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 Norman Mailer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Norman Mailer. Show all posts
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Saturday, August 30, 2008
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, #10
Melbourne, Oz
January-March,2008
Dear Bernard, Your winter birthday approaches (--do you think in terms of particular months, seasons, constellations?) as here in Melbourne summer's hottest days (& nights) seem to be passing. Impossible sometimes for me to concentrate on reading & writing --mind you, I dont make it easy for myself in my non-aircon, tin-roofed, weatherboard! Even so, the journey continues... Richer --e.g., the fascinating 'Bob Dylan' movie, I'm Not There, seen recently --and poorer --e.g., Norman Mailer's death late last year. (And no sooner said than one of I'm Not There's stars, Heath Ledger, has reportedly died in L.A. --tragically young, 29. My sadness at that news undoubtedly fueled by the parallels with our Timmy's death five years ago... Ledger's art & young-man's emotions irrevocably entwined (--a once-in-a-generation talent, like James Dean, according to Travolta)... Found dying, if not already dead, in his L. A. apartment --'accidental death' almost worse than intentional or expected. What a waste --and waste there is & always has been among our 'best & brightest' --war, illness, drugs --whatever, & forever... Of course, "he leaves a legacy"... Dont they all? Do we need reminding of Kerouac, 47, robbed of his three score & ten...)
(February.) You've been with Dylan from the beginning... 1965 when you bought the first vinyl? I thoroughly recommend I'm Not there, though is it showing outside the art-house circuit? If nothing else you'll enjoy the sound-track (there's also a covers' CD). Dylan's a fascinating subject for a bio-flick, as this film is misleadingly described --actually, it's a series of interwoven fictions at the centre of each of which is a surrogate or pseudo Dylan. The film's thesis, & possibly Dylan's, is that authenticity or the real is gained & maintained by an aware subject's mercuriality, and the evasion of stable bureaucratic identity is how it's achieved. The film's fictions are projections of Dylan's media persona, illustrations of themes from his songs, & biographical snippets. Consummate artist that he's been, Art & Life equally represent him. It's the fate of celebrity --Kerouac, unsurprisingly also mentioned in the film, a casualty of the phenomenon (too literal a believer perhaps).
Cate Blanchett's Dylan, aka Jude Quinn, is superlative mimicry --cheeky & also poignantly instructive. She perfectly reproduces the Dylan from David Pennebaker's historical footage of the early 1960s British tour --her acting is almost like channeling! From the signature Dylan hairstyle & chainsmoking to speed-king foot-tapping & pot-head sniggering, she has the character down pat. The portrait careers through naturalism, farce & satire in its astonishing facsimile. For my money, Cate Blanchett's Jude Quinn is the drawstring of the entire ensemble --for the fictions to work, the facsimile was essential. Her casting is a canny director(Todd Haynes)'s coup de grace! And just as fellow Aussie Heath Ledger's film-star character Robbie Clark, hated, as it happens, by the folk-singer he plays on screen, slides calamitously between relationships, so does I'm Not There slip between fiction & history, fulfilling that experience of the Real required of 'the Dylan film' by those who feel they 'understand' him!
Now here's the neatest connection to Norman Mailer : given that Mailer was in my mind & often popping into conversation during this period, it felt like a synchronicity when, in the middle of I'm Not There, Robbie Clarke, at the big Hollywood party, identifies him through the throng, across the room. There's Mailer, he says. For the life of me I thought the constantly thwarted wife was about to seek him out --maybe she was, but the camera finds husband & girlfriend first and Mailer is lost in the Hollywood night.
*
Speed-reading Advertisements for Myself (my first & probably most influential Mailer --five shillings Corgi paperback bought 42 years from the great little Paperback Parade in Southampton), I'm impressed all over again. Part of the reason for that is his intention & ability to impress --one feels his fire and his texts are firing : those 1940s pieces, the war-stories, & the 1951 Man Who Studied Yoga... what am I trying to say here? --something about energy, creating an equation for egotism where egotism is the energised individual's antenna to the world, which characterised poets & novelists of that period, including the Beats --and Mailer's delightfully pugilistic yet confidential & charming Evaluations - Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room (p339) is a register of that...
For example, of Jack Jones; "Like Styron, like myself, like Kerouac, he has been running for President as well as sticking at his work, and it was near tragic to watch the process as he imprisoned anger, and dwindled without it."
Of Capote; "He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm for rhythm."
And of our man; "Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is a pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollypop. Yet I think he has a large talent. His literary energy is enormous, and he had enough of a wild eye to go along with his instincts and so become the first figure for a new generation. (...) For a while I worried about him as a force from the political right which could lead Hip into a hole, but I liked him when I met him, more than I would have thought, and felt he was tired, as indeed why should he not be for he has travelled in a world where the adrenalin devours the blood."
And so on; Mailer's perspicacity arraigning Bellow, Algren, Salinger, Bowles, Bourjaily, Brossard, Vidal, Broyard, Willingham, Ellison, Baldwin. Scandalously, no women in his text but Mccarthy, Stafford & McCullers in the footnote along with Burroughs, then unknown, wagered by Mailer to "rank as one of the most important novelists in America and may prove comparable in his impact to Jean Genet."
*
(March.) I think Advertisements for Myself is where I first read the names of Brossard, Broyard & co., before I scored the Protest anthology... The book is also the home of his White Negro piece, his Reflections on Hip & the famous The Hip & the Square (a forefunner of Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp?) --the fifty page section, Hipsters, should always have been part of the unfolding Beat story : psychologically acute, sociologically & politically resourceful.
I was ten-thousand miles from Home but with my Kerouacs & Advertisements for Myself, deep into the freedom of the poet-artist-Beat-adventurer's world. Melbourne was my 1966-67 Beat heaven!
What is it now, do you ask? It's where I am & able to catch my breath (my life) in retrospect -- to see those seasons again; survey the writings, the diaries, the books in the way I've been promising myself for years.
One of several references I discovered I shared with Retta, when I met her in 1967, was The Village Voice Reader : A Mixed Bag from the Greenwich Village Newspaper (Grove Press, 1963). We both had copies bought in Melbourne the preceding year. Daniel Wolf was its editor & Mailer partly financed & wrote for it. Did you know it? I didnt see a copy of the actual newspaper until Betty Burstall placed copies on the tables of her Cafe La Mama in Carlton, Melbourne, 1967/68.
The Reader puts me right into the middle of a world, vibrations of which were everywhere by the mid Sixties; it's still hilarious, and its history haunts. Though I would be leftism's first fellow-traveller for years to come, the particular clarification of that anthology (for example, Mailer's "Hip is an American existentialism, profoundly different from French existentialism because Hip is based on a mysticism of the flesh", pp49/50) was in terms of its alternative to communism's alternative, producing a phoenix out of the post-war angst & alienation. Even today I think it's an alternative to Corporate man & woman as zenith of success!
Kenneth Tynan hoped, in a brilliant contribution, ostensibly reviewing Advertisements for Myself, that some day Mailer would resume his socialist faith (p124) --fat chance if "community" now declares for middle-class respectability & prissyness instead of embracing the dangers the collective of true individuals will always present to the political status-quo!
Tynan's quote from Mailer actually doesnt reflect what socialism would be for an English intellectual, then or now --it's excitingly contradictory or enigmatic : "As socialists, we want a Socialist world not because we have the conceit that men would therefore be more happy... but because we feel the moral imperative in life itself to raise the human condition, even if this should ultimately mean no more than that man's suffering has been lifted to a higher level." Hmm --suck on that, corporatists of left & right!)
It's fair to say that Janine Pommy Vega, to whom you referred in your last letter, is Old Guard by the above standard! Her beat-wandering seems eventually to have led to the anti-American world-view (minus the USSR, pro-what one wonders? : the Hugo Chavez-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad world-view?) if her contribution to a particular on-line web-site means anything, keeping company with 9/11 conspiratorialism & the rabid rest of it. Summarising her trip in an essay, Revelations of Companionate Love (published in Johnson & Grace's Girls Who wore Black, Rutgers, 2000), Mary Damon notes, "Since her return to the US (punctuated by long periods of travel in the interest of mountain climbing and spiritual pilgrimage/tourism), Pommy Vega has lived in rural upstate New york. She has continued her devotional practice by teaching writing workshops in the prison system. While her work and life no longer manifest a belief in the redemptive possibilities of romantically loving one man [her essay focusses upon Poems to Fernando (City Lights, 1968) in which SPV addressed the grievous loss of her husband, the Peruvian painter Fernando] but rather in being of service to incarcerated people generally (...) she practices a "poetics of service" through a continued contact with the abject, the outcast, and the poetic(...)"
Damon finds parallels between this Beat Generation woman and certain medieval mystics. Any critique of modern times would probably describe the increasing popular interest in every alternative to spiritually deficient & creatively shackled materialism, including, of course, the medieval ascetics & mystics whose example may well be reanimating contemporary monasticism & asceticism in all faiths. After all, our own delight in Buddhism & Taoism & contemporary alternative lifestyles has rather a lot to do with the dancing figures of the Han Shans, Issas, Bashos et al --thus Kerouac, Snyder, Ginsberg, Whalen, Kyger & all!
I'll leave it there for now.
Love as ever,
Kris
*
Weymouth, UK
2008
Dear Kris, Good to get your latest. You're in fine form, as usual. I must tell you I've never read Norman Mailer. Is that a big omission? I'm sure there are many others. Where you went in your reading, I usually followed --Emile Zola, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, W.C. Williams etc... I think when you were reading Mailer I was veering towards Europe --nouveau roman... I've never read anything when i should have done! And now, living in the desert that is Weymouth, I'm right out of things.
Talking of being out of things : today I find myself thinking I'm turning into Dad --I've been gardening. First I was pruning the hydrangea in the front garden, cutting out last year's dead blooms --now there's no chance of frost burning the stems. I did it in the morning sun. Then, in the afternoon, I followed the sun around to the back and mowed the lawn. I know it's too soon to say but I think I've got the gardening bug and found the merit of work! I'm getting to know why Dad enjoyed it so much. The only mystery being that for someone who spent so much time in the garden why it wasn't a more wonderful place & space? Anyway, I've found that I'm able to garden. Never thought I would. I've passed through a barrier. To spur me on I have a few new books on gardening. Stanley Kunitz says in The Wild Braid (Norton, 2005), when asked what was happening in his garden at the end of March, "All is stirring. Hope is stirring." (p113) Kunitz who, at a hundred, has forty years on me, gives me hope! Wonderful.
I've been reading Wendy Johnson on gardening in Tricycle magazine for a number of years. Buddhists make wonderful commentators, and now I have her book, touted as forthcoming for ages --Gardening at the Dragon's Gate (Bantam, 2008). I would've liked more about Suzuki and Buddhism interspersed, as Ed Brown did in his Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings (Riverhead Books, 1997), but it's still a great book. I was hoping Wendy Johnson would do an Ed Brown in my imagination. Both are students of Sunryu Suzuki, one a cook, one a gardener.
*
Funny how some dreams stick and others don't. Lately I can remember a dream of the Dalai Lama --we were playing fruit-machines together! I also dreamed of Gary Snyder --he was hanging out with Joanne Kyger. Just glimpses. The most memorable, tho', was a dream in which I was living at a Zen monastery type of place. I had my own rooms there. All my books were there, shelves and shelves of them, of which the other monks were jealous. So, one night, to bring them down a peg or two, I urinated over their collection of books and paintings. In the morning, as you can imagine, they were pissed off and wanted to punish and harm me in some way. But some Theravada monks arrived just then to save me. I seemed to recognize one of them, but back when I knew him he was a Korean Zen monk. "You've joined the Theravada monks now, have you?" I said to him. He just smiled and nodded, eyes knowing and twinkling. I felt saved. On waking, and for the next day, I felt well-disposed toward the Theravada. But soon after I was pleased to still be in the fold of Soto Zen!
Reading To Meet the Real Dragon by Gudo Wafu Nishijima (Windbell Publications, '92) and Dogen Zen (Kyoto Soto Zen Center, 1988), particularly the essay Dogen Zen as Religion by Uchiyama Roshi, have helped me keep on track. I've also been watching a DVD, Zen Meditation, from Throssel Hole Buddhist Monastery --very helpful.
Recently received a stash of DVD's from Wisdom Books, the pick of which was Zen Buddhism : In Search of Self. Filmed at a Zen temple in Korea, following a 90 day retreat by two dozen nuns. Love their grey robes! I know that's shallow but I've always loved that grey colour. And their socks! Korean Zen is softer, or should I say not as harsh as Japanese Zen. But the Soto Zen of Throssel Hole and Roshi Jiyu Kennett seems especially right and sane to me. So much for my current direction. Don't think I have time for other stuff, Christianity, Bede Griffiths. yoga etc. Life is short. Need to get a grip and be more focussed. I know you always say 'one doesnt preclude the other', but....... I know also that Kerouac went from one to the other and had a strong feeling for both. But I aint he. I'll be on the train to Hexham. And maybe stretch the Buddhism to include the Taoist trail...
Bernard
January-March,2008
Dear Bernard, Your winter birthday approaches (--do you think in terms of particular months, seasons, constellations?) as here in Melbourne summer's hottest days (& nights) seem to be passing. Impossible sometimes for me to concentrate on reading & writing --mind you, I dont make it easy for myself in my non-aircon, tin-roofed, weatherboard! Even so, the journey continues... Richer --e.g., the fascinating 'Bob Dylan' movie, I'm Not There, seen recently --and poorer --e.g., Norman Mailer's death late last year. (And no sooner said than one of I'm Not There's stars, Heath Ledger, has reportedly died in L.A. --tragically young, 29. My sadness at that news undoubtedly fueled by the parallels with our Timmy's death five years ago... Ledger's art & young-man's emotions irrevocably entwined (--a once-in-a-generation talent, like James Dean, according to Travolta)... Found dying, if not already dead, in his L. A. apartment --'accidental death' almost worse than intentional or expected. What a waste --and waste there is & always has been among our 'best & brightest' --war, illness, drugs --whatever, & forever... Of course, "he leaves a legacy"... Dont they all? Do we need reminding of Kerouac, 47, robbed of his three score & ten...)
(February.) You've been with Dylan from the beginning... 1965 when you bought the first vinyl? I thoroughly recommend I'm Not there, though is it showing outside the art-house circuit? If nothing else you'll enjoy the sound-track (there's also a covers' CD). Dylan's a fascinating subject for a bio-flick, as this film is misleadingly described --actually, it's a series of interwoven fictions at the centre of each of which is a surrogate or pseudo Dylan. The film's thesis, & possibly Dylan's, is that authenticity or the real is gained & maintained by an aware subject's mercuriality, and the evasion of stable bureaucratic identity is how it's achieved. The film's fictions are projections of Dylan's media persona, illustrations of themes from his songs, & biographical snippets. Consummate artist that he's been, Art & Life equally represent him. It's the fate of celebrity --Kerouac, unsurprisingly also mentioned in the film, a casualty of the phenomenon (too literal a believer perhaps).
Cate Blanchett's Dylan, aka Jude Quinn, is superlative mimicry --cheeky & also poignantly instructive. She perfectly reproduces the Dylan from David Pennebaker's historical footage of the early 1960s British tour --her acting is almost like channeling! From the signature Dylan hairstyle & chainsmoking to speed-king foot-tapping & pot-head sniggering, she has the character down pat. The portrait careers through naturalism, farce & satire in its astonishing facsimile. For my money, Cate Blanchett's Jude Quinn is the drawstring of the entire ensemble --for the fictions to work, the facsimile was essential. Her casting is a canny director(Todd Haynes)'s coup de grace! And just as fellow Aussie Heath Ledger's film-star character Robbie Clark, hated, as it happens, by the folk-singer he plays on screen, slides calamitously between relationships, so does I'm Not There slip between fiction & history, fulfilling that experience of the Real required of 'the Dylan film' by those who feel they 'understand' him!
Now here's the neatest connection to Norman Mailer : given that Mailer was in my mind & often popping into conversation during this period, it felt like a synchronicity when, in the middle of I'm Not There, Robbie Clarke, at the big Hollywood party, identifies him through the throng, across the room. There's Mailer, he says. For the life of me I thought the constantly thwarted wife was about to seek him out --maybe she was, but the camera finds husband & girlfriend first and Mailer is lost in the Hollywood night.
*
Speed-reading Advertisements for Myself (my first & probably most influential Mailer --five shillings Corgi paperback bought 42 years from the great little Paperback Parade in Southampton), I'm impressed all over again. Part of the reason for that is his intention & ability to impress --one feels his fire and his texts are firing : those 1940s pieces, the war-stories, & the 1951 Man Who Studied Yoga... what am I trying to say here? --something about energy, creating an equation for egotism where egotism is the energised individual's antenna to the world, which characterised poets & novelists of that period, including the Beats --and Mailer's delightfully pugilistic yet confidential & charming Evaluations - Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room (p339) is a register of that...
For example, of Jack Jones; "Like Styron, like myself, like Kerouac, he has been running for President as well as sticking at his work, and it was near tragic to watch the process as he imprisoned anger, and dwindled without it."
Of Capote; "He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm for rhythm."
And of our man; "Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is a pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollypop. Yet I think he has a large talent. His literary energy is enormous, and he had enough of a wild eye to go along with his instincts and so become the first figure for a new generation. (...) For a while I worried about him as a force from the political right which could lead Hip into a hole, but I liked him when I met him, more than I would have thought, and felt he was tired, as indeed why should he not be for he has travelled in a world where the adrenalin devours the blood."
And so on; Mailer's perspicacity arraigning Bellow, Algren, Salinger, Bowles, Bourjaily, Brossard, Vidal, Broyard, Willingham, Ellison, Baldwin. Scandalously, no women in his text but Mccarthy, Stafford & McCullers in the footnote along with Burroughs, then unknown, wagered by Mailer to "rank as one of the most important novelists in America and may prove comparable in his impact to Jean Genet."
*
(March.) I think Advertisements for Myself is where I first read the names of Brossard, Broyard & co., before I scored the Protest anthology... The book is also the home of his White Negro piece, his Reflections on Hip & the famous The Hip & the Square (a forefunner of Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp?) --the fifty page section, Hipsters, should always have been part of the unfolding Beat story : psychologically acute, sociologically & politically resourceful.
I was ten-thousand miles from Home but with my Kerouacs & Advertisements for Myself, deep into the freedom of the poet-artist-Beat-adventurer's world. Melbourne was my 1966-67 Beat heaven!
What is it now, do you ask? It's where I am & able to catch my breath (my life) in retrospect -- to see those seasons again; survey the writings, the diaries, the books in the way I've been promising myself for years.
One of several references I discovered I shared with Retta, when I met her in 1967, was The Village Voice Reader : A Mixed Bag from the Greenwich Village Newspaper (Grove Press, 1963). We both had copies bought in Melbourne the preceding year. Daniel Wolf was its editor & Mailer partly financed & wrote for it. Did you know it? I didnt see a copy of the actual newspaper until Betty Burstall placed copies on the tables of her Cafe La Mama in Carlton, Melbourne, 1967/68.
The Reader puts me right into the middle of a world, vibrations of which were everywhere by the mid Sixties; it's still hilarious, and its history haunts. Though I would be leftism's first fellow-traveller for years to come, the particular clarification of that anthology (for example, Mailer's "Hip is an American existentialism, profoundly different from French existentialism because Hip is based on a mysticism of the flesh", pp49/50) was in terms of its alternative to communism's alternative, producing a phoenix out of the post-war angst & alienation. Even today I think it's an alternative to Corporate man & woman as zenith of success!
Kenneth Tynan hoped, in a brilliant contribution, ostensibly reviewing Advertisements for Myself, that some day Mailer would resume his socialist faith (p124) --fat chance if "community" now declares for middle-class respectability & prissyness instead of embracing the dangers the collective of true individuals will always present to the political status-quo!
Tynan's quote from Mailer actually doesnt reflect what socialism would be for an English intellectual, then or now --it's excitingly contradictory or enigmatic : "As socialists, we want a Socialist world not because we have the conceit that men would therefore be more happy... but because we feel the moral imperative in life itself to raise the human condition, even if this should ultimately mean no more than that man's suffering has been lifted to a higher level." Hmm --suck on that, corporatists of left & right!)
It's fair to say that Janine Pommy Vega, to whom you referred in your last letter, is Old Guard by the above standard! Her beat-wandering seems eventually to have led to the anti-American world-view (minus the USSR, pro-what one wonders? : the Hugo Chavez-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad world-view?) if her contribution to a particular on-line web-site means anything, keeping company with 9/11 conspiratorialism & the rabid rest of it. Summarising her trip in an essay, Revelations of Companionate Love (published in Johnson & Grace's Girls Who wore Black, Rutgers, 2000), Mary Damon notes, "Since her return to the US (punctuated by long periods of travel in the interest of mountain climbing and spiritual pilgrimage/tourism), Pommy Vega has lived in rural upstate New york. She has continued her devotional practice by teaching writing workshops in the prison system. While her work and life no longer manifest a belief in the redemptive possibilities of romantically loving one man [her essay focusses upon Poems to Fernando (City Lights, 1968) in which SPV addressed the grievous loss of her husband, the Peruvian painter Fernando] but rather in being of service to incarcerated people generally (...) she practices a "poetics of service" through a continued contact with the abject, the outcast, and the poetic(...)"
Damon finds parallels between this Beat Generation woman and certain medieval mystics. Any critique of modern times would probably describe the increasing popular interest in every alternative to spiritually deficient & creatively shackled materialism, including, of course, the medieval ascetics & mystics whose example may well be reanimating contemporary monasticism & asceticism in all faiths. After all, our own delight in Buddhism & Taoism & contemporary alternative lifestyles has rather a lot to do with the dancing figures of the Han Shans, Issas, Bashos et al --thus Kerouac, Snyder, Ginsberg, Whalen, Kyger & all!
I'll leave it there for now.
Love as ever,
Kris
*
Weymouth, UK
2008
Dear Kris, Good to get your latest. You're in fine form, as usual. I must tell you I've never read Norman Mailer. Is that a big omission? I'm sure there are many others. Where you went in your reading, I usually followed --Emile Zola, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, W.C. Williams etc... I think when you were reading Mailer I was veering towards Europe --nouveau roman... I've never read anything when i should have done! And now, living in the desert that is Weymouth, I'm right out of things.
Talking of being out of things : today I find myself thinking I'm turning into Dad --I've been gardening. First I was pruning the hydrangea in the front garden, cutting out last year's dead blooms --now there's no chance of frost burning the stems. I did it in the morning sun. Then, in the afternoon, I followed the sun around to the back and mowed the lawn. I know it's too soon to say but I think I've got the gardening bug and found the merit of work! I'm getting to know why Dad enjoyed it so much. The only mystery being that for someone who spent so much time in the garden why it wasn't a more wonderful place & space? Anyway, I've found that I'm able to garden. Never thought I would. I've passed through a barrier. To spur me on I have a few new books on gardening. Stanley Kunitz says in The Wild Braid (Norton, 2005), when asked what was happening in his garden at the end of March, "All is stirring. Hope is stirring." (p113) Kunitz who, at a hundred, has forty years on me, gives me hope! Wonderful.
I've been reading Wendy Johnson on gardening in Tricycle magazine for a number of years. Buddhists make wonderful commentators, and now I have her book, touted as forthcoming for ages --Gardening at the Dragon's Gate (Bantam, 2008). I would've liked more about Suzuki and Buddhism interspersed, as Ed Brown did in his Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings (Riverhead Books, 1997), but it's still a great book. I was hoping Wendy Johnson would do an Ed Brown in my imagination. Both are students of Sunryu Suzuki, one a cook, one a gardener.
*
Funny how some dreams stick and others don't. Lately I can remember a dream of the Dalai Lama --we were playing fruit-machines together! I also dreamed of Gary Snyder --he was hanging out with Joanne Kyger. Just glimpses. The most memorable, tho', was a dream in which I was living at a Zen monastery type of place. I had my own rooms there. All my books were there, shelves and shelves of them, of which the other monks were jealous. So, one night, to bring them down a peg or two, I urinated over their collection of books and paintings. In the morning, as you can imagine, they were pissed off and wanted to punish and harm me in some way. But some Theravada monks arrived just then to save me. I seemed to recognize one of them, but back when I knew him he was a Korean Zen monk. "You've joined the Theravada monks now, have you?" I said to him. He just smiled and nodded, eyes knowing and twinkling. I felt saved. On waking, and for the next day, I felt well-disposed toward the Theravada. But soon after I was pleased to still be in the fold of Soto Zen!
Reading To Meet the Real Dragon by Gudo Wafu Nishijima (Windbell Publications, '92) and Dogen Zen (Kyoto Soto Zen Center, 1988), particularly the essay Dogen Zen as Religion by Uchiyama Roshi, have helped me keep on track. I've also been watching a DVD, Zen Meditation, from Throssel Hole Buddhist Monastery --very helpful.
Recently received a stash of DVD's from Wisdom Books, the pick of which was Zen Buddhism : In Search of Self. Filmed at a Zen temple in Korea, following a 90 day retreat by two dozen nuns. Love their grey robes! I know that's shallow but I've always loved that grey colour. And their socks! Korean Zen is softer, or should I say not as harsh as Japanese Zen. But the Soto Zen of Throssel Hole and Roshi Jiyu Kennett seems especially right and sane to me. So much for my current direction. Don't think I have time for other stuff, Christianity, Bede Griffiths. yoga etc. Life is short. Need to get a grip and be more focussed. I know you always say 'one doesnt preclude the other', but....... I know also that Kerouac went from one to the other and had a strong feeling for both. But I aint he. I'll be on the train to Hexham. And maybe stretch the Buddhism to include the Taoist trail...
Bernard
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)