Made of This

lost and found and still lost

Walking today, on my way to the post office with a bundle of The Infinite All Right zines under my arm, I found on the sidewalk a sealed, stamped letter, ready for mailing. It was from someone in Atlanta named Angelona, addressed to someone named Rosemary, in North Augusta, South Carolina. How strange to find a letter on the same day the Seventh Letter project launches. In the project, every seventh copy of the Infinite All Right that’s ordered will include a handwritten personal letter from me. Just the sort of letter this smallish envelope I found might contain. Just the sort many of us so miss getting now.

The envelope is pictured above, and I’ve blacked out both of the names out of respect for privacy, even though I don’t know if “privacy” is what I’m talking about, since anybody could see the outside of the letter. Only the inside matters.

And I was thinking about the lack of connection that seems to have led to the decline of letter-writing … or the hyper-“connection” that isn’t really, but that makes us believe it’s enough, so that the old ways are quaint unnecessary … and just was I was mulling this, I found something else in the street: a folded, crumpled piece of paper, with writing on it.

I always pick these up and read them. 

The paper had a lot of scribbles on it, not all of them legible or coherent, but one passage at the bottom stood out: “Why is it when I play by rules, rules change. I thought this shit would end different, but it end the same. I’m stuck in pain. I wish I could just go back to the days I wasn’t alone.” There are the names of cities on the paper, as if the person was making travel plans. “Leaving from ports … ” I stuffed it in my pocket. 

At the post office, on the back of the envelope I found first, I wrote a little message, explaining how I’d found it and where, and that I was mailing it. Signed, “a stranger.” But I don’t know what to do with the other one.

what a difference a year sort of makes

The blog languishes no longer (exactly a year to the day, today) and behold: there is news. Today we shall hear from the printer about The Infinite All Right, a father-son zine of poetry and prose put together by yours truly and his son, Skyler, with help from Joyce, who has contributed drawings. Joyce’s works already are garnering rave reviews. Well, people like them. She did one partly from a photo provided by Natalie Schulhofer, Joyce’s collaborator and model in the ongoing “Acedia” project, which explores various aspects of that spiritual mood. The white area in the drawing, which looks like snow, is actually thistles, though it did make me think of last year at this time, specifically: the snow storm. And hey, finally, I have a new website, showcasing all of the crap going on.

snow job

Inches of winter just about shut down Atlanta – OK, it did, completely – and we ventured out walking on Snowmageddon, Day Two. A friend emailed me about the “yokels” on TV news. I wrote back:

“It’s customary among TV ‘news’ ‘reporters’ in the South. They’re almost always from somewhere else — the Northeast, the Midwest. They couldn’t make it there, and they are resentful of their failure. So, when selecting interview subjects for ‘stories’ in the South, they pick the most backward-looking dolts they can find, and chortle amongst themselves as the segments air to the rest of the world, confirming everyone’s prejudices about this part of the country (and making them seem at least marginally hip in the process). That’s what ‘journalism’ is really about, these days, North and South, East and West: confirming prejudices, reassuring people that, really, it’s not necessary to think or even have compassion. I’m not saying I love the South, or that it’s ultra-sophisticated, if the rest of the world could only see. I’m saying … well, what I just said.”

But the whole thing tires me, thinking about. I just want to look at the snow.

pizza joint, pants down; and pictures at an exhibition

During the premature cold snap, when I thought about that guy who lives under the Freedom Parkway bridge, just outside our back door, I remembered (again) our pizza pickup that night at Nancy’s on Ponce De Leon.

It was summer. Joyce stayed in the car about a half-block away, motor running. On my way into the shop, I made quick note of the dim, tattered figure standing across the street. He was doing a twitchy dance accompanied by random shouts, as we often see in our homeless. But he seemed benign.

Returning with our food, I saw – from about a half block away – that the man had moved nearer to the car. He was almost under a streetlight now, still cavorting madly. Scruffier than I could make out before, and his pants hung well below his waist. This looked less like a fashion choice than slippage brought on by the frenetic footwork and flapping-arm action.

Joyce would be watching me, I knew. And she would be watching the street dancer, probably with a twinge of desperation, even though the car doors were locked.

What I did next I can’t explain.

I balanced the pizza above one shoulder, like a waiter with a tray in some high-class restaurant. Then I skip-jumped along the sidewalk, hopping merrily as I used to do for the entertainment of my kids. This lasted all the way to the car.

Joyce didn’t think it was funny. I didn’t either, though I couldn’t stop laughing until we got home.

When temperatures warmed lately – not enough that half-naked men could perform publicly in the evenings, but enough that under-the-bridge dwellers had enough blankets – I was relieved. And a little annoyed.

Annoyed because, even though Joyce was still sick with her virus, we used the fine weather on our last day of holiday vacation to visit the High Museum and look at Dali paintings before they left, and the art of Tiziano Vecelli,

We should be hiking, I thought. This is like springtime. It’s going to rain again soon, or snow. We should be taking advantage.

And then, as she passed by a huge Vecelli portrait and I clicked a forbidden photo with my cell phone, I wasn’t relieved or annoyed. I felt grateful. It was the kind of gratitude that sometimes has to sift through density to be known, but penetrates. Eventually.

I have pants that fit, and tightly, due to the too-frequent pizza. I sleep on a soft bed. Most of my faculties are operational most of the time, and I have a woman who is so far generally relaxed about the intervals when they fail me.

So that’s how Thanksgiving came late this year. Like winter came early.

***

The Rumpus’ new “Readers Report Back” roundup includes me at the bottom of page 2. Theme: “Neighborhood.” 

trip notes, and watching Santa die

The Rumpus posted my true Santa story (scroll about halfway down the page), just as we got back from Alabama. Some highlights, in no particular order:

1. Bite on the cheek from recent-born grandchild, Two-Teeth Jake. The heavy head, drooly lips and lazy tongue feel good but then, gah.

2. Watching the kids crawl through their new fabric tunnel from Ikea that when collapsed for storage looks like a giant condom, and when opened for crawling-through, looks like a giant ribbed condom open at both ends. The irony of kids spilling out the end.

3. Night riding with Joyce on a bridge across a lake. The fat, soon-to-eclipse moon filters through high clouds and puts a sheen on the water. I think of monster catfish waving their slow tails. Joyce sees her first shooting star …

radio waves

My mother expected from Jim all the claptrap and rigmarole of courtship and he delivered, along with what he claimed was “hand-packed” ice cream for me, in a plain white carton.

I checked for thumbprints. None. A charlatan.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the square-jawed, honest (it turned out) guy who became my stepfather, stuck me with his last name and moved us to a new Illinois town, Byron. As a teenager I drove the country roads. After each song intro, time check and weather forecast, I turned down the radio and repeated the words in a deeper-than-my-usual voice that sounded, I thought, at least as good as Larry Lujack’s on WLS in Chicago.

Lujack played “Layla,” “Lola,” and “Let It Be.” He played an unlikely hit called “Mill Valley,” by Lisa Abrams’ fourth-grade class.

“It looks as pretty in the rain as in the sun / And there’s a mountain that belongs to everyone / And there are creeks that run on endlessly / And trees as far as you can see.”

Mill Valley, a small town north of San Francisco, was heaven. I was in hell.

“I’m gonna talk about a place that’s got a hold on me / A little place where life feels very fine and free / Where people aren’t afraid to smile / And stop and talk with you a while.”

The dimwit farm boys at Byron Community Unit School District 226 hip-checked me into walls. They mocked my name. “Ah’s born in Tennessee!” They stole my jockstrap in P.E., leaving me even more vulnerable during Bombardment, which the football coach made us play with basketballs. His name: Mr. Farrey, pronounced the way he had probably wished all his life it wasn’t. We had this much in common.

In a decade, I would be on the radio myself, disc jockeying at a 500-watt country music station in the middle of a cornfield, using Jim’s last name, happily.

A few decades after that, through an accident of available rentals – having migrated as far west as I could, having long ago forgotten the song – I’d live in Mill Valley.

Of course I’m thinking more about Mill Valley than Jim. “Earth hath not anything to show more fair.” That’s not Byron but Wordsworth. He’s talking about London but I mean it about Mill Valley, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. Over troubled water. 

You can’t always see evidence of the hands that did the packing, but you can know when you are delivered.

haunted by reading

It’s complicated and simple, and folds back on itself. A few days ago I was reading the poet Eileen Myles’ novel Inferno. She writes, “Joe Brainard even said on his deathbed: one good thing about dying. You don’t have to go to any more poetry readings.”

Brainard, the sort-of inspiration for Made of This, wrote a memoir called I Remember, which consists of his memories in a book-length list, each starting, as those exchanged in Made of This do, with the phrase “I remember.”

In Myles’ novel, Brainard — a painter who attended poetry readings done by his New York friends — appears suddenly on page 101 and hasn’t been mentioned again. I’m still reading.

Then I got an email from the poet Ron Padgett, who wrote a book about his late pal Brainard. I’d found the book in a used bookstore a few weeks ago, and sent Padgett a copy of Made of This. “A delightful concept and a delightful result,” Padgett wrote in the email.

One reason I liked the idea of doing this memory-exchange project with Gianni was Brainard’s history with Bolinas, the seaside town north of San Francisco where I lived for a while. Brainard spent a lot of time in Bolinas with other artists. He loved the place.

Bolinas figures strongly in the book I’m writing, which is about fathers — my father, Tom — and sons, and a brother I never had.

Then in Borders I saw The Petting Zoo, a new book from Jim Carroll, the poet who also wrote The Basketball Diaries. Not until I read the back flap did I find out Carroll is dead, too. Heart attack, last year.

Later I looked up his Sept. 14, 2009 obituary in the New York Times, charting his life. In 1973, the year I graduated from high school, Carroll “left New York to escape drugs,” says the obituary. “He settled in Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco,” where he met and married a woman. Later they divorced. “He is survived by a brother, Tom.” When I’m finished with Myles’ novel, Carroll’s is next.

The other night Joyce and I took a walk into Cabbagetown, through the colorful graffiti tunnel and west, finding a tucked-away part of the neighborhood we’d never investigated before.

We’re always half-searching for tiny restaurants like I miss so much from San Francisco. And there it was, a new discovery. Sidewalk tables, big windows, dim interior. People sitting out with wine. The Carroll Street Café.

points

“He’s got claws,” Joyce called from the bed. “Watch ya dick!” By way of a complicated method of closing and opening the closet, bedroom and bathroom doors, we had kept the night’s guest from crossing paths again with Sunny Boy, our de-clawed butterscotch cat-in-residence. The first time was bad enough. But I could hear the gray visitor — a spayed male, we think — getting lonely out there. I went to check on him.

Mr. Gray had followed Jamie and her friend Sara home from the Say Anything concert at the Variety Playhouse. We walked them over there around sunset. About halfway down N. Highland Ave. a guy in a pickup truck slowed near them, then roared off. They didn’t notice, but Joyce and I did, a few yards behind. “Why do guys do that?” Joyce said. “A guy sees pretty girls and wants to impress them, and then he’s gone. So what’s the point?”

The concert, with two opening bands, was less than impressive, too. “The lead singer of the first band sounded like his testicles had not descended yet,” Jamie said. Sara’s face looked like this was the worst sound imaginable. It must have been almost as grating as the yowl Sunny Boy let out, upon meeting Mr. Gray, who gazed back, bored.

Last night I cooked polenta-coated tilapia with capers, red chard and seared Brussels sprouts. A man in the kitchen, chalking up points one of the few ways it works anymore. It did.

arrogance

In the emergency room at Emory, the triage zone was full of people upright in chairs. Some stared, silent. Others talked and laughed. It was still early. A portly man wheeled in his wife with a plastic-lined wastebasket in her lap.

I thought of the Euripides quote. “How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely?” The quote is painted on a roof beam of Montaigne’s library. My ridiculous accident – a trip-and-fall on concrete while running, wipeout – might have given me a broken  rib. Felt like it, which could mean (I winced at the arm movement while Googling this) a punctured lung to accompany the shoulder, knee and hand abrasions. I wanted to rest. “We’re going,” Joyce said.

Books were involved in the mishap. When I lost my footing, I tucked the small stack of them under me like a football. Had I let them fly, maybe I would have sustained less damage. I’d write about this. I write about everything.

“If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it always in apprenticeship and on trial.” Montaigne himself.

While we waited, Joyce read a book on symbolism in art. A nurse called me into the office. “Oh,” she said into the phone. “She can’t work, stuck at home?” Her nose turned up at the tip. In profile her chin was perfectly rounded. “What she do about tomorrow and the next day? No. No. I don’t care if you take her around, but you tell her that twenty dollars ain’t for no gas to run her, it for getting her to work. You take that twenty dollars back. You heard me.”

She hung up, took my blood pressure and asked questions: height, weight, nature of the accident, date of birth. “You an Aries,” she said. “They arrogant. But they kind. My boyfriend an Aries. So is my momma and my nephew. They all arrogant.” She laughed softly, rows of gleaming teeth. “What come in here” – she tapped her head – “come out here” – she pointed to her mouth. I thought about Montaigne’s library again, another quote painted on the rafters, one from Pliny the Elder about how “nothing is more wretched and arrogant than man.”

She said, “I’m a Libra. I know how to handle y’all. What’s your pain? One to ten, one the best and ten the worse.”

Five, I said, trying not to sound wretched.

She kept typing, nodded at the screen. “Probably not broke but Ima send you to X-ray right now, else you be waitin’ two hours. I wish we had snacks. They don’t give out peanut butter anymore since the salmonella. I miss that. Prevention.”

Riding home, I imagined floating above the car, Joyce at the wheel, scowling in the dark, dodging the potholes so I didn’t howl, saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” over and over. I thought about Montaigne, gone mildly nuts in his middle age. Retired from public life, he started hard on his essays, those little miracles of precision. In one he quoted Pliny, who seemed to have the antidote for arrogance and wretchedness, or a way to make them bearable. “Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up.”

 

the right moves

In response to memories in the book, my friend Becky hand-wrote 32 pages of her own, in neat pencil script on lined paper, each entry prompted by something she read in Made Of This. It’s funny, sad, moving … I’m still reading.

Becky sent her project from Minneapolis with a copy of the book for me to sign, and she tucked a note inside the book.

 

Later, in an email, she wrote, “I didn’t even think about it; it just came to me and seemed like the right move to make.” Sometimes those moves are the best.

Wednesday night, Joyce and I went to

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adjusting the contrast

 

People are hitting the Facebook page, according to the ad counter, finding the book. This is good. Not for the money, since there isn’t any, but because Made of This – the technology behind it – can draw parts of the world together, and by parts I mean people, we who perceive ourselves as fragmented, lost. Of course that’s only if the technology gets used, like our numbing ones.

Just after sundown, the clouds blushed indigo. In the parking lot I took an inferior photo on my outdated cell phone and emailed it to myself. Later, crossing N. Highland at Elizabeth, I was almost run over by a man in an SUV who ignored the stop sign, cell phone clamped to his head. In line at the market, I peered over a woman’s shoulder as she scrolled her phone, one of those newer models with a touch screen. I thought about the phrase “touch screen,” how touching a screen means contact with something that covers. How we might screen our touches. On her phone this woman had captured an image of the same sunset. Not really the same, since she had to have been standing in a different position, seeing the clouds in a different way, from another perspective, but I’m sure (politely, I didn’t ask; we don’t ask) the photo was taken within minutes of mine. 

At home, my downloaded photo was suddenly big, needed fixing. Bring up the pink, sharpen the contrast. I stopped, hit “undo.” A friend sent modeling shots from a fake-bridal photo session she got talked into: carefully posed portraits, no doubt slightly adjusted afterward with darkroom tricks. She was insecure about them. She made jokes. 

I went back to my sunset. Saturated the hues. Undo. I thought about the guy who almost smeared me across the asphalt on N. Highland. He never saw a thing. What else had he missed? I imagined the woman in line sending her photo to the guy in the SUV. “Can you believe this? How was work today? I’ll be home in a few minutes, just picking up some wine. I love you!”

A few clicks enlarged my sunset photo until it filled the borders of my laptop screen. I touched the screen. It didn’t scroll but I touched it anyway.

coyote ridge

The last fog rolled into the bay, just in time for the sun to sink, mist like a comma or like a curl of hair on a forehead. I climbed to the top of Hill 88 faster than ever before, the cool breath beading on my arms and face and soaking my shirt. Something about being up there made me think of everyone I’ve known, without their names, and all they said to me, without the words.

It’s unfair that I can remember this now. That I can feel how my life changed – how I changed my life – and at the same moment feel the past, beside me, inside me, in every corner of the room. Maybe this is what our book is about. I don’t know what our book is about.

lads at midnight

After my mother died I found a poem tucked into a side slot of her billfold. She had clipped it from a magazine and folded the paper into four squares. Between my fingers the inch-sized wafer was like nothing at all, pinched air. Even in the 1950s or 1960s when this most likely appeared, what major-circulation periodical (she didn’t read literary ones, not that I know of, and this was glossy paper) would publish a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay? Her best-known poem?

***

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

***

They talk about absent fathers but the daily back-and-forth absence/presence of the mother (make the baby wait!) marks a kid at least as much, or more at the infant age, as the gone-for-good dad. But the regular traumas of almost everyone’s life are forgotten. Not daytime TV material.

Today I’m trying to imagine her … summers no longer singing, the birds having taken off, maybe her husband too … scissors busy, the rasp of the blades and crackle of the page as she follows the edges of that poem.

Gianni writes: Speaking of [Joe] Brainard, I just found out that I Remember was followed by I Remember More and More I Remember More. There’s also I Remember Christmas (!) but it was published by the Museum of Modern Art so it might be a special (art?) project. These four books came out in the space of three years. If everybody is going to buy our book through Amazon and what you wrote about the “royalties” is right, we’ll need to sell about 5 million copies before I can buy myself a Big Mac.

Gianni writes (in response to the entry, “over water”): As far as I can remember nobody in my family or my close circle of friends died in the water. There actually was a boy whose father had drowned in the river while fishing. We weren’t very close though, I don’t even remember his name. This kid was handsome and an excellent athlete. He ran very fast and was a gifted soccer player. Once he almost broke my leg with a kick. When “Saturday Night Fever” came to town (we were 13 or 14), he fancied himself another John Travolta. Then one summer he botched a dive into the see and almost broke his back. I wonder what happened to him.

rake’s progress

I drank too much last night, probably as a way of dealing with the new day job and its unfamiliar pressures, which today I am less capable of dealing with because I drank too much last night.

Three hours of work, then a hike around the neighborhood. The leaves are dying, winter’s making an inroad, taking its chance. Fall is here. I didn’t fall though I may be dying. Back to the keyboard. No idle heart, hand or mind.

On page 43 of Joe Brainard: A Retrospective book I found “his friend Ann Lauterbach” saying that Brainard in his last decade – he died in 1994, just as spring gave way to summer – “stopped making art, but he didn’t stop being an artist.” Six years ago I read and loved Lauterbach’s The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. I didn’t know anything of Brainard’s connection with her then, but I’d probably read Brainard’s I Remember, on which Made Of This is sort of, loosely, based. I like to think of I Remember and Night Sky occupying space near each other on my bookshelf or, probably, the scattered floor.

On page 78 of the retrospective book, this excerpt from Brainard’s diary: “Jimmy Schuyler and I went uptown yesterday to see some shows. It made me realize how tired I am of art.” His entry is dated 1969. Tired of art, unable to stop until death did the job for him. (“I think the best way to understand death is to think about it a lot,” Brainard says in another place. “Try to come to terms with it. Try to really understand it. Give it a chance!”) Jimmy Schuyler, the poet James Schuyler, in his 40s at the time Brainard wrote about him, had something to do with the naming of my son, Skyler James, who would also become a poet, though it wasn’t my idea and he wouldn’t be born for another 18 years.

Here’s Brainard and Jimmy Schuyler strolling back from a day of art shows, under the night sky in New York, the way Skyler James and I, given our chance, have done in San Francisco after a trip to our favorite bookstore, City Lights. The city’s lights lighting up the night, Sky. 

the most beautiful

“We understand the world by how we retrieve memories, re-order information into stories to justify how we feel,” writes Stephen Elliott toward the end of his memoir, The Adderall Diaries, which I finished today. Probably so.

Because we’re so involved in storytelling with MothUP Atlanta, Joyce and I talk a lot about what makes a good story. She likes Joseph Campbell’s theory about how stories descend from myths and archetypes. A few days ago I remarked that Campbell took a lot of his concepts from Carl Jung, and now she’s reading him. Also it seems like a lot of our stories, when they fall flat, do so because the writer or teller has grasped only the situation, as Vivian Gornick says in her book – that is, the outer circumstances – and not the story itself: the inner impulses that drive the action and make the situation worth hearing about.

Back to Stephen Elliott. Joyce said a while back that my writing resembles his, so 

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