DELPHI SCRIBBLE




Crossing from the Northcote Shopping Plaza to the older market section revamped by the Aldi store, I don't immediately recognise the tall man in shades as Andrew Sant but it's him alright, obviously so when he removes the sunglasses. What are you doing here? he says --it's Thursday : shouldn't you be sitting in a cafe near here writing? I'm going there now, I say, --done my shopping… Just doing mine, he says… Ive been in England for a month, I say… I'm going later, he says --how was it? I'm pulling a face, composing a proper reply… You didn't want to come back! he says --adds : I know how you feel, haven't got it as bad as you but I know exactly… I begin explaining & describing :  Got further into the West Country I'm forever dreaming… discovered more people & places & art & beer… you know! He smiles & nods, shakes my hand again, --got to go, he says… One day when we're both in England, he says… Yes! that'll be great!

On the spur of which I speed through the run-down arcade, blocking nostrils to the combined fug of Vietnamese nail repair salon and Greek fast food, onto High Street , cross on the lights & whaddayaknow see Pi O at the tram stop, saluting me I think, so I respond, "hello again" forming on my lips but perhaps it was someone else entirely he'd acknowledged, -- he's turned to the kerb as I pass full-tilt for the Delphi… Two whom I could imagine bumping into are Lloyd & Trimble, locals after all, around & about my own cafe & the Northcote Social Club & the old Town Hall et al --the Village in other words --the Greek village --but oh no, suddenly overcome by the image of the Widow's beating & stoning in Zorba the Greek --Irene Papas --what horror! --and then killed! --first time the other night seeing it again for many years --superstitious, bloody-minded, pre-modern, peasants-- islanders, just like Anne Axenskold was saying, treating me to afternoon tea, the day before I left Weymouth for Australia couple of weeks ago, talking about Portlanders in same tone of voice as we've reconnoitered Thomas Hardy's & JC Powys's weird & wondrous characters, --that other tribe across the Causeway, mysterious & hostile not the half of it…


[7-May, 2015/ 27-28 June, 15 tweeked]



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MORE ART CRITICISM

Regarding John Hubbard (in Dorset)

from the Journal[English], Journey 07
Tuesday, 9th October (...) Abed,11-05pm. Nothing much doing in Dorchester -- For a start the spitting rain of Weymouth had become heavy downpour in Dorchester --no chance, therefore, of following the stream into the countryside abutting the town but hidden from it (in the sense of this countryside surprising one when one comes upon it so close to the town centre) -- We visited the Museum wch. was showing paintings by John Hubbard but the thought of 6 Pounds entry x 2 for an exhibition of aerial views of Dorset several of which we could see through the entrance of the gallery room put Naad [Bernard Hemensley] off & therefore me too -- But cards & catalogue of earlier show were inviting --
At Library later on I researched [Googled] John Hubbard and was happy to find his story : from Connecticut, came to UK in 1961. . .He's in his late 60s [70s actually]. . .When I saw Naad again I told him JH was one of ours. . .references to Peter Lanyon, Mark Tobey, Maurice Graves, Zen & Taoism, Chinese poetry. . .Mentioned in dispatches by Peter Fuller. Say no more. The unexpected gift of this Journey. I have his e/mail and will probably follow up.

from little jottings notebook, at the Blue Raddle, Dorchester
Wednesday, 10th October. As luck wd have it (luck? --this is synchronicity, non?) I met the artist, John Hubbard, and only could have done so had we not attended the show y'day and only didnt because we thought entry was 6 Pounds and the view from the doorway was of aerial views which we thought would amount to a couple of paintings on each wall of a type that might not not detain us --
Spoke to JH
tall man, green jumper, runners, corduroys, angular face, distant american tinge to accent -- I'd been aware of him & a woman he'd greeted with hug & kiss -- That's not Dorchester, I thought : he might be the artist! -- When they came alongside (I was riveted by a charcoal of Dartmoor, intrigued by sub-title "The Inland Sea") I listened a while to their conversation then when he caught my eye (and the term "psychogeography" ascribed to Iain Sinclair tickles me again --that intersection of energies wch. can be mapped, wch. actualises what we call synchronicity --& how appealing is that?!)(and isnt that already available --the principle established by Konrad Bayer "map of his head"?) I smiled & sd I apologised for "eavesdropping his conversation" (he was telling his friend that the small oils on paper were done in Sutherland --in Scotland? or did he say that friends of his or children had become fascinated by Sutherland wch. I took to be Graham Sutherland), and sd how much I liked the charcoal -- He said it was alright to eavesdrop : he was "talking for me as well" -- It's always nice to meet new people, he said --I said I'd looked him up on the internet, loved the Rubens detail wch. I'd magnified to the maximum --loved the shape & flow of the tree in the foreground -- Also said I'd picked up on a reviewer's ref. to Peter Lanyon --he was a friend of mine, he said -- With that ref. in mind I'd wondered if I was looking at aerial views? -- He said people often sd. that but he "most strenuously rejected [he] was doing that" -- "Mine arent aerial --they're from the ground up!" -- I told him I was from Oz -- He said he had a picture in Australia -- in Ballarat? I asked [according to internet] -- He thought about it -- yes, there, he said, but s/where else, at the gallery in Melbourne -- I said I'd look out for it -- I congratulated him on his show, left him to his principal admirer and said to a woman who'd approached him same time as I did : sorry for stealing your conversation! Not at all, she laughed, I can talk to him now! -- Sense then of a local art scene --

from the Journal
Thursday, 11-10-07, in the conservatory, 5pm (...) Re- John Hubbard -- It was flicking thru catalogue of charcoal drawings in the Museum foyer that caught me -- Naad thought we'd seen his work years ago -- and knew s/thing of him, e.g. Abbotsbury Gardens, designing a garden -- And when I looked him up on the internet I had all the confirmation I needed. It's always been an imperative to connect with &/or contact the local [Dorset] scene -- [Jack] Clemo back in '87 or '90, the Powys family, the Portland gallery/Margaret Somerville, Anne Axenskold, the Canadian painter [Marie Laywine Cooper, in Abbotsbury] et al -- John Hubbard is part of that home-making for me and by extension for Naad also -- I found an e/ contact for him on his web-site wch. decided the issue : I now had to see the latest show, aerial views or not!
Couldnt believe that the show was free entry --what a faux-pas previous day -- And then deducing the older, tall, grey-haired chap in green jumper & runners was him --darting around the gallery, greeting a woman admirer & guiding her from one painting to the next -- Had to be him! --
A chap in waistcoat over white shirt, a moustachio Bootsy & Snudge character, was the first to introduce himself --a fan evidently who referred to previous [of JH's] shows -- And so when JH & woman friend came alongside I just had to say s/thing!--
I like the Dartmoor charcoal very much, I said, and also the 4 small works adjacent -- "From memory" or "from my head" he'd told his friend -- & "Sutherland" wch. cd have been the region of Scotland or the esteemed painter!
I mentioned the ref. to P. Lanyon in review on internet --wondered if I was looking at aerial views? Lanyon a great friend but no, he "strenuously" denied that his pictures are aerial -- my look up not down! he said -- For example, the large cliff & sea & sky painting I heard him describing to his friend -- I mentioned Lanyon's Mullion Bay in Melbourne --he seemed to know it and agreed people looking at Lanyon could interpret his own work in similar fashion --
I told him how taken I'd been by the Rubens (detail) on the internet --the sensuous foreground tree -- I'm sure we'll talk anon. . .

Sunday, 21-10-07 [Melbourne] (...) I've enjoyed reading & re-reading John Hubbard's catalogue note for his Spanish paintings & drawings (Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster) earlier this year. I'm particularly touched by the reference to Dorset & Cornish locations juxtaposed with the 20thCentury painting references one accepts as the major tradition & also those refs. to the Ancient Chinese & the Tao --for example, on the subject of the artificiality of horizons, "While I have only been to Tresco [Scilly Isles] twice (and you can't see the horizon within that garden), I have known both Porthmeor & Chesil for over 40 years. I used to divide my paintings into introspective (woodlands) & extrovert (open landscapes) but for some years that has ceased to apply. There is the endless fascination of water, its movement & shifting light is the essence of life itself, as the Chinese realised long ago. it is an important part of the Tao."

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November 3rd, 2007, Melbourne

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS (part 4)

October 4, 2006
Melbourne

Dear Bernard, I'd begun writing my next letter (22/8) a few days before you commenced yours. And of course when the sad but inevitable event of Dad's death occurred, on September 5th, we agreed we'd exchange letters in person when I came to Weymouth for the funeral.
Dad's early influence upon us and latterly his illness has been present at the edges of our correspondence; now his death takes centre stage.
From the late 80s on, when I began to regularly visit you all in England, I accepted he was who he was for all the strife it had caused me and tried, thereafter, to be a friend for him on his walks & in his talks. For some years I think he reciprocated although you always said that how he presented himself during my visits wasnt what he was like usually. You also said that his walks around Radipole Lake bird reserve or on the first stretch of the Dorset Downs had less to do with environment or aesthetics than his own physical constitution, though he could wax lyrically about the experience. Unfortunately any weather less than golden summer kept him indoors. So he really wasnt a walker & philosopher like your Goldcroft Road neighbour Anne Axenskold's late father, Frank Brown, whose two posthumously published books of "reflections" one might have thought would have interested Dad. But Frank Brown appears to have been a contemporary man for whom the references & concerns of tradition continued to resonate, whereas Dad took refuge in the effects of the past : a nostalgist, outide of culture & society. He was increasingly reserved in his interests & opinions with less & less time for other people & the world.
Relating this to The Dharma Bums for a moment : when I first encountered the figure of Japhy's father in the book, a kind of Pan who outdid Japhy in his partying, I seriously wished Dad had been the same kind of turned-on man! Rereading TDB I'm not so sure! And the awful thought arises that perhaps Tim had to contend with me as libertarian rival during his youth? But, Tim left home early, had his own social & music scene and a secret life which didnt overlap ours... An interesting tack, maybe, to account for Japhy in the light of his father's example --age-old theme, of course; fathers & sons...

*

(August/September,'06) Have we asked the question, what & why the attraction to the whole Beat thing, especially the concept of "dharma bums"? I probably can't do better than quote the grab from The Listener, on the cover of my Great Pan paperback, "Adds up to one hell of a philosophy of life"!
Before the Beats one had an idea of the artist's life, fed as much by the 19thCentury images of poets & painters in Paris as anything contemporary or local. "Artist's life" conflated with "student's life", especially the example of the art college student's. You know, I can still feel horror at the prospect , then, of living & working for the whole of one's life in a small town such as Southampton was in the 50s & 60s, without ever experiencing the bliss & revelation anticipated in one's reading. Living in a conventional manner in Southampton was the premature burial writ big : Pete Seeger's "little boxes". Eric Burden's "I just gotta get out of this place" was the anthem of escape!
I suppose London was the obvious location for an English boy's alternatives, but how was a provincial lad to make a life there? And the alternative wasn't altogether defined by getting a start in the literary mainstream either. In the generational hiatus between Beats & Counter Culture there fell our reading, writing, hitch-hiking, emigration... To an extent, the life I lived in Melbourne in 1966 & 1967, before & after I met Loretta Garvey, continuing through the La Mama cafe-theatre years, 1968-69, was my truly Beat phase. Finding a place in the progressivist culture & politics as a poet was as significant to me as gaining publication. That age-old contradiction of opposition & disaffiliation on the one hand, and seeking acceptance on the other. (In that sense, cliche or not, Kerouac's inability to cope with success was a blessing since it always returned him to the world. The novels which record actual disintegration foretell his doom and are part & parcel of his legend. Minutia is irredeemable but Kerouac's Whitmanish accumulation and the drive infusing it is the means of its transformation.)

*

(October 14th-18th incorporating August,06 notes) Tedious to trace one's Beat affinity through forty years but misleading if I dont state my falling out of love with Kerouac in 1969 and the many years in which the Beats were only in the background of my thinking.
In 1969, Henry Rosenbloom, nowadays the publisher of Scribe books in Melbourne, solicited a review from me of The Vanity of Dulouoz for the Melbourne University magazine. He'd heard from one or two of the student poets who'd joined us at La Mama (which since '68 had become the La Mama Poets' Workshop) , namely Marc Radyzner & Garrie Hutchinson, that I was a Kerouac fan. But the politics Kerouac paraded in that book shocked me to the core. In that black & white era of the war in Vietnam and the international youth culture, Kerouac was suddenly an enemy! I damned the book for its red-neck conservatism and the editor rejected my article. He wrote to me that I evidently didnt realize the importance of Kerouac! Me, Kerouac's number one fan? I was hurt, indignant & confused.
I dont think I properly mourned Kerouac's death later that year because of this volte-face. Retta & I, in England now, were visiting George Dowden, the American poet living in Brighton, who was working on Ginsberg's bibliography amongst many other things. He'd taken us to meet Bill Butler, another poet & American ex-pat, who owned the prestigious Unicorn Bookshop. We'd hardly exchanged greetings when Bill, clutching the New York Herald Tribune, asked if we'd heard Kerouac was dead? We stood around gawping at the obituary. Bill was serious & seriously affected. George produced a small, hardback notebook : my new notebook, he said showing it off; I'll write a poem about this, it'll be the first entry in my new notebook. Bill barely glanced at it : I've always found, he said, that one only writes small poems in small notebooks. Quite a deal of tid for tat between them.
Although I recorded a talk on the 10th Anniversary of Kerouac's death, broadcast on the ABC, and wrote book-discussion notes for On The Road a year or two later, it wasnt until 1986 or 7 that the love-affair resumed in earnest! That was the year of Richard Lerner & Lewis MacAdams' wonderful documentary Whatever Happened to Kerouac? There they all were --the oh so familiar names with their twenty years' older faces : Corso, amusing & insightful ("Kerouac had talent but Shelley was divine!"); McClure still the handsome man described by Kerouac... I think Retta, Tim & I saw it together or they saw it in Sydney and I attended by myself in Melbourne. I was exhilerated --skipped the couple of miles from the Valhalla cinema, then in Richmond, home to Westgarth. It was time to begin building my Beats & Co shelf at the Shop. In between his rocknroll, Tim joined the conversation, eventually preferring Burroughs to all the Kerouac he'd borrowed from me --for obvious reason as time would ultimately & tragically tell...

*

It occurrs to me that the viewing of the film coincided with the period I've called my "enlightenment reading" in the mid to late 1980s, when I read extensively in the areas of psychology, religion, & philosophy attempting to find a way around the cul de sac postmodernism had become for me. It seemed to me that personal & common experience was now denigrated, and that personal expression & expressive writing was thought to be passe. It was time for me to turn away from "theory" and re-encounter self & world more or less transparently. Some of my greatest literary pleasures in recent years have been types of memoir & commentary in which questions about life & orientation are the actual basis of the travel, natural history, topographical, spiritual, even cullinary writing at hand.
Larry Schwartz, journalist friend from The Age, said an interesting thing at the Shop today. Why do I love all of this Beat stuff? he exclaimed. Is it because they liberated us? he said. I agreed that they had. And the kind of literature they were writing was one we identified with, I said. So is it our own lives we're reading about then? And are we writing those books? he said. I think that degree of transparency is involved insofar as the author is soliciting identification & correspondence. That's been the case since Whitman but it gathers steam with the Beats and their legacy...
A slim volume I intend sending to you is Kenneth White's Travels in the Drifting Dawn (Penguin,1990) : definitely not the work of genius claimed by the blurbs and perhaps also by the author but White's tastings of British & European places & atmospheres occasionally do convince one that something more suggestive than an adolescent egotism is at stake. I mean, give me Kerouac's ego any day if Kenneth White's Sixties' good times are the alternative. With Kerouac one would flee the pseudo-intellectuals & artists to whom White so readily submits his gift (and he has a gift undoubtedly). But you be the judge --the literary & philosophical references are familiar even where the landscapes are not. You'll think of Basho as well as the Beats...

Love, Kris



Weymouth
Halloween, 2006

Dear Kris, Sleepless early hours of the 31st October --uncomfortable chest easing as I write. The Doors' "Light my Fire" prompts me on Janice Long's morning radio show. Got me to thinking that it was really American music that led me. Kerouac and the Beats came afterwards. It was the mid-Sixties that I turned on to the folk music of Peter,Paul & Mary, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. That was when I started buying records in a big way. I remember having Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" and Dad actually allowing me to play it on Xmas Day, '66 --usurping Harry Belafonte! But the electric music wasn't in keeping, I know, with a family Christmas, much as I was keen to hear my favourite --"Visions of Johanna". (Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were all the rage at Southampton Tech College the year I was there in 1965.)
To think I've been back home with the parents twenty-five years. Time has collapsed, as I did, like a concertina. Whew! I've lived here all that time --apart from when dad resisted welcoming me home to "his" house. Like you, I felt he wasn't the father I wanted. I consciously looked for a father-figure for years --someone who could tell me something. Never found one. I think I felt cast adrift in an unfriendly universe --heightened, possibly, when you emigrated to Oz --and then suffering years of apprehension and existential terror. But nursing Dad along for his last two years we did share something. Poor Dad, all he wanted to do at the end was pull the covers overs his head, sleep and blot everything out. Possibly the metaphor for his life.
He was a solitary man. A man who would've liked to build a boat and sail around the world to a South Sea island, as you mentioned in your eulogy for him at St John's Church.
(11/11/06) One thing that did irk me about Dad's illness was that he would never accept the help of a more healing diet. My low-fat vegan diet might have assisted. Or macrobiotic diet. Or raw-food diet. All of which I know about. But he didn't have any faith in such things. I'm pleased we could accomodate his tastes in what he wanted to eat --cream cakes for afternoon tea! bangers & mash! --he loved mashed potatoes. And although all his life he ate steamed vegetables he couldn't tolerate the taste towards the end. Tho' he liked green peas. I'd try to encourage him to eat a different diet; tell him about miso soup or fresh fruit & vegetable juices, but he didn't want to move in that direction. Ah, well!
Talking of food, I saw our friend Anthony Bourdain on t.v. last night. We've agreed he's a Kerouacian figure --writer, traveller. How much Kerouac was into food I don't know. We know of his love for booze! --but food in TDB was nothing to write home about. Japhy had his bulghur wheat for the mountain trip up the Matterhorn. But when they came down it was a "great dinner of baked potatoes and porkchops and salad and hot buns and blueberry pie and the works." Anyway, the highlight on Bourdain's programme for me --he was in Korea-- was watching his young companion making country-style kim-chee pickles. I didn't go much for eating chopped octopus that was so fresh the suckers on the tentacles were clinging and clamping on to Bourdain's mouth as he ate! Wriggling on the plate! I'd love to make pickles. Get into home food production. Sourdough breads etc. And if I could make amazake myself I'd save a lot of money. Naturally fermented foods are very good for you...

Love, Bernard

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(to be continued)