The honeymoon continues. My enthusiasm in keeping this
"journal" is still alive. But for how long? Long enough, I hope.
It is really hard to keep from turning this
"journal" into a dreaded rehash of today's events. I'm going to try.
But it is important to say that I turned in The Pimp in Carolyn Doty's
class. Mitsuo read it last night and thought it was very, very good; he was as
enthusiastic about it as he gets. But he is such a friendly pleasing guy, that
it's like having my mother read it, I fear: I can do no wrong. To even things
up a bit (and also because he made a point of asking), I give a copy to John
S who was fairly and perhaps justly critical of Stones. I think The
Pimp is better, and I will be very interested in hearing his opinion of it.
He'll probably find faults I
wouldn't have imagined, but that's to be expected from this latter day Curtis
J (no, John is better than Curtis-I don't know why-John X sues fairness,
class as Curtis never did. And isn't it queer that John is the one who uses
drugs, whereas when I last knew Curtis, he was a sworn abstainer? Interesting.
As the Folger family says, who'd of thunk it?)
Speaking of John, he read a short story in class today.
It was a quite good, drug-influenced work; very impressive, as I said in my
critique in class. Deborah the wimp (God, what an ADOLESCENT thing to call
someone), she who wrote that horribly negative story about the woman
revolutionary who kills herself all alone, was so impressed she first, in
class, asked John to "ghost write" her acid trips, then afterwards in
the Student Union asked him for a copy. She said it was the only story she
heard in class that she wanted a copy of. What does she do, take creative
writing courses to find copies for personal collection? Is she too broke to buy
an anthology? It is she that I am referring to when I say "that nit-picker"
in my notes.
I hear John's stories and I wonder what the hell I'm
doing trying to be a writer. He does what I can only hope to do. He has his
faults which are very comforting to me, but he's fathoms above me. But all I
can do, they told him on the phone yesterday, is keep on writing, and in class
today I hit on three ideas for prospective short stories. Among them, the one
I'll probably work on first (the one I'm most interested in at the moment)
concerns two brothers about the age of Bill Steinman and Chuck Williams unfortunately.
(The two boys in Stones.) The older brother is mentally retarded, and
thus receives an enormous amount of attention from their parents. The younger
is insanely jealous about this, so he takes his brother out and kills him.
(Actually, I don't know whether to make jealousy the motivation were just
disgust over a brother in such a state.) The title, which is more than
tentative, is Sick Boy. The idea is that the reader will initially
believe that the title refers to the retarded boy, but in reality it's his
brother-sick meaning mentally ill. I might start it now, maybe later, after
finals. The family keeps the retarded boy at home because they really love him
and want to care for him. For the sake of experiment I might write it in the
first person, but it's a heady subject, one that I might not be able to handle
now. No, it would be best to make it your standard third person viewpoint.
One interesting thing-I got up the nerve to ask Toni
N, the gorgeous Toni N, if she would like to study for the Italian
test Friday with me. She says she didn't have time and was remarkably
unenthusiastic about it. I didn't press it further, although I had an
opportunity. As desperate as I am for female companionship, I'm not about to
push myself; maybe I'm confident that there'll be another opportunity coming
along later. This was the second time I've asked her out-before it was to Arabella
(no, she didn't like classical music), and another time, just once-I walked
with her on a Wednesday after class. (I passed Mitsuo, Rosemary and Scott with
her-a bonus!) But our communication, outside of small talk in the classroom,
has been nonexistent. I did gain insight into one facet of her personality,
however-a good deal of her family, parents included perhaps, are dead. Very
interesting. This could explain her aloofness. She will be taking Italian next
semester, but a lot of other classes too... It looks hopeless. Probably because
of this, I telephoned Beth B this evening-she wasn't home. I left a
message, and if she will return it, it wouldn't be to my avail now, for Steve
is talking (and hyena-ating) to LA John Sigelhoff just now.
After I called Beth, Steve and I watched a film of
Dorothy Parker’s short story The Big Blonde. Very depressing. Hazel, the
protagonist, flutters from man to man, a hot potato of an ornament. Whether it’s
her fault or his, she can't hold onto a guy, and finally she unsuccessfully
tries to commit suicide. Her life is a continuous exercise in superficial
futility-she must act happy to have companionship, but she can't keep either
one. It was on KQED's Great Performances showcases, very reminiscent of a
lighter story of the same period-Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair,
which has also recently been filmed with Shelley Duval and Bud Cort. Ah, them
roaring 20s. And I am so pissed off a KQED for letting their contract to show
Monty Python expire without a fight. They can just go under now. Even opera
telecasts alone are not worth suffering these idiotic pushers or, as they
called them 80 years ago, drummers.
Well, it's been nearly an hour that I’ve been writing,
and I have to go study for the first of three tests this week (in French
phonetics). And since this is the last piece of paper I have at my disposal, I
must close before the page ends. So, it's 12 min. to midnight, my mom is in
Oregon, this blue pen has just about had it. I keep screwing up words and God
knows where I'm going. All in all, it’s just another day in the life of Chris
Folger.
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