Almost Houses

This is an image that is a result of a goggle search for residential search for houses in Bloomington Indiana.  This is sick. Why wouldn't a search of this sort turn up pictures of houses? Anyway, there was a house, a block north of the main drag through Bloomington, Ind. near the south end of town that my girl friend and her two roommates shared in 1969. They had made home made wine in their basement. I was Unca Dan to the dogs that lived in the house. My best friend, Jim Hauser, was welcome. I never really slept in this house, but Marti and I smoked and talked and played chess and drank wine here until 1971. The other girls loved me, and encouraged me in my endeavors. They all hoped that Marti would love me as they wished they would love me. It wasn't meant to be. The only thing that bonded us, was that she wished that I was she and she was me, and I wished that I was her.  She also had a photographic memory which has also been mistaken for a sign of great intelligence. Never argue with someone who can repeat verbatim any argument you have ever had. The whole thing was a great mistake. But the thing about it was, we played great chess. And we smoked like chimneys. And we were married and divorced  eighteen months later. A sad tale of want-to-bes that never were. 

Houses

Well, it didn't look like this. It was on the north end of Bloomington, Indiana, near a good sized farm (at the bottom of the hill.) The farm was all pasture land and they had horses out there when I was little. The Fells owned it. I delivered newspapers to them later, after they were rich from selling their land. But they never seemed to pay me. (Thrifty Hoosiers go to heaven.) It was a little neighborhood store with living quarters in the back. The living room door was off the side of the front porch and a bit away from the store's front door. It was long and narrow and there was a kitchen directly behind it and two more bedrooms behind that. The grocery store seemed huge when I was little. There was everything, including a meat counter and a big walk in freezer and a giant trap door that led to a giant basement. It had a large wooden front porch and we kids got to set up a little counter of our own in the summer time and sell penny candy from the store. Later the heavy wooden support posts rotted out and they replaced with aluminum supports. The store was shut down when I was around 10, I think. My father put in a wall covering up the meat counter and took out all the shelves and counters and fixtures and remodeled the store into a living room. The old living room became a bedroom for my brother and I. My bed was against the now permanently locked old front door. (My brother used to tease me about the boogy man coming through the door while I was asleep.) We had a joint back yard with my grandparents who lived behind us, but their house faced the side street. There was an old outhouse in the back corner of the yard. We had a lot of grass. I can remember playing on the front porch during a large summer thunderstorm. Except for what sometimes went on in the house, It wasn't a terrible place to grow up. I loved my mother and grandmother. The grown men, my father and grandfather were mean or useless. My brother remembered recently that he was walking down the side yard and I took a running leap from the front porch and tackled him in the grass. He probably won the wrestling match.

Pictures

Just cause I like 'em

Mark Twain Dying

Just finished Volume 4 of Albert Paine's Mark Twain Biography. It covers the last 7-8 years of Twain's Life. Paine became Twain's Boswell. He spent an enormous amount of time with him, going through all of his papers, sitting in as Twain dictated memories for about four years and played endless games of billiards with him night after night. This is a real biography. You get to see small moments. Paine lived down the hill from him, was there when Jean died, went to get him in Bermuda when it wasn't clear he'd make it back alive. Was at his death bed.
Great read, not to mention the Gilder mentions throughout. I have the second volume on its way. It looks like I will be reading this out of sequence as I turn up loose copies. It's out there for your Kindle and there are paperbacks available it looks like. My copy was great because its very old and beat up and the binding is falling apart (published 1912) and has an unfortunate $1.25 written in crayon on the inside page. Who, in their right mind, would want to read this on a Kindle.

My Volume Two showed up today- not the volume two of this biography- pissed me off that they would mislabel the AbeBooks listing. What they sent is the 2nd Volume of the Autobiography.

$7.00 bucks- oh well. I'm mostly pissed because I was looking forward to some ore Paine,

Weddings

To be so young and in love. I got to perform the ceremony for these two. My sister's boy and his sweetie. Her family are great people. His Mom passed away a few years ago, so his ragtag family all flew in to help. We are lucky people, we've beaten all of the bad karma that we started with. Can't really think of much to say. Great fun!

I like blue myself

They go off and they change and they come back and they look the same. The tattoos can be interesting too.

I had glasses and longish hair, then a mustache and then real long hair, and then short hair and then finally the mustache went away, then the glasses and then the hair came back. I think I'd like blue. I've off and on threatened to come home red, but never have.

Also

Found a CD by Sara Watkins (formerly of NickleCreek) Great song of her channeling an old John Hartford tune

What you find

Found a little well worn fourth volume of a Biography of Mark Twain by Albert Bigelow Paine at a thrift store in Wilmington on Friday afternoon (for only three dollars) and discovered that this was Twain official guy and he spent the last ten years hanging out with Twain and working on this. This starts out in 1901 when he started working with him. (Richard Gilder appears in the first three pages) It has that chatty respectful tone of the 19th Century that I've grown to appreciate. 

---

The New York Times, April 10, 1937

ALBERT B. PAINE, 76, BIOGRAPHER, DEAD
Novelist and Writer of Mark Twain's Life - Stricken in Florida on Way Here
ON PULITZER COMMITTEE
Began as Photographic Supply Dealer - Was Decorated by France for Joan of Arc Book
NEW SMYRNA, Fla., April 9 (AP). Albert Bigelow Paine of West Redding, Conn., author and biographer, died here tonight after an illness of four weeks. His age was 75.
A member of the Pulitzer Prize Committee for many years, he had just finished reading a novel which may bring its author the award next month. Mr. Paine spent the Winter in South Florida and was en route to New York when he was stricken and brought to a hospital here.
For the past forty years, Mr. Paine had spent most of his time in Europe and the East.
Survivors include the widow, Mrs. Dora L. Paine, who was with her husband; three daughters. Mrs. Louise Paine Benjamin of New York, associate editor of The Ladies' Home Journal; Mrs. Frances Paine Wade of Paris, France, and Mrs. J. H. Cushman of West Redding, and a sister, Mrs. Carry Alexander of Orange Park, Fla.
The body will be sent to West Redding for funeral services and burial.
Wrote Twain Biography
Albert Bigelow Paine wrote fiction, humor, verse and edited several magazines, but his outstanding work was a three-volume biography of Mark Twain, with whom he lived and traveled for four years. In addition, he wrote "The Boy's Life of Mark Twain" (1916) and "A Short Life of Mark Twain" (1920). He was Twain's literary executor and arranged for publication of "Mark Twain's Letters" (1917).
"Thomas Nast - His Period and His Pictures" (1904) was Mr. Paine's first biography. He also wrote lives of Lillian Gish, Captain Bill MacDonald of the Texas Rangers and George F. Baker, New York banker.
Mr. Paine lived for several years in France and wrote "Joan of Arc, Maid of France," and "The Girl in White Armor," works which brought him from the French Government the decoration of Chevalier in the Legion of Honor.
His travel books, all widely circulated, included "The Car That Went Abroad," "The Ship Dwellers" and "The Tent Dwellers." His first novel was "The Bread Line" (1900) and he followed it in 1901 with "The Great White Way," a title for Broadway and New York's theatrical district that came into general use.
All through the years he turned out skits, sketches and a steady string of books for children, the "Hollow Tree," "Arkansas Bear" and "Deep Woods," the first of which were produced in the Nineties and which are still selling.
Spent Youth in West
Mr. Paine was born July 10, 1861, in New Bedford, Mass., the fifth child of Samuel Estabrook Paine, a Vermont farmer and storekeeper, and Mercy Coval Kirby Paine of South Dartmouth, Mass., daughter of a family of seafaring folk. When he was a year old, the family moved to Bentonsport, Iowa, where the father owned a store and a farm. But in a few months the elder Paine marched away to the Civil War. After the war the family moved to Xenia, Ill.
There Mr. Paine attended a one-room school, writing "compositions" for the weekly "literary" exercises. At 20 he went to St. Louis, learned photography, tramped with camera for three years through the South and then set himself up as a dealer in photographic supplies in Fort Scott, Kan. He kept this up for ten years, but wrote, too, and his first book, "Rhymes by Two Friends" (1893), was also the first book of William Allen White, for it was a collection of their verse.
A pleasant note from Richard Harding Davis, accepting a Paine story for Harper's Weekly, decided him to turn author in earnest, and in 1895 he sold his photographic business and went to New York.

The First Time

Paris Spleen

This is Paris after all. Just finished Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. The last of his work it looks like. The real inspiration that probably help create Borge's "Labyrinths" and Calvino's "Cosmicomics" and who knows, maybe "Tales From The White Hart" (Arthur C Clark) I like it better than "Flowers of Evil"

Went today to play 'come to jesus' music at a church in Long Beach. It was a circle just to play old time music. Rocky Top was thrown in there. I thought we were going to have a audience, but it was just for the fun of it for the musicians. My buddy asked on the way home 'What would heaven be, if it could be whatever you wanted it to be?' I described Samoa. And then I thought of Paris and Venice and San Francisco. Perhaps Paris with a beach and palm trees.

I'd highly recommend it. Then it occurred to me that heaven needed a lot of good books (leather bound with gilded page edging) and a lot of good music. There is something to be said for sitting around singing all day long. Yep, Paris with a beach and good bookstores. Maybe ole Chuck here sharing a brandy in a little bistro.

They Don't Look Like Much

I've been blessed by amazing offspring. One sings like an angel and works with unfortunate children and patients with the touch of an angel. One is super jock who has moves I'd never dreamed of that understands high tech engineering and math and can listen and transcribe chords on a song that has never been written down. And I have a third that writes from college that she is busy reading Rabelais http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Rabelais (in the old French) in her French Lit class in her first few months at college. These are the lives I would want for children of mine. And I guess they are.

If you've not read Rabelais, you should, if you've not helped people you should, and if you have not moved your fingers like God intended you to, you should.

Friday Night

She's pregnant. She starts throwing up every morning, upon arriving in Paris Illinois from New Orleans. The bottom of the end of 2nd act comes with her being thrown out of the church she tried to join. The friendly old guy gets drunk and confesses her rape to her, which she doesn't remember because she was drunk (at 17). And she has to have a C section which she passes out in the middle of it and wakes up in the middle of the night in a little two bit country hospital where no one is on duty and she doesn't know what happened to the baby.

This about building a life out of ruins.

I've got a long way to go in thinking about it. There is a villain here- a mystery of her mother to solve, and her father. Her mother killed someone- who was it if it wasn't her father?

You guys know Dürrenmatt?

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit

Sort of the inspiration- sort of not. Nothing so blatant..

I'm a Tall Guy

The very first of my true loves was this little 120 bike that you could shift from trail gear to street gear.

If you can imagine a very tall skinny guy with his knees up over the handlebars, you get the picture.
I rode this all over Southern Indiana. Even before I got my license. Sold it to buy a truck with my wife to be.
I should of kept it.

Cars I Have Owned

The ones above don't include a couple of motorcycles and a couple more I couldn't find pictures of and ones owned by significant others. We lost another one yesterday. The Ford Galaxy was the one I drove as a teenager. I kissed my first girl in it (and my second) and learned to drive with one hand, so you could put your arm around the girl. I whacked a corner of a building with it. The Church Van was great fun. I drove the Studebaker from Utah to Indiana and it died upon reaching Bloomington. The Accord I gave to my ex-wife.
The pick-up drove me from Indiana to Utah, with stock racks and a trailer. Only in Indiana would you get stock racks as a wedding present. When we sold the Civic, we had to sandblast the kid seats out of the back because they were perpetually car sick.

The master driver bear of them all is fine. But we can't have her walking. She would never get anywhere.

It Could Be Worse

Ungrateful Writes

Both are masterful parodies of Sherwood Anderson, the only writer I know of that has been made fun of by two Nobel Prize winners. Any how Swatty, (Sherwood) didn't appreciate either. He helped both of these squirts get their first book published. Hem's was written to get him out of his contract with Anderson's publisher so he could take The Sun Also Rises to Scribner's.

I think I'm beginning to hate writers (or at least wannabees). Everyone is an expert. The GLAWS Group I participate in have a lot of experts and a lot of self-justifying authors. "My character would never do that" "I can't change the scene, that's not what I was trying to do." "I've published here and there. They took it, who do you think you are?"

"I have two agents interested" Yes, but the first 100 pages of your book is scene after scene of people sitting and eating, five times.

"I'm writing a history of so and so," Yes, but it's a novel. Try some drama, try some character development.

It's bad enough that they all have dreams of grandeur and they use programs that count their active verbs. Or they read thousands of self-help writing books and no novels.

One of the guys believes he grew up around the corner from Edgar Allen Poe and used to see him around.

I'm also ticked with people who won't bother. We just got an email from a girl that came maybe twice and now we wants us to destroy any copies of her stuff that we may have. She, of course, didn't read anybody's work.

The latest reaction to my feedback, is, well that's the way you write. That's the way you would write it.

It's really not. I have no interest in writing anybody's books for them, or any interest in stealing anyone's ideas- as if there were really were any original ideas in the world.

I'm interested in you writing something that has passion and drama in it. (Like every book in the world but yours.)

I think I like musicians better. And the people in my yoga class. No one's trying to one up you there.  

One With The Universe

That's me trying to tune me banjo with 20 musicians playing nearby. The little electronic turner was going haywire. I finally borrowed someone else's and hid behind a tree. Every time you put the banjo in the case and carry it somewhere, it needs to be re-tuned. Such is life. When the kids were small, I'd put on a fake Indian
Guru accent and tell them how they had to become one with the universe. To reach nirvana, they had to give up earthly things and eat only rotten vegetables and bathe in filthy rivers. This is why my children are slightly warped.

When you start counting up reciprocity from your friends, you realize that maybe it means something else. Why do you count now, and you didn't count before. Why are there certain friends that you never expect anything from in return? And why are there some that after years there are still expectations no matter what? I think I'm out of tune.

Dancing Bears

The nice thing about sending little bears out into the world, is then you can go dancing.




Check out the lyrics below


Not Your Grandparent's Square Dance from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Thing We Keep

I have a stack of these in a rubber band in my night stand drawer. It's almost 2 inches high now and I'm still adding to it. It's (when its completed) my record of one finished Merit Badge for one boy. There's probably 150 -200 of them that I've done. Bragging rights.

I recently showed up to play bluegrass with a handful of folks to play at a convalescent home in Long Beach. Before we went on, I was talking about how we had an empty nest now. The singer said, "An empty nest except for the Boy Scouts." He thinks its funny for me -this old dead head looking almost sixty dude still playing with the scouts. There still are there teenage boys traipsing through from time to time.

I've gone out of my way to recruit new guys to do the Cycling Badge. 150 miles per kid- a few Sunday bike rides yet to come. I can teach you how to take care of your body, make a movie, be a scholar, ride your bike, draw a picture, find your way in the world.

Mostly cause I didn't get to do any of this stuff when I was kid. My short lived career was over when they disbanded my troop because none of the parents wanted to volunteer.

Weddings I have Written

Years ago, a friend called and asked me to get ordained in a mail-order church, so that I could conduct their wedding ceremony. Turned out cool. I wrote a little something, the bride and groom wrote their own vows and we did it. It was over in the valley (San Fernando) for those non-LAers, at the groom's mother house. The food was wonderful. The bride was Brazilian and her friends cooked. The groom worked for Bon Appetite and they cooked. Had a hotsey totsey art photographer and music and flowers done by the bride. And the next day, I was in the the car, listening to KCRW and the DJ described the wedding and said it was the coolest one he had ever been to.

Well, I get to do it again in Portland. My nephew is marrying. They sent me this whole big ceremony, which I'm in the midst of rewriting in my own words (mostly to give it flair and drama) but keeping it in the same structure and the vows they wanted. It will also help me to learn it. Writing a marriage ceremony is not an easy business.

Maybe there will be a video to put up here.
I bought a new suit and everything.

It's also hard to write about God and sacred stuff if you don't agree with the words themselves. I believe in things, just not with those christian words that make martyrs and bigots.

Daydee

She encounters her father, who she hasn't seen in 34 years, living in the bushes out on the edge of town near a house she inherited. He is crazy as a loon. They both somehow know who the other is. Then what is to be done with him? Has she any obligation really?

Flashback of New Orleans, she and John Seagum in bed on a Saturday morning (the only time he can perform) They begin drinking by 9:00 am. He whiskey, she tequila sunrises. 

She finds heroin works in the empty house- but it is very old. It makes her think of other individual paraphernalia she's found in her mother's things and then she realizes that her mother was probably a junkie. Which then leads her to believe the mother was sleeping with the three men

Flashback of mother being incredibility critical- something inane - like a dance recital at 13.

Are there ghosts? Great grandmother and great aunt in empty house? Great uncle in barn? Mother in church?
Dead dog in yeard?

 

More about Daydee

Daydee has come to meet with the sleaze ball lawyer. She's been through her mother's records and found a deed to land that she apparently doesn't own in the estate and the friendly guy that has been helping her, told her that her mother signed it over to the lawyer for legal fees owed. She has come to try to get written proof. In the conversation, the lawyer tells her that the sheriff had found remains of a body out on this particular farm. And they had decided it was probably been Daydee's father and that he had been murdered. So they were investigating Daydee's mother for it. The lawyer thinks she did kill him and makes mention of evidence that she brought him, but he asked her to take it away. He thinks Daydee's father probably deserved to be killed. Sleaze ball lawyer never produces transfer paperwork on the land. He tells Daydee it was for payment of legal fees for defending her in the murder investigation.

Daydee has agreed to hire the sleaze ball minister to open and close the graves and to do the grounds work on the cemetery for the time being. He wants her to put up signs around the cemetery and wants her to sell the bucket off the cemetery's backhoe to him for cheap. (Basically, handicapping her ability to hire someone else, or to learn to do it herself.) He is pompous twat. He reminds her of his moral superiority whenever he gets the chance and bugs her about buying a marker for her mother's grave, which she does do until late in the book.

The friendly guy drives her all of town and takes her to breakfast at the local diner where he introduces her around as her mother's daughter. And reminds the guys in the diner that she went to high school in town here. He tells her details and stories about her mother's business that she doubts that he would really know. The friendly guy has a wife with Alzheimer's out at the local nursing home who he visits every week.

I write all of these scenes down and then cut them up and lay them out on the floor of my studio and try to put them in dramatic order and find a structure. So you get to share the process.

 

The Third One (or The Second One)

The other one is a full blown tale about a Purchasing Agent for a large unnamed university who is almost disabled from Parkinson's and is being laid off in the midst of a huge janitor strike. A women he's had the hots for, for years, has been laid off and so her kids can't get free tuition any longer. He's got friends in high places because he buys toys for all the bigwigs. And he knows who pulls the strings and knows who is responsible for laying off all of the university's janitors. So he decides he's going to assassinate the evil person at commencement. He is saved at the end by the slug people that work as gophers for the bigwigs. And he doesn't actually kill anyone- he gets to the point where he can do it, but doesn't. He fades away into the Parkinson's delusions or dreams at the end like death has come to claim him.

There was a Michael Douglas movie about an engineer who loses his job and then his car and he tries to walk home and ends up with a gun... something like that but sweeter.

All three of these could be full blown, probably dark books. All are based on personal stuff (Ah, really?) A friend thinks I need to write a book with a happy ending. I think all three will have an up ending, although not necessarily a happy one.

The next step for me is to start compiling scenes and see if they add up to a book.

 

The Workings of the mind

This is the one that I am probably going to write next. Paris, Ill. Little farm town. A 45 year old lady gets off a Greyhound bus, dressed like this and her heels click on the worn out 50 year old sidewalks. Daydee (Diedra) has been a call girl and later a paid mistress in New Orleans most of her life. The last man she was involved with is in prison and her mother has just died, leaving everything to her. She has an over the hill face now. Only sixty year olds find her slightly attractive. Anyhow, she's inherited a farm and some buildings and a privately owned cemetery in this little town. The three men that try to help her, went to high school with her. They have a secret and guilt associated with her, that she doesn't even remember, but they do. She changes with trying to make a go of things here. Her father, who she barely remembers, and disappeared when she was 10, turns out to be alive and is a crazy street person who has only just returned himself and is discovered living in the bushes outside of town. She's writing letters to her guy in prison. Definitely Faulkner in Illinois. I need the bottom of the bottom for her - that's probably the big piece missing. It occurred to me that maybe she's pregnant and doesn't realize it.  

Cooking up another new story

I've never understood writers that can't write. I seem to carry around at least three books in my head that are waiting to be written. Mailman, pith helmet, hairy legs, (a lonely man - that might be the title.) lives alone, carries a deep pain inside from a lost love. A can of doggie mace in his pocket. On his route in Beverly Hills, doesn't have his ipod today because he forgot to charge it, finds the front door ajar and the moans of a woman coming from within in. He enters to find a lovely young thing splattered with blood, holding a knife over her father's body. Dead of course. She swears she didn't do it. She asks for his help. He convinces her to call the police. She hangs on him. The police arrest her for the murder. He's convinced she didn't do it, or sees this as a way to win her love if he finds the real murderer. He delves into this guys life. Everyone loved him, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Big movie mogul, mistresses, a son, a wife, the daughter turns out to be a big problem- lots of affairs. Everyone he meets has a motive. He Sherlocks it out. He does get the girl, but it ends badly. He solves the murder.

What do you think?
Marlow as mailman.

Hair

How did this come about? Well, we all want to be different than the generation before- god forbid that we would look like our WW II parents (in my time). I was in my thirties before I was intimate with a woman who shaved her legs.

We were free and natural. Wore patched jeans. Let our hair grow. Grew mustaches and beards. My women friends were hippies too.

Who would want to look like anyone from the 1980s? 1950s? 1960s?

How long has my hair been?  In 1982, it was above my ears. The Bonaventure Hotel had a dress code. It was the days of three piece suits. I've not had a tie on in two years now.

Do they make fun of us, like we did of our parents values?