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The immigration demonstrations in LA right now are not the first time the National Guard has been called in to quell a protest.

I'm thinking about the People's Park protests in Berkeley. The National Guard advanced on us with rifles drawn & then the helicopters descended. Was it the National Guard or the helicopters that dropped the tear gas canisters? I can't remember.

I do remember fleeing across campus, pushing the then-toddler Alicia in her stroller, tears & snot streaming down my face. Maybe this is the reason why Alicia grew up to be such a bitch: Exposure to tear gas addled her unmylinated brain!

Still, it's always news when the gub'mint uses military-style force against white people.

And, of course, the People's Park incident happened in 1969. Which is to say a trillion million years ago. I was only 17, or I would have known better than to bring a toddler to a political protest. On account of skipping all those years of school, I actually started at UC Berkeley when I was sixteen.

###

Sadly, I will not be around for the NYC pride parade because it is Lew & Ed's wedding reception weekend, so I will be in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.

I avoided all those Pride demonstrations when they were just about marketing.

But this year, Pride has a political dimension so it has regained its gravitas. I'll go to as many Pride demonstrations as I can stuff into my schedule.



Anyway.

The Pinebush Alien Fair did take place yesterday—rather stupidly because yesterday it poured relentlessly whereas today, the scheduled Rain Day, it's not only dry but pleasantly balmy.

I grabbed an umbrella and drove on up.

The chief joy of the Pinebush Alien Fair is its costumes. But very few people wanted to wear costumes in the rain. I'm sure this dog didn't:



But its mean humans made it dress up anyway.

There were a couple of good window displays:



But mostly, it was just yr typical tacky upstate New York small town craft fair. Disappointing!

###

I went home & spent the rest of the day Remunerating. Because those fuckin' MacArthur Foundation people keep forgetting to send me my genius grant money.

Went for a looooong tromp—five miles!—when it finally cleared up at sunset.

Watched The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. (Excellent if you don't mind low production values.)

Abluted.

Slumbered.

And then at 3 in the morning, awakened with a bolt & decided to try and read myself back to sleep.

Grabbed the first book at hand from the stack on my night table—Tracy Dougherty's remarkable biography of Larry McMurtry.

Which is even more remarkable on second read:

Consciousness: the sense of self, the voice chattering at us in our heads, the apparent awareness of a presence, a spirit, a soul inside us, distinct from our bodies and the electrical firings in our brains. Scientists and philosophers fall all over themselves trying to explain, define, or locate consciousness. It is like searching for darkness with a flashlight...

“I have felt largely posthumous since [my open-heart] operation,” McMurtry said. “My old psyche, or old self, was shattered—now it whirls around me in fragments … The heart-lung machine allows for biologic survival, but my own feeling is that the person, as opposed to the body, dies anyway … For a certain period of time one is technically alive but in another, powerful sense, dead. Then one is jump-started back into life, but the Faustian Bargain has been made: you’re there, but not as yourself. That self, that personality, lies back beyond the time when you were on the pump. That gap, in my case at least, has proven unclosable.”


I have heard that from several other open-heart surgery survivors, too.

And sometimes you can just look at people like Bill Clinton who've had the surgery & know that's what happened to them.

###

Larry McMurtry wrote one perfect novel—The Last Picture Show—and several flawed novels I have deep affection for—Lonesome Dove, Moving On.

And a whole lot of dreck.

It occurs to me that McMurtry's biographer Tracy Dougherty is a much better writer than McMurtry ever was.

What gave McMurtry the edge, I suppose, was that he was actively elegizing a dying mythology (i.e. the American West.)

Humans revere their mythmakers.
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What's been saving my sanity this past couple of months is a strange little radio station out of Jersey City called WFMU.

It's totally non-commercial. Operating expenses are generated through marathons several times a year. The volunter DJs are a motley crew. There's X-Saturday Night Live writer Andy Breckman who upon release from the Lorne Michaels gulag went on to create the TV show Monk and has been doing a weird Andy Kaufman-esque show called 7-Second Delay on FMU for the past quarter century; a classical music program called Why Do We Only Listen to Dead People?; a Latin American show, Secret Canine Agents; Mr. Fine Wine's Downtown Soulville; Strength Through Failure (highlighting the failure of rock, the failure of sound, the failure of noise, the failure of the 21st century); and dozens more.

Mostly I listen to FMU on the drive to the Y.

But honestly? If I were at the top of a cliff and could be assured I'd end up in a world where FMU was the elevator Muzak, I take the plunge in a heartbeat. And if I were a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel, I'd rely upon FMU to decipher the Grand Conspiracy for me.

###

Also still working my way through Larry McMurtry-Land.

Terms of Endearment is such a bad book! But has such a powerful ending.

Next up on the jukebox: All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers. (I must say, however uneven McMurtry's prose is, his titles are always genius.)

###

Mostly this week, I have been sad, sad, sad, sad, sad.

Nothing I can really do about it.

I pull it together when I'm interacting with other people, (and there's a lot of that), but my ground state right now is melancholy.

Human beings suck, you know?

But it's a sunny day for the first time in a week and afternoon temps are supposed to flirt with 70°, and I'm gonna tromp the Highland side of the Walkway, so maybe I'll change my mind.

Moving On

Mar. 29th, 2025 10:01 am
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Got a powerful hankering to reread Moving On last night. I've already reread all 728 pages at least three times but not for the past 20 years or so.

Alas! The epub was only available through Amazon, which, of course, I hate and have vowed a mighty oath never, ever to use.

But what are you going to do when you have an itch that only Amazon can scratch?

Reader, I bought it.

The $8.88 I spent will pay for approximately one-half of a bolt on Bezos's yacht.

Maybe it's the bolt that will break and sink the whole fucking thing.

A girl can dream.

###

Moving On is a deeply flawed novel, which I kinda knew even the first time I read it in the McGill University library stacks so very, very long ago while the golden light poured through dusty windows. (What I didn't know was how profligate I was being in wasting my youth.)

But if you're ever trying to figure out why people who live in Texas—or who once lived in Texas—love Texas, it is the novel to read. Moving On drips Texas.

It doesn't have much of a plot.

It's a more or less aimless chronicle of three years in the life of a highly annoying character named Patsy Carpenter who is Jacy Farrow with an education: Pretty—though McMurtry has a hard time describing her prettiness, which is weird because McMurtry is very good at describing un-pretty characters. Entitled. Rich. Reads a lot—this is how McMurtry tries to make the character endearing; it doesn't work.

Patsy Carpenter has the worst dialogue of any character in any McMurtry novel.

I kept trying to hear the dialogue as I skimmed the quotation marks on the page, but honestly, that's not possible. Nobody talks like that no matter how pretty, entitled, rich, well-read, and pert they are.

Patsy's dialogue, too, is kind of a mystery because McMurtry is known for his realistic dialogue, and indeed, the other Moving On characters—with the exception of the Los Angeles contingent, Joe Percy, who is thrown in to provide deus ex machina—speak very realistically.

What Moving On has going for it, though, is that somehow its characters and the things that happen to them lodge in the same part of your brain as actual people you know and the things that happen to them. It's a very strange and unique literary alchemy that has something to do with the bemused, third-person narrative voice. (If I were writing a Ph.D. thesis on the works of Larry McMurtry, I'd go to greater lengths in my analysis.) Reading Moving On, I kept wondering: What if I were a Larry McMurtry character? What kind of novel would Larry McMurtry write about me?

###

Anyway, I got about a third of the way through the book and so stayed up much later than I ordinarily do. When I finally slept, I dreamed about Marybeth: We had a horrible fight because I had taken her diary—a leather-bound volume with pages and pages of neat, blue-ballpoint script—and done something so bad to it that we stopped speaking. (In real life, Marybeth and I also stopped speaking, but we never had a horrible fight because I never could articulate exactly what she'd done to me—though I felt it, I felt it.)

Today I must Remunerate as soon as I get back from the transfer station, which I must go to because Icky is too cheap to pay for garbage service.

Also, fresh-faced little Brian finally passed along the right password to the Adrienne-4-Ulster-County SquareSpace account, so I'm gonna try and finish that website by the end of the weekend.
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Another dream about Rick Raffanti & the House of Usher! (Should I start skimming obituaries?) Only this time, the House of Usher was a very grand place, filled with crystal chandeliers, stained glass, & gleaming mahogany. Rick stood on a balcony high above me, calling, "DiLuch!" (My nickname in the volleyball days.)

We embraced.

He told me he had recently remarried. Connubial bliss was the term he used.

Do you own this house now? I asked. It's the house I grew up in—Well. Kinda, sorta.

But, no. He didn't.

###

Meanwhile, yesterday, I toddled off to the gym & repurpled my hair—two activities designed to cheer me up because Black Chicken was making me very sad: She would not eat the corn tortilla bits I lavished upon her, & she would not leave the henhouse. She is clearly depressed—but I can't do anything about that because she is not my chicken!

It seems like a waste of time to expend emotion on a situation you can't do anything about. Yet I couldn't help grieving for her. The plight of animals often moves me more than the plight of humans. I mean, fuck humans. I suppose that makes me cloyingly sentimental.

###

When I got back from the gym, I played around with SquareSpace. Watched tutorials—which always moved too slowly, so I'd give up & dash downhill through the software itself, trying to find the elusive backend.

After a while, I developed a begrudging respect for SquareSpace. Saw how I might actually come to like the software if I got better at configuring it.

SquareSpace is design-oriented rather than content-oriented, and that means they have many fail-safes in place to prevent you from undermining the layout. I can see the utility in this: Professional websites must have a certain look. But it also makes it exceedingly difficult to tweak the content.

Anyway, I came up with a design & basic verbiage for the Adrienne homepage, & sent a screenshot to fresh-faced little Brian, the campaign manager.

Fresh-faced little Brian shot an enthusiastic email back: He loves the direction I'm going in!

I actually think that's true.

I'm pretty confident I can finish the website this weekend.

Which will be a relief since I didn't actually volunteer to do Adrienne's website. In the runaround, I was somehow volunteered.


###

I'm on my second reread of Tracy Daugherty's Larry McMurtry bio. It continues to delight.

One of the most interesting things about McMurtry was that while he was an obsessive literati, he was not necessarily obsessive about writing. In his youth, he thought he was obsessive about writing and produced one perfect novel: The Last Picture Show.

Later on in his life, he carved out the novel most people think of as his masterpiece—Lonesome Dove—from a mess of half-finished manuscripts & screenplays that had accumulated on a series of desks over a span of 20 years or so.

But his true passion was not for writing books; it was for collecting books. McMurtry was a kinda modern-day priest of the Library of Alexandria! And the most interesting parts of his biography are his rare book scouting adventures.

###

About Lonesome Dove itself, McMurtry was ambivalent. He likened it to Gone With the Wind—a very apt analogy, I think.

Now, I happen to think Gone With the Wind is a great American novel!

But I didn't attend a graduate program in English literature at a major university, and McMurtry did. I am a post-modernist: I see absolutely no difference between so-called high culture and so-called low culture. Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—they're absolutely equivalent to me.

Larry McMurtry was not a post-modernist.

###

Lots of other fascinating things in this book—as, for example: McMurtry had a long relationship with Ken Kesey that started when they were in the Stegner Fellowship together.

About Kesey, McMurtry wrote, "He made it plain that he meant to be the stud-duck... There were about a dozen of us assembled when Ken made his entrance, and he was hardly the only competitive person in the room. Like stoats in the henhouse, we were poised to rend and tear... we were all young males. Ken plopped himself down at the right hand of Mr. Cowley and got set to read what turned out to be the first chapters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This was stud-duckery indeed."

Now, I happen to think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a steaming pile of shit.

Sometimes a Great Notion is better—but, you know. A Look Homeward Angel imitator.

Back in the Jurassic when I was young, Kesey was a mega-cultural icon. Literary excellence was one of many laurels heaped upon his brow.

I do understand how One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest got nominated to its place in the American literary canon: The literary pantheon back then was male-dominated, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the Male Castration Fantasy made print.

But I simply loathe it.

Anyway, Kesey's mental decline is episodically chronicled throughout the McMurtry biography, & I, for one, enjoyed reading about it.
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Strange, strange, strange, strange dreams....

In the middle of the night, I dreamed I'd been just horrible. Acting out in the most destructive, self-centered ways. Till finally the people around me grew tired of it and locked me in a room.

I managed to escape & went to find BB. Railing at the injustice of it all. BB received me cooly. Yes, I could stay in his apartment, if I promised not to misbehave. But no, I could not accompany him to dinner with his three lady companions. I was simply too much of a liability.

Woke up to pee. Staggered back to bed.

And dreamed some more.

I was playing video games on my computer. Three, maybe four video games simultaneously. When I went to check the time widget—I had to be some place—I couldn't find it; in its place were these strange, cryptic hieroglypics. And then I noticed the computer was very hot, so hot that it had, in fact, melted, turned into this great mass of grey rubber. Oddly enough, I wasn't that panicked: I had backed it up not so terribly long ago & of course, my entire diary is online. I would just have to eat the $1,500 or so a new computer would cost.

I ran off to find Ben in the apartment we shared—a variant of one of my first Oakland apartments, the one over the Indendent Driving School that occasionally turned into a dirty video store, only located on upper Flatbush Avenue where my dreams frequently misplace it.

Do you want to break up? I demanded.

No, he didn't want to break up—but he, too, was off to dinner with three ladies and distracted.

###

I think dreams are meaningful, so I'm glad to be remembering mine again.

###

The Larry McMurtry bio continues to be an utter delight. Every paragraph so rich, studded with brilliant language & reflections. McMurtry is what I would describe as a flat writer. Not uninflected! But short on the figurative. Daugherty plugs McMurtry into a mythic landscape I want to wander through.

###

In other news...

On Sunday, Belinda took me out to lunch at a Himalayan restaurant in Beacon as a thank-you for doing her taxes. We had momos:





Food was delicious & Belinda told me stories about her dysfunctional relations.

All relation are dysfunctional, right? And everybody is a relation! So how is it that the people who tell the stories are always the sane ones?

###

Then yesterday, I TaxBwana-ed. Three of my clients were recent emigres from Haiti, and only one spoke English, so I struggled by in my execrable French.

You don't have problems, I thought midway through the first return. These people have problems.

It was a grey & rainy day, which maybe was why I was filled with loathing for my fellow TaxBwanas. One of my rules for getting by is that in any situation I find myself in, I always look around for someone I can conscript into the role of Situational Best Friend—it just makes being in a group a whole lot easier. But there is no one in this group I can conscript: I don't like them, but more importantly, they don't like me. They don't dislike me; they just don't like me.

I suppose it's kinda like the deal with DNA: You share 95% of your DNA with snapping turtles, and yet when you look at snapping turtles, you think: We don't have very much in common!

The other TaxBwanas breathe oxygen. So do I! The other TaxBwanas have opposeable thumbs. Me too! The other TaxBwanas have larynxes they use to make sounds that are equivalent to the sounds I make & that I can interpret.

And yet, when I look at them, I think, We have nothing in common.

And that makes me feel lonely. And sullen.
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Woke up in the middle of the night from a vivid dream:

I was on a bus, but then the bus took a turn off the familiar route, & I realized it was the wrong bus.

So then I had to think about which stop I should get off to have the best shot at getting where I wanted to go. Rick Raffanti was on the bus, too—a very old & withered Rick Raffanti. And I thought, Yes, of course: He has MS (in real life, he doesn't.) And I also thought, Those preternaturally young-looking men—the ones who look 18 when they're 35—always age badly when they finally start to go.

I decided to get off the bus where Rick got off the bus. And I kissed him on his cheek—which was papery and... moist at the same time.

There were two ways out of the street I found myself on.

The first was an alley that ran along the back of a clutch of little stores. Except the alley deadended against this massive cliff with very eroded stairs. I watched two young vigerous girls struggle up those stairs & thought, You (meaning me) will never make it up.

The second way was through one of the stores. And it was the most amazing store filled with all sorts of rare & beautiful treasures presided over by a kindly Black man.

Sadly, in waking up & then willing myself back asleep, I have forgotten what all those rare & beautiful treasures are.

###

Anyway, I neither Remunerated nor web-designed yesterday because early in the morning, I stumbled across Tracy Daugherty's absolutely terrific biography of Larry McMurtry & began reading that instead.

Tracy Daugherty is also an excellent fiction writer & the Larry McMurtry bio reads like fiction, not necessarily because the events of Larry McMurtry's life are so picaresque—though in many ways, they are—but because Daugherty sows so much backstory into them that the book is as much a biography of Texas as it is of McMurtry. Thus, the opening chapters about McMurtry's family & his boyhood—first on Idiot Ridge (!) and then in Archer City—read like Jim Harrison's most elegaic myth-making about the Old West:

This was the new Cold War Texas, redrawing the map of the state McMurtry had known, on which he could pinpoint, in this same area near Amarillo, the spot where, in the late nineteenth century, the sad last running of the buffalo occurred in the Panhandle. It was a single buffalo, begged from Old Man Goodnight on his famous ranch by a small, ragged band of Comanches who'd slipped away from their reservation in the Indian Territory. They showed up one day riding old, emaciated horses, wearing tattered feathers and scraps of white man's clothing. They asked Goodnight to release an animal to them. He complied out of compassion, giving them a ropey young bull, assuming they'd take it back to the reservation and eat it. Instead they let it loose and chased it across the plains—to the extent that their horses could run—the way their ancestors had once pursued millions of animals here. They killed the bull with lances and arrows, just to taste the old ritual, then sat silently on their exhausted mounts staring at the dead animal, reckoning with their longing and the staggering absence of what once was. A chilly wind from the north ruffled the rags of their clothing.

That is a perfect paragraph—from the way geography balances on the conditional, comma-separated clauses of its opening sentence, as elegantly as a gymnast on the bars, to the way a myth condenses from the mists of its imagery and the unsentimental dismissal of that last understated sentence.

The hackles on the back of my neck stood up when I read it.

###

If I close my eyes very tightly, I can still summon up the smell of the McGill University stacks where I first discovered Larry McMurtry. (What was I doing at McGill University? Don't ask.)

The book was Moving On, generally considered one of McMurtry's less successful novels. But I liked it.

Moving On was the saga of the lachrymose Patsy Carpenter, filled with aimless graduate student angst and rodeos and Houston heat, so I don't know why I liked it. I didn't like any of those things. I suppose I liked it because it was immersive, and I like to be immersed.

I was in the library stacks at McGill University hiding out from a complicated love life and also from a physics class that I was flunking. I didn't much care that I was flunking because it was clear my complicated love life would shortly take me very far away from Montreal, back to California where I would never, ever mention my McGill transcripts.

That was also the winter I discovered Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God! As a child, I had been obsessed with Greek, Egyptian, & Roman mythology, used to organize complicated role-playing games with my fellow students at Hunter High School, then an all-girls school: You be Zeus, I'll be Hermes. (Trickster gods have always appealed to me.)

Campbell offered validation for the syncretism I saw everywhere. Still see everywhere, beneath the forces of social conformity constantly rallying to restrict human imaginations.

###

McMurtry himself turns out to be a fairly unpleasant character. Not only looks like my old Monterey neighbor Bill Sullivan but seems to have that same obsessive personality, hiding out behind a cloak of gee-whiz affability.

One thing that really surprised me: I had always assumed McMurtry was kind of a laidback writer, as casual as his casual prose. In fact, he was not: He was deeply steeped in the canonical literature of the 19th century. Like the structure of The Last Picture Show—my favorite McMurtry novel—was actually patterned after the structure of Middlemarch.

Who knew?

And, of course, McMurtry is a very uneven writer. Not just from book to book, but also within the same book. Like The Evening Star is mostly drek but right at the end of the novel comes one of the most moving scenes I have ever read.

I got about 200 pages into the biography, and I can tell I am reading it too fast.

So today, I will try to do some Useful Work before scampering off to socialize.

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