PIANO ~

If you listen to Monk / you listen to Mary Lou Williams, or you should. She was teacher, friend, mentor with him and many of the giants in Be-Bop. Born in the south and raised in Pennsylvania (1910-1981), at the age of six Williams was already playing for money to support her family. Self-taught and overwhelmingly spread through jazz, spirituals, ragtime, blues, swing; one can build up quite a record collection gathering and knowing the world of this composer, player and arranger, who gave some of her finest stuff to Duke Ellington. At the end, dying of cancer, she added it up, "I did it, didn't I. Through muck and mud."

BACK ROAD CHALKIES ~

from Music's Mask and Measure
Flood Editions
www.floodeditions.com





photo © bob arnold

IRONWOOD ~

Over many years when working in the woods I cut out ironwood chunks and brought one or two home to bark peel, dry out and eventually paint to install on the wall as a clothes hook. We used them all the while Carson was growing up. Sometimes he carried one home for me as we came back from work. Eventually they all got moved for something new and Sweetheart took the hooks as a good sport thinking she would use them in her weaving room. Years ago.

This morning in a general cleaning-out-the-corner ceremony, I noticed the hooks all in my tool room, no word said. Everything said. I figured I'd take a photo of the gang before I start distributing them back outdoors where they always belonged. They got painted to 'go with the room'. Now I'll see how they do in the great paint-never-lasts outdoors. A place for a cap, a work rag, an old shirt, a canteen strap. They'll find their place.

Once upon a time a friend and I built a footbridge, heavy enough to take a tribe all at once. We cut out of the neighboring woods and used ironwood as stringers. But unpeeled. We had a boss who thought he knew better than we did, and of course the unpeeled stringers rotted.

How I was later hired to replace those rotted stringers, with a ladder, in a river, is another story.






photo, ironwood © bob arnold

LESSON ~

BARN RAISING ~

A psychedelic barn-raising.

Great things were happening in the great state of Wisconsin recently.

A poetry reading by an old lamp in front of a great tractor. Hay on the floor.

Please have a look at Joshua Corey's spirited website and learn more.

p.s. folks: when you see "Clay Smith" mentioned, this is an error, innocently. Joshua Corey means Daniel Smith, the fine midwest farmer and poet, a favorite at Longhouse.

SO LONG (AND WE MEAN IT) ~

Naphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg (1923-2010)

TWO GARGANTUANS
"FROM OFF THE STREETS"

Harvey Lawrence Pekar (1939-2010)

photos Tuli Kupferberg: © Christopher Felver/CORBIS
Harvey Pekar: © Chris Buck

EARTH ~

photo: w. eugene smith

W. EUGENE SMITH

Driven. Native of Kansas. An almost lifetime of amphetamine use & hard drinking kept up the drive to become one of the great photojournalists of the world.

Making legendary portraits of Schweitzer, Nurse Midwife, the terrible legacy and beatings near the end of his life withstood in the city of Minamata, Japan at the hands of thugs as he documented the flushing of heavy metals into the city's waters and the cause of Minamata Disease. The heartbreaking portraits of diseased children. Always directing his camera at innocence, tenderness, even his brutal shots from WW 2 or the working-class boroughs of UK.

Coming home to settle into a personal survey of Pittsburgh which would consume his life for three years...the job that was meant to take three weeks. Parting company with his employer Life Magazine and going to work at Magnum.

In 1957 W. Eugene Smith needed a place to hole-up as he tried to make sense of his massive photo-essay on Pittsburgh. He left everything behind — a fine home, wife and four children, and moved into a hustlers region of Manhattan, 4th floor. Then described as a dilapidated five-story loft building. The flower district by day; running with drugs, thieves, night-crawlers and musicians by night.

Smith had his head wrapped around Pittsburgh, but soon found out he was in one fascinating spot. Amongst the lofts and artists in his building he heard and saw and became friends with a whole new world too good to be true.

Thelonious Monk or Zoot Sims were visiting and playing upstairs, along with countless others unknown and terrific in the BeBop era, playing their hearts out night after night. The documentarian put his keen instincts to work. And this is all of a great book collected by Sam Stephenson, who seems a near equal with Smith in work horse ethics to get a portrait made. And the portrait is: our hero from 1957 to 1965 wired up the building where he lived — his room, hallways, other rooms as if his own private recording studio and made, count them! 1,740 reels of stereo and mono audiotapes. That's 4000 hours. And on those tapes are jam sessions supreme with Roy Haynes, Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, Sonny Clark, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk and many more. Conversations in street movement, passersby, sounds of an underground.

Smith's camera was never idle, even when one or two were in hock: he exposed 1,447 rolls of film making roughly 40,000 pictures. The beauties are in this book. Many shot right from Smith's dingy apartment window, around and about the building, in with the musicians jamming.

When anyone laments or whines, "But I'm only one man"— they're forgetting about W. Eugene Smith.

Walk into the Paradise Garden by W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978)-----------www.pbs.org

JIM DANIELS




EFFICIENCY, BOWLING GREEN, OH


I lived in an ancient motel turned into efficiencies

barely big enough for the double bed.

Two electric burners and a sink.

Four friends from Michigan came to visit.

So happy to see them, I poured beer

over their heads, up their sleeves. They in turn

did not hurt me. I'd started smoking again.

I blamed the whole state of Ohio. In the small town

you could walk everywhere and nowhere

and in between. Three bars — two with the word

"Dead" in their names. The wind smacked us upside

our drunken little heads. One friend, a woman,

shared the bed with Marc. The rest of us lay

on indoor-outdoor carpet in a U-shape around them.

We listened to each other breathe in that stinky room.

Months later, in the middle of a shower, the entire wall

of plastic tiles crashed down on me. It could happen

that quickly. An awkward bruise, an unfamiliar

number, a misplaced ring. When the phone rang, I didn't

answer it. Nobody did. They might've done something

under the covers, Marc and Lee Ann. The sound

would've been a blessing. Maybe I heard it, maybe I didn't.

In the morning, I made eggs and instant coffee

and Tang. We stood without coats in the ravaged parking lot.

I lived in #2. There was no #1. We smoked and coughed

and laughed till they drove back to Michigan

and I walked down to work at the Korner Grill.

Maybe they'd stolen Marc's K and stuck him

with the C. At least they didn't add an E on Grill.

My ex was back in Michigan — her name ended in E.

The woman I'd followed to Ohio was lost in between

the O and o where the clouds had numbers

and the hills were either imaginary

or man-made or laced with unknown

chemicals. I slept at the foot of the bed

and was almost never happier. Four friends.

If I was a dog, I'd have licked their feet.

The U can be a beautiful letter, softly catching

falling things. The room key, attached

to a large plastic motel, jabbed my pocket

like a worn knife. My friends convinced me to use

my porch light for its radiant yellow,

its optimistic glow. In case somebody might

come home, even if it was only me.


from Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies
(Eastern Washington University Press)





Jim Daniels is the Jack Daniels of American poetry workingclass joes and janes — a college teacher with a great ear and eye for the American tale. To tell you the truth (always) I was packing this book up for a customer this morning and had to glance through the poems again. This poem caught my fancy as did so many others, but I can only balance the book open with one page wedged under my leg and a new biography of Hamsun holding down the other side of the book so I can read (squint) and type. Hopefully I got it all right.

MAHMOUD DARWISH ~

Mahmoud Darwish is one of the poetic legends of the Arab World (1941-2008)

Put your name in my hand and write

please click on image to enlarge

translated from the Arabic by Jeffrey Sacks
Archipelago Books
www.archipelagobooks.org

RAIN ~

Finally — after a good week of temperatures looming & zooming from 90-104 degrees, we get some rain. And with any luck we'll have 50 gallons of rainwater in our roof edge bucket-brigade to help water the gardens with the next heatwave. Love dem buckets. . .






by the way...speaking to a South Dakotan visiting our neck of the woods the other day, and while serving us an ice-cream cone (life is tough), he reminded us of what it was like to go through a 7 or 8 year drought Dakota/midwest style. Like everything, the story was mostly in his eyes.

photo © bob arnold

WOLVES ~

One of the purest driven rock 'n' roll acts in the past four decades.
Each player is a virtuoso.
Here they grab a Tom Waits song by the horns and ride.
From Ride This: The Covers

and then this gem, the better "live" version by Los Lobos,
best known to all Dead fans from 1971.

THINK BACK, PILGRIM VIII

LEGONG (1933 created,1935 released silent film)

EAT ~


Poets like Lew Welch and James Dickey used to write for ad agencies. "Coke Is It" and "RAID Kills Bugs Dead" etc.

I'd like to think a poet, blessed with humor, wrote this little diddly found below:

Sandwiches have tremendous potential for loading you up with nutrients and keeping you slim. Unfortunately, too few actually deliver. Check out this handy list of The Worst Sandwiches in America to find out which ones make you large and which ones make you lean.

WORST PASTA
Domino’s Chicken Carbonara Breadbowl Pasta
2,960 calories
114 g fat (48 g saturated, 2 g trans)
4,440 mg sodium

Domino’s may not boast many drive-thru windows, but its food is most certainly made with speed in mind. This edible bowl is just one extension of that. It allows busy customers to simply gobble up the whole meal, bowl and all. No dishes. (Next thing you know, restaurants will be giving you edible menus and serving you soda from an edible cup. When you’re done, maybe you can just eat the table and chair, too.) This pasta-filled bowl has two days' worth of fat and still manages to squeeze in 1,500 calories of pure carbohydrates!

VISITORS !

It's a back to back to back 95 degree days (in the shade) and I've been trying to stay cool by being with gold prospector Jack London in the Klondike. In James L. Haley's new biography of London titled Wolf (Basic Books) it's fairly easy to do. This is the biography to finally end all biographies of the great adventurer and self-mythologer. So far holding Haley's hand through London's myriad childhood handlers, youthful pirate life, burrowing into the Oakland library with the autodidact, riding the rails eastward from California, to build-a-fire episodes, and soon to be as war correspondent, lover, sailor, rancher, book writing emporium etc., it's a brisk and sure ride. He'll be worn out and dead by middle-age, poor Jack. He lived five lifetimes compared to most American writers. I knew we finally had the definitive portrait when I saw the book title. But, dude, did you know Jack London, the father of Buck and Wild Fang, surfed? (Hawaii 1907)

Around the London I have new poems in the mail to read, many and flowing, by both John Martone and the painter and poet Ed Baker. These come to me as gifts and every poem and texture of the books feels this way. This good. As poetry draws away into one conclusion: unreadable to the masses (the ultimate conceit), there remains a poetry holy in its extremes of either complexity or simplicity and the beauty is when both mesh as one.

fruit fly
you need
six legs

JM


as the painter and poet affirms, it is all BRUSH MIND


You may write to John for his many books: Cathartes aura, drosophila 1, shell :
1031 10th Street, Charleston, IL. 61920

Ed Baker's DE:SIRE IS (www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk).

My cap goes off once again for the many presses that dig in and sacrifice personal funds and their time to keep the juices of a small press community churning.
If it stops / It all stops.


full moon
exactly
where I left you

EB


from Full Moon by Ed Baker
Lilliput Review #174, Don Wentworth, 282 Main St., Pittsburgh, PA. 15201

As for the neverending cycle of Beat Generation books — we seem to have a few domains that need be covered: Kerouac's, or better: Ginsberg's America, which Bill Morgan has enlightened with accurate swiftness in his The Typewriter Is Holy (Free Press). One may read this book as a sort of cliff notes of the entire Beat scope of things. The next domain is the Far East, and in this case India, which Deborah Baker in The Blue Hand, the Beats in India only improves upon alongside the books and poems of the travelers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. We still need the hardcore portrait of poets and travelers and influences (which will be a great book, I believe) from Japan. That will come.

The European theater of Beat will open as readers eventually fall into place via Simon Vinkenoog and Franco Beltrametti and other courageous movers & shakers from that region. The ultimate Beat will be the women writers and poets that were neglected in their time, or seen more as a fancy, rather than the true romance of the era, which was only picked at or mauled over by many of the male writers. Think here massive collected poems by the likes of Di Prima, Kyger, Kandel and Pommy Vega. I'd even press ahead and expand the imagination for a full scale portrait of the post-Beat environment, Aquarian and Hippie stratosphere. This might incorporate a spellbinding cinematic text of poets, writers, singers, builders, dreamers, bomb throwers, activists, and tree huggers. Maybe one of many climaxes of the Jeffersonian and American Dream.

All in all I've never been satisfied by the list of usual suspects in the Beat pantheon — certainly Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso and the chief storyteller Jack Kerouac are there. Ginsberg almost became an academic, but nothing can deny his relentless spirit and ringmastery...or Howl, or Kaddish. Not to forget Ferlinghetti for being Ferlinghetti, his own island. But how can Bukowski be denied? even if he were denying the loudest! the slaw of the poems, the prose, the man, the style are beautifully misfitting, European tinged, with all the L.A. Fante and Chandler and horse-tracking, and just wanting to be left alone thrown in. Early, masterful John Weiners is yet another, and Jack Hirschman, Charles Plymell, and Barbara Moraff — don't sell America short, it's heartbreaking in its glory & faults.

~

In closing, before heading back into the shade and the World Cup final games, let me quote widely from Wade Davis The Wayfinders (Anansi / www.anansi.ca). You can see the only copy I have on hand is a borrowed library copy, so if you live close to Northampton, Massachusetts, I'll be returning this excellent book of field essays soon. Let me first concur with a rereading, slow and savoring. Writing and a practice of exploration doesn't come this wild, and likewise refined, all too regularly.

~

from SACRED GEOGRAPHY

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.
—Albert Einstein

In a rugged knot of mountains in the remote reaches of northern British Columbia lies a stunningly beautiful valley known to the First Nations as the Sacred Headwaters. There, on the southern edge of the Spatsizi Wilderness, the Serengeti of Canada, are born in remarkably close proximity three of Canada's most important salmon rivers, the Stikine, the Skeena, and the Nass. In a long day, perhaps two, it is possible to walk through open meadows, following the tracks of grizzly, caribou, and wolf, and drink from the very sources of the three rivers that inspired so many of the great cultures of the Pacific Northwest, the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en, the Carrier and Sekani, the Tsimshian, Nisga'a, Tahltan, Haisla, and Tlingit. Keep on for another three days and you'll reach the origins of the Finlay, headwaters of the Mackenzie, Canada's greatest river of all.

The only other place I know where such a wonder of geography occurs is in Tibet, where from the base of Mount Kailash arise three of the great rivers of Asia, the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, vital arteries that bring life to more than a billion people downstream. Revered by Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain, Kailash is considered so sacred that no one is allowed to walk upon its slopes, let alone climb to its summit. The thought of violating its flanks with industrial development would represent for all peoples of Asia an act of desecration beyond all imaginings. Anyone who would even dare propose such a deed would face the most severe sanctions, in both this world and the next.

In Canada, we treat the land quite differently. Against the wishes of all First Nations, the government of British Columbia has opened the Sacred Headwaters to industrial development. Theses are not trivial initiatives. Imperial Metals Corporation proposes an open-pit copper and gold mine processing 30,000 tons of ore a day from the flank of Todagin Mountain, home to one of the largest populations of Stone sheep in the world. Its tailings pond, if constructed, would drain directly into the headwater lake chain of the Iskut River, the principal tributary of the Stikine. Over its lifetime of twenty-five years, the mine would generate 183 million tons of toxic tailings and 307 million tons of waste rock, which would need to be treated for acid drainage for over 200 years. Two other mining concerns, Fortune Minerals Limited and West Hawk Development Corp., would tear into the headwater valley itself, on a similar scale, with open-pit anthracite coal operations that would level entire mountains.

The largest project is a proposal by Royal Dutch Shell to extract coalbed methane (CBM) gas from the same anthracite deposit, across an enormous tract of more than 4,000 square kilometres. Should this development go ahead it would imply a network of several thousand wells, linked by roads and pipelines, laid upon the landscape of the entire Sacred Headwaters basin. CBM recovery is by all accounts a highly invasive process. To free methane from anthracite, technicians must fracture the coal seams with massive injections of chemical agents under high pressure, more than a million litres at a shot, a technique that in some deposits liberates enormous volumes of highly toxic water. More than 900 different chemicals, many of them powerful carcinogens, are registered for use, but for proprietary reasons companies do not have to disclose the identity of the solutions employed at any given site.

Environmental concerns aside, think for a moment of what these proposals imply about our culture. We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to come in and by the very nature of their enterprises leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape utterly transformed and desecrated. What's more, in granting such mining concessions, often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog, we place no cultural or market value on the land itself. The cost of destroying a natural asset, or its inherent worth if left intact, has no metric in the economic calculations that support the industrialization of the wild. No company has to compensate the public for what it does to the commons, the forest, mountains, and rivers, which by definition belong to everyone. As long as there is a promise of revenue flows and employment, it merely requires permission to proceed. We take this as a given for it is the foundation of our system, the way commerce extracts value and profit in a resource-driven economy. But if you think about it, especially from the perspective of so many other cultures, touched and inspired by quite different visions of life and land, it appears to be very odd and highly anomalous human behaviour.

~ WADE DAVIS

photos © bob arnold

LONGHOUSE ~

Here's what we've been up to for early summer of hand-making booklets & jewels.

Each title is the length & breadth of a chapbook, using far less paper product & waste!

Inquire about purchasing all eight titles at one saving price.

EARTH ~

BEFORE AND AFTER

JK was here last weekend with a bottle of wine and a flask of Wild Turkey and we all had stories to share. I drank lemonade and everything went smoothly. Always does.

Then Sweetheart came down with a wicked migraine. This is a first. It lasted three days with horrendous vertigo, much motion-sickness and a royal nightmare. We have to re-think what to prepare for next time. This caught us bottomless.

Now she is recovered and getting stronger. A turquoise skirt and white blouse, barefoot in the gardens, joyous to be alive.

Just in time for a drunk who slammed into my stone wall the other night at 3:30. Sweetheart heard it all. I slept through it all. But I was out there from 7-9 this morning rebuilding 50 feet of stone wall. This isn't a suburban frilly stone structure, but a genuine farm wall; some stones the size and weight of woodstoves.

The idiot (all drunk drivers are idiots) left behind his front grille to the vehicle (Land Rover) and one intact headlight. Inside the headlight frame was the date 1999.

We could see in the dirt road where his tracks left the road and even went possibly airborne, smacking against the side of two sugar maple trees, then raking or plowing along the stone wall. For awhile there it seems the driver was driving on top of the wall, grinding to get off. On a basswood tree we found gouge marks 10 feet up on the bark. That from the vehicle's climb.

When the vehicle got wrenched back onto the road it came within inches of going over the cliff edge to the river. Inches.

It still wasn't done — the vehicle came bounding onto the lawn of our yard and lunging toward another stone wall, just missing that. Leaving a tire track in the grass, it was gone...spreading oil for a half mile on the dirt road heading north. Up river.

I saw the fragile tips of light purple hosta flowers blowing in its wake.

Sweetheart said the stone wall looked better after I was done rebuilding it than before. I built "before", too. A long time ago.

photos © bob arnold

BORN IN U.K. ~

PJ Harvey recorded "The Mess We're In" a year after Dusty Springfield passed away to breast cancer in 1999. Springfield was an Irish lass born (1939) in the UK as Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien and her soul and voice rivaled anyone's anywhere. PJ Harvey is likewise UK born (1969) and her career continues on course. On this track she is joined by Thom Yorke. Both tracks skim the ceiling.

ALL THIS WEEK ~
NEW BOOKLETS FROM LONGHOUSE !

JOHN LATTA

click on images to enlarge

If you would like to purchase the new booklet, please link here


For the complete Longhouse titles we offer, please link here

Photograph by Giancarlo Latta

ALL THIS WEEK ~
NEW BOOKLETS FROM LONGHOUSE !

BOB ARNOLD

click on images to enlarge

Morning sunlight offers long shadows

If you would like to purchase the new booklet, please link here


For the complete Longhouse titles we offer, please link here


photo © susan arnold, june 2010

BACK ROAD CHALKIES ~ JULY 4th

Henry David Thoreau moved into his habitat at Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts on this day 1845 — one week before his birthday.

He wrote of the pond, "blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both."

photo © bob arnold