April 15th, 2013
In a couple of hours Cathy & i are setting off for Brittany (St Malo) via Poole... From St Malo to Roskof (spelling? ive only heard it spoken)... The other capn advises warm clothes. Jeans, jumper, good shoes : I dont have many options!!! Raincoat? Forget it!
Y'day bus ride to West Bay to see the Paul Jones exhibition at the great Sladers Yard gallery. Yes, it has a café too! Scones with jam & cream + hot choc, coffee etc But dont spread that around! I'm supposed to be shedding weight!
Paul Jones on a continuum with Nicholson, that is clarity, precision; but then the Tapies-like metallic, mixed-media patina throws the work somewhere else. I guess the Nicholson connection is the constructed abstracted landscape, and the sculptural aspect. Also the topographical element, internal & external map. Looking at a work such as this (and perhaps ANY work) I cant help but 'see' all of the associations as though enabled to review the lot!
Seems to me that West Bay has 'developed' somewhat since last visit [September/October, 12]; like the place is it's own now, not a bedraggled stop before Bridport. Loved the little harbour, and the dramatic cliff wall, and the big seas & spray like steam off the water.
John Anderson recommended S W Victorian coast as nearest to this cliff/sea/green apposition after I returned from late '80s English trip raving about Cornwall, Devon, Dorset coastline... remembered this & John himself as we watched the little kids dare the white seas catch them on the sand!
So, folks, off to Brittany, and probably out of touch til Thursday when we're back to Weymouth again... Salut!
oOo
May 1st, '13
Scoured EVOLVER [Wessex Arts magazine] for likely shows to see and find Lucas Weschke exhibiting at the Bridport Arts Centre... Bernard has told me abt occasional meetings with L W in Weymouth... I knew the name Weschke as of Karl Weschke of St Ives school associations [died 2005, German expat, settled in Cornwall, intimate of Wynter, Hilton, WS Graham et al]... Sure enough Lucas is K W's son...
Contrast of hard, sober lines & apparently whimsical figures tho' the titles suggest o/wise... Exhibition in foyer, 'continues in cafe'... thank goodness we didnt have to peer over coffee & cake patrons to see the linocuts! On the other hand, the large upstairs gallery perhaps too cold & cavernous for L W's pieces...
oOo
PS : May 8th,'13; Heathrow to Bangkok
Captain speaking : 10 hours &15 minutes flight...
There's a general spreading out from allotted to what're perceived as better seats. Christy allows himself gleeful chuckle sufficient to alert jovial ghosts though not fellow passengers. Historically aching legs now have 3 seat spread to flex in.
12.32, rolling...
12.41, taxiing...
12.52, here we go, here we go, here we go... turning, turning, following American Airlines flight to the runway...
Altitude 735 feet hitting the cloud but English fields discernible...
Lost in the fog, says Ed, where blue is sea or sky, archipelagos on high. And Christy spies the drinks trolly though Ed it is who calls it like it is : even better with G&T, he snaps.
From his angle peering up the aisle, Christy sees gowned nurses with portable drips...
At 19,000 feet see the leaving of England, darling strands of beach, the Channel, encroaching the breadth of Europe. The bumf says Eddie...
oOo
May 19, '13
I'll take advantage of the Boswell Festival's focus by thinking aloud, at a tangent, about a contemporary writing that's in & out of (i say 'in & out of' because 'simultaneously' not quite right) biography, autobiography, memoir, history & commentary. 50 years years ago Mailer's Advertisements for Myself wowed me; 40 years ago Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, with its wonderfully novelistic beginning; also the many forms of the New Journalism... Then there's Iain Sinclair's writing, notably his John Claire book... and a book i'm currently reading, David Caddy's Cycling After Thomas & the English...
In fact, now that ive begun this survey it's as though the 'in & out of''s more the rule than the rarity! In this time of which we're writers, 'in & out of' , with its begging of categories, sits happily beside pure biography & history... Local examples would include our friends Robert Kenny (The Lamb Enters the Dreaming) & Evelyn Juers (House of Exile)...
oOo
May 21st, '13
Recall late 60s, copy of the Village Voice at Betty Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre in Faraday Street, Carlton, --at least i think it was Village Voice? --could have been I.T.? --no, Village Voice --and there was a pic & article about Jim Morrison & Michael McClure --Morrison staying with McClure in latter poet's loft. Mention this as important music/poetry connection in our casual education them thar times. Years later realized that McClure & Manzarek were touring --in Europe i think. Manzarek's novel about Morrison, The Poet in Exile (pub Thunders Mouth, 2001) has its moments; "You son-of-a-bitch," I said, 'Don't tell me the rumours are true." (Morrison replies, "I haven't heard the rumours.") Retta reminds me, singing "When the music's over, turn out the light..." Except it isnt ever over!!! Ray Manzarek, RIP
oOo
May 23rd, '13
Exactly as Mandy Pannett says, the kind of thing i also love! Must see if i can order via Ingram for Collected Works Bookshop...
"Original and fascinating" a review of: Cycling After Thomas And The English...
[www.amazon.co.uk]
22 May 2013
By
Mandy Pannett "wordshopper"
"This is the kind of travel writing I love. Not only is its journey inspired by Edward Thomas, one of my favourite poets, but David Caddy's imaginative counterpart to the linear route he takes is a lateral one, full of anecdotes and observations, everyday tidbits, reflections on literature, history, geography and nature - a broad and intriguing canvas. Robert Frost's poem `The Road Not Taken' is based on the many long walks he took with Edward Thomas and the way his friend would try to show him lots of things at once, all in different directions. There is something of this outspreading, this reaching out to grasp the essence of things, in this book. In the chapter on Salisbury, for instance, the author, stands on a spot where Constable painted and describes what he sees, but the next paragraph begins `I could cycle north west to Salisbury Plain where Wordsworth walked' and in the paragraph after that he muses on the fact that `I could cycle north and east a few miles along the A30 to Figsbury Rings.' Edward Thomas would have understood such dilemmas very well.
The quest (which is how the journey seems to me, a quest that is both physical and spiritual) begins with the author's desire to repeat the poet's travels by cycling round parts of southern England. At the same time there is a wish to pin down the intangible and find what it means to be `peculiarly English'. In this context, throughout the book, certain key words recur: heritage, topography, local, identity, tradition, freedom. We are offered no definitive conclusions, no answers to the questions, only hints and suggestions and the joys of exploration.
`Cycling After Thomas' was inspired by Edward Thomas' `In Pursuit of Spring' (1914). David Caddy's motivation is clear: `When I reread this montage of stories, quotations, voices, literary criticism, digressions and odd juxtapositions, I knew I had to emulate the journey and see what was left and who had subsequently lived along the route.' From this reading begins the bicycle journey that starts and ends in Dorset with many digressions and stopping off points along the way.
There is a wealth of material in this book, too much to cover here. Like David Caddy and like Edward Thomas I could say I'll refer to this, I could talk about that, I might discuss a comment or digress to an anecdote - but since that would be distracting and haphazard I'll just mention parts of the book that interest me most - possibly because they take place in areas I know well. I love the chapter about Box Hill where Jane Austen sets the picnic in `Emma', the discussion on Vaughan Williams' `The Lark Ascending' together with the whole background and roots of folk music, and the wonderful chapter on Winchester where Keats began his `Ode to Autumn' and where, near the water meadows, `by squinting and removing all the cars and car parks there is still a strong sense of the natural world present.'
There is more, lots more. This book entices me, as I'm sure it will other readers, to follow the quest for myself."
I dont have Edward Thomas's In Pursuit of Spring, and since David described it to me, in the Dolphin couple of weeks ago, I've been intrigued, but have found two extracts in a Thomas anthology i do own, Edward Thomas on the Countryside : A selection of his prose & verse, ed Roland Gant (Faber, '77)... Read them last night before sleeping : lovely stuff! And can imagine the encouragement David felt for his own heightened reportage from ET's noting & quoting.
oOo
June 1st, '13
Thank you Andrew Kingsford for yr tip : I regret to say that if i have even heard of Raphael Samuel it's only the merest echo in my thick head...
[See : Bishopsgate Institute - Samuel, Raphael - The Raphael Samuel Archive www.bishopsgate.org.uk Raphael Samuel Archive at the Bishopsgate Library]
The context for Andrew's suggestion was my description of conversations with David Caddy last month in which I wondered about the reception David's book, Cycling After Thomas & the English, might have received in England. In my mind was a sense of a general avoidance by sophisticated criticism of questions of 'identity', characterizing it as passe at best & more often a dangerous distraction. In the conversation with DC, he confirmed his tradition as Christopher Hill, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm... Andrew agreed there was a left-wing shrugging off of 'identity' but not all them, he said : Thompson, Raymond Williams, and crucially Raphael Samuel...
OK, let's get ready to read!
+
A Melbourne connection with the generality of the above is an argument i began shaping in response to Waleed Aly's opinion piece in The Age (May 17,'13), headlined "Tory Politics : pact to the rafters in contradiction" & sub-headed "Tea Party in the US, the UKIP in Britain --Abbott better beware of the rising attraction of conservative splitters"... It seemed to me, though interesting, that Aly's piece was misleading insofar as its marxist or at least economic template prohibits any mention of questions of identity expressed nationally though deeply, personally experienced. I'm not across Tea Party or (Bob Katter's) Australia Party agendas like Waleed Aly, but have followed the discussion in England for several decades and recognize UKIP as a player in an utterly proper & necessary cultural questioning. (Questioning as critically remembering & celebrating...) At one time the contrast was with the USA --for example the discussion of British & American English (WW1 to the present) as prism for shifting authority (--poetry's foremost in this poet's mind but economic & political power's caught in the same wash). Ever since Britain's entry into the EEC, 'Europe''s been the necessary issue, and certainly what most exercises the minds of any number of people in Britain, let alone UKIP... This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and needless to say my response to Aly (probably a book and as much autobiography as political critique) hasnt left my notebook!
+
In his article, Waleed Aly's political-economic analysis contends, "We're entering a new phase in which the Western world is no longer globalisation's biggest winner. Bob Katter's constituency have long been globalisation's losers. (...) Katter and UKIP are, in some muddled way, attempting to capture what conservative politics lost when it got radically liberal : an abiding concern for the local, and privileging of the local, and a rejection of political programs that bring huge structural change." Aly's phrase 'muddled way' perhaps acknowledges the establishment's cliche depiction 'loony', but that aside, he's got the equation right : globalization & the local. And in the heart of the local is the cultural, the identity question. Not at all sure what parallels can be drawn along that line between Australia & Britain. The people ive talked to, as recently as a few weeks ago, are concerned abt sovereignty vis a vis the EEC's bureaucracy. None of them have yet voted for UKIP! Their's is a concern on behalf of a 21st century multi-ethnic Britain against a version of the global emanating from Brussells wch depersonalises & decontextualises a society, an economy, a culture... I'm at one with them in a happy, whole-hearted struggle for particularity against abstraction! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera....
+
From a review of Raphael Samuel and relating to my interest :
"Theatres of Memory: Volume 1. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture
[Verso, 1994, 479 pages] [Review from Political Science, ?'94]
The idea that the past is a plaything of the present, or a 'metafiction', is only now beginning to disturb the tranquillity of professional historians, but for some twenty years it has been a commonplace of epistemological criticism, and a mainspring of experimental work in literature and the arts. Thus in 'magical realism' or 'modern Gothic' the fairy tale can appear as the latest thing; while in the visual arts, futurist installations offer themselves as parodies of Old Masters. 'Back to the future' is also a leitmotiv in commodity marketing and design - something discussed here under the heading of 'Retrochic' - while in Britain, as in other advanced capitalist societies, conservation has been the cutting edge of the business recolonization of the inner city.
According to critics of the heritage industry the current obsession with the past signals not a return to tradition but the exhaustion of history's grand narratives. The postmodern condition, so the argument runs, is one where the future has spectacularly parted company from the past. Nostalgia is the sigh of the historically orphaned, heritage a symptom of national decay.
In this book - the first of a trilogy - Raphael Samuel takes issue with the heritage baiters. He offers an alternative genealogy of resurrectionism, relating it to the environmentalist movements of our time. He argues that we live in an expanding historical culture, one which is newly alert to the evidence of the visual, and which is reconnecting the study of landscape and townscape to that of the natural world. It is also, he argues, more democratic than earlier versions of the national past, and much more hospitable to hitherto stigmatized minorities. The volume is prefaced with a long essay on unofficial knowledge and has an Afterword on 'allegories of the real'. "
Hmmm. Well, we'll see!
Showing posts with label Iain Sinclair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iain Sinclair. Show all posts
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, # 11, July, 2009
January 13th, 2009
Melbourne
Dear Bernard,
Can I take you back a few weeks to a telephone conversation we had? I'd rung you after watching the particularly inspiring Lakes District episode of Griff Rhys-Jones' Mountains BBC-tv series. Griff was in top form --he's literary, intelligent, very amusing & enviably fit! He emulated Coleridge's leaps down precipices, albeit assisted by ropes & pulleys & professional climbers --one certainly wasnt going to follow him in that --and he walked in the footsteps of one of your (I almost say 'holy') men, Alfred Wainwright. It was at that point --my head full of the Romantic poets & Wainwright's pleasant & seemingly accessible walking trails --that the question presented itself : What is the British context for the 'Dharma Bum'? The immediate answer might be : poetry, walking (hills, moors, woods, coasts), art, pottery & craft, photography, traditional & contemporary religious practice... You responded with a laugh : That's my life you're describing (health & opportunity permitting)!
Staying with this British angle, a word around & about Jim Burns, inspired not so much by his book, Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals (edited & introduced by John Freeman, Trent Editions, UK, 2000), but what I hoped it contained when i returned to it this past winter. Old amigo John Freeman's introduction sets the scene, accurately claiming that "Burns' criticism is a one-man crusade against the star system in literature", since "he is interested in the whole picture, to which the bit players and technical staff also make essential contributions." It's a "crusade on behalf of the forgotten" Freeman says --or those who'd be forgotten were it not for the certain kind of literature in which Kerouac's project, for example, is also found.
I too feel a nostalgia for that era of American Bohemians & progressive writers of whom Burns is so fond. It was a model of creative non-conformity & the confluence of life & art. The time I encountered it in my reading I was similarly defined. I'm nostalgic because I've changed/life's changed... I remember some years ago confiding to Alan Pose that to a great extent I'd "lost History" because of massive & cumulative disenchantment with left-wing politics, but experiencing the concerts of Martin Carthy & The Watersons, & Roy Bailey & others, in the'90s had returned History to me. At least initially (--recall exploding in disbelief last year at a Brunswick Folk Festival concert when Alistair Hewlett invoked Hugo Chavez as first of the 21stCentury's saviours; Dave Swarbrick continued tuning his fiddle)... Raising roses out of the rubble (a la Allen Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra?!) is one, & an abiding, thing, but rabble-rousing is too much of the blood & fury of the something-else I no longer believe.
You'll recognize some of my early favourites in Jim Burns' roll-call --Erskine Caldwell for example, Kenneth Patchen, & the writers identified with 1920s Greenwich village. And then there are the Beats themselves --particularly John Montgomery & Lew Welch, & Seymour Krim as a devoted commentator. At one time many of us drew from the same source. There's a larger story here about life in the English provinces predisposing one to an American counter-culture which had, one felt, reacted to a similar impoverishment & saved its soul. However, the wheel turns.
It was an article Alan pose showed me, by Iain Sinclair (Man in a MacIntosh, published in The Guardian, 30-8-08), essentially discussing forgotten English novelists --Londoners of course; Sinclair's eternal & apparently infinite patch --the import of which, at least for me, is the constant fecundity of the local and the necessity to know & celebrate its particulars & exemplars. England, it seems to me --I remember exclaiming to Alan --owns a cultural density enabling constant rediscovery & reevaluation of people & their scenes & times. Much more than in Melbourne, I said. But no sooner made the claim than retracted it --: even with the thinner history of settler Australia, forgetfulness is endemic! I'd begun my own reclamation project in the 1980s, publishing my 1960s diaries & notes concerning La Mama & the emerging new poetry scene, and then pushing back to the '50s & '40s for roots, and intending then to bring the whole thing back to the present. But I shelved it all the moment I stopped producing H/EAR magazine in 1985. (I've been thinking of re-asembling it within the magazine space of my blog recently --the blog might now be the best medium for my concept of the 'active archive'.)
And so, returning to Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals, I was disappointed not to find anything local. Jim Burns says that his 1967 article, The American Influence, "has dated in the sense that some of the facts have changed." --but he doesnt repudiate his original statement : "I suppose I am, in a way, an exile in my own country. (...) In fact, I can't honestly say I feel very much part of English life in general. I'm probably in a position similar to the American expatriates in paris in the 1920s, moving around the areas i know best, ignored by most of the locals, and in touch with a few literary acquaintances by mail, and a few local friends because of our interest in jazz and drink." What I hoped I'd find in Burns' collection was something else on British '50s & '60s predecessors --though, predecessors of whom & what? Without the dharma, who & what are these (notional) bums?!
It's forty-odd years since the Sixties, and boxed sets to prove it! And there are fiftieth anniversary editions of the seminal Beats, not to mention "The Original Scroll", before us. Are Griff's mountains --Lakes District, Wales, Scotland --the closest our English selves will get to Taoist & Buddhist Asia, not to mention the Beats' Tamalpais & etc?
Happy New Year!
Love, Kris
***
Weymouth/Dorset, UK
19 April-16 July,'09
Dear Kris,
I'm floored by your question in the last letter and by my life's current events. To touch upon the latter : earlier this year it was realized that Mum had Alzheimer's. Her short-term memory-loss impacts on life here sharply. In some ways we have a normal life given she's coming up 85, but to cap it off she's had a fall in town and fractured her hip. Looks like she'll be in hospital quite a while. Anyway, it's some respite for me to write if I can get into gear.
As to your question -- "What is the British context for the Dharma Bums?" -- hmmm? To me Dharma Bums seems an essentially American trait. Americans are so 'open'. They 'let go' and 'go for it'. Put their all into things. Not that the British don't. They're eccentrics, their trait is eccentricity -- people of the ilk of Griff Rhys-Jones whom you mention. But they don't seem able to accommodate the spiritual. That is, the artists don't. Dharma Bum for me says 'Buddhist', 'artist', 'Bohemian', 'poet', 'free spirit'... a merging of all these. I don't aspire to be an English Dharma Bum! Have never felt English English. As an Egyptian said to Mum, "But you're not Egyptian Egyptian." Anyway, the British don't do it for me. Just isolated pockets here and there I relate to. But as I said, I'm not English English. Am I labouring the point?
Poetry : I look to Chinese, Japanese and American models. Jazz : Americans (I mean, Courtney Pine, for instance, is not a great musician -- innovative but not great). And there's no U.K. Buddhist magazine with the profile of Tricycle, Buddha Dharma or Shambala Sun, tho' I 'enjoy' the Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. But that is a dedicated Soto Zen publication.
There is no hint of Dharma Bummery in Rhys-Jones or his Mountains t.v. series, though I do like it. And I've been watching Julia Bradbury in the footsteps of Alfred Wainwright (A. W.). I watch all the walking programmes. I don't think Dharma Bum comes into it. One of two Brits I have regard for and makes me think 'Dharma Bum' is Bill Wyatt. (I don't know if Bill Wyatt and Ken Jones relate to being Dharma Dums. Both are poets and Buddhists.) Wyatt's latest is Gleamings from the Throssel's Nest (Longread Publishing, 2005). 'Throssel's Nest' refers to Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey up in Northumberland, where Wyatt goes for retreats. Initially Jiya Kennett forsook her native England for the U.S. There was antipathy from the British Buddhist establishment on her return from Japan. The U.S., as usual, was more accommodating.
The other, Ken Jones, I'm tempted to also call a Dharma Bum, but wonder if he's more the 'Pilgrim Fox' of his self-styled persona? See Pilgrim Foxes : Haiku & Haiku Prose by Ken Jones, James Norton & Sean O'Connor, published by Pilgrim Press, 2001. From the blurb, "These three writers are on a spiritual quest. They are foxy pilgrims. But fox is a trickster, a shape-shifter. And this quest about how to make sense -- or nonsense -- of our lives is far from straightforward." So, it is a spiritual quest not dissimilar to being a Dharma Bum. But I don't think they identify with what is essentially an American manifestation. Jones is the pick of the three. Also, his Stallion's Crag : Haiku & Haibun (Iron Press, 2003), and Arrows of Stones : Haibun (British Haiku Society, 2002) are top notch. Jones is well known and respected on the British Buddhist scene, and widely published.
Beyond these two I haven't found anything to get excited about in respect of Dharma Bums in Britain. In any case, activity is all very well, but what about mind? Walking in itself doesn't make a Dharma Bum. As Arthur Braverman writes, "Most of the foreigners in Kyoto in the early Seventies were wanderers and bearers of an exciting new consciousness. we would strike up conversation with each other on trains or in coffee-shops. These people don't look like dharma bums. But there again, neither do I. Are they exchange students, businessmen, or simply tourists?" (Living and Dying in Zazen, Weatherhill, 2003.)
On the bus back from Dorchester hospital this afternoon, after visiting Mum, I started reading A Blue Hand by Deborah Baker (Penguin, 2009). It's "The Tragicomic, Mind-Altering Odyssey of Allen Ginsberg, a Holy Fool, a Rebel Muse, a Dharma Bum and His Prickly Bride in India." This is the real deal for me! The Americans have it!
So, who's to know? Dharma Bum aint visible in U.K., but things do go on.
Your aspiring Dharma Bum of a brother,
Bernard
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Melbourne
Dear Bernard,
Can I take you back a few weeks to a telephone conversation we had? I'd rung you after watching the particularly inspiring Lakes District episode of Griff Rhys-Jones' Mountains BBC-tv series. Griff was in top form --he's literary, intelligent, very amusing & enviably fit! He emulated Coleridge's leaps down precipices, albeit assisted by ropes & pulleys & professional climbers --one certainly wasnt going to follow him in that --and he walked in the footsteps of one of your (I almost say 'holy') men, Alfred Wainwright. It was at that point --my head full of the Romantic poets & Wainwright's pleasant & seemingly accessible walking trails --that the question presented itself : What is the British context for the 'Dharma Bum'? The immediate answer might be : poetry, walking (hills, moors, woods, coasts), art, pottery & craft, photography, traditional & contemporary religious practice... You responded with a laugh : That's my life you're describing (health & opportunity permitting)!
Staying with this British angle, a word around & about Jim Burns, inspired not so much by his book, Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals (edited & introduced by John Freeman, Trent Editions, UK, 2000), but what I hoped it contained when i returned to it this past winter. Old amigo John Freeman's introduction sets the scene, accurately claiming that "Burns' criticism is a one-man crusade against the star system in literature", since "he is interested in the whole picture, to which the bit players and technical staff also make essential contributions." It's a "crusade on behalf of the forgotten" Freeman says --or those who'd be forgotten were it not for the certain kind of literature in which Kerouac's project, for example, is also found.
I too feel a nostalgia for that era of American Bohemians & progressive writers of whom Burns is so fond. It was a model of creative non-conformity & the confluence of life & art. The time I encountered it in my reading I was similarly defined. I'm nostalgic because I've changed/life's changed... I remember some years ago confiding to Alan Pose that to a great extent I'd "lost History" because of massive & cumulative disenchantment with left-wing politics, but experiencing the concerts of Martin Carthy & The Watersons, & Roy Bailey & others, in the'90s had returned History to me. At least initially (--recall exploding in disbelief last year at a Brunswick Folk Festival concert when Alistair Hewlett invoked Hugo Chavez as first of the 21stCentury's saviours; Dave Swarbrick continued tuning his fiddle)... Raising roses out of the rubble (a la Allen Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra?!) is one, & an abiding, thing, but rabble-rousing is too much of the blood & fury of the something-else I no longer believe.
You'll recognize some of my early favourites in Jim Burns' roll-call --Erskine Caldwell for example, Kenneth Patchen, & the writers identified with 1920s Greenwich village. And then there are the Beats themselves --particularly John Montgomery & Lew Welch, & Seymour Krim as a devoted commentator. At one time many of us drew from the same source. There's a larger story here about life in the English provinces predisposing one to an American counter-culture which had, one felt, reacted to a similar impoverishment & saved its soul. However, the wheel turns.
It was an article Alan pose showed me, by Iain Sinclair (Man in a MacIntosh, published in The Guardian, 30-8-08), essentially discussing forgotten English novelists --Londoners of course; Sinclair's eternal & apparently infinite patch --the import of which, at least for me, is the constant fecundity of the local and the necessity to know & celebrate its particulars & exemplars. England, it seems to me --I remember exclaiming to Alan --owns a cultural density enabling constant rediscovery & reevaluation of people & their scenes & times. Much more than in Melbourne, I said. But no sooner made the claim than retracted it --: even with the thinner history of settler Australia, forgetfulness is endemic! I'd begun my own reclamation project in the 1980s, publishing my 1960s diaries & notes concerning La Mama & the emerging new poetry scene, and then pushing back to the '50s & '40s for roots, and intending then to bring the whole thing back to the present. But I shelved it all the moment I stopped producing H/EAR magazine in 1985. (I've been thinking of re-asembling it within the magazine space of my blog recently --the blog might now be the best medium for my concept of the 'active archive'.)
And so, returning to Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals, I was disappointed not to find anything local. Jim Burns says that his 1967 article, The American Influence, "has dated in the sense that some of the facts have changed." --but he doesnt repudiate his original statement : "I suppose I am, in a way, an exile in my own country. (...) In fact, I can't honestly say I feel very much part of English life in general. I'm probably in a position similar to the American expatriates in paris in the 1920s, moving around the areas i know best, ignored by most of the locals, and in touch with a few literary acquaintances by mail, and a few local friends because of our interest in jazz and drink." What I hoped I'd find in Burns' collection was something else on British '50s & '60s predecessors --though, predecessors of whom & what? Without the dharma, who & what are these (notional) bums?!
It's forty-odd years since the Sixties, and boxed sets to prove it! And there are fiftieth anniversary editions of the seminal Beats, not to mention "The Original Scroll", before us. Are Griff's mountains --Lakes District, Wales, Scotland --the closest our English selves will get to Taoist & Buddhist Asia, not to mention the Beats' Tamalpais & etc?
Happy New Year!
Love, Kris
***
Weymouth/Dorset, UK
19 April-16 July,'09
Dear Kris,
I'm floored by your question in the last letter and by my life's current events. To touch upon the latter : earlier this year it was realized that Mum had Alzheimer's. Her short-term memory-loss impacts on life here sharply. In some ways we have a normal life given she's coming up 85, but to cap it off she's had a fall in town and fractured her hip. Looks like she'll be in hospital quite a while. Anyway, it's some respite for me to write if I can get into gear.
As to your question -- "What is the British context for the Dharma Bums?" -- hmmm? To me Dharma Bums seems an essentially American trait. Americans are so 'open'. They 'let go' and 'go for it'. Put their all into things. Not that the British don't. They're eccentrics, their trait is eccentricity -- people of the ilk of Griff Rhys-Jones whom you mention. But they don't seem able to accommodate the spiritual. That is, the artists don't. Dharma Bum for me says 'Buddhist', 'artist', 'Bohemian', 'poet', 'free spirit'... a merging of all these. I don't aspire to be an English Dharma Bum! Have never felt English English. As an Egyptian said to Mum, "But you're not Egyptian Egyptian." Anyway, the British don't do it for me. Just isolated pockets here and there I relate to. But as I said, I'm not English English. Am I labouring the point?
Poetry : I look to Chinese, Japanese and American models. Jazz : Americans (I mean, Courtney Pine, for instance, is not a great musician -- innovative but not great). And there's no U.K. Buddhist magazine with the profile of Tricycle, Buddha Dharma or Shambala Sun, tho' I 'enjoy' the Journal of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. But that is a dedicated Soto Zen publication.
There is no hint of Dharma Bummery in Rhys-Jones or his Mountains t.v. series, though I do like it. And I've been watching Julia Bradbury in the footsteps of Alfred Wainwright (A. W.). I watch all the walking programmes. I don't think Dharma Bum comes into it. One of two Brits I have regard for and makes me think 'Dharma Bum' is Bill Wyatt. (I don't know if Bill Wyatt and Ken Jones relate to being Dharma Dums. Both are poets and Buddhists.) Wyatt's latest is Gleamings from the Throssel's Nest (Longread Publishing, 2005). 'Throssel's Nest' refers to Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey up in Northumberland, where Wyatt goes for retreats. Initially Jiya Kennett forsook her native England for the U.S. There was antipathy from the British Buddhist establishment on her return from Japan. The U.S., as usual, was more accommodating.
The other, Ken Jones, I'm tempted to also call a Dharma Bum, but wonder if he's more the 'Pilgrim Fox' of his self-styled persona? See Pilgrim Foxes : Haiku & Haiku Prose by Ken Jones, James Norton & Sean O'Connor, published by Pilgrim Press, 2001. From the blurb, "These three writers are on a spiritual quest. They are foxy pilgrims. But fox is a trickster, a shape-shifter. And this quest about how to make sense -- or nonsense -- of our lives is far from straightforward." So, it is a spiritual quest not dissimilar to being a Dharma Bum. But I don't think they identify with what is essentially an American manifestation. Jones is the pick of the three. Also, his Stallion's Crag : Haiku & Haibun (Iron Press, 2003), and Arrows of Stones : Haibun (British Haiku Society, 2002) are top notch. Jones is well known and respected on the British Buddhist scene, and widely published.
Beyond these two I haven't found anything to get excited about in respect of Dharma Bums in Britain. In any case, activity is all very well, but what about mind? Walking in itself doesn't make a Dharma Bum. As Arthur Braverman writes, "Most of the foreigners in Kyoto in the early Seventies were wanderers and bearers of an exciting new consciousness. we would strike up conversation with each other on trains or in coffee-shops. These people don't look like dharma bums. But there again, neither do I. Are they exchange students, businessmen, or simply tourists?" (Living and Dying in Zazen, Weatherhill, 2003.)
On the bus back from Dorchester hospital this afternoon, after visiting Mum, I started reading A Blue Hand by Deborah Baker (Penguin, 2009). It's "The Tragicomic, Mind-Altering Odyssey of Allen Ginsberg, a Holy Fool, a Rebel Muse, a Dharma Bum and His Prickly Bride in India." This is the real deal for me! The Americans have it!
So, who's to know? Dharma Bum aint visible in U.K., but things do go on.
Your aspiring Dharma Bum of a brother,
Bernard
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
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
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
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