ART & ABOUT IN VIENTIANE

KRIS HEMENSLEY & CATHERINE O'BRIEN


THE "ART & ABOUT VIENTIANE" INTERVIEW


*

[Ever since Cathy mentioned Mr Patrick [Dr Patrick Gay] to me --in 2003? --I've created an image of him in my mind. Sometimes he's a French Rumpole, his equivalent of a Pommeroy's --anise?-- perpetually on the go! Or he's a Somerset Maugham or one of his characters, or even Malcolm Lowry's vice-consul from Under the Volcano --a mature-aged man who loved Laos as he'd been educated to do by French colonialism though not at all a lording-it colonial. Indeed, I imagined his Frenchness had given him the character to recognize the necessity of a local painting which could take its place in at least Asia's contemporary art, a contemporary art which was recognizably Lao though no longer traditional, all of which is probably true. I was crestfallen, however, when Catherine described him as younger & slimmer & hipper than me --no tropical white jacket & pants or cigarette in holder & et cetera! Even so, perhaps he nurtures such a character within his jeans & t-shirt facade?]

*

Kris Hemensley : At last I've been to Mr Patrick's Treasures of Asia Gallery [on Setthathiroth Street], except that he's not there!
Catherine O'Brien : He's in Singapore, & he does seem to go there at this time of year...
KH : Yes, but didn't you say you noticed a different director's name on his card?
COB : No, it was when I entered the gallery I felt it wasn't a gallery anymore. It was an art shop. There were Hmong textile bags readily available at the market, containing buffalo horns or maybe goat, and the girls hammering the frames on the floor seemed incongruous. Another thing : I noticed piles of Vietnamese art (water-colours, tourist paintings), not that there's anything wrong with Vietnamese paintings but a whole pile of them, also effigies you can see at the Talet Sau market... and then, most surprising of all were the dolls--
KH : The faceless dolls?
COB : No, they're not faceless... they're made by a Hmong lady at the Night Market in Luang Prabang... my friend Daniel, who's now returned to Canada, first told me about them, and then Kris Coad & I collected them...
KH : Don't I recall you describing them as magical or shamanic?
COB : They're spirit dolls, some had two heads-- They're a folk art coming from somewhere we didn't know, nothing like the stuffed animals also sold there-- These were naively made, badly stitched-- And I was surprised to see them in the gallery because obviously someone thought they were sellable in a gallery context--
KH : Do you think Mr Patrick...?
COB : I don't think so... Previously he's promoted a certain kind of Lao artist & the occasional passing Frenchmen...
KH : Do you think Patrick isn't the director anymore?
COB : Well, why is another name [Phimphone Vilaydeth] on the card? ...Patrick was the first one to tell me of a French artist, Marc Leguay, who lived in Lao & probably Thailand as well -- The Lao artists copied his style --red flowers from the flame tree, beautiful Lao women bringing offerings to the monks... It was a style from which the young artists got the idea of painting traditional subjects. But now it's what we saw there today--
KH : The Delaunay, Cubist kind of thing --which I quite liked--






COB : Patrick also showed the older painters --the academy professors --art only came from the art schools.
KH : Do you think an era has ended?
COB : I think Patrick was the first person to have the idea of bringing all the Lao artists together in a gallery. Some of these artists were hanging at the gallery today.

*

[The paintings to catch my eye were, firstly, Cubist style, in which the figures rise from ornate surfaces or are one element of the ornate swirl, &, secondly, the depictions of monks. I suppose the latter puts me right in the post-colonialist gunsight! The exoticised subject, integral to our orientalist repertoire, they'd jeer. Except that the monks are at the heart of these societies too. The monks chanting & eyes-closed praying --simultaneously realistic & idealized as the monks are in the everyday. Another painting, same artist, has them in rows --a phalanx of backs of heads, each figure emerging from the golden brown --the geometry, perhaps, met before their identities.
The series of monks juxtaposed with Buddhas is obviously devotional, symbolic, but given a certain sensibility or ideology not fanciful. (I remember my first time in Glastonbury, UK encountering numerous paintings & prints of Arthurian & British mythological subjects, sometimes in the recognizable Somerset or Cornwall landscape, and I would also have ignored it all as kitsch except for the emotional, aesthetic & cultural investment I'd latterly made in those subjects & landscapes!)
A third category were the flower paintings --not botanical studies, though they owned that genre's veracity, but floral tributes (as it were), something of the French Impressionists &, of course, Georgia O'Keeffe.
Thinking then, after Catherine's reminder of the existence of censorship in Laos, it's probable that such subject-matter is also opportunity for painting pure & (not so) simple. The genre's main exponent, at least in Mr Patrick's stable, is Keomany, the painter Cathy's bought, and it doesn't detract from our proposition that her current work is a series of children studies. Perhaps it's similar to Chinese folk or genre painting, although the examples I have in mind, from the 1970s, had that heroic aura in which stylization cancels personality & transparency is the stamp of official approval. And its naivety reflects the affection for the subject & precedes its expression.
Where Modernism isnt the gauge it doesnt mean there isnt a gauge. But even when there are modernist forays, genre resumes its traditional or pre-modernist importance --that is to say, painting is propelled by the subject into whatever expression & modernism isnt wholly characterised by the dominant expressionism or abstraction.]

*

KH : Reading La Peinture Contemporaine Lao (2007), I see that art & artists runs in families?
COB : Yes --for example, P. Noy's husband is an artist --specialises in ethnic women --Isabelle showed Noy at L'etranger in Luang Prabang... Vilay, untrained, amateur, P. Noy's brother-in-law... I met him at the Art School exhibition --I leant him a book on S.E. Asian art. He came round to get it --I was going to buy one of his paintings --one of his first... But I returned to Australia, didn't get my book back, haven't seen him around since, though his paintings are at Patrick's... Patrick used to buy most of the paintings --
KH : Is Mr Patrick's interest aesthetic? commercial? personal?
COB : He told me he did his PHD on Lao history. He helped set up an ethnic museum in Phonsilly-- I told him that's funny --every time I've been there it's shut! He bought a huge number of historical photographs of Asian people & places including many Lao subjects ["The gallery also owns the most important collections of iconographic reproductions from Asian countries dating from 1860 to 1940...", p14, La Peinture...] -- he obviously has an interest in preserving the culture-- He's more than a collector--
KH : Where was the gallery to which you took me where your Keomany painting is still waiting for you?
COB : Five Arts Gallery in central Vientiane--
KH : It was funny when the guy, one of the artists looking after the gallery that night, didn't understand that you'd already purchased her Golden Lotus! It was wrapped in newspaper, upstairs, --you showed him & apologised for not yet picking it up & he was saying that of course you could buy it if you wanted to! What attracts you to her flower paintings? (I note that, according to La Peinture..., her husband, Bounepol, a graduate from the same Faculty of Fine arts in Vientiane, similarly paints in the 'hyperreal' manner --the monograph describes them as forming 'a couple in the same artistic domain' & Keomany's style as 'vegetal hyperrealism'...
COB : I first saw them at the International Women's Day Exhibition in Vientiane, in 2006 --a big show of women artists... Looking at such an exhibition you have to set aside all your modern art preconceptions but you're hoping to find something really fine --It's an old building, unfortunately it's going to be turfed --It's a building with a history --Behind a curtain there's a painting by Leguay, I think --At the counter, a group of women, smiling, happy for anyone to come --None of the shows I've attended there get much attention --You know these women are the artists --Looking around I saw very large canvases of flowers --the dok chompa (frangipani), the national flower --huge close-ups, glistening with dew --sensual -- They reminded me of Georgia O'Keeffe but I doubt these artists have encountered Georgia O'Keeffe --I'm not a lover of flower paintings per se --It's the form, the colour I like --The painting I've bought is quite different to the others --the Golden Lotus --Because it's set on a black background it has an abstract quality --At Five Arts, next to her new children studies, were one or two brown flowers studies --like seaweed --which are even less naturalistic...
A lot of the pictures in La Peinture Contemporaine Lao belong to Patrick. They form the basis of the collection represented there. Perhaps because they were reflecting what I'd been seeing in Laos, I responded to pictures of women going to the temple --for example, by Anoulom, one in particular, Women Going to the Temple in Phon Si (which means 'colour mountain') --and one by Chandavong, Procession in Luang Prabang. Anoulom's painting has the Marc Leguay red flower motif in the corner; you can see the influence through Leguay of Gauguin --the romantic figures of women, bathed in soft light...
I like Monkan... I talked to him one day... the thickness of the paint, the colours...
KH : Yes, they're both stylized & fluid, energetic --
COB : Mick Saylom perhaps hasn't found his style yet --a young painter --I'm not into his string paintings --he traces the figures with string, perhaps jute, builds the painting around the outlines --The catalogue calls it 'vegetal string'...
KH : They're keen on the 'vegetal' aren't they?!
COB : I liked Chandavong's blue hues --in particular one portrait, a face, at Patrick's gallery for ages but surprisingly not in the book --I feel very affectionate to the group of paintings & painters I saw at Patrick's gallery which coincided with my first years in Vientiane --I'd also seen them at the National Faculty of Fine Arts collection --I got to meet some of the painters & to match the paintings with the painters-- I could then identify them in cafes or hotel foyers, knew who they were by, where they came from --For example, once at the Spirit House, the hotel restaurant on the road by the Mekong, as I was walking home by the river, I saw an exhibition of paintings by Monkham --So I recognized that period --There's a particular Lao cafe which had somehow collected paintings --At the Lan Xane Hotel there is a collection of an earlier period of paintings --Those two places have very interesting collections --Now, when you see the Five Arts paintings at the "M" Gallery, and the perhaps changed scene at Patrick's gallery, there's a sense of new artists, different styles --There seems to be an increasing romanticism --temples, Buddhas, gods, stars!
KH : Are they creating a mythology?
COB : I don't know --maybe --and maybe they know those subjects will sell!
KH : So the door is well & truly opening but onto what one's not really sure...?
COB : Yes!
One painter, Mr Vithaya came round to see me --His brother is Anousa & his sister-in-law is P. Noy --He's self-taught --I saw these wonderful paintings of monks carrying umbrellas shaped like discs --You could say comics style painting --very unusual perspectives--
KH : Like a camera, filmic?
COB : Yes --and he makes the characters from geometrical shapes --for example, seven monks, a parabola --I almost bought it --lost his phone number. As a naive painter with an unusual perspective on traditional subjects, pethaps he's one of the new wave...
The Maison de la Culture exhibition was a big one --I saw the group of painters I'd discovered at Mr Patrick's in a larger context of contemporary Lao art --Their themes were similar but they had their own styles --as if they were a development from the larger, traditional painting...
Mr Vithaya also made the Dreaming About a Departure ('07) --
KH : That painting struck me looking at the book --It had that Casper David Friedrich feel of the individual facing the Absolute --
COB : I was surprised, but then not because he's such a thoughtful person --I had an interesting conversation with him about Lao cosmology, so why should I be surprised by this strongly symbolist picture? The figure has left his thongs under an umbrella, so I imagine he is still beneath the umbrella while his dreaming self walks into the clouds carrying his tong pai (his travelling bag)...


*

[The traveller's experience of censorship is muted by the general absence of signs of authority. One's ready to observe the local requirement for modesty in dress & the sanction upon affectionate or sexual expression, not because of statute but in accordance with the gentle nature & rhythm of that society. Although the term 'open door' doesn't appear in the pages of the widely distributed La Peinture Contemporaine Lao, it occurs to me that the art represented there is its official confirmation. Thus the importance of Mr Patrick's gallery & vision.
Coincident with or perhaps part & parcel of the phenomenon is the cultural activity of the foreigners in Laos. I'm intrigued by the potential for interaction, on the level of both non-Lao representation of indigenous subjects and of the continuation in Laos of the work of foreign artists. Parallel reality, world within world, collaboration. The foreign art isn't only European (French of course, German, British etc.) or North American but also Asian (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese etc.) &, dare one say, Australian.]


*

COB : There's a Lao artist who has his own 'shop', full of paintings & drawings --he told me he'd trained in China. What I liked were large charcoal drawings of figures influenced, I think, by Chinese calligraphy. His other work was of Lao subjects.
KH : Once again this reminds us that influence isn't always the big, bad West. For Laos there's also the not insignificant links with the old Communist states of Europe & current Communist regimes in Asia.
COB : Yes... earlier on there was the influence of Vietnam --Lao artists studying there --but not so much now, although there is still official cultural exchange between Laos & Vietnam. In Luang Prabang there's probably more inter-relationship & exposure than in Vientiane...
The Quiet of the Land exhibition, curated by France Moran --which included film by British-Lao installation artist, textiles by French-Lao & European anthropologist, painting, photography, very significant installation work (e.g., Anne Hamilton) --has to have been tremendously significant...


*

COB : I have to say I'm not involved in the wider circle of Lao art & artists... What I'm interested in is the Vientiane art as I came across it in town --in galleries but also in shops & cafes (cafes which show certain periods of painting)... There is a gallery, relatively recently opened, Maison de la Culture de Ban Naxai, like an 'approved' gallery, whose opening I attended, which shows the work of many of the artists I've seen at Mr Patrick's gallery. He actually gave me the invitation! I didn't see him there... I looked at all the work & saw the artists sitting together at a table, but I didn't stay...


[June/July/August, 2009
Vientiane/Bendigo/Melbourne]

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MORE ART CRITICISM, # 3

[KRIS COAD : "WAITING..." , at Diane Tanzer Gallery, Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
October 20-November 17,2007]

WAITING FOR KRIS COAD

As one artist to another : our currency is response. Being a friend of the artist exacerbates the obligation (Robert Duncan : responsibility is the ability to respond), & propels the urgency.
I assume, now, exquisite ceramics from Kris Coad, and the chamotte clay tiles & stools & the bone-china shoes in her new exhibition, Waiting..., reward that expectation. One must constantly remind oneself of the sophistication of her work lest familiarity blunts ones appreciation of her true & tried craft nous. Her piece in the Contamination group-exhibition at the Gasworks, Albert Park (18/10 -28/10/07), is yet another example of her ability to make exquisite ceramic art of simple themes & familiar objects : viewed from the notional front, pillow-cases on a clothes-line; from the back, the garments within the translucent pillow-cases; on the near wall, a product of the entire exhibition's theatre-lighting, the clothes'-like shadows, a wonderful bonus for the particular work.
It's an irony, though, that the deliberate theatrical staging of the Gasworks show, the Gasworks' house-style I think (individually lit pieces within the large darkened area), fully expresses the innate drama of the work itself --a work (Washing Day) which probably wouldnt demand an entire show's focus as does Waiting...'s clearly connected tableaux at Tanzer's. But what the room at Tanzer's required, in my opinion, was a gradation of light appropriate to the different tableaux, especially for one I initially thought was the single piece but as the price-list clearly indicates is in fact three! And, in my mind, those three of seven tableaux do create an installation of their own, utterly different in its suggestivity to the remainder of the room. The expectedly exquisite smaller pieces --e.g., stool, tile, shoes --are disarmingly elegant, but the largest tableaux, the intended work or my fabrication, is something else again!
A week or so ago, on first visiting Kris's exhibition, I assumed that the entire room was an installation, an unfolding though mysterious narrative. And I wasnt going to be diverted by the artist's title or, paradoxically, by the beauty of her tiles, stools, & shoes. I was consumed by the riddle also appreciated, I realized, in the penultimate sentences of Sarah Bond's catalogue-note --"Is there another room to enter and should I remove my own shoes out of respect? Have they been collected here for another purpose?"
Remove my own shoes? O God, I thought, remove myself; so difficult to be there as the awful feeling grew in me & around me that Kris Coad's largest tableaux was no homage to an Asian temple but the ante-room of something like a dungeon of no return, even one of the death camps' ghastly ovens.
Waiting? Of course, objects always await their narrators. They are, if you like, referred subjects themselves --perfect in themselves but inanimate. It is human presence/absence (Buddhist living/dying?) which dynamises them. Whatever they are is not narrative. But mercy : mercy, mercy, mercy : the owners of these shoes werent ever coming back...
One of Kris Coad's signatures is the illuminated object (electric light artfully deployed upon the unique texture of her pieces). So possessed was I by the macabre stillness of the large tableaux that I saw candles within the shoes, little shoe candles, little flickerings for the departed souls, diminutive sepulchres. I wished then for muted lighting or darkness except for the few lit shoes & whatever filtered in from outside the gallery. However, I completely accept the comment made to me by Ursula Dutkiewicz, when we discussed these issues at the Gasworks last week, that there is a world of difference between a commercial gallery & something like the Gasworks, a space given over to its artists. So, of course, one understands & accepts the definitive tension in a commercial gallery between commercial & aesthetic imperatives. Tanzer's does well in this context : the grey wall at right angles to one tableaux, the large white screen contextualising the largest work, are crucial theatrical props. Priceless, as it were.
This is Kris Coad's first large room : her work deserved it! She filled it! No waiting for Kris Coad! The artist's arrived!

--Kris Hemensley
October 28-November 7,2007

KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 7

LAUNCHING SPEECH FOR BECOMING BUDDHA : THE STORY OF SIDDHARTHA, BY WHITNEY STEWART & SALLY RIPPIN; 4th May, 2005, at the Greville Street Bookstore, Greville Street, Prahran [Melbourne].

It's a great pleasure for me to be launching Sally Rippin's book tonight. I've got to know Sally as a neighbour at the Writers' Centre where she occupies a studio adjacent to Collected Works Bookshop on the 1st floor of the Nicholas Building. I'm aware of her working away next door and always look forward to our conversations & green teas!
I'm dedicating my remarks tonight to my brother Bernard, who I've recently visited in Weymouth,UK --Bernard and his long struggle with agoraphobia and, of a more positive kind, with Buddhism's precepts & practices, its Asian traditions & its manifestations over the past century in the West... And to my dear friend Cathy O'Brien who presently lives & works in Laos, and apart from teaching English to everyone in Vientiane she's up to her ever widening eyes in that fantastic amalgamation of animist & Buddhist ceremony & practice... I dedicate it also to the continuing conversation between Cathy, myself & Kris Coad, the ceramic artist, around & about Indian, Chinese, Japanese & SE Asian aesthetics & themes...
It's also very nice to reacquaint with Jurate [Sasnaitis] in her shop [Greville Street Bookstore], and with [co proprietor] Des Cowley, who were friends & colleagues for many years at Collected Works...
This launching gives me the opportunity to tie together several strands of my life & my loves!
I was in Bangkok recently, to meet Cathy and to attend the wonderful retrospective exhibition of the Thai artist,the late Montian Boonma... It was impressive to say the least... He is one of Asia's preeminent contemporary artists [sculpture & installation] whose modern art practice is also perfectly explicable as Buddhist art --as his catalogue noted, "Boonma returned to local wisdom due to his consciousness of traditional society and his appreciation of Thai art"...
Cathy took me to the King's Palace temple complex, and I realised what an important place it was in the Buddhist world... And I was overwhelmed by the temples, the statuary, the sense of 'living temple' or church --and by the magnificent murals, hundreds of yards of the Ramayana story...
It so happens I'm a reader of Thomas Merton, who died tragically in Bangkok in 1968 --so when I arrived in England [the next leg of my '05 journey] I raided my brother Bernard's extensive library for his Mertons and found the Asian Journal...[I feel very much like Thomas Merton who on the occasion he was asked to lead a prayer confessed, "I have no idea what I am going to say." He then spoke profoundly about openness... "I am going to be silent a minute, then I will say something... 'O God we are one with you, you have made us one with you, you have taught us if we are open to one another You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts.' ]
This is Thomas Merton at the King's Palace : "There are of course Disneyland tendencies in all these Thai wats and I suppose at times they go over the line... As for the frescos, yes they were good too, in their way, so close to a comic strip; this is not meant to imply a judgement good or bad, after all I think the murals are perhaps the best thing in the whole temple. Hanuman has a prominent place in all this --he is at once a monkey, god and successful fighter and I think this says much that illumines the whole comic book and pre comic book tradition." --which takes me to illustration and specifically this book by Whitney Stewart & Sally Rippin.
My only personal experience of such a project has been working with Jiri Tibor Novak twenty years ago on my book, our book, Christopher... But I've always loved the pictures accompanying text, for prime example the Universal Comics era of literary classics --Mort D'Arthur, especially the Holy Grail chapter when Galahad lays eyes on the challice...
Let us open the book, Becoming Buddha... On the title page Sally's wild goose... In the book-trade I came to know it as the logo of Scottish press, Floris, publisher mostly of Rudolph Steiner titles but also Celtic & Scottish Gaelic works of literature & spirituality... I visited the abbey at Iona in the west of Scotland in 1990, whose symbol is the wild goose...
On the next page [the foreward by Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama] the lotus flower & the leaf of the Bodhi tree --beautiful marginal decoration... This is, of course, a book dedicated to the Tibetan cause & its form of Buddhist practice. It is blessed by the Dalai Lama. It is a picture book of one of the great stories of the world...
The writer's sentence, "At a time when the oldest bodhi trees in Asia were still in youthfull bloom..." is juxtaposed on this page with Sally's dance of leaves. Of course, the branch is assumed --literally, the leaves hang --but without the branch the leaves are miraculously suspended... The child is looking out of the pouch of the mother --with them there eyes!
[And so we follow the story of Siddhartha from baby to boy to youth to marriage to his life outside the palace.] Here Siddartha & his friend meet the monk... Sally's picture of Siddhartha's face is, I think, deliberately unformed --that is, it has less delineation than the monk's. But, one anticipates Siddhartha's progress in the beatific expression of the monk who meditates --in the story an as yet unknown practice. The face of the Buddha, as we would recognize it from its thousands of images in the great Asian traditions, is more that of the monk than Siddhartha...
The picture of Siddhartha as an experienced meditator yields, I think, to a kind of androgeny in its representation... Neither male nor female --maybe like one of the sacred transvestites of India, male & female simultaneously --the shaven dome of both baby & old one --the closed lids of an inner-seeing & not-sleeping person. And note the brilliant touch of the blue ribbon of thought/non-thought, the ribbon or vibration, the invisible thread which illustrates a transportation, a beyond-oneself, a transpersonality... The lumpyness of it is so much to the point of the realness of meditation --it's great that we dont have some wafting airy-fairy emanation! And the lumps perhaps contain monkey feet & tails! The figures work as decoration & the imagery suggested by the text...
In all the pictures thus far, black is border & background, positively or implied. But in this picture, which illustrates a scene prior to Siddhartha's enlightenment, --we could call it the Temptation and accept the Christian significance of that term --Sally has bordered the dramatic event with blue. I think the blue is the prelude to the golden orange of the magnificent next chapter/next page... Blue is a transcending colour, the colour of sky, of air (if it could be coloured) --it's the colour of the sea as well but that's the reflection of the sky!
The image of Siddhartha, on this orange & gold page, touching the earth with the fingertips of his right hand as his left hand rests across his thigh, is absolutely at one with Whitney Stewart's text... "Siddhartha's mind was steady. No trace of inner darkness blinded him. Free from pride, doubt and fear, from anger, excitement and sorrow. Siddhartha had clear vision..."
Here is Buddhism's figure of the enlightened person --here is the continuum of earth, nature, mind, and one thinks of Romanticism's legacy to modernity, including environmentalism's mystical aura & etc...
In her 'Illustrator's Note', Sally states she's not a Buddhist, "but have a great respect for Buddhism and the Dalai Lama. I knew that in illustrating this book, the challenge for me would be to work with historical images of Siddhartha already created by many wonderful artists over hundreds of years , but also to bring to each picture my own interpretation of Whitney's text. I began by collecting together as many beautiful materials and images of Siddhartha as I could find to inspire me. From there I began to paint Siddhartha the way that he appeared to me in my mind. While I painted each illustration, I practised the Dalai Lama's meditation exercises in this book and worked to create the most peaceful and beautiful image I could, all the while aiming to represent the light and compassion that Siddhartha, and now the Dalai Lama, bring to this world."
For those wishing to explore further I'd recommend, in addition to the multitudinous classical Buddhist literature, Herman Hesse's wonderful Siddhartha, which many people here would already know, and Thich Nhat Hanh's recent 600 page life of the Buddha, Old Path White Clouds, which draws on 24 Pali, Sanskrit & Chinese sources...
So, without further ado, I declare Sally's book, Sally & Whitney's book, launched!

------------------------------------
Becoming Buddha : the story of Siddhartha, published by Lothian Books , Melbourne, 2005.

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

28/30 December, 2006
Melbourne

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

*

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

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

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RE- TRIP TRAP AND ALBERT SAIJO

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

Love, Kris


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17th January, 2007
Weymouth

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

Love, Bernard


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(to be continued)