Assignment 7: Story

-the short story about the failed dinner attempt, lots of story but really fun to draw/paint

-The writers room crypt dream, but just about descending the stares and being COMPLETELY confused and then just getting in the water for a while.

-My experience with the Best Film Of Our Time/10th anniversary, LOTS of good ones here. Focuses on the Claremont experience and what happened afterwards...like almost no movie is actually shown, but just Movie's Disease.

-Being escorted to the Village from Vista with my sister's "cool friends"

-getting settled in the new theatre downtown that still felt like it was 100 years old somehow

-having multiple types of Thirst afterwards

-The crushing question on Thanksgiving day

-being SO (read: more) cautious around pale white people

-Bound book, small comic that's text heavy (holding something in my hand on cover)

Assignment 6: I Remember Bits

1. I remember the night I decided I would call myself a poet. I had been invited to a dinner party of literati, and I knew I would inevitably be asked what I did. I usually said I was a teacher; I was twenty-seven years old and had been writing poems since I was nine. I made up my mind that if anyone asked, I would say I was a poet; I left my apartment with resolve, a sense of mission, and security. And someone asked. Alain, a charismatic French poet wearing a blue velvet jacket and a long white scarf, asked me what I did; I took a deep breath and said I was a poet; his face distorted into a human field of disgust: “A poet!” he cried. “If you call yourself a poet then you cannot possibly be one; poets live in shadows and never admit and do not discuss, and besides, a real poet knows that all the poems in the world do not a poet make. I would no more call myself a poet than call myself a man—it is the height of arrogance, as any dog knows.” Dear me! I left the party in tears—hard cold tears of confusion and humiliation. It seemed my final hour.

2)I remember the day I stood in front of a great, famous sculpture by a great, famous sculptor and didn’t like it. Such a moment is a landmark in the life of any young artist. It begins in confusion and guilt and self-doubt and ends in a triumphant breakthrough: I see the world and I see that I am free before it, I am not at the mercy of historical opinion and what I want to turn away from, I turn away from, what I want to approach, I approach. Twenty-five years later I read an essay by John Berger on Rodin and in it Berger was able to articulate all that I felt on that afternoon, standing in front of a great Rodin. But by then I was old and vain and the pride of being vindicated was, I admit, just as exciting as Berger’s intellectual condemnation of Rodin’s desire toward dominance.

3)I remember when I graduated from college, we were asked to submit exactly how we wanted our names to appear on our diplomas, and I spelled my middle name (which is Lorraine) Low Rain, because the day before I had been reading W.S. Merwin’s new book and in it was some kind of brief Japanese thing along the lines of “Low Rain, Roof Fell.”

I remember when my parents saw my diploma, they were horrified and kept asking me how I could have done such a thing, after they paid for my education and all.

I remember finding the diploma among my mother’s things after she died, and throwing it away.

I remember I never did like to save things much.

I remember saving everything.

4. I remember (later) thinking that it was actually hilarious that I used to read poetry to cows, that they were an integral part of my most serious moment.