My first residence after college was sharing the upstairs apartment of a house in what was an Italian neighborhood by day and Black ghetto at night. Here goes:

Twelve-hour drive, from Dayton, I guess, on Friday. [This was in the blue Buick Skylark I was purchasing from my father.]

Saturday, swimming in the campus pool at Harpur, and then a string quartet concert with Kara. Sunday at her parents’.

Next Friday (did I oversleep work? Got a call from Bob at 8, to my chagrin). This turned into the steak-in-the-rain event with Esperanza that ended at Howard Johnsons to eat and then back to her place, where D-Man was unexpectedly sitting in a chair. “They make fantastic dancers, and I slink into depression.”

And then, after a brace of empty pages, comes “Tromping Through the Wilderness with the Choir” as a long prose entry before my futile flight to Montana and Utah and back. Much muck here, as well as some sharp flashes that have been woven into my earliest “professional” poems. Much of the rest wallowed in self-confusion.

My house? [Susquehanna Street, presumably.] Nikki’s strand of bells above my bedroom door, her candles, my T-shirts and bellbottoms, her gift of Lili Kraus playing Mozart.

Includes mention of a letter, where I read “Nikki” but not the “good-bye” – when I read it aloud to D-Man and Al (ah, not going by his usual “Thor”), both responded, “That sounds bad.”

My own bit, to self: “Do I want you? I don’t know. I despise you, but I am you.”

Wound up taking the following week off, the futile Montana trip.

She asked why they wanted her back. They see her throwing her life away. As for me? I saw her running away from what she saw as an empty life. “I’m supposed to do in two or three days what I couldn’t in 1½ years? It’s impossible.”

She buys expensive dresses she’ll never wear.

Great Falls “looks like any Midwestern city, except that the lawns are better watered and the people are friendlier, probably because there aren’t as many of them.”

At breakfast, a conversation with a woman psychologist. I got around to mentioning Nikki.

“Is she spoiled? Does she pout (or get upset) when she doesn’t get what she wants? … She needs psychiatric help.” Unprompted.

She needs to do something on her own. We need to commend what she does right. In giving her attention for doing something bad, we may encourage her more whenever she seeks attention.

Lyric poems lack maturity, Yellen said. But these aren’t poems, I’ll confess, they’re teardrops.

My freedom’s shallow, unlike my sorrowful loneliness.

~*~

Three aged yellow teletype paper letters were also folded into the notebook, all lower-case, undated; one to Ostrom, written on a Sunday afternoon. Mentions swimming a quarter-mile three or four nights a week, playing violin, and getting ready to hear Ella Fitzgerald that night.

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.

The first five spiralbound volumes reflect much of my thinking and experience underpinning my novel Daffodil Uprising, yet lacks many of the human sides of the story.

As you’ve noticed, none of them stand as journals or even systematic reflections, although one notebook opens, “I resolved the conflict between egotistic drive for position, for empty status, and intellectual quest,” arising from my decision to step down as arts editor at the Indiana Daily Student early in my junior year. Packman was among the first I consulted in making the move.

That volume, with an IU cover, does have my Men’s Residence Center address sticker, indicating I took my film course the spring of my junior year, rather than in my senior year. The first half has detailed notes taken during films, and my relationship with Nikki was in full force, though my record is only – apparently – class notes or scribblings while viewing, starting with Renoir’s Grand Illusion.

~*~

I was still far from journaling,

That would switch with the sixth volume, a book that starts out in Bloomington in the fall of 1968 as college class notes, but ends (after a big gap) in my emerging turmoil in Binghamton. That is, June 1970, the beginning of what would be a fervent, transformative decade for me: Bloomington, Binghamton, ashram, Fostoria, first marriage, Bloomington again, and then Yakima.

Two of the previous notebooks originated in the winter and spring of 1970, the second-half of my senior year of college, but with this notebook I was finally out on my own, my first full-time job, paying rent, owning a car, in despair regarding my first lover.

Revisiting this, I expected that much had been closely gleaned for the novels and poems.

I was surprised by how much hadn’t.

~*~

What strikes me, looking back, is the neurotic frenzy of those years, even before adding in the evenings of concerts, operas, lectures, and so on. Just where was my sense of direction? Or was it more likely escape?

These notes were from a grad-level seminar, Frontiers of Public Policy and Action. Classmates included Brian Loveman, George Strump &/or George Stein, Paul Wogaman, and Major [his given name] somebody.

Takeaways:

Selecting one form of action as policy does not preclude other possibilities. So what causes policy to limit choices?

Soft constraints = a matter of choice, which leads to difference.

Hard constraints = invariance, operating across all political systems, including political inequality.

We assume that a dollar is a dollar. But is that true when dealing with the public treasury?

What happens when a dollar of yours is used to harm you? When you are taxed to harm yourself?

A public good may become a public bad.

A political price is assumed in all political systems.

Capabilities = potential assets.

Limitations = political liabilities.

Every decision reflects these.

With multi-tiered political systems, the concept of commons becomes ambiguous.

The bribe = the rich get richer; the poor, poorer.

Public entrepreneurs. Public goods and services.

Behavioral theory as an alternative to top-down management perceptions.

Unity of command: limited span of control. A belief the organization is always directed toward the center. (As for a bell curve?) (Or that which deviates from authority?)

Bureaucratic disfunctions. Formal versus informal policy/action.

Rules of procedure may dictate the solution.

Medieval epistemology quite at variance with contemporary perspectives. As in, spirits as an opportunity for Truth to be revealed, as well as magic and myth.

As for those who are negatively affected by an action (externalities) = direct consequences of actions.

A bilateral monopoly = oligarchy or other monopolists.

Water policies in the West as an example of a local matter that exerts much wider influence.

Trade associations within public agencies …

Dynamic of a hidden hand, an equilibrium without direct intervention.

How do we assure that rivalries between cities, states, or nations work toward a common good?

The aristocracy of the South became a military caste. State military colleges in South, not North, Midwest, or West.

Can bureaucratic professionals regulate their superiors? Or is a self-centered careerist more interested in pleasing the superiors who control his promotions?

As for strong client relationships?

Is what we’re buying with tax dollars in the national interest? (Block grants versus categorical grants.) Are these grants or are they purchases? Are we buying what we should?

Taxing capacity = real jurisdiction.

Politics as a subset of corruption.

Public education as a public good yet to the individual’s advantage.

Monocentric decision-making processes in a large city lead to

• Moves toward common, central preferences. (Bell curve, with a tendency to lose information on different interests.) Also, what is necessary to put together a minimum winning coalition?
• Deterioration of public services, along with decomposition of neighborhood, fundamental social change.

Mafia as a shadow bureaucracy versus government collective action.

~*~

 From Spiralbound Daffodil, with commentary from now.

My last two surviving college notebooks, from the period just before I began personal journaling, nevertheless offered some clues to my state of mind at the beginning of the ‘70s. From the cover, I see I lived in I lived in G253, an honors dorm in the Graduate Residence Center. Yes, some undergrads were allowed.

Terence Martin turns out to have been on his way to a distinguished career he ended as a professor emeritus. “His first book, The Instructured Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction, became a classic study of how Americans wrote fiction in a society deeply suspicious of the imagination.”

In addition to Seth and Diane Rubinstein/Rubenstein, my classmates included Monroe Anderson, Julie Harvey, and Jeff Hersh.

The reading list:

• Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Tom Wolfe Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test (which was largely about Kesey)
• Kurt Vonnegut God Bless You Mr. Rosewater and Cat’s Cradle.
• Robert Coover: The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
• Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
• Joseph Heller Catch-22
• John Hawkes Second Skin
• John Barth Floating Opera
• Donald Barthelme Snow White
• Thomas Pynchon V
• Ishmael Reed The Yellow-Black Radio Broke Down and the Freelance Pallbearers
• Peter S. Beagle Last Unicorn

In retrospect, I’m seeing how much this course shaped my own attempts at fiction. Do note that there were no women and no Kerouac on the list.

For a closer look at the course and the authors, see While Their Novels Were Still New in Thistle Finch editions.

~*~

Mention of AFSC in Dayton – draft counseling?

Natt Thompson may have known Joe Elder.

Roy and Alice Leak or Leaky, faculty from North Carolina.

~*~

End matter had a page of journalism recruiters on campus, February 17 through March 11, from Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Journal, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Lindsay-Schaub papers (Decatur, Illinois), Louisville Times. Unfortunately, a wave of layoffs shortly afterward meant the job interviews were for nil.

There’s also a listing of Chekov pages for my Russian lit course (though taught by the Russian language department, the readings were in English).

Another page sketches plans for a “cell in the woods,” something with a glass roof and a cot or hammock. Buckminster Fuller had his geodesic dome; I was playing with a square-turned-diamond (from the gable end), the bottom corner sunk into the ground, diagonal width 12 feet at ground level – the overhang would leave two sides sheltered. Maybe I’d stack firewood there. The cot would be at one end, rather than the workbench I expect.

~*~

 From Spiralbound Daffodil, with commentary from now.

 

In one notebook, only the first eight pages were used. The remaining pages remained blank. Somehow, I was now at Indiana University, Bloomington.

I’m confused about the time of these entries. Page 2 opens, “Tiempo comes out this week: it is beautiful, austere, and masculine. Will the effort to excise the cobwebs, the Romantic [Victorian?} cancer from this God-forsaken place be worth the effort?” On page 4 there’s a bracketed [November 14] entry, “at breakfast time, the puddle was frozen. At lunchtime, a butterfly flitted in sunlight; I thought it was a falling leaf.”

Yet the entries have me suspecting the entries might actually be from early spring or later, when my love life was in turmoil. The only notation on the opening page was a pathetic: “Poem to Nicki. Can I be your older brother / if I cannot be your lover?”

There’s also a description of our visiting Toad Hall with my sister and our driving to Bedford, with the Hoosier hills creased by naked trees and framed by blocks of farmed fields, rocks cut away by creeks, golden fallen leaves, and yellow cut limestone. Also, Cezanne quarries with mottled gray skies.

Still, these details also would fit November.

~*~

My reading stack included Steppenwolf, which I read half-drunk on one of my first bottles of wine, as well as Leviathan, Dark Ghetto, Hostettler’s Amish Society, Morning Watch, Einstein on Mozart’s piano concerti, the usual studies grind, Neibuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, and the Kerner Report.

Story idea: Levithan (or the perfect ruler): the sovereign as an omniscient computer. [Remember, this was at the end of the ‘60s!]

~*~

My primary focus was on Nikki or, more accurately, her absence. In the years since, I had forgotten that we had ongoing struggles long before the final split.

“The library on Saturday night is quiet: a great escape from couples.”

[I see I was using colons the way I now use dashes. One seems literary, the other journalistic, often as a substitute for parentheses.]

Sunday morning is for the purest music: Mozart piano concertos, the Shostakovich preludes, Herbie Mann, Beethoven’s sixth.

And then:

“This week has been weird. Nikki’s decision [whatever that was], then all night Wednesday after our tearful walk. My feeling suicidal playing dodge ‘em with cars. The beauty of being together, skin against skin, her breasts pressed into my arms. Pale sunrise, lavender against blue. Gut-torn scars exposed again. The same lines Fay gave. ‘But I’ll still want to know where you are, too, and know what you’re doing.’ ”

[Funny, neither of them followed up long on that.]

“She is so fucked up, makes herself unhappy when she should be the happiest,” despite the humor that makes my friends think she is so funny. … but I really don’t know her yet. …

“Her chemistry is different. She smells and tastes so different from other girls. Maybe it’s Jewish.” Hmm: “Fay and I had an unspoken language Nicki & I don’t. But Nicki is more human, more sensitive, more the artist and intellectual.”

More the child, actually. If only she would grow up Yet “she stabilized me …”

“Running the door into Paul, the pianist who has never heard of Von Karajan, as he carried hot chocolate.” Who was this guy in my dorm?

Or Jack, “who does not understand literature. I read him a few excerpts from Steppenwolf and understood nothing. Intellectual jerk.”

~*~

Artists do not make contented cows on the sidewalk.

As I was going to buy a baby-congratulations card:

Who might the mother have been? Kathy H?

three blue baby buggies
pushed by three
student-type mothers

Now I see that Nikki and I were having troubles before my trip to Florida. The trip, even so, went swimmingly.

Vietnam
Love it
Or leave it

Other bits:

The worst profs I’ve had hold doctorates from Ivy League schools.

One poly sci course offering was about why politicians must tell lies, keeping their constituencies in ideology and darkness.

Two nights a row, meatloaf. On third day, at lunch. The dieticians serve what no one else would dare do.

The best part of any book is the last half. The author has laid all his piddly groundwork: he is now ready to move, if he can.

Really?

Trout Fishing in America: big writing now. [Maybe this was my first awareness of the work, from a reference in Newsweek or Time, rather than actually having the book, something I think happened in my Montana trip in the spring of ’70, after graduation, about the time I started journaling seriously.]

This campus is filled with a bunch of would-bes: would-be writers, would-be lawyers, would-be scientists, all pretending and preventing others from getting ahead. Rah, mediocrity!

Conversation with V.O.: basis of Hobbes and of Kantian ethics is an assumption that good and the maintenance of the state are one and the same. … His wife is teaching what looks like a fantastic course on urban affairs, very problem-oriented …

Make every minute count. It will soon add up.

“I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.” – last words of Adolph Eichmann, Nazi leader.

Her family’s Lake Worth rural route address and phone number occupied my back page. The ranch was essentially West Palm Beach.

~*~

From Spiralbound Daffodil, with commentary from now.