Odd Jobs (I lost count)

I was a stay at home Dad eight years ago. One the last things I did was get up at 3:00 am on Thursdays and drive down to San Pedro. Recycler had routes for delivery and restocking of their numerous classified ad magazines to grocery stores, liquor stores and gas stations. I'd pick up a pick-up size load of these things and then drive like a bat out of hell to deliver them to all the places on the route you were given. I soon discovered that some of the places were 24 hour places and some didn't unlock their doors until 10:00 am. So the first couple of times, I finished around two in the afternoon. (Oh, and you used you own car and had to pay for your own gas.) The organized soul that I am, I came up with complete route map based on the the opening times and timed my stops so I didn't have to back track or wait. You also had to collect the old issues and settle up with the owner or cashier. Then you had to return to the main depot, turn in your money and dump all of the old issues. I was soon finishing up by 11:30 in the morning. It's hard work if you want to do it fast. I had to be at the kids' school to pick them up at three. I was making about $120.00 for the eight hour work. Got to know all the liquor store folks in my little territory, interesting bunch. It is a good way to keep in shape.

More Rejection

I got one from William Morris UK, that was a form signed by Mail Clerk #7

Years and years ago, I got one from a poetry journal, written on my poem, saying "Not bad, have you read Frost, Pound, Keats, Shelly, Bryon, Stevens..." and on with about fifteen names.

Before I self-published "It Knows You By No Other Name" I sent out a hundred and ten query letters to agents all over the country. They were all personalized and individually signed so it wouldn't look like I was doing a mass submission. I got about 20 form letters back, 89 agencies didn't respond at all and one letter from a guy that said he really liked my letter, but wasn't taking new clients.

I had an agent in NYC for "Come To The Edge Of Them" and when I called to check in with after about six months, he told me that the publishers he had contacted didn't know what to do with my book. I asked if he was still representing me, he said sure, but that was the last time I ever heard from him. He sounded old, so maybe he died.

Copper Canyon Press put a post it on the front of my poetry, saying "I can't publish this."

My screenplay is still on Angelica Huston's nightstand, fifteen years later.

In New Orleans, I used to tape them up on the wall above the kitchen table where I wrote. Then, I started to cut out comic strips on writing and taping those up instead (mostly Snoopy as he was typing away on top of his dog house) and then started replacing those with postcards my friends would send me from far away places. Now I write in front of a window, been doing that for twenty years now.

I played my banjo last night after writing in front of my window. He's a happy fellow even when I sing sad.

Martha Doesn't Get The Last Word

Natalie, You may find that you will get a lot of reactions like this. I would suggest that you leave out the word "promising' in your responses. Please remember that the relationships with the writers will pretty much conform to the allegory of the fox and the hound. The writer, no matter how bad or how good, is running for his or her life. You are running for your dinner. And don't offer suggestions. I never respond to rejections if they are done in a professional manner. Please don't provide copies of your notes: you had already decided you didn't want the book, your associate decided to reject on the basis 'that it might be boring' All this just confirms my final impression of you and your agency. Sorry, you don't get the last word. Dan All of this is sad, don't you think. I feel bad now.

Martha Has To Have The Last Word

Dan,

Why in the world would I respond if I hadn't read it? In fact, two people
had read it; I'll attach the cover with my notes. I'm going to end this
here, Dan; I'm sorry you felt the need to respond this way.

Natalie Fischer



Gosh, I think I hurt her feelings?  She attached proof that she read it:

Martha Stewart Speaks

Dan,

To be honest, I am shocked that you would so blatantly lie "I attended the
G.L.A.W.S. panel you participated in last weekend and spoke to you briefly
afterward" and then rebuke me for believing it; it is an extremely
inappropriate practice. If you had attended the panel you would have
realized how swamped I was with introductions at the end (over 75 people),
and so yes, of course I assumed that I had met you when you stated this.

Both myself and a colleague took the time to review your submission, and I
find your response to our consideration highly unethical.

I wish you the best of luck with another agency.

Natalie Fischer 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My Response:


Natalie,

You have no ethical problem with skim reading a manuscript and then offering an off base and untrue criticism? This manuscript was been through fifty hands before I began submitting it for publication, it may have its problems, but not the ones you described. It was quite obvious from your note that you had not read it.

But, I can be wrong, if you are just stupid, I apologize.

Dan

I Want Martha To Tell Me What To Do

I had a friend once that had a Russian cousin that married an American lawyer, and the happy couple settled in Los Angeles. This was late for both of them, they were in their fifties. But they were very happy. He went off to Century City every morning and she wanted something to do. She had published some poems in Russia and thought of herself as a writer. So she became an agent. She had some business cards printed, ran some ads in some magazines and began to get submissions from writers wanting to hire an agent. Soon she had a a little group of writers that she was guiding to be published. They would pay her a fee and she would criticize their work and they would rewrite things in the hope of getting closer to being published. When our Russian Poet Friend got stuck she would come to my friend and I and ask advice, because we were writers. This is beginning to sound like Martha Stewart. Expert because people thought she was. Our Russian Poet Friend didn't know anyone in the publishing world or in the movie making world. Ask yourself if you would want Martha Stewart as your agent? If it is blonde and/ or has spiked hair, ask yourself how it got that way. If it can't read or speak English (if you are writing in English), if it tells you you are promising but you are doing it wrong, if it frowns because of your age, if it asks for money, I'd suggest just shrugging it off. (This is a true story, the Russian Poet had her shingle out for a few years before she retired)

Rejection Rejection Rejection

Dear Dan,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to consider THE TRUTH ABOUT TREASURE ISLAND.  It was a pleasure to meet you at the G.L.A.W.S. panel; my apologies for the delay in getting back you – I was a bit rushed over the holidays and am just now catching up!

Though I was impressed with your writing and creativity, after careful consideration, I feel that this project is not quite right for me. I see a lot of promise here, but it’s just not the kind of novel that I represent, and I really feel that I wouldn’t be the best agent for this. In general, I did feel confused at a few points, first with the narrator’s gender, and second with keeping all of the names straight. I got lost without introductions. As you know, however, these decisions are highly subjective and another agent or editor may have a completely different opinion from mine. 

Again, thank you for the chance to consider THE TRUTH ABOUT TREASURE ISLAND; I wish you every success with your work.

Sincerely,

Natalie M. Fischer

Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency

natalie@dijkstraagency.com

This is the new opening of the novel:

"Dear Dr. McNay,

            It was nice to meet you. I’m glad you are so well versed in the period and the literature. I will value your help a great deal; I’m just not sure I want to be the ‘wisp of a girl accountant.’ Can you come up with a better label for me? I once had a childish dream of being a writer, how about George Sand? Here is the first installment of what we discussed.  Joe Strong in all his glory. He is an honest man- here in his diary. He is also very masculine. His journal, in the beginning made me angry with his insensitivity and it oozed with an imagined sense of smelly socks. But he has become my friend in the last two years. I’d like to tell you how I found him."

Well, that was confusing wasn't it. Maybe the writer really isn't 'a wisp of a girl accountant' or someone who wanted to be called George Sand? Maybe she's really a boy or a fifty year old man. AND maybe the diary is really by a woman pretending to be Joe Strong. The opening line used to read "I'm a wisp of a girl and an accountant..." -you think I sent her that instead by mistake. I can see how that could really be confusing.

I should have sent a glossary. You meet the Girl Editor and then you meet Joe Strong and then his son and his wife and then the Stevensons. Gosh, maybe I didn't send her those pages.

I was in a Writers' Group where we read snippets from our works in progress. Mine was out of the beginning of this book, a little bit later when the Editor explained where and when it took place: Samoa 1893. After i read five pages the guy in the front row asked, "Where does this take place and what is the time period? Ah, in 1893? In Samoa?

(Oh, I didn't really meet this woman. She was at a G.L.A.W.S. panel that I didn't attend. Everyone I talked to afterward who was there said it sucked. These people just got up and played holier than thou and made every one in the audience feel really bad. I didn't have to feel bad to take advantage of the situation. It doesn't surprise me that she remembers me well from the meeting. Her perception and mine are quite obviously on different planets.)

Odd Jobs* footnote

Thinking about wandering strange cities in the middle of the night, I was never attacked or robbed in any of those settings, But I was robbed twice when I worked as a night auditor. Once in Tucson, by a guy that had killed a liquor store clerk a few nights earlier with his stick. I wrote a poem about it: http://murderer.us/HoldUpMan/index.htm

The guy came in and tried to whack me and we fought and I ran out and ran next door to an all night restaurant where some cops were having dinner. He got away, but with  no money. I still have a bite scar from him on my arm. I'm pretty sure I broke his nose.

The second time was when I was moonlighting at a motel in Santa Monica just 12 years ago. These three guys came in a pulled a gun and I gave them the money and they left. At this point I decided I probably wasn't going to working night audit any more. If you haven't heard this song, you should. It is so sad and it could've been me.



I called my wife in Arizona from the hospital they took me to at 3:30 to tell her I was all right. That was just stupid, but you want to let someone know what has happened and you've survived. I was bitten a couple of times and had big bruises from being kicked while I was on the floor momentarily. My glasses were broken and I had a gash on the bridge of my nose.

I didn't call my wife in the middle of the night the second time.

The top painting is by Brenda Guyton: www.brendaguyton.com/painting.htm
The Man Behind The Gun is by Ajie Pribadi and can be found here:

ajiebkp.deviantart.com/art/Man-behind-the-gun...

The Best Walking Town Ever

Nice shot, huh. I was working graveyard shift at the St. Francis Hotel and just lived about 5 blocks away on Leavenworth near Sutter. My wife was working the day shift. I was never able, in my numerous years of working graveyard, to shift to sleeping nights on my two days off. So I would be awake all night at home while my wife snored in the next room. After doing some writing, watching TV, & reading, I would slip out for a walk. San Francisco at night is a very interesting place. Especially at two in the morning on a week night. Saw a guy with a long beard in an evening dress with gloves (like Barbie). This was before AIDS and all the guy bars overflowed on to the sidewalks with leather and chains. There was a little Buddhist storefront in China Town that was manned by a little round Tibetan Monk in flowing robes all night. There was a used bookstore about a half block from City Lights that stayed open 24 hours. And there were donut shops filled with the lost. A few times I walked up and around Coit Tower- which was cool in the middle of the night.

 Generally, I would go up Sutter to Polk and follow Polk down to the Pier and then go round through North Beach and China Town and end up in the Business District at dawn and then climb Sutter back home. To this day most of my memories of living there have to do with the night. My oldest was born there and we did walk the stroller up and down the hills of Nob Hill. But I left felling I didn't really connect to the city or the people there. It was hard making friends when you have to go to work just when a party was starting. There was a Writer's Group that met at the Public Library run by a very weird guy that had his face disfigured by a botched plastic surgery and had spent the rest of his life trying to get it fixed and treating the world like it was everyone's fault. I didn't get to meet real creative people. I wrote a long boring first draft of a novel there about New Orleans.

I wish it had been different. I still love the feel of the city. How you can walk for hours and its always interesting, There were these three people (midwives) that helped my daughter into the world that I appreciate and still think of fondly.

Being Parent

S.S. Humanity from Matthew Ladensack on Vimeo.

Check this out. This is a new short from my daughter's friend Matthew. This is not so bad for being an empty nester. There are very cool talented folks passing through this house on their way someway else.

And This One

Its Raining

Listen to the pouring rain

Listen to it pour,

And with every drop of rain

You know I love you more

Let it rain all night long,

Let my love for you go strong,

As long as we're together

Who cares about the weather

Listen to the falling rain,

Listen to it fall,

And with every drop of rain,

I can hear you call,

Call my name right out loud,

I can here above the clouds

And I'm here among the puddles,

You and I together huddle.

Listen to the falling rain,

Listen to it fall.

It's raining,

It's pouring,

The old man is snoring

Went to bed

And bumped his head,

He couldn't get up in the morning,

Listen to the falling rain,

listen to the rain                    
-Jose Feliciano

What you remember. This is high school for me. I still knew all the words. Needless to say it has been raining here heavily for the last three days. Work has paid for a Dreamweaver class for me so I can make better things.

Do You Know The Way To Monterey?

The walk in Monterey would start here. Saturday morning (really Tuesday morning, because my weekend was Tuesday and Wednesday) I'd go off walking from my boarding house room above Cannery Row, wander down here and look in shops and head along the coast down to the downtown and the Monterey Pier. The walk between here and downtown wasn't built up yet and you were climbing up rocks or walking in surf part of the way. There was a desk clerk who spend all of his time off fishing off the pier. He had been to Vietnam and back and had a wife, but just fished and worked. He never mentioned if he caught anything. I'd stop to say hi. There was never anything in his bucket. He was as cool as ice. A janitor that had been fired from the hotel came back on Walt's shift with a pistol ready to kill the owner. Walt admired the gun and asked to see it. The guy gave it to him to look at. When the janitor realized he wasn't going to get it back, he just left.
Downtown were a bookstore or two and an old adobe where Fanny and her sister and her children were living when Robert Louis Stevenson showed up to propose and run away with her. She had to get a divorce first. And Steinbeck lived in Pacific Grove for years. I was told the old timers knew him as Overcoat John because he wore one all the time.
Usually, I'd find a different route back, walk up through the Presido and then down into Pacific Grove or just go back up Lighthouse to the boarding house.

Stevenson House

It was a quiet little town most of the time except for the weekends in the summer when the tourists all appeared.

Walking South - Nawlins

The walk here varied a lot over the three years I lived here. Early on, when I first got there and had an apartment on Rampart Street, I was out a lot at night, mostly out of lonesome-ness. I meet a guy one night that was probably bi-polar or some such and he called himself "Walking Man." We walked through the night all over the French Quarter and then across Canal Street into the Business Section of downtown and then back across the Quarter and out into the neighborhood pass Esplanade. He said I was the only person he had ever met that could keep up with him and didn't get worn out. I don't think I ever saw him again after that one night. We watched the sun come up and went our separate ways. I knew he was crazy. I used to walk from Rampart over to the Printing Company near Lee Circle where I worked every day and then back again in the evening. The real walk developed later, after I moved out of the Quarter. I'd take the street car to Canal on a Saturday or Sunday morning and then stroll down Bourbon to Esplanade.

Then turn toward the river and circle back to the Cafe Du Monde for breakfast and then through Jackson Square to look at the artists' stuff (is there a pattern developing here?) and then over to Royal. Usually Fred was manning the desk at Le Librarie (Cary Beckham's Royal Street Bookstore) and if I was writing I'd go hang out in the courtyard out back and write and then wander toward Canal again. I'd usually hit the other bookstores on Royal as well. And then ride the streetcar home.

Nothing to do with walking -but it does

A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

Since I'm recommending books, let me say this is a incredibly good read as well. He was a reader (very young) for Borges after he went blind. I ran into Bob Aber ( my wheelchair bound Cerebral Palsy psychologist, writer, friend in a thrift store up by Cantor's on Fairfax in LA) (That is a story unto itself) Anyway we were talking and found we had both read this. It's a wonderful book as well. Sheer indulgence. Like reading a literary biography of your favorite author. This is connected slightly. I do a mini-walk on Saturday mornings up around Cantor's while my daughter is doing her literary thing. Hit three thrift stores, look for Bob, look in Canter's and a funky bookstore up there that seldom does any business, but is very cool, but won't carry my book. Go back to pick up the daughter. She drives us back home now. Recommended it to her, but she is young. She did carry The Odyssey to France with her for the year she was there, so she's ok. 

Walking Part Two & 1/2

The guy in the middle is John Burroughs. He was as famous as John Muir, wrote naturalist articles for the Century Magazine back in the day. You know the other two. Burroughs was a walker. Big time. He was a farmer, but began writing and the writing made him money. He had a bad marriage. Seems the lady didn't believe in physical relations. (I had a wife like that once). So ole John went for a walk. There was a neighbor lady that liked him and they spent time together and after a while she gave birth to a baby boy, so one day out on ole John's walk, he went by and got his son and carried him back to his house and told his wife 'here's my boy, we're going to raise him' and she agreed. This is probably my favorite walking story.  This, of course, raises a question about Wyeth and those 'Olga' paintings. Did he walk over? How far?

Walking- Part two

wanderlust  a history of walking

by

Rebecca Solnit

Walking: First is the necessary intellectual background for the art / sport of walking and taking long walks. I'd recommend this book - it's a great joy to find yourself in wonderful company

Publishers Blurb: Drawing together many histories — of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores — Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction — from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja — finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.

Walks Part One

I've gotten bored with the series on jobs I've held - I'll know doubt get back to them. (I only got up to 1979). I want to talk about walks. I've been taking walks for years now. The backpacking is just an extension of the habit. Coleridge used to go on long walks and compose his poetry in his head. I started because I was too young to drive. We lived 10 miles out of the city limits of Bloomington and in the summer I would walk into town to go see my friends or go to work at the A & W Drive-in on the south end of town. We lived 10 miles out from the north side of town. I could walk really fast. I used to work on Friday nights, so I would get out of school and start into town on 10th Street and then cut across Indiana University. I would wander through the Art School Building to look at the student exhibits, then stop in here (above) at the Lilly Library to see what they had on exhibit that week. Its a rare book and manuscript library. It turns out they have Gilder personal papers (see Retirement Project link). Then I'd wander through the Student Union, roll a couple games in their bowling alley and then go down by the law school and down Kirkwood to the Courthouse.

 

Then head south on Walnut to the city limits where the A & W Drive-In. There's a golden fish weather vane on the top of the courthouse here. There were a couple of bookstores worth looking at on Kirkwood. There was a bookseller that me let buy a 5 volume set of Freud's Papers, at a volume a paycheck because I couldn't afford it all at once. The migratory flocks of birds would circle the courthouse trees in the autumn evenings. I was 14-15 years old. I'd sometimes walk with other kids that worked there, but I liked to do the walk by myself mostly. I recall leaving one friend behind because he couldn't keep up. I walked it stoned once. I think it was about 10 miles.

Tiling

I was going to to talk about something sexier, but I've just spent the last two days ripping up old tile in our bathroom and putting in new tile. The picture doesn't do justice to what I'm doing, because I snitched this photo off the internet and I'm doing imported 6" Italian fired tile that makes this look sick. I'm good at this. I love this. I could have been a contender. I have an eye that will allow me to go out there and run the tile parallel to anything and fill it in later and it will all match and look perfect. I bought a $75.00 tile saw from Home Depot that works pretty well, except that it sprays water at you. In my previous life, I would rent a $100.00 a day saw and cut all the pieces to fit in one day. There's a porch in Venice that is still there with my handiwork. There is something incredibly satisfying about cutting ceramic tile and putting it down and grouting it and having it look perfect. In my next life, I will do nothing but  tile and mosaic work and die from back knees and a bad back. I was finishing in the rain here in LA and was worried about electrocuting myself because the saw was out on the back deck under the canopy, but the deck was wet and and the extension cord was wet and the deck was wet and I ended up with my rubber souled sandals with a bunch of towels around. cutting my last three pieces of trim- cause I wanted to do the grout tomorrow and the wood trim.

This is what I could be doing, only better

    

Hidden Masterpieces

I found this print signed by Picasso (in pencil) in a Thrift store in LA and bought it for $2.00. I had it framed for $20.00. I'm fond of it. When I was looking for a picture of it to put up here, I found a similar print signed went for $200.00 at auction a couple of years ago. So its not terribly valuable, but I like the print and I tell people that all the art in the house is mine except for the Picasso. I am sure I found a George Inness painting in a thrift store on Polk Street in San Francisco in 1978. It wasn't a large one, but it was priced at $200.00 and I had no money then. I should have hocked my wedding ring. Anyway, I keep looking. Inness found his own first commissioned painting for sale in a Mexico City bazaar twenty five years after he had painted it. There was a Jackson Pollack that was disputed for years because it had come from a thrift store until they discovered his fingerprint in the oil paint. I still look. Occasionally you find canvases that have talent and ability. One guy caught me looking one afternoon.

  

He wanted to know if I would be able to recognize something valuable if I saw it. Only if it was in the realm of my expertise. 19th Century American I could probably spot. The canvas internal frame would give it away no doubt. There was a collection of original canvases that appeared a one shop up in Hollywood. Maybe twenty pieces all by the same painter. There was a couple there debating about buying four to hang all together in their living room. I was joking with them, saying that this was probably where my paintings were going to end up. They were were lucky to have the find. Within the week all twenty were gone. I didn't buy any. My kids are already making claims on the my paintings in my house. So I may be one generation away from the thrift store. I still look. Maybe there's another Picasso out there.

CD Mania

Experiences of thrift stores vary a great deal. The nonprofit running it has a character all its own and the staff and customers can all have different styles. There's a lot of poor people looking for clothes and toys at all of them. In LA its mostly hispanic and black shoppers and the whiteys like me are bargain hunters or scrounchers and take great delight in their finds. I've run into three different friends at three different shops in LA over the years. There were regulars I got to know when I had more free time during the week days.

What I wanted to write about was the experience of CDs at the Goodwill stores in LA. Most just have the CDs stacked out on a shelf, empty cases piled with ones that have CDs in them, usually a pile of CDs without cases there as well. I wandered into a store on Venice and National and found that all the CDs were put in a glass case and when I asked to see them, I was told I had to wait for the 'CD Manager.'  He came, took them out and stood over me as I looked at them and when I decided to get a couple, he carried them to the cashier. He told me that people were stealing them. Ok. When I returned the next time, the 'CD Manager' wasn't available, so I couldn't see them. Mind you, these are priced 1.99 to 2.99 each. What seemed to be a wave of implementation, several of the stores developed the same policy or they took the actual CDs out of the cases and kept them in a book up front and left the empty cases out for people to look at. This was very confusing because all the stores have a stock of empty cases as well that were mixed in with the ones that contain CDs. And then you have to wait in line up front to find out if they really had the CD and buy it. Anyone ever wait in line at a thrift store? Such a fun thing. Then everything reverted back to way it was except for the store on Santa Monica Blvd just west of the 405. The new manager was apparently the 'CD Manager' from the other store .' All the CDs, probably 400, were stacked up behind the counter and you had to wait for the 'CD Manager' I had asked him at one point in our encounters, whether he sold many of them this way. He told me no. Then suddenly, two months later, the CDs were all stacked out on the shelves again. I hope they sent the guy to get help.
During the several months of the Goodwill process of retooling their merchandizing, I walked into another thrift store in Hollywood and found a guy with his portable player and headphones, sitting listening to each CD he was considering. The clerk said he had been there at least two hours. I wished I could of hooked him up to the 'CD Manager.'

Digital Music

I've decided to take the step and go completely free of media here. (The CDs are taking over my studio. Five years of buying anything that looked interesting in thrift stores while waiting to go back and pick up my kids from whatever they were doing.) If you are a scrounger and are willing to dig through the whole world of music, you can usually find something. I like Bluegrass, some Country, Jazz and Classical, anything that barely resembles a CD by a street musician, weird ethnic stuff...

a little bit of rock and pop, anything by a strong female voice, choral groups, asian and navaho flute, some Wyndom Hill, all folk, John Mellencamp, Tom T. Hall...

 

and of course my new love, da banjo. Goodwill is charging 2.99 these days, a lot of the other shops are $1.00 or $1.50. Most of the CDs are fine. Only occasionally do you find one with playing problems. I discovered you can just run it under tap water and wipe it off with a cloth dish towel and that will solve most problems. You can even do a little dish soap lightly. (So much for those fancy CD cleaners, huh?) I've probably 500 CDs right now. Most are going. My daughter is shocked- what happens if the Drive dies, you will loose all your music? A guy at work thinks we should save all media, just in case. I'm hoping for day when you can walk around with a little pod that will download all your music from your server via satellite. Oh, maybe we can already do that.

Done In By People In Bright Clothing

Well, for those of you that were following the saga of my attempt to build / organize a shared booth at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, I want you to know that I've finally been done in. I've gone through about ten writers that sounded serious about buying in and then one by one, I get told 'Oh, I have to be out of town that week-end' or 'It's not for me' The latest was from the most diabolical writers of them all. Who do these people look like? You know them. They've all written children's books. (I've often wondered how writer's groups function if everyone is writing children's books. I'm imagining the criticism: 'Alice, there should be two ducklings, not one' and 'Look, Jane, Look has been done. You need to be more original'  Do they work on the artwork as well? Anyway, I was approached by one of these creatures that told me that she and two friends wanted to buy in, but couldn't I change the time slots and the amount of money and she couldn't understand my sign up sheets, and oh she and her friends really wanted to have the slots together. So I helped her. Her daughter helped her with her email. She sounded like a decent person. I'm now waiting for the checks to arrive. I might even eat the difference to make it work. I nudge some other people who want in but can't commit. One of them drops out. Some other friend of this grandmother wants in. Then I get an email tonight. 'Oh, we're not doing it.'

'We're going to pay the GLAWS group and participate on their table.'

You would think these people would take up scrap booking or quilting.

Pssst, you really think putting four sentences under a picture is writing?  

Marie Bashkirtseff

That's her in a self-portrait up top to the left. The rest are hers- she liked brown. I've 35 pages into her journal. She's thirteen and too smart and gushes like a thirteen year old. Too much money, me thinks. They fired a tutor she didn't like and just bought her a horse. About eighty pages into Madame Bovary. The description in Flaubert is to die for. The gushing of thirteen is not a bad thing, as long as its outgrown. Too feel that way again for fifteen minutes would be a marvelous thing. To write like Flaubert -well, it can be done and for longer than fifteen minutes. The print below is from an early edition of Madame Bovary. The watermark tells you where you can buy it if you like.

Really Odd Jobs

Donate plasma! Sell blood plasma as stay at home income. Learn how to sell plasma and get paid cash on a weekly basis. Great how to earn money quick solution.
Yes, you can sell blood plasma and get paid! I'’m sure you'’ve run across ads to donate plasma before.

Some are in the newspaper, others are on radio stations or even online.

It's a very popular "how to earn money quick" concept on college campuses.

If you sell plasma, you can earn around $50 a week for no work whatsoever.

Plus, it is a lot less invasive than a clinical research study.

What is Plasma?
Plasma is the yellowish liquid part of your blood.
Is Donating Blood the same as Donating Plasma?
No. You do not get paid to donate blood. (Though check with your local Red Cross…we’ve gotten dinner gift cards, theme park tickets, and other incentives for donating blood.)
How to Donate Plasma 
When you donate plasma, the plasma is extracted from your blood, and the non-plasma is returned to your body. You will have two needles in your arms. One going, and one coming. The procedure generally takes 1-2 hours.Locate a plasma center in your area. You can try this blood plasma centers directory. If your area is not listed, never fear! Just do a Google Search.

If you've never done this, it can be educational and lucrative. Tucson Arizona in 1980 was not an easy place to survive. You could go get a bag of groceries a week at the Food Stamp Office and you could get food stamps and I sold plasma to be able to buy myself cigarettes. You received the food stamps based on your income. I was working full time at a hotel and took all of our receipts and my pay stubs into the food stamp office to show them that we could not live on what they were giving us. They told me that was the way it was supposed to work- that we would be so unhappy that we would want to get off the program. 

The bag of groceries didn't look this good. You got white bread and a box of Rice Krispies and certainly no fresh vegetables. Del Monte treated me better. Of course, the plasma money could be used for food.

Leaving San Francisco

This is prompted by the last entry about the "odd jobs" I've held in my life. I bought a bike something like the one above in 1977-78. Bought it in LA and rode it up PCH to Monterey and froze my ... off. Had no coat for riding at night. Stopped and bought newspapers and stuffed them in my shirt and pants to ward off the cold. Stopped every hour or so for coffee. I looked a sight waddling into a cafe with newspapers in my clothing. I finally reached Monterey about 9 or 10 at night and couldn't stop shivering for about an hour. I kept it for the rest of the time I was in Monterey and San Francisco. Cynthia and I went everywhere on it. She bought me an surplus air force flight jacket (leather) so I'd stay warm. (Still have the jacket) She would still ride on the back after she got pregnant. We'd ride down to Carmel to visit the holistic doctor she hoped would be able to deliver the baby. I carried groceries and packages of diapers from Sears on it later. I tooled around the countryside all around Monterey and Salinas and S.F. Kept it parked in a rental space around the corner from our apartment building. We'd sing Leonard Cohen songs together over the rrrr of the engine. At that time, you could ride a motorcycle in California without a helmet, which I did sometimes. The Presido, between where I worked in Monterey and where I lived in Pacific Grove, was a military base and you had to wear a helmet when you rode across the grounds. We were arrested one night and held several hours by the MPs before calmer heads prevailed and they let me go with a warning. When we left San Francisco for Arizona, we decided it was no longer practical and the expense of taking it too great. So I sold it to a girl we knew and taught her to ride it on the streets of SF before we left. I can still see her carreening down a hill, barely missing the parked cars. My brother at 62 just bought himself another one. I could do that.

Bookstore Bouncer

We were trying to save money to move to Arizona, so I took a job during the day as Security Guard for a bookstore in a very touristy part of SF. (While working full time at night) The nutzy street people had to be escorted out, so as not to scare the normal people shopping. And the book vultures would swoop through occasionally. These were the guys in long overcoats who grab an entire shelf of picture type books and run out. They would sell them to the used bookstores for their money for the week. The whole thing reminded me of my short stint as a bouncer on Bourbon Street when I needed extra money. It's not anything you would want to do over the long haul.

Bovary and Marie Bashkirtseff

This is a painting by Marie Bashkirtseff, who from the age of twelve to twenty-five, kept a journal, and painted in France. She died at twenty-five in 1884. The Journal was just sitting there lonesome, waiting for me. I loaned it to my daughter, who just returned it after a year, deciding that she was never going to read it it. It seemed a natural companion to balance Madame Bovary, which I've also started to reread this week. The first ten pages of a gushing twelve year old is just the stuff to extinguish the hate in Flaubert's eye. I'm rereading Flaubert because I want some his hatred in this new book I want to start. Almost every character in Madame Bovary is described in the most mean-spirited way- dear Madame and the good Doctor are more sympathetic because they are portrayed just as losers. Open it anywhere and look at the description of the characters. This is not realism, this is hate.

But who doesn't believe in romance. C'est moi?

Working the old hotel

The St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. I actually enjoyed this, sort of. I was a Food and Beverage Night Auditor. I worked the graveyard shift with two other guys. Our home base, where we actually worked, was the deserted accounting office where all the clerks and the Controller were during the day. One of the three guys tried to convince us that he was the boss, but I checked that out with the Assistant Controller and was told we three were equals. Pissed him off. (He worked a full day shift in the US Post Office and slept under a desk in our office when he could and slept in his van in the Post Office parking lot before and after his shift at the hotel. He only went home on weekends and the two days off he had at the hotel during the week.) We had a main frame computer and would enter and balance all of the five restaurants transactions plus all the banquets for the day. Even on a incredibly busy day/night we were done by three. We usually would turn the lights off for a while and snooze under the desks. We did have a giant chess tournament going on among the staff. We three played and read books to outplay each other and the individual restaurant managers would come to try their game on us. A couple of the security guards and a couple of the servers were involved too.

                                                                           The front desk manager played as well I think.

We didn't have one of these. (My grandmother did. I can remember playing on it as a kid.) Anyway, the three us at the St. Francis were incredible on the calculator. You had to run these enormous tapes and balance everything. Quite a few years later, I won a ten-key competition at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel staff Olympics. You didn't realize hotel skills were so rarefied?

They wiped down the Lobby with Old Gold every night and there was a guy that washed all the coins for the front desk cashiers for the next morning.

Odd Jobs - Bookseller again

There used to be a large B. Dalton's on Geary and Grand or near there in San Francisco. It was time to go back to the big city. I got hired as the Shipping and Receiving Manager for the store, which as I recall, was the largest in the country: three stories. We had a good 4-5 people working in the cellar receiving books, sticking price tags (with computerized inventory numbers on them!) and shipping out the returns. I thought I could get into the Management Training Program if I did a good job. This is 1978. I inherited an apartment near the Haight from a painter friend who was off around the world. I was in the basement all day long.

We had one of these funky old metal freight elevators that came up from our basement and opened directly on the sidewalk outside. We had to go out and warn people off to open it and then pile it with boxes off some truck. Do the same routine when we had things picked up. I had a older guy working for me, who had been a professor of Slavic languages at a university in Ohio, who was going through a messy divorce and so he was working at the bookstore for pennies and doing cash under the table for translations of literature for some of the SF publishers. His wife was taking him for everything, or so he said. Anyhow, it was 100 degrees in our basement one summer day and he decided he was going to open the freight elevator to give us air. In his anxious guilty haste, he tripped a couple of people on the sidewalk above, got the elevator jammed and was ready to walk out in frustration with his life and the heat and the job. He got to go stand outside on the sidewalk to direct people away for two hours until we got the thing closed. No Management Training Program for me. My wife got pregnant and I had to go back to the hotel business because it paid better.  

Edith and This Old House

The first day of the new year. We closed it with playing music at my house, great company, great piano and guitar and mandolin- not so great banjo. (That's me, everyone else made me sound so good.) Got to talk and eat and watch the ball drop on TV. This morning I just finished "Edith Wharton, An Extraordinary Life" by Eleanor Dwight. Big pictorial biography that I picked up for a $1.50 

A entertaining read. She was basically old money, married money and made money from her books. Moved around a lot, had a lot of money to spend on clothes, houses and gardens and traveling and entertaining. I've not read any of her novels yet, so I'll let you know. I grew a little tired of the interior designs of her houses and her expansive gardening. I have a feeling that this, like James, is a bit of the 19th century version of "Lifestyles of The Rich & Famous" Its hard to feel sympathetic towards her loveless marriage and her one or two flings. I did discover that she was neighbors for a little while with the Gilders (near Lennox) and that it was much more of a enclave for the wealthy that I realized. I'm having second thoughts about my Helena De Kay Gilder (see website link above- retirement project) thing. I had gotten out my transcript of the journal she and her husband kept in first few years of their marriage and worked a bit one afternoon trying to read and write out another couple of pages, but the handwriting is just too unreadable. Supposedly, Helena's daughter was transcribing it, I wonder if its time to give up or time to get my hands on the family papers to see what's there.

My fiction doesn't deal with the rich, why am I interested in writing a biography about one?

Anyhow, just because they are great writers, that doesn't mean they had meaningful lives or even interesting ones. I tried one of Goethe's travel journals and discovered it was all about rock collecting. Time for a nother nap. Happy 2010!