buddhist pie

Emily Books, an indy ebook store, has published the buddhist for their February offering.  To the left is a pic I stole from the Emily site of my publishers, Emily Gould and Ruth Curry.  Here's an article about the Emily Books project.  It's been great working with them, and they've sold an impressive number of the buddhist ebooks the past couple of weeks.  I couldn't be happier.  Interactions between Emily Books and Publication Studio and me went super smoothly—and that's a lot of fingers in the pie. 

I just looked up "finger in the pie," and according to Dictionary.com, the phrase hails from the late 1500s, but "the precise origin of this metaphor, which presumably alludes either to tasting every pie or being involved in their concoction, has been lost."

According to Pie Maven:

These idioms originate from the nursery rhyme of Little Jack Horner, which is believed by many to be a true (if figurative) story of the steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, before the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. Legend has it that, just prior to the abbey's destruction, the abbot sent Little Jack Horner to London with a Christmas pie which had the deeds to a dozen manors secretly baked inside. During the journey, Horner opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the manor of Mells in Somerset. The manor properties included lead mines in the Mendip Hills, hence "He pulled out a plum" - from the Latin plumbum, for lead:

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie,
He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
And said "What a good boy am I!"

Who knew.

The marketing copy Emily Books posted for the buddhist is fucking awesome:

Crushes are the best.  They are also the worst.  In the buddhist Dodie Bellamy renders both of these extremes with precision and immediacy, using the lens of her own breakup with a Buddhist teacher.

The book began as a blog that Bellamy kept during and after this failed relationship.  This intimate, almost epistolary form allows her to skip merrily from shallow to deep concerns, sometimes in the same sentence.  Meandering vignettes develop into devastating observations about love, heterosexuality, dignity, privacy, and the point of writing. If you have felt the sting of a bruised ego, the hope kindled by an out-of-the-blue email, or clung desperately to the false confidence of 'you go girl' affirmations, then there is something in this book that will make you cringe, cry, or burst out laughing.

Bellamy is a poet and writing professor in San Francisco. Boy is she ever: she often writes about getting Taoist internal organ massages, she’s in an open marriage, she wakes up with a ring of eye makeup around one eye and Googles “raccoon spirit guide."  She pays attention to everything, evoking the micro-shifts in her thoughts and feelings and physicality with uncommon skill.  This turns out to be crucial to her project: “An in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability is a powerful feminist strategy … to deny behaviors gendered as weak or “feminine” is not feminist or queer, it’s heteronormative to the hilt.”   Whether or not you buy this 'vulnerability as strength' thing at the beginning of the buddhist,  you’ll almost certainly be convinced by the end.

This past Monday on the phone I marveled to Emily, "You made my book sound so good!"  She was interviewing me for the Emily Books tumblr.  Two days later, the interview was published online.  That's the kind of turnaround an instant gratification addict like me can appreciate.  Emily is so quick and adept!  She sent me an edited transcription on Tuesday and I did some finetuning.  She also posed one additional question, which I wrote a response to.  Emily suggested we do the interview via email, but I'm still insanely busy and I know how much work email interviews are.  If you throw yourself into them, you're essentially writing a series of short essays.  I'm happy with the way our interview turned out, but editing it, I was, again, appalled by how inarticulate I am when speaking as opposed to writing.  I felt like doing a Bob Kaufman-esque vow of silence. I'd stop talking but I wouldn't stop communicating.  I'd carry around a keyboard, and when people would engage me in conversation, my fingers would attack the keyboard in a fury, and in every human interaction I'd be totally lucid and witty and smart.  The spoken words of my conversants could never match the cleverness of my fingers.  My life would be like a Noel Coward play, all the time.  Click click click.  I'd never again blurt out a "sort of" "like" or "you know."  All week I've been thinking of cunning things I'd have put in that interview if I hadn't been too lazy to write it.  But then I wouldn't have had the pleasure of talking on the phone with Emily. And of course the best part of the conversation was when she turned that damned recorder off.  Emily steered much of our conversation to issues of honesty and vulnerability in writing; I was amused and a bit horrified by how often I hedged answering her questions.  Oddly, even off the record, she didn't ask me the identity of the buddhist.  So many people ask me that.  It's a hard thing to get out of me.  Emily's thought a lot about all sides of sharing oneself online.  She wrote a fascinating article called "Exposed" for the New York Times magazine about the pitfalls and glories of "oversharing" online. 

Anyway, this has all been thrilling and I love having my finger in the Emily Books pie.

Illegitimate

Here's the link to "Illegitimate Business," the first of six monthly columns I'll be writing for Open Space,  the SFMOMA blog.  It's about a group show at Will Brown gallery featuring art that was acquired outside the gallery system, some of it through rather shady means.  Kevin and I loaned this clock, a sculpture Nayland Blake made when he was an art student.  Each artwork is accompanied by signage narrating its acquisition.  So of course I loved such a writing-based show.  Context is everything, and I'm reminded of the randomness and perfectness of why we love any object or person.

I wrote an involved post yesterday about all of this and lost it.  Kevin says I should reconstruct it, but there is no reconstructing a blogging moment.  Today has a different tone, different concerns.  Kind of melancholy with an overcast sky, imminent rain.  Glad I have a haircut appointment, as it will force me to take a walk through this moist gray atmosphere, with the sun's muted brightness breaking through in patches of blue.

Blogger is not being very friendly to me lately.  Recently I had all my links mysteriously turn blue and nothing I could do could get them back to the tasteful burnt red I chose.  Through fortuitous googling I discovered the problem was pasting from Microsoft Word, that Microsoft Word brings with it evil code that overrides your template.  So I had to find the offending post and remove its code and all is well again, colorwise.  As I write this, I think, of course all is not well colorwise, my mind is in free association mode and it's tragic I have a shitload of work to do today and cannot coddle my free associating mind.  The past few nights on TV we watched One Potato, Two Potato, a 1964 film about the tribulations of an interracial marriage, with intense stylized acting.  Characters project their psychological truths onto the world through children's play.  Interracial lovers leaping and hopping about and running races in a park.  The stylized acting gives the totally naturalistic film a dreamlike quality, a banal nightmarishness, like Kafka.  The psychological and the cultural in this terrible state of combustion.

One Potato, Two Potato was shot in Painesville, Ohio.  And even though its point is the horrors of racism, to me the white characters seem too liberal for the mid-century Midwest I was raised in.  They acknowledge their racism and they feel guilty for it.  In Indiana, no one around me expressed guilt over racism.  Racism was natural, a right.  Even 5 years ago, at my mother's funeral, a neighbor lady, the mother of a girl I went from kindergarten through high school with, came up to me and complained that the people they sold their house to, turned around and sold it to blacks.  She grabbed my eye, and said the word "blacks" in a sort of whisper-hiss, she said it like I would understand the violation of this, like I was part of this compassionate brotherhood.  See my mother in a coffin just a few feet away, and me standing there not knowing what the fuck to do with this.

Midway Flashback

In the middle of a 3 hour layover at Midway Airport.  I'm sitting in a sandwich shop called Potbelly.  There's a guy playing guitar and singing.  He does a cross between Bruce Springsteen and Nivana.  Very good at his covers.  He looks like my first "boyfriend" in San Francisco, a street artist at Fisherman's Wharf, an occupation I found endlessly exotic.  I have a coveted table next to an electrical outlet.  I feel like airport royalty.  I got hardly any sleep last night, but the plane wasn't totally full and I got a whole row to myself.  I lay across all 3 seats, covered in the down coat I brought to battle the mild Midwestern winter, and I slept most of the way.  Unconsciousness makes things go by so quickly!

I hadn't realized I was flying into Midway, and it's a bit intense, as I used to fly here often to visit my mother, Midway being much closer to Indiana than O'Hare.  This is the airport I flew into when I would wonder if our visit would be a good one, if that visit would be our last good visit, meaning she would be able to leave the house, meaning we could have fun lunches and trips to Carson's to buy clothes.  She wouldn't buy clothes on her own; only when I visited.  She'd lost so much weight she needed clothes, and shopping is one thing I'm really good at.  I flew here when I went to the hospital to watch her die.  I flew into here when I had to come back to Indiana to open an estate checking account.  Because of the Patriot Act, you can't open a checking account long distance.  Did you know that?  I didn't.

The first thing I did after deplaning was to look for Nuts on Clark and buy some caramel corn.  One time I flew back to Oakland on Thanksgiving, and Kevin picked me up and we went straight to a potluck.  I bought a big bag of caramel corn for my contribution.  It was a hit.  Nuts on Clark makes good caramel corn.  Then I bought a beverage and grabbed this spot so I could listen to the excellent singer who looks like my old butch boyfriend.  I'm in a great spot to drink in the people.  Many of them are from the Southside because Midway's so close; it's not as sophisticated an airport as O'Hare.  I recognize these people—it's like I share their  energetic DNA.  They look so different than California people, in a way that's far beyond fashion.  I see my mother in all these stern, fleshy, angular faces.  There's a seriousness to these people, even though I know behind that they all have wicked senses of humor that can shock Californians.  And even though they seem unapproachable, there's a generosity and loyalty there.  There's a sense of life is hard and don't fuck with me.  When I see someone walking by with a softness to them, I know they're not from here.  No matter how hard I try to be soft, I'm always stern.  But it's not just me, I want to declare to the world.  This energy isn't as boisterous, as, say New Jersey energy.  There's a covertness, a condensation, like the energy is roiling beneath the surface.  It's all contained now in the zombielike dreariness of airport life, but you can tell—given provocation it's eager to explode.  Like when my sleeping cat Sylvia notices a fly and she springs to life, bloodlust in her eyes, crying out, which always seems so counterproductive, like isn't the fly going to hear her.

So I guess you could say I'm missing my mother, but I'm also missing me, the undiluted harsh Midwestern me before she got complicated by other worlds, other influences.

Nothing in Mind

So I don't know what I'm going to write here.  My life has been either about school stuff, which is not okay to write about here, or personal in a way that I wouldn't want to reveal it in an unmediated public way, but the personal's going okay, just insanely busy, like I worked 12 hours yesterday and felt guilty when I said, fuck this, I'm doing the dishes.  That's what I did for fun, the dishes.  The dishes suffer when I'm really busy, and no I don't have anything as high tech as a dishwasher.  I also boil water in an old-fashioned kettle on a gas stove and I pour it over things.  I like kettles.  They make me feel like a colonial woman or a witch.  The crazy busyness should end in a couple of weeks, and there should then be time for ME ME ME.  In the midst of this work-work-work, I gave a reading Sunday night at the home of Ryan Funk in the hills above Castro, in a lovely house with picture postcard views.  Any time for myself the past couple of weeks has been stolen time; I have actually just said fuck it a couple of times and wrote draft material for my book in a frenzy.  It felt good, that urgency, the thrill of the uncontrollable transgressive urge.  Driving over to the reading, overwhelmed with all I should have been doing instead, I said to Kevin, if I could pay someone to give this reading for me, I would.  But once there, I soon found myself sitting on the floor beneath the panoramic view, talking with co-readers Linda Norton and Donna de la Perriere (Jordan Karnes also read and everybody was amazing; I was so pleased to be in such tender and smart community), and I softened and relaxed into my fate.  It ended up a lovefest; some former students were there and I got lots of hugs, and despite my initial resistance, it turned out to be quite nourishing.

Another thing, besides my dailiness with Kevin and my 3 cuddly and bossy cats, that's been keeping me going is gorging on Downton Abbey night after night.  We watched Season 1 on DVD while Season 2 accrued on the digital video recorder, but now we're caught up and we have to wait until next Sunday, like the rest of America, for our next fix.  Season 2, in many ways, isn't as good as Season 1, but I'm fascinated with the depiction of World War I.  In season 2 the War is more interesting that any specific character, even arrogant Lady Mary, with her newfound humble hunching of her shoulders.  Stand up with your head held high, I want to say to her.  It's like she's auditioning to play a nun.

Looking at Ariana Reines' tumblr this evening.  Even though I love her long, thoughtful posts, I also enjoy it when she reposts things she's read or listened to.  Little hits, like pecks on the cheek between major makeout sessions.  I think, I shouldn't make such a big deal out of what I post on Belladodie.

I've been listening to my 3rd Nina Simone CD in my car.  First I listened to Nina Simone at the Village Gate, which I found beautiful; then I listened to the rough politics of The Best of Nina Simone, impressed with how the album frightened and disturbed me.  Now I'm listening to Just Like a Woman: Sings Classic Songs of the 60s.  That one's been hard for me.  Here's the songlist:  Just Like A Woman, Here Comes The Sun, I Think It's Going To Rain Today, Suzanne, Who Knows Where The Time Goes, In The Morning, I Shall Be Released, Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season), To Love Somebody, The House Of The Rising Sun, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, The Pusher, Mr. Bojangles, and My Father—predominately white, and often wordy, songs.  My first couple of hearings, I thought, this is one of those sagging career ventures to capture a broader audience.  The most problematic songs are Jerry Jeff Walker's Mr. Bojangles (made popular among 70s youth by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), and Steppenwolf's The Pusher.  Both songs could be seen as white takes on black culture, the patronizing sentimentality of Mr. Bojangles, based not upon tap dancing virtuoso Bill Robinson, but a street performer Walker met in a New Orleans jail.  Steppenwolf's pro-marijuana/hippie drugs, anti-hard drugs stance reminds me of the still prevalent class distinctions between bourgeois drugs and those of the disenfranchised.  The acceptance/chicness of grass and coke even, compared to the horror of crack.  So, I wonder, was Nina Simone okay with these songs, is this just my white liberal projection, or did she have some issues with them.  I wish I could ask her or read an interview somewhere.

After repeated listening I'm impressed with the heart she puts into repeating god-damn the pusher man, which of course reminds me of her masterful rendition elsewhere of Mississippi Goddam.  The more I listen to Just Like a Woman, the more I'm seduced by this different layer of Nina Simone, her subtle subversions and reinventions of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.  Another song that was hard for me is "The House of the Rising Sun," mostly because of her knock-out version of it on Nina Simone at the Village Gate.  The Just Like a Woman version is strangely upbeat, and I'm like what the fuck!  But then at the end she turns to scat singing, and it becomes this body crying out in a frenzy, and it's amazing.  Mr. Bojangles is also a live version, and after the audience claps, as a sort of mini-encore Nina Simone sings the verse about how his dog up and died.  Her pronunciation of dog as "dawg" and the crackling vulnerability of her voice is heart-breaking.  Only a genius could tease out the tragedy infusing these sing-songy lyrics.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes it takes a while to be able to hear somebody, but when you do it's like the clouds part and rays of glory come streaming through.

What I'm leaving out is last night's death of poet Stacy Doris.  I am but a bleep in a vast communal mourning.  Anything I could say would be an understatement or a cliché.  She is missed.