December 2003

I’ve been reading Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner, a “biographical novel” about a famous member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was America’s most militant union from 1905 to the early 20s. They believed in fighting. A lot of them were killed or jailed. Some of their strategy, however, was nonviolent, and we could learn something from it.

The Wobblies crammed half the jails from Everett to San Diego with belligerent workers fighting ordinances against free speech and street meetings, piling in until they jammed a town’s whole system of law and order, pouring down from the woods and the camps, beating their way up from skid roads and winter boardinghouses, streaming in from the harvest country. If they did not like a jail’s food they “built a battleship,” pounding on the walls and floors until frantic police turned firehoses on them or gave up. They organized and kept their jails spotless, and they sang till townspeople gathered laughing outside to listen.

We need to make ourselves visible by speaking and passing out literature in the streets, and we should think about cramming the system. That should be easy to do in Oregon, since voters are not willing to tax themselves to support the state, and “public safety,” a euphemism for putting working-class people in jail, is being starved along with everything else.

Today I moved into a quad – four apartments share a kitchen – about a 15 minute walk from downtown Eugene. After 21 years, I’m back.

Years ago I read in a pop psychology book that one way of knowing what is going on in your unconscious mind is to notice what songs you sing. I’m not singing it, but this is what has been going through my mind tonight:

As for me my little brain

Isn’t very bright

Choose for me dear Santa Claus

What you think is right

I think I’m just so tired that I feel blank, very simple-minded. Now what?

I read, therefore I am.

In old age, Hope finds, everything wears thin….

What did Emerson say about death? No more trips to the dentist. – John Updike, Seek My Face

The main character of Updike’s book is the fictionalized widow of artist Jackson Pollock, renamed Zack McCoy. At 79, she is being interviewed by a writer, remembering the art scene of the 40s and 50s, when art was a radical force.

… that glowering theoretical passion, left over I suppose from Marxism….

Interesting that this is the second novel I’ve read about Pollock’s widow in old age, both picked up in my usual accidental way – I was not looking for novels about Pollock. Then there was the movie about him. In dream interpretation you’re supposed to ask, why is this coming up now? Also a good question, perhaps, about culture. Why is Pollock coming up now?

Or maybe the question is, even though I think my literary browsing is accidental, and I like it that way, why is this coming up now for me? Why am I choosing books and movies about art?

Everything I do I must do quickly. I think it pollutes it if a second thought intervenes. Contemplation kills…. – Updike

I’ve always envied artists.

Sometimes before I fall asleep I’ll find the mental switch that turns my mind loose, and see great images. But I can’t hold on to them or recreate them on paper.

Lately I’ve been fantasizing about doing masks.

I usually don’t think in images, like the painters in Seek My Face, but in concepts, patterns, theories.

What Updike, perhaps any serious novelist, is interested in is the subtleties of human experience and interaction, overlaid, in this case, by a lot of art history. Someone wrote about Updike that he is always the “good student.”

Hope’s husbands in this novel represent different stages in modern American painting. There was the art-as-religion phase, where everyone was serious, followed by the ironic phase, where they played with reality and celebrated the ordinary.

… his feeling for America: he saw us as savages, really, full of vitality and appetite and an outrageous wonderful vulgarity, where my feeling about Americans is that what they are basically is conscientious … and usually exhausted…. – Updike

WASPs, people who work all the time and don’t know when, or how, to quit. Restless people who turn on the TV and bang doors.

I started doing this in my late teens, writing down quotes from my reading, wanting to save the parts that spoke to me. A friend says it’s good that I do this – I tell her about all these books I read so she doesn’t have to read them.

12:42 a.m., and even here in southeast Eugene I can hear the train blowing its horn. When did they give up on whistles? I can imagine how annoying it must be in the neighborhoods further north, close to the tracks. One letter in the paper about it since I’ve been here, an old issue. Every town has old issues, and when I travel it’s one of the things I look for. But the people I visit are often disinterested in local issues. I ask what is happening in their town and they shrug. I guess whatever it is, it’s not happening to them.

Eugene has always been an island in the south end of the Willamette valley, with a distinct identity. It doesn’t fade off into other cities like so many places.

In the four months I’ve been in this area, living with family in Springfield, Eugene’s eastern neighbor, the main local issues have been:

·        The new federal courthouse being planned in Eugene. Heavy pressure from locals to include a ramp for the disabled, which the feds don’t want to do because they think it messes up their design. Also, I think they just don’t like having locals tell them what to do.

·        Location of a new hospital in Eugene. I still don’t understand this, but apparently the two local hospitals, one in Eugene and one in Springfield, are doing a relocation dance.

·        There is also talk, has been forever, about reviving the two cities’ downtowns. Like most U.S. city downtowns, they were hurt when malls drained their business. Springfield’s downtown seems about dead, very low rent. Eugene’s downtown is low key but has some life in it – a big new library, local bus station, art, bookstores, cafes with entertainment. A Saturday market for crafts in the dry season. It’s alright with me the way it is, except I would like to see a large downtown theater. Eugene’s downtown has always had a small town feeling.

It isn’t just, or mainly, the physical effort of moving that wears me out, but the emotional effort of relocation, of being wrenched out of orbit. It’s the fish-out-of-water syndrome.

I feel like I’ve been moving for about four and a half months.

The opportunity is to do, be, something new.

And to get to know a place deeply, the way you don’t when you travel.

But it’s hard to see this when I feel like a stranger.

We so desperately want the familiar, even if it’s not that great. Even if it’s boring, because it is familiar.

AARP’s magazine cover says 60 is the new 30. In their dreams. Instead of that crap, pandering to us, wouldn’t it be more helpful to explore what 60 really is? How is the 60 year-old consciousness different from that of a 30 year-old? What can we do with this stage of life? I have more questions than answers.

It’s very easy to feel like it’s all over and there’s no point in getting up in the morning. (So I usually get up around noon.) People are telling us we have to push ourselves to be more active, but I’m not sure that’s the answer either. What happens if we just sit? (Your body falls apart and you die.)

As always, I’ll probably get through this by following my nose. I’ve never been able to plan my life.

What keep shutting me down is the need for self-protection in poverty-stricken Oregon. In February there will be a referendum on the state legislature’s tax increase, and the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid) will be once more endangered, as it has been, off and on, for the last year or so. One crisis after another. The only good news is that Oregon’s income tax revenue has stopped declining. [The referendum lost.]

Unbelievable ad in Eugene Weekly: “Doctor Leveque says, ‘Cannabis gives the best relief.’” He’s an old man the state has been after for signing a lot of forms so people can qualify for medical marijuana.

I love the cultural wars when the outlaws have a chance of winning.

Every time I get stoned I write about not having anything good to eat.

Noam Chomsky has a new book out, Power and Terror, reviewed in Eugene Weekly: “He says the best way to prevent terrorism is to stop participating in it.”

Since I moved into this apartment I’m feeling ambivalent about connecting up my computer. Do I want to be back online, available?

There is one dirty dish in the drainer of our shared kitchen and two dirty dishes in the sink. This never changes. I’m wondering if someone moved out, long ago, and “we left his things just as they were.” To preserve the presence. Or maybe he died. No matter.

The only coffee mug I brought with me from Portland has written on it, “leukemia ® society of America.”  Lest I forget. Or maybe I’m bragging.

I wonder if it’s just the hours I keep that make me look back on every place I’ve lived as dark. Something I noticed in the movie Sylvia, about the poet Sylvia Plath: they lived so dimly then, in pools of light.

… growth with its fatal undercurrent of leaving behind …. – Updike

As I have left so much behind, and been left behind.

The working class includes employed people and their family members whose living is dependent on selling labor-power (the ability to work) to employers for wages or salaries…. – Paul Le Blanc, A Short History of the U.S. Working Class, 1999

Proportion of U.S. labor force, according to Le Blanc, receiving wages:

·        1880 – 63 percent

·        Today – “perhaps 80 percent”

Of the white indentured servants brought to the American colonies, Le Blanc says that about two-thirds died before they completed their 4-7 years of service. In The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad wrote that indentured servants were treated much like black slaves. He thought those who survived were the ancestors of today’s poor whites.

The tragedy of the modern, or should we say post-modern, artist is that the public’s attention span is so much shorter than his normal creative life. – Updike

I get the impression that domesticity often subdues the creative temperament.

… the purity, the heedlessness that can make something truly new. – Updike

Even if you don’t produce for money, it’s hard not to please people by giving them what they want.

I’m always afraid that if I take advice I’ll end up being the other person. Or some widely shared social construct. We get so much input that the “me” is fragile. We are not supposed to be self-centered, but when the “me” disappears so does anything original it might produce.

Too much TV, for example, tends to wipe me out. So does busyness, stress, change, politics – anything that forces me to focus outward. And wears me down. Perhaps because of ageing, my energy supply seems perilously low. [Season?]

In America there is such an overwhelming amount of surface that it’s hard to go deeper. Sometimes I try turning off some of the surface for awhile.

Walking around Eugene, I saw a poster for the “Lee Harvey Oswald Blues Band,” photo of Oswald getting shot by Jack Ruby with a standup microphone in front of him.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply…. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

In The Business of Books, Andre Schiffrin writes that money has taken over the "liberal professions" -- medicine, law, publishing, etc.

Nearly one in five men suffering pain or illness will forestall a visit to a doctor “as long as possible” according to a major survey examining men’s health. – Register-Guard

Marriages that end always end badly, because that’s the only way they can end.

The section below is copied from an online blog (weblog) I tried in December and January, then gave up. It felt too immediate, not allowing any time for reflection and editing. For this version, I have reflected and edited.

Wednesday, December 31st, 2003

I think what the Democratic congressional candidates for president are discovering is that hardly anyone likes them. That's why we keep electing governors. So they're all attacking Dean. How smart is that? It just reinforces the idea that these guys have nothing to say.

According to The Oregonian, only 26 percent of Portland households have children. No wonder it's so hard to get tax support for schools.

There is nothing you can get from anyone that is worth putting up with their crap.

Strange, writing in Real Time. Feels more dangerous. I'm not waiting for passion to fade.

Passion?

All right, everyone form up into two neat lines....

Undecided between "all right" and "alright" I looked it up online. The American Heritage Dictionary says that "alright" is not accepted as standard. "Consequently, one who uses alright, especially in formal writing, runs the risk that readers may view it as an error or as the willful breaking of convention."

God knows I wouldn't want to do that.

I must find other sources of consolation. $50 for an eighth is too much.

I stumble over "eighth." Seems like it should have one less letter. One of those words that is awkward to write. You really have to slow down and think about it.

It's ten after midnight on the first day of the new year, fireworks going off outside. Happy New Year.

Why are fundamentalist religions, of whatever kind, so puritan? As if self-denial were the key to salvation. Why do we get fixated on not doing rather than doing?

Some kind of line is crossed in America when you accept charity.

I like to get stoned and have these long conversations with myself. Like being back in college.

I like to sit here on my bed in my little apartment and look at the tangle of wires under the computer table, which seems like art.

Tuesday, December 30th, 2003

Or will mechanical minds [computers] start up by themselves when they reach a certain level of complexity? (Is there critical thought, like critical mass?) – Peter Menzel & Faith D'Alusio, Robo sapiens, 2000

Sunday, December 28th, 2003

... psychologists now believed a certain amount of random behavior was necessary for innovation. – Michael Crichton, Prey

Thus the need for drifting. To keep an organism, such as me, innovative, you have to keep breaking up its routines. Poverty, and the periodic failure of social and political arrangements, has a way of doing that for me. Plus I've always been a novelty seeker.

Prey is a reasonably entertaining, fairly routine science fiction monster story, the monster in this case being swarms of microscopic robots – nanobots.

Crichton says that bird flocks have no leaders. Nor is flocking instinctual – hardwired into their brains – but a few simple rules that produce flocking are. Rules like, when you're flying stay close to another bird but don't bump into it. Simple rules like this, in birds or robots, can be used to produce complex "emergent behavior" that looks intelligent but isn't.

I thought about this while reading a speech by "Granny D." Haddock, one of my heroes, on the Portland IndyMedia website. She talks about comic book politics, people who know little or nothing about political policy who choose their leaders based on simple characteristics like how strong they appear. Which makes me wonder if American politics could best be understood as a form of flocking.

Drift is a journal of ideas. I started it in Nov. 1989 as an occasional printed journal for friends and family, and kept it up until June 1995. Quit writing then, not sure why, for over five years, then started again in Jan. 2001, publishing on the Portland Writers website.

The only problem with that is that I'm always way behind. I write in notebooks and then type it up much later. Right now I'm editing last March. I've been thinking I'd like to bring Drift into the present tense, so a blog seems like the way to do that. We'll see. Like everything else I do, it's an experiment.