Since 1971 I have been logging book, music, film reviews and rural-to-town commentary from Woodburners We Recommend. Susan tells me my chief readers are folks lost a moment looking for more information about their woodstoves. Sorry. The ‘Burners continues on another part of the Longhouse website. Woodburners On-Fire! will be a more concise overview — as if you have stopped on our back road and asked for instructions on how to get out, and instead I speak to you one of these reviews. Go well.

remembering

SNOOKS EAGLIN
KON ICHIKAWA
BILL HOLM






CHINA / POETRY


David Hinton, translator / Classical Chinese Poetry (Farrar)

You're on your way to go have a meal out, a pretty good meal at that. For me it would be two meals at the cost of this book (including a loved one across from me) and still I'd say skip the meals and buy this book. Your body will be all the wiser when you have that third crack at eating out and now you can go with new Chinese friends and their 500 poems spanning three millennia in your belly. Roughly drawn from 1500BCE to 1200 CE, maybe the richest period in Chinese history. David Hinton has been working a long time with his Chinese fellow travelers, it shows in every step of this book, the choices, like stones placed. The introductions for each poet and historical favor are so rewarding the book and poems will never step back into a remembered section. It is now.




MUSIC FILM / DVD

Donovan : Sunshine Superman

A little gem that grows & grows, 3 hours long, on Donovan as Sunshine Superman, but really a journey that works and shows a sixties icon survivalist ala 1962-2008. It makes a terrific case of what happened to a sixties icon 1960s-to-now. Donovan ever articulate pulls you in, if you don't mind a millionaire constantly referring to himself as a "gypsy". It's small potatoes when you consider some of the real gypsy songs he's written and sung for decades. His earliest songs rise out of Celtic lore, the Beats and looking for a beauty that works splendidly. Dylan, the inventor of snark for generations to come, is the opposite pole. Yet he is mercurial as an immense art form for a handful of amazing years that still haven't touched the ground. I think it's high-time the two troubadours did one last concert together and allowed everyone in for free.




UNFORGETTABLE / POETRY

Ron Padgett, Great Balls of Fire (Holt)

There was an open kitchen window with an apple pie cooling on its sill once upon a time for American poetry and it ran wild through the streets. Not revolutionary poetry, but true anarchy, with childhood and lots of play and brightness poetry. It lasted a few years. The same year as Woodstock, the same year as Manson, is the year I'm thinking about. Exactly 40 years ago. I remember spotting this book up on a bookstore shelf and where I lived in small town it had to be quite a bookstore to carry such a book and it was such a bookstore. Of course it went out of business, just like this book was never seen again with its star-spangled cover of white stars on blue background all over the dustjacket and even the same on the cloth and over all the endpapers, too! Someone in the design dept., at Holt had a great deal of fun with this. Joe Brainard was of course the artist. He even wrote the jacket blurb about the poet and it continues to be one of the best definitions of a poet going. And the poems? The poems were fully American bred gone once to France and doused head to toe and sent back home again. Sort of like what you get when looking at Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Everything about the book still makes it one of the very best from that second generation NY School, and a stark original post Frank O'Hara. The poet's photograph on the back jacket flap is of a happy kid. Where'd you see one of those in the poetry slums lately?

Ron Padgett is a poet. He always has been a poet and he always will be a poet. I don't know how a poet becomes a poet. And I don't think anyone else does either. It is something deep and mysterious inside of a person that cannot be explained. It is something that no one understands. It is something that no one will ever understand. I asked Ron Padgett once how it came about that he was a poet, and he said, "I don't know. It is something deep and mysterious inside of me that cannot be explained. — Joe Brainard

note: there was a revised version of the book issued by Coffee House in the early 90s, and while worthwhile as most Padgett titles are, it ain't the same high. The original cloth edition is a wooden puppet sort of toy. Unmistakable.

WOOD CULTURE

Spike Carlsen, A Splintered History of Wood (belt sander races, blind woodworkers & baseball bats), Harper Collins

You better be damn good with a name like Spike on the subject of wood. And he is. With an estimated 10 billion acres of forest on this planet, the author sets forth sharing his own experiences as a woodworker, visiting wood terrain from toothpick factories (one cord of wood maketh 7, 500,000 toothpicks, no kiddin') to logging champs, precision wood turners, and even Academy Award nominees for outstanding performance by a wooden structure. There's plenty of photographs, an index, resources page and an author's photograph I trust. He looks like he'd be good on his toes.

BILL PORTER / RED PINE ~ CHINESE BRIDGES ~ NEZEN

Ronald G. Knapp & A. Chester Ong, Chinese Bridges (Tuttle)

Here are two fascinating books written from the depths of on-foot China. The backcountry. The splendid book of bridges hikes deep into the past, long before mathematical design was applied by engineers and instead indigenous craftsman worked the natural wonders of timber and stone. Viewing the covered wooden bridges of southern Zhejiang and northern Fukian, the so-called "rainbow bridges" is all one will need to capture some fulfillment of the practical, majestic and even daring. Follow that up with peeks at the log fested Jiemei Bridges and the temple perched aboard the Jingxing Bridge swallowed in Cangyan Mountain and one will wonder what sort of people, culture and traditions are held fast here. Many of these bridges and principles are found nowhere else in the world.

Bill Porter, Zen Baggage, a pilgrimage to China (Counterpoint)
For any poor boy with no money to get to China, the book of bridges leafed open on your lap with delicious visuals, while reading Bill Porter's no-nonsense Zen Baggage, is just the hardware for a cheap-seat pilgrimage. Porter, also known as the translator Red Pine to streams of readers of Buddhist poetry and sutras, returns in 2006 with his walking stick, on a pilgrimage from Beijing to Hong Kong to sites associated with the first six patriarchs of Zen. Don't ask what Zen is, just dig in, read and listen. Listen further after you set the book down for a rest, since Bill Porter also tries to get his rest, massages for his trail bumped back, visits with most anything and anyone interesting along the way. This is a field report like few modern disciples move themselves to live, withstand and write. It's got the ancient glory. Minced nicely within the passage are flashes of personal introspection and autobiography — it's only in the very last pages we learn Porter's father was a bank robber out of Arkansas, with a gang that got all shot up in Detroit where only his father survived. After prison and renewal in Texas and later Los Angeles for his dad, Bill Porter was born. The young man had his own varied stages, AWOL in the armed services, some years in a Chinese monastery, the very jagged procession that often comes with enlightenment. Few books bow to reverence and ordinary matters as well as this one. Walk into it.

POETRY

Eliot Katz
Love, War, Fire, Wind
(Looking out from North America's skull)
art by William T. Ayton

Narcissus Press, 498 Primrose Hill Road
Rhinebeck, NY 12572
info@narcissuspublications.com


I wanted to share this tiny poem from a big book of great long poems and prose cycles spanning from the BC backwoods visits Eliot makes to his loved one in a fire tower summer job site, back to the mean streets and grand streets of New York City and New Jersey where for many years EK worked as housing advocate for homeless families. Check into all his other poetry titles, none will set you wrong.

Sitting To Praise

I am sitting down at my kitchen table
to write a praise poem
for the people of my country,
the people and the oceans —
some of the people,
and the future oceans cleansed.
I am sitting to celebrate the way Americans
have responded since 9/11
by recognizing the value of every human life,
only that's not what really happened.
But it happened for some Americans,
so I'm celebrating you —
You know who you are.

2003

MILITARY PEACE

Captain Paul K. Chappell
Will War Ever End?
a soldier's vision of peace for the 21st Century

Ashoka Books/Rive Books, 8 Gray's Farm Road, Weston, Conn. 06883 www.rive.com

Joining the deep ranks of other war veterans like Dwight Eisenhower and George Orwell who have fought and worked for peace, this son of a Korean-Vietnam vet, and himself a West Point graduate and Baghdad soldier, sets down a concise treatise of historical fellowship. It's battle tagged and reasonable.

MUSIC / CD

The Rough Guide to YODEL

It's snowing tonight in the Vermont woods, not a light showing anywhere as I step out into the fresh boreal stuff and just feel like, well, yodeling! Did you know some of the finest yodelers are women, with great names that many of us know like Cathy Fink, Laura Love, Gillian Welch and my favorite Carolina Cotton. Ed Sanders has yodeled on record, so has a truck driver by the name of Mike Johnson. I know Hank Williams yodeled, though his ghost didn't make the cut here. Often termed textless vocalizing, but then so is screaming. Yodeling is far sexier.

FILM / DVD

Fatih Akin, The Edge of Heaven

This is my choice over the winter of a recent film I'm recommending to you. I've seen it twice now. I'd watch it a third time with you. Thanks to Eero whose watching and excitement took me back to the film again. Friends do this for friends.



Roman Polanski, Knife in the Water

Nearly 50 years old! and fresh as a daisy. Roman Polanski's very first film with characters and a story line that has barely aged a day. It's enigmatic sexual theme of threes-a-crowd aboard a ship of marriage has been tried a million times, but few as well as this one. Crisp black & white photography with virtuoso handheld camera work by Jerzy Lipman.

Samuel Fuller, White Dog

From a true accounting and book by Romain Gary. Charges of racism long kept this film out of circulation — in the hands of master storyteller/filmmaker Sam Fuller we receive the full bravado, by way of a white Alsatian trained to attack any black person. A "white dog". Through the dog, Fuller bravely reveals the disorder and fierce conditioning that runs amok through the human universe. As usual, this director was years ahead of his time as his simple and precise story line grabs the truth by the throat. With an interesting cast including Paul Winfield. Ennio Morricone takes care of the rest. Now a well earned Criterion classic.

ART /JOSEPH CORNELL / H.C. WESTERMANN

Kirsten Hoving
Joseph Cornell and Astronomy
a case for the stars (Princeton)



Yet one more entry into the vast mindset of American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972). Standing with his work solo — no guides, no text — just you with the art, one creates their own halo of wonders. Each year now a guide book seems to appear, the best often composed by women (a soft spot for Cornell anyway) delving into the sacred regions of the artist's persuasions: film-work, cosmic collages, hand-built boxed marvels and the regular fantastical. It may be a bottomless well what books are yet to come. Reach for the stars.



H.C. Westermann (Abrams)

One shouldn't move away from Jospeh Cornell without tipping a cap to HC Westermann, another box sculptor magnifico, who fashioned all of his work with the skill of a cabinetmaker. Like Rockwell Kent, an artist who built with his own hands his own house and studio, it may have been what nailed Westermann with a fatal heart attack in the bargain as royal workaholic. Painter, sculptor, draftsman, builder, WW2 marine who experienced the drowning of 2000 seaman resulting years later in his series of Death Ships.

MUSIC / LP ~ CD

Joshua Burkett, Where's My Hat?

Right now I have spinning Joshua Burkett’s latest recording Where’s My Hat? From its opening sounds, powers of invention, delicate and grousing, this recording lifts me into its world. Am I lying? Is that a bagpipe working with acoustic guitar skimming off some percussionist self sound? For the first time ever I am hearing Josh’s voice — distinguished words, I mean. In previous recordings his voice could be bird flight, wind under the door, eerie and whispering, the sea from a distance. And the songs don’t noodle and drift self-consciously into a personal no man’s land. There are borders and this musician bounces against them with a playful and dead serious ambition. Harmony wants to be on the plate with dissonance. It’s about making sense. It’s about visiting us with a smile. So far only distributed as one-of-50 from Feather One’s Nest (I have number lucky 7) handed to me by Josh right out of his traveling satchel when I walked into his used record store (Mystery Train of Amherst, Mass.) I believe Karen Dalton was playing on the turntable. A few stragglers had come in from the cold. Fourteen songs, all recorded at Gold Studios over some years, and of course wishing for a blue sky world.

VERMONT HISTORY

Greg Joly (text), Rebecca Lepkoff (photographs)

ALMOST UTOPIAThe Residents and Radicals of Pikes Falls, Vermont, 1950. (Vermont Historical Society)

There will always be people who are termed 'different' - here's a whole book of them - and I believe it will become a quiet classic all its own. Great books are sometimes made as if from flesh filling some vacancy asking for them, or a place or space and often a need, and this is one such book. Its subject hasn't been quite documented before and it's dealing with an endangered species - communitarian homesteaders in the southern Green Mountains of Vermont at the dawn of the Korean War. A time in Vermont before paved roads, Ben & Jerry's, and even hippies. The stalwart team of Scott & Helen Nearing have already practiced their homestead craft here for a good twenty years and in fact are the catnip attraction for this new leg of rough & ready back-to-landers, war resisters and dreamers. Without breathing a word Rebecca Lepkoff's delicately wrought black & white photographs will tell a tale of oil and water between the natives (residents) and the radicals. These photographs are as fine and defined and situated as any Walker Evans ever snapped working with James Agee, and that's saying something. The finest portrait photograph of Scott Nearing you'll ever see, and he's smiling nevermind, is in this book. I've strolled through a few bookstores and have spotted this unique album on display amongst other clutter, and each time the appearance of Ruth Stark's photograph, in galvanized black & white, walking toward me strong-arming not one but two hardback chairs, has me stop and look deeper. The tarpaper shack, rusted stovepipe, shoddy roof, variance of paint and trim, rugged grass, and a woman in floral dress with a boxer's gaze. What's not to like? so come hither. Here's how Greg Joly invites us in and acutely describes the terrain: Almost Utopia presents a photographic portrait of one Vermont community poised on the edge of modernity: It's the summer of 1950, the Pike's Falls neighborhood of Jamaica in the southern Green Mountains. Rebecca Lepkoff, a New York photographer, is drawn to this place by the presence of idealistic back-to-the-landers gathered around the Forest farm experiment of long-time radical thinker and political dissident Scott Nearing and his new wife, Helen Knothe. She proceeds to take pictures of everything she sees. I love a book that cuts to the chase and then works patiently at unwinding the spool with brilliant photographs and a crisp, knowledgeable text. One gets the feeling that Rebecca and Greg are most at home with the radicals and love it when they can spend some time with the natives, who barely pay them any mind. You see, you truly can't get there from here. But Lepkoff, miraculously, does catch the elixir in one photograph, untitled of course, frontispiece to the opening chapter "Upon This Foundation". If you know anything, you'll know this when you see it.

Lastly, MUSIC /DVD

Johnny Cash & Roscoe Holcomb: Rainbow Quest

In the age of "Twitter" — and I'm sure to come Ditter and Zitter — where one doesn't need to worry about conversing with whom one doesn't wish to converse with (the ultimate Me! Tool!), slip away into the stream with Pete Seeger and his old black and white mid-1960s TV show Rainbow Quest, where he perched on a simple wooden rocking chair around a table with guitars and banjos and musician friends like Roscoe Holcomb (Kentucky mountain singer of the high lonesome sound), Jean Redpath (Scotland), June Carter (Carter Family lineage) and Johnny Cash (a wild beanpole, before he refined) and listen to great music and conversation from the ultimate un-twittered ones. They, in fact, learned their lessons from all walks of life and unfiltered messages coming forth. It made for original wonders.

Long Winter...& Almost Spring ~ See You With More Books & Such Down the Road