I
have not even read my second book for this year. Susan Sontag waits.
And Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark. And The Second Plowing. And a dozen
others
now in the care of Nico. The books that I lost. The texts that I miss.
That I
remember them distinctly is perhaps an indication that they are not
really lost
to me. They have served me, and have remained with me, textually. Nadz
lost to
the typhoon Monico Atienza’s translation into Filipino of Arundhati Roy.
It went with their house. How angry I was for a little while. But what
is a book to a house? I did
miss it, but it’s Monico Atienza I miss more. It’s Rosa Luxemburg I miss
more,
more than her little book Reform or Revolution, which can be accessed in the
net, anyway. It is Switzerland I miss more than the stories about Swiss watches and
the Swiss army’s compulsory draft. Lol, they trained all their citizens that
they may shoot at those who want them on their side? Is that what defending neutrality means? Marge Piercy’s He She It I have thoroughly absorbed I live some of it while
Piercy only wrote it. That was my last word to her: Oh, I thought you live what you write.
What will Douglas think if they found out I quarreled with
Marge Piercy over permit to publish? Hahaha. That I dragged Marge Piercy down
to their level or that I upped them? They are just like Marge Piercy. Petty
like kitchen wives always complaining about the costs of things and the
hardscrabble life of the hardworking writer. They work long and hard without
recognition, said she. When it was her poem we were negotiating about, not some
other obscure poet’s! Lecture galore. To tell me that.
When you write to
writers they always assume that they are the writer, not you. We are all like
that, except Sawi.
But I am not a writer. I am just me little girl blue.
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