EARTH ~

RUTH STONE
June 8, 1915 ~ November 19, 2011

when I met ruth stone some years ago she signed a book of hers to me ~ "love, Ruth Stone".
enough said.

THANKSGIVING ~

EMI Records workers hand packing vinyl records in 1965
Look at those smiles!

"To take upon us the mystery of things: this is my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously" — King Lear

I walked into a used music store yesterday and Sticky Fingers was rolling, on this song below. Is it me, the album, or both of us, at just how over powering it all still sounded? Maybe moreso in these times — the world economics unraveling, with global warming mishap ~ perhaps, and closer to home: a government that is pretty much kaput. Was this album a foreshadow for things to come, or a contributor? Did this album really make out-of-their-minds-Americans? Does it really take Kafka and George Orwell to forecast that nothing works if you don't work? Truly work. You know, doing many things you don't wish to do, but they have to be done: help your neighbor, pickup after yourself, address others with respect and concern, balance differences so a partial harmony may materialize. Does anyone really think an album that flows as spooky and as long as the river Nile wasn't made with struggle between many skilled musicians, engineers, producers at catching the times in its teeth? All pure hard work.



I'm not content at listening to a mob being pissed off. I've been listening to that for six decades. It's nowhere. Pick up the ax, build your home.



Is it really going to come to a vast and powerful minority of 1% that is going to control by police state (watch Occupy videos for prime example, or in Cairo, Greece, China, Tibet, Africa, Syria et al) how we ride our wobbly (think bicycle) but beautiful country down the road? Really? This one-percent is mighty mighty because they thoroughly believe in what they own: money, land, companies, people. What do you believe? They love to keep us drugged on commodity and fear. I'm not about to buy outrageous Rolling Stone tickets when I can walk into a music store and find this song-blast coming my way c/o of a free-thinker youngster behind the counter nodding to the music and to me with a grin. This is what free is all about. Zero cost. Float awhile while you rest. I think we can be hard workers and love and be insurmountable. I really do. And brush aside a one-percent. It means showing the cops (who are now robbers) and the armies (mercenaries) they're bought and working for a no end. Their families, too. Everyone is as frightened as you are. Throw out the dead flowers; plant, grow, cut some new.



By the way, we came home and played Sticky Fingers. Loud. It's even better curling through the house with all the lights out. Be brave.

EMI Records

sticky fingers, 1971

OCCUPY ~

Read about Pepper Spray from Scientific American:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/11/21/about-pepper-spray/







MORE!


http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/too-much-violence-and-pepper-spray-at-the-ows-protests/248761/

TED ~

THEODORE ENSLIN
1925-2011








a partial list of Ted's books:

• The Work Proposed (1958)
• The Place Where I Am Standing: Poems (1964)
• This Do (1966)
• To Come, To Have Become: Poems 1961-66 (1966)
• New Sharon's Prospect & Journals (1966/1967)
• The Four Temperaments (1966)
• Characters in Certain Places (1967)
• The Diabelli Variations, and Other Poems (1967)
• Agreement and Back: Sequences (1969)
• Forms 1-5 (1970-1974)
• Views 1-7 Berkeley, CA: Maya (1970
• The Country of Our Consciousness (1971)
• Etudes (1972)
• Sitio (1973)
• The Swamp Fox (1973)
• Views (1973)
• With Light Reflected: Poems 1970-1972 (1973)
• The Mornings (1974)
• Fever Poems (1974)
• Of East Dennis: The Highlands in Sorrow (exact year not known: 197-?)
• Mahler (1975)
• Ländler (1975)
• The Median Flow: Poems 1943-1973 (1975)
• Synthesis 1-24 (1975)
• The July Book (1976)
• The Further Regions (1976)
• Carmina (1976)
• Papers (1976)
• Assensions (1977)
• Ranger CXXII & CXXVIII (1977)
• Circles (1977)
• Concentrations (1977)
• Ranger (2 vols. 1978 corrected edition 1980)
• Tailings (1978)
• Occurrence: An Issue of Theodore Enslin (1978)
• 16 Blossoms in February (1978)
• May Fault (1979)
• Opus 31, no. 3 (1979)
• 2 Plus 12 (1979)
• The Fifth Direction (1980)
• The Flare of Beginning Is in November (1980)
• Star Anise (1980)
• Two Geese: Two Poems (1980)
• Madrigal (ca. 1980)
• In Duo Concertante (1981)
• Axes 52 (1981)
• Markings (1981)
• Processionals (1981)
• September’s Bonfire (1981)
• “F. P.” (1982)
• Meditations on Varied Grounds (1982)
• A Man in Stir (1983)
• Gray Days (1984)
• Songs w/out Words (1984)
• The Weather Within (1985)
• For Mr. Walters: Master Mechanic (1985)
• The Path Between (1986)
• The Waking of the Eye (1986)
• Case Book (1987)
• Six Pavannes (1987)
• Love and Science (1990)
• Little Wandering Flake of Snow (1991)
• Mad Songs (1995)
• Conversations (1998)
• Sequentiae (1999)
• Then and Now: Selected Poems, 1943-1993 (1999)
• In Tandem (2003)
• Nine (2004)
• I, Benjamin (2010)
  

the saddest news just now in via phone call from richard levasseur, one of Ted's closest friends, and mine. Few words but that the good man was gone last night (Sunday-Monday) in his sleep. Ted and I read our poems in public together as a twosome a few times, maybe the most memorable for me was at Melville's home Arrowhead in the Berkshires. Goodbye musician~poet of the seascoast & hills.


Photo courtesy Whit Griffin
Photo courtesy of Alison Enslin

EARTH ~
(Alaska)

Douglas Brinkley



Douglas Brinkley is one grand American mind. A historian at Rice University, Brinkley has plowed like a work horse in probably the widest range possible for one man: he is the authorized biographer of both Jack Kerouac and Rosa Parks, he has edited Kerouac's Journals, Ronald Reagan's Diaries, and published books on Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Hunter S. Thompson. Quite a crew.

Watch below Douglas Brinkley and others speak on the preservation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge against the monstrous odds of oil companies. Hang with it, Brinkley gets dissed (at roughly 31 minutes on the screen), by grumpy Republican disgrunts impatient with any conversation or meditation regarding preservation.

Imagine, this is an American congressman Rep. Don Young (Alaska), paid by taxpayers (including you, me and Mr. Brinkley) barking at Professor Brinkley by calling him "Professor Rice" from "Garbage University"(?) along with "elitist group", "ivory tower" et al. and demanding this guest on the panel "Be quiet".

Occupy the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.



update April 22, 2012:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/22/don-young-spent-campaign-cash-fbi-source_n_1443390.html
















photo: vanity fair
arctic national wildlife refuge

MIND JELLY ~

It was 62 degrees today, November 20th, and we raked oak leaves and cut oak logs. Split oak logs. Piled oak logs. A friend came by for a visit, then took his daily newspapers we receive for him, read first, and then save for his pickup every month. It's called collective consciousness.
We read, save, he pays, and picks up. We make sure not one ad or inner sleeve coupon is lost and I detest those things. He loves those things. Differences can be a wonder. 62 degrees and it may be the last of the good old summer-feel days as winter makes a move in. The mind turns to jelly for a moment or two, despite all the hardship and struggle elsewhere going on. This is the sort of song that comes back to haunt, a song you can still hear in certain grocery store aisles. Gerry Rafferty is the one with the soft spoken voice, a Scotsman, who died this year of liver failure.

and then he'll settle down
in some quiet little town
and forget about everything

vocals: gerry rafferty
saxophone: raphael ravenscroft
lead guitar: hugh burns

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL ~

Pepper Sprayed ~ Elizabeth Nichols holding strong at Occupy Portland (Oregon)

Most recently this photo, which is quickly becoming an iconic image from the movement, has gone viral. It shows Occupy Portland protester Elizabeth Nichols getting hit directly in the face with pepper spray by Portland police. The shot was taken by Randy L. Rasmussen, a photographer for the Oregonian, during Thursday's protests.

The picture itself has been called a lot of things, but intriguingly enough, the most accurate description of how it was taken is that it was an accident. Ramussen explained in an interview with the Oregonian that he didn't even know he had captured the scene until he saw it appear on a computer screen when he returned to the office.

But Elizabeth Nichols, the woman being hit in the face with the spray, certainly knew what happened (though she didn't know it had been captured on film). Nichols won't soon forget the incident, regardless of the photo.

From the Oregonian:

Nichols said a policewoman jabbed her in the ribs with a baton and pressed it against her throat. That made her angry.

She yelled at the officer, saying she was being mistreated. That's when another officer shot her with pepper spray. A photo by The Oregonian's Randy L. Rasmussen, which flashed across social media websites, shows Nichols was sprayed from a few feet away.

"It felt like my face, ears and hands were on fire," she said.

UC Davis, California, November 18, 2011

&

UC Berkeley, California (Robert Hass):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat-poets-has-new-meaning.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Huffington Post

photo: Randy L. Rasmussen
ny times

GOODBYES ~


MUNCHKIN ~

Karl Slover, One of the Last Surviving ‘Oz’ Munchkins, Dies at 93

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 16, 2011

DUBLIN, Ga. (AP) — Karl Slover, one of the last surviving actors who played Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz,” died on Tuesday in a central Georgia hospital. He was 93.

Karl Slover in “The Wizard of Oz” as the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins' band.

The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, said the Laurens County deputy coroner, Nathan Stanley.

Mr. Slover was best known for playing the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins’ band, but he also played an Oz townsman and soldier, according to John Fricke, author of “100 Years of Oz.”

Long after the 4-foot-5 Mr. Slover retired, he appeared around the country at festivals and events related to “The Wizard of Oz.” He was one of seven Munchkins at the 2007 unveiling of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame dedicated to the film’s little people. Only 3 of the 124 actors playing Munchkins remain.

Mr. Slover was born Karl Kosiczky on Sept. 21, 1918, in what is now the Czech Republic.

“In those uninformed days his father tried witch doctor treatments to make him grow,” Mr. Fricke said. Young Karl was immersed in heated oil until his skin blistered and then attached to a stretching machine at a hospital, all in an attempt to make him taller. When he was 9, he was sold by his father to a traveling show in Europe, Mr. Fricke said.

Mr. Slover was paid $50 a week for “Oz” and told friends that Toto, Judy Garland’s canine co-star, made more money.

we loved you, but Toto was boss
photo: MGM
article: ny times

JOHNNY ANGEL ~
(Lee Pockriss, songwriter)

Shelley Fabares

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/arts/music/lee-pockriss-composer-and-songwriter-is-dead-at-87.html?ref=obituaries









Lee Pockriss (1924-2011)
Johnny Angel was written by Pockriss & Lyn Duddy (1962)
Shelley Fabares is still very much with us

READING LIST FOR THE STRONG ~

http://www.guardiannews.com/world/blog/2011/nov/17/occupy-wall-street-day-of-action-live



http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/ows-library-is-rebuilding-afte.html

http://www.democracynow.org/



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/17/dorli-rainey-keith-olbermann-pepper-spray_n_1099198.html?ref=media



"The top 1 percent of Americans possess a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute."

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/professor-of-profits/?ref=opinion



http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/movies/20tillman.html



http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/21/opinion/100000001183275/the-umbrella-man.html



http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/nov/10/penn-state-jerry-sandusky-indictment


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-cohen/jerry-sandusky-grand-jury_b_1109885.html?ref=sports&ir=Sports



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/secret-dread-at-penn-state.html?_r=1







NOT TO BE CRUDE, BUT TO FACE THE CRUDE

First rule of thumb on the road to progress (further) is: Don't Shit Where You Sleep. I don't care if you are in the Marines, Occupy Wall Street (another Marines), coaching football, or camping out with me. Don't. All articles above and visuals concern themselves with how don't works and does work. Where it doesn't work affects civilization, just trust me on that. Or go read your history.

Sure there are bad eggs and dead-beats in the Occupy army, but the majority show a force, a glow, for something magnificent: camaraderie, heart, soul, and a dedication to their country and fellow brother and sister, which, by the way, is all about what the Marines are supposed to be about.


The Penn State scandal is the scandal of our time. The subject of sexual abuse is demoralizing and underground and everywhere, and the names and institution involved here showcases an American Pie story. The top of the mom & pop, white picket fence heap: college football, team play, leaders to trust, myriad of millions in annual profit, in the halls of education. It isn't in absolutely every school or church, thank goodness, but it is with us. There remain terrific teachers, coaches, priests, ministers, preachers, yet the evil is there and ruining. Far worse than any boogieman Terrorist. Sports radio, which I've been hanging with for the last few weeks listening, is turning in its conservative guy grave. Coach Joe Paterno of Penn State (a certain god) is having his name erased off the trophy and perhaps soon the building in his name — which is like taking Reagan's name off the airport. We go to war and push our children (many go from a sports salute to a military salute) to die or return disabled and crippled for life. We give them trillions of dollars in debt to take care of when we all pass away from our war chest bravado and endless infidelities. And for good measure, we rape and fuck them and their lives to kingdom come. Never ever again talk or preach to us about "the children" or "the village" you've burned to the ground. Don't.

~
photo: ipernity.com

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Carson and Bob Arnold once upon a time out on the windy plains

Take a ball of string
let it go — that was our
trail


WE LEFT WYOMING through West Yellowstone where Susan wanted a photograph in the town of two road signs indicating "Leaving Wyoming" and the other, "Welcome to Montana." We like the Wyoming sign because of the bronco rider who also appears on the license plate. We once had neighbors who took their first trip out west for two weeks hunting, and for the journey they bought a large used pickup truck topped off with a camper. Each year they headed west in the fall to hunt until there just wasn't any more space on their garage or over the doors of the house to nail up elk racks and various other horns. By that time horses and trailers were bought and the couple started to don rigid cowboy hats, and of course it was only a matter of time before they got sick of our partisan New England wooded valley and left for the west. We heard it was to Wyoming.


From West Yellowstone we were to drive that afternoon to Big Sky, Montana which didn't look more than fifty miles away. We decided on Big Sky since, after all, it was a nickname of sorts for Montana, plus it was the title of a once popular novel by A.B. Guthrie — who I didn't think lived in Big Sky — having him confused with Chet Huntley, who had. Choteau was the town Guthrie lived in, a town much farther north on Willow Creek. A friend told us once while traveling with his teenage son about a visit they made to A.B. Guthrie — totally unannounced, and according to this friend's report the writer and his wife were amiable, treating the two to a few hours of Montana hospitality. At that point in Guthrie's life, around 1980, he was past his prime in writing the distinguished historical novels of Montana and the west; the type of books that would star Kirk Douglas when made into a film by Howard Hawks. The type of book or film that is rarely read or watched anymore. By the time our friend knocked at Guthrie's door, he was publishing mystery entertainments like No Second Wind and was a specialist on small town Montana life, and I guess he was available to talk with.


As Guthrie was fading away in the eyes of many on the literary scene, Thomas McGuane was picking up, and like Guthrie he earned a bit of money in the film world with his screenplays. For awhile in the 1970s, McGuane single-handedly invented the modern western script — though his westerns might wrangle from the past or present, his interpretations of the west are upbeat and generally acquainted with Montana. My favorite film from a McGuane script is Tom Horn (and come to think of it: Missouri Breaks) which has everything to do with Wyoming and nothing with Montana but McGuane might have identified with the real life figure of Tom Horn especially played through the eyes of Steve McQueen. Not a great film, but McQueen is pokey enough and striking. In a McGuane script come wily unpredictable lines that A.B. Guthrie would never use, and in Guthrie's early novels are body and tenure that McGuane's followers think he has finally achieved in his succession of novels and short stories, plus a fine book of essays on sports — An Outside Chance — sport, like rodeo and flyfishing. In the books of A.B. Guthrie and Thomas McGuane you measure just how big, big sky Montana is.


Most readers are delighted to fall into the hands of Norman Maclean and his book A River Runs Through It. The secret of this book is its middle ground of Guthrie and McGuane, and most of us know by now it was written by a retired English professor with nearly unbearable patience and dexterity to the scribbled line. Maclean's boyhood, for anyone who read the book the year it came out, was then perfect for someone like Robert Redford to play one of the parts in the film — since like Redford, the storytelling is a little too finished. However, the idea lay fallow and Redford developed into the director of a film from the book. Now all these writers struck a chord with Hollywood, and for Norman Maclean the final product of his book resulted in a film appearing after his death. I'm not sure he would be the type to become excited about all the fanfare. You will know almost enough about a person on the decisions they make and the following book by Maclean: Young Men and Fire was again from Montana, though the subject wasn't as allegorical as boys and their fishing lines — this posthumous book was about smokejumpers — fourteen young men who lost their lives fighting a forest fire and revealing some truths about life and death. It would make a terrific film. It might be a film about westerners and not movie stars, and it could have a principal of young men, hardships, families and the livelihood of a wilderness. There would be no heroes, Paul Bunyans or crackpots as in the films made from Guthrie, McGuane and the first Maclean book — if it wanted to, it might be one of the few effective movies spun from Montana.


As we drive a nearly desolate road shared with tractor-trailer truck drivers steering like us through a course split of rainy fir trees I begin to wonder about other writers from this state, perhaps less popular, with none of their works, so far, engineered into films. We're already in Big Sky — population not much, and a few writers predictable to the area pop up: James Welch, William Kittredge and Ivan Doig; however these will do just fine, especially Doig whose book This House of Sky is, I believe, one of the finest memoirs ever written from Montana, or anywhere. I can say nothing more than the book was written as powerfully as religion and love. A writer could compose this one book in a life and perhaps be content. I wouldn't think again about Ivan Doig and his first rate book after leaving Big Sky — it turns out there isn't a whole lot around the town in the off-season and we have to think further about a ride to Bozeman.


Gulfed in mountain ranges, dark is coming on. What were supposed to be cabins for rent clumped by a river look damp and boarded up. We start to laugh when we think how we left that morning from Salt Lake City, drove to the Tetons through the rime of Yellowstone and are now in a convenience store at a Big Sky road junction with maybe forty-five miles to Bozeman. In the store we buy three hotdogs turning on a heated tray. The only other customers in the store are two teenage sweethearts with nowhere to go, but they're familiar with the owner of the place telling us after we ask for mustard and how far is Bozeman, that she just moved here from Kentucky two weeks ago with her husband, a state trooper, but she had a job once as a hair dresser. If the new business gets off the ground she wants to open a beauty parlor. She was the spitting image of Southern benevolence. All of this on a high road to the sky, and maybe only in Montana.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)








photos © susan arnold

BACKROAD CHALKIE ~

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Gabriela Mistral

FRUIT



---I'm scattering fruit around
on the sun-white ground.


---Tightwoven wicker baskets hold
piles of Brazilian gold.
From Brazil, look, child, they sent us
sleepy clusters of siestas.
As I empty out the glory,
colors and scents go rolling.


---You crawl off in hot pursuit
of the fleeing-maiden fruit —
see the melting medlars roll,
the tattooed, prickly pineapple.


---And they smell of Hy Brasil,
breast where earth can suck its fill,
that lets the whole Atlantic spill
from its lap when it's too full. . .


---Touch them, kiss them, play and suck,
learn the different ways they look.
Tonight you'll dream your mother's chin
has become as black as sin,
and night's a basket black as soot,
and the Milky Way bears starry fruit. . .




FRUTA


---En el pasto blanco de sol,
suelto la fruta derramada.


---De los Brasiles viene el oro,
en prietos mombres donde canta
de los Brasiles, niño mío,
mandan la siesta arracimada.
Extiendo el rollo de la gloria;
rueda el color con la fragancia.


---Gateando sigues las frutas,
como niñas que se desbandan,
y son los nísperos fundidos
y las duras piñas tatuadas. . .


---Y todo huele a los Brasiles
pecho del mundo que lo amamanta
que, a no rener el agua atlántica,
rebosaria de su falda. . .


---Tócales, bésalas, voltéalas
y les aprendes todas sus caras.
Soñarás, hijo, que to madre
tiene facciones abrasadas,
que es la noche canasto negro
y que es frutal la Víe Láctea. . .



~ Gabriela Mistral
translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
(University of New Mexico Press)



from About Mistral


Like most North Americans I knew nothing about the poet. She was a whole world to discover, a wild terrain, a new language.


I'll say little here about her work; it seems better sense to let it speak for itself. My introductions to the six parts of the book sketch out her life story and the nature of the poems. Of her life it's enough here to say that she was born in Chile in 1889, traveled and lived all over Europe and the New World, and died in the United States in 1957.


I do want to talk about her current obscurity, for she was a famous poet in her lifetime. One would expect a Nobel Prize winner to be well represented in English. All I have found is a small volume of translations by Langston Hughes; a larger selection by Doris Dana; a good recent selection by Maria Giacchetti of poems and prose; and a translation by Christiane Jacox Kyle of some early prose-poems.


It is not just a problem of language, or a North-South problem. Mistral's work is only partly accessible even in Chile. Her roving life left her works curiously dispersed. The four books of poetry published during her lifetime came out in New York, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Santiago de Chile...


...The problem of Mistral's reputation also has something to do, alas, with gender. Having been adulated as a poetess, she is not read as a poet.


Who's afraid of Gabriela Mistral?


I'd say anybody who reads her might well be afraid of her. She can be frightening strange. Many of those who wrote about her had to tame her, to reduce her, before they could admire her. The formidable woman who scared off her suitors and fled from her patrons got petted and patted down into acceptable femininity. Biographers have magnified an adolescent romance into a lifelong obsession, while either deploring or ignoring the fact that she lived most of her life in sexual independence of men. They have crooned over her for being childless, while scarcely mentioning the fact that she had a child by adoption and brought him up for seventeen years. The "Gabriela" they give us is all cliche — a blighted romance then a lifetime of tears . . . a sexless schoolmarm yearning over children . . .


She was a school teacher and also an eminent, internationally recognized, professional educator. She was for years a brilliant cultural envoy for her government — Madrid newspapers in 1933 called her the "spiritual ambassadress of Spanish America." She took children seriously and wrote poems for and about them; she also wrote about children and other underprivileged people with fierce political topicality. She grieved at being barren, was fascinated by motherhood, achieved it by adoption, wrote about it often, and was almost mortally wounded by the death of her son. Evidently a person of great kindness, who made deep, long friendships, she seems to have found her true home only in an absolute internal solitude. She left Chile at twenty-four and never lived there again and wrote about it all her life. Her passions and self-contradictions are like those of her native landscape — immense, volcanic, absolute.


What she was above all was a poet, self-taught, almost wholly self-made, who worked constantly, tirelessly, all her life, at her craft.

...


Mistral published about four hundred poems; this book contains a hundred and sixty-four of them.


My selection was almost completely subjective. I worked on those that I could translate and abandoned those I couldn't. Personal taste and prejudice certainly led me to some and away from others, but the act of translation is so mysterious to me that I'm unable to explain the process of finding the translatables and the untranslatables. Love and language lead where they will.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

photo:

redalyc.uaemex.mx

THANK YOU, BOBBY ~

Bobby Byrd



We just received a lovely bear hug from Bobby Byrd, and so did Janine Pommy Vega, all together. It immediately reminds me of a Southern Proverb that I share from Travis Ball, another old friend from the south: “If you want to travel fast, walk alone. If you want to travel far, walk together.”


http://whitepantiesanddeadfriends.blogspot.com/


Bobby was born in Tennessee and has lived with his great family for many years in El Paso writing great books of poems. http://www.cincopuntos.com/products_detail.sstg?id=110




photo:
jill somoza

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Jaime deAngulo (1948)

Sunlight colored
blonde flies by
in white sports car
Calif. Rte. 1, low
on the Big Sur
rear bumper
sticker says
"Just do me"

Jaime deAngulo. Anyone who has been to California for a visit and wants to see the state — which can be persuaded to have six, seven and maybe eight different regions — the journey will require a car, and if you haven't much time the driving will be extensive. Nothing wrong with that if you like that sort of thing and at least have plans to return someday to tie-in what you passed through.

I was lucky on my first and second and now this year's third visit to the state because I was with Susan who knew a good many places, whereas I knew none except from my reading, so naturally I followed her leads. Carson took to the Pacific as his mother once must have, while I walked to its surf as if saying, "Well, it's about time," and could cry at how well it lived up to its beauty.

In California, thinking again about these regions, there is a coastal range surging north to a coast that feels as sonorous as the Pacific Northwest, most so around the Klamath region which has seen its share of cantankerous floods. Up there you can lose yourself in a fathom of redwoods. The Great Central Valley has been exclaimed by people who know the state as being one of their favorite locations — it's mostly open road south from Mount Shasta foothills with all types of bugs spattered on the windshield from a fertile and irrigated georgic — a memory of olives, rice and sugar beets. Hard to believe it was once swamps and shallow lakes. The Modoc plateau we would have missed if another friend hadn't insisted we visit: "Go there," he said, pointing to the map, "you'll drive on a highway with hardly anybody on it." Of course he was right. It came to pass we would drive to Alturas after first going to two places: Carson City and Susanville for obvious reasons, and the drive north in the evening, through miles upon miles of juniper and sagebrush, brought us closer to where Jaime deAngulo met and lived with his book of the same tide Indians in Overalls.

Of all the writers that have come to live or even pass through California one of the most colorful had to be Jaime deAngulo. Known to be more beautiful than handsome by women when he was younger, long black hair blue-eyed playful intellect who roamed the Big Sur coast on horseback stirring up dude ranch ideas to earn a living and in the bargain scaring off any prospects by his own freewheeling prospectus that forewarned potential visitors that this ranch had no cowboys, not even a cow, and forget any picturesque corrals because you would be hardly on a horse anyway — the trails on the coast were too tricky and twisted — the country too rough for good horses; Jaime's horses were like sure-footed goats. He would go on to describe his guides as "crazy," the cook was foul-mouthed and ill-tempered, bring a bathing suit if you like because there was a beach, but it was six­teen hundred feet below the ranch. Expect sleeping on hard ground in some weird canyon. To say the least no visitors showed and those few in support of the ranch began to grow restless, finances were broke, and it was about then deAngulo began shooting cattle due to a neighbor's trespassing which spiraled out of control leading to his arrest; an unfortunate embarrassment for a man raised by a Spanish noble­man who preached how one should never have his name in the papers except when one was born, mar­ried and at his death.

This Spanish nobleman Jaime deAngulo ran away from at age eighteen after those early years in Europe, landed in San Francisco at the time of the city's great earthquake and soon after achieved a medical degree from John Hopkins. His special field, genetics and research on the fruit fly, brought him back west to study at Stanford University. Although that plan would be diverted — how deAngulo was a medical doctor who became an anthropologist on a visit to northern California — and the horse ranch he bought out in nowhere-as-can-be Alturas, home territory to the Pit River, Modoc and other Indian tribes and today better known in motel lobby pamphlets for its volcanic residue. It was right here Jaime deAngulo discovered a big piece of American pie, teaching himself how to record the Pit River Indian language through his enchantment with linguistics. Throughout his travels of California, New Mexico and parts of Mexico, changing his life with each visit, deAngulo ended up recording an outstanding twenty-seven Indian languages, the greater portion in this estranged area of northern California.

This is the part of California the Spaniards never settled; a stronghold to this day for pioneers and nonconformists — those who need leeway. Steep chaparral flanks, conifer timber, beach dunes, marshes, up to arctic tundra, the Baja, Mojave, Owens Valley, White Mountains on one side and on the other the Sierra Nevada range. Take Jaime de­Angulo as your guide, as thousands have, writers from the east coast journeying to the west coast, like Van Wyck Brooks — notable literary gentleman with a piped curiosity who remembered deAngulo on an "Arab horse and his red sash and El Greco beard, had all the look of a remnant from an earlier time;" and who would publish, long afterwards, his early experiences with the Pit River tribe in the pages of the Hudson Review, peddled there by Ezra Pound, the very Indians in Overalls. This book, and all the stories and other books, researched by an anthropologist who would just as rather gain his studies by rolling in ditches drunk with shamans and specters, while his poised colleagues set forth bundled for research.

Never mind how Jaime deAngulo died, he died as the majority go squarely fascinated by living and greeting, studying and flying by the seat of their pants; now older and ragged, living alone and looking out at the Pacific from a room in Berkeley, Jaime became almost forgotten. But of course deAngulo never has died, he's with us today and with you tomorrow and while in California you will have to cross it, climb it, duck under it and wind around if you plan to meet the state .

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)

Jaimie De Angulo on Hudini circa 1920s, Big Sur, CA.

lower photo:

redegggallery.squarespace.com

OCCUPY ~

image:
motifake.com

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Neal Cassady & Ann Murphy in '39 Pontiac
(Allen Ginsberg & Charles Plymell in the back seat)

rollin'
tumblin'
ridin'
sleepin'
over the
wheel

Neal Cassady. Some writers and even former Presidents have had close calls on trains. John Quincy Adams escaped injury aboard the Camden & Amboy in 1853; a derailment killing one and harming a number of others. The philosopher Lin Yutang was involved in a wreck in the 1940s — once again, a derailment, and just as the train was picking up speed leaving its North Philadelphia station. Eye witnesses couldn't shake the memory of seeing one coach being pitched vertically in the air only to be busted in half by an overhead signal bridge. This was the same train Henry C. Mencken rode regularly from Baltimore to New York.

As towns grew, the cut-through railroad tracks had to be crossed by streets spreading out to new neighborhoods. Train depots were situated right in the center of town or at the outskirts, it all depended. Located in the center of town established travelers and cargo, businesses and citizens all together. Some towns hated to see the railroad and its watertowers, worker shanties, rail-yards, etc., other towns made a show of it.

Today, no passenger train passes through Santa Fe, New Mexi­co; while trains skirt the edge of town in Whitefish, Montana — right at the end of the main street, a big Burlington Northern yard — and how many times have we awakened in the early morning just in time to see Hutchinson, Kansas fly on by...looking up its lonely opening daylight street running at a right angle to the railroad tracks.

One writer who worked for the railroad and literally died beside the tracks; no longer with the face of a boy born on the road with parents enroute to California, this birth taking place in Salt Lake City which is a jump on the map away from his upbringing in Denver which is another jump to his death in Mexico so many years later, so many stolen cars later and the go, go, go that went into the railroad work and the railroad work went into the driven cars as he crossed America at the drop of a hat taking any­one who would come along with him was the nature of his writing. Welcome to Neal Cassady. His best writing tabulated in first person speed letters, whole-hearted vividly confessional pages written to Jack Kerouac, which lit the lamp for serious book writer "John Kerouac" — as his name was printed on his first novel — to never be the same writer again. Stumped by writer's block after the first book, with experiences of road and sea travel and not sure exactly how to let it all go, it was the letters from Cassady that poured forth Kerouac's next book On the Road. It is no sur­prise that Neal Cassady, as "Dean Moriarity," was the central figure in the book; a book written and now as legend on a long paper-roll during three weeks of feverish remembrance. It all came out as a brilliant letter to a friend.

Dead along the tracks in Mexico after wandering away from a wedding party and barely dressed, rain slapping down, his body fueled on alco­hol and barbiturates, Neal Cassady wasn't too far away from Kerouac who wouldn't believe the news his old friend was dead, and then Kerouac was gone the year after. Neither made it to age fifty. Their road and sea and trains had by then all changed. By the time they died their living and celebrations in books of that liv­ing was becoming a big business, a catalyst that pin-wheeled thousands of other writers, but really these two of all the mess struck like iron one hundred years later and by far the best those early visions of America sung as songs to the open road by Whitman. All the other writers were oriented from a European, Far East, or intellectually dressing down to a common.

Cassady would know, without ever having to read the twentieth century's great long poem of America — Carl Sandburg's "The People, Yes" — published when Cassady was ten years old; poem of wide flood gates glory, from the people not just about the people, sprawled and dangling and music voice ridden long before anything beat or beatnik, and Cassady and Kerouac knew enough to tip their hats to a Whitman or Sandburg butter-rich in their mouths, big as pas­tures these folksongs, and often coolly angular as a nonstop jazz. The folk opened their shirts and beat their chests, but jazz would later skip flight and im­provise their lines.

Drugs did something too, spangled to the next generation as just the key to get "some­where;" in hands of the travelers it stimulated the drive, wrote more books, perhaps matched the energy of what was experienced to somehow getting it all down on paper. But without a doubt the car, the road, sweethearts, and stars above the railroad yard were more important. But how to make it all work? On tape today the speed-rap Neal Cassady is obviously a drug induced in the limelight young girls by the side trav­eler. It's heart-breaking to know the performance was egged on by a merriment that was going nowhere for him, by a counter-culture self-possessed yet search­ing, though in no way raised and belonging to daily work habits and customs as Cassady knew in the post World War II years and his job on the railroad along the coast of California aboard the Southern Pacific. He would work here as a young man, and he would work here as an older man. No matter if color blind he started at the bottom of railroad work and earned his way up as boomer, switchman, passenger brake-man — moving on the trains that pushed produce out of Salinas and Santa Clara Valley truck-farms — these workers still bend and chop and freight trains carry it along today.

Cassady was a family man, a married man when scheduled to the railroad. A pho­tograph taken in 1949 out in the bright California sunshine shows Neal Cassady standing beside two of his co-workers — older men, all in uniforms like Cassady's: ties and vests — and Cassady looking the tenderfoot and not at all the later champ of Beat legion; hands behind his back, pants pressed, hat cocked, railroad pins like his colleagues on both lapels of his jacket. How lovely. He doesn't appear to be wearing the official pocket watch nor retractable key chain for switch keys, but the shoes are steel-toed and there might be a future for this kid of twenty-three. Neal Cassady, dead at forty-two, faraway from any railroad but somehow walking the town tracks in San Miguel de Allende, always the railroad man.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters (Coyote Books, 1995)

photos:
allen ginsberg
worldhum.com

dedicated to friend & beat scholar joy walsh (1935-2011)