I just did Ms. Phillips a favor in microcosm and purchased her debut collection, which I read, in Wolfgram Memorial Library, some odd thirty three years ago, in 1982. Read yes, but cannot remember the slightest thing about it, because of my young vibrating brain fumes. Of all Phillips work, I believe I responded to Black Tickets best, but if I can be unkind about my brain damage and overzealous emotional longing, I can stick a few pins in feminine literary endeavor which has its moment in the sun and then becomes more of a routine expectation. Much like Lorrie Moore, with whom I only have passing familiarity as a reader, Jayne Anne never quite sealed the deal with her modern overlay on the South's agrarian argument with the cosmopolitan North, and I harbor the vague idea that I was referred to her work because of the effective shock value of her plot points about body betrayal-- one of her stories where this is accessible and easy to grasp is "Home", an anthologized piece about a dying grandmother and the battle with "smell". The bonny instructor is less confrontational about fecal matter than I am in my posts, but "Home" is brave, honest, nicely balanced between burgeoning youth and the struggle with age over death.
Why the bottom fell out for Phillips after that is anyone's guess. Writing is a lousy way to make a living. Machine Dreams, her novel, has some interesting tropes, but those figures of speech weren't enough to sustain the book, and like many short story authors, she falters in long form, and Fast Lanes, which I now read at Paley, alone and unhappy, did not seem to sharpen the perspectives of her voice. Why then I cut her portrait photo out of P&W, taping it on my door in Diamond Park, and wrote her publisher a frothy enthusiastic letter, and then my more dangerous poem, "fortissimo" published in Metis, a tribute, yes, but it was also something else, a form of sexual imitation so that I could get laid the way I imagined Jayne Anne herself presenting her body to men as something to be feasted. Heady stuff, eh?
Yes, but both Jayne Anne and I will soon be passing the torch, and to those who will listen, although you'll have to learn this for yourselves: it is okay to get "blown away," by a writer who touches on your affinity, but this doesn't mean they aren't ambivalent about hero worship, that they aren't flawed people too who have to have practiced shields with students, and they will not necessarily offer you the friendship you think you don't have.
I don't think I asked her if she ever got the letter. It was foolish in any case; the poem, however, will be in my book, with her work more evenly adjudicated.
Showing posts with label iconic sacraments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iconic sacraments. Show all posts
Friday, April 10, 2015
Sunday, January 20, 2013
In My Journal
The Sunlight Aria: Urethra Knives 01/20/13
(36)
Dialing down the spastic dowager voice, I have to step off the blogger platform now and again, even if hate is truly beginning to consume me, as an issue even on the most pragmatic terms, what does it matter? Much like Sebold’s dead and virgin fuck worthy adolescent, vivacious and charming as the young actor was on screen, the hate itself is all that I have left, stark, veering toward crone cryogenics, this is how a constantly thwarted lust for life dies, its embers encased in stone cold methane, not any one thing, merely the cumulative total, besotting myself with Jerry, our 2007 contact the last gash, really, the last expenditure I had to exhaust. Did I love him, Frank asked with his Puerto Rican imbecility, and I cannot remember what I actually said to my bonny bastard nearly ex husband, but no, one does not love a glass fractured mortal icon now balding into a praying mantis post Vietnam boomer posture, no, but I would do anything now to reset the relative idyll, my brother engaged with his needle via which AIDS would waste the masculinity of his flesh into yellowish pink fevered bones no one wanted to touch, this that was Ridley Park, had I not answered the phone, and wrote “Professor McGuire,” on a notepad, dwelling on his professional title with nascent awe, had I not been there to let him the key to go look at my father’s little upstairs studio, had I not asserted myself, and found myself shaken to the core that he was a Shakespearean about to teach where I was about to be a freshman, poor Joanie looking at me like what’s the big deal?
Exactly, the big deal is I am dying in Philadelphia because I made a dynamic and once beautifully manic intellect that his was, as I then saw it, the biggest deal of my life, and no Frank, that is not love. It is the sentiment of wounded, even crippled primates, that gives fanaticism its power to do so much harm, that is what I experienced. The divine revelation of Christ for a Renaissance post modern sensibility. I could not just settle for getting raped by one of my mother’s trailer trash lovers, crying through the then necessary aborting drill bit no, me? I had to worship a somewhat gifted educator, sitting here at fifty looking at all the pieces of that puzzle, and how they, those pieces, accentuate the multiplicity of my wounds in a taunt pickle of aging urine, dark or light, depending on what liquid I utilize when I am not utilizing, like Kerouac, an intake of 32 ounces of coffee. Bladder cancer would actually be something of an upset, but then, if that is actually what it is, if not a cervical issue also. even if I do not lose to it outright, would give a plebeian sanctimonious owl hooting woman like Josie her justification, wouldn’t it? I need no imagination to know how a rabid bitch like that would take the news that I went down over a degrading rubber balloon, offering up a little prayer perhaps, in the happy consolation of her congregation, her and that insufferable God loves me as he made me hope. The stupid mechanisms we use, non viable females.
I do not know whether or not I am strong enough to handle a temporary fieldwork assignment, courteous as I and the ACLU woman were to each other, someone like me, forced to turn to the radical left, blind to the pain they bred in me, but going to the interview will, at least, be yet another matron whaling in the dark engagement. We’ll see, whether or not I ever forgive myself. Do I love him? It reverberates, a challenge to any rationale, like his daily familiarity with Susan. The doubt in my mind will never entirely settle, whether my finalist poem “On Goodbyes” was a love song of a turbulent girl in the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong thunder in her heart for men who could not accept her as a loving intimate, not that way, and had he dared it, not that it would have been right, but had it happened, and not been the stuff of real sexual fulfillment, I would have laughed, his gaunt and ugly energy, my flaccid spastic body and thick black pubic hair, I would have laughed, for that which is a broken heart. I hope Joanie did well. She was a good girl, a sweet soul, never was unkind to me.
6:03 am, Sunday
(36)
Dialing down the spastic dowager voice, I have to step off the blogger platform now and again, even if hate is truly beginning to consume me, as an issue even on the most pragmatic terms, what does it matter? Much like Sebold’s dead and virgin fuck worthy adolescent, vivacious and charming as the young actor was on screen, the hate itself is all that I have left, stark, veering toward crone cryogenics, this is how a constantly thwarted lust for life dies, its embers encased in stone cold methane, not any one thing, merely the cumulative total, besotting myself with Jerry, our 2007 contact the last gash, really, the last expenditure I had to exhaust. Did I love him, Frank asked with his Puerto Rican imbecility, and I cannot remember what I actually said to my bonny bastard nearly ex husband, but no, one does not love a glass fractured mortal icon now balding into a praying mantis post Vietnam boomer posture, no, but I would do anything now to reset the relative idyll, my brother engaged with his needle via which AIDS would waste the masculinity of his flesh into yellowish pink fevered bones no one wanted to touch, this that was Ridley Park, had I not answered the phone, and wrote “Professor McGuire,” on a notepad, dwelling on his professional title with nascent awe, had I not been there to let him the key to go look at my father’s little upstairs studio, had I not asserted myself, and found myself shaken to the core that he was a Shakespearean about to teach where I was about to be a freshman, poor Joanie looking at me like what’s the big deal?
Exactly, the big deal is I am dying in Philadelphia because I made a dynamic and once beautifully manic intellect that his was, as I then saw it, the biggest deal of my life, and no Frank, that is not love. It is the sentiment of wounded, even crippled primates, that gives fanaticism its power to do so much harm, that is what I experienced. The divine revelation of Christ for a Renaissance post modern sensibility. I could not just settle for getting raped by one of my mother’s trailer trash lovers, crying through the then necessary aborting drill bit no, me? I had to worship a somewhat gifted educator, sitting here at fifty looking at all the pieces of that puzzle, and how they, those pieces, accentuate the multiplicity of my wounds in a taunt pickle of aging urine, dark or light, depending on what liquid I utilize when I am not utilizing, like Kerouac, an intake of 32 ounces of coffee. Bladder cancer would actually be something of an upset, but then, if that is actually what it is, if not a cervical issue also. even if I do not lose to it outright, would give a plebeian sanctimonious owl hooting woman like Josie her justification, wouldn’t it? I need no imagination to know how a rabid bitch like that would take the news that I went down over a degrading rubber balloon, offering up a little prayer perhaps, in the happy consolation of her congregation, her and that insufferable God loves me as he made me hope. The stupid mechanisms we use, non viable females.
I do not know whether or not I am strong enough to handle a temporary fieldwork assignment, courteous as I and the ACLU woman were to each other, someone like me, forced to turn to the radical left, blind to the pain they bred in me, but going to the interview will, at least, be yet another matron whaling in the dark engagement. We’ll see, whether or not I ever forgive myself. Do I love him? It reverberates, a challenge to any rationale, like his daily familiarity with Susan. The doubt in my mind will never entirely settle, whether my finalist poem “On Goodbyes” was a love song of a turbulent girl in the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong thunder in her heart for men who could not accept her as a loving intimate, not that way, and had he dared it, not that it would have been right, but had it happened, and not been the stuff of real sexual fulfillment, I would have laughed, his gaunt and ugly energy, my flaccid spastic body and thick black pubic hair, I would have laughed, for that which is a broken heart. I hope Joanie did well. She was a good girl, a sweet soul, never was unkind to me.
6:03 am, Sunday
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