My favorite time of day at the office is when the mail arrives. There are readers and contributors I’ve corresponded with for years, though we’ve never met, and I love this moment at the backyard fence, swapping gossip, mysteries, wisecracks, Big Ideas, and the touchingly ordinary stories of our lives.
I’ve especially liked getting mail from Patrick Miller, a thirty-one-year-old advertising copywriter and typesetter and poet and ex-North Carolinian now living in Berkeley, California. He makes me think and, better yet, laugh. I was pleased last year when he dived into the ego-infested waters of self-publishing with his own “letter-at-large,” called, appropriately, Presumptions.
He wrote in his first issue: “This presumptuous idea — a freelance writer starting his own direct-subscription service in order to publish essays, reportage, poems, half-truths and complete fictions — is not new. No doubt some ancient Sumerian scribe, giddy with his new mastery of cuneiform, took to creating a private set of writings in clay just for his own amusement and, when he could stand the privacy no longer, invited all his friends over to his house . . . where, for a price, they could read his wedges. Sometime during the party, his best friend probably took him aside . . . and, in a sincere effort to pierce his author friend’s unwise exhilaration, asked softly, ‘Now just exactly why are you doing this, good buddy?’ Later, when the priests who employed the scribe found out about his misappropriations of the then sacred skill of writing, he was executed.”
Patrick is still alive, though he’s suspended publication of Presumptions until the end of the year. Predictably, he ran out of dough and is figuring out how to cut expenses and find more subscribers. I agree with his friend who advised, “Financial ruin is no reason to stop publishing.”
I’m grateful to Patrick for permission to reprint these excerpts from Presumptions as well as reader responses to a presumptuous survey he conducted last January.
Subscriptions to Presumptions, which is published every three weeks, are available on a sliding scale from $12 to $36 yearly (pay what you wish) from Patrick Miller, 1442A Walnut Street, #58, Berkeley, California 94709. Or send him $10 for all the back issues.
— Ed.
About this time a year ago I received a note from a friend and editor which ended this way: “Bright holidays for you, I hope. I’m always happy when it’s over.” Those few words strike me as a graceful confession of a pretty common Christmas neurosis — an attitude many of us assume this time of year when social convention requires a merry and bright altruism in the face of a private and sometimes inexplicable sadness.
The popular explanation — the one that serves as the basis for many a newspaper feature on Holiday Depression — is that the American family ain’t what it used to be, and its frequent brokenness is all the more painful for those who attempt (or no longer attempt) to gather all the fragments around the tree and make something whole of it again. That’s probably a sound theory as far as it goes, but it’s not really helpful. What I’d like to see seeping into public consciousness — via those newspaper stories, for instance — is the sensibility that a good measure of sober contemplation is not only OK, but positively healthy and appropriate for the season.
By sober contemplation I mean a state of mind & feeling as different from depression as wild, lampshade-wearing frivolity. Depression doesn’t contemplate anything; it’s an attitude that incessantly reviews a few unchallenged assumptions (like the unfairness of the world) in order to prolong its reign over consciousness. To me it’s just the flip side of enforced merriness or gift-list obsession. All of these are escapes, enjoyable or not, from the traditional end-of-year suggestion that we face the music concerning our deeds and our prospects. That music, of course, echoes with the harmonies and discord of one’s particular family history.
Am I imagining a new Norman Rockwell scene of Gramps, Gramma, Mom, Dad, Sis, Sis’s kid by her first hubby, her new beau, brother Frank and his boyfriend, and cousin Clare with a coupla kids of uncertain lineage, all sitting by the tree and a mound of unopened presents, quietly lost in thought? Well, not quite. I believe that contemplation can be an active and social act, as well as a private meditation. I’d just like to see the social definition of Christmas “celebration” expanded a bit to include a straightforward gazing into the heart of our family experience — a contemplation that is at once psychologically meticulous and spiritually generous. Because understanding how we got from there & then to the here & now (and how the cycle repeats) is the key to any hopes we entertain for what’s popularly called “transformation” — the soulless buzz-word we use these days for the traditional and provocative concept of redemption.
A Christmas Observation
Your father, the perpetual comic sits on a kitchen stool stringing out one-liners while the women he knows best suffer graphically, pursing their faces, bracing themselves for his lifetime funniness. You’ve heard it all before but he thinks it’s good one more time, for one more line — while his face grows round as a mushroom, red as a fevered moon. After a pause his chuckles confront the silence, and we are all tested. Your mother has a soul of patience. You have the soul of your father, and sometimes he hugs you in a strange, unfunny way. But he does his duties: builds artifacts of sudden eloquence, holds his flint to your mother, even changes his work, in mid-life like Jesus or Henry Miller and always he remembers to distrust your lovers.
I am out for a little afternoon coffee; this is when I begin to wake up, and preview the evening’s typographical assignments. (Consciousness usually peaks at work, around midnight.) I’m in the mood for a little innocent eavesdropping — a mood that often strikes me in public. (Yeah, I’m the weird guy with the notebook and the offsides stare.) In fact, I’ve recently given thought to finding a hearing aid to enhance perfectly normal aural capacity, the better to catch crucial conversation fragments that always get lost in the hubbub of restaurants, supermarkets, parties and the like. I’ve yet to act on the notion because of the nagging feeling that it’s a little sick.
Depression doesn’t contemplate anything; it’s an attitude that incessantly reviews a few unchallenged assumptions (like the unfairness of the world) in order to prolong its reign over consciousness.
Anyway, I’m seated in one of my favorite eavesdropping spots (no, I’m not telling you where — find your own!). I’m getting down on paper some pieces of a dream when my attention is drawn by the passing figure of the Thinnest Woman in Alameda County. She’s in her late twenties, I guess, with long unruly black hair and a long, pretty/sad face. She walks right by my table with a cup of coffee, and doesn’t seem to be wearing her clothes — blue jeans and a plain, dark blue flannel shirt — so much as walking around somewhere inside them at the same pace they happen to be moving forward. Her shirt hangs from her shoulders without the slightest interruption from a presumably feminine anatomy. She sits at a table about ten feet away with her back to me, and I see she has a brownie in front of her. I feel hungry for her.
About two minutes later I look up for no particular reason, and who should walk in the front door but the Skinniest Guy in Northern California. He must be a housepainter, because nobody else has the right to walk around in clothes that spattered. He’s so tall he habitually stoops from the shoulders up, as if he got tired of ducking under doorways and adopted a posture that solves the problem. This fellow shambles into the center of things, looking for someone, and then walks up behind the Thinnest Woman, reaches over her shoulder and breaks off a corner of her brownie before she even sees him. “Hey, thanks!” he says in a breezy, familiar manner, chomping away, as the woman suddenly pushes her chair back half a foot, raises both arms about halfway up from her waist, half-clenches her hands and says slowly, deliberately, and loudly enough for eavesdroppers to hear quite clearly, “I — have — asked — you — NOT — to — do — that — anymore!”
“Oh, right,” says Skinniest tonelessly, and walks away to go order his own food. Thinnest slowly drops her arms to her sides and seems ready to cry. So am I. For a moment, I am utterly convinced that there is no hope for women & men. Such are the just desserts of the eavesdropper. . . .
So we were near the end of two and a half hours of long-distance conversation, an eternal friend and I, and we were finally getting around to the good stuff: the war between the sexes. She wrapped up a description of problems in her marriage in a slightly apologetic tone: “I know it’s becoming a cliche,” she said, “but I do think the chronic problem of men of our generation is a fear of commitment.”
Knowing that the best defense is always a devious offense, I countered, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, with “Well, if that’s true, it’s a problem aggravated by the fear modern women seem to have of giving a straight answer.”
“Straight answer?” my friend inquired warily. “Straight answers about what?”
“Straight answers about anything,” I replied, abruptly rising to vituperation. “About whether they really want to go out tomorrow night — or about whether they’re willing to take the risks their high-flying ambitions require. I can count on three fingers the women I know who answer simple questions directly without hedging their bets, and don’t contradict themselves tomorrow. That’s exactly it!” I exclaimed, warming to an emphatic wind-up. “Women of our generation are afraid of giving a straight answer. It’s an epidemic.”
But I’d charged too hastily, and left the crucial rear flank exposed. “Well now,” said my friend testily, “I get the feeling that what you call a straight answer is only what you want to hear. Maybe you don’t listen to anything else. You might understand more of what women say if you weren’t so ready to resist what you hear.”
Stung, I found myself answering with a realization born just as the words comprising it were spoken. “Perhaps,” I said slowly, “but you know I think it’s when I’m resisting the most that I’m listening the hardest.”
“Yes, I know,” she laughed. “Me too.”
When I was about ten my sister Karen and I got the bright idea of clipping all the coupons from travel advertisements in the back of National Geographic, and sending away for the free literature those advertisements offered. I can’t remember what inspired us; perhaps the sense of isolation we had growing up near Charlotte, N.C., which was not the busting cultural metropolis it is today (why, back then you couldn’t even fly direct to San Francisco!). Whatever the reason, our own direct-mail campaign worked wonders; within weeks the Miller mailbox was inundated with slick brochures, four-color booklets, free pens, souvenirs, and an occasional phonograph record labeled something like “Sounds of the Orient.” I found all this correspondence, impersonal as it was, hugely exciting, and months later I could still be found clipping the random TWA coupon that promised irresistible inside dope on the Hawaii vacation I wasn’t about to take. Karen, five years my senior, lost interest sooner; she was becoming preoccupied with concerns I regarded as truly esoteric.
Twenty-one years later, I confess that my fascination with What’s in the Mailbox Today remains undimmed. My tastes have changed considerably; nowadays I prefer the handwritten news from a faraway friend to the exquisite production of an unknown ad agency, first-class typography notwithstanding. And I could probably write a book already on The How-to of Romantic Correspondence: How to Get Started, How to Drop Hints, How to Hound and Cajole, How to Screw It Up or Wind It Down. No wonder, then, that my journey as a writer has taken the present turn, and so far the responses are much more fascinating than the Geographic experiment. In this and occasional PRESUMPTIONS to come, I’m going to share the high spots of all this correspondence with you.
As I’d hoped while planning this gig, I’ve made contact with a number of people also in the “business” of self-publishing, and started a collection of their printed efforts. The most impressive of the small publications to come my way is called THUMPER: A Review of Health & Diet, published in Los Angeles by freelance journalist Diane Broughton. THUMPER is a feisty example of an increasingly rare genre: investigative journalism by an impassioned, lone-wolf crusader. Diane’s cause is diet sanity — a state of mind that declines in direct proportion to the growing overabundance of super-processed and “fast” foods in America today. I’d hesitate to call Diane a natural-foods proponent, because that might imply a practical or philosophical alliance with one or another food fads. In fact, Diane keeps her recommendations on food simple and general, and spends more of her time rooting out who is adding which suspicious additives to the stuff America eats.
THUMPER wasn’t even a year old when it provoked the kind of controversy which is the birthright of a bona-fide muckraker. Diane was invited to appear on weight-loss guru Richard Simmons’ TV show in October, 1982, after she wrote two articles on Simmons that, in her own words, “Weren’t hatchet jobs but . . . weren’t testimonials either.” She took more of a liking to Simmons in person than she expected (her comment on his energy level: “Three dozen zombies are probably walking around without curiosity, humor, drive, sensitivity or pain because Simmons got their share”), and while on his show voiced her contention that the hormones given to beef cattle to fatten them up probably have the same effect on humans who consume the meat. At that point, the burger hit the fan out in cattleland, and while the Simmons show found itself threatened with law-suits, Diane found herself invited to Wichita for a feedlot tour and press conference. Apparently, the cattlemen expected to win Diane over by giving her the kid-glove treatment (“From the time I arrived in Wichita,” she wrote, “I was completely taken care of by the Kansas men in a way I haven’t experienced since Los Angeles embraced the Feminist Movement. It was lovely.”), and by simply showing her a suspiciously clean and spacious feedlot (“it looked like summer camp for heifers”). These tactics failed and Diane stuck to her guns while publicly facing off the cattle interests. The Wichita Eagle-Beacon later reported, “Broughton didn’t eat any beef at the luncheon, nor did she eat any crow at the news conference.” As recently as June of this year, Diane was in the news again — this time, the Los Angeles Herald — for catching the attention of L.A. County’s Task Force on the same subject.
“I have this tic,” Diane wrote to me recently. “I like to tell people what others don’t want them to know, and that’s what my publication is about.”
Diane was the first to tell people that President Reagan doesn’t care for hormones, steroids, or other additives in his burgers, and consumes only organically-fed beef raised by his household butcher, Bruce Oxford. (Oxford candidly told Diane that Reagan wouldn’t like her if they discussed the subject together: “You’d be too strong-minded for him, and he doesn’t like intellectuals.”) The Reagan-beef item was followed up by MOTHER JONES, the nation’s foremost muckraking periodical, which strangely failed to credit THUMPER. When Diane took MJ editor Mark Dowie to task for ignoring her, he explained for her benefit that “Journalism in America is completely derivative. . . . If we cited every source we had for stories, the magazine would be full of sources and no stories.” And rather than make it up to her, he advised Diane that “If you can’t live with it, you should probably get out of the business.”
“Not on your life,” answered Diane in THUMPER.
Well, Diane Broughton may be too uppity for the likes of Reagan and Dowie, but THUMPER subscribers like myself are glad she’s hanging in there. You can order any past or future THUMPERs for $1 a copy, up to a two-year subscription for $24. Write Broughton Press, P.O. Box 36C96, Los Angeles, CA 90036.
The Monthly Independent Tribune Times Journal Post Gazette News Chronicle Bulletin, published right here in Berkeley by a fellow who variously calls himself Denver Tucson, T.S. Child, and the Editor. The Monthly . . . Bulletin contains lots of tiny typewriting, magazine-graphics collages, vulgar interpretations of Marmaduke cartoons, and the world’s dryest comix, “The Bone Family.” (In November, “Mama cooks a Thanksgiving turkey . . . and they all sit and look at the bones.”) Child/Tucson once summed up his convincing theory of human intelligence thusly:
Why are smart people always unhappy? Why do geniuses always end up committing suicide? And on the other hand, why are the most ignorant, thick-headed, pickup truck-driving, gum-smacking, beer-swilling morons always strutting around and grinning happily as if they were on top of the world? The answer to all these questions is the obvious one, the one everyone has suspected for centuries: intelligence is pain. Smarts hurt.
You can find this one free around Berkeley, or write 2510 Bancroft Way #207, Berkeley, CA 94704.
Presumptions’ Readers Survey
Do you find personality in inanimate objects? What lost object do you mourn?
TS: Two objects that I will always mourn are my orange blanket and my kwerb stick. My orange blanket was my only blanket in the year 1970; one night, one of my sister’s boyfriends named Roz, who was a 90-pound Black Muslim who wandered the streets in rags begging from everyone and taking any drugs he came across, knocked on our door and said, “Clover (that was my sister’s name at the time) I’m cold,” whereupon she came into the room (don’t ask where my parents were) and tore the blanket off me, leaving me naked in the bed, and gave it to Roz, who then wrapped it around himself and disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. . . . The kwerb stick was an integral part of my preadolescent magic system, developed in the eighth grade. The kwerb stick was a pitiable little twig about an inch and a half long, unremarkable in every way. Yet it was responsible for keeping all life in order. When I lost it things started to get fucked up and they haven’t been the same since. CC: Sure do. When I was a kid, I used to walk around, and if I bumped into anything I’d say “Ouch” — not for me, but because I figured the door or the wall was hurting.
Do you see a therapist? What have you learned from therapy?
MP: I don’t and never have consulted a therapist because 1. I’m pretty sure that s/he doesn’t know any more than I do, 2. my problems are for the most part imaginary or contrived, and 3. I hate to say it, but isn’t therapy just a tad wimpy? I mean, get your ducks in a row and straighten up and fly right. ML: I learned in therapy that I am constantly feeling responsible for the feelings and even the destinies of everyone connected to me. This was an incredible revelation. My therapist discerned it because I was always trying to take care of her and make sure she was alright before I “laid my own stuff” on her. This condition still afflicts me from time to time. LP: Not these days. Can’t point my finger to insights from the past, but remember that sometimes when you repeat to someone a story you’ve been telling yourself over & over for years & they say, “Wait, you’ve got the ending backwards” and you say, “By George, you’re right!” then you look better to yourself now that you’re not backwards anymore in that particular story.
When was the last time you cried?
TS: The last time I cried was two days ago when I listened to “Run Come See” by the Pennywhistlers, an all-women folk group from the early 60s. “Run Come See” is a Bahamian folksong about a tragic shipwreck in 1929. This song is so heart-rending that it has made me cry every time I’ve listened to it since I was two years old, and that’s a lot of times. No other song has the power to blow me away like this one. Should be required listening for everyone on the planet (Folkways 8773).
What was your most romantic moment?
JE: The most romantic moment I have experienced is getting married. It hasn’t happened in the past; it has happened in my future. I experienced it in advance, you might say. I saw the flavor of the event. What made it romantic was that it was a symbolic expression of love, rather than an event that tried to seduce love into being felt . . . there is no rice. It doesn’t leave a wedding cake flavor in the guests’ mouths, and we aren’t all knotted up and nervous & in a panic. We behave as though we are really having fun (because we are) and everyone else does too. Children are not forced into suits, it is not June. You want to know more, you’re welcome to come.
What’s most on your mind when you’re not thinking about anything? Do you meditate?
TS: My mind whirls uncontrollably all the time, so you could say that I’m never thinking about anything in particular. You could say that I meditate practically all the time, if you consider lying around and staring off into space meditation.
Where do you go for renewal? Have a religion? Is your secret motivation cynical or optimistic?
MP: Renewal? You mean I can go somewhere and get it? TS: Where do I go for renewal? What kind of a question is that? This is no longer 1975, buddy. JE: Even a cynic is motivated by optimism. Humans, in order to survive, must at their roots be optimistic. The cynic has been hurt to a sufficient degree that he chooses to wear an armor of knowing, a shield of contempt, and brandishes a sword of manipulative, self-righteous anger (a sword he appears to be using on himself, although he is only threatening). Behind this fortification is always a heart that yearns to be shown that something else is possible . . . without that heart of optimism, without hope & a secret faith that something else should happen, might happen, wants to happen, may happen at any moment, a human being cannot exist.
Is your most intimate fantasy religious, sexual, casually friendly, or cosmic? Do your fantasies frustrate or direct you?
LP: It’s hard for me to separate cosmic & sexual but I guess I’d have to say it’s a combination with religious overtones. There are a lot of ducks. White ones. D&L: Materialistic. It soothes me to dream of a BMW. JD: When you specify my most intimate fantasy, I interpret that to mean the fantasy which I am least inclined to reveal. My most intimate fantasy has not yet revealed itself to me. . . . I fantasize living a fantasy-free life, where my state of mind allows me utter complacency. I guess that implies that my fantasies frustrate me. Nonetheless, as I age my fantasies are about becoming more attainable (except for the one about world peace and justice), so it seems I’m being directed, or inspired, by my fantasies, or else even my fantasies are falling victim to the era of lowered expectations.
