Later today, after making this video, I went to my acupuncturist. He makes maple syrup every year and we’ve talked about how putting a tap in a tree is kind of like putting an acupuncture needle in someone.

I’m trying to get back to work after a week of travel. I was at Penn State last Thursday, and look! They have a giant Chas. Addams painting! It’s part of the Fred Waring Collection, which is part of the university library archives. Actually, the FWC was one of the many sponsors of my visit. I dimly recalled Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians as having played some kind of outmoded lawrence-welkish kind of music when I was a child , but back in the big band era this guy was apparently a big deal.

Not only was he a band and choral conductor, he’s the Waring of the Waring Blendor. And in his spare time he became a jai alai champion. You can see his wicker jai alai launcher thing in one of the many display cases in the archive. See the old “blendors” in this one? Anyhow, this dude was also a big fan of cartoons, and he has a whole lot of original cartoon art all over the place by people like Chester Gould, Milt Caniff, Ernie Bushmiller, Al Jaffee, and Bill Keane.

But the really coolest thing about Fred Waring is that he saved everything for his whole life. And he made so much money that he could give all this stuff, from laundry tickets to music manuscripts to raccoon coats to jai alai equipment, to Penn State to organize and make available forever and ever.

The other notable thing that happened to me recently is that I learned about a brilliant program that will keep you off the internet for up to eight hours at a stretch! It’s called Freedom. Thanks to Elizabeth Bluemle, author and co-owner of Flying Pig Books, for turning me on to this. I simply don’t have the self-discipline to not check my email every .02 picoseconds, or go haring off to Google to research every inchoate neural flicker before it can turn into a thought, let alone an idea. I once heard about a guy who had his girlfriend change the password on their internet service every morning, and not give it to him no matter how hard he begged. I admired that setup, but it seemed a bit unwieldy. Freedom achieves the same end with less fuss.

Elizabeth also told me about Write Or Die—a program that starts deleting what you’ve written if you stop typing for a moment—but I haven’t had the nerve to try that yet.

Oh! And one more thing. Come to the Kate Clinton/Lily Tomlin show on Staten Island on April 17th. Hol and I are gonna go! It should be pretty amazing.

Here’s the piece I did for it. It’s based on The Game of Life, which I played obsessively for a while as a child, often by myself. (the colors come out really garish here…sorry)

I think if you click on that, it’ll take you to Flickr, where you can see a larger version.

Anyhow, I just wanted to put that up. Now I’m off to give a talk at the University of Chicago. If you’re in the area, come by! I’ve also updated my events page. Maybe I’ll be in your neck of the woods sometime soon. Apparently I have nothing better to do than travel around talking about myself.

Here’s Kate’s site for more info.

Here’s another item. I went out to get the mail yesterday, and there was my Oberlin Alumni magazine. I was idly glancing at the cover as I walked back inside, and something looked oddly familiar about it. It wasn’t just the drawing of the iconic Oberlin library womb chair, or the obstreperous Richardsonian silhouette of Peters Hall visible behind it through the window…no, it was something else.

“Oberlin Writes.” Hmm. Could it be? Indeed, it was. Cartoonist David Heatley drew the cover art for this issue, which includes this very sly allusion to an image from my memoir Fun Home.

I don’t know whether anyone else will notice, but I’m very flattered. The issue is about all the various writers who’ve come out of the college, and it notes the unusually high ratio of cartoonists among them, including Heatley, me, R.O Blechman, and Josh Neufeld. (Also, though not mentioned in the article, David Rees, Barry Deutsch, and Jason Little.)

Today I spent hours creating a timeline of my life over the past ten years.

That was before I got to this passage in Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf, which I just started yesterday. Actually, I’ve been meaning to read this bio for a while but what prompted me to finally undertake it was Joan Schenkar’s biography of Patricia Highsmith, which I’m also reading. Schenkar begins her effort to describe Highsmith’s life by referencing Hermione Lee quoting Woolf on the impossibility of writing biography. Here’s Woolf:

” Facts have their importance—But that is where the biography comes to grief. The biographer cannot extract the atom. He gives us the husk. Therefore as things are, the best method would be to separate the two kinds of truth. Let the biographer print fully completely, accurately, the known facts without comment; Then let him write the life as fiction.”

I feel very dedicated to the project of writing my own biography as nonfiction. But she’s right. Trying to convey the facts AND the true story at the same time is not for the faint of heart.

I think that I shall never see
a poem lovely as a tree.
But please give me HDTV.

We had to take these two trees down today in order to get HDTV satellite reception. Well. And also because they were too close to the house, and shaded the garden. They were indeed lovely, but so is the open space. And so, I hope, will Rachel Maddow be in 1080p.

Well I’ll be goldanged. Why am I paying for therapy when I can get analyzed here quite brilliantly for free? Thank you to Alex K who identified Diving Into The Wreck as my dream association in the last post. Right down to the “body armor of black rubber,” “the grave and awkward mask.”

Adrienne Rich figures rather prominently in the memoir I’m writing, and clearly this poem has lodged itself somewhere deep in my psyche. Here’s a site that lists comments from various writers and critics about Rich’s 1972 poem. Margaret Atwood said about it in the NYT Book Review:

“This quest–the quest for something beyond myths, for the truths about men and women, about the “I” and the “You,” the He and the She, or more generally (in the references to wars and persecutions of various kinds) about the powerless and the powerful–is presented throughout the book through a sharp, clear style and through metaphors which become their own myths. At their most successful the poems move like dreams, simultaneously revealing and alluding, disguising and concealing. The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.”

I won’t say any more about what I’m working on. I often feel like blogging is a kind of “spilling my seed,” a dispersal of my thoughts before they’re fully formed. Kinda like that puddle of ink in the last post.

Hey, are there any readers in the Twin Cities who might be interested in earning a few bucks to look up a Star Tribune article for me at the library on microfilm? Contact me here!

Thanks to everyone for all the discussion on the last post about Prop 8 and Haiti. I’m sorry I’ve been so absent. I’ve been lost in my own subterranean murk and it’s hard to surface.

I had this dream the other night that I was in a cave full of water. I had a wetsuit on, and I was adjusting my mask because I knew that I had to dive down into the water and swim underneath this big ledge. When I surfaced on the other side, I’d be out under the open sky. Some other people had already successfully done it. But I was really anxious. It was scary to dive down there without really being able to see the way out—I just had to trust that I’d find it. I was having a really hard time psyching myself up. Finally, I got my mask sealed tightly around my face and was about to jump when…I woke up.

I drew you this picture of it. Then I ran upstairs to get my ink wash, to shade the drawing, and on my way back into the office I dropped all five of my jars of watered down ink on the floor.

What could it all mean?