Neurological Damage Control

Here it is, mid March 2010. I keep looking up and realizing I've lived in this burg (Urbana) for going on nine years now. We had hoped to only spend a few years here, but then things happened. In any case, nine years along on this particular bend of the river. I have to admit, though, that the blog has turned out to be a very decent diary/journal, up until Randy Britton made me de-personalize it for the sake of his paranoia. Well, he's a paranoid person, very Navy. Good for him. As if anybody out there is interested in his life, much less mine.

When I do get people surfing through it is primarily either a subject that brings them, or it is a specific figure from my complex past. Thus, no one is likely to come looking for this particular post, unless I drop a significant subject or name into it.

Someone recently surfed through looking for Lucia Getsi, a person I know very little of but whom my ex-wife, Becky #2, positively hated when she lived in Bloomington-Normal. I guess Getsi must've been on staff at ISU there. I knew her primarily through her poetry. She had made a reputation, having written a book of poems about dealing with her daughter's disease. I forget what it was, but it was something profound and dramatic. As I recall, from hearing her read once, the poetry was pretty good. It is, of course, the politics that tell the real tale here. I believe Getsi was one of the people who panned the Writers BarBQ in the lit community.

So far as I know, though, everybody panned it in the writers community. It was just not too ultra cool for them. We published all over the map, sci fi, fantasy, realism, gay people's lives. Boy, you name it, we thought if it was a human experience it ought to be in the mag. But the Illinois Arts Council thought we sucked. We didn't publish enough Illinois writers. Then we published them but not the right ones. Then we published them but not their significant work. Get the drift? I always thought it was that guy who ran TriQuarterly in the old days, Gibbons?? He had a budget of a half a million dollars a year (Chicago University). We had a budget of a couple of thousand. Yet, we were considered the offensive group that he needed to keep out of the grant machinery.

That was another experiment of Tim's life that was flushed down the drain by those who think they are smarter and better than me. And I let them, too. Because after all is said and done, I just don't play well with the other children. I don't compete and I don't much like people who do compete. My brother Greg ruined competition for me before I was in my teens. And let's face it, when an art becomes a bureacracy, then the people who run it aren't the artists anymore, they are the people for whom power is the reason to be. And that is certainly true in the Illinois Arts Council. And for most of the socalled heavy heads I knew in Illinois letters over the years.

For every Jim McGowan, there was a Larry Lieberman. For every Dave Etter, there was a Dan Guillory. For every Gwendolyn Brooks there was a John Knoepfle. Eek. The good work was so often subsumed by the merely competent but well connected people. And you had to be nice to them and kiss their anuses and pretend like they had something going on or they wouldn't give you shit. And even then they wouldn't give me shit.

So I read my poems every day and I send a few out, here and there. No one seems to actually read them. I never get a comment. I can ask a couple of my friends to read things and comment, and they do. A line or two. But even my closest friends often choose to just ignore my work. The reason for my life.

I have tried to keep my integrity in this art, in these words. As far as I know I have. If this means I have consigned myself to the basement, that is too bad for the species as a whole. Because it means there are others like me, lost and never given the attention they deserve. Who knows what great art and science is out there, in boxes in the garage?

When I die I suppose all this will dissipate. What's the word? Attenuate. Indeed as all lives must eventually become thinner and thinner and then disappear into the ether. Who do we remember from five thousand years ago? Mainly kings and other killers, and the ideas of the gods. And in ten thousand more years will any of this have any kind of substance?

Thanks to the Lady Arianrhod, for this time and for this space.