not object to the patriarchal dominance engineered into her event, she cannot have philosophical thoughts. She will be holed up in their cottage with nothing to do while he goes to work. All that too. 3 Zach writing about teaching, asking what I know about it. In school I was never interested in teaching. I didn't feel anyone could teach me. I taught myself. It was more efficient to just work on things from books. - I didn't think of the ways I was being taught by the curriculum or essay questions, took those as givens. Teaching was what people said or what they wrote on my work, and those both seemed irrelevant. My grammar was better than theirs. I wrote better and knew it. I liked the liveliness of Mr Mann and Mr Dyck but what mattered to me was just that they liked me, they saw I was bright, they enjoyed me, they advocated me publicly in a community that had disparaged me, they got me marvelous opportunities. They were what my dad should have been. In university it was the same. I taught myself, except for Kim I didn't trust the profs not to make me smaller than I wanted to be. Joyce has been my only teacher and she earned my trust over years, by seeing me better than I saw myself. And then teaching. It's the family shop. My mother and her many brothers and sisters are 100% teachers and/or married to and/or parents of. In my own family 3 of 4 are profs, tho' two of us started as artists. I began to want to teach, when? I liked TAing. I was good at it. I was clear and could lay things out for people. I found teaching could make me love people. I could stand in front of 20 people creating a glow of love, interest and confidence in the room. I loved individual students because I was responsible for them, in a position to intervene. - I think it must have been before I went back to school, when I began to feel a pressure of personally-found knowledge I wanted to pass on. In my 40s had already begun mentoring, for instance Laiwan. In the garden leadership was like teaching, in that it included figuring out what would be good for people to do and directing them in doing it. Now what is it. It's still clarity and benevolence, but now I have the larger clarity of a worked-out global philosophical correction to a lot of public theory, and my benevolence has learned personal psychological intervention from Joyce. Those two clarities work together, are theoretically joined and joined in the moment when I look at a student's way of thinking. At the same time there are students I can't do anything for, and I am becoming swifter I think at recognizing when that is so. - A lot happened today - wrote and sent comments for Zach's process paper, wrote and sent Jody's letter, wrote and sent Tabe's, phoned Peter Dyck and talked to him for more than an hour as the sky faded here but not in Edmonton, and then had Rowen phone to admit he flunked 4 out of 5 this time - same as last time, he started strong but wilted into escapes. In the last hour looked myself up on Google and found I was programmed with Anne Severson at Indiana U, whose programmer quotes Brakhage saying Notes in O is one of his favorite films ever. Can that implausible thing be true? 4 Talking to Peter last night what I noticed most was that the same thing had happened to his voice as had happened to Don's, its torque was gone. There used to be huge drive and humor when he spoke and when he wrote letters. Now he went on evenly, pleasantly, he was nice, he was modest, equable, fair, a good man, but not curious, not generous, not taking hold. - Do not have $12,000, and so will think abt going ahead on my own. What do I need? [equipment list] Should I start going for it     YES Buy the tower   A camera   Expensive camera     You said I'd get the grant   I didn't   You were wrong   You're wrong more than you used to be   no (I laugh and give the safety pin a kiss.) - Piece in the Times yesterday about hormone levels in spectators of firewalking, sports events, other ritual, synchronizing with those of the performers. [note from Jody Wild Research - I am never likely to forget your Wild Research presentation. It put me in tears. First, when listening to people speak I have a habit of translating or explaining to myself what I hear, as I hear it. This doesn't feel like background chatter, and I think I am a pretty attentive listener so it must not interfere with communication, but I do have the sense of a multi-part Listening process. Not sure when or where this originated, not sure I ever even would have realized I did it until I listened to you speak - but when you presented that workshop, my inner interpreter went on standby. I understood what you were saying, no interface needed. You spoke my language. On top of that disconcerting bliss, you spoke my process. That's the way I do it! kept running through my head. I always have felt my achievements to be such chancy things, felt that only by some great good fortune did I at the last minute stumble onto the pattern that rhymed the mixed-up whole. For that reason I hated being singled out and praised, in school - I never really worked to be 'good' at science, math, writing I just either 'got it' or I didn't, just like now I can either 'write good' or I can't, with very little personal choice in the matter. Seems wrong to be awarded merit based on something I can't help/can't stop. (I think often of Zach Katz, how uncomfortable he got when praised for writing that somehow didn't satisfy him. I wonder if he and I think alike? Maybe I'll e-mail him.) When you spoke, you treated so matter-of-factly this business of crashing, of struggling to build a voice, and pointed out that letting fly would just naturally follow on its own - I was blown away. Could this be, that I have been doing something right all along? That slow and steady does not have to be the way to win a race? That the way I work is perfectly valid, entirely predictable, happens to other people too, and is not some kind of disgraceful by-passing of due process?] 5 Jim Mann. "You should know that you were always one of the very special students and 'friends' in my father's life. There is no doubt in my mind that he knew how important he was to you because he took great pride in the part he played in your life and the person you became. You were always one of his special people." He's Curl BC president - he and Russ are big beeves, their Facebook photos say, and here is David Mann in my photo so slight in his grey suit, so young. He has a small head, a bit tilted, thin mouth, ears pinned pack. He was so slight I never had a sense of a body inside the big loose suit, except for his carefree way of sitting for instance on the bookshelf ledge under the windows, one leg up, plain black shoe, not large, saying something whimsical in his crisp, dapper way. I can hear his voice. He was an unpatriarchal man, an actual person, sophisticated, I thought, just right. He'd come up to me in the hall and put an arm around me in what I knew was not at all a bad way. Nobody else did that, nobody else had ever done that. He was from somewhere else. [Opposite pages Final Cut Pro how-to notes] 6 Cleaned up index pages for GW this morning - dashes and link numbers, color. If it's the best section it should be presentable. Still have to do the part pages. Dykstra agent? - He came to LG in September 1957 when I was 12 going into gr 7. In 1959-60, his last year there, I was 14-15 in gr 9 and got him the governor general's [medal] without realizing it was his too. And then in 1962-63 when he had been in Sexsmith 3 years, I got him 92% in the provincial gr 12 exams. His story is a story like mine, in a way, he was driven to make the county's worst school its best. He was at Sexsmith till the fall of 1969, another 6 years. At the end of that time I was in London, first autumn in London, and Doris died of lung cancer. He was a smoker. I saw him at the college in 1979 or 80 when he'd been there a long time. If he was my dad's age he wd have been 35 when he came, and Peter ten years younger. - Day off. I blazed through 6 packets and have 4 long or hard ones left, so today I've done whatever I wanted, w&d and then working by myself at Scott's (he's away, gate locked, I got onto the garbage roof to lean over the fence and unlock it), came home with $33 worth of juice, fixed up photos from the garden and betweentimes have been with David Mann's story. Palo verde in full flower, African sumac thinned, orange butterfly stopping at a salvia, fountain bubbling quietly. Coreopsis in full yellow next to the palo verde, same strong yellow on the athanasia down at the far end. - Spanish village where fire walking happens once a year, relatives and out-of-town spectators monitored for heartbeat, found sync in the relatives but not the spectators - during the whole event, not just when the relative was walking. NYT May 3 2011 - b. 1920, father a railway man, lived in Jasper, two parents born in Scotland, WWII air mechanic overseas, RCAF. 1945 married Sask girl in Ottawa, U of Sask biology, fish hatchery Jasper, County of GP bursary for ed degree. 7 Saturday morning, sea fog grey these mornings. Jim got the GG in his year and had a dad who was proud of him and said so. His mom died when he was 19 and he has never married. He lived in Holland Park for a year. He's transcribing the rest of his dad's story now. Was in Dames rocket at 7:30 so knows what he'd likely think was the worst, but still went on writing to me through the morning. His photo shows David's small features in a face twice as broad. Fine white hair. The front of his shirt has a prosperous bulge at the belt. Mr Mann's steady black eyes. - Mr Mann's childhood in a small house with a cursing lout of a father. He and his little sister kneeling at a window at night watching the CN station burn. A narrow town on a bench between the mountain and a river with rail line and highway this side of it. His [childhood] story has a grim dark feel but he says he read and reread Freckles and Girl of the Limberlost, which means he felt for where he was, maybe. - I went to SH5 1-3 tonight because I didn't want to go back to packets and wanted to see what Jim might have seen. Went through fixing dashes. There's not enough Sexsmith in it, it's egotistical. Every once in a while half a line that jumps forward. I'm sure she never slides glances at mirrors when she passes them. Sometimes she gives one a good hard stare for five minutes or so, but none of this girly covert admiration. Mr D is thin too, but his ears are too nice. For all that, though, he's a beautiful man. Particularly because he's so ugly. Seriously! It felt different from the high school parties we used to have - no, I'm different. I felt like a middle-twenties aunt having a good time with the kids. I felt wonderfully free - how? The freedom from want. lighted windows (two ketchup bottles and a tea kettle silhouetted against the light in Knobby Clark's shanty); fluid red streaks of neon far down the street beside the hotel. I thought as I crossed the gravel road to my street, "I would like to do this forever - work during the day at some busy, important place, and then come home at night to a street roofed over with these giant trees, and peopled by friends. 9 Oh my dream - Rowen in 824, a child, cutting me off. I'm inviting him to come sit with me, something intimate, and he's refusing. He says he wants to change his last name to Michael's. He doesn't want to be with me at all anymore, because I've been always wanting to go off and work. I walk into the bathroom and am sobbing over the tub when I wake. I fall asleep again and Luke is there too, other kids. They have gone out and gotten food, are coming up the stairs with it. They don't want me to feed them. I'm trying to tell Luke that I did good things for them in some ways. I'm not feeling it now but as I came out of these dreams I was distraught. Had this been there all along? I was also thinking it would be better for Rowen if he were angry that way. That was a firmer fiercer child than he is. 10 Last night Whoopi Goldberg as Celie. She and Shug, marvelous Shug. - March 31 1920 - Dec 24 2001 Jan 26 1920 - Nov 3 2002 They will have crossed paths in Jasper when they were 21, maybe. Life was not life without her and I suddenly began to realize just how much I had counted on her love, support and encouragement in doing my job and I realized that so much of the successes I had were because she was by my side. Jim and I both drove and we reached Edmonton in under 3 and a half hours. At the car I told Jim the news and he drove us to Kat's, tears streaming down his face. ... We chose the Maligne I suppose because of its wild turbulent yet alive nature and because we had spent such great and wonderful years together on its banks. ... a letter to the County expressing my appreciation for their act of respect in closing the school on the day of her funeral. Looking at an honored, honorable life. He was at Sexsmith and LG from 1957 to 1969 - 12 years. 10 years, 35-45, of an almost perfect record as a small town high school principal. He didn't make enemies, he didn't need enemies, he could handle himself. He could love his kids and show pride in them, he could adore his wife and depend on her and take care of her. My Sexsmith journal I'm seeing has some of his quality of tolerant affection. She said she'd die before she passed 40 and she did. How can that have been? They had 24 years together, 3 babies in the first 4 of them. - And then here's Jim, 60 years old, one heart attack already, who says that after less than a week I know more about him than than 99% of people he knows, reads mysteries, spy stories. GG winner too but he stayed closer to home. I sent him the url for Leaving the land and he doesn't see the use of it, why think in ways almost no one else does. And yet he's wanted the conversation we're having. He asked where what he calls my openness comes from and I said it's an artist thing. Have told Paul I'll come to BC before the semester ends so I can hang out with him. Alice Munro found on a high school lit site: She wrote that she would hate to think she had gone after Ladner because he was rude and testy and slightly savage, with the splotch on the side of his face that shone like metal in the sunlight coming through the trees. She would hate to think so, because wasn't that the way in all the dreary romances - some brute gets the woman tingling and then it's goodbye to Mr. Fine-and-Decent? No, she wrote, but what she did think - and she knew that this was very regressive and bad form - what she did think was that some women, women like herself, might be always on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them. For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity? A man could have a very ordinary, a very unremarkable, insanity, such as his devotion to a ball team. But that might not be enough, not big enough - and an insanity that was not big enough simply made a woman mean and discontented. Fr Vandals Why did I laugh hugely at that. The thought of Roy and Tom containing me was so startlingly true. But what exactly does it mean. 11 They both released me. Energy. But what about 'contained'? What safety is missing with tame people? Do you understand this   Do I     no ?     order, practical, slow growth, improvement They force one to grow   Is that it     YES Is my dad in that category   Chaos isn't containment   The containment is their larger courage   Olivia's in that category   But is it really courage     yes One is contained in a task   Their greater realness   Second question, what is it about the way she wrote it. Read aloud, why is the piece of my own I was looking at last night - the Europe intro and 3 stories about Jerry - so much more stilted? What makes it so lively a voice - and classical too, it sounds like masterful literature. A lot of dashes and a lot of dancing. It's very loose but lands on the dot. There's billowing in it: "a very ordinary, a very unremarkable," and "might not be enough, might not be big enough." Movement of thought, like in VW. 12 It happened twice when I'm looking at a letter from Jim. A little flame, a little warm spot that vanishes when I startle at it. It startles me because that never happens now and because he's the sort of person who is president of BC Curling and is bulky at the belt. I suppose it's when he's vulnerable in the letters? What got me in Tom, sad eyes. And something protective in the way he keeps telling me how much Mr Mann esteemed me. And the fact that he's looking for land. Letter from Martin saying he wants to build a tilt on the Humber. Oh Luke's voice. Bought the 8 core tower this morning after I zipped to Paradise Hills to buy bootleg CS5 from a man with a baby on his lap. It was photo day at school for his three little girls, whose photos I could see above the couch, so they had been up at six he said. The streets on the crest of the hills were wide, bare and poor, treeless but with a lot of light, the downtown towers a silver grove across the plains and quite a long way north. He'd grown up there, Justin said, but he'd like to move to Poway. I asked if his girls are good with computers. He described a construction game they're on, multiplayer, where they build houses and gardens. Meantime the baby sat quiet on his lap and stared. The mother, who is a manager at a big box store, came home unexpectedly, plucked up the baby, took him into the kitchen. Justin had tattoos up his neck and thick on his left forearm. He doesn't speak Spanish except for a little he learned because his grandmother didn't speak English. Richard at OAS saying I can get more years counted because they were educational. [opposite page: notes for Sean's garden Around SD a Baja flavor. Coastal sage scrub. "Soft chaparral." Sea level to 3000'. Summer fog, winter rain. Shallower root system than hard chap. Salvias white, black, purple (leuophylla). Calif sagebrush. Encelia. Buckwheats. Ephemerals. Southern oak woodland. Santa Ana winds. Oak savannah a type of it. Coast live and Engelmann, lemonadeberry, sugar bush, coffeeberry, holly leafed cherry, goldfields, poppies and lupins, ceanothus sorediatus 8' in one year dk green thick blue. Native verbena lilacina, Calif fuchsia, manzanitas, wild paeonies, Calif poppy variants, cholla, dudleya, 13 The nasturtiums in the glass are in different places when I wake. Luke yesterday used the word trajectory for what Rowen doesn't have if he doesn't do well now. - Here's my 8 core machine, is it a good idea. Mac Pro 3, OS 10.6.7, speed 2.8 GHz, 64-bit multicore, memory 8 GB, terabyte RAM, serial G883015LXYK. Full res on 30" cinema, HD use port 1. Has audio line in and line out ports for analog, optical digital audio in and out. 14 In a handful of typical healthy soil there are more creatures than there are humans on the entire planet, and hundreds of miles of fungal threads. Nematodes, single-celled bacteria, protozoa, minerals, organic molecules. Mycorrhizal inoculants - bit of soil from native area in each hole. Hardpan under ground - break it - auger - small vertical sections of pipe. - 7:30 Saturday evening - Saturday work today - washed the floor - stripped the bed - took laundry to University Ave - watered at Sean's - drove to DC Computers to pick up an extension cable for the keyboard - sat in the jeep waiting for laundry to dry - went home and washed my hair - took the garbage down - drove to Belleview to look at Nora's garden tour open house - stopped at Denny's on Pacific Highway to eat steak - came home and took the two mattress duvets to the other Laundromat to wash them - they take an hour to dry - came home and laboriously made up the bed - that was twelve hours with intervals for a couple of student notes and a controlled exchange with Francis about Zach. Now the light is fading, ivory neon, fading all over. It was depressing at Nora's, her garden and house laid out to be stared at by crowds of well-off white female nonentities who were murmuring "cute" wherever they stood. It's Nora's La Jolla social arrival. Twelve years ago she and I were touring other people's gardens and I was making hers. We went to Buena Creek Nursery and bought her first plant, the * rose. Now she has Bellevue packed with stuff, a garden like an antique shop. Busy. The house busy too, and it's not personally significant stuff, it's like stage setting. It grieved me. I felt it was staged to catch the interest of just that sort of vacuous pallid society woman, who peered over the barrier into the living room and through the barn doors into Sheila's room. There weren't sightlines and spaces, just stuff, frenetic money. I haven't got over the Gill house I'd have made of it, internal spaces opened out, light from the terrace, not that dark hole of a living room, and a sheltered quiet garden in which one could feel what I used to feel in the upper bedroom. I understand, I think, it's Nora's burgeoning creation, she doesn't have other forms for it, and now it's what she does with David. - Who has taken over Taft so there's none of me left in it. That grieved me too, although it's many years since I've had enough control of it to make something of it. What's there now isn't one whole shape, as I'd made it, even overgrown as it was. [3 pages of garden notes] 15 It is set up - hidden behind the far end of the desk, where it just fits - cords bundled and tied. I pressed the button and it roared BINGG. - Can I do something about the way days are desperate - I'm desperate for email, desperate for something in my mouth, desperate to look at beautiful, feeling people on TV. 16 I was walking with Greg. We were holding hands. I was feeling his strong big friendly body pulling me along. Then we were lying talking on a bed in an anteroom in a skid row hotel. Two rooms beyond it had light showing through partly open doors. I said I was going to pee, I'd be right back. There was a young woman in the bathroom. I was wondering why she lived in this dirty run-down place. I'd love a strong big friendly body   It's just what I need   Physically?     no Emotionally     YES Do men also need bodies bigger than them     no I'll never have one again     no That need has fallen into decreptitude     YES It's a young woman's need   The decreptitude is not having it     YES So should I look for it     no Was it a mistake to say that to Jim     no Am I on the way to him     no Is he on the way to me     no Is someone on the way to me     no Can I use this hunger better   Tell me how?     balance, practical care, friendship, and inspiration Is that what I'm doing now     no I'm doing practical care   Friendship?     no Inspiration?     no Is that what I'm doing now     no The garden was that     YES Gardens are always that for me     YES Because I have them all in one place     YES Is there a way I can have them all in one place now     no Inspiration is what the computers are for   Email is a feeble attempt at friendship   See more of Tom as a friend     no Can you tell me what to do about friendship     YES reverses, of friendship, temper, anger Process anger     YES You mean be anyone's friend   The way I was when I was young   Francis?     no Like Jean was   I like anger   Should I     no 16 Eyes wide shut last night and I still feel icky. I'm repelled by Kidman and Cruise and was repelled by their characters. They are icons of beauty without being beautiful, they emote without feeling, when they are on screen I feel myself shrinking back from them. Soulless. There's the moment at the beginning of the film when she lets her long dress fall and we see her naked all up and down, her pretty round bum. It's a perfect body, a doll body. And then in the rest of the film many naked women, all with the same shape, long legs, slender hips. They are all white. The sex is all frenetic pumping. What's wrong with the movie got clearer when I read that it's based on a 20s Viennese novel - German decadence pasted onto those two Hollywood nothings, portentous music, an old Hollywood director's last confession of perversion. But I haven't said it yet, what's under, behind, when I talk about it, is grief for all those naked women's bodies, that they are prostituted in the making of the film, in giving themselves to that story. Is it that? But then I have to ask, is posting the journal like that? It says no. Because the sex is in the midst of everything else? Yes. He could have made a movie of the actual book, and it would have been truer of him, less prostituted to mid-American vacancy. Cruise isn't credible as a doctor - that, to start with. Enough. Such a hard night, aching. It's raining this morning, mizzling. I can see it against the sycamore. Have turned on the heater. - Went through RF last night and this morning, a few small fixes. Wanted her energy and popularity. Regret her facetiousness, often disgusted by the writing, never admire it. - Flourishing: positive emotion engagement relatedness significance accomplishment, earned success   Beauty, should I add.   Arbitrary punishment or reward - learned helplessness.   My question is how to flourish more given what I have to work with. Constraints - Not enough money for rent somewhere else Packets about 8 days out of 21, time broken up most of the year, month in summer on the new schedule, two months in winter Something I don't understand about health, the ache Isolation, no daily company or concrete challenges Rain and cold make me ache No structure asking for my better work [the college's] mediocrity   Projects - W & D Ant Bear - Em, Favor M & L We made this - FCP Audio Orpheus   None give relatedness. Engagement seems to wait for others. Significance doubtful in all. Bits of accomplishment not steady or completed. Gardens give most, but briefly, irregularly and lack significance except immediate beauty.   I do something, get something done. It is a significant thing. I have interesting skillful relations with people in doing it. I am deeply absorbed in doing it. - All those together to me are positive emotion.   Are there things to add: Other people recognize what I've done. Significance for me means beauty and philosophical clarity, rightness. That's the kind of person I am. So is the question how to get engagement, relatedness, accomplishment and recognition within the projects I have? Do you think that's it?     YES Is there a way to have an art community?   I'd have to move   Can I have 10 years of really engaged art     YES 19 No email, no one on my pages except one Russian crawler, for days now. Final Cut Studio 3 from a bootlegger in PB last night. There was a west wind and a rough sea, waves dark grey-green, whitecaps, and on the sand where the white lace pulled back a slick pink and silver sheet of sky. Night before last, when FCP wouldn't open on the new Mac Pro I looked at Herb garden, night falling on iMovie and yesterday opened the We made this box and sorted photos, which reviewed the whole project. Using its hardback notebook for audio notes. Am sitting for slow breathing again to help with sleep and the way any little enterprise seems to push up my blood pressure. Realized last night that traumatic structure is coming up when I do. Does it need something. - I feel more capable of editing in an interesting way now. Don't have to have documentary intentions and don't have to deal with Louie, and is there more? - Yes the software's capabilities and having them at home. And more? As if something else from the 20 years between. - Emilee: I was reading a letter from Ellie Came w a package a deck of cards She was telling me / I had a vision of her coming to her own conclusions a long time ago about "is this for the rest of this life" She's leaving her man and sad but free Takes what she can carry and tells him to leave some things And the cards, the deck of cards I realize they were hers and she's giving them to me The most beautiful images front and back I remember suits of colors and animals Tigers or cats some kind unicorns or white horses I turned a card and it was the ace of cups or hearts loud and clear And I was excited to sort the cards and feel her in them But then my mom came in and interrupted and I woke up May 17 - Mary phoned tonight to say she had diagnosed herself as having Alzheimers. She'd done it looking at a pamphlet. I asked how she felt and she said relieved. "It's in my brain, it's not my fault." I said I was impressed with her both for diagnosing herself and for taking it that way. [opposite page - list of Herb garden shots] 20 Have got into gear - though Austin Sharp of PB has scammed me when I tried to buy FCP and I had to chase him yesterday - was 9 hours straight editing Braja's thesis and then still had it for hours of FCP Youtube tutorials on animating photos and making text overlap. Long letter from Greg, as happens when it's maybe 1 in the morning back east. He has many enthusiasms, more than he did, even; developed enthusiasms. Today it was Comanche history. He's happy I think, a prospering person. 22 At midnight I was animating photos on FCP on the Mac Pro. Yesterday morning - Saturday - I thought to phone the UCSD bookstore - they had it for $300 - I rushed up I-5 and bought it. While it installed for hours Greg and I were writing back and forth about our two years in Kingston. I was reading RF6 and 7, and he was finding 179 Division and 40 E Clergy on Streetview. Should I chase my $100    no Let it go because my total still is only $400   But get revenge of some kind later    no I'd still like to find out where he works and show up there  Tax records?  Shut him down  Reporter at the UT?  There's a moment when I'm starting to get involved with Peter where I say "So Tuesday - it has occurred to me for the first time that I might make the journal work, or rather that I might make it work for myself - disciplined work that I do against myself but for something." July 1968 after finals. Then after I buy the Nikon, "It was very clear how I should live. I had three points! 'The first is that I have to be honest and only say what's true. The second is that I have to work only out of love of the world, and the two aren't necessarily compatible. And the third is that I have to stay alive somehow and really look for alternatives but especially I have to stay alive.'" "I do think of the future, vaguely, as pictures that celebrate the spectacle, as children who are not rooted in a single place but can move with me, as no husband but lovers I can return to, still in some way as an ability to work on the edge of myself where I can feel the edge and be afraid or joyous." 23 After I'd zoomed in on the view of the 179 Division door to see the house number, and looked at the barred basement windows in one of which was our kitchen, I dreamed - yesterday afternoon, sleeping on the couch - that I was passing the building on the street and glanced down through the window at a table with a checked table cloth and a little vase of flowers. Three mornings ago I dreamed I was living in Choy's house, which was laid out with a back window looking south as in other dreams, and found a section of the kitchen wall had been ripped out. Behind it was revealed a two-level storeroom. The lower level was empty. I was thinking how to use it, it could be enclosed with wire mesh and be a children's play space. Then I saw that the upper level was full of stored Chinese ceramics, all kinds, all sizes. I was taking them down into the main room and looking at them. I woke and then dozed and woke and dozed and woke again. Each time I found myself thinking what to do with Choy's big collection, should I phone his sons to come and get them, as if it were a real decision. Yesterday got started with Favor. I'd sent Emilee's cover and she liked it and will look for a photo. Set out the steps for her. Started to work with James' very much better 4th draft of his paper - that's what kept me awake last night probably. Laundry, library, writing to G and happy in company. I now have things to do all day. Ant Bear on Indesign ML on Indesign We made this on FCP Tests for Orpheus on FCP Sean's native garden design Wrapping up the semester Van for a couple of weeks Art books from the libe for ends of days 24 Tuesday morning bright after dark days, quiet 6:55, 25 Because I have something else to do I'm blasting through packets, it's only Wednesday and I only have 2 more plus changed parts of Zach's. I handled Francis. I called him out in public, during the conference call. He backed down at length. "There's been a miscommunication." I let him talk. He should speak to Zach he said in the end. I sent Zach a note, then Zach sent me a copy of his letter to F. It was sucky. Well done, I said. They talked. Zach will graduate, I think. It seems dangerous to say so though, or anything about this handling, as if F will pick up the gloating and reverse. Here's someone writing in the Times today about a journal: "I am poisoned," he writes, "by hatred of others who are 'better,' more efficient, who do not flatter and love me unceasingly." easily one of the great diaries and moral documents of the past American century. What it lacks in cohesiveness it makes up in its frankness, its quick-pivoting angularities. Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Whitman "the terrible and graphic loneliness of the great Americans." Alfred Kazin's journals selected and edited Richard Cook 2011 Yale. NYT Thurs May 26 2011 C6. 27 Happy all day because of FCP. Now I've started at the beginning of the book and am working through all the steps. That way I don't get stuck. - What I wrote first was "It has the advantage ..." Where is this bad language coming from - I'm often having to stop and try again. Slow breathing before bed, things that come up, are they scars? I was feeling them as crushed heart. They're contractions/withdrawals?  Can I undo them on the spot  Gendlin focusing  That will do it   I was noticing I was holding sadness abt my dad as a way to hold him in life     YES Can I undo all harm done me  ALL?   And then?     not withdrawn, successful, balancing, coming through   Do you like the software     YES - After years of hand-fixing hyphens I discovered today that Pagemill has Find and Replace All. Fixing SH because Greg is getting toward the middle of SH3. 28 Gianfranco's birthday. He's in the Venice Biennale. When I see him move I understand something of what it was about me when I was young, a grateful radiance of success. The way I changed after I got the GG in October of 1960. "At school, I can feel my self and my relationship to the people there evolving into something new and satisfying. I feel relaxed, easy, friendly, in my contacts with nearly everybody. It's not so much just an effervescent mood or day, but a longer, lasting-er, easier relationship to everybody." I'm lighter. "This was a miserable, I-hate-Father day. I made cracks. He got mad." "Wore my new blue-brown plaid almost-shag skirt to church to show it off in choir. Mrs Nick Siebert wears such exotic perfume." "Daddy thinks the hosses are good." "Spent 7 hours on writing my story. It's good at the end, bad in the beginning and dull in the middle but maybe I can fix it later. Maybe not." Had been wanting to remember Mary Stolz's name, found it and now I see she was born in 1920, died not long ago, and wrote 60 books. She was married at 18, in pain with arthritis, published To tell your love with Harper at 30, divorced at 36. A dr fixed her and she married him at 45. Molly Slattery. "Gifted writer at fifteen." I picked her out because her people were smart, they were personal with each other in ways I hadn't seen and wanted. They were personal with themselves, they were in their real experience. The example I dimly remember is of a girl looking at her older sister's body. The unspoken, in my culture unspeakable. She gave me a sense of a better culture somewhere, realer better people. She had the company from the beginning of an editor she adored. "I'd not be the writer I've managed to become without her." "That a being we cannot spare has gone beyond our reach, that no need of ours can reach her. Although Ursula has been long retired, I seem still to exist in the aura of her brooding concern for each book. those long, marvelous, incisive, intuitive editorial letters. She would put a marginal note, NGEFY (not good enough for you). ... a vision that allowed her to accept, and generate, ideas unacceptable, even unheard of, when she entered the field of children's literature." These from a memorial note online. When I look at SH what needs saying is what a crude blank culture it was. I was that too, but I could recognize the realer way of being with people when I saw it. The way David Mann was with me. I'm startled when I see it in the journal. He's so up front in his love for me. It's anomalous. Did he feel about me the way I felt about him, that he was the only one? That can't be. And yet he was touched in some quick, the evidence is. I was my raw blank culture in immediate consciousness and something larger and freer behind, beside, along with it. He lived that larger free self outright, and I didn't, but could he see it in me? 29 I stopped at Tom's after the farmer's market. Sunday morning. Mockingbird on his wire, yellow hibiscus blazing at his door, which was tight shut as if he were away or asleep. He was dozing but glad to see me. I sat beside him on the couch marveling to notice that I fancied him. The seniors' center has enfolded him. He's happy. There's more Hands On work, but not too much. He walks across the park. There are old men from the Golden West who know him. Betweentimes he reads. He saves books for me that most often I don't read, and writes notes about things on TV that might be useful to me - thinks of me, in other words. Why did I fancy him. For one thing, he has whittled down his pot. For another he wasn't in his shut down male work mode, he looked like the freckled Irish boy. For another, I'm happy since I have FCP, I'm not locked out of right work. For another Greg is being interested in ways he's not. For another he lets me talk now, before he begins. And there he still is with what can easily warm my puss, his beautiful uncompromising nose and his tight perfect big hands. And also the sense I can't bear, whenever I do fancy him, that he doesn't fancy me back. That sad pride has been under so much of my pulling back. 30 Memorial Day Monday, I have another Sunday on my roof. Bright 7:40. 31 Dreamed a cactus plant next to my bed, that I was noticing had died on one side, while thriving on the other. (Which side was it? Its left if I think of its back being the part toward the wall.) My sister was in bed with me on my own left side. I'd gone out and come back and found she had gotten rid of that plant and some others. I was angry, wanted to kill her, had my hands around her neck looking at her little round blank head. Then the kind of dreaming where I'm in corridors looking for someplace I don't find on and on. In between something about talking to a neighbour man in the corridor. Is half of me dead    YES Left side of my brain    no, right The presence side  "My sister in bed with me"  The way I didn't have presence at the party  When I was fancying Tom was that presence  Temporarily dead    no Permanently   Nothing I can do about it  Bloodflow?    no It was an answer to a question  Will you comment    strength, crisis, overview, (magician) Is it more since I broke up with Tom    no It's why I broke up with Tom  Did it happen in my relation with him    no At [the college]    no If I can't do anything about it what should my attitude be    act, to come through, anger, into improvement You mean I can't do anything directly  Am I angry about one main thing  Can you name it  Abandonment   The only one I'm not angry with is Luke    YES Can you name with one card    love I'm angry that I don't love them    YES Not that they don't love me    YES That's true  I'm angry at them because I don't love them and I don't love them because I'm angry at them  Closed loop  It sounds as if the only solution is a drug    no Success?     no A dissolution  Of the conditions I put on loving    YES That's what Joyce would say  I was right to ask to love everybody  And I did    YES Okay     YES Wd loving everybody harm me    no Be good for health    [series of end-of-book pages: action lists, calendar, money summaries, pension summaries]   volume 23 in america volume 22: 2010 june - december work & days: a lifetime journal project