Nora Robertson

Check out Back Fence’s theme this time around—it’s Just Can’t Get Enough: Getting Stuffed and Being Stuffed, and yours truly contributed a story about being addicted to mentally recording moments, sort of an extreme take on remembering important things in life, aka writer’s disease as one friend said to me.   Though I think mostly the moments I notice are a sort of distraction from the depressing real stuff that might going on.  I wouldn’t know.  I’m too busy noticing the curtains.

Adrianne Young’s account of a acutely constipated kitten is also pretty amusing.

I guess it happens from what people tell me, but I’ve personally never seen Powell’s close down the Pearl room for a reading before.  Slavoj Zizek—philosopher and cultural icon—read September 9th to an audience eight deep into the aisles.

I came half an hour early and was lucky to get a spot on which to lean on the front of a bookshelf.

He was here to promote his new book Violence, but as he said he would early on, he talked about far more than the book, bringing in chicken jokes, dinner party conversations, late-Platonic notions of discourse and the inadequacies of hard-core porn to further his cultural critique of our particular historical moment.

What jumped out to me was this persistence of ideology.  Zizek proposed that we are engrained with certain attitudes that seem ostensibly moral and high-minded, like all good doctrines should, but actually interfere with practical political solutions to the problem in question.  The inability to discuss racism was one example he gave, how PC attitudes make it very difficult to address the latent racism which remains dysconsciously in our society.

I can only say that in my life as a schoolteacher, I have seen that to be true.  No teacher would ever say they are prejudiced, right?  Yet a lot of the more progressive critique of the education system, such as Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, point up subtle inequities which I have seen in real life, like a principal saying out loud that he had lower expectations for ESL students going to college, or an English teacher calling a counselor in front of an entire Honors English class to question a student’s placement because she had a strong accent.

And then there’s the larger systematic problems, such as why students of color are disproportionately represented in special education programs and underrepresented in honors programs, which has not only to do with the school system but with larger social problems that many communities struggle with and which affect a student’s level of literacy background and focus they bring with them to school every day.

These are all problems which could be solved, imo.  The thing is, it would take a brutally honest societal conversation around the legacies of slavery and colonialism and what to do about them going forward.

The last time we saw a conversation like that was in the late 60’s.

I totally ripped off the title of this post from Allison Dubinsky’s email to me, but didn’t think I could do better.  I don’t really know much about this event, other than Allison’s description:

The images have been described as “phantasmagoric,” “otherworldly,” and “eerie.” I guess I’d describe them simply as “extremely cool.”

However, I did check out Jim Kaznjian’s website, and his images are very Dali-esque, imo, and also in black and white by the way, which lends a rather more Escher-like quality to them.

I’m also curious to check out Pushdot Studios, now located right off 11th and SE Division—they focus on digital/computer-based art primarily, which sounds intriguing.

This is a manuscript I ran across tonight while digging through old papers from when I was maybe eighteen, the kind of thing you do when you’re packing and don’t want to take anything unused or unnecessary with you into your new life. I liked some of this though. I took a few pics to go with.

The man is dark-haired and round-faced with a square jaw, but I’m not sure. It’s always the same. Nameless, at least to me, with dark lids looking into me, stroking tenderly and lightly my hair. Sitting down below the house stilts, beside the river gully, we’re talking wild, but none of it remains to remember. Only his long eyelids and brown eyes, Russian brown it seemed to me now, eyes full of soft black like broken pencil lead. I’m scared now to think about it, but I don’t think I was scared at the time. This was my mother’s house, remember. I lived there, in those wood-paneled rooms.

One time I sat with a guy in the cab of his truck and he offered to let me steer if I wanted to but I should probably sit in his lap so as to make it easier, but I refused seeing as some natural restraint was telling me to be uncomfortable. This is not to say I didn’t stay up at nights thinking about maybe someday when I grew I might still know him and maybe we could marry seeing as I’d only be ten years younger. That wasn’t much, was it? Mama went out once with a guy nineteen years younger than her. He used to read her love poems by Kabir behind closed doors. I used to read the book, but couldn’t figure out what was so great about it.

I liked novels. Mom also used to buy Pepperidge Farm cookies for this guy. At least novels were stories, and stories you could get lost in. She was trying to fatten him because Scott was young and starving-ass skinny, and still lived with his mother, and washed his hair with detergent and was a haunting failure at being a composer. We didn’t really know if he was a good composer or not because it cost a lot of money to hire an orchestra.

And then there was an altercation between my mother and his brother regarding the money he apparently borrowed to pay our electrical bill, and he lied about having beaten his brother for her, and then one of her paintings got mysteriously slashed, and we always suspected one of them had snuck in and done it. He didn’t come around for a long time after that.

And then cold and cold and lonesome cold and gone and reminder now of trips spent chasing something I couldn’t figure out, and that which I long for is so shifting. Frozen-cold, hard pavement-cold, yes fuck-cold, the witch’s marrow that twines you in and makes you want to swallow. Oh, I’m so tired. Start at the beginning. Sometimes I think I spent my childhood in a darkened room. Through a white-sashed window through six separate panes, I can watch a broad, leafless tree. We live on the edge of a gully. A ravine, really. It’s a hundred bodies high, it’s very high, and the river runs through heavy with melted snow. Sometimes, the room opens and I can walk to the far shore of the river over footbridge, under dangling swooping telephone wires.

I don’t bring any food. It isn’t worth it. I know I’m going back. I know I’m deconstructing an essay of temperance, a lifetime obeying what I don’t understand. I think I’ve sensed that man floating in mother’s dreams, floating in mother’s dreams, spinning mid-air above her broad queen bed. I’m not sure whose man he is. I’ve suspected he really should be mine. His hands are dark and dark-haired and strong-nailed and I’ve wondered what it would be like for him to touch me with these fine long fingers.

My bed is thin. My sheets are flannel and itchy with balls from long use. My bedframe is square planes of pine. It was a bunkbed before they separated my sister’s bed from mine. No one else can really fit in this bed. It’s under the molded ceiling I dream of floating up to soft wings wrapping me, bearing me upwards.

I lie though when I say no one else can fit in my bed. I imagine him. I never fill in the face though. My man is tall, dark and faceless. And I will someday perfect me so that I can be perfectly desirable and there will be no question or anguish. I will have perfect clear skin and wear designer clothes and never say anything that’s wrong. I will have a thong bathing suit that fits snug over my toned hips. No one will be able to resist me, including him. I picture myself at night, outside of me, and watch what I look like breathing and wrapped in a twisted white blanket and hopefully looking so compelling and beautiful. I judge my beauties against my imperfections and decide I’ve got twenty years, surely I could master my faults. Surely I could remedy that stricken look in the mirror, and the habit of looking in the mirror all the time itself. Although then I wouldn’t know what people see when they look at me, whether the guy with the truck sees my blue eyes, my mouth which Mama always says is rosebud. You see, I need the mirror so I can check.

The only way I have any hope of knowing I’ve improved is by looking. Mama looks in the mirror this way too. I’ve seen her. Sometimes I try to imagine what I’ll look like with breasts, breasts like hers, with great cherry-gumdrop nipples and pale veined skin, breasts that seem to droop a little like fruit that’s just overripe. Breasts with stretch marks from doing all that hanging there. Real woman breasts. I can’t imagine how these tiny circles will ever grow.

It’s at night I most feel him spinning there. He lays down besides me in the bed. He does not slide between the covers and come to rest lengthwise next to me; he materializes there. He lays there and so gently runs his finger along my ribcage, sliding his nail along thin nighttime cotton, up the hipbone and down, down the slope to my stomach resting on its side, and he cups the tender mass of my female belly. The cold blue light fills the bathroom window. I lower myself into the sink, he slides his hands down my spine, my eyes are white, my teeth are blue and rotting with fungus, moss growing in the crack in our backs with abandon, he raises me, he lowers me, and all the while fingers are seeping round thighs, thigh bones, I can almost feel his vibrational warmth, I can almost make it real. I can feel the nape of his neck bristling, it’s one on one in one.

The mirror is cracked from side to side and beaded with dew, with steam from bathing, there’s a limelight from the mirror and I wait for the mist to clear so I can see myself. And all this time, we never leave my bed. All this time, the covers rest lightly against the frame and cold of winter, and I never leave my bed.

I interviewed Adam Arnold a couple years ago for a fashion column profile for PDX Magazine right before his color blindness collection and was struck by how complex his understanding of color perception was, of visual perception actually, and how informed his clothing was by these insights. Truly, wearable art. So I can’t wait to hear what story he has to tell now, and he’s only one of a great line-up. Must also mention that Jess Hecox, my darling friend and graphic designeress, had quite a bit to do with the poster…ain’t she grand?

A few weeks ago, I performed in Tiffany Lee Brown’s piece, Play Me, as part of JAW, the playwright festival down at Portland Center Stage (seen in pic to left). Part of what I believe she was playing with was this concept of public versus private space, the new ways we negotiate that in the advent of various technologies such as the cell phone and recording devices. Who hasn’t overhead somebody’s colostectomy account or bad date post mortem while on line for a coffee? And while I totally get that that’s bad manners, I’ve been guilty of that myself, which is why it was easy to play cell phone woman. I just loitered around in the lobby re-running recent phone calls I could remember having while folks streamed around me, completely ignoring my end of the conversation, as if I wasn’t having one, as if I was in a phone booth made of space.

Meanwhile, people trickled up to the balcony area, where Tiff was manning a “volunteer” station, wearing a volunteer badge, which was another take on anonymity actually—apparently Tiff was at an event one time, hanging out with some friends who were volunteering, and an event patron assumed she was a volunteer because she was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. If you look the part…interactions with service people do tend to have an impersonal flavor, even though the person in question may be an artist themselves. So anyway, Tiff was giving people instruction sheets for viewing the installation, and some people got the instruction to call my cell number, and I’d have a personal conversation with someone who had no idea who or where I was. The first thing everyone did was peer over the balcony at me. So I’d chat with them about how their Sunday was going, and why they were here at JAW or in Portland. Some folks were really open and willing, and some definitely had their guard up until they got used to the idea. An interesting cross-section of humanity, how open to the unfamiliar they were, to having a little intimate chat with a stranger.

There also was Eric Hausmann playing ambient music from within a bathroom, which was a hit. People kept peering around the doorframe to see where this out of place noise was coming from. His space had a sacred flavor to it, with all the brass Tibetan bowls and ringers, right there in the john next to the urinal and the tp.

There also were all these installations of cd or cassette recordings secreted around the place, which the audience would find via their maps on the instruction sheets. I contributed a couple stories, one about “hold me” based on my memories of Newport when my ex-husband proposed to me, and one about finding a noose in an abandoned factory while looking for wierd stuff to photograph in college. That was a creepy little locale, let me tell you. Some other contributors were Pecos B. and Frayn Masters—everyone did something intimate, but they were all different of course. Frayn’s was naturally hilarious. A cool thing was some were installed very publicly on lit podiums, and some were in hidey places like under a stairway or just in incongruous places like a drinking fountain. What’s public, what’s private, who’s intimate with us, who’s not—where do we draw these lines?

A few weeks ago, I drove out to interview the editor and publisher of Nestucca Spit Press for the New Oregon interview series I’m cooking up for the 2GQ web journal. I’d seen him read at an Oregon Literary Review reading at the Blackbird Wine Shop, which was a fun event, nice pours and a sweet space, and was struck by how he kept saying, “it don’t get any more Oregon than this.” And his knowledge of recent Oregon regionalism, of course.

So I drove out to the coast to find out more. I found him in an open-plan ranch house punctuated by skylights washing out a collection of Oregon-centric prints and memorabilia, planning the next great move in Nestucca Spit Press’ mission to preserve Oregon history. Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology will feature over 60 Oregon writers and 55 primary document excerpts, presenting a contemporary intersection of the literary and political in Oregon culture. Featured writers include Monica Drake, William and Kim Stafford, Matthew Stadler, Cheryl Strayed, to name just a few—and full disclosure, I also have a piece in the book. The title comes from that Ken Kesey quote about Oregon being a citadel of the spirit, a point of view I’d say is both captured and skewered by the book.

Matt was inspired by a small pamphlet published for Oregon’s centennial that had been put together by local contest, which incidentally featured a certain first place winner named William Stafford, but I think in my somewhat biased opinion that this version of a memorial anthology is going to live up to its title. It’s a true inventory of this moment in our history. It’s gargantuan, it’s full of strong voices addressing crucial controversial issues affecting Oregon’s future, and it’s “no valentine”, as Matt said to me. Like a lot of Matt’s endeavors, it’s a bit of an outsider perspective: radically mixing the personal essay and original source material, not shying away from controversy, yet relentlessly pro-Oregon all the way through.

Check out the cool historical photograph, which is of Tom McCall signing the bicycle bill. He’s also known of course for being a preserver of local beaches and an advocate of the bottle bill. McCall helped to make Vortex happen, the country’s only state-sponsered outdoor rock festival, subject of Nestucca Spit Press’s first big book and a total 60’s hippie affair. Matt had tons of cool stuff actually. I only wish I’d photographed the viewmaster reels of Oregon’s World Fair, but they probably wouldn’t have come across on film too well anyway.

My friend Todd Cobb, who just moved to New York leaving me without our rambly writing gabfests, was surprised I’d never read On Writing by Stephen King. I have to admit to having some anti-genre fiction prejudice (aside from my narrow but intense interest in mystery/noir), despite the fact that I know several people who publish/webdesign/write pretty cool sci-fi:—the silliness of taste, that we like one thing and not the other, what can I say? So, have actually never read any Stephen King before this book, shockingly, though I may have to remedy that.

The cool thing about this writing book is it’s mostly not a writing book in the typical sense. It’s not like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, which begins by talking about aesthetic principles and the impossibility of aesthetic principles, that they “prove relative under pressure.” Which is no doubt true, that there are Things to Think About When Writing Fiction and Things To Watch Out For, that we’ll kill our intuition however if we get too rigid about following aesthetic absolutes which are so abstract as to be useless in practice. Of course, Gardner’s entire discussion is in itself pretty abstract—not to say that it isn’t insightful, but as Gardner himself said, that kind of abstraction is not always useful if what you want to do is simply tell a good story.

I am aware, mind you, that this post itself is somewhat abstract.

Which is where King’s book really shines, because it just takes us along for the ride with him in a very practical, humble manner. I wonder if this is in part because he writes genre fiction; he does say in the first section of the book—a short memoir of his life as a writer—that his HS principal found a copy of a self-published book (a proto-zine?) and asked him why he wrote this “junk” when he was so talented. Perhaps writing fiction that is meant for a general audience helps a person avoid some of this abstraction about technique?

Literary fiction tends to use a lot of fancy pants technique. At a Tin House lecture on defamiliarization by Anthony Doerr this last Wednesday, he talked about Victor Shlovsky’s theory about avoiding received language. Shlovsky encourages us to make “objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception” in order to keep described objects (people, things, events, what have you) from the automatization of perception. This happens to be a pet theory of mine, something I first heard about in an undergrad lit theory class and was corrupted by, that to find a more physical way of describing things makes the reader experience them more directly. It also relates pretty directly to Julia Kristeva’s semiotic theory, her idea that a way to subvert the abstraction of the symbolic aspect of language—the signified—is to work more on the level of the signifier, or the rhythm and melody of the words themselves. In a word, the language. Gertrude Stein can be read as working primarily on this level, as can James Joyce. I also think you can do this through figurative language. Kate Braverman is a great example of this. The problem, of course, is that there’s a limited audience for this kind of thing.

Doerr ended his lecture by saying that there’s a balance there that you have to make a choice about as a writer, how accessible you want to be, which I think is a way of saying that using less received language makes the language fresh, but you also have to consider how much you want the story to tick along. Sometimes you kill some darlings.

This also seems to be King’s opinion—tools basic to a writer are character and situation. And not plot, actually. He believes the spontaneity of creativity is incompatible with careful plotting. For him, the situation comes first, and then the characters. Like many novelists report, characters often take off in unexpected directions once he starts writing. “For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing…if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety.”

He also, however, says that vocabulary is the most commonly used tool of a writer. “The word is only a representation of the meaning; at best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.” Given that, use the most fitting word you can find. Wow, overtones of Shlovsky here? So I think we come back to the relativity of principles under pressure—sometimes you gotta stick to the story, and sometimes you gotta revel in language. Thank god. I do love to revel in language. And there’s only so many darlings I can bear to kill.

Ok, Back Fence PDX is really about the stories, but unfortunately, my camera was full early in the evening. I will say the storytellers rocked, though I only got to see the second half since I was part of the crew modeling swimwear at intermission. Will definitely come to the next one as a paying customer, which I believe will be next August, theme to be true colors, including a former gang member and one of those ladies who does your colors.

Check out the gaggle of beauties I got to strut around with last night at the premier of Back Fence, theme being summer love, pool time, sweaty stickiness, that kind of thing. For a more complete account of the evening, check out Matt Davis’ blog entry—I wonder if he was there because Allison Hallett was a storyteller and they both write for the Mercury? I don’t know, but was sorry I had to miss her story because we were all getting ready together the first half of the show. Which experience reminded me of getting ready for the prom or a wedding or any other girl-centric nail salon sort of environment, all trading make-up tips and bits of experience about life and love in no particular order. You might say we had our own storytelling series while putting in hot rollers.

On the porch of our “green room” house, the bevy surrounds Pamela Levenson of Popina Swimwear. At Tour de Crepes, Jessica Hecox and I make ze small talk. Bottom, primp time. Jess is applying gloss very gracefully I must say, while Kathryn, aka The Recovering Straight Girl blogger, gets some hair time with Sadie Byington of Eclipse the Salon.

I woke up this morning with all these images in my head.

Long strands of seeds dangling from the center of giant palmate leaf structures. I’m alone and this is who I am alone. Waist deep in weeds. The mud is sucking at my toes. This could be the Nile. This could be Sumeria, and my husband’s waiting for me to return with a basket woven of rush so he can go fishing. We have nothing in the house, not a grain. Something has happened in the family, a disaster. Maybe our child has died, and we have to pay the sorcerer and it’s sucking us dry. But for right now, it’s just me, a slim brown arrow, a succession of triangles, belly-hip, shoulder-belly, naked and caressed by the tender nips of the not-yet-caught fishes. The not-dead fishes, still alive, still alive! Maybe this is where one of those stories about a magic fish granting all our secret grandiose desires would come in.

I remember standing in the Sacramento river with my mother when I was about ten. We’d been to visit a guy friend of hers. Oh boy, here we go again, was my main thought at the time. (Single mom, dating, not favorite topic of child.) But he turned out to have a very cool stained glass making studio and allowed me and my sister to play around wrapping the edges of colored shards in copper tape, just so happening to asorb us completely for nearly an hour while they disappeared somewhere.

In the river, we were naked, the warm mud sucking at our toes, cat-tails hanging ponderously around us and I didn’t even remember to be afraid. My sister was, I think. She refused to go in and sat continuing to wrap glass on the bank. My mother’s breasts floated slightly. The California sun masqueraded as tropical, sub-tropical, perhaps even the sun of a delta. A fertile crescent, as I’d just been learning in school. Even at that age, deltas reminded me of that other delta. I wondered what it’d be like when I had breasts, if they would bounce around in the water like that. The mud seemed as fertile as anything out of time and I was not afraid of whatever might be crawling around down there. I was not not afraid either though.

The man lasted a couple visits more. I think we broke something valuable and that was that.