May 3, 2022

My fortune cookie from a purchase of hot & sour reads “Ignore all previous fortunes.” 

Director DS wants to cut the word “Chinamen” from the script as being offensive. The line is uttered by Claire Clairmont in 1820. The best I could say was “I don’t want to fight about this one. Do what you will.” I remember how I fought Red Hen to keep “retard.”  We give ourselves lumbago virtue-signaling. One of my memories of Michael Yeats is his remarking that something or other didn’t have “a Chinaman’s chance,” then falling all over himself in correction when he noticed an actual Chinese person in the room. That was 40 years ago. 

Thinking hourly, nightly, about my father. This gives me a sense of disloyalty to my mother, but perhaps she’ll have her turn. My very first years were magical, and their magic had something to do with my father’s garden (which I have sought to reproduce ever since) and his inventiveness building an environment for us on Goodview Avenue. Something happened, some catastrophe that I either did not witness or put out of my remembrance, that ruined everything forever. Was it me? Was it something between husband and wife? I don’t know how I shall ever know. I though of this while he was alive, but couldn’t find a way to say, “What was it turned one of us, either you or me, into what we are?”

Thinking of the AVGMC concert, a mound of sexagenarians (at the least) warbling on about May-time and seizing the day. Not to be looked upon. . . . 

MJ writes of The Ones with Difficult Names: Thank you, David. I am finding your book utterly ravishing--expansive and surprising, yet burning into some naked fiery core of self-realization and recognition--kind of a holy book. Cheers and hats off