I just saw the most disgusting thing on CNN. Wolf Blitzer says to his guest, “May I pick your brain for a moment?” And the guest says, “Sure.”
I’m sorry — I just got up and turned off the TV. Wolf Blitzer is a creepy creepy guy.
“I’m makin’ pruno!”
is what this fellow shouts
at me and my chat-mate.
We’re sitting on a bench,
enjoying the East Bay sun.
He comes up to us
holding a black garbage bag.
He puts the bag down
next to us on the bench.
He was so happy.
There was something
moving in that bag.
He disappears into the coffee shop.
Then pops back out like a
hillbilly leprechaun.
Grabbing the bag he crows:
“I’m making pruno!”
He shakes our hands and
cackles down the street.
I’m telling you,
it almost made me want to
make some pruno.
******
note: I was delighted to find out later that pruno (pronounced “prune-o”) is a kind of homemade booze commonly associated with prison living.
A thing that makes me mad
They named a drug
designed to help men urinate
“Flomax.”
(They really did.
They called it “Flomax.”
Can you
imagine the joy in
that room? “Flomax!”
“Oh my God — we’re going to
call it ‘Flomax!’ Somebody, do a trademark
search!”
“You’re incredible,
Dave.” “No Sally, you are
the incredible one. You came up with
the ‘max’ part!”)
It makes me so angry. They
named it “Flomax”
when they
could have
called it
“Niagra.”
An Interview with Ianthe Brautigan
Photo credit: Nancy Bellen.
Ianthe Brautigan was born in San Francisco at the tail-end of the Beat Era. Her book You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), recently optioned for a movie, chronicles her life growing up as the daughter of poet and novelist Richard Brautigan and grappling with his suicide in 1984. Her work has appeared in Cartwheels on The Faultline, The Poet’s Eye: A Tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Antioch Review, and will appear in Confrontations. She’s taught at Sonoma State University and lives in Northern California, where she’s currently working on a novel.
Ianthe Brautigan on the Web: Red Room, You Can’t Catch Death
Cecil Vortex: What sort of writing had you done before you started working on your memoir?
Ianthe Brautigan: I was actually a Theater Arts major, and I was going to the Junior College, and I fell in love with my English 1A class and ended up writing nonfiction essays. At that point I realized that I was going to be torn between the two worlds, and I decided to choose writing. I still went to New York and worked for Roundabout Theatre and was in the theater world and toyed with that for a little while. And then I came back to Sonoma County and really started writing in earnest and did all the things that writers do — I took creative writing courses and did workshops and worked with Robin Beeman, who’s in the county and is absolutely phenomenal. I got my undergrad in English Literature at Sonoma State, which was the best thing I could have ever done…. You need to read a lot of stuff and get an idea of what’s going on. Then I got my MFA at San Francisco State University, and I don’t recommend that for everybody.
Going back to my memoir, God, I had started that in the form of poetry right after my dad died. And I’m a terrible poet. But I wrote a prose poem and Don Emblen read it and he said, “You’re onto it — this is what you should be doing; stay away from that poetry stuff.” [laughter] And I began writing about my dad. And as you might imagine, it took a long time.
CV: Was the transition from short stories to poetry to memoir writing difficult, or did you feel like you were finding your natural genre?
IB: I think it’s important to try all sorts of stuff. I love writing short stories. I’ve written a novella. I think that in memoir and nonfiction writing, you’re using the craft of fiction writing. In fact, a lot of what makes, I think, a good memoir is that it has a lot of fictive elements, except it’s based on truth.
CV: Can you elaborate on that — how fiction-writing techniques can play a role in memoir writing?
Nordic Sub Shop
He sounds surprised
at everything he says he’s
constantly surprising himself.
“Is there food somewhere around here?” is what I asked.
“There is?!” he self-flabbergasted. “Nordic Sub Shop — right next door?! Good food?!?”
Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Prediction: Pain
If the ceasefire has fully unraveled by the Fall, let me be among the first to predict that the GOP will argue that “the insurgents want [insert Democrat nominee here] to win — they’re insurging to control our election. That’s how much they fear John McCain. And yes, a vote against John McCain is a vote for the terrorists.”
Dyngus among us
I’m so happy. The world is purring today. And I’ll tell you why: Dyngus Day.
Me and my metaphor
I have this recurring dream in which the brakes in my car give out. The shudder these dreams share is that moment when I’m pressing down but the car careens.
I’ve had this dream in various forms for probably twenty years or so. Not too often — every couple of months I’d guess. I had a version of it last night as one of my last late-dawn eye-flitters. The thing that struck me, as I yawned myself into the day, is that we’re hardwired for metaphor.
Our brains could operate in a much more literal fashion. We could fall asleep and a fast-talking phantom self could give us an eight-hour lecture on exactly what it is we hope for and what we fear. But instead we close our eyes and we generate these little poems for ourselves.
In my case, my brain seems to have found a metaphor it likes and it’s sticking with it. I suspect that the brakes meant one thing when I was twenty and they mean something a little different now that I’m two times twenty. But the image persists. Or maybe it’s been the same mortality song all along: “hey, wait — stop time!” And wouldn’t that be nice?
That sensation of soft brakes is so real, I find myself wondering if I ever owned a car that had this problem. Was there something wrong with the brakes on that strawberry-scented Chevy Impala I drove as a teenager? Or the gold Accord that carried me from New Jersey to the West Coast?
I don’t think so. These aren’t real brakes, after all. Just a poem I tell myself at night.
Harold, asleep at the wheel
This morning while dropping my kids off at school, it occurred to me that California is now my home. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else.
I spent seventeen years on the east coast, interrupted by five years as a kid in Holland. Meanwhile, my California experience will hit nineteen years this coming July.
Oh, I’ve been keeping one eye out for the “when will I have spent half my life out here?” milestone — it’s waving at me from about 3 years down the road. But this subtler calendar-flip slipped past me in the night.
If I was super-dooper rich, I think I would hire someone to scan my personal numerology, looking for just this sort of Highly Significant Moment.
“Mr. Vortex, did you know that your heart has now beaten more times than a bumblebee’s wings will flap, using standard bumblebee life expectancy charts and such?”
“Thank you, Harold.”
“Also, if all the work emails you’ve sent were compiled into one document, it would be eight times longer than Finnegan’s Wake.”
“That’s fascinating, Harold. Here’s a gold doubloon with my face on it.”
it’s me
I saw you watching when I got up
and I want to reassure you,
it’s not you, it’s me. It’s not the way
you were snapping your fingers. Or how
loudly you were breathing. Sure,
I don’t like your shirt. But
there are lots of shirts
here I don’t like.
Look at that guy, for example.
No, this is about me.
And the choices I’ve made.
The potatoes I had last night, for example.