Fri 3 Jul 2009
I forgot how deceptive Portland summers are. You wake up every morning for maybe three straight weeks to a cloudless sky, dry heat, Mt. Hood visible in the distance, and you do not remember the previous ten months of darkness. You ride your bike through the wide, shady streets in Ladd’s Addition. loping around the rose gardens, looking into the blue through the branches of the ancient poplars, and for a moment, summer is the only place you are; the rest is mutable. It’s impossible to remember the heart-squashing gray from before. At The Corresponding Society reading in Seattle last week, poet, Robin Summers, called Portland “the behemoth sadness” in one of his pieces. He was twirling, alternately raising and lowering his body as though on a lever. He did not just mean the weather. The reading was held at Pilot Books in Capitol Hill, where a beautiful, young proprietress named Summer Robinson runs the counter. The books are held on suspension shelves that bang into the walls, and there’s a tiny mezzanine above the front entrance where she keeps arm chairs and a lending library. She carries only small press and local authors, and she said, “If there was ever a time to go bankrupt, it’s now!” This is her full time job.
There has been a lot of awful national headline news from Portland in the last two months, including a woman who threw her kids over the Sellwood Bridge. I was in Sellwood last night, riding around double-Dutch on my bike with Austin. We watched the Woody Allen movie, Stardust Memories, and we could barely speak after it finished. There was no distinction between what the character’s life was and what he was filming, or if it was a film within a film (within a film). There was a scene towards the end where “Stardust” by Louis Armstrong is playing, and Charlotte Rampling is lying on the floor reading the paper, and she and Woody Allen are just staring at each other while he eats yogurt. It’s black & white but all the light is visible. It was a puzzle, hinting at the unknown center. Austin and I had spent the day trying to invent a genre for literature of that kind. Hinting at an unknown center. It was 3 o’clock in the morning.
The junk is just rolling in. My mom and I start early in morning, and then continue on into the day, with a late afternoon gap where I go to the cafe to write and she practices her flute. She, John, and I end up in the backyard around dinner time, usually. Sometimes Noel is here, cutting up playing cards for his voodoo bookmarks. I visited my brother at the state hospital last week. We sat by the koi pond and didn’t talk much, but he looked good. He was relaxed, and I might return soon to look at old photographs with him. It’s the only evidence of a different life, and if I don’t look at them every once in a while, I forget, too. My mom and I got a milkshake on the way home, and then we found a free vanity on curb and packed it into her hatch. Hopefully we are making money.
While we were traveling, I read a lot of Richard Brautigan; even found a $6.50 Pocket Edition of Willard and Hist Bowling Trophies, which usually only comes in hardback and goes for $45. Then Hawkline Monster, In Watermelon Sugar, and my favorite stories from Revenge of the Lawn. At our event in San Francisco, I read a story called “A Short History of Oregon” I’d written as an homage to my revisiting him. He commit suicide in 1984, in Bolinas where we harvested the garlic. I also finished Gender Trouble yesterday, and in Oakland I read The Old Man and the Sea for the first time. I recently finished The Violent Bear it Away, which completes my reading of Flannery O’Connor’s entire body of work, and it was staggering and merciless, and all her repetition of messiahs and gruesome endings and waxen mothers and retarded children was all for a reason. If she hadn’t died so young, her power might have crushed us, the Americans. We would have eventually known too much. Her face got so small the sicker she became.





