FAREWELL ~

Don Van Vliet (1941-2010)

Don Van Vliet, Check Bif, 1986



The artist Don Van Vliet has passed away today in a hospital in northern California.


As well known to the music world as Captain Beefheart, who with his Magic Band, merrily terrorized the world from 1965-1982. There were twelve studio albums released, the last being Ice Cream for Crow.


Trout Mask Replica (1969) should be listened to to be believed. All the albums are required listening for entrance to either heaven or hell.


If you saw the group, you probably haven't forgotten, no matter the drugs or time delay.


Susan still smiles and shakes her head "no thanks" when asked what it was like seeing the master and his band in concert in its heyday (early). She has a little bit of say here being second cousin to Don Van Vliet's wife Janet. Janet "Jan" Van Vliet was older sister to Jim Jenkins, skilled mountaineer, who wrote two detailed guide books mapping out much of the southern Sierra, including the Pacific Crest Trail. Jim died young, in 1979, on a California highway stopping to assist a motorist in need. His mother Ruby would continue the good work revising the guide books until her own passing in 2007.





This deep deep California history.


One day the town of Lancaster, California will be remembered as the town that survived having both Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet in the same high school (Antelope Valley High School), already teaming up with their combined hothead interest in rhythm & blues.





The Captain would retire from music in 1982 and devote the rest of his life, far from the maddening crowd, to his expressionist paintings. Here and there he was known to show up as a contributor to a few recordings. Years enduring multiple sclerosis would eventually take him.

don van vliet photo: beefheart.com
beefheart & zappa: last.fm

WITH ME ~

photo: atomicpinup.com

MOTHERS ~

Anton Rausch's "Mother and Child"

Antonio Polito: This has been the century of the common people. Who now represents these "common people"?

Eric Hobsbawm: At the beginning of the 20th century, the peasant was a typical human being who lived off the land. But at the end of the 20th century, this is no longer the case. We could have chosen a worker, a member of the working class that grew enormously during the century, and probably reached its peak in the third quarter of the century. But today, its size and influence are shrinking fast. What about an office worker, someone who works at a desk in front of a computer? He or she wouldn't do either. An office worker would be fine for western Europe or the United States, but there are still vast areas of the world where this image would not mean very much.

If you insist on looking for a symbol for the 20th century, I would suggest a mother with her children. The people who have most in common are mothers, wherever they live on the face of the earth, and in spite of their different cultures, civilizations, and languages. In some ways, a mother's experience reflects what has happened to a large part of humanity in the 20th century. What is no longer typical in our era is the traditional family structure that develops around the mother. Of course, there wasn't only one type, but almost everywhere there was some family structure. This is no longer true today.

But in spite of the fact that humanity's variety and the rapidity with which it has changed during the 20th century make it very difficult to choose a symbol for the "common people", if there has to be one, I would choose a mother with her children.

from ~ On the Edge of a New Century, Conversations with Eric Hobsbawm by Antonio Polito; New Press, 2000.

Eric Hobsbawm is a fellow of The British Academy and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many books include Industry and Empire; Uncommon People; and On History.

LIVINGDYING ~

"The day after his mother's death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning."

from MOURNING DIARY
(October 26, 1977-September 15, 1979)


October 27


Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes?




November 5th

Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated, faintly, Voilà (I'm here, a word we used with each other all our lives).

The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment.

That's how I can grasp my mourning.

Not directly in solitude, empirically, etc.; I seem to have a kind of ease, of control that makes people think I'm suffering less than they would have imagined. But it comes over me when our love for each other is torn apart once again. The most painful point at the most abstract moment...

November 18

Not to manifest mourning (or at least to be indifferent to it) but to impose the public right to the loving relation it implies.




November 19


A trip from Paris to Tunis. A series of airplane breakdowns. Endless sojourns in airports among crowds of Tunisians coming come for Aid Kebir. Why does the ominous effect of this day of breakdowns suit mourning so well?




November 26


What I find utterly terrifying is mourning's discontinuous character.




November 28


To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)?

Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought. . .?




February 16, 1978


This morning, more snow, and lieder broadcast on the radio. How sad! — I think of the mornings when I was sick and didn't go to school, and when I had the joy of staying with her.




April 18, 1978 Marrakesh


Now that maman is no more, I no longer have that impression of freedom I had on my trips (when I would leave her for short periods of time).




May 18, 1978


Maman's death: perhaps it is the one thing in my life that I have not responded to neurotically. My grief has not been hysterical, scarcely visible to others (perhaps because the notion of "theatralizing" my mother's death would have been intolerable); and doubtless, more hysterically parading my depression, driving everyone away, ceasing to live socially, I would have been less unhappy. And I see that the non-neurotic is not good, not the right thing at all.




June 13, 1978


Not to suppress mourning (suffering) (the stupid notion that time will do away with such a thing) but to change it, transform it, to shift it from a static stage (statis, obstruction, recurrences of the same thing) to a fluid state.



June 24, 1978


Virtually no sign of an internalized mourning.

This is the fulfillment of absolute internalization. All judicious societies, however, have prescribed and codified the externalization of mourning.

Uneasiness of ours insofar as it denies mourning.




July 18, 1978


Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.




July 29, 1978


(Saw a Hitchcock film, Under Capricorn)


Ingrid Bergman (around 1946): I don't know why, nor how to express it: this actress, this actress's body moves me, touches something in me which reminds me of maman: her complexion, her lovely, simple hands, an impression of freshness, a non-narcissistic femininity...




Paris, July 31, 1978


I live in my suffering and that makes me happy.

Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.




August 18, 1978


The locality of the room where she was sick, where she died, and where I now live, the wall against which the head of her bed rested where I have placed an icon — not out of faith — and still put flowers on a table next to it. I have reached the point of no longer wanting to travel in order to be here, so that the flowers here will always be fresh.




January 20, 1979


Maman's photo as a little girl, in the distance — in front of me on my desk. It was enough for me to look at it, to apprehend the suchness of her being (which I struggle to describe) in order to be reinvented by, immersed in, invaded, inundated by her goodness.




January 30, 1979


We don't forget,

but something vacant settles in us.




March 18, 1979


Each time I dream about her (and I dream only of her), it is in order to see her, believe her to be alive, but other, separate.




May 1, 1979


I was not like her, since I did not die with (at the same time as) her.

~

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes
translated and with an afterword by Richard Howard
(Hill and Wang)

photo: RB and his mother in Bayonne, circa 1923

EARTH ~

john clare (1793-1864)

Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves



John Clare had his doubts about John Keats, a poet he had never met.


"In spite of all this his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies & not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described."


An age old tale between the bumpkin and the flatlander.





john keats (1795-1821)


I live in the eye



Here is Keats at Ambleside water fall (England's Lake District); the first water fall he had ever seen:

"We afterwards moved away a space, and saw nearly the whole more mild, streaming silverly through the trees. What astonishes me more than any thing is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect, the countenance of such places.The space, the magnitude of mountains and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance. I shall learn poetry here."


You want to hug him with that last line.






robert frost & wallace stevens, key west 1940


Yet I am the necessary angel of earth



"I have seen cowboys; I have seen prairie dogs; hundreds of wild ducks, Indians in camp with smoke coming through their discolored tent-tops; I have seen mountains swimming in clouds and basking in snow; and cascades, and gulches."


...says Wallace Stevens the future executive from Hartford, Connecticut, freshly peeled off from a Harvard graduation and New York Law School and piercing through Canada's wild landscape aboard the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1903, exhorting to the "character of mountains above timber-line."


It was part of a six-week hunting trip, and the images and bounty of it stayed with the poet through all of his poetry and to his deathbed.


"Downward to darkness, on extended wings."





photo: frost/stevens c/o alfred knopf

WITH ME ~

... right now

Thelonious Monk, piano
Oscar Pettiford, bass
Kenny Clarke, drums

recorded: 1955 / Riverside LP

a Webster / Ellington tune

RAILROAD EARTH ~

Finn Wilcox

Finn Wilcox might not mind if he was referred to as a railroad bum, since he's been riding the rails since 1969. Finn explains it had something to do with Charlie Manson, the paranoia of the hitchhikers highway, and where he left the road and took to the trains. He's written a classic of this mode of life with the photographer Steven Johnson called Here Among the Sacrificed; two other books of poems have since followed Nine Flower Mountain (Tangram), and Lesson Learned: Love Poems, from Empty Bowl Press (2010).

Finn worked in the Northwest’s forests for over twenty years. It's been said he planted over a million trees. With his co-editor Jerry Gorsline, they gathered a world of similar workers and writers for the anthology Working the Woods, Working the Sea: an Anthology of Northwest Writing.

Finn has lived with his family in the Port Townsend region for the last three decades. Recently he gave a great reading which you can link to below. Be sure you use "see all" to watch the whole show. This is Mike O'Connor, poet and translator of Chinese masters, introducing Finn.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAnderfitz

ONCE IN VERMONT ~

Working the woods together, much like today. From Greece, Iannis Xenakis joins us.

camera : susan arnold

Longhouse Special Special ~

In less than a month Longhouse will be 40 years old !
A day hasn't gone by where we haven't worked at it.


To help celebrate the 40th anniversary
(and to get to the 50th)
we are offering a treasure chest to draw from

=

Send $50 and we will send to you 8 publications
of our choosing from the Longhouse treasure chest...


One-of-a-kind
Booklets, cards, broadsides for framing, books !


And on top of that we'll pay for shipping, too!

International orders the only exception so please inquire.


With this, you can gift yourself, or better:
have the bundle shipped to someone else.


Just tell us where to send the gift and we will.


Don't even ask what publications will be sent, that's half the fun.
We're capable of fitting in some real surprises and sizes.


You may pay by credit card, personal check, money order,
or use the easy Paypal account below.


Got a great friend you want to make even greater —
here's your chance.


Mom, Dad, brother, sister, kids, neighbor : "hate poetry"
— try this gift on them.


While supplies last!

Send info, pay us, we'll take care of the rest.

CZECH IV ~

a scene from I Served the King of England

Come ahead, watch yourself a magical film.

Netflix says 2 stars, I say star-bright!

Again, from the wizardry mind of Bohumil Hrabal
and director Jiří Menzel


A person becomes most human, often against his own will

When he begins to founder

When he is derailed or deprived of order

TOUCHED ~

I came up from a nap in the evening, 5 degrees and Orion clear as bell over the woods river, and began to read this piece in the Dec 13, 2010 The New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates. The last book I read by her was many years ago, the thin one on boxing. A pretty good one. The New Yorker for too many years now has engulfed itself with frantic, scare issue pieces on dying, modern medicine, doctoring or not, one misery after another.

This one is a love story and its loss. It's also a woman's piece, beautifully done.

I would read it.

"A Widow's Story", the New Yorker, page 70. Dec. 13, 2010





photo: Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith by Bernard Gotfryd

EARTH ~

CZECH III ~

Milan Kundera

You know what it's like when your friendly stubble-finger mechanic turns out to be a crackerjack banjo picker in the off hours (are there still "off hours"?) ...well that's what Milan Kundera is to me. A wonder. A grounded novelist, activist, man of letters, and supreme gliding essayist. As much as his writing, there are the subjects he chooses, or which choose him to speak. He's up to job.

~ EXILE AS LIBERATION ACCORDING TO VERA LINHARTOVA ~

In the 1960s Vera Linhartova was one of the most admired writers in Czechoslovakia, the poetess of a prose that was meditative, hermetic, beyond category. Having left the country for Paris after 1968, she began to write and publish in French. Known for her solitary nature, she astonished all her friends when, in the early 1990s, she accepted the invitation of the French Institute of Prague and, on the occasion of a colloquium on the issue of exile, she delivered a paper. I have never read anything on the subject more nonconformist and more clearsighted.

The second half of the past century has made everyone extremely sensitive to the fate of people forced out of their own homelands. This compassionate sensitivity has befogged the problem of exile with a tear-stained moralism, and obscured the actual nature of life for the exile, who according to Linhartova has often managed to transform his banishment into a liberating launch "toward another place, an elsewhere, by definition unknown and open to all sorts of possibilities." Of course she is right a thousand times over! Otherwise how are we to understand the fact that after the end of Communism, almost none of the great emigre artists hurried back to their home countries? Why was that? Did the end of Communism not spur them to celebrate the "Great Return" in their native lands? And even if, despite the disappointment of their audience, that return was not what they wanted, wasn't it their moral obligation? Said Linhartova: "The writer is above all a free person, and the obligation to preserve his independence against all constraints comes before any other consideration. And I mean not only the insane constraints imposed by an abusive political power, but the restrictions—all the harder to evade because they are well-intentioned—that cite a sense of duty to one's country." In fact people chew over cliches about human rights, and at the same time persist in considering the individual to be the property of his nation.

She goes further still: "So I chose the place where I wanted to live, but I have also chosen the language I wanted to speak." People will protest: sure, a writer is a free person, but is he not the custodian of his language? Isn't that the very meaning of a writer's mission? Linhartova: "It is often asserted that a writer has less freedom of movement than anyone else, for he remains bound to his language by an indissoluble tie. I believe this is another of those myths that serve as excuse for timid folks." For: "The writer is not a prisoner of any one language." A great liberating sentence. Only the brevity of life keeps a writer from drawing all the conclusions from this invitation to freedom.

Linhartova: "My sympathies lie with the nomads, I haven't the soul of a sedentary myself. So I am now entitled to say that my own exile has fulfilled what was always my dearest wish: to live elsewhere." When Linhartova writes in French, is she still a Czech writer? No. Does she become a French writer? No, not that either. She is elsewhere. Elsewhere as Chopin was in his time, elsewhere as, later, each in his own fashion, were Nabokov, Beckett, Stravinsky, Gombrowicz. Of course each of them lived his exile in his own inimitable way, and Linhartova's experience is an extreme case. Yet after her radical, luminous declaration, we can no longer speak of exile as we have done up till now.

Milan Kundera

Vera Linhartova

EARTH ~

LEARNING TO SPEAK


As a child running loose,

I said it this way: Bird.

Bird, a startled sound at field's edge.

The sound my mouth makes, pushing away the cold.

So, at the end of this quiet afternoon,

wanting to write the love poems I've never written,

I turn from the shadow in the cottonwood

and say blackbird, as if to you.

There is the blackbird. Black bird, until its darkness

is the darkness of a woman's hair falling

across my upturned face.

And I go on speaking into the night.

The oriole, the flicker,

the gold finch. . . .

This is a new version of a classic book of poems — narrow spine, not so many pages, and every poem to remember. Atheneum first published the collection in the early 70s when it won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972. If it hadn't been for the re-issue, the book was on its way to disappearing. Many have, many fine ones.

It's our job to pull things back.

Peter Everwine was born in Detroit, raised in western Pennslyvania, educated in the midwest, and settled down for decades in California. When not writing his own poems he is translating from Hebrew and interpretations from Nahuatl.


~

BACK FROM THE FIELDS


Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,

looking for God knows what.

Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.

Something to fill an empty spot.

Maybe a luminous angel

or country girl with a secret dark.

He came back empty-handed,

or so I thought.



Now I find them:

thistles, goatheads

the barbed weeds

all those with hooks or horns

the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones

those wearing lantern jaws

old ones in beards

leapers in silk leggins

the multiple pocked moons

and spiny satellites, all those

with juices and saps

like the fingers of thieves

nation after nation of grasses

that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds

and grab handholds

in whatever lean place.



It's been a good day.





JUST BEFORE SLEEP


In the poem that comes just before sleep,

I am walking out into

the darkness of summer fields,

drawing it close about me.

What I wanted to say

was the silence of olive groves,

the longing of a road white with dust.

I speak an old language, love —

the fields rising and falling,

the small beards of light

nodding over the earth.

I am entering your hair,

coming home.





LOOKING INTO THINGS CLEARLY


The doctor smiles and comes toward me.

In a room so pure I can hardly breathe,

he opens my robe and touches the fragile

bones of my wings. "I'm glad you've come," he says

and I know I'm sick.



Something is wrong with me upstairs.

A neighbor's mouth tears like a wound, so dark

I think of a spring cupped in black roots.

The phone rings and another village is burning.

My head dreams of escaping into white stone.



"It's almost painless," he says, hiding

his hand behind his blue coat.

Only I can't see him clearly.

When I squint he seems to be

my father sidling through the halls of banks,



he is a bruised face, he is the President,

the drifting blue haze of factories,

of my own breath hovering over me.

I reach to touch him, but my fingers

enter and pass through —



he blossoms around them in a red flower of light,

petal after petal of light opens out:

I'm a window looking into a backyard.

Some men are digging what looks like a grave,

about the size of a child's.





NIGHT


In the lamplight falling

on the white tablecloth

my plate,

my shining loaf of quietness.



I sit down.

Through the open door

all the absent I love enter

and we eat.


(from the meadow: selected and new poems)





TWO POEMS BY AYOCUAN CUETZPALTZIN


I

Let the earth last

And the forests stand a long time


Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin said this, traveling

The road to Tlaxcala

The road to Huexotzinco


Let field after field

Unfold with brown corn

Flowers of cacao


Let the earth last



II


We live in the country where things go away

Is it like this

In that country the dead wander?

Are some happy there

Among old friends?

Or is it here only that passing a face

We look into it

And speak its name?


( translated by PE from "The Aztec Poems" )





from Collecting the Animals
Peter Everwine
Atheneum, 1972

SAILOR ~

Poppa Neutrino's trans-Atlantic raft constructed of trash

Poppa Neutrino (William David Pearlman), spent his early years in San Francisco. At that time he saw a documentary on nomadic aborigines, and made up his mind: "That's the way I want to live; I never want anything more." Throughout his seven decades PN has been a young soldier, outsider/rascal/highway-department-official, circus performer, father, church founder, nomad, band and street performer, designer, raft builder, and nautical record breaker.

In the late 1990s Poppa Neutrino became the second man in history to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a raft, but his vessel was made of trash, and that's a first.

In 2008 Poppa Neutrino moved to Burlington, Vermont to set-up life and shop. This time he built a raft on Lake Champlain.

When his vessel was ready, the plan was to circumnavigation the globe, sailing away from Burlington heading south to Florida with three sailors and three dogs. They would be aboard a new craft — a 37 foot trimaran rigged with two outboards, a supplied pilot house and four cabins.

On November 9th their raft was washed onto rocks at Thompson's Point, Vermont on Lake Champlain. Everyone was rescued.

Stay tuned. And while waiting, perhaps read Alec Wilkinson's book The Happiest Man in the World. It's all about the great Poppa.

Poppa Neutrino





photo: poppa neutrino: floatingneutrinos.com

THINK BACK, PILGRIM XI

KANETO SHINDO

KEISUKE KINOSHITO

HIROSHI TESHIGHARA

EARTH ~

KENJI MIYAZAWA


This is one of my favorite poets, always was, always will be.

I found his work when a very young man in Gary Snyder's The Back Country and nothing in poetry for me has ever been the same. I loved dearly the Han-Shan translated by Snyder in Riprap, though nothing touched me as fully as the Kenji.

It was the story behind the poems and the man, the story felt within the pulse of the poems. I went and found every book I could find translated into English for years to come. I'm still looking.

I may still get Hiro Sato, the kind one, to one day allow one of his Kenji stories or group of poems to be published. Gerry Hausman did send to us a beautiful little group he translated with a Japanese friend. We put that into a glove of golden papers.

Kenji Miyazawa was born in Hanamaki, Iwate, Japan in 1896 and passed away in the same place 37 years later . Even struggling for years with pleurisy he hiked the fields he loved.

This poem has been in my tool room so long I had completely forgotten it was there. It's right even with the vise.




KENJI MIYAZAWA






photo © bob arnold
old.japanfocus.org

WITH ME ~

Nightlife. . .

written & arranged by John Zorn
in collaboration w/ a cast of characters
On golden LP: elektra/nonesuch

MAN'S BEST FRIEND ~

Sweetheart reminded me of this favorite cartoon I like stapled onto a post in my tool room. My father drew cartoons who taught me and I taught my son and I still draw and have my weekly favorites from magazines and elsewhere. Few, for me, top this one out of an old New Yorker.

If you can read the cartoonist's name — I can't — please drop me a line.

I'd like he or she to be credited.

coda: answer received from our good friend Annie in Canada:
the artist is Mike Twohy. Thank you Annie.







the new yorker

CZECH II ~

Dear G—

On a rain day this week I sat down again and watched Jan Wiener (1920-2010) in the film FIGHTER (2001) with Sweetheart this time. I figured I owed it to the man and his recent passing, your dear friend, and for us to watch this fascinating journey and story together. Curiously, while never once drifting in my respect and actual honor for JW, it's Arnost Lustig who holds up finer for me as a man and all-around individual. There is something festering in JW — no doubt his past — yet AL also had a brutal past and seems to have healed himself with a bit more humility, patience and an almost unbelievable sweetness for his often difficult friend.

The film is also deeply moving for its historical understanding and revelation. The filmmaker (Amir Bar-Lev) has an elegant and deft touch at voice-over while using impeccable choreography for the landscape, story and reasoning. There is both poetry (breadth and beauty) and terrible madness throughout the film.

Watching Jan Wiener at work, in his homeland and surroundings (Slovenia, Italy etc), one is quite taken with his tenacity at finding his way. It's a Holocaust film with two elder survivors of Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia backtracking in a half-century later. One stayed-put and took it on the chin, the other fought his way through an underground, and some would say became a spy, even a traitor, not a partisan. I say hold judgment and let the film and all individuals speak.

We are witnessing or suffering in current wars and perhaps via WikiLeaks fueled and stymied and surrounded by deceit — so much so we know wars never end.