Showing posts with label Henry Miller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry Miller. Show all posts
Friday, January 5, 2018
TOPOGRAPHY
[---> Elwood
1/1/18
10.05's allowed to be late any time missus
if it means ma & pa kettle
can stumble up to Clifton Hill terminus
from the 'Garth
& catch it at ten past ten --
long runs of clear traffic on New Year's Day
deserted roads no one aboard the bus --
after first fusillade of midnight fireworks
hit the hay (a la Heaney "I dreamt we slept in a moss
in Donegal / On turf banks under blankets"
misremembered always from P. Gebhardt's
rare edition of Glanmore Sonnet number ten
"laid down my head on a square of turf" --Peter ay?
last post cuts through all the crap right here --as Retta
in '73 upon waking --of Buckmaster
"the dead come back to us / like clear water
in a dream" --how to deal with this
unannounced convocation
Seamus --Peter -- Charles?)
slept like a --like the proverbial --
cop cars & ambulance pass bus unhurriedly --
dance of cirrus across pure azure --
down Punt Road's gentle hill & icons
Bill Nuttall's Niagara Gallery the cricket ground & no parking
park --the Cricketers pub & the topless barmaids other one --
thirty years since "The Last Gardens" preoccupied me --
Judith Rodriguez at Penguin Books when was that?
late '80s '90? wrote despite this or that part
it was "intractable" ( i.e. didn't give a shit
for 'readers'?) --both Nick Johnson & John Kinsella
read & liked it but it got lost
& then i lost the yen for publishing it!
mystical milieu of my poem all around the Royal Botanical --
& the river --
South Yarra's posh European tone --
like Gauloises wafting Italian equivalent --
tonal mist the gist of it --
scuffing past the fine houses --
does periphery qualify as stuff of history?
invisible at the edges Poet's remit
though Poetry itself another element
amidst the powers that be!
down down now into the hip hop of St Kilda Junction
the massive dial --
fifty years ago another configuration
pre-motorway historic shops & housing
old world's demolition --
ritzy then as now --Kings Cross's little Melbourne
cousin --same vibe now as before on
Fitzroy Street --recognize the "bums
beatniks & bastards"from pre-Oz Emigration manuscript --
anticipated in Southampton
holding out for another world --
after library & gallery the general cemetery
far preferable for mooning teenage artist
to our village bloated by housing boom
into anonymous nowhere's-ville
every summer's destination ELWOOD --hollowed from
sea's reverberation heard on late afternoon's approach
escaped from City "Gone Fishing" the notice
pinned on bookshop door --
a sense of pre-fabs among the grand olds
extending from St Kilda --the ephemeral straggle
DHL identified Sydney to Thirroul
that "next wind might blow away" --
Elwood's beach house encampment
emigres' struggles resolved within cooee
of beach & water --pre-de luxe marina
& walking paths era --
rough & ready 'off the rocks'
at year's turn 1966 --
closest ever came to Greece --Miller's Colossus
fomented idée fixe --free at last
& subject only to sand & sea & wave-slapped rocks
beneath great southern sun --
Greek idyll dreamt of in
Southampton parks laid in
fully clothed in summer
huddled in winter
Old Dart's natural season --
ten minutes stroll from Thackeray Street
over the Beach Road & rugged landfill to the sea --
lodging with Penny Poynton in her little house
whose mercy delivered me from the calamity
across town in Ascot Vale --
how could love come undone so?
not love but its ambivalent rhetoric --
young & old tied in knots by it --
much vaunted home of free-spirits
free-love FREEDOM contorted into haunted house --
ghosts of suicide & murder spooking art-of-life's
studio --as tho (& no flippant reference
as my ideal reader could guess)
Dostoevsky's darkest direst testament
had obliterated Khalil Gibran's enlightenment --
overnight! --
curses threats desperate sex --
death's door off the latch & not the half of it!
last January fifty years ago
took new met girl there to greet
could say fellow exiles part-
Bohemian part-suburban
in the almost sweet Peace of Penny's house
by the sea ("the sea! the sea!") --
after Ascot Vale such equanimity
a kind of blasphemy they might have said --
and the Peace lasted --
for a while --
and can only smile now
by the sea
the sea
[1-5 January, 2018]
Saturday, January 14, 2017
THE BEACH REPORT, 4-1-17
January 4th, 2017
Head full of Greece out of early morning emails with Jenni K --reciting the influence of the Durrells, Miller, Clift & Johnson, Leonard Cohen (--i appear to be the only one of the generation who never went to India or Greece or Paris for that matter --friend Cathy's 70's overland adventure its epitome --though naturally always in my head, --and Paris on the map in 1964 but something happened to prevent Christopher Owen, with whom i shared a passion for Oscar Wilde & whose idea it was to drop out of the Tech College in Southampton & go to Paris with me, --my actor friend with the parley vous & the aristo manners & a double crown, --suddenly we werent going -- his pater he said, or his mater, no money forthcoming --ah well, i went to South Wales instead ℅ of a few quid from Aunty Lydia who shared my disappointment at the abandonment of the Parisian reconnoitre -- yet Amsterdam was ever mine, & Ostend & Aachen & some of the German towns, especially Koln, Soest, Dortmund --and India, Greece…? --hmm… "next life" i mutter…) --once more at the kiosque --heard you were still here, Happy New Year--
--but the Point Ormond end of Elwood Beach's sou-westerly bluster's more like the Skegness of another life's forbearance --that is, desire's English inventory of never-visited seaside towns, fed by schoolfriends' holiday reports. However, there was always the Isle of Wight, a jewel compared to the smaller, shalier, stonier, scrubbier Hampshire resorts. Bournemouth we never ever got to, --posher, cosmopolitan, sandy, everything the Aunty in her sophistication would insist as almost acceptable in eternal competition with the Alexandria of her childhood & youth.
*
When encountered, Summer's here-again-ness could never not have been! One minute of summer day's sand, sea & sky causes instant forgetfulness of Winter --the cliche of the constantly warm-weathered Australia absolutely restored…
*
Two little boys squabbling over ball, bucket, ice-cream; third little feller inured from the fight by innocent infancy. Mediterranean mother sprawled in the recliner on the sand shrieks instructions for the three to enact the perfect family photograph, otherwise ignores their mayhem. Kayakers return to the water's edge, survey the chop, then quickly into their craft & paddle out. Three swimmers who pulled past in deep water far beyond where our kind of splashers on a brighter, stiller day would abound, reverse now on seemingly effortless point-to-point. From rocks & sea-wall a hundred, two hundred yards away near the old yacht club, the children's playground, toilet block, food vans, presently closed restaurant, back to Point Ormond…
*
Port Philip Bay's EPA warnings taken to heart --spit out face full of salty, sea-weedy water. One immersion's enough. Throw strange ball back to player with bandy bat. What's that? i'm asking. Thank you, he says clubbing the ball fifty yards across the grass. Hurling, he says --it's an Irish game! Ah --I was thinking lacrosse or a form of bush tennis. Now dried off & dressed, notebook in hand, i've commandeered the best bench. Only now, Loretta observes, are others entering the water. The sun's hotter. Your reporter's on his way...
Head full of Greece out of early morning emails with Jenni K --reciting the influence of the Durrells, Miller, Clift & Johnson, Leonard Cohen (--i appear to be the only one of the generation who never went to India or Greece or Paris for that matter --friend Cathy's 70's overland adventure its epitome --though naturally always in my head, --and Paris on the map in 1964 but something happened to prevent Christopher Owen, with whom i shared a passion for Oscar Wilde & whose idea it was to drop out of the Tech College in Southampton & go to Paris with me, --my actor friend with the parley vous & the aristo manners & a double crown, --suddenly we werent going -- his pater he said, or his mater, no money forthcoming --ah well, i went to South Wales instead ℅ of a few quid from Aunty Lydia who shared my disappointment at the abandonment of the Parisian reconnoitre -- yet Amsterdam was ever mine, & Ostend & Aachen & some of the German towns, especially Koln, Soest, Dortmund --and India, Greece…? --hmm… "next life" i mutter…) --once more at the kiosque --heard you were still here, Happy New Year--
--but the Point Ormond end of Elwood Beach's sou-westerly bluster's more like the Skegness of another life's forbearance --that is, desire's English inventory of never-visited seaside towns, fed by schoolfriends' holiday reports. However, there was always the Isle of Wight, a jewel compared to the smaller, shalier, stonier, scrubbier Hampshire resorts. Bournemouth we never ever got to, --posher, cosmopolitan, sandy, everything the Aunty in her sophistication would insist as almost acceptable in eternal competition with the Alexandria of her childhood & youth.
*
When encountered, Summer's here-again-ness could never not have been! One minute of summer day's sand, sea & sky causes instant forgetfulness of Winter --the cliche of the constantly warm-weathered Australia absolutely restored…
*
Two little boys squabbling over ball, bucket, ice-cream; third little feller inured from the fight by innocent infancy. Mediterranean mother sprawled in the recliner on the sand shrieks instructions for the three to enact the perfect family photograph, otherwise ignores their mayhem. Kayakers return to the water's edge, survey the chop, then quickly into their craft & paddle out. Three swimmers who pulled past in deep water far beyond where our kind of splashers on a brighter, stiller day would abound, reverse now on seemingly effortless point-to-point. From rocks & sea-wall a hundred, two hundred yards away near the old yacht club, the children's playground, toilet block, food vans, presently closed restaurant, back to Point Ormond…
*
Port Philip Bay's EPA warnings taken to heart --spit out face full of salty, sea-weedy water. One immersion's enough. Throw strange ball back to player with bandy bat. What's that? i'm asking. Thank you, he says clubbing the ball fifty yards across the grass. Hurling, he says --it's an Irish game! Ah --I was thinking lacrosse or a form of bush tennis. Now dried off & dressed, notebook in hand, i've commandeered the best bench. Only now, Loretta observes, are others entering the water. The sun's hotter. Your reporter's on his way...
Sunday, October 18, 2015
GUILLERMO O'JOYCE : "MILLER, BUKOWSKI & THEIR ENEMIES"
[23-9-15] A kid, device in ear, lap-top on chair in front of him, ostentatiously sets up in the full sunshine window at Cathedral end of the corridor overlooking Swanston Street. Now dont give me he's our time's Kerouac and that I should be more accepting! JK, remember, advocated "scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy" not well-heeled youngsters with portable computers etc in full view and treading on toes of ordinary people including high rent paying micro-retailers in classic Nicholas Building in the rejuvenated rag trade quarter, obstructing their customers & small parties of visitors with guides describing the history including adjacent lie of the land or people simply investigating our floor, walking up the corridor to look out on the city street below... Which growl, not so irritated as to botch another potential angle to the eternal plot --writing out of the sensational world, the given, on the platter of whatever leads to perception --refers me straight to yesterday's gift, the book Miller, Bukowski and Their Enemies : Essays on Contemporary Culture by Guillermo O'Joyce --described, "[T]his new edition with nine new essays first published in Great Britain by Pinter & Martin Ltd, 2011" (evidently then, deducing from bio/biblio notes, the first edition comprised five pieces, written/published between '68 & the present edition --he's a contemporary therefore, another brother of the time)--
which I continued reading overnight (akimbo with new book, without child's excuse of ill-abed). Spotted it in a general catalogue, hard to miss such a title & uncommon name of author. Open it on Comments on Work by Guillermo O'Joyce. Appreciative but backgrounding the reverse. Next page entitled How Censorship Operates in the United States. I'm immediately reminded of Bill Knott's self-published poetry books in 2001, to wit, "I think every poem in this book was rejected at least once by some magazine or other, and indeed the majority here never did achieve periodical publication. An 'acknowledgements page' would not be very impressive" juxtaposed with the testimonials on back-cover. 'Over three decades of critical acclaim', for example, "It is no accident that the major British and American poets of the 19th and 20th century were outsiders. The most original poet of my generation, Bill Knott, is also the greatest outsider." --Stephen Dobyns, '95, and one could have chosen blurbs from Kevin Hart, Jim Elledge, Charles Simic, Sandra McPherson, Thomas Lux et al --a literary milieu, by the way, which probably appals Guillermo judging by the argument & examples in the piece, Masturbation in the strophe factory : 4 essays on Contemporary Poetry… Not quite in the same bag as Bill Knott but subject to similar frustration. Guillermo includes a note from Harper's Magazine's Lewis Lapham, "My friends told me that if I tried to publish this [essay] I could put my career in a bottle and cast it in the wine-dark sea." Similarly, Alice Fulton's fulminations from the University of Michigan to her student, David Levine, "I wasn't here this summer, but had I been here and seen William Joyce in your resume, you not only would not have gotten a fellowship but you wouldn't have gotten into this university." Hilarious but horrendous.
On account of what? Guillermo's writing most reminds me of the serious romanticism, simultaneously literary & political, its presumption & pursuit, synonymous with the Young &/or Progressive, even Radical, prospect, once mine too. Unlike Guillermo I was never tested by the commitment which could take one to this or that academic or professional writers' workshop as so many Americans and latterly British & Australians do, although I did teach or facilitate "creative writing" at the community access level for many years... But Guillermo's essays are all guns blazing at academics, publishers, celebrated critics & writers, in short (but at great length) The Writing Industry, --corollary he assumes of the venal & vicious Western Civ, the consequences of whose politics he describes & denounces. He's for the anti-bourgeois often working-class literature, an heir therefore to 19th & 20th Century French, Russian, British & American realism, into which frame the conflation of Bohemian & Beat writing. Outsiderdom opposes middle-class society & culture; the 'little boxes', as it were, enemies of freedom, he poxes & pillories. Anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, promoting a kind of existentialist survivalism against careerism. Yet few of Guillermo's greats were hermits or complete disaffiliates. They were more likely democrats than guerillas, seeking to influence not annihilate. Most contributed their radicalism to the literary or political domain as I said of & to Hans Magnus Enzensberger when we met in Melbourne in 1981, opposing his notion of Australia as tabula rasa ("you can do anything!") as though history & culture were absent or counted for nothing. (Very likely Guillermo would approve Enzensberger's critique of "the consciousness industry" though Hans Magnus was hardly anarchist or outsider.)
[24-9-15] In the chapter on the artist & writer Irving Stettner (1922-2004), whom I surely do recall from a Henry Miller connection including Stroker magazine (via the mail art & small press hook ups in the late '70s), Guillermo refers to "earned innocence, a term invented by Nelson Algren" (p48). Guillermo explains, "It is comparatively easy to be light and carefree at 24 or 34 (….) But how does anyone keep their gusto, verve, humanness when the gray hairs settle in and he has an artistic audience of 14, eats out of tin cans, and buys coarse toiletpaper instead of White Cloud? This is what I mean by earned innocence. In short, how is it that the boy becomes a man, shakes off mentors and becomes a true voice in his own right…" Clearly this is our author's challenge too.
[28-9-15] He sticks with the boy for his estimation of Kerouac's vision, such informed experience predicated upon what Guillermo calls "a host of necessary virtues", thus
"curiosity
faith that we would be treated well by strangers
wonder
awe
belief in our own capacity to navigate in strange territory
total belief in the present moment
ability at a glance to take in the world as a whole
the notion that everything was animated" (p202)
maintained through the decades.
The literature per se doesn't age, only the style (as in 'dated'). Narrative & characters are impervious to passing time, inviolable in poetry & prose --a world complete, truth intact.
[8/14-10-15] Three or four pages of Guillermo's take on Buk, His Own Best Friend, promote the brilliant conjunction of Bukowski & W C Fields, as he says (p56), "Fields and Bukowski are two of a dozen of the truly American voices of this [20th] century. Their lives and their work are instructional manuals on how to convert paranoia into galvanising art." Analogy like metaphor, albeit compositional manna, can also be writer's sure way of losing losing the plot. But Guillermo's on the money here. "Out of a paranoia about the motives of others, they hide money under the rug, under the ice-cube tray, in books, and then can't remember the next morning where they put it. Chaos ensues. they threw up their arms, they curse God and Walt Disney; they tear apart the house. Once, upon returning books to the library, Bukowski spotted something green peeking out of one book, and opened it to find three 20s and a10-spot, huge amount of money for him at any period of his life.this absent-mindedness isn't for lack of concentration; Fields' & Bukowski's concentrations are simply elsewhere. They find the world off, and beneath all the hijinks of their respective art forms, mostly loveless."
Guillermo could have included Kerouac in the analogy. Making another point he notes, "Other than jazz and W C Fields, there are no cultural references in On the Road." (p211) --which has become an American distinction, --says Guillermo, "A Europe that is in rubble shouldn't have much to say [post WW2] about the value of Shakespeare, Diderot, Plato, Aristotle, J S Mill, Voltaire, Goethe, Moliere, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Kafka, etc etc". Evidently Bukowski & Kerouac can begin from scratch. Perhaps Kerouac as Fields removes him from the overall sad set and however many sorry instances equips the figure with viable ambivalence about life, which is how the mystically inclined, Catholic, Buddhist, survive the crazy world.
For Guillermo, Kerouac is "the hero we needed", albeit his post-Road life becomes the martyrdom the others (Miller, Bukowski, Stettner et al) evaded, transcended --survivors each, achieving their three score years & ten, prolific to the end. One's happy to read a Kerouac of technical achievement --Guillermo's analysis of On the Road as a 4 part jazz work (and here's me writing this, ears ringing with Kenneth Rexroth's 1957 Cellar Club recording of Thou Shalt Not Kill (i.m. Dylan Thomas), --the jazz punctuation exploding the word "dead" in the most declamatory section of the famous poem!) amply funds it…
"Each of the 4 sections of On the Road culminates in a jazz scene and does so with such intensity and virtuosity that there can be no doubt that music is the foundation with which he spent so much time building his book. So jazz forms not only the inspiration for Kerouac but becomes as well his method of construction. Because he inherits no language to recapitulate jazz's vast terrain, he must invent one and this accounts for the freshness and spontaneity of On the Road. Fifty-three years later [written in 2010?] it reads better than it did when it was first published. Each paragraph is organised along the principle of as series of jazz chords with the principal characters -- Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others who receive their solo time wail mightily and brilliantly in the tradition of bebop but don't always make sense…till the reader reviews their rants in the context of the entire novel. This bebop, and I would assert here a host of other jazz forms -- swing, cool jazz such as the version of 'Autumn Leaves' with Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis -- is Kerouac's answer to the slavery (Moriarty would call it "hung up") he finds about himself at all times."
Out of the blue(s), Guillermo's raised up the game from well-drilled sociology to twitching the actual music --sound-shape of existence, thus writer & writing implying & obliging total engagement -- the only hero the rest of us scribes & scribblers ever need.
[fin, 18-10-15]
Saturday, January 11, 2014
THE BEACH REPORT : Posts Retrieved from Facebook, Late 2013, early 2014
The Beach Report : 11/1/14, from the Elwood Beach kiosk
We're done, mid-morning, as the colour of the day (cloud-grey & white) begins to change. There's the feel of blue sky & sun --skin registers warmth, obviously, but i'm tempted to invoke the 'intelligence of the day' as though environment actually is innate. And even an hour after the dip there arent any other swimmers, only a temporarily capsized sailboard in the water.
*
Thank Heavens for Betty Ryan & the bottle of white wine she shared for our Henry's getting to Greece --her evocations, notwithstanding Henry's saying she wasnt a storyteller, in addition to the correspondence from "my friend Lawrence Durrell, who had practically made Corfu his home." I thank Henry for the Greek experience too, never having gone though many I've known did & do. But reading The Colossus of Maroussi (the 1950 white blocked purple covered--'Travel', 'Complete Unabridged'-- paperback issue) in Australia, winter through to summer '66/'67, performed the transmogrification whereby my Elwood exile (--oh yes, there's an awful & heavy tale attached but not for telling here), living in Thackaray Street, one of the poets' roads (exact mirror of Thornhill/Southampton's topography, Down Under's not so secret meaning), became my Greece, -- swimming off the rocks (industrial detritus), recovering breath spent battling the riffs & unexpected depths, propped between stone & concrete in a nest of sand, driftwood, dried seaweed, with best friend satchel containing biro & notebook, novel, poetry, tobacco/papers/matches, supporting me forever...
*
You see, it happens every time I'm here, between Elwood & Point Ormond --every summer as first the elements & then the literary & cultural memories work me over. Remembering as I re-live it, the Beat life of sun, sand & sea...
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[via David Caddy / Tears in the Fence]
Posted on January 10, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) 1934-2014
When Le Roi Jones’s volume of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, appeared from Totem / Corinth in 1961 it had a Basil King drawing on the cover and it had a poem titled ‘Way Out West’ half way through it.
As simple an act
as opening the eyes. Merely
coming into things by degrees.
Basil King was over here in England at the end of last year and he talked and read, along with his wife Martha, at Kent University amongst many other places. Basil had also worked alongside Le Roi Jones in the late 1950s when he provided the covers for the magazine which Le Roi edited along with Hettie Cohen, Yugen. Yugen closed down in 1962 after number 8 but not before the starting up of The Floating Bear, a newsletter, edited by Jones and Diane di Prima. The Addenda to that issue number 8 of Yugen gives its readers the following information:
The newsletter, The Floating Bear, and its editors, Le Roi Jones and Diane di Prima, were cleared in April of obscenity charges stemming from their publication of a section of Jones’ System of Dante’s Hell and William Burroughs’ satire, The Routine.
That little note at the end also gives an update on what Le Roi Jones was upto, including editing Corinth’s fiction anthology, Avant Garde American Fiction, ‘which will include such prose writers as Fielding Dawson, Burroughs, Kerouac, Rumaker, Selby, Creeley, Douglas Woolf, Irving Rosenthal, Herbert Huncke, Paul Metcalfe, Diane Di Prima, and others’.
Had he had lived Amiri Baraka was due to come over to London this year to attend the University of Canterbury’s one-day conference, Baraka at 80, to be held at the ICA on 12th April.
The very last sentence in that last Yugen issue is:
‘At all other places they cremate them; Here we bury them alive’.
Farewell to a most important poet, dramatist, short-story writer, editor and major figure throughout the past fifty years.
*
(c) Ian Brinton ;
oOo
Kris Hemensley
Mourn both Le Roi Jones & Amiri Baraka. Complex within itself/himself, impossible for one such as I, to neatly unravel after 50 years of development. Poetry, politics... May as well throw this in even if a poignant contemplation more appropriate than a thesis at this sad time. So : The change of his name from Le Roi Jones to Amiri Baraka emblematic (paradigmatic?) of this time of changes (1960s to date). Well recall seeing the shocking pic in Village Voice in '68 of Jones/Baraka : bloodied head coshed in middle of Newark riot. Remember thinking this is the beginning of something else, --a something else agglomeration of all the radical ideologies any one of which one might have sat & mulled or stood toe to toe & argued, but tossed up now with race relations, black revolution, --and where was poet in that calamity out of which insurrection was suddenly spun? --reversal of the judgement of skin colour in the urgency of solidarity --educational indeed for white boy to experience the boot on the other foot even if thousands of miles away in Melbourne/Oz from Newark --psychically & imaginatively empathizing, responding --the Vietnam War already the actual ground of could-be would-be refuse-to-be conscripted the daily '60s life --suddenly absent when landing back in England, late '69 --a whole other &, notwithstanding the Irish troubles, relaxed English vibe. It's been my American friends, Duncan McNaughton particularly in my head now, who've articulated the necessary hybridization/cosmopolitanism in name of the Real, --American as African & Spanish. Poetry, politics... And you know what Ive said about the warts & all as the truth of my situation, that is against perfection (as if politics could ever be pure)... And how revolted ive been by ahistorical that is hysterical conspiratorial leftist politics, in wch this or that erstwhile minority is no more than ideological canon fodder... in this minute i'm putting it back together, the Humpty Dumpty of me, of poet amongst poets, --hailing here Leroi/Baraka, the poet, the playwright, the editor publisher anthologist, Hettie's other half --and RIP...
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[January 7, 2014]
[via Monique Chester, Weymouth/UK]
SIRENS HAVE SOUNDED
The following SEVERE Flood Warnings will remain in force from 19:00 on 06.01.2014 until 02:00 on 07/01/2014 including the times of high tide. Peak water levels and waves are expected between 21:00 and midnight. Flooding may already be affecting properties, low lying areas and roads. The Causeway between Portland and Wyke Regis may be impassable and may be closed as a precaution. Dangerous wave overtopping including shingle is possible. The time and date of the forecast high waters for which this Flood Warning is in force are 21:45 (Local time) on 06/01/2014 (21:45 GMT) Please listen for the sound of the Flood Warning sirens which will be sounded IF wave overtopping occurs at Chiswell. The forecast wind direction is South West The forecast wind strengths is Force 7
*
B H : A river passed by my door during the night...
K H : how dyou mean B? A river on Goldcroft Road? But youre on a rise or coming off a rise? Used to be rivers down Flinders Street and when I was a sailor on shore leave in Singapore once upon a time the monsoon broke around me as I sheltered and the road became a river. Only thing was, before the inundation occurred it was an ordinary road with open sewers/gutters but after the rain there was only water to be waded through to the slightly higher part in the middle of the road. With my whites rolled up, my shoes in my hands above my head, I stepped into the torrent (had to get back to the boat y'see) and down I went, into the sewer!!! The locals laughed at me then helped me up. But I'd gashed my toe on the way down. Back at the Fairstar I stuck a plaster on the wound. A day & night of increasing throbbing pain later the ship doctor operated on my toe. Local anaesthetic. Cut off half the nail then scooped out the flesh. You could have lost the toe he said, another day the leg!!!! Did this flood come out of the blue for you or has it been developing last day or so? And watch out for your toes old boy!
Jo Harris : didn't know you were a sailor...did you run away to sea?
K H : regarding sailor boy --yes, I guess I did run away to sea Jo! Went down to the Labour exchange with brother B, asked for unusual job, and hey presto! 1965...
J H : those sailors pants...bell bottoms with a flap...sooo sexy..maybe that helped you decide
K H : Blue uniform for the northern part of the voyage, whites for the tropics... I just had to get-a get-a get-a get away! I couldnt wait another day ay ay!!! And yes, Jo, always liked the look, the whites not the blues... With my post-op foot I could wear a sandal instead of white shoe, but the good foot had the shoe still! I worked in the Ship Shop with the photographers (German) and the hairdressers (English, Scottish, Italian). I also had hold duties. I cannot tie knots so my tying & hauling of packages was a nightly ordeal for me and a huge laugh for the others. Shared cabin at first with the photographers but they complained that I snored --I think they said I snorkled. They were believed. I was moved to an Italian purser's cabin. He slept during the day when I was at work, & v-versa. One or two funny if not scandalous incidents. In retrospect of course e/thing is hilarious, vast comedy of life. Even at the time I was watching over my own shoulder so to speak --being a writer you see and my Nobel prize not too far away...
--------------------------------------------------------------
January 7, '14
The more I think about KILL YOUR DARLINGS the more I like it... truth is you have to check things out yrself however persuasive friends & critics!
I've been thinking about the historical settings & references : The World at WAR, so the film is its gigantic footnote? thus 'existentialism'... The War crucial threshold of change... not necessarily refusing the call to arms but simultaneously accepting the call to LIFE, and of one's own order... the wackier the better! that is, backing yr own call...
*
January 6, '14
Well, whaddayaknow! Saw Kill Your Darlings at the Nova in Carlton this afternoon and was captivated. Intriguing story. Contrary to what Ive heard around the traps, mostly re- the inadequacy of Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg, found the film psychologically coherent, soundly based in the literature. For my money, Kerouac's The Sea Is My Brother corroborates the merchant marine signing-up scene, tho Lucian [Carr] is the extra dimension contributed by the film. Still thinking it through. Yep, excellent.
I accepted the characterizations, the actors melded with originals... Dane DeHaan's Lucian Carr as beautiful memerising boy, pent with desire & imagining, recalls for me people I met along our young way (let's say younger way since it's not done with yet --and not just the tearing, waring manuscripts of up to fifty years ago but the impulses, the heart & soul within) --which is the mark of --what? --the memorable --the mythic --template or archetype of life/of lives understood that way...
I saw Charles Buckmaster in Radcliffe's Ginsberg --imagine 17 years old --up to the big city --nervous, expectant, sensitive to all & everything --dear Charles in good suit, jacket, partly for employment, partly because he was poet embarking at last on adult career... Et cetera... A heartbreaking film from several vantages : Ginsberg & mother, Jennifer Jason Leigh's pathetically superb Naomi, "don't ever leave me"; even Michael Hall's David Kammerer, not at all one dimensional villain, but knew him in my own once-upon-a-time, the contradictory authoritarian & libertarian behaviour (to be the author, the director of the freedom : recipe for disaster if not to oneself then to others)... Much much more!
--------------------------------
Ralph Hadden's 2013 Bests prompts me again towards my own. Flicking through my journals for books, music, films, events. Just as it comes then, not distinguishing between first & re- reads.
Melvin Bragg's Francis Bacon interview/doco.
Diane Burrell & Chris Dench discs.
Incredible String Band movie (c/o Dave Ellison)
On the Road movie.
Ben Sidran discs.
Ian Hamilton Finlay selections (U of California press) introd Alec Finlay.
Lisa Gorton's Hotel Hyperion.
Sun Ra & His Arkestra.
The Rodriguez movie (c/o Cathy O').
David Caddy's Cycling after [Edward] Thomas and England.
Paul Blackburn's Pierre Vidal translations (c/o B H's library).
Ted And I : A Brother's Memoir by Gerald Hughes.
Ernest Hemingway By-Line : selected articles & dispatches.
Fiona Hile's Novelties.
Claire Potter's Swallow.
Lou Reed.
Shirley Clarke's Robert Frost documentary.
The African Queen.
Marion Taylor's Colmer's Hill [Dorset] : One Artist's Obsession (c/o B H gift).
Simon Warner's Text, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll (Bloomsbury).
Pete Spence's Kynetonbury Tales.
Valli Poole's A Box of Humming Birds.
Glenn Cooper's The Proportions of a Man.
Robert Kenny's Gardens of Fire (UWA press).
Simon Armitage's Walking Home : Travels with a Troubadoor On the Pennine Way.
John Kinsella's The Vision of Error (FIP).
Paul Summers' Primitive Cartography (Walleah Press).
Pine Torch by Ainslee Meredith.
Claire Gaskin's Paperweight.
David Morley's The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet).
Ken Trimble's Barking Mad Poems.
John Ashbery's Quick Sentences.
Jordie Albiston's Book of Ethel.
Christopher Heathcote's splendid articles on art & artists in Quadrant magazine.
I Thank You : Celebrating Tim Hemensley & the Powder Monkeys, at the Tote, Yarra Music Festival (21/7/13), cast of thousands including the Spazzies, Joel Silbersher, TJ, John Nolan, Adalita, Power Line Sneakers, Roman Tucker...
The Cherry Fest in AC/DC Lane (24/11/14) Powder Monkeys & guests, Hoss, The BellRays, Chris Wilson et al
and that's [not] all folks.....!
___________________________________________
December 23, 2013
Watched concluding episode of Scorsese's Living In The Material World doco on George Harrison this evening. Quite a journey and reflective of many of our own generation's I suspect. Spiritual/metaphysical teasers like GH's concern as to how one "left this body". His (double?) sadness therefore at John Lennon's murder. Very interesting to me was the commentary from racing driver Jackie Stewart. Ditto, Eric Idle. The epitome of the "material world" --racing cars, films, music industry --intersecting with otherness --that old conceit of materiality exceeding itself, not that spiritual life doesnt have its own forms... GH on the mantra effect of My Sweet Lord, as though hypnotic repetitions... Great to see Shankar & the other Indian musicians... GH's commitment to almost everything, whatever the ostensible contradictions. I think we must all have drunk the same water!!! We'll play some Harrison & Shankar et al tomorrow... Anyone else catch this?
---------------------------------------------------
December 9, 2013
Great dream the other night : Sitting in train carriage with Tom Clark, couple of his friends, & Robert Kenny. He still looks very young ("still looks"? how would I know! --we ALL look very young whilst being who we are as of now!)-- I'm telling him how wonderful AND maddening it was to see his pic in Paris Review, his & Tom Pickard's, when we were teenagers, 20, inspiring for a 20 year old in gob-smacking way! We're having marvellous rave together when Robert says that he's aware the two people at other end of shared carriage-table arent saying anything, are excluded from the conversation. Theyre ok, man, says Tom, and I tend to agree-- Robert asks if anyone has a copy of Kant (any Kant? the Complete? Pure Reason?) --wants to open up the conversation so that others can join in! Tom says, this is getting heavy man --I say, putting a hand on Robert's arm & on Tom Clark's, look, we're serious people, Robert's the Australian PM's History prize winner & poet, and Tom as we know is past poetry editor of Paris Review and poet & biographer of Charles Olson etc, --of course we can be serious, but let's not get heavy, and Tom's right, I say to Robert, let's not get uptight --Which seems to help! That's right Tom says, let's loosen up! And we do!
-------------------------------------------------------
December 5, 2013
A great pleasure to host Venie Holmgren this afternoon at the Collected Works Bookshop. The early (5pm) start, the unsettled weather, clash with other events (eg, Jenny Harrison at the Dax Centre), & the old out-of-towner hoodoo combined to restrict attendance. But bless Ricky Tanaka for transporting Venie down from Hepburn Springs & chaperoning her across town, and Ken Smeaton for enthusiastically introducing the poet & launching her book, The Tea House Poems. Ken recalled 1970s street poetry in Melbourne with Poor Thom & Venie, the living & literary importance of both of these to him. Venie corrected the SMH's attribution of 93 years to herself --she's only 91! I remember F T Prince telling me in the early '90s that he was probably England's oldest publishing poet --he was around 80 something at the time. He also said it got physically harder to write a poem let alone a book. Venie suggested this was her last book & last launching. One never knows though... She would have been welcome to read her entire little book; she probably did half. Lovely things, Japanese (haiku / tanka) style. We have a few copies now in stock. THANK YOU everyone who came for supporting a unique event.
----------------------------------------------------------
November 5, 2013
Beautiful day for the Melbourne Cup. Yday Collected Works Bookshop & Mary's Maria's Beads and Trims (Formerly Maria George Pty Ltd) set up a table at top end of the hallway, overlooking Swanston Street. Champagne, cheese + biscuits, tzatziki dip, cup cakes. Watched the Cup Eve parade of champions (& their connections as they're fond of saying) in between popping back into respective shops for phone calls, customers. Today I think I'm heading down Abbotsford way, to the Yarra Hotel to imbibe the excitement amongst the rock'n'rollers. Place a bet en route. Nice chat with Ali Alizadeh , during y'day's toing & froing, in wch my champagne lubricated tongue wound its way around the tale of young Kris H's migrant's 1966 dinkum aussie Melbourne, via all the non-Anglo exiles of Europe needless to say, introduced to Moonee Valley & Olympic Park (dogs) in that Bohemian open house I'd landed up in, that surreal fearful amazing first season Down Under! Ali doesnt share my horse racing or indeed any other sporting delight but we did agree abt the magnificence of the horses! Hurrah & huzzah to all!
oooOOOooo
[typed up & published, 11th January, 2014]
We're done, mid-morning, as the colour of the day (cloud-grey & white) begins to change. There's the feel of blue sky & sun --skin registers warmth, obviously, but i'm tempted to invoke the 'intelligence of the day' as though environment actually is innate. And even an hour after the dip there arent any other swimmers, only a temporarily capsized sailboard in the water.
*
Thank Heavens for Betty Ryan & the bottle of white wine she shared for our Henry's getting to Greece --her evocations, notwithstanding Henry's saying she wasnt a storyteller, in addition to the correspondence from "my friend Lawrence Durrell, who had practically made Corfu his home." I thank Henry for the Greek experience too, never having gone though many I've known did & do. But reading The Colossus of Maroussi (the 1950 white blocked purple covered--'Travel', 'Complete Unabridged'-- paperback issue) in Australia, winter through to summer '66/'67, performed the transmogrification whereby my Elwood exile (--oh yes, there's an awful & heavy tale attached but not for telling here), living in Thackaray Street, one of the poets' roads (exact mirror of Thornhill/Southampton's topography, Down Under's not so secret meaning), became my Greece, -- swimming off the rocks (industrial detritus), recovering breath spent battling the riffs & unexpected depths, propped between stone & concrete in a nest of sand, driftwood, dried seaweed, with best friend satchel containing biro & notebook, novel, poetry, tobacco/papers/matches, supporting me forever...
*
You see, it happens every time I'm here, between Elwood & Point Ormond --every summer as first the elements & then the literary & cultural memories work me over. Remembering as I re-live it, the Beat life of sun, sand & sea...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[via David Caddy / Tears in the Fence]
Posted on January 10, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) 1934-2014
When Le Roi Jones’s volume of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, appeared from Totem / Corinth in 1961 it had a Basil King drawing on the cover and it had a poem titled ‘Way Out West’ half way through it.
As simple an act
as opening the eyes. Merely
coming into things by degrees.
Basil King was over here in England at the end of last year and he talked and read, along with his wife Martha, at Kent University amongst many other places. Basil had also worked alongside Le Roi Jones in the late 1950s when he provided the covers for the magazine which Le Roi edited along with Hettie Cohen, Yugen. Yugen closed down in 1962 after number 8 but not before the starting up of The Floating Bear, a newsletter, edited by Jones and Diane di Prima. The Addenda to that issue number 8 of Yugen gives its readers the following information:
The newsletter, The Floating Bear, and its editors, Le Roi Jones and Diane di Prima, were cleared in April of obscenity charges stemming from their publication of a section of Jones’ System of Dante’s Hell and William Burroughs’ satire, The Routine.
That little note at the end also gives an update on what Le Roi Jones was upto, including editing Corinth’s fiction anthology, Avant Garde American Fiction, ‘which will include such prose writers as Fielding Dawson, Burroughs, Kerouac, Rumaker, Selby, Creeley, Douglas Woolf, Irving Rosenthal, Herbert Huncke, Paul Metcalfe, Diane Di Prima, and others’.
Had he had lived Amiri Baraka was due to come over to London this year to attend the University of Canterbury’s one-day conference, Baraka at 80, to be held at the ICA on 12th April.
The very last sentence in that last Yugen issue is:
‘At all other places they cremate them; Here we bury them alive’.
Farewell to a most important poet, dramatist, short-story writer, editor and major figure throughout the past fifty years.
*
(c) Ian Brinton ;
oOo
Kris Hemensley
Mourn both Le Roi Jones & Amiri Baraka. Complex within itself/himself, impossible for one such as I, to neatly unravel after 50 years of development. Poetry, politics... May as well throw this in even if a poignant contemplation more appropriate than a thesis at this sad time. So : The change of his name from Le Roi Jones to Amiri Baraka emblematic (paradigmatic?) of this time of changes (1960s to date). Well recall seeing the shocking pic in Village Voice in '68 of Jones/Baraka : bloodied head coshed in middle of Newark riot. Remember thinking this is the beginning of something else, --a something else agglomeration of all the radical ideologies any one of which one might have sat & mulled or stood toe to toe & argued, but tossed up now with race relations, black revolution, --and where was poet in that calamity out of which insurrection was suddenly spun? --reversal of the judgement of skin colour in the urgency of solidarity --educational indeed for white boy to experience the boot on the other foot even if thousands of miles away in Melbourne/Oz from Newark --psychically & imaginatively empathizing, responding --the Vietnam War already the actual ground of could-be would-be refuse-to-be conscripted the daily '60s life --suddenly absent when landing back in England, late '69 --a whole other &, notwithstanding the Irish troubles, relaxed English vibe. It's been my American friends, Duncan McNaughton particularly in my head now, who've articulated the necessary hybridization/cosmopolitanism in name of the Real, --American as African & Spanish. Poetry, politics... And you know what Ive said about the warts & all as the truth of my situation, that is against perfection (as if politics could ever be pure)... And how revolted ive been by ahistorical that is hysterical conspiratorial leftist politics, in wch this or that erstwhile minority is no more than ideological canon fodder... in this minute i'm putting it back together, the Humpty Dumpty of me, of poet amongst poets, --hailing here Leroi/Baraka, the poet, the playwright, the editor publisher anthologist, Hettie's other half --and RIP...
-----------------------------------------------------------
[January 7, 2014]
[via Monique Chester, Weymouth/UK]
SIRENS HAVE SOUNDED
The following SEVERE Flood Warnings will remain in force from 19:00 on 06.01.2014 until 02:00 on 07/01/2014 including the times of high tide. Peak water levels and waves are expected between 21:00 and midnight. Flooding may already be affecting properties, low lying areas and roads. The Causeway between Portland and Wyke Regis may be impassable and may be closed as a precaution. Dangerous wave overtopping including shingle is possible. The time and date of the forecast high waters for which this Flood Warning is in force are 21:45 (Local time) on 06/01/2014 (21:45 GMT) Please listen for the sound of the Flood Warning sirens which will be sounded IF wave overtopping occurs at Chiswell. The forecast wind direction is South West The forecast wind strengths is Force 7
*
B H : A river passed by my door during the night...
K H : how dyou mean B? A river on Goldcroft Road? But youre on a rise or coming off a rise? Used to be rivers down Flinders Street and when I was a sailor on shore leave in Singapore once upon a time the monsoon broke around me as I sheltered and the road became a river. Only thing was, before the inundation occurred it was an ordinary road with open sewers/gutters but after the rain there was only water to be waded through to the slightly higher part in the middle of the road. With my whites rolled up, my shoes in my hands above my head, I stepped into the torrent (had to get back to the boat y'see) and down I went, into the sewer!!! The locals laughed at me then helped me up. But I'd gashed my toe on the way down. Back at the Fairstar I stuck a plaster on the wound. A day & night of increasing throbbing pain later the ship doctor operated on my toe. Local anaesthetic. Cut off half the nail then scooped out the flesh. You could have lost the toe he said, another day the leg!!!! Did this flood come out of the blue for you or has it been developing last day or so? And watch out for your toes old boy!
Jo Harris : didn't know you were a sailor...did you run away to sea?
K H : regarding sailor boy --yes, I guess I did run away to sea Jo! Went down to the Labour exchange with brother B, asked for unusual job, and hey presto! 1965...
J H : those sailors pants...bell bottoms with a flap...sooo sexy..maybe that helped you decide
K H : Blue uniform for the northern part of the voyage, whites for the tropics... I just had to get-a get-a get-a get away! I couldnt wait another day ay ay!!! And yes, Jo, always liked the look, the whites not the blues... With my post-op foot I could wear a sandal instead of white shoe, but the good foot had the shoe still! I worked in the Ship Shop with the photographers (German) and the hairdressers (English, Scottish, Italian). I also had hold duties. I cannot tie knots so my tying & hauling of packages was a nightly ordeal for me and a huge laugh for the others. Shared cabin at first with the photographers but they complained that I snored --I think they said I snorkled. They were believed. I was moved to an Italian purser's cabin. He slept during the day when I was at work, & v-versa. One or two funny if not scandalous incidents. In retrospect of course e/thing is hilarious, vast comedy of life. Even at the time I was watching over my own shoulder so to speak --being a writer you see and my Nobel prize not too far away...
--------------------------------------------------------------
January 7, '14
The more I think about KILL YOUR DARLINGS the more I like it... truth is you have to check things out yrself however persuasive friends & critics!
I've been thinking about the historical settings & references : The World at WAR, so the film is its gigantic footnote? thus 'existentialism'... The War crucial threshold of change... not necessarily refusing the call to arms but simultaneously accepting the call to LIFE, and of one's own order... the wackier the better! that is, backing yr own call...
*
January 6, '14
Well, whaddayaknow! Saw Kill Your Darlings at the Nova in Carlton this afternoon and was captivated. Intriguing story. Contrary to what Ive heard around the traps, mostly re- the inadequacy of Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg, found the film psychologically coherent, soundly based in the literature. For my money, Kerouac's The Sea Is My Brother corroborates the merchant marine signing-up scene, tho Lucian [Carr] is the extra dimension contributed by the film. Still thinking it through. Yep, excellent.
I accepted the characterizations, the actors melded with originals... Dane DeHaan's Lucian Carr as beautiful memerising boy, pent with desire & imagining, recalls for me people I met along our young way (let's say younger way since it's not done with yet --and not just the tearing, waring manuscripts of up to fifty years ago but the impulses, the heart & soul within) --which is the mark of --what? --the memorable --the mythic --template or archetype of life/of lives understood that way...
I saw Charles Buckmaster in Radcliffe's Ginsberg --imagine 17 years old --up to the big city --nervous, expectant, sensitive to all & everything --dear Charles in good suit, jacket, partly for employment, partly because he was poet embarking at last on adult career... Et cetera... A heartbreaking film from several vantages : Ginsberg & mother, Jennifer Jason Leigh's pathetically superb Naomi, "don't ever leave me"; even Michael Hall's David Kammerer, not at all one dimensional villain, but knew him in my own once-upon-a-time, the contradictory authoritarian & libertarian behaviour (to be the author, the director of the freedom : recipe for disaster if not to oneself then to others)... Much much more!
--------------------------------
Ralph Hadden's 2013 Bests prompts me again towards my own. Flicking through my journals for books, music, films, events. Just as it comes then, not distinguishing between first & re- reads.
Melvin Bragg's Francis Bacon interview/doco.
Diane Burrell & Chris Dench discs.
Incredible String Band movie (c/o Dave Ellison)
On the Road movie.
Ben Sidran discs.
Ian Hamilton Finlay selections (U of California press) introd Alec Finlay.
Lisa Gorton's Hotel Hyperion.
Sun Ra & His Arkestra.
The Rodriguez movie (c/o Cathy O').
David Caddy's Cycling after [Edward] Thomas and England.
Paul Blackburn's Pierre Vidal translations (c/o B H's library).
Ted And I : A Brother's Memoir by Gerald Hughes.
Ernest Hemingway By-Line : selected articles & dispatches.
Fiona Hile's Novelties.
Claire Potter's Swallow.
Lou Reed.
Shirley Clarke's Robert Frost documentary.
The African Queen.
Marion Taylor's Colmer's Hill [Dorset] : One Artist's Obsession (c/o B H gift).
Simon Warner's Text, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll (Bloomsbury).
Pete Spence's Kynetonbury Tales.
Valli Poole's A Box of Humming Birds.
Glenn Cooper's The Proportions of a Man.
Robert Kenny's Gardens of Fire (UWA press).
Simon Armitage's Walking Home : Travels with a Troubadoor On the Pennine Way.
John Kinsella's The Vision of Error (FIP).
Paul Summers' Primitive Cartography (Walleah Press).
Pine Torch by Ainslee Meredith.
Claire Gaskin's Paperweight.
David Morley's The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet).
Ken Trimble's Barking Mad Poems.
John Ashbery's Quick Sentences.
Jordie Albiston's Book of Ethel.
Christopher Heathcote's splendid articles on art & artists in Quadrant magazine.
I Thank You : Celebrating Tim Hemensley & the Powder Monkeys, at the Tote, Yarra Music Festival (21/7/13), cast of thousands including the Spazzies, Joel Silbersher, TJ, John Nolan, Adalita, Power Line Sneakers, Roman Tucker...
The Cherry Fest in AC/DC Lane (24/11/14) Powder Monkeys & guests, Hoss, The BellRays, Chris Wilson et al
and that's [not] all folks.....!
___________________________________________
December 23, 2013
Watched concluding episode of Scorsese's Living In The Material World doco on George Harrison this evening. Quite a journey and reflective of many of our own generation's I suspect. Spiritual/metaphysical teasers like GH's concern as to how one "left this body". His (double?) sadness therefore at John Lennon's murder. Very interesting to me was the commentary from racing driver Jackie Stewart. Ditto, Eric Idle. The epitome of the "material world" --racing cars, films, music industry --intersecting with otherness --that old conceit of materiality exceeding itself, not that spiritual life doesnt have its own forms... GH on the mantra effect of My Sweet Lord, as though hypnotic repetitions... Great to see Shankar & the other Indian musicians... GH's commitment to almost everything, whatever the ostensible contradictions. I think we must all have drunk the same water!!! We'll play some Harrison & Shankar et al tomorrow... Anyone else catch this?
---------------------------------------------------
December 9, 2013
Great dream the other night : Sitting in train carriage with Tom Clark, couple of his friends, & Robert Kenny. He still looks very young ("still looks"? how would I know! --we ALL look very young whilst being who we are as of now!)-- I'm telling him how wonderful AND maddening it was to see his pic in Paris Review, his & Tom Pickard's, when we were teenagers, 20, inspiring for a 20 year old in gob-smacking way! We're having marvellous rave together when Robert says that he's aware the two people at other end of shared carriage-table arent saying anything, are excluded from the conversation. Theyre ok, man, says Tom, and I tend to agree-- Robert asks if anyone has a copy of Kant (any Kant? the Complete? Pure Reason?) --wants to open up the conversation so that others can join in! Tom says, this is getting heavy man --I say, putting a hand on Robert's arm & on Tom Clark's, look, we're serious people, Robert's the Australian PM's History prize winner & poet, and Tom as we know is past poetry editor of Paris Review and poet & biographer of Charles Olson etc, --of course we can be serious, but let's not get heavy, and Tom's right, I say to Robert, let's not get uptight --Which seems to help! That's right Tom says, let's loosen up! And we do!
-------------------------------------------------------
December 5, 2013
A great pleasure to host Venie Holmgren this afternoon at the Collected Works Bookshop. The early (5pm) start, the unsettled weather, clash with other events (eg, Jenny Harrison at the Dax Centre), & the old out-of-towner hoodoo combined to restrict attendance. But bless Ricky Tanaka for transporting Venie down from Hepburn Springs & chaperoning her across town, and Ken Smeaton for enthusiastically introducing the poet & launching her book, The Tea House Poems. Ken recalled 1970s street poetry in Melbourne with Poor Thom & Venie, the living & literary importance of both of these to him. Venie corrected the SMH's attribution of 93 years to herself --she's only 91! I remember F T Prince telling me in the early '90s that he was probably England's oldest publishing poet --he was around 80 something at the time. He also said it got physically harder to write a poem let alone a book. Venie suggested this was her last book & last launching. One never knows though... She would have been welcome to read her entire little book; she probably did half. Lovely things, Japanese (haiku / tanka) style. We have a few copies now in stock. THANK YOU everyone who came for supporting a unique event.
----------------------------------------------------------
November 5, 2013
Beautiful day for the Melbourne Cup. Yday Collected Works Bookshop & Mary's Maria's Beads and Trims (Formerly Maria George Pty Ltd) set up a table at top end of the hallway, overlooking Swanston Street. Champagne, cheese + biscuits, tzatziki dip, cup cakes. Watched the Cup Eve parade of champions (& their connections as they're fond of saying) in between popping back into respective shops for phone calls, customers. Today I think I'm heading down Abbotsford way, to the Yarra Hotel to imbibe the excitement amongst the rock'n'rollers. Place a bet en route. Nice chat with Ali Alizadeh , during y'day's toing & froing, in wch my champagne lubricated tongue wound its way around the tale of young Kris H's migrant's 1966 dinkum aussie Melbourne, via all the non-Anglo exiles of Europe needless to say, introduced to Moonee Valley & Olympic Park (dogs) in that Bohemian open house I'd landed up in, that surreal fearful amazing first season Down Under! Ali doesnt share my horse racing or indeed any other sporting delight but we did agree abt the magnificence of the horses! Hurrah & huzzah to all!
oooOOOooo
[typed up & published, 11th January, 2014]
Thursday, September 2, 2010
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, Number 12, September, 2010
Melbourne
16 November/ 30 December, 2009
Dear Bernard,
I've begun watching the DVD of Richard Lerner's What happened to Kerouac? --such an inspiration when I saw it on the big screen in 1987. You remember the story --Retta & Tim caught it in Sydney, on their holiday with Anna Couani, same time as I saw it in Melbourne, and we all loved it --in my case, literally bounding the few miles home from the Valhalla cinema in Richmond --for the relief of it as much as anything --that the Beat life & literature had survived despite the tragic rise & fall of the chief protagonist, and was even now inspiring. I confess, though, the monster fan I'd been in the Sixties had taken a political hit from Kerouac's own, apparently reactionary, mouth in '69 when I read Vanity of Duluoz in Melbourne, and then received an aesthetic broadside in England, after reading Ed Dorn's comment in New American Story (Grove, 1965, bought from one of George Dowden's sales), that "Kerouac took care of all of what the informal range of the personal ruminator can do with our material. He continues to do so. I value his writing very much. But it is only partly satisfying. His syntax is quite dull. It allows the use of the 'I' only one device(...) But the limited presence is perhaps our greatest problem." (1963)
But, back to the film, what a buzz! I was totally energized, like Ray Smith emulating Japhy, running down the mountain --the method we learnt ourselves from Dad, as kids, --Isle of Wight summer holidays --to trust the momentum, without thought &, therefore, self-consciousness & fear! (And years passed before I tried that again --around Port Campbell (S.W. Victoria), goat-footed down the rocks & gullies, early '90s with Cathy. Must be time again for another such descent --which is a bit like saying, time I had another flying dream!)
Young acquaintance James Hamilton leant me the DVD --and it occurs to me he may be thinking of just such a project regarding the Melbourne '60s La Mama poetry scene --like, "What happened to Buckmaster (& Co.)?" The scope could & should be expanded, though the earlier one goes the less likely the subjects will be alive. This was underlined for me recently with the death of Alan Murphy. I'd hoped to conduct a formal (publishable) interview with him, informed by numerous chats we had when he visited the Shop --we'd reconnoitre his memories of WW2 & after, the '50s & '60s Melbourne scene, which I delightedly realized connected to my own forays, since the '80s, into alternative histories.
*
One of the gifts of What happened's second viewing is John Clellon Holmes' conception of Kerouac as "a prose experimenter of consequence who can be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce." The context for Kerouac's originality, says Holmes, is "The interaction of imagination & reality [which] is the source of all literature (perhaps not the Goncourt Brothers or those Realists, Naturalists, whom no one reads) in which the personality of the author, the consciousness of the author, the point of view of the author, never gets into the book."
No shock of the new when it's enjoyed or suffered half a century of amelioration! One needs, therefore, this kind of literary reminder of Kerouac's stylistic novelty. Even I tend to normalize the style as 'talk-write', familiar now in the contemporary practice of both literature & the variety of non-fiction. But when Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied on piano by Steve Allen, you hear the jazz of it --and it's the music of his language, as tho' poetry, which impresses --the texture resembling the process of remembering as well, perhaps, as the way jazz is constructed.
None of that in Bukowski whose talking-writing is more or less as-it-comes but, to use blog-lingo, he's always 'on topic'. Bukowski's facility is that ear-&-tongue craft which knows & trusts to the natural succession, succinctly deployed. No associational runs or fields, nor need there be for the writer narrator he is --just what is, what happened, what happened then, & then...
*
I'm reminded of Bukowski's great little piece on Neal Cassady as I watch the footage of Cassady & Ginsberg at City Lights Bookstore in 1965. "his eyes were sticking out on ye old toothpicks and he had his head in the speaker, jogging, bouncing, ogling, he was in a white t-shirt and seemed to be singing like a cuckoo-bird along with the music, preceding the beat just a shade as if he were leading the parade." (Notes of a Dirty Old Man; City Lights, '69.)
In the footage, Ginsberg's stoned silly, wanting to ameliorate his friend's hostility to the young counter-culture audience. They're in front of a camera amongst a crowd you'd bet were its subscribers. Cassady ("where's the fee?" he says, as though to provoke any hippy anarchists present) can't settle. He's awkward, agitated, speedy, as if compelled to be on show --nervous as one's read of Ken Kesey or Kerouac himself come to that --nervous to express opinion. He resorts to what sounds like parody of Burroughs & Kerouac paranoia & cynicism : "All the extremists, all the civil rights, all the kids, anybody on any side(...) this is all hindsight what we're talking about --it's already too late --the Pentagon's taking care of all... they're killing us all deliberately..."
Ginsberg burbles : "Well, that's the point -- I have no idea who's running the country..." (It's only the point if running the show's important --our holy man's political shadow or his share of politics' own shadow.) As for Cassady --never an easy place to speak outside & think against the consensus. Much reason, therefore, to be jumpy.
Bukowski perceives Cassady as Kerouac's boy : "you liked him even though you didn't want to because Kerouac had set him up for the sucker punch and Neal had bit, kept biting. but you know Neal was o.k. and another way of looking at it, Jack had only written the book, he wasn't Neal's mother. just his destructor, deliberate or otherwise."
Now what a can of worms that is. Off the top of my head : the ethics of attribution however complicit or acquiescent the assignee; the double edge of exemplarity; the downside of fulfilling the mythic life however transformative its promise...
*
I'll close on an entirely optimistic & beautiful note --namely, the letter from Henry Miller to Kerouac's publisher at Viking, written October 5th, 1958, reproduced in the 50th Anniversary (American) edition of The Dharma Bums (Viking, '08), which Karl Gallagher, another Dharma Bum I assure you, recently showed me. (As I understand it, your British edition has Ann Douglas's introductory essay but no letter from Miller, which is a pity.)
The line we always felt existed, as far-flung readers & enthusiasts, between Henry Miller & the Beats --though aspects of Miller also obviously resonate in Bukowski : the pariah-worker novels --Miller's Molloch, for example, a first cousin of Post Office , Ham on Rye, etc. --is here joyously underlined.
The Dharma Bums was the first Kerouac novel Miller read. His letter ripples with praise with praise & enthusiasm. He's led to say that Kerouac "is the first American writer who makes me feel optimistic about the future of American letters. Whether he is a liberated individual I don't know, but he certainly is a liberated writer. No man can write with that delicious freedom and abandonment who has not practiced severe discipline." After many similar compliments, Miller concludes, "Others run out of 'material' sooner or later. Kerouac can't. He's all there is, because he's identified himself with everything, material or non-material, and with the silence and the space between. We've had all kinds of bums heretofore but never a Dharma bum, like this Kerouac. He doesn't throw dust in your eyes... he sings. "God, I love." Take hope, you lost ones --Jack's here!"
All best wishes for the New Year!
love,
Kris
oOo
Weymouth,
25th August, 2010
Dear Kris, Yer 'tis -- the letter that's been so long coming. I think you'll understand that I was absolutely swamped by family events. It was so difficult coping with looking after Mum as she declined following her fall last July (2009) and fracturing her left hip -- which impeded her mobility -- wheel-chair, zimmer frame and stair-lift. And then her Alzheimers.
Everything passes she said. And now she has -- April 3rd. And slowly, slowly I emerged. She released me from her for the second time. It was truly cathartic. Now I'm flowing and blossoming like never before. And I'm ready, and up for getting back to being a Dharma bum.
Having said that, I'm curtailing this correspondence for now. It certainly sustained me. Your letters kept the light flickering within me. I did tell you that it hadn't gone -- that it was still there! But now I fully understand things in my heart instead of in my head -- that poetry can save you, And what is working for me at the moment is the new initiative with my publishing. Stingy Artist Editions lives.
I've not had the head or feeling to publish anything since 1996 --14 years --& now everything --including the publishing --is flowing again. It started with my poems for Mum in July (4 Poems, i. m. Berthe Tawa). And because of that I thought of two further projects. One, for Franco Beltrametti -- a folded broadside -- two of his letters to me -- facsimile -- & two poems I'd written for him. The other publication is for dear friend Marilyn Kitchell --I wonder where she is? --a similar thing --but a folded card. In total I've got plans for a dozen or so publications between now & the end of next year. I'll be ready for 2012!
Big Dharma explosion? Where will the Bums take us? Reminds me of Franco's poem, Crucial Matters (to Robert Creeley), in Three for Nado, by Franco, which I published in 1992 :
come here
see it in print
keep it together
give me a break
and never be done
with all of it
hummingbird
on snapdragon
(?. VI.89)
We'll never be done with any of it! Anyway, Dharma brothers forever!
Love,
Bernard
________________________________________________
16 November/ 30 December, 2009
Dear Bernard,
I've begun watching the DVD of Richard Lerner's What happened to Kerouac? --such an inspiration when I saw it on the big screen in 1987. You remember the story --Retta & Tim caught it in Sydney, on their holiday with Anna Couani, same time as I saw it in Melbourne, and we all loved it --in my case, literally bounding the few miles home from the Valhalla cinema in Richmond --for the relief of it as much as anything --that the Beat life & literature had survived despite the tragic rise & fall of the chief protagonist, and was even now inspiring. I confess, though, the monster fan I'd been in the Sixties had taken a political hit from Kerouac's own, apparently reactionary, mouth in '69 when I read Vanity of Duluoz in Melbourne, and then received an aesthetic broadside in England, after reading Ed Dorn's comment in New American Story (Grove, 1965, bought from one of George Dowden's sales), that "Kerouac took care of all of what the informal range of the personal ruminator can do with our material. He continues to do so. I value his writing very much. But it is only partly satisfying. His syntax is quite dull. It allows the use of the 'I' only one device(...) But the limited presence is perhaps our greatest problem." (1963)
But, back to the film, what a buzz! I was totally energized, like Ray Smith emulating Japhy, running down the mountain --the method we learnt ourselves from Dad, as kids, --Isle of Wight summer holidays --to trust the momentum, without thought &, therefore, self-consciousness & fear! (And years passed before I tried that again --around Port Campbell (S.W. Victoria), goat-footed down the rocks & gullies, early '90s with Cathy. Must be time again for another such descent --which is a bit like saying, time I had another flying dream!)
Young acquaintance James Hamilton leant me the DVD --and it occurs to me he may be thinking of just such a project regarding the Melbourne '60s La Mama poetry scene --like, "What happened to Buckmaster (& Co.)?" The scope could & should be expanded, though the earlier one goes the less likely the subjects will be alive. This was underlined for me recently with the death of Alan Murphy. I'd hoped to conduct a formal (publishable) interview with him, informed by numerous chats we had when he visited the Shop --we'd reconnoitre his memories of WW2 & after, the '50s & '60s Melbourne scene, which I delightedly realized connected to my own forays, since the '80s, into alternative histories.
*
One of the gifts of What happened's second viewing is John Clellon Holmes' conception of Kerouac as "a prose experimenter of consequence who can be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce." The context for Kerouac's originality, says Holmes, is "The interaction of imagination & reality [which] is the source of all literature (perhaps not the Goncourt Brothers or those Realists, Naturalists, whom no one reads) in which the personality of the author, the consciousness of the author, the point of view of the author, never gets into the book."
No shock of the new when it's enjoyed or suffered half a century of amelioration! One needs, therefore, this kind of literary reminder of Kerouac's stylistic novelty. Even I tend to normalize the style as 'talk-write', familiar now in the contemporary practice of both literature & the variety of non-fiction. But when Kerouac reads from On The Road, accompanied on piano by Steve Allen, you hear the jazz of it --and it's the music of his language, as tho' poetry, which impresses --the texture resembling the process of remembering as well, perhaps, as the way jazz is constructed.
None of that in Bukowski whose talking-writing is more or less as-it-comes but, to use blog-lingo, he's always 'on topic'. Bukowski's facility is that ear-&-tongue craft which knows & trusts to the natural succession, succinctly deployed. No associational runs or fields, nor need there be for the writer narrator he is --just what is, what happened, what happened then, & then...
*
I'm reminded of Bukowski's great little piece on Neal Cassady as I watch the footage of Cassady & Ginsberg at City Lights Bookstore in 1965. "his eyes were sticking out on ye old toothpicks and he had his head in the speaker, jogging, bouncing, ogling, he was in a white t-shirt and seemed to be singing like a cuckoo-bird along with the music, preceding the beat just a shade as if he were leading the parade." (Notes of a Dirty Old Man; City Lights, '69.)
In the footage, Ginsberg's stoned silly, wanting to ameliorate his friend's hostility to the young counter-culture audience. They're in front of a camera amongst a crowd you'd bet were its subscribers. Cassady ("where's the fee?" he says, as though to provoke any hippy anarchists present) can't settle. He's awkward, agitated, speedy, as if compelled to be on show --nervous as one's read of Ken Kesey or Kerouac himself come to that --nervous to express opinion. He resorts to what sounds like parody of Burroughs & Kerouac paranoia & cynicism : "All the extremists, all the civil rights, all the kids, anybody on any side(...) this is all hindsight what we're talking about --it's already too late --the Pentagon's taking care of all... they're killing us all deliberately..."
Ginsberg burbles : "Well, that's the point -- I have no idea who's running the country..." (It's only the point if running the show's important --our holy man's political shadow or his share of politics' own shadow.) As for Cassady --never an easy place to speak outside & think against the consensus. Much reason, therefore, to be jumpy.
Bukowski perceives Cassady as Kerouac's boy : "you liked him even though you didn't want to because Kerouac had set him up for the sucker punch and Neal had bit, kept biting. but you know Neal was o.k. and another way of looking at it, Jack had only written the book, he wasn't Neal's mother. just his destructor, deliberate or otherwise."
Now what a can of worms that is. Off the top of my head : the ethics of attribution however complicit or acquiescent the assignee; the double edge of exemplarity; the downside of fulfilling the mythic life however transformative its promise...
*
I'll close on an entirely optimistic & beautiful note --namely, the letter from Henry Miller to Kerouac's publisher at Viking, written October 5th, 1958, reproduced in the 50th Anniversary (American) edition of The Dharma Bums (Viking, '08), which Karl Gallagher, another Dharma Bum I assure you, recently showed me. (As I understand it, your British edition has Ann Douglas's introductory essay but no letter from Miller, which is a pity.)
The line we always felt existed, as far-flung readers & enthusiasts, between Henry Miller & the Beats --though aspects of Miller also obviously resonate in Bukowski : the pariah-worker novels --Miller's Molloch, for example, a first cousin of Post Office , Ham on Rye, etc. --is here joyously underlined.
The Dharma Bums was the first Kerouac novel Miller read. His letter ripples with praise with praise & enthusiasm. He's led to say that Kerouac "is the first American writer who makes me feel optimistic about the future of American letters. Whether he is a liberated individual I don't know, but he certainly is a liberated writer. No man can write with that delicious freedom and abandonment who has not practiced severe discipline." After many similar compliments, Miller concludes, "Others run out of 'material' sooner or later. Kerouac can't. He's all there is, because he's identified himself with everything, material or non-material, and with the silence and the space between. We've had all kinds of bums heretofore but never a Dharma bum, like this Kerouac. He doesn't throw dust in your eyes... he sings. "God, I love." Take hope, you lost ones --Jack's here!"
All best wishes for the New Year!
love,
Kris
oOo
Weymouth,
25th August, 2010
Dear Kris, Yer 'tis -- the letter that's been so long coming. I think you'll understand that I was absolutely swamped by family events. It was so difficult coping with looking after Mum as she declined following her fall last July (2009) and fracturing her left hip -- which impeded her mobility -- wheel-chair, zimmer frame and stair-lift. And then her Alzheimers.
Everything passes she said. And now she has -- April 3rd. And slowly, slowly I emerged. She released me from her for the second time. It was truly cathartic. Now I'm flowing and blossoming like never before. And I'm ready, and up for getting back to being a Dharma bum.
Having said that, I'm curtailing this correspondence for now. It certainly sustained me. Your letters kept the light flickering within me. I did tell you that it hadn't gone -- that it was still there! But now I fully understand things in my heart instead of in my head -- that poetry can save you, And what is working for me at the moment is the new initiative with my publishing. Stingy Artist Editions lives.
I've not had the head or feeling to publish anything since 1996 --14 years --& now everything --including the publishing --is flowing again. It started with my poems for Mum in July (4 Poems, i. m. Berthe Tawa). And because of that I thought of two further projects. One, for Franco Beltrametti -- a folded broadside -- two of his letters to me -- facsimile -- & two poems I'd written for him. The other publication is for dear friend Marilyn Kitchell --I wonder where she is? --a similar thing --but a folded card. In total I've got plans for a dozen or so publications between now & the end of next year. I'll be ready for 2012!
Big Dharma explosion? Where will the Bums take us? Reminds me of Franco's poem, Crucial Matters (to Robert Creeley), in Three for Nado, by Franco, which I published in 1992 :
come here
see it in print
keep it together
give me a break
and never be done
with all of it
hummingbird
on snapdragon
(?. VI.89)
We'll never be done with any of it! Anyway, Dharma brothers forever!
Love,
Bernard
________________________________________________
Friday, April 6, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS
10 May 2006
Land of Oz
Dear Bernard, I realized tonight what a "gonzo" reporter Kerouac actually is. After all, what is The Dharma Bums but a travel book in which narrator & place are continually transposed, with either aspect absolutely crucial in evoking & defining the other? The genre didnt exist when he was writing, in fact he'd naturally call it a novel, as all his writing, though one should say that after Joyce & Proust the novel-of-life imparts a legacy of seriousness for the writer of fiction. The novels of life-as-lived, after Joyce & Proust, and Miller might be a prime example, allow their authors to seriously represent themselves, indeed to be fully present in their own analyses -- but as history, confession, topography, and not the pseudo science in that name. I'm half the book ahead of you in this re-reading (it's around 40 years?) so I've already escaped from the city with Ray (Kerouac), Japhy (Snyder), & Morley (John Montgomery) and climbed the Matterhorn in the High Sierras. And descended -- it's exhilerating!
When I say "travel", I include the journey or quest book that the genre has come to enthusiastically embrace. Inner journey parallels the outer. The "gonzo" slant subverts the public or conventional story -- it delivers the "secret" history. In The Dharma Bums the reader is given a key to the Beat Generation writers, mostly & importantly to Gary Snyder as the Zen Buddhist mountain climber Japhy Ryder. When I read Kerouac I'm also deciphering my beloved Beats, trusting the fiction as much as the ever-growing biography. In the 60s it was simultaneously biography. And we didnt appreciate how close we were to those characters & events. We were first generation readers, reading & emulating as we set out upon our lives.
The power of this book is seen in its basic situation; for instance, "I sat crosslegged in the sand and contemplated my life." Doesnt that grab you? Didnt it always? Isnt that what all art's about? Isnt that always where we were found?
Love, Kris
16th May, 2006
Weymouth / England
Dear Kris, Of course the whole dharma bums biz "grabs me". And I think it always did. Only wish I'd been more of a Zen lunatic/hermit -- my persona of Abbot of Goldy Abbey reflects this. Anyway, I'm diverted from my currentreading of The Dharma Bums continually. I've a whole load of books I'm reading concurrently. I'm rereading Bones of the Master (an account of an old Ch'an Master's return to Inner Mongolia), and today George Crane's sequel to this just arrived -- Beyond the House of the False Lama (Travels with Monks, Nomads and Outlaws)-- falls into the groove of TDB nicely, as do the other two books that came -- The Three Way Tavern : Selected Poems of Ko Un , and Vegetable Roots Discourse from Robert Aitken. Hope these don't divert me too much, plus all the diet and macro books. I'll have to just sit and get on and read it. I'm only a few pages in. And you're already half-way through! The last time we read a book together was John Cowper Powys' Maiden Castle. I don't think either of us finished in the end. But this feels different. Is this our true calling?!
Love, Bernard
P.S. Japhy (Gary Snyder) has written the forward for Ko Un's book. Good that he's still out there doing it.
_________________________________________
(to be continued)
Land of Oz
Dear Bernard, I realized tonight what a "gonzo" reporter Kerouac actually is. After all, what is The Dharma Bums but a travel book in which narrator & place are continually transposed, with either aspect absolutely crucial in evoking & defining the other? The genre didnt exist when he was writing, in fact he'd naturally call it a novel, as all his writing, though one should say that after Joyce & Proust the novel-of-life imparts a legacy of seriousness for the writer of fiction. The novels of life-as-lived, after Joyce & Proust, and Miller might be a prime example, allow their authors to seriously represent themselves, indeed to be fully present in their own analyses -- but as history, confession, topography, and not the pseudo science in that name. I'm half the book ahead of you in this re-reading (it's around 40 years?) so I've already escaped from the city with Ray (Kerouac), Japhy (Snyder), & Morley (John Montgomery) and climbed the Matterhorn in the High Sierras. And descended -- it's exhilerating!
When I say "travel", I include the journey or quest book that the genre has come to enthusiastically embrace. Inner journey parallels the outer. The "gonzo" slant subverts the public or conventional story -- it delivers the "secret" history. In The Dharma Bums the reader is given a key to the Beat Generation writers, mostly & importantly to Gary Snyder as the Zen Buddhist mountain climber Japhy Ryder. When I read Kerouac I'm also deciphering my beloved Beats, trusting the fiction as much as the ever-growing biography. In the 60s it was simultaneously biography. And we didnt appreciate how close we were to those characters & events. We were first generation readers, reading & emulating as we set out upon our lives.
The power of this book is seen in its basic situation; for instance, "I sat crosslegged in the sand and contemplated my life." Doesnt that grab you? Didnt it always? Isnt that what all art's about? Isnt that always where we were found?
Love, Kris
16th May, 2006
Weymouth / England
Dear Kris, Of course the whole dharma bums biz "grabs me". And I think it always did. Only wish I'd been more of a Zen lunatic/hermit -- my persona of Abbot of Goldy Abbey reflects this. Anyway, I'm diverted from my currentreading of The Dharma Bums continually. I've a whole load of books I'm reading concurrently. I'm rereading Bones of the Master (an account of an old Ch'an Master's return to Inner Mongolia), and today George Crane's sequel to this just arrived -- Beyond the House of the False Lama (Travels with Monks, Nomads and Outlaws)-- falls into the groove of TDB nicely, as do the other two books that came -- The Three Way Tavern : Selected Poems of Ko Un , and Vegetable Roots Discourse from Robert Aitken. Hope these don't divert me too much, plus all the diet and macro books. I'll have to just sit and get on and read it. I'm only a few pages in. And you're already half-way through! The last time we read a book together was John Cowper Powys' Maiden Castle. I don't think either of us finished in the end. But this feels different. Is this our true calling?!
Love, Bernard
P.S. Japhy (Gary Snyder) has written the forward for Ko Un's book. Good that he's still out there doing it.
_________________________________________
(to be continued)
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