Buffalo Bill, aged 4: a dandy lad with a mournful mien

I forgot to bring back the title of the book in which I found this. I love my job. It is like walking around in a gigantic encyclopedia.

The New West: gun-totin' sweetheart, 1910

What a gal!

My tumblr. (I changed the url)

-Breitling Cosmonaute timepieces-

Books at My Desk. A Renewed Investigation. Myths To Live By.

Sooooo I can't help but bring back all manner of interesting things from storage to my little cubical-nest. And sometimes, like now, I actually have a little time to go through the piles and see what I have randomly brought back.
Here we have Joseph Cambell's Myths to Live By, Viking Press, 1972. I used to own a copy of Masks of God--it must have been volume 1, Primitive Mythology. But I have never really read much else by JC, and I'm not likely to read this book straight through anytime soon either. But I did just flip it open, and the quote to catch my eye (partly because someone had lightly penciled a double underlined ?! in the margin (I disapprove for the most part of marginalia in library books but there are grudging exceptions)) was this one spanning the end of page 102 and the top of 103:M

Ask an artist what his picture "means," and you will not soon ask such a question again. Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the types of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and *words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don't ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.*

(Asterisks indicate the point of penciled marginalia. I would have tended to pencil the following paragraph, were I the sort to do such a thing, which I assure you I am not--not in library books, anyway)

But to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. "All life," said the Buddha, "is sorrowful"; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. "The world," said the Buddha, "is an ever-burning fire." And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.

Astounding Science Fiction covers, 1960

yet another place to stop, look, and listen

The tumblr.com account of x-ray iris (also known as the indextronaute. and pamela)

endless delights of the wondrous realm of book storage.

what a sassy lady!

it almost makes me want to learn to rope and ride

this is for the typewriter-lovers out there---

neat little graphic from Gazette v.XIX n.3 1973

speaking of The Woman in the Body...

no, I haven't  actually read any further in the book mentioned in the previous entry--I keep checking out further fascinating monographs, or randomly taking bad cell-phone pictures of things that catch my eye as I shift great numbers of books on tall shelves in order to insure that there are no books on the lowest shelves, and that the distribution of books is equitable. I absolutely adore equitability.

At any rate, today I was shifting row upon row of PNs. And I opened up, at random --- well, I left the citation behind but it was the July/August 1980 Film Comment with Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance on the cover. But I hadn't yet seen the cover when I, standing on a platform ladder, on a whim opened to:

R to L: Kitten Natividad and that country band from The Blues Brothers

 

I was eleven years old in 1980. And this does seem to grasp at a bit of that gossamer zeitgeist that permeated that confusing---yet simpler? I doubt it, actually---time.

a book from storage. it is red.

And its title is The Woman in the Body and its author is Emily Martin. Oh and I see that it is subtitled A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Published in 1987 (the year I graduated high school). The title must have caught my eye as I searched for storage requests. I could be very happy left alone for hours in Offsite Storage: I want to read it all, or at least peruse most of it.

This book has an--is it epigram or epigraph? Y'd think with a fucking Masters Degree in Publishing I would remember such distinctions (about that: I guess I burnt myself out on the subject. The same way that, back when I was a Plant Lady taking care of rental tropical plants, after a while I sadistically allowed my own houseplants, which once had made me so proud, to die. Or when I worked in the record stores--I didn't want to listen to music on the drive home. You know?) by Adrienne Rich from Of Woman Born to wit:

I know no woman--virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate--whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves--for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. There is for the first time today a possibility of converting our physicality into both knowledge and power.

Well, all righty then. I like knowledge and power! I think. I know I like knowledge. I wonder if Adrienne Rich had children? Well easy enough to check. By the way, Ms. Rich, I think, with her poem "Living in Sin"

She thought the studio would keep itself.

No dust upon the furniture of love

implanted in rural, pre-pubescent (I was eleven when I first read it) me a desire to live in sin despite the relentless milkman. But anyway. I see that she bore three sons. I myself am childless and determined to remain that way--at least as regards bearing children. But back to the book. What might I learn from this book? I'm not going to read it cover to cover, I am sure.

 ::peruses chapter titles::

 oh "The Familiar and the Exotic" eh? "Medical Metaphors...: Menstruation and Menopause" now there's a mouthful..."Premenstrual Syndrome, Work Discipline, and Anger" for some reason sounds positively feudal to me...well all right I will probably find bits and bobs of this to be interesting. I do miss my sociology studies.

Thank you for joining me during this episode of "what's on my desk"---brought to you by almond bubble tea with tapioca from The Chit Chat in PDX OR.

all the books on my desk

-Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy.

This is a Summit book--it came to me from Tesc Library at Evergreen State College up around Olympia. Short stories. In much the same way that I love tiny cookies and individualized desserts, I love short stories. So perfect. I'm impressed with these. I am on page 160 of 219--three stories to go. I notice that this book, which is due on June 22nd, is dedicated to Geoffrey Wolff. I am more familiar with the work of his brother Tobias--oh how I admire his work. And also his reading-aloud skills. His is one of my favorite episodes of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast with New Yorker fiction editor Debra Triesman.

I can't remember why I ordered this book. just searching around in the database, I guess. Perhaps I have recetly heard her  name mentioned amongst the Portland writers I try to keep up with. Will try to keep up with. I am determined to submit something somewhere before the end of may. Why else did I disrupt everything--everything--about my former life, if not to write? And, by extension, fuckin' present it to a readership.

Like I'm just about to do with this teensy-weensy post.

300 words at a time.

 So I have been writing on
typetrigger

as xrayiris. It would please me to no end to be read by YOU.

Someday These Posts Won't Be So Crudely Done

Coronet. The Magazine That Makes You *Wonder*

The word obscured by the sticker? Love.

What Games Did They Like To Play?

Add caption

Blurry and Off-Centered Cell-phone Photographs of Things I See While At Work

This is a detail of the frontispiece to Elliot West's

Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier

-sick day-

And I thought that once I had the job I wanted, these days wouldn't happen anymore.

And I thought that once my insurance kicked in, these days wouldn't happen anymore.

And I thought that once I got my new glasses, these days wouldn't happen anymore.

Longer days. Higher temperatures. Blue Skies.

I'll open a window. I'm thinking of moving furniture. I should listen to the McKinney Sisters--they sing my favorite version of Blue Skies--it's always good for getting me started moving furniture around, and if I can move a little furniture around, I can maybe move around the pieces in my head--move out of inertia.

I mean, after all--my sweetheart and I are planning to drive to the coast tomorrow to see if we might espy the puffins who spend the spring on Haystack Rock.

And I didn't even mention the fact that

I

saw

Robert

Plant

in concert with Band of Joy on Tuesday night.

"Now, nudity may not be for everyone."

It's a Kids in the Hall quote.

Mark McKinney just got naked onscreen--but with a big ol' X over the full monty.

So I happened to wonder just how naked I plan to get with this ol' blog I'm seemingly beginning here. I tend toward the confessional. I don't write fiction. However, I am also circumspect and, in the words of (I think it was) Pete Martell on Twin Peaks: "she's filllled with secrets." But then again, I think of bell hooks and how she writes of living in truth--absolute truth--the truest truth a person can tell--

But then again I think about Dave Eggers in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (although I can never locate the quote) wherein he writes about oversharing--and it is along the lines of "even if they know everything, even if they know the worst, what do they really have over you?" I think I should find that quote.

We shall see. I keep telling myself that.

someone's had a case of the "I-usetas"

When I was a little girl growing up in South Carolina, if my mother thought I was being pouty or bratty or self-absorbed she'd tell me I had "me-itis." As if this were a terrible, debilitating disease that would cause me to waste away as if consumptive or tubercular. "Get over yourself" was the basic message.

So, long story short, instead of getting over my me-itis, I allowed it to flower, giving in to the full force of my tempestuous nature and getting in many a pickle and many a scrape and behaving in a harum-scarum manner that caused a lot of trouble, broken bones, bad grades, catastrophe, estrangement and et cetera.

And also, I was imaginative and sweet and likable and sassy and fun and effervescent and et cetera.

And studious, and industrious, and curious, and at times like both the grasshopper and the ant. And I grabbed the thistle and seized the day and whatnot.

I suppose this is a bit of a long-winded and off-the-cuff way to introduce myself. Here I am, just turned 42 (the Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, right? Right?) and living all the way across the country from the only place I've ever lived in my life. All of a sudden, it seems--and yet I've been here five years already and just now starting to really dig in.

And I've noticed that my me-itis is still there (I mean, my last name begins with an I and my first name encapsulates the word "me"--) and that's okay. But what isn't OK? Something I'm barely becoming aware of and that is the I-usetas.

I useta be married.

I useta have a house.

I useta have a wooden beaded curtain.

I useta have a whole bunch of friends I saw from Thursday through Sunday if not more often.

I useta . . . I useta . . . I useta.

I guess some of this has been a mourning process. My life has flip-flopped in a major way. Not for the first time, really, but whew! Talk about pulling up stakes.
There have never been many pioneer types in my family. Not much of a template for moving around. I'm really doing pretty well. I have a lot of gratitude for my household of three (my beloved, and my fat cat, and me). But I have still been on some knife's-edge of my past and my heretofore unimaginable future.

I think of that tarn in front of the House of Usher.

And also of Elysium Fields.

Today I got my brand-new glasses--first time my prescription's been checked in six years. Oy, were my eyes bad! Now I have progressive lenses. Everything is sharp and clear, but there's still a little familiar blurriness until I shift my gaze around and find what the kind lady at the optician's office called the "sweet spot."

And there you have it. I can see. Not to belabor the point--but--I can see.

Oh No

Feeling cruddy and generally sorry for myself even though I'm listening to Rubber Soul on vinyl. And Sammy-the-Cat just jumped up on the bed with me wanting me to play mouse-fish-bird with him. And there's chocolate. And Matthew is cooking my favorite casserole. And I'm surrounded by books.

Oh, gratitude. Now, to get that game of mouse-fish-bird underway.

Unfurling? Potentially.

Well. There are so many wonderful blogs I've been reading lately. And I want to join in this fun community. But not tonight, because I'm about to go and read a book (WHAT book? Oh, I'm just re-reading The Madness of a Seduced Woman for the something-th time). But I will ponder this in my sleep--this posting business. Last night I dreamt again of finding unexpected rooms in the house in which I tired of dwelling--fancy rooms, fun rooms, a room with a yellow couch I couldn't decide whether to keep or throw out.

I love these dreams. They remind me to explore the things I let lie fallow as I pursue some ideal future--waiting to write until "things are better"--until I get my new glasses or I've worked at my new job for a while or I get a new phone or et cetera.

Inhabit those unused secret rooms! There are always plenty more.