TELLING IT WHOLE ~
(the best damn writer in the NY Times)

TIMOTHY EGAN:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/conservative-cash-crop/?hp





Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY.

WITH ME ~

DAVID TRINIDAD



ODE TO THELMA RITTER


There's no one like you in the movies
anymore, Thelma, no lovable, middle-aged
character actress, gravelly voiced and
hard-boiled, with a sharp-tongued flair
for the cynical as well as the comical. You
could work miracles with a little screen time,
turning out indelible performances in a matter
of minutes: Bette Davis's acerbic sidekick
in All About Eve, Jimmy Stewart's down-to-
earth nurse in Rear Window, Doris Day's
perpetually hung-over maid in Pillow Talk.
You played women with names like Clancy,
Aggie, Bertha, Birdie, Lottie, Leena, Della,
Stella, Sophie, Sadie, Maude, Mae, and Moe.
But what of you, Thelma? Online I find only
this mini-biography. Born in Brooklyn on
Valentine's Day in 1905. Trained at American
Academy of Dramatic Arts. Stage career
mostly unsuccessful. Married Joseph Moran
in 1927; briefly gave up acting to raise two
children. Started working again in radio in
1940. Bit part in Miracle on 34th Street launched
noteworthy screen career. Appeared in thirty
films between 1947 and 1968. Died of a heart
attack in 1969 in New York. Thelma, six times
you were nominated for Best Supporting
Actress, and six times you lost. You, who
could save any movie with your wisecracks!
A Google search uncovers this little-known fact:
"Shirley Booth was not the first choice to play
Hazel. Thelma Ritter was. Miss Ritter wanted
the role badly, but due to illness had to bow out."
Booth would win two Emmys in the early '60s
for playing television's sassiest maid — your
rightful part. O elusive trophies! O tired heart!
You, who survived the Titanic in one picture,
would say sadly, world-wearily, in the next:
"I have to go on making a living so I can die."


from The Late Show
David Trinidad
Turtle Point Press 2007

photo : flixster.com

BACK ROAD CHALKIE ~

photo © bob arnold

NEW FROM LONGHOUSE ~










TEST MILE


Lost the big herbivores but gained
all these trees. The fir tree is formed
like a flame and is thus the Universal
Root, the foundation of all things.
Enormous and immediate, the dynamic
expression. Alive in a molecular world.
A world estranged from the Mysteries,
reduced to fingering detective fiction.
Science is great when it confounds
fundamentalists, not when it modifies
corn. In the front room pounding
Beethoven with the door locked. Sleeping
with too many afghans. Staff around
to make life nicer. Knit me a corgi.
I was thinking about it and then I was there.
Not important what others call it, so long
as you have a name for it. As the
monarch follows the milkweed. The king
in the custard pie. Even his bookmarks
are interesting. The temptation to be smart.
To dwell inside a cave and glow green
from living off nettles. We are the mountain.

Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to

Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!

Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!

NEW FROM LONGHOUSE ~

HIGH WATER


Running downstream on high water
you don’t have to muscle the paddle;
just knife it in the current to stay straight.

When a whirlpool roils to the surface
your body flexes and veers with the boat.

Watching the shore go by:
red granite, white birch bark,
the bronze-green thickets of trapper’s tea
your mind drifts.

Where the river widens into a lake
you start working again,
and step back into the world;
searching for the next portage
or a good camp site,
thinking about supper.

Look at that raven playing with the wind:
his mind isn’t penned in
by deadlines and maps,
his body’s not burdened with tools.
Setting his wings,
he swoops, and gives us the eye.
Flapping them twice,
he climbs, clears the timber
perches in a jackpine snag,
talks to us as we float past.

For him, the sky is water.
Clouds mark the currents
of the rivers he runs.

Cirrus River

"The Bob Love (booklet) is especially perfect, almost as if it should have a waterproof pocket to carry it in in one's backpack." ~ Ken McCullough

Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to

Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!

Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!

LONGHOUSE BOOKLETS SUMMER 2011




version 2

please email us for ordering information

or visit Longhouse 2011 New Titles

film : © bob arnold

EARTH ~

MIKE WATERSON

1941-2011

Goodbye to a British folksinger, boat builder, carpenter from Robin Hood's Bay, Yorkshire village, UK.

Here Lucy Ward sings Mike Waterson's delightful revenge ballad "A Stitch in Time".

photo : mike harding

PANTS ON FIRE ~

please watch & listen:

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/24/new_expos_reveals_nuclear_regulatory_commission

DREAMER 1 ~

image : caughtbytheriver.net

DREAMER 2 ~

image : caughtbytheriver.net

DREAMER 3 ~

image : caughtbytheriver.net

DREAMER 4 ~

image : caughtbytheriver.net

THE MAN IN THE RAINCOAT ~

Peter Falk

Sept 16, 1927 ~ June 23, 2011

See Columbo, John Cassavetes films, Wings of Desire for primo Peter Falk. Adieu.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/arts/television/peter-falk-columbo-actor-dies-at-83.html?pagewanted=1&ref=global-home





photo : ny times

EARTH ~

Julio Cortazar

To Be Read in the Interrogative



Have you seen

have you truly seen

the snow the stars the felt steps of the breeze

Have you touched

really have you touched

the plate the bread the face of that woman you love so much

Have you lived

like a blow to the head

the flash the gasp the fall the flight

Have you known

known in every pore of your skin

how your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart

must be thrown away

must be wept away

must be invented all over again


~


from Save Twilight
(City Lights 1997)
selected poems
trans. Stephen Kessler

BORN IN BRUSSELS TO ARGENTINIAN PARENTS IN 1914 JULIO CORTAZAR WAS RAISED IN ARGENTINA BEFORE MOVING TO PARIS IN 1951, WHERE HE PASSED AWAY IN 1984. BETWEEN THEN & THEN HE MANAGED TO BE STRIKINGLY HANDSOME, DARING IN LIFE AND THE NOW CLASSICS HE WROTE, INCLUDING HOPSCOTCH, BLOW UP AND OTHER STORIES, 62: A MODEL KIT, ALL FIRES THE FIRE AND MUCH MORE. NOT ONE OF HIS TITLES WILL LEAD YOU WRONG.

photo : citylights.com

UNWASHED ~

A detail of Balthus’s smock, scanned and reproduced by the artist Katerina Jebb.

" Balthus always painted in the smock, using it like a cloth to wipe his brushes clean. It was never washed and, over 60 odd years, it accumulated layer upon layer of pigment, becoming an artwork in itself. "

please read on. . .

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/the-art-on-his-sleeve/




ny times

EARTH ~

RONALD JOHNSON



from The Shrubberies





slant

rain

drops

from

each

prickle

of holly











a homing of hummingbirds

to a singular blossom











cornucopia convolvulus

kudos in stratosphere

over the arched bridge

so easily over an edge












ignation gentian

smouldering purples

pleader at gate











tempi all exempt

except tempest











a place not on any map

snapping & crackling

between antipodes











Nature, a stickler for detail



each niche filled sheer overkill



a kind of anti-antimacassar

to draw out cellular matter











afar, the lilac

reach to the stars

in silence absolute

staircase of cataract

and galaxies mute











sun in the honeyhives

combing order from time,



light on light suffuse

like liquid copper



climbing in the dark

ore heights Byzantine











From here, across the Mts.

everything is quite different

customs, architecture, smell

but same appetite for Hell











of crayon canyon

cut by juniper smokes

turquoise sky above

leaping the bounds











quick — a startled faun

unstill as a flame






RONALD JOHNSON
THE SHRUBBERIES
EDITED BY PETER O'LEARY
FLOOD EDITIONS 2001

A most beautiful piece by Jonathan Williams on Ronald Johnson from the Jargon site:

http://www.jargonbooks.com/rjobit.html

photo : webdelsol.com
book : flood editions

EARTH ~

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Sorry about the ugly bug; but for those who have had this disease, as I have (twice), or a loved one, likewise (crushing), then this short film may prove helpful. Many thanks to Whit for sharing it with us.

READER ~

film : © bob arnold

EARTH & THE GOOD GUY ~

Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vermont)

required : truth serum

BLUESMAN ~

Sam & Ann Charters



I can't write it any better of this full life than Wikipedia can provide with many of the proper contact points and cross reference dimensions — further below, take the Charters biography on a whirl.

Sam Charters is International and Americana in the best sense of both words. His quiet and enduring achievements in music, history, poetry and the multi-facets of the Beat Generation are legendary to anyone who has stayed abreast of each field, even if the subject himself often takes a back seat and allows the light to bask elsewhere.

In some ways nothing could be more perfect than having him write a portrait in his 80s with his wife, the Beat historian Ann Charters, on the unknown relationship to many, between John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac. The true two dudes who wrote the first true Beat novels Go by Holmes and On the Road by Kerouac.

Brothers Souls by the Charters along with Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe, coinciding with the actual Beat literature, may become in time, for the arm-chair traveler, the road to take.




University Press of Mississippi
(2010)



from Wikipedia:

Samuel Charters, born Samuel Barclay Charters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 1, 1929 (his name also appears as Sam Charters), is an American music historian, writer, record producer, musician, and poet. He is a noted and widely published author on the subjects of blues and jazz music, as well as a writer of fiction.

Charters was born and spent his childhood in Pittsburgh. He first became enamored of blues music in 1937, after hearing Bessie Smith's version of Jimmy Cox's song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" (Charters 2004). He moved with his family to Sacramento, California at the age of 15. He attended high schools in Pittsburgh and California and attended Sacramento City College, graduating in 1949. After being kicked out of Harvard for political activism, he received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Charters purchased numerous old recordings of American blues musicians, eventually amassing a huge and valuable collection. In 1951, at the age of 21, he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he absorbed the history and culture he had previously only read about; he lived there for most of the 1950s. He served for two years in the United States Army (1951-53) and began to study jazz clarinet with George Lewis, but soon acquired an interest in rural blues. In 1954, he and his wife began conducting field recordings (initially for Folkways Records throughout the United States, and then in the Bahamas in 1958). Their 1959 recordings of the Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins proved instrumental to Hopkins' rediscovery.

Charters began his writing career in 1959 with The Country Blues, regarded as the first-book length work on the subject, as well as compiling the companion album to accompany it. Since that time, his writings have been influential, bringing to light aspects of African American music and culture that had previously been largely unknown to the general public. His writings include numerous books on the subjects of blues, jazz, African music, and Bahamian music, as well as liner notes for numerous sound recordings.^[1]

From approximately 1966 to 1970 he worked as a producer for the anti-war band Country Joe and the Fish. He became thoroughly disenchanted with American politics during the Vietnam War and moved with his family to Sweden, establishing a new life there despite not being able to speak the language at first. He divides his time between Sweden (where he has a residence permit to live, though maintaining his U.S. citizenship) and Connecticut. He has translated into English the works of the Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer and helped produce the music of various Swedish musical groups.

Charters is married to the writer, editor, Beat generation scholar, photographer, and pianist Ann Charters (b. 1936), whom he met at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1954-55 academic year in a music class; she is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Connecticut.^[2] The two have collaborated together on many projects, particularly their extensive field recording work.

Charters is a Grammy Award winner and his book The Country Blues was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1991 as one of the "Classics of Blues Literature."^[1][3] In 2000, Charters and his wife donated the 'Samuel & Ann Charters Archive of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture' to the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. The archive contains materials collected during the couple's decades of work documenting and preserving African American music throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The archive's materials include more than 2,500 sound recordings, as well as video recordings, photographs, monographs, sheet music, field notes, correspondence, musicians' contracts, and correspondence.^[4][5][6]

Charters' most recent book, A Trumpet Around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz, was released in April 2008.

Books by Samuel Charters

• 1959 - The Country Blues. New York: Rinehart. Reprinted by Da Capo Press, with a new introduction by the author, in 1975.
• 1962 - Jazz: A History of the New York Scene. Garden City, New York: Doubleday (with Leonard Kunstadt).
• 1963 - The Poetry of the Blues. With photos by Ann Charters. New York: Oak Publications.
• 1963 - Jazz New Orleans (1885-1963): An Index to the Negro Musicians of New Orleans. New York: Oak Publications
• 1967 - The Bluesmen. New York: Oak Publications
• 1975 - The Legacy of the Blues: A Glimpse Into the Art and the Lives of Twelve Great Bluesmen: An Informal Study. London: Calder & Boyars.
• 1977 - Sweet As the Showers of Rain. New York: Oak Publications
• 1981 - The Roots of the Blues: An African Search. Boston: M. Boyars.
• 1984 - Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn: An Imaginary Memoir. New York: M. Boyars.
• 1986 - Louisiana Black: A Novel. New York: M. Boyars.
• 1991 - The Blues Makers. (Incorporates The Bluesmen and Sweet As the Showers of Rain) Da Capo.
• 1999 - The Day is So Long and the Wages So Small: Music on a Summer Island. New York: Marion Boyars.
• 2004 - Walking a Blues Road: A Selection of Blues Writing, 1956-2004. New York: Marion Boyars.
• 2006 - New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus. Marion Boyars.
• 2009 - A Trumpet Around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi.

thank you to Wikipedia

Why the continuing interest in the Beats? The Beats constitute the single most important literary movement in America in the last fifty years. It isn't the drugs, the sex, the jazz, the tone of feverish apocalypse that accounts for this. It's the urgency with which they view the artist's aesthetic and social function. It's not their supposed irresponsibility which compels the critics to go on re-assessing their work (even in superficial terms); it's precisely the opposite. It's the fact that they were so responsible to the big questions, the big facts. Their almost maniacal efforts to find new modes, new forms, new styles to go with their material, their new vision, has kept their work not only relevant, but consequential. Oddly enough, the Beats are the direct heirs of the solidest tradition in American literature, what Matthiessen called "the American Renaissance" of the mid-19th Century. History will sort it out.Perspective is the last turn of the wheel.
— JOHN CLELLON HOLMES, Interior Geographies




photo: University of Connecticut at Storrs

DEPOSITION ~

Deposition
a painting by
Jack Kerouac & Franco Angeli

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/arts/design/deposition-by-kerouac-and-angeli-on-view-in-rome.html?scp=1&sq=Two%20rebel%20figures,%20one%20traditional%20painting&st=cse

painting photo by Lorenzo Capellini