Laurence Vail

Notes:   Who was Laurence Vail?  Why do I identify with him?  How pretentious is that?  How dare I engage in Manque Business? These are the questions I will deal with tomorrow, or down the line....

.........I woke up at 5am, an hour ago, with the idea that I had to clarify or continue with the above mention of Mr. Vail and the Manque business, but then re-thought it.  I am stuck on the idea that I have to justify this Blog.  It goes back to having something to sell. ...That's where I am on that right now. (Laurence Vail, by the way, was an artist, and a critic, the first husband of Peggy Guggenheim, the father of her only two children, Pegeen and Sinbad. Father and children spent the summer of 1945 in the house I grew up in, the year before my family moved in. Lawrence was short on products. He painted, (under-productively, you might say), wrote some criticism, and he painted wine bottles, that is he actually applied paint onto wine bottles after finishing the wine. He was an alcoholic. I refer to the Vail family in my book.)

Robert Sylvester, a columnist in the New York Daily News back in the forties and fifties, (who also drank an awful lot,) and a friend and fishing buddy of my father, illustrator Ray Prohaska, used to write his column with little dots separating the gossip tid-bits.  Like..., Liz Taylor dating someone new.....Tony Bennett tonight at the Five Spot.....The Blues are running under the light in Montauk. ......For awhile, I wanted to be like Sylvester.  I even got a summer job at the News, as a copy boy, while I was in college.  I suppose I used my proximity to Sylvester, such as it was, as an excuse to use the dot dot dot affectation.   

I'm stuck on the idea that because I don't have a product I must therefore present some justification for blogging; some sort of collateral. So, in order to get unstuck, I'll just tell myself that the whole reason for the existence of the Blog as a phenomenon, is for the likes of me to leap over that problem.

When Blogs first came into being, I found one by a guy up in Alaska which was about how to be an Autodidact. That was around the time I started calling myself that. I'd read a book by a young woman, young at the time, titled something like, My Year as an Autodidact. I was well into a life of autodidacticism by then, but I bonded with these two folks, and went into overdrive around that time. I don't remember much about what the Alaska guy had to say; he did have some self-published books to pitch.  I must have read one or two.

......As a one time active alcoholic who stays sober, and reads, I can't help having noticed the amazing growth industry of sobriety memoirs, and can't help thinking that mine would be more interesting than theirs, or yours. These books, though, always leave me with the feeling that the author is stepping into dangerous territory trying to profit from a personal disaster that is only provisionally over, and usually with the self-sacrificing assistance of numerous people who feel safe only in their anonymity.  If you want cautionary tales, believe me, they are out there.  

......

In my early years of staying sober, the first five years being how I usually look at that arbitrary categorizing, I satisfied my yearning to do something creative by keeping a journal, and by reading with a sincere eye toward personal growth. It was the seventies, and the infantile sixties were in their adolescence, branching out from sex, drugs and rock and roll into the human potential movement and its broad array of consciousness changing activities; meditation, journaling, body work, group therapy, and etc;  I partook. 

I kept notes concerning my therapy, my Rolfing, my meditation technique, and my reading. I was in a process, and the process was was one of rehabilitation.  I wasn't someone who had just been a nice guy who drank too much. I had been a self-and-other destructive near-do-well. I was full of guilt. I was in desperate need of self-improvement. 

There is an interesting twist to this story though, in my humble opinion, and that is, that while my active drinking life had become a downward spiral of despair, what revealed itself to be a different path became more and more enjoyable. 

What's for sale here?

I'm sorry, I just haven't invented a better mousetrap, yet.  If I do, you'll be the first to know. I have written a book, it's a sort of memoir-history about Amagansett and my family's life in that little hamlet, but I don't expect to make any money from it. I wrote it out of personal need, though it was like self-root-canal to get it done; to the extent that it's done. I also felt that I couldn't write about anything else because I lack educational credz. That's cowardly I know, but I've always been chicken about being challenged.

Once upon a time, when I was in my early thirties, I had a girlfriend who was very well-off and well connected.  I was struggling to make a living, and one day she said to me, "I'd like to help you Tony, but you don't have anything to sell." I thought that was brilliant. I struggled with the idea for months, maybe years, I'm not sure, but within weeks I signed up for a creative writing course. I thought I'd try to write a book that could be made into a movie.
It would be a Somebody-Done-Somebody-Wrong story.  I wrote a few pages. And a few more. I never completed anything. I drifted around the country like a beatnik, struggled, wrote a few poems, met a few poets and writers, and, while I was still young and good looking, became a project for several talented and well-placed women in the art and culture socio-economic class.
My adventures at that time might make an interesting book, but in the meantime I've gotten very old and I'd be competing with a population of young memoirists just out of Iowa Writer's Workshop and associated places; a population only exceeded by the young abstract expressionists that crowd every mini-Soho in every city in the country that has more than one tall building on it's skyline.  Anyway, to be honest, I have all the notes and letters and if I live long enough I probably will write that What I Did book. 
The reasons for my not having anything to sell, then, are many and varied. It's my intention to go into some of those reasons as a part of the theme of this blog, 'Me, and why I find Myself so Fascinating'.

Introduction.

 

I'm calling this Blog 'Prohaska & Me' for the following reason or reasons.....For one, it could refer either to my persona and my other selves, or to me and my relationship to my father, which was and is interesting to me, or to my interest in the name itself which comes from it having been seen as weird and different by my peers, in my growing up years.

My name is Tony Prohaska.  Yes, there are more than one of us in cyber-space. The one you are most likely to confuse me with is the one in Topeka, Kansas who works for Hallmark Cards. So I'll distinguish myself by giving a few buzz-word type references: 

 

Amagansett:  That's the village I grew up in.  
 

Horses:  I like horses. [And, lately, I've also become inordinately fond of Donkeys and Mules.] 
 

Artist:  My father and mother were artists; see  Rayprohaska.com.  and I've had a lifetime fascination with artists and what makes them tick.  
My Age: seventy.  Born December 28th, 1942. as of; see to the right, below Post Settings.   [allow for age of post.]
 

Personality type.  Eccentric.

 

....Ah, now we're getting someplace. Why am I eccentric? I would say the number one reason for that is that I am narcissistic. I believe that is both a genetic and a transactional family process. Also it may have something to do with the fact that I don't have any children.

That leads to a related fact about my exalted self which is that I am a recovering alcoholic. I am assuming that it's O.K. to discuss something like that in this forum and if I'm wrong I stand ready and willing to be corrected. I've been sober 39 years, as of this past spring. [see; Post Settings] 

The other thing that is eccentric about me is that I consider myself, to some degree which I've never really pinned down, an artist. My intellectual curiosity has always led me toward learning about what makes the creative mind tick. While I have variously considered myself blocked, depressed, deprived, disoriented, transcendent, too good for all of you, not good enough, and failed; ...the failed criticism, or the Manque business, is the one I'm most touchy about, so please don't mention it unless you intend to be extremely gentle; like a gorgeous nurse with a maternal voice, snapping on a rubber glove and saying "I promise this won't hurt."
Is that a little obscene? Oh God, please forgive me! I forgot to mention. I'm also a spiritual person. Yes. It's true. At the moment my spiritual practice is connected to a horse that I'm riding for a short half-hour lesson once a week. It's kind of mind-body work. Not kidding here.

I guess that's it for my first e-blogger post. Over and out.