THIS WRITING LIFE

Listening to the British Library's British Poets CD, which Robert Mitchell kindly gave me the other day because, disappointingly, it was a dud: his expectations of disc 3's WS Graham, Amis, Edwin Morgan, G. Mackay Brown et al, dashed upon the rock'n'roll of Ferlinghetti, Bukowski, Ginsberg, --the American disc slipped incorrectly into the British box-set. And it is a shock on the ear let alone sensibility; the speak easy vs the elocution lesson… The contrast's the greater because one's probably missing Whitman's introduction, from whence the long century of a determined modern cultivation, mostly all free one imagines, even as Ashbery's sestina or Sexton's parables, the colloquial messing up the old poetical.

On the 2nd English disc, Dylan Thomas follows George Barker, and it's his dramatic  diddledy-di which upsets the decorous continuum, as far as annunciation's concerned, from C Day-Lewis through John Betjeman (full of fun, a poetry that sticks in the ear, history recorded via nostalgia and as true as comedy allows), Spender, Auden. Sorley MacLean is different & not only due to the Gaelic (that is, the Gaelic's thoroughly not-Englishness); and R S Thomas in another way. But Dylan Thomas is something else, the strong & continuous flowing, the rhymes & rhythms, the repetitious or better said, the apparent circularity of image & rhyme; in the spirit of Hopkins & Yeats, accessible to their great spirits.

The British disc is an entire lesson, whether or not in the largely bypassed diction --a lesson in the old craft by its late practitioners, the mid 20th Century's sages & stars who were the main men on the shelf when I was beginning, hardly beginning, early '60s ℅ Southampton's public libraries. I got into my own stride by rejecting the lot of them. I was looking for W C Williams not Charles on the poetry shelf!

Listening to the American disc, I can imagine the converse surprise of the American poetry buff, the  horror listening to Larkin or Hughes instead of John Ashbery or Le Roi Jones… And I can hear how Adrienne Rich connects with Anne Sexton & I'm sure Sylvia Plath too. Incantation by which didactic is kept sweet to the lyric. Question : How remain individual (retain eccentric personality) in the vortex of the topical (perhaps the involuntary generality)? How save individual in the maelstrom of the everyday (one's 'particular narrowness' as per Celan)? How prevent the signature American poetry (the declasse vernacular to which all accents adhere, Walt's 'democratic idiom') convoluting to artless prose? My questions, only mine, never finally put away…

(December, 8th, '16)

GUILLERMO O'JOYCE : "MILLER, BUKOWSKI & THEIR ENEMIES"

[23-9-15] A kid, device in ear, lap-top on chair in front of him, ostentatiously sets up in the full sunshine window at Cathedral end of the corridor overlooking Swanston Street. Now dont give me he's our time's Kerouac and that I should be more accepting! JK, remember, advocated "scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy" not well-heeled youngsters with portable computers etc in full view and treading on toes of ordinary people including high rent paying micro-retailers in classic Nicholas Building in the rejuvenated rag trade quarter, obstructing their customers & small parties of visitors with guides describing the history including adjacent lie of the land or people simply investigating our floor, walking up the corridor to look out on the city street below... Which growl, not so irritated as to botch another potential angle to the eternal plot --writing out of the sensational world, the given, on the platter of whatever leads to perception --refers me straight to yesterday's gift, the book Miller, Bukowski and Their Enemies : Essays on Contemporary Culture by Guillermo O'Joyce --described, "[T]his new edition with nine new essays first published in Great Britain by Pinter & Martin Ltd, 2011" (evidently then, deducing from bio/biblio notes, the first edition comprised five pieces, written/published between '68 & the present edition --he's a contemporary therefore, another brother of the time)--

which I continued reading overnight (akimbo with new book, without child's excuse of ill-abed). Spotted it in a general catalogue, hard to miss such a title & uncommon name of author. Open it on Comments on Work by Guillermo O'Joyce. Appreciative but backgrounding the reverse. Next page entitled How Censorship Operates in the United States. I'm immediately reminded of Bill Knott's self-published poetry books in 2001, to wit, "I think every poem in this book was rejected at least once by some magazine or other, and indeed the majority here never did achieve periodical publication. An 'acknowledgements page' would not be very impressive" juxtaposed with the testimonials on back-cover. 'Over three decades of critical acclaim', for example, "It is no accident that the major British and American poets of the 19th and 20th century were outsiders. The most original poet of my generation, Bill Knott, is also the greatest outsider." --Stephen Dobyns, '95, and one could have chosen blurbs from Kevin Hart, Jim Elledge, Charles Simic, Sandra McPherson, Thomas Lux et al --a literary milieu, by the way, which probably appals Guillermo judging by the argument & examples in the piece, Masturbation in the strophe factory : 4 essays on Contemporary Poetry… Not quite in the same bag as Bill Knott but subject to similar frustration. Guillermo includes a note from Harper's Magazine's Lewis Lapham, "My friends told me that if I tried to publish this [essay] I could put my career in a bottle and cast it in the wine-dark sea."  Similarly, Alice Fulton's fulminations from the University of Michigan to her student, David Levine, "I wasn't here this summer, but had I been here and seen William Joyce in your resume, you not only would not have gotten a fellowship but you wouldn't have gotten into this university." Hilarious but horrendous.

On account of what? Guillermo's writing most reminds me of the serious romanticism, simultaneously literary & political, its presumption & pursuit, synonymous with the Young &/or Progressive, even Radical, prospect, once mine too. Unlike Guillermo I was never tested by the commitment which could take one to this or that academic or professional writers' workshop as so many Americans and latterly British & Australians do, although I did teach or facilitate "creative writing" at the community access level for many years... But Guillermo's essays are all guns blazing at academics, publishers, celebrated critics & writers, in short (but at great length) The Writing Industry, --corollary he assumes of the venal & vicious Western Civ, the consequences of whose politics he describes & denounces. He's for the anti-bourgeois often working-class literature, an heir therefore to 19th & 20th Century French, Russian, British & American realism, into which frame the conflation of Bohemian & Beat writing. Outsiderdom opposes middle-class society & culture; the 'little boxes', as it were, enemies of freedom, he poxes & pillories. Anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, promoting a kind of existentialist survivalism against careerism. Yet few of Guillermo's greats were hermits or complete disaffiliates. They were more likely democrats than guerillas, seeking to influence not annihilate. Most contributed their radicalism to the literary or political domain as I said of & to Hans Magnus Enzensberger when we met in Melbourne in 1981, opposing his notion of Australia as tabula rasa ("you can do anything!") as though history & culture were absent or counted for nothing. (Very likely Guillermo would approve Enzensberger's critique of "the consciousness industry" though Hans Magnus was hardly anarchist or outsider.)

[24-9-15] In the chapter on the artist & writer Irving Stettner (1922-2004), whom I surely do recall from a Henry Miller connection including Stroker magazine (via the mail art & small press hook ups in the late '70s), Guillermo refers to "earned innocence, a term invented by Nelson Algren" (p48). Guillermo explains, "It is comparatively easy to be light and carefree at 24 or 34 (….) But how does anyone keep their gusto, verve, humanness when the gray hairs settle in and he has an artistic audience of 14, eats out of tin cans, and buys coarse toiletpaper instead of White Cloud? This is what I mean by earned innocence. In short, how is it that the boy becomes a man, shakes off mentors and becomes a true voice in his own right…" Clearly this is our author's challenge too.

[28-9-15] He sticks with the boy for his estimation of Kerouac's vision, such informed experience predicated upon what Guillermo calls "a host of necessary virtues", thus
"curiosity
faith that we would be treated well by strangers
wonder
awe
belief in our own capacity to navigate in strange territory
total belief in the present moment
ability at a glance to take in the world as a whole
the notion that everything was animated" (p202)
maintained through the decades.

The literature per se doesn't age, only the style (as in 'dated'). Narrative & characters are impervious to passing time, inviolable in poetry & prose --a world complete, truth intact.

[8/14-10-15] Three or four pages of Guillermo's take on Buk, His Own Best Friend, promote the brilliant conjunction of Bukowski & W C Fields, as he says (p56), "Fields and Bukowski are two of a dozen of the truly American voices of this [20th] century. Their lives and their work are instructional manuals on how to convert paranoia into galvanising art." Analogy like metaphor, albeit compositional manna, can also be writer's sure way of losing losing the plot. But Guillermo's on the money here. "Out of a paranoia about the motives of others, they hide money under the rug, under the ice-cube tray, in books, and then can't remember the next morning where they put it. Chaos ensues. they threw up their arms, they curse God and Walt Disney; they tear apart the house. Once, upon returning books to the library, Bukowski spotted something green peeking out of one book, and opened it to find three 20s and a10-spot, huge amount of money for him at any period of his life.this absent-mindedness isn't for lack of concentration; Fields' & Bukowski's concentrations are simply elsewhere. They find the world off, and beneath all the hijinks of their respective art forms, mostly loveless."

Guillermo could have included Kerouac in the analogy. Making another point he notes, "Other than jazz and W C Fields, there are no cultural references in On the Road." (p211) --which has become an American distinction, --says Guillermo, "A Europe that is in rubble shouldn't have much to say [post WW2] about the value of Shakespeare, Diderot, Plato, Aristotle, J S Mill, Voltaire, Goethe, Moliere, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Kafka, etc etc". Evidently Bukowski & Kerouac can begin from scratch. Perhaps Kerouac as Fields removes him from the overall sad set and however many sorry instances equips the figure with viable ambivalence about life, which is how the mystically inclined, Catholic, Buddhist, survive the crazy world.

For Guillermo, Kerouac is "the hero we needed", albeit his post-Road life becomes the martyrdom the others (Miller, Bukowski, Stettner et al) evaded, transcended --survivors each, achieving their three score years & ten, prolific to the end. One's happy to read a Kerouac of technical achievement --Guillermo's analysis of On the Road as a 4 part jazz work (and here's me writing this, ears ringing with Kenneth Rexroth's 1957 Cellar Club recording of Thou Shalt Not Kill (i.m. Dylan Thomas), --the jazz punctuation exploding the word "dead" in the most declamatory section of the famous poem!) amply funds it…

"Each of the 4 sections of On the Road culminates in a jazz scene and does so with such intensity and virtuosity that there  can be no doubt that music is the foundation with which he spent so much time building his book. So jazz forms not only the inspiration for Kerouac but becomes as well his method of construction. Because he inherits no language to recapitulate jazz's vast terrain, he must invent one and this accounts for the freshness and spontaneity of On the Road. Fifty-three years later [written in 2010?] it reads better than it did when it was first published. Each paragraph is organised along the principle of as series of jazz chords with the principal characters -- Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others who receive their solo time wail mightily and brilliantly in the tradition of bebop but don't always make sense…till the reader reviews their rants in the context of the entire novel. This bebop, and I would assert here a host of other jazz forms -- swing, cool jazz such as the version of 'Autumn Leaves' with Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis -- is Kerouac's answer to the slavery (Moriarty would call it "hung up") he finds about himself at all times."

Out of the blue(s), Guillermo's raised up the game from well-drilled sociology to twitching the actual music --sound-shape of existence, thus writer & writing implying & obliging total engagement -- the only hero the rest of us scribes & scribblers ever need.


[fin, 18-10-15]

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, Number 12, September, 2010

Melbourne
16 November/ 30 December, 2009

Dear Bernard,

I've begun watching the DVD of Richard Lerner's What happened to Kerouac? --such an inspiration when I saw it on the big screen in 1987. You remember the story --Retta & Tim caught it in Sydney, on their holiday with Anna Couani, same time as I saw it in Melbourne, and we all loved it --in my case, literally bounding the few miles home from the Valhalla cinema in Richmond --for the relief of it as much as anything --that the Beat life & literature had survived despite the tragic rise & fall of the chief protagonist, and was even now inspiring. I confess, though, the monster fan I'd been in the Sixties had taken a political hit from Kerouac's own, apparently reactionary, mouth in '69 when I read Vanity of Duluoz in Melbourne, and then received an aesthetic broadside in England, after reading Ed Dorn's comment in New American Story (Grove, 1965, bought from one of George Dowden's sales), that "Kerouac took care of all of what the informal range of the personal ruminator can do with our material. He continues to do so. I value his writing very much. But it is only partly satisfying. His syntax is quite dull. It allows the use of the 'I' only one device(...) But the limited presence is perhaps our greatest problem." (1963)
But, back to the film, what a buzz! I was totally energized, like Ray Smith emulating Japhy, running down the mountain --the method we learnt ourselves from Dad, as kids, --Isle of Wight summer holidays --to trust the momentum, without thought &, therefore, self-consciousness & fear! (And years passed before I tried that again --around Port Campbell (S.W. Victoria), goat-footed down the rocks & gullies, early '90s with Cathy. Must be time again for another such descent --which is a bit like saying, time I had another flying dream!)
Young acquaintance James Hamilton leant me the DVD --and it occurs to me he may be thinking of just such a project regarding the Melbourne '60s La Mama poetry scene --like, "What happened to Buckmaster (& Co.)?" The scope could & should be expanded, though the earlier one goes the less likely the subjects will be alive. This was underlined for me recently with the death of Alan Murphy. I'd hoped to conduct a formal (publishable) interview with him, informed by numerous chats we had when he visited the Shop --we'd reconnoitre his memories of WW2 & after, the '50s & '60s Melbourne scene, which I delightedly realized connected to my own forays, since the '80s, into alternative histories.

*
One of the gifts of What happened's second viewing is John Clellon Holmes' conception of Kerouac as "a prose experimenter of consequence who can be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce." The context for Kerouac's originality, says Holmes, is "The interaction of imagination & reality [which] is the source of all literature (perhaps not the Goncourt Brothers or those Realists, Naturalists, whom no one reads) in which the personality of the author, the consciousness of the author, the point of view of the author, never gets into the book."
No shock of the new when it's enjoyed or suffered half a century of amelioration! One needs, therefore, this kind of literary reminder of Kerouac's stylistic novelty. Even I tend to normalize the style as 'talk-write', familiar now in the contemporary practice of both literature & the variety of non-fiction. But when Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied on piano by Steve Allen, you hear the jazz of it --and it's the music of his language, as tho' poetry, which impresses --the texture resembling the process of remembering as well, perhaps, as the way jazz is constructed.
None of that in Bukowski whose talking-writing is more or less as-it-comes but, to use blog-lingo, he's always 'on topic'. Bukowski's facility is that ear-&-tongue craft which knows & trusts to the natural succession, succinctly deployed. No associational runs or fields, nor need there be for the writer narrator he is --just what is, what happened, what happened then, & then...

*
I'm reminded of Bukowski's great little piece on Neal Cassady as I watch the footage of Cassady & Ginsberg at City Lights Bookstore in 1965. "his eyes were sticking out on ye old toothpicks and he had his head in the speaker, jogging, bouncing, ogling, he was in a white t-shirt and seemed to be singing like a cuckoo-bird along with the music, preceding the beat just a shade as if he were leading the parade." (Notes of a Dirty Old Man; City Lights, '69.)
In the footage, Ginsberg's stoned silly, wanting to ameliorate his friend's hostility to the young counter-culture audience. They're in front of a camera amongst a crowd you'd bet were its subscribers. Cassady ("where's the fee?" he says, as though to provoke any hippy anarchists present) can't settle. He's awkward, agitated, speedy, as if compelled to be on show --nervous as one's read of Ken Kesey or Kerouac himself come to that --nervous to express opinion. He resorts to what sounds like parody of Burroughs & Kerouac paranoia & cynicism : "All the extremists, all the civil rights, all the kids, anybody on any side(...) this is all hindsight what we're talking about --it's already too late --the Pentagon's taking care of all... they're killing us all deliberately..."
Ginsberg burbles : "Well, that's the point -- I have no idea who's running the country..." (It's only the point if running the show's important --our holy man's political shadow or his share of politics' own shadow.) As for Cassady --never an easy place to speak outside & think against the consensus. Much reason, therefore, to be jumpy.
Bukowski perceives Cassady as Kerouac's boy : "you liked him even though you didn't want to because Kerouac had set him up for the sucker punch and Neal had bit, kept biting. but you know Neal was o.k. and another way of looking at it, Jack had only written the book, he wasn't Neal's mother. just his destructor, deliberate or otherwise."
Now what a can of worms that is. Off the top of my head : the ethics of attribution however complicit or acquiescent the assignee; the double edge of exemplarity; the downside of fulfilling the mythic life however transformative its promise...

*
I'll close on an entirely optimistic & beautiful note --namely, the letter from Henry Miller to Kerouac's publisher at Viking, written October 5th, 1958, reproduced in the 50th Anniversary (American) edition of The Dharma Bums (Viking, '08), which Karl Gallagher, another Dharma Bum I assure you, recently showed me. (As I understand it, your British edition has Ann Douglas's introductory essay but no letter from Miller, which is a pity.)
The line we always felt existed, as far-flung readers & enthusiasts, between Henry Miller & the Beats --though aspects of Miller also obviously resonate in Bukowski : the pariah-worker novels --Miller's Molloch, for example, a first cousin of Post Office , Ham on Rye, etc. --is here joyously underlined.
The Dharma Bums was the first Kerouac novel Miller read. His letter ripples with praise with praise & enthusiasm. He's led to say that Kerouac "is the first American writer who makes me feel optimistic about the future of American letters. Whether he is a liberated individual I don't know, but he certainly is a liberated writer. No man can write with that delicious freedom and abandonment who has not practiced severe discipline." After many similar compliments, Miller concludes, "Others run out of 'material' sooner or later. Kerouac can't. He's all there is, because he's identified himself with everything, material or non-material, and with the silence and the space between. We've had all kinds of bums heretofore but never a Dharma bum, like this Kerouac. He doesn't throw dust in your eyes... he sings. "God, I love." Take hope, you lost ones --Jack's here!"

All best wishes for the New Year!
love,
Kris

oOo


Weymouth,
25th August, 2010

Dear Kris, Yer 'tis -- the letter that's been so long coming. I think you'll understand that I was absolutely swamped by family events. It was so difficult coping with looking after Mum as she declined following her fall last July (2009) and fracturing her left hip -- which impeded her mobility -- wheel-chair, zimmer frame and stair-lift. And then her Alzheimers.
Everything passes she said. And now she has -- April 3rd. And slowly, slowly I emerged. She released me from her for the second time. It was truly cathartic. Now I'm flowing and blossoming like never before. And I'm ready, and up for getting back to being a Dharma bum.
Having said that, I'm curtailing this correspondence for now. It certainly sustained me. Your letters kept the light flickering within me. I did tell you that it hadn't gone -- that it was still there! But now I fully understand things in my heart instead of in my head -- that poetry can save you, And what is working for me at the moment is the new initiative with my publishing. Stingy Artist Editions lives.
I've not had the head or feeling to publish anything since 1996 --14 years --& now everything --including the publishing --is flowing again. It started with my poems for Mum in July (4 Poems, i. m. Berthe Tawa). And because of that I thought of two further projects. One, for Franco Beltrametti -- a folded broadside -- two of his letters to me -- facsimile -- & two poems I'd written for him. The other publication is for dear friend Marilyn Kitchell --I wonder where she is? --a similar thing --but a folded card. In total I've got plans for a dozen or so publications between now & the end of next year. I'll be ready for 2012!
Big Dharma explosion? Where will the Bums take us? Reminds me of Franco's poem, Crucial Matters (to Robert Creeley), in Three for Nado, by Franco, which I published in 1992 :

come here
see it in print
keep it together
give me a break
and never be done
with all of it

hummingbird
on snapdragon

(?. VI.89)

We'll never be done with any of it! Anyway, Dharma brothers forever!

Love,
Bernard

________________________________________________

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, #6

Melbourne
7-12th, March,2007

Dear Bernard, A delight to have your January/February letter. The late Summer humidity knocked me around --couldnt really write in a concentrated manner. I'd made a couple of notes waiting for yours, though, which I'll include here. Since our last communication I've been reading John Steinbeck whom I always regarded as a precursor for the Beats, at least in Cannery Row. Describing its characters recently to an acquaintance I ineptly used the term "disenfranchised". He yelped disdain and quoted Scott Fitzgerald's contempt for Steinbeck. I hate the disenfranchised, he laughed. I corrected myself : they're not disenfranchised; they're just not bourgeoise! And that's the crux. Steinbeck's characters arent properly working-class either although the fishing-town of Monterey accomodates the bums, the lost & down & out, the whores, the eccentric loner marine-scientist-ecologist. The whole place seems fuelled by alcohol but the marvellous mess of their lives isnt a footnote to alcoholism --it's the real thing; life completely outside of the Protestant work-ethic & the bourgeoise ideal. No sense of respectability or upward mobility, which was the model threatening us when we were young.
Time for me then, this Summer, to revisit Doc (Ed Ricketts) & the bums after a year hobnobbing about Steinbeck with his greatest fan around here, short-story & haiku friend Michael de Valle. Of course I remember you as a reader of Steinbeck in the'60s. I still remember the smell of those new paperbacks --not only the Steinbecks but your other love, H.E.Bates (whom I quickly collared as our time's successor to my master, DHL). This isnt purely nostalgia : we luxuriated in the pleasure of purchasing, collecting, reading these books, apprentice seekers & writers connecting to the wider world! You shocked me, though, when you recently told me Dad turfed out most of your books, including the Steinbecks, when you moved out for your first away-from-home jobs. I'm still shocked.
(14/2/07) My Steinbeck binge is full on : three-quarters through Cannery Row, a third into Travels with Charley, begun The Log From the Sea of Cortez and today Retta gives me Sweet Thursday for St Valentine's Day! Realizing Sweet Thursday was Cannery Row's companion volume I've been searching in Melbourne's second-handers. Rett found it at the book market in Federation Square on Saturday at a stall I'd twice approached earlier only to be told by the bookseller that he was still unpacking his boxes, nowhere near his esses! I complained to Michael, who's been running his own stall for a few weeks, bravely trying to move his own titles. He also promised to keep an eye open for me!
(18/2/07) On page 50 of Travels With Charley, Steinbeck's describing "the strangeness of Deer Isle" --the "sheltered darkling water seems to suck up light , but I've seen that before." I'm thinking somewhere else in America during a life of travels, but then he mentions Dartmoor. And then the coup de grace : about Stonington, "Deer Isle's chief town", he announces "it very closely resembles Lyme Regis on the coast of Dorset, and I would willingly bet that its founding settlers came from Dorset or Somerset or Cornwall. Maine speech is very like that in West Country England..." and so on until, almost inevitably, the similarity proceeds to Avalon! I knew I should be reading this book today after our good phone-call (our constant recapitulation feeding ever-present pasts into the future) abruptly ended : quickly got my things together for Retta's early-morning excursion to the beach.
Something meant-to-be about that also : for there was Dimitris Tsaloumas standing at the water's edge. Havent sen him for a few years --you know, he spends Melbourne Winter on Leros, returns here for Summer. I told him we had his new collection (Helen of Troy, UQP). He said it contained 4 typos! I said I hadnt read it except for the haiku series. He laughed sardonically. He said he hadnt thought there were any poems left in him, and he was ill with a mysterious dry-skin condition, but then the haiku came. I said it was only when I counted the syllables that I realized the poems more than simply resembled haiku! He sucked in breath, pursed thin lips and said that only me with my close reading would expose the truth that one of his tanka wasnt syllabically (he said metrically) accurate! He laughed, one arm around my shoulder. Haiku? Shrugged, laughed. Haiku!
(19/2/07) Actually, I think it's one of the haiku that's "wrong" --six syllables in 3rd line of IX ("now sunset fires gold / of autumn in your soft hair. / Birds riot in the plane.") --But the two series of tanka (57557) are impeccable. And yet, elegant poems though they are they lack the immediacy of, say, Kerouac, Welch & Saijo's Trip Trap. Hardly any of the Trip Trap poems fit the formal scheme but most have the haiku spirit. Like all beat writing, conventional literary values & imperatives are called into question. As for me, I'm probably more likely to emulate Dimitris than Trip Trap although I have played with the instant mode forever --from Kerouac to New York & Bolinas --wherever the Buddha sits!
How do you characterize your own haiku or the kind of thing in the American mag you publish with, Hummingbird [ed Phyllis Walsh, PO Box 96, Richland Center, WI 53581]?

*
I note you make the same point about haiku vis-a-vis great literature and extend the thought in your conclusion about ordinariness & enlightenment. At the same time, realization remains crucial --that is, it isnt the mere doing but the quality achieved --without sacrificing the purity of the act or the art. I suppose that conundrum is where the Zen comes in!
You have your Chafey's & Radipole-lake pathways as I have my Elwood/Point Ormond coastal walk to St Kilda or even the daily crossing of the bridge on High Street overlooking the blessed Merri Creek. Our dreams of the big treks is definitely linked to these. Travels With Charley relates to this too --"once a bum always a bum" he jokes, but at age 58, on the cusp of older age, he surrenders to the innate restlessness, to be on his way and on the way. He wants to rediscover "this monster land", the wild sociologist, one truck, one dog.
For myself I care less about the sociology than for the "monster" within, whom one reintegrates into the world, especially the world beyond human saturation --a pathway or a mountain provide the same opportunities.
We've talked about Taoism recently in the context of your second thoughts about the value of emersing yourself in the complexity of Buddhist philosophy. Your abbreviation of the whole thing was Buddhism deals with Mind whereas the Tao is concerned with man in Nature. I know that's a cartoon but I like it. The Dharma Bums is somewhere in that frame.
Rereading Arthur Waley's Han Shan translations (my 40 yearold paperback of Chinese Poems), in acknowledgement of Han Shan as the figurehead of Kerouac's book, I'm inclined to fabricate the ancient mountain poet as skirting one (Buddhism), escorting the other (Taoism). Han Shan in the mountain country, the mountain's daily visitor whose witness is of mind, pincered by sight & seeing, poet of the bafflement of what-is. More or less what Ray Smith is in TDB.
Japhy spins the Buddhist lore all day & night, wherever he goes. He's in Buddhist heaven! I must reread Snyder's Cold Mountain translation, but in my head is the thought that the reflection of Han Shan in TDB, in Smith's ultimately ambivalent excursion, is true of a poet for whom neither parable nor analogy banishes existential trepidation. No Zen in this song, Han Shan wrote --wistful & brave.

*
I'll end on that note but must slip in a new title which came my way recently --Iain Sinclair's Edge of the Orison (Penguin, 2006), sent to me by jazz musician & literature fan Scot Walker in Sydney. The subtitle, "In the traces of John Clare's Journey Out of Essex" says it all. I hope you can track it down in the wilderness you sometimes imply of provincial England's bookshops. I've begun Sinclair's latest adventure and have to say it achieves the tone I strive for in my topographical writing. Simple difference : Sinclair is a walker, practices what he preaches. The job's all before us, bro'; we'd better get cracking!

Love, Kris


*

Weymouth
April 2007

Dear Kris, If I still had the Steinbecks I'd get them out and share your delight and enthusiasms. I've looked out for him in second-hand bookshops, hoping to dip in again. Didn't want to buy new paperbacks. In collector mode I fancied 1st editions... but I'll never afford that. By the way, a 1st British edition of Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz was L120-. It's still, needless to say,sitting in the shop I saw it in, in Dorchester. It's been there some time.
Talking of the 'lost' Steinbecks, I also don't know where my H.E.Bates and French classics are. Oh, well. At least my record collection is mainly intact. I have too many books anyway. I must slim down. Make the library more manageable. Especially if I have to, or need to, or want to move at some point in the future. So difficult, I've already found, to part with any. I'm a collector. I really must get Anthony Bourdain into my collection. If his writing is as good as his narratives on his t.v. programmes he'll be indispensable. Not that I eat his sort of food. I look to John McDougall, M.D., for that. I have a pretty regular dose of him every day. He espouses a low-fat vegan diet that I follow almost to the letter. 99%. It's an unprocessed, starch-based diet (e.g. rice, millet, potatoes, beans, corn, breads) with the addition of fruits and vegetables. He does allow occasional use of nuts, seeds and soya products (e.g. miso, tofu, spya milk) but not T.V.P. etc. And no oils.
McDougall is a very straight guy. But radical in his field. It was great fun to see him have a beer on his latest DVD --"McDougall Made Easy"! He's trying to appeal to everyone --ordinary people. He's telling us he's a regular guy. Anyway, I love him. And I love Bourdain. Who you follow will decide which way your weight, blood-pressure and cholesterol go! Tough choice for me. But I am decidedly vegan at the moment. With whom to have fun becomes an awkward equation. Does one want to have fun? Uchiyama Roshi in Refining Your Life : From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment" says something interesting -- "...somehow, the word 'fun' is not exactly the way I would describe my activities... Anyway I suddenly recalled one thing I do which you might call fun, and that is sipping three small shots of whiskey after the day's work is done. ....Personally, I do not care much for alcohol and cannot stand sitting around drinking with a bunch of people. The reason I drink is because even after I have been in bed for some time my feet never seem to get warm.... The life we lead here at Antai-ji, however, is far from the kind that allows the sipping of hot sake and the nibbling of snacks with it. I drink with the express purpose of warming my feet, and I have grown accustomed to taking the whiskey straight to maximise its effect.... Now if the word 'fun' could be applied to this situation,then this is the time I have 'fun'."
I remember Ted Enslin's lines in a poem from The Country of Our Consciousness --"I tend to congratulate a life, that lived, is harder than it need be." Enslin would congratulate Uchiyama Roshi. McDougall would understand. But Bourdain wouldn't see the point. Not sure where I stand. I know I'd like to be out in the world with Bourdain on his t.v. trips in my fantasy life --but I'd also be at Artai-ji doing 14 hours a day of zazen at sesshins. I think Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder would be a mixture too. But can't see Ray Smith on food for health. You never can tell what people will do though. Even Bukowski took to health foods, vitamins and supplements towards the end of his life because ill health forced his hand. There's no knowing what people will do when the elephant stands on your chest.
Presently, I'm reading in The Dharma Bums where Ray Smith goes home. It struck a chord with me --being home, meditating, trying to explain myself to the neighbours. I don't mention Buddhism to them. If only I had a trip planned to the West Coast, like Ray. I sometimes dream of living in the south of France and maybe being near Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh. And, of course, sometimes the dream is to be with you in Oz. I'd have to go back many years when I felt free enough to just take-off somewhere tho'. Too many! But there is still in me a seed for adventure. Ray is heading for his fire lookout job for the U.S. Forest Service on Desolation Peak. That great book, Poets on the Peaks by John Suiter (Counterpoint, 2002), gives a thorough account. No, I'm not suggesting anything like that for myself. But the spirit is there.

Love, Bernard

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS (part 5)

28/30 December, 2006
Melbourne

Dear Bernard,
The day I read your letter at the Shop I'd just opened box of books from Ingram International and imagine my astonishment, with your reference to Anthony Bourdain fresh in my mind, to find him quoted on the back of the John Fante Reader (Ecco,'o2)! To wit, "John Fante was the grand master of So Cal underbelly fiction. His unblinking eye and heroically unsparing prose gave no quarter and took no prisoners, yet his work --however debased, deluded or cruel his subjects --remains always beautiful. No one working the same side of the street --then or now --can touch him." Fante was always one of yours, via Bukowski I guess, but how interesting to find Bourdain there as well --the "brotherhood of the grape" perhaps?!
I cant claim synchronicity for the Bourdain I'm now reading. Retta has been aware of my new enthusiasm for a while, which then climbed a notch after the July UK visit when you & I watched a couple of episodes of his tremendously entertaining television series together, but her Xmas gift was a pleasant surprise. His chapter in Kitchen Confidential (Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly) about the precocious little kid he was, in France holidaying with brother & parents, hating everything except fries & burgers until the moment of his life-determining gastronomic awakening, is guilelessly poignant. His humour hardly disturbs the text's limpidity. I'd like to see his fiction now if only for a test of his narrative style. But what could beat this : "I'd sit in the garden [in the Gironde] among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was a wonderland for under-age drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaise and the Katzenjammer Kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinees in French, until the pictures swam in front of my eyes, smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane."

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I'm also reading Vanity of Duluoz and, you'll be amused to hear, enjoying it. A great deal changes in 40 years! Because I havent yet located a copy of my rejected 1969 review in all my mess of manuscripts & diaries, I'm intrigued to find what might have been the references & passages that offended me back then.
Perhaps the address "wifey" provoked me from the outset --I could well have conjured mysogeny from that device. Today I immediately pick up on the Celinesque gambit of regailing the recent past from the very present with a narrative profitably unsentimental & spikier I think than earlier Kerouac. But "wifey" gratuitously makes one eavesdropper rather than direct recipient of the narrative. I suppose I'm being too literal --after all, Kerouac is really only ever talking to his reader. Vanity of Duluoz is subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-46". It is a concertina of a book, expanding, encapsulating, digressing and eventually reaching both the chronological & philosophical conclusion signalled at the beginning.
How & why then is "mysogenist, anti-Semitic, conservative rant" the main memory I've coddled all these years? Che as Fascist would have been a severe irk in 1969! "In those days [the Fourties] we were all pro-Lenin, or pro-whatever, Communists. It was before we found out that Henry Fonda in Blockade was not such a great anti-Fascist idealist at all, just the reverse of the coin of Fascism, i.e., what the hell's the difference between Fascist Hitler and anti-Fascist Stalin, or, as today, Fascist Lincoln Rockwell and anti-Fascist Ernesto Guevero, or name your own?"
My 1960s leftism was, I've come to realise, influenced as much by "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" politics as by genuine idealism --psychologically explicable for a 20-yearold though ethically monstrous at all times. Kerouac's equation of left & right-wing politics as the same kind of gangsterism employing the same lies was too confusing then for me to comprehend. It took me a long time to appreciate anti-totalitarian dissent. "Commitment" blinkered me for years --mind you, by the end of the 1970s getting into the 80s, I was beginning to see clearly again...

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Something about Snyder I found in Rebecca Solnit's stimulating Wanderlust : A History of Walking (Penguin, 2000) : quoting from David Robertson's book, Dharma Bums, in Real Matter (Utah,1997), she refers to Snyder's encounter with the banned 19C mountaineering religion Shugendo while he was studying Buddhism in Japan in the 50s. Snyder & Kerouac's climb was "not the object of a quest, as for the grail. Instead it goes round and round and on and on, rather like the hike that Kerouac and Snyder took and even more like the poem [Mountains & Rivers Without End] that Snyder projected writing..."
This brings me to the book I sent you for Christmas, Opening the Mountain (S&H,'06) : Searching on the internet for David Robertson, jumping around the Gary Snyder sites, I found the account of the 1996 circumnambulation of Mt Tamalpais when Snyder & Robertson led what has become the annual hike. It's a lovely book & record in itself but the inspiration I hoped for you wasnt at all on the Mt Tamalpais scale. The reverse, though definitely connected. About Tamalpais Snyder wrote : " Circling -- climbing -- chanting -- to show respect & to clarify the mind. Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg & I learned the practice in Asia. So we opened a route around Tam. It takes a day." Cutting to the chase alright!
My journeys with Cathy O'Brien,in the late 80s & early 90s, to Port Campbell, where the Southern Ocean meets the limestone & bush of the national park adjacent to the green agricultural inland, had this celebratory & meditative quality. Our friend, the late John Anderson, had, as you might recall, suggested that the South-west Victorian coastline might be the closest I could get in Australia to what I'd been experiencing in Dorset, Devon & Cornwall. He was right. What would it have been like to have hiked with him? I can just imagine he & Cathy ambling along in endless, wide-awake dreamland! Dead nine years now...
Similar sensations on the small walks on the Dorset Downs, solo or with the family, and particularly many climbs up & around St Catherine's Mount in Abbotsbury overlooking Chessil Beach. And it all began with the circuits of Radipole, the RSPB sanctuary you introduced me to in 1987. As Snyder implies, it's the respect of nature & the clarification of mind the place affords. That's why Haiku Bums popped into my mind when we were on the phone at Christmas speaking about these things! We'd like to be Dharma Bums --and what an example Cathy is to us, there in Laos, schoolteaching, experiencing the animist & Buddhist life, continuing now waht she began as a hippy girl, overland with boyfriend in Asia, in the 1970s --but ours is an imagined project extended on the far smaller physical scale.Or what?
Happy 2007!
Love, Kris

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RE- TRIP TRAP AND ALBERT SAIJO

(7/01/07) I knew Trip Trap years ago --thought I knew, I should say, though it may not be faulty memory but the case this current edition has extras like the Lew Welch novel extract, his letters to Kerouac (1959-60) and perhaps even Albert Saijo's A Recollection (1973), which is one of the best pieces in the book. I ordered copies for the Shop after you mentioned buying a copy (from Alan Halsey's catalogue or your esoteric book distributor?) --they've arrived and I'm thoroughly charmed!
I reread the sections of Big Sur (Saijo refers to it as the "beautifully sustained prose of his book of suffering") in which Saijo , "a serious young lay priest of Japanese Buddhism when all is said and done", is a character alongside Lew Welch.
I'm writing this at Kris Coad's flat (I want to say "great little pad" a la Saijo's evocation of his San Francisco neighbourhood fifty years ago) : a ceramicist (for some reason I resist the present usage "ceramist")' s environment. It's all on display, her studio & living-space. Table-ware, prayer-flags, stuff found along the shore, objects she collects. Half Morandi, half Buddhist monastery! In the breeze now of the early morning "change" the humidity of the night-before disperses. Cathy's farewell dinner-party last night the reason why I'm still here with a little hang-over! She flies back to Vientiane via Bangkok tonight. Kris has booked her ticket to visit in February. Come & go, here again then gone again...
(9-01-07) How else to be but matter-of-fact when flux is so evident?It's a state of mind isnt it? Thus the matter-of-fact style of the Buddhist Beat writers, infused with the wistfulness of the ancient Chinese (Taoist?) poets they loved.
I "googled" Albert Saijo... The photograph heading the article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for July (?) 1997 I've copied & sent to you, entitled "Running on Rhapsody", is exactly how one imagines Saijo from Kerouac's description of him as George Baso (surely pronounced Basho). He has the same kempt, bony, bespectacled features as Snyder --little, wiry & more ageless than the epithet "old" (Kerouac's "little, old, George Baso") confers (ditto Snyder).
If he's still alive he'll be 81 or thereabouts. In 1997 he'd have been in Hawaii six years, enjoying its multicultural alternative to mainland American "white-male dominant society." None of his books appear to be in print, aside of the collaborative Trip Trap. I'll write to Bamboo Ridge Press in Hawaii for Outspeaks a Rhapsody (1997) though --"a series of stream-of-consciousness rants and rhapsodies on topics such as the pain ("Analgesia --Land of Pain Free") and the horrors of a technological society ("Luddite Manque")." --according to the article.
I wonder if my attraction (yours too?) to the bit-players, the extras, is because that's where we also fit in to this weird & wonderful scheme of things. "All the world's a stage" etc. As you said, in different context, "sitting up, lying down, do the best you can." Add : And not giving in to conformity; not closing one's mind to wisdom, beauty, wonder; not disqualifying one's own contribution amongst the big glister & bluster! Hail Albert Saijo! Hail John Montgomery! Hail Will Petersen! Hail the Haiku Bums!

Love, Kris


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17th January, 2007
Weymouth

Dear Kris, Too much! Your letter just in! It's a huge thing we're doing! I hadn't dreamt it would grow and envelop so much. I do like Albert Saijo. Many thanks for printing that stuff off the internet for me. He's a little man, isnt he? Looks like a Japanese Gandhi in the picture. I like that. Small people are more handy. Less expanded. More yang. I'm reminded also of Haru Arai --a traditional Japanese Barrel Maker (Okayasan) as described in one of my favourite books, Cullinary Treasures of Japan. "He was very small, under five feet tall and about eighty pounds, with gentle black eyes and short silver hair. He was dressed in a traditional thick cotton vest and baggy pants with a split for his big toe... Arai-san was exceptional; his skill, strength and wittiness are rare at any age." He's described felling a large bamboo (thirty-f00t and one-hundred pounds), picking it up and shouldering it down a steep mountainside at 71 years of age. Albert Saijo would be good company for him. The same breed I'm sure. You say Saijo is Roshi now. I wonder,living in Hawaii, if he's something to do with Robert Aitken.
"A Recollection" by Saijo is great opener for Trip Trip. I wonder what stirs in our imaginations to relate to the "trip" so strongly? I guess it's voyage of discovery. Inwards and outwards. As you say --we'd like to be Dharma Bums / Haiku Bums. Got to get my shit together!
By the way, I ordered Trip Trap from my 'friends' at Green Spirit Books in Wiltshire. They belong to the Schumaker Society (small is beautiful) and are a not-for-profit business. They'd never heard of Kerouac when I asked for a list of his books in print!
The haiku/poems in Trip Trap are playful and fun to read but not eminently great. Maybe it's not the point to make great literature. Just get it all down, record the trip/ the journey.
I picked-up on the fact that both Kerouac and Lew Welch had their mothers figuring in their lives. And here am I living with Mum. Twenty years now. And alone together now since Dad died. It made me laugh that we had that something in common.
John Fante? I haven't read him for over twenty years! I was very excited when I received Ask the Dust from Black Sparrow Press, knowing he was one of Charles Bukowski's inspirations. That would be 1980. And unfortunately Black Sparrow is no more. I can agree with Anthony Bourdain, whom you quote from that John Fante Reader, that the writing is "debased, cruel and beautiful." For example, "Treat her rough, Bandini, treat her around and she'll wrap around your cock and die there." (Prologue to Ask the Dust, Black Sparrow, 1990.) Buk was onto a good one there! Sadly, I've so many books piled-up here and there about the house I can't find Ask the Dust --I've just had a look for it. It must be upstairs in the loft maybe. So many books. Might well be a good idea to finally get that bookshop and be a bookseller like you. Who would be interested in Fante and Bukowski in Dorset tho? But I did see a mass-market paperback of Buk's Factotum when I was in Dorchester last week. Shop might be the best thing before the books get damaged. Been dreaming of a bookshop for thirty years now! Two of my social-work friends and I were actually looking around Gosport for premises in the mid'70s...
(11-February'07) 4.15 a.m. Still very dark. Birds chirping outside --accompaniment to the radio. I thought birds waited until first light? Maybe it's the street-lights. I've been reading George Crane's book --about the monk T'sung T'sai again. But I've just been downstairs to fetch up TDB and Opening the Mountain. Birds and radio apart nothing intrudes and obsessions of the day haven't started on at me.
Opening the Mountain was such a wonderful present to get from you for Xmas. I love the photographs. That picture of mushrooms... Just me to pick out food!
I do understand what you say about making our own walks a ritual, our own environment 'sacred'. Don't have to go to Tamalpais or Higi or Kailash. But wouldn't it be great to do just that. To be able to do it. Walking up to St Catherine's at Abbotsbury that first time with you last summer (June'06) was great for me. It took me 20 years to think my heart would take the effort. Ah, the view. But we climb the mountain to climb the mountain. As Snyder says, "The main thing is to pay your regards, to play, to engage, to stop and pay attention. It's just a way of stopping and looking at your self too". And Smith (TDB, p63) quotes "the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing.'" Smith realises then that he doesn't have to climb the mountain. And that everyone's trip is going to be different. "Now there's the karma of these three men here : Japhy Ryder gets to his triumphant mountain-top and makes it, I almost make it and have to give up and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all is that poet's poet [Morley] lyin down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming by a gurgling plage, goddammit they'll never get me up here again."
This ascending mountains, or circumnambulating is not about getting to the top or walking all day. The journey is the thing. Just being on the path is enough. Being on the path is enlightenment. "Ordinary mind is enlightenment itself," as an 8th Century Chinese master said, talking about zazen. Being ordinary is enlightenment... I have my Chafey's and Radipole paths...

Love, Bernard


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(to be continued)