Wacky Mode

Found an article about novelist Padgett Powell in a three-week old issue of the New York Times Sunday magazine that I had brought home so Toni could do the crossword puzzle. Powell wrote a critically acclaimed novel in 1984 called “Edisto” and then not much since then except a few short stories. In one called “Mrs. Hollinsworth’s Men” he writes” “Her husband is indistinct.” What a sad thing to say about anyone. I have many character flaws but am not indistinct. Of someone else Powell said, “I think he’s dead but still talking.” Equally sad. How many people do we know who fit that description.

Powell just published a novel called “The Interrogative Mood” that mainly consists of one person asking a second person a series of questions about love and loneliness. Author Dan Halpern mentions that Powell studied under Donald Barthelme, who asked creative writing students: “We have wacky mode. What must wacky mode do?” The rest of the class sat silent, stumped, but Powell answered, “Break their hearts?” I think that means, “Really get through to someone emotionally.” I guess that is a worthy goal for a novelist, or, for that matter, me as editor of Steel Shavings magazine.

Also in NYT magazine: an essay about a guy’s 63 year-old mother going out on an Internet date and wondering how soon to accept a kiss, etc., etc. Someone my age must really be lonely or horny to subject oneself to that.

Met with English professor Anne Balay and one of her students about a project we are going to do together involving the interviewing of gay and lesbian steelworkers. Anne had to go through numerous hoops to win the approval of the campus Human Subjects Committee, but things are a go. All we need now are subjects to interview. Anne wants me to start the ball rolling by interviewing a gay guy who is willing. I’m not supposed to know his name and he will contact me. Anne and I got a demonstration from Tome Trajkovski in Information Technology on various digital recorder models and how to use them. My huge old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder is on its last legs – it’s time to join the twentieth-first century.

One of the questions Anne submitted for approval by Human Subjects was, “Are you a gold card?” I asked her what that meant and it’s slang for “never have had sex with someone of the opposite sex.” Though a lesbian, she has two teenage daughters so obviously isn’t a “gold card” herself. In my retirement journal I wrote about attending an Arts and Sciences Research Conference session where Anne spoke on fantasy fiction “Tough Girls and commented: “With her manly shirt and tie, she looked fetching and sexy in a butch sort of way. The English Department website lists her fields as Women’s, children’s and queer literature. She worked five years at the “Foreign Car Hospital” and proudly wears her mechanic’s shirt around campus. Hope to get to know her better.” Last week I gave her volume 40 with some trepidation and was pleased that she was fine with my description of her. Since I wrote that, she has let her hair go from red to its natural grey and looks twice as cool as before.

In my “Retirement Journal” I quote historian Walter LaFeber, who wrote me that he “assumed that I’d discovered that I didn’t have as much free time in retirement as expected.” In his case he attributed it to the “Warren Harding syndrome of not knowing how to say no.” Perhaps that’s why I have a half dozen projects going simultaneously, including not only the gay and lesbian steelworkers project but editing a book about an Hispanic matriarch called “Maria’s Journey,” helping Sheriff Roy Dominguez write his autobiography, an oral history of IU’s FACET program (honoring teaching excellence), writing books reviews for Magill’s Literary Annual, and helping Modern Languages professor Eva Mendieta publish work she has done on the history of Mexican-American mutual aid societies in Northwest Indiana. I was not ready for retirement, and as my friend Paul Kern put it, calling my musings a retirement journal is a misnomer since I’m not really retired.