A Not-So-Odd Job

I have been distracted somewhat from my writing here for the blog, and have had most of my normal routines vigorously tossed out the window, by my having taken on this new job that I mentioned here the other day.

I was interested in this job somewhat but never quite pursued it -- I was comfortable in my already complicated life, after all .... yet I ended up with the work, all the same.

A pattern exists in my life which is quite clear, now -- that I tend to step up to help resolve a less-than-desirable situation, if that less-than-desirable situation happens to be afflicting a co-op. This first manifested in me becoming manager of the struggling Turtle Creek Food Co-op, in Beloit, in the late 1980s. The co-op's struggle continued, while I earned almost nothing for my labors; yet the co-op did last another four years. I was by no means ideal for the job except in the sense that I was somewhat willing to taken a vow of poverty in support of what seemed a community Good, having already quite decisively taken and frequently renewed a vow of poverty in order to pursue the creative life, throughout the earlier decade.

Having stepped up to take on that task was perhaps a mistake. The task was there to do, though. Likely I failed at it it to no greater degree than I excelled at it.

In the second instance, however, I am fairly sure my failure was complete -- for at a point of leadership crisis at the Stevens Point Food Co-op I become involved in trying to reshape that leadership, and ended up in a position that was wrong for me. I had sworn I would never end up a part of a day-to-day cooperative management team. I felt some interest in managing store matters in a logical manner, but also felt an equal disinterest in holding endless meetings ... so I bailed out of the situation pretty promptly, but not prettily.

I suppose I am exactly the kind of dust that coooperative vacuum-claners suck up: for in recent weeks it again has been a co-op that has done just this, with regards to the dust that I am. The differences from earlier situations are several. In this case, I seem to have actually resolved an operational problem, simply by stepping in. (You might think of a dishwasher stepping into a restaurant and suddenly ending a half-year cooking dilemma: it is akin to that.) Despite my early expectations, moreover, this new job has turned into one requiring a fair degree of physical labor.

This has a bit of an odd feel for me, since physical labor has always seemed something to be volunteered, rather than to be paid for. I have certainly taken my share of odd jobs that involved simple physical work -- yet I did always think of those jobs as "odd." The opposite of the odd job is apparently the regular job, which this one seems to be.

(As you may be thinking, it does occur to me that my life might have been easier had I viewed matters otherwise than this, sooner.)

For a third difference, this is a co-op on the producing end of the spectrum, not the consumer end. Many of the myriad forces that pull together and tear apart consumer co-ops seem to go unfelt in producer co-ops.

Cheers ...

Creative Antiquities Dusted Off for Display

Thursday morning I read an e-mail from Fairwood Press's Patrick Swenson. He wondered if I had any thoughts about which of my various Talebones stories should go into the Best of Talebones collection he is editing.

A nice question to ponder.

Later, in the afternoon, I read a penned note from John Thiel, forwarded to me from Beloit. The Magazine of Speculative Poetry still uses the Post Office box I used for many years; and once in a rare aeon it receives mail for me, sent out of the misty pages of the past.

Thiel edited a small-press magazine named Pablo Lennis back in the 1980s -- an affair of wild, every-inch-used mimeography, as I recall it. I sent him a few poems. His note of yesterday reads, "We have your poem 'Dream-mare,' which I published in Pablo Lennis, up on the Net in Surprising Stories, found at http://surprisingstories.dcwi.com."

To receive a note about a poem being published ... handwritten on a tiny slip of paper measuring only 3 by 4-3/4 inches ... takes me back to the 1980s. I was no Lyn Lifshin in those days ... (Lifshin published in every nook and cranny of the small press, and was remarkably good at producing short free verse, employing lines of only a few feet) ... yet all the same I sent out scads of verse of varying qualities. I felt the call to do so; I regarded it as my writerly duty to press my talents to the utmost, and to pursue opportunities in any mimeographed literary extravaganza that came along -- which included quite a lot of miscellaneous science fiction and horror-oriented zines, besides the general litzines. The scene was a lively one, helped along by Len Fulton at Small Press Review and Janet Fox at Scavenger's Newsletter, among others. Some poems I felt great confidence in; others I doubted.

I am unsure about "Dream-mare," right at the moment. My opinion must await my viewing the relevant pixels.

An interesting aspect is that I am being informed of publication after the fact. I am, I should say, glad to be informed at all. Since the prevailing attitude in electronic presses remains a bit free-wheeling, I applaud any instance of editorial courtesy. At least one earlier Internet publication of mine is a poem republished without notification: some litzine editors of a bygone decade had decided to perpetuate -- or to perpetrate -- their publication online. To find my poem republished in an Internet publication without my say-so displeased me to a degree less than, or equal to, the degree it pleased me. As an advocate of small-press effort, I do understand when a certain fluidity plays into matters of print and reprint rights ... or I do understand, at least, when it happens only on a rare Thursday. In the case of these poems, I feel it to be nice (or at least I hope it is nice) that they have a chance to rise out of their printed obscurity -- even if the method employed in their raising is that of submerging them into a second sort of obscurity.

Cheers ...

Phraseology

Martha, who is reading a P.G. Wodehouse novel, found within a single paragraph the phrases "gave me the pip" and "a bit of all right" -- which were two favored phrases of our friend Roxie Alexander (Associate Professor and then full Professor, Beloit College), whom I knew briefly as advisor/teacher and for many years as a good friend. She and I were drinking buddies, after a fashion. (A rather good fashion, I will say.) She was an Anglophile even if of Scottish-Kansan extraction. The fact that she taught English literature -- especially Chaucer -- and the fact that she was an excellent, conscientious teacher, as opposed to merely a dutifully sound one, may have influenced her tendency to gather, adapt and regularly deploy the colorful or idiosyncratic phrases she came across; but I think most of us who knew her well regarded it as a deeper matter than that. It was a vital part of who she was. She had a respect and love for words and usage.

"Gave me the pip" is used in reference to being somewhat sharply irritated; and it is said of a person and not a thing. The phrase, "That's a bit of all right," is used in reference to a meal -- or at least in my memory the phrase made its appearance exclusively in relation to good cooking. I usually heard it from Roxie's lips in relation to Roxie's own cooking, as it happens. She was not wrong about most things but never wrong in her estimation of her Kansas cooking -- and oh, my, her pot roasts with carrots and potatoes cooked alongside ... In any case, both phrases have their places in Martha's and my roster of phrases because of Roxie, not because of P.G. -- although it is far from impossible that P.G.'s usage lurks behind her use of these phrases.

Part of the reason these phrases seem so natural to us, and ring so true in our internal ears, is that Roxie never tried to adopt or appropriate a foreign accent. She was Kansan and was proud to be Kansan; and she kept to her Kansas roots to such an extent that her roots spread their tips to other countries. So her phrase, "Gave me the pip," went something like, "And she did This and That and she GAVE ME the PIP." You never needed to know what a pip was, to know what she meant. (I asked her once what the pip was, in that phrase. I believe we ended up talking about seeds.) Similarly, there was nothing of pseudo-British poise, gentility and dryly self-possessed demeanor in her use of the phrase, "That's a bit of all right," which she usually said as, "WELL-LL, That was a bit of ALL-LL RIGHT." "A bit of all right" may seem like a tentative and not-quite-approving phrase, on the face of it. Roxie could render the most shy and reticent phrase of English hidden-in-closet indecisiveness into an expression of radiantly triumphant fact. She was brilliant in that way.

Anyway, Roxie gave us "the pip" while never giving us the.

Cheers ...