Julia Vinograd, the bubble lady

 

Sometime before 2018 I bought a lot online and one of the books was this one by an author I had never heard of before. Then in March 2018 my family went to SF for a family vacation and while in the city I made a point of visiting The Beat Museum and City Lights Bookstore. At The Beat Museum I found a better, earlier printing of this book and bought it. 

Then I started to do some research on this poet. The bubble lady. A Berkeley, California mainstay. A poet who lived off her annual - and I do mean annual book sales. She produced a book a year and lived off the sales of her books that she hawkishly did as the street poet she was. 

As amazed as I was at her output, I began to look for and find copies of her chapbooks. THEY interested me in ways that her later books didn't. The ones produced by Zeitgeist Press didn't have the same zing (for me) as her earlier ones did. But, the later ones did provide her with a steadier income which, as a street poet, is what she needed most. 

Sadly, later the same year that I happened across her book at The Beat Museum, she past away. 

I continued to seek out and get as many of her chapbooks as I could find before the prices - well, they began to get ridiculous. 

Julia's legacy truly began after her passing. A volume of her collected work appeared,A Symphony for Broken Instruments: Selected and Unpublished Poems by Julia Vinograd was published in 2019 (haven't gotten it yet), a documentary has been made of her life. She has a lifetime of friends and admirers who are not willing to forget her anytime soon. Nor should they. She made some astute observations about culture and life that remind me of early Frank Zappa. Darn near painful at times. 

It's all rabbit hole from here

 Take a book, a signature, a bookstore (in say - Brooklyn) a publisher (hobnobbing in Austin, TX) WRITE BLOODY PUBLISHING and you have the framework of a dive into a rabbit hole of deep and meandering context leading to either some interesting conclusion or 

I like how Franny's signature swallows her written name. 

or another blog entry which may, or not, have any connection to this one.

Books that need to be turned into films

Tim Sandlin's first novel, Sex & Sunsets, ought be made into a movie. It's better than the three books of his that have been turned into films. Yes, it's quirky but come on, in the Post-Twin Peaks world we live in, quirky is GOOD.

Hey filmmakers, get on the stick! Turn this book into a film already. Katie Holmes as Colette. Come on people, use your imagination! This book is dying to become a film!

Bookgasm returns - yes, I have a "problem"

 Once upon a time the milk crates in the photo were my book cases. Some of them. At my worst I had more than a dozen such plastic cubes before we were able to get wooden book shelves. 

There's a video I have watched a number of times and it has to do with two people who meet at a wedding reception but they are way off the outside of the entire affair and they strike up a conversation - it's about 20 minutes long and I find it sweet but that's not the point - early on the woman talks about how she has drained the battery in her phone because she kept checking it, basically to not be bored with her surroundings, and she then admits "I have a problem" and the way she says it just strikes me as both humorous and truthful. 

So, yeah, I have a problem. I have BOOKGASMS each and every time I go into a library or a bookstore or a flea market or a thrift store or a little (free) library. Anywhere there are books to be surveyed, I can be found surveying them. 

I live in an unopened book store. I don't think my wife would argue with this assessment although she would also say she never agreed to do so - so, I have some issues to deal with. And several years ago I abandoned this blog to focus on my chapbook blog but I am back because I am going to use this blog as therapy. To ween myself, and/or prepare myself to open an actual (someplace other than where I live) bookstore since I have been collecting for decades and can never read them all. Not in this lifetime or the next. 

In fact, I have to say, I have been gathering these books for the purpose of dispensing with them one day. They struck my eye or they were signed by author or they were important books by neglected authors who critics love but readers are not clued in on. Books for folks NOT the general public. And "I have a problem". I can't say no to these misfits, these orphans. 

 "It strange what happens with old books? They choose you. They reach out to their buyers – Hello, here I am, take me with you. It’s as if they were alive.” From The Nautical Chart by Arturo Perez-Reverte Page 53

Once I post this I am going to go back to re-read this blog in its entirety to capture the aroma of my original intent. And then, I will proceed.