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2001-06-14 | 8:27 p.m.

Listened to Diane di Prima on NPR (KQED) this morning. Wow, she really started to bug me. Apparently she was promoting a memoir, which the interviewer had read. So he'd lob a softball question at her, based on his reading of the book, and she say, crisply, "Well, no." Because she didn't want to answer that question just yet. I wonder if it bothered him as much as it did me. Probably he was inclined to cut her a little more slack than I am. She had a New York thing going on and I have a longstanding problem with New York women. I don't try to---for the most part I try to get along with people, or at least be neutral. And certainly I've made friends with women from New York. Though not many.

I never thought of myself as particularly Californian until I realized how I felt about New York women, and why that was. For example, Diane di Prima was talking about moving to the West Coast and how it opened up new opportunities for her to pursue "scholarship" in "alchemy and psychic healing" and other areas that many people would consider (and even I would consider, painfully) loopy new-age California ideas. But even though I don't have much room in my life for that sort of thing, I am still a lifetime more California than she is. There is something about their WAY that I don't like. A kind of prickliness. I know you really shouldn't generalize in this way, but this is my diary, after all. There is a bluntness about them that you do not, as a general rule, encounter in women from California. It can be a subtle thing, and I do not mean to suggest that California doesn't produce strong and tough-minded women. But we are more� it's hard to describe. Here's an example (if you don't understand immediately what I'm talking about, you're just going to think I'm ridiculous. Fair enough.)

Okay, I'm in a shop in Berkeley with a young woman (I am young, too). She is an old friend of my boyfriend's (though not an ex-girlfriend), so I feel a little awkward shopping with her, to be honest. But I'm showing her around or driving her around, or something. Can't quite remember. I imagine she couldn't drive. She is a born and bred Manhattanite. Famous people over at her house all the time when she was growing up. A famous writer helped her with her homework when she was a kid. Etc.

In this shop, which is one of those incense and patchouli oil places, not my scene at all, though of course having gone to Berkeley I am well-versed in the accoutrements, she is contemplating the purchase of a dress. One of those cheap gauze dresses made in India with mirrors sewn into the bodice. Supposedly she has no money, but she has money to buy a dress, which is one of those annoying quirks common to college-age women (no matter where they're from). She has narrowed it down to two dresses. The sales clerk stands by expectantly. She tells me she can't decide which dress she likes better. She likes them both. Which one do I like?

"Well," I say, "I think the red one looks better on you, it has a prettier design, and the color goes great with your hair."

She stands there a moment, holding up both dresses in front of a mirror.

"I'll get this one," she says indifferently, tossing the blue dress down on the counter.

I say nothing, of course, but to myself I am thinking, Why bother asking me my opinion if you don't give a crap what I think? Most of the women I know and love would never cause an acquaintance to lose face in that way. They would say something to explain the decision, like, "Yeah, but I like the embroidery better on this one." It is a way to spare the other person's feelings. I like that; I think it is merely polite.

Now, you're probably saying that I shouldn't base a whole theory on a silly incident like that one. And you're right, of course. But I've had plenty of other experiences with New York women, and with one notable exception, even the ones I like I don't really like. The exception, it should be noted, is from upstate and didn't move to the city until she was grown. But I remember that day in the store because it seemed so unnecessarily unfeeling. Or maybe she really wanted me to feel snubbed. I couldn't say.

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