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.