TINASKY 2

[WildForest at aol.com]

HERE'S THE TEXT OF WT'S FIRST LETTER TO THE AVA.  NOTE THE EVIL DENTIST
BIT...
COPIES OF THE AVA MAY BE PURCHASED BY CALLING:
707 895-3016
JSC

Bruce Anderson, Editor
The Anderson Valley Advertiser
Boonville, CA 95415

Dear Mr. Anderson:

RE: Yr. editorial column in the March 6 AVA: Don't come wimping to me.  If
you're sap enough to buy a book some whore of a paid reviewer recommends, you
get what you deserve.  If your're trying to come on with fems w/glasses,
you're supposed to carry a copy of "The Raj Quartet", or better yet, "Anna
Karenina", let people know you dig Nicola Padgett's cute little cupcakes. Or
are you trying to let on like you've read everything worthwhile ever written
& are riding the cutting edge of European culture? xxx I remember a bullshit
interview with Jorge Borges a few years ago, the roundheel said, what are you
reading these days, Borges said, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, & like that.
 Mr. Anderson, have you read "The Confidence Man", "Pierre", "Whitejacket", &
"Mardi" lately?  (You will have noticed I'm not much of a Hawthorne woman.)
 If your answer to the foregoing was an unqualified "yes", you're a damn
liar, along with your other venial sins.

xxx

Commerical time:  There is a hole in the wall in Fort Bragg called Fiddler's
Green, where under-the-bridge characters desperate for a few pennies sell the
beloved paperbacks they have been lugging around on their skin backs & creeps
with a little more money can go in there any day & buy things like:  Hard
Times, by Studs Terkel, & The Case of the Midwife Toad, by Arthur Koestler, &
Daniel, & Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow, & Big Tall Meaulne, by "Alain-Fournier",
& Wurthering Heights, by you-know-who, & Voyage to Arcturus, by David
Lindsay, & The Rose of Tibet, Lionel Davidson, & A High Wind in Jamaica, by
"Richard Hughes", & Kiss of the Spiderwoman, by Manuel Puig, to name just a
few.  If a book's any good, it should have B.O. from having been next to
somebody who loved it.  Years ago, Mr. Anderson, when you were a little boy &
I was in your present racket, I used to write about how poor & horny I was,
of course, & there was a guy who used to send me currency that had B.O.  If
he was a thief, he was a hardworking thief, & I have always remembered it as
the cleanest money I ever spent.  End of commercial.

Well, after all, Mr. Anderson, "de gustibus non disputandum est", as Ed
Sanders remarked when he fucked the sheep, & there may be people who really
get it off reading what the Atlantic Monthly & the NY Times Book Review pitch
to them, but I would like to make a comment about each of those specific
publications:  a) When Jimmy Carter was running for President, the Atlantic
Monthly had a cover picture, a drawing of Carter & Nellie Rockefeller in a
bathtud together, which I took as a sort of a polite substitute for showin
them in bed in action...I always felt like the Carter administration was,
like, "Hey, Jimmy, Nixon sort of stunk up the White House for a Republican
for a while, so guess what?  There's going to be a Democratic President...one
term..."...& after that I'm surprised that the Atlantic Monthly even exists
to burn down people's interest in reading.  b) About 20 years ago, a
Peninsula doctor named DeKaplany married a gorgeous San Francisco showgirl &
a few days later tied her to their bed & skinned her alive with acid &
surgical knives. (DeKaplany was Kenneth Patchen's anestheticist.  Patchen's
surgeon did not believe in alleviating pain, it builds character.  DeKaplany
has been out of....

***I say "European culture" instead of "western culture" not to confuse the
issue with Gabby Hayes.
...prison & amongst us for many years.)  A KPFA book reviewer made a joke
about this incident on the air, while Mrs. DeKaplany lay in a hospital
skinless, dying in agony; she was within sound of his radio voice, as her
mother and other concerned people were.  The KPFA book reviewer, who's name
was John Leonard, and who later became the head of the New York Times Book
Review, said, "Dr. DeKaplany thought his wife was dirty, so he gave her a
bath in acid."

Further RE:  You should quit with MacNeil & Lehrer & watch Cagney & Lacy,
Laverne & Shirley, to keep uyp with what's really going on.  Like, a couple
of weeks ago Mary Beth found out she had cancer & went to this Gensu-happy
surgeon who was going to whack off her tit, but Chris got her to get a second
opinion, & the sceond doctor was familiar with a new, minor operation that
get rid of Mary Beth's cancer w/o going for the Rockefeller-Ford status
symbol, & this is TRUE, Mr. Anderson, & you didn't exactly hear any huzzahs
from the AVA on 60 Minutes, did you ?  Munch on this scene:  "Well, good
morning, Mrs. Jones, how you feeling?  Say, want to see a healthy uterus?
 Look in the bag here.  Ha, ha, I would have SWORN you had cancer!  Well,
that's one on me, hey?  Win a few, lose a few!"  How many times would you say
that scene has been played in America, Mr. Anderson?  In round
numbers...none?  & on the other who recovered "miraculously" without
treatment from "cancer" ?

But to hell with you, what about me? You must have noticed an iten in Joe Bob
Brigg's column a couple of weeks ago, tangling me up with Susie Bodine, & I
want to straighten that out:  although I appreciate Susie efficiency in
protecting Mendocino county from earthquakes, my only activity shared with
her is hitchhiking, & I'll hitch with almost anybody but Marcia Sloane, & the
only thing I have against hitching with her is that I usually end up sitting
in the bed of a pickup holding her cello.  & furthermore, I would like to
state that I am not one of those scuzzy citizens you see sleeping under our
beautiful bridges (clochards, we used to call them in Paris, i.e., the bums,
not the bridges).  It is true that I did take refuge temporarily under
various ones of our local structures ( & who has a better right? Who paid for
them?) after I was rousted out of my Upper Pudden Crick bunker by a literary
lynch party led, I believe, by the poetry editor of the Mendocino Commentary,
but I have long since made my home in one of the coastal residences of a
long-time patron & admirer, well-known in northern California as the Bicycle
Man, & in addition to privacy I enjoy the more usual American amenities of
Jacuzzi, micro-wave, & cable color TV, & I wish, Mr. Anderson, you would make
some kind of a stink about San Fransisco channel 5's crummy picture quality
when they are on the network, poor dear Angela Lansbury looks like the Ft.
Bragg Safeway's cheese counter.  It is, in fact, due to the beneficence of
the Bicycle Man, as he is known to his future constituents, and not to the
indulgence of any public institution, that I have been building up a TV tan
recently, for the first time in about 30 years...a revelation perhaps
somewhat similar to a Lilliputian lady discovering that Lemuel Gulliver did
not really have the biggest one in the world.  Babycakes & I watch the tube
all the time from our wiggle water bed, & believe me, Mr. Anderson, the only
thing really wrong with TV is that it doesn't get the dishes done; believe
me, Mr. Anderson, a fortune awaits the woman who invents a combination
TV-clothes & dish washer-dryer-vacuum cleaner, so we can lie in bed & watch
the Hill Street Blues clean things up around the house, or around the blind
as it is in my case.

The other night we were watching a flick called "Welcome to Hard Times,"
based on the early Doctorow novel, & it had somebody's idea of a heavy cast
headed by Henry Fonda, & it  was very reminiscent of "The Oxbow Incident" 40
years ago with a heavy cast headed by Henry Fonda (Harry Morgan, Dana
Andrews, Anthony Quinn, in his first "dramatic role" Academy Award winner
Jane Darwell, Harry Davenport, & William Eythe, who later directed the only
production of Mel Torme's musical comedy "Break it UP" whihc is about the
antique business, the greatest title & subject for a musical comedy I ever
heard of after my own Orwellian phatasmagoria, "Blair!", & can't you just see
it done in Mendocino Village by all the usual gang? )), & it was obvious that
somebody had seen the quality in Doctorow & tried to do with "Welcome to Hard
Times" what somebody tried to do with "The Oxbow Incident", but it was even
worse, & it made me wonder if Doctorow was able to do it in the novel...make
it palatable...madey so; it might be less ridiculous with your mind making
the pictures instead of seeing them on the tube.  I haven't read "Welcome to
Hard Times" yet.

The first time I read Doctorow, I was reading along in this stinky copy of
"Ragtime" that I stole from Fiddler's Green, & all of a sudden stopped &
thought, wow (I don't claim to be a profound thinker), wow, I thought, this
guy ( & I looked at his name on the cover of the book) is the greatest
American novelist going these days (Anthony Burgess for the english, Graham
Greene is senile) & one of the things he was doing as he went along was to
make me feel the rhytmn of ragtime music by the rhythmn & color & whatnot of
his prose.  In the flick they didn't attempt to do that at all with their
visual montage, altough it would have been easier, & they left out the
central thing in the novel "Ragtime," which comes on like this:  The daddy
takes his kid to a Giants game, & the kid likes it, & the daddy asks him why
he likes it, & the kid says, "Because the same thing happens over & over
again."  Brilliant?  Look at a strip of movie film, Mr. Anderson, or toss a
stick for a dog to fetch, or try to remember when you were a kid, what a drag
you were, trying to get grownups to play with you.  I can remember when I was
on year old & could never get enough of Grammaw Peace popping her false teeth
out at me, & this is the artistic nervous system of the novel "Ragtime", &
the flick left it out entirely.

Well, maybe nobody explained it to them.

In Doctorow's novel "Daniel", he does an entirely different number...see,
what happens in "Daniel" is, there is this idealistic young Communist couple,
& they get fried as Russian spies who stole American atomic secrets, although
they obvioiusly did nothing of the sort, they were betrayed by the perjury of
their evil dentist friend who of course wanted to save his own skin & besides
definitely had the hots for the wife, & the young couple's son grows up with
this heavy on his mind, & that's the way it is, but then Mr. Doctorow gives
you a little tiny tickle of something...what?...what?...just the tiniest
tickle, as if you could feel it with the end of your finger, or the back of
your mind, & this thing grows through the book, until it's a big black
"reality", as big as the reality the kid started out with, & this is the
possibility that his parents were red herrings...that they took the fall
willingly to divert suspicion from a similar couple who really were atomic
spies, & the evil dentist who betrayed them was actually abetting them in
suicide, doing what they wanted him to do, & the kid finally tracks down the
dentist, who is the only person he knows of who can tell him the truth, & he
finds him in Disneyland, riding on the idiot rides, a drooling senile idiot
who can't remember the truth about who put his pants on, much less anything
else, & loves the kid & (perhaps) everybody.  I haven't seen the flick of
"Daniel" on TV yet, Mr. Anderson, so I don't know what they did with it, but
I'll bet Timothy Hutton is cute.

Faithfully yours,
Wanda Tinasky

P.S.  I admire Phil Donahue for calling himself a "workaholic".  Donahue's
idea of work is sitting under a hair dryer.

P.P.S. For your "read-alikes" feature:  Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the
Dead" & D.H. Lawrence's short story "The Prussian Officer" (& have you read a
really good Lawrence novel lately, Mr. Anderson?)  Mailer also managed to
make a book length story, called, I believe, "Why Are We in Vietnam", out of
something the poet Alta said better on a sign she carried in to a protest:
 SUPPORT THE WAR!  BEAT YOUR KID!