Graham Greene
Posted: April 1, 2011 Filed under: books, people, writing Leave a comment
Graham Greene in mid-life
Our worst enemies
here are not
the ignorant
and the simple,
however cruel;
our worst enemies
are the intelligent
and corrupt.
––Graham Greene,
in The Human Factor
Name dropping
Posted: March 31, 2011 Filed under: books, fiction, people, writing 2 Comments
Check out page 295 of Jim Harrison’s newest novella collection, The Farmer’s Daughter, when you see a copy. He kindly slipped my name into one sentence in this force majeure book, particularly the first two novellas: The Farmer’s Daughter and Brown Dog Redux. There’s simply no writer like Jim Bear. He shares his buddy Thomas McGuane’s luminous language plus an always beating, warm heart, making for characters that are the closest you’ll ever get to pulsing human blood on the printed page. Plus funny, out loud laughing.
Naipaul’s strange masque
Posted: March 26, 2011 Filed under: articles, books, people Leave a comment
I’m 115 pages into V.S. Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa, and it’s one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read; so strange, you’re afraid to speak about how odd it is. After finishing Naipaul’s biography, it’s clear he was brought up with a fear of blacks and what they represented to his class of East Asian-Indian Trinidadian society. It’s something he was never able to leave behind. The book is about a six-month trip he took through the heart of old Africa, in the sense that he was in search of whatever remnants of primeval tribal culture he could find, particularly the spiritual and religious aspects. Certainly, a promising subject for him. But to watch him flounder around, you wonder is this the same writer of the earlier nonfiction books who could take apart a culture in 50 pages? The problem is you can’t be sure of what he’s trying to do here. It may be the ultimate writer’s fatigue or possibly an experiment, some new approach to storytelling (that so far he and I both seem to be trying to untangle). He’s a master of prose. We know that, but the prose here is constantly exuding irony (intended and not intended), condescension, put-ons, farce and cascades of clunky one-liners that highlight naiveté, stupidity, obtuseness, ignorance, on top of which he casts himself as a an awkward character whose rapport with his subjects is based on all of the above. It’s such a literary wreck, you’re forced to keep reading for the wrong reasons. There must be a point to it all, but so far it has eluded him and me. I have no choice but to keep reading in hope of the best and enthralled that it may be what it appears to be––simply bad, a writer whose style and personality have broken down but in a bravura act been put on display for all to see. A sort of ultimate who cares after the Nobel Prize. I just got the quirkiness of the style: it’s Dick and Jane go to Africa. That makes me, and you, the readers, children who will read any little story that keeps chugging along. A sample:
Since life (and death) are so full of snares, there are many ablutions to be done and many taboos to be observed. It is better to be barefoot. For the high priests especially it is taboo to have the soles of their feet covered; these important people must always have a link to the earth. If they are caught wearing shoes, they can be fined. Full shoes are allowed in some shrines, but not slippers. Wherever the high priest walks becomes holy, because he is the physical representation of the spirits, and is possessed by the spirits. The high priest wears white and carries a broom in his hand. The broom stands for his cleansing function.
Philip Larkin
Posted: March 5, 2011 Filed under: articles, people, poetry, writing Leave a comment
I’m nearing the end of Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Larkin’s essence is best captured in a description made by his longest-running girlfriend, Monica Jones, who decided that his tombstone should bear the word, “Writer,” not poet, and she’s so very right. Larkin started life wanting to be a novelist and wrote two good novels, before hitting a wall and ultimately abandoning two uncompleted novels. But his full-time turn to poetry continued the voice of the novels, in condensed, contained stories grounded in stripped down quotidian, demotic language, concerned with everyday life and, particularly, his personal fears and insecurities. His thousands of letters to his girlfriends and friends, in the reading, are close equivalents to the gist that makes up his poetry, by that I mean you often get exact glimpses of his poetic voice and are put in that place, in the states of mind, from which his poems arise. Aesthetically, he pushed romanticism out the door, but ironically the intensity of his art, and the body of the poems––the personae that they create––re-romanticized, if you will, his effort. He credits Thomas Hardy in his evolution, but there seems an unbridgeable gap between the two. Larkin’s language is post-modern, absolutely taken down to the bone. Hardy was still writing as if poetry needed to be beautified, something Larkin avoided. He wanted simply to give each word the space to live, individually and, finally, collectively. That esthetic is absolutely essential to his being able to write about what he does with such affect. I’m not sure, but maybe Larkin’s intention was never to devalue romanticism by avoiding it, but rather to renew it by rummaging around in hopes of finding it in the banality of life, to invest it with the seriousness it deserves in light of the recognition that ordinariness is all that we have. That is not to say that everything is ordinary, in the sense of routine. The point is also that all we have is what we get, as Larkin might say, and what we get is raw, unshaped, discrete, often quite beyond our control, so we must stand up to that face to face. Something along this line is touched on in his Paris Review interview:
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel happiness is unlikely in this world?
LARKIN
Well, I think if you’re in good health, and have enough money, and nothing is bothering you in the foreseeable future, that’s as much as you can hope for. But “happiness,” in the sense of a continuous emotional orgasm, no. If only because you know that you are going to die, and the people you love are going to die.
Elliot said something perfect about Larkin, while remaining neutral: “He can make words do what he wants.” At any rate, I’m glad finally to have discovered Larkin. He gives me something I need––art made from within our time based on an interesting sensibility of thought within a common feeling or moment.
Bedside books
Posted: February 26, 2011 Filed under: books, people, writing Leave a comment
Books by Rembrandt (Iphone photograph)
–The World Is What It Is, The authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French. This looks to be a rock solid, no holds barred appreciation of the ruthless artistry of the Calypso Rambler.
–The Letters of Alan Ginsberg edited by Bill Morgan. A best of the best of AG’s some 3,000-plus letters.
–The Selected Letters of Alan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder edited by Bill Morgan. The two lions of spring who made it to be lions of winter.
–Philip Larkin by Andrew Motion. Someone should do a study on the art of profanity as irony and satire, using the correspondence of Larkin and the chattering conversations of Larkin and Amis. William Empson?
Philip Larkin’s nothing
Posted: February 23, 2011 Filed under: people, poetry, writing Leave a commentWonderful wording by Philip Larkin, from the poem “I Remember, I Remember.“
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”
or, Something, like nothing, happens anywhere, or
Nothing like something happens anywhere or
Something like nothing happens anywhere…
self portrait by Philip Larkin
I’m reading the Larkin biography by Andrew Motion, after having learned a great deal about Larkin from reading Kinsley Amis’s and Martin Amis’s writings about him. Larkin was one of those people everyone knows, on the surface, but who only a few people are allowed to know well over a long period of time. The stereotype of his “ordinariness,” of course , is a total fraud.
It can have only survived because of his looks, which through photographs placed him in the company of a passing face in the crowd. On the other hand, everyone who really knew him found him physically striking, and, if they were allowed entre into his world, they knew his mind was on fire. What let him down were the little things, and by that I mean those little things that become big things when we’re adults. One’s traits. The tip-off to Larkin’s character is his women pals. He had good ones, and for a long time, juggling them one, two or three at a time.
Something said early in the book about God wanting people to exercise their desires [that would be the Old Testament God, since the New Testament God is nowhere to be found], to seek abundance in life, resonates in Larkin’s life. His fears and inhibitions stimulated his desires which were met, judging from what I can see, about as well as anyone’s. But he didn’t think so, and on that he largely based his art. He early saw how life’s so-called ordinariness was the unrelieved companion of desire and pleasure, and an antidote to fear, and of course, in his art, he forsook standard romanticism to drive that point home.
It has led to the common misunderstanding of his work that haunts all original writers for years after their work is completed, until ultimately the work is seen fresh by a new generation for what it really is. The New Romanticism.
d.h. lawrence
Posted: February 20, 2011 Filed under: people, photography, states of mind, writing 1 Comment
the phoenix on this Penguin cover makes it a classic (Iphone photograph)
I love dictionaries:
phoenix |ˈfēniks|noun (in classical mythology) a unique bird that lived for five or six centuries in the Arabian desert, after this time burning itself on a funeral pyre and rising from the ashes with renewed youth to live through another cycle.• a person or thing regarded as uniquely remarkable in some respect.
PHRASES rise like a phoenix from the ashes emerge renewed after apparent disaster or destruction.
ORIGIN from Old French fenix, via Latin from Greek phoinix ‘Phoenician, reddish purple, or phoenix.’ Phoenix 1 |ˈfēniks| |ˈfinɪks| |ˈfiːnɪks| Astronomya southern constellation (the Phoenix), west of Grus.• [as genitive ] ( Phoenicis |fēˈnīsis; -ˈnē-| |fɪˈniːsɪs|) used with a preceding letter or numeral to designate a star in this constellation :the star Delta Phoenicis.
ORIGIN Latin.Phoenix 2 |ˈfinɪks| |ˈfiːnɪks|the capital of Arizona; pop. 1,321,045. Its warm dry climate makes it a popular winter resort.
The Etiquette of Freedom
Posted: February 6, 2011 Filed under: articles, books, buddhism, people, reviews, writing Leave a comment
This essay originally appeared in The Kyoto Journal, issue No. 76.
The conversation between poets Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison in The Etiquette of Freedom, based on several days spent together while walking over the hills of southern coastal California, is a rare meeting of minds and personalities. A DVD film, The Practice of the Wild, co-produced by Will Hearst and Harrison, accompanies the book, which also contains a generous selection of poems that illustrate Snyder’s ideas. What we have here is a treasure: a rambling conversation between two of America’s most original poets––clear-eyed, unsentimental outsiders, both outdoors men who have spent their life probing the nature of nature.
In Asian terms, Snyder, 80, is the host of the book and film, and Harrison, 73, is the guest. A lifelong fan of Snyder’s work, Harrison assumes a dual role of interviewer—drawing Snyder out, opening up themes, offering him a stage to hold forth, which he does in his usual sharp, light and clear way. We know this encounter is the real thing when Harrison tosses out one of his favorite quotes of D. H. Lawrence that he frequently uses on his own interlocutors: “The only aristocracy is that of consciousness.” It’s easily passed over, but Snyder bites into the moment and their two minds engage:
GS: What do you think he meant by that?
JH: I think he meant that the person who is most conscious lives the most intensely––if “intensity” is the real pecking order, since life is so limited in length, as we are both aware of vividly––
GS: The most vividly. I’m not sure I agree with how he meant that, but that’s a good question.
JH: Why do you disagree?
GS: Oh, because it’s too spectacular, too romantic.
JH: Well, so was he.
GS: Of course. At any rate, you could set that beside an East Asian idea of the aristocracy of consciousness, and a Chinese or Korean idea of that would be much calmer, much cooler. Not like a hard glowing gem-like flame, not like a flaming candle burning out––
JH: That’s what Kobun Chino Sensei said; they criticized his friend Deshimaru because he said, “You must pay attention as if you had a fire burning in your hair.” And Kobun said, “You must pay attention as if you were drawing a glass of water.
GS: Oh, that’s better.
JH: The concept of the divine ordinary.
The title, The Etiquette of Freedom, comes from one of his early seminal essays, at the heart of The Practice of the Wild (1990), which explores his ideas behind the terms Nature, the Wild and Wilderness. In their fullness, the three terms are meant to encompass all aspects of phenomenal life, the whole of creation, a process in which humans are one part (though vastly threatening to the other parts). He wrote: “The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom [for humans].” Approaching Nature from the largest perspective, says Snyder, has sometimes caused him to be misunderstood.
GS: People, including environmentalists, have not taken well to the distinctions I tried to make between Nature, the wild and wilderness. You know, I want to say again, the way I want to use the word “Nature” would mean the whole universe.
JH: Truly.
GS: Yes, like in physics.
JH: Right, exactly.
GS: So not the outdoors.
JH: No. That’s a false dichotomy.
GS: Yes.
JH: –or a dualism.
GS: Yes, Nature is what we’re in.
gary snyder
The term “wild,” as used by Snyder, is a metaphor for the natural processes within Nature when least affected by man’s disproportionately heavy hand (but even our destructive, consumptive role is part of the natural process, as Nature, in the broadest sense, is constantly engaged in a vastly complicated destruction, consumption and renewal). Fully understanding these terms is conjoined by the role of time as measured in hundreds of thousands and millions of years and not at the rate of humankind’s anthropocentric perspective. For more on these terms, see The Practice of the Wild, where he wrote, “Nature is not a place to visit, it is home,” and, in a prophetic stroke: “It is the present time, the 12,000 or so years since the ice age and the 12,000 thousand or so years yet to come, that is our territory. We will be judged or judge ourselves by how we have lived with each other and the world during these two decamillennia.” For more on his ideas on bioregionalism and environmental issues, see Turtle Island(1974), his homage to North America, and his other essay collections and talks: The Real Work (1980),A Place in Space (1995) and Back on the Fire (2007). All of Snyder’s essays are gems. Those on Buddhist themes are filled with poetic prose rising to the level of inspired teishos.
The title, The Etiquette of Freedom, functions as a loaded metaphor, speaking of the importance of living in Nature with a humbleness that reflects humans’ disproportionate role—and responsibility—within the natural processes of creation and life and death. Etiquette means to show respect to a person or occasion. We see this attitude reflected worldwide in ancient cultures when someone asks for understanding before taking a creature’s life or before felling a tree for a home. By exercising an “etiquette” relationship with Nature, we can realign our sense of place and in turn, we experience a greater correctness in a more responsible relationship with Nature. Snyder himself has come to personify a meme which evolved out of the counterculture movment and has been absorbed into mainstream culture: the way to a richer life is to settle in, to reinhabit a rural area, to learn the names of the plants and animals, the geology, the history of the indigenous people, to study the folklore, to engage in civic life, to pay attention to the schools, to deepen one’s sense of self, to live life fully as a thoughtful member of a bioregion in which one strives to play a grateful and productive role. It is a meme for a practical, reality-based approach to life, and one which he played a major role in creating.
Poets Snyder and Harrison with Snyder’s dog Emi
The interplay between the individual and Nature has been Snyder’s subject since his first translations of Cold Mountain (Han-shan) poems as a student at Berkeley. For more than 50 years, he has been the American poet who has most fully embraced the subject of Nature, and the nature of consciousness. In 1955, he left America for Japan to study Zen. His public life began, in a way, as a fictional character in the novel Dharma Bums (1958), in which Jack Kerouac created a charismatic, heroic character named Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder)—a young, self-assured American poet and outdoors man. In the late-60s, when he returned from Japan to live in America again, he immediately became a central figure in the evolving counterculture. His influence was based on his poetry and his practical ideas of returning to the land, which were embraced as a rallying cry by many young people, and canny elders. His approach was an extension of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s ideas on self-reliance and nature, and Buddhist philosophy. Wary of becoming a counterculture spokesperson, he quickly retreated to live in the isolated Sierra foothills near Nevada City, where he worked on his craft. After Turtle Island, he assumed a role of poet and environmental social critic. In his late period, he taught at the University of California at Davis, while continuing to publish poems and essays. Since then, the mythology surrounding him as a teacher has deepened. Over the coming decades, his work will travel well beyond America’s shores, and one feels the mythology has only just begun.
Snyder’s work has always been aligned with his commitment to Zen. Looking back now, his poetry and essays fan out like one long scroll of his life, a record of what he’s seen and felt and learned. To throw him together here with Jim Harrison’s highly refined Ikkyu-like spirit is a gift—two American poets who have extended the lineage of Emerson and Thoreau (Dogen and Han-shan)—two old men, well-seasoned and free, walking and talking, and turning the wheel.
Review photographs copyrighted San Simeon Films.
a poem by Roxy Gordon
Posted: January 21, 2011 Filed under: people, poetry Leave a commentRoxy “Coyote Boy” Gordon, writer-poet-songwriter
Posted: January 16, 2011 Filed under: books, people, poetry, writing Leave a comment
Drawing by Roxy Gordon
This post is long overdue, because in some way I refuse to accept that the Coyote Boy is gone. His life was very intense, but surrounded by a calm circle, a powerful aura that honored the idea of one-of-a-kind. He was a writer, artist and singer-songwriter. Sometimes Breeds, Smaller Circles and other of his books can be found on ABE, the used book website
I’m reprinting two pieces by Roxy that give a feel for how he saw the world. Later, I’ll publish some of his poetry, which comes from the “Tough School” of poetry.
The West Texas Town of El Paso
by Roxy Gordon
[Edited by Judy Gordon]
This all starts in San Francisco, North Beach, hanging out with famous writers.
In those days I still wore western shirts, couldn’t buy one there. I decided it
was time to go home. We left in a little red Ford full of a dog, cats, two of
our friends and our new born baby. A big rent trailer on behind. Nobody but
me seemed willing to drive. We got lost in some town in Wyoming, middle of
the night. A policeman stopped us, looked into the car and couldn’t believe what
he saw. He figured the best thing to do was help us out of town. Before the sun
was up, I was seeing trees in the middle of the highway. We found Denver,
spent a day recovering and headed over Raton Pass. We made Texas, spent
some time building a fence, and decided to go back to San Francisco. We
stopped south of Santa Fe and had a conversation, decided Albuquerque, but
we couldn’t find anybody we knew there. Judy had never been to El Paso. I was
young and stupid, said let’s go.
We made El Paso middle of the afternoon, bought a newspaper and found a
trailerhouse for rent out on the river road. It was cheap. We moved in two
hours later. The bathroom overflowed. And we were right next to a railroad exchange.
Not good for sleeping.
Judy got a job in a printshop. She had learned typesetting in Austin, when she
worked for Bill Wittliff’s Encino Press. Wittliff wrote the screenplay for
Lonesome Dove. We decided to move out of that trailerhouse, found an ad in
the paper for a house on Blanchard. It was a big, beautiful house just across the
street from the University of Texas at El Paso. It was on a hill; from the side
porch, you could see Juarez and the Franklin Mountains. The old lady who
owned it was from Mexico. She could hardly speak English. She lived in a little
house out back. She spent most of her time in Mexico. She was gone when her
house was broken into. I called the cops and a kid came. He stationed me at the
front door to catch the burglar if the kid could run him out. Like a fool, I
actually stood there. Then Judy set herself on fire – blazing grease on the
kitchen stove.
Judy worked at the printshop and I changed my kid’s diapers. My first book,
Some Things I Did, arrived in the mail. It was published by Bill Wittliff. I set
it on top of the refrigerator. The little TV was on top of the refrigerator. We
watched Ed Sullivan.
My guitar amplifier picked up a radio station. We listened to that and watched
Gunsmoke on TV. One day I called Judy to the window to see a very tall, pretty
girl hitchhiking. She wore black leather shorts. She passed up several cars for a
guy on a motorcycle. One day, I walked across the street to UTEP. I went to the
student union, looked at the students. They looked like students I’d seen from UT
to California to Minnesota. They are all grandparents now. My friend, David
Phillips, called me to say he and his wife, Carol, were about to visit her mother in
El Paso. I drove down to try and find them, found David walking up the street
looking like Kris Kristofferson. Later, we went to Carol’s momma’s house. She
told me my writing informed her generation about what our generation was all
about. Carol and David divorced after that and Carol told me David and I were
too Texan for her to stand. Last I heard, she was in New York writing songs.
The freezeplugs rusted out on the Ford. I let it sit for a couple of days, then
fixed it with some kind of plastic goo. I got a job at an advertising agency,
writing print and TV. Judy got fired from her job because she mixed up pages
on a book. I walked to work in bright El Paso sunshine, got there every morning
for a meeting. Roy Chapman ran the agency. He’d been the host of a kids’ TV
show in El Paso. It was called Uncle Roy. He was not my idea of an uncle. He
was a mean old man, kept telling me to get out of my chair at the meeting so he
could sit down. My co-writer was a middle-age German who lived miles south
in Mexico, but spent the week in El Paso. The agency had two major accounts,
a bank in El Paso and Weaver Scopes. The German and I made up TV
commercials for the bank, had apples and oranges rolling around. I wrote a
piece for Weaver rifle scopes. Somebody rewrote it. Whoever did not
understand how scopes work. I had a fit. That may have been the beginning of
the end of my advertising career.
Judy and I drove the plastic-fixed Ford around El Paso. We saw pretty girls
walking on the streets. We saw cripples. We went to the dollar drive-in movie,
three for a dollar. Went to the A&W Root Beer Drive-in. We walked on El Paso
Street, had beggars after us. One afternoon a young woman tried to sell us her baby.
We left in the wounded Ford and headed north for Albuquerque. Marty Robbins,
I have been to the city of El Paso.
=====================================================
(Published by Coleman Chronicle & DV, 29 December, 1998.)
=====================================================
Why There Were So Many Presidents of the U.S. on The Fort Peck Reservation
by Roxy “First Coyote Boy” Gordon
(With thanks to Walley Cantrell, Edited by Judy Gordon]
About a hundred years ago, the white Bureau of Indian Affairs decided Indian kids
needed to go to what they called boarding school. Those kids, little kids and old,
were taken away from home to live nine months a year at boarding school.
The Indian agent would send his police to round-up all the kids and what some
of the parents did was round-up the kids and head for the hills. But the cops
would catch most and put them into a wagon to head for boarding school.
They deloused these kids and dressed them civilized, cut their hair and took
them off to learn white men’s ways.
One time a bunch of little boys got rounded-up at Fort Peck, Montana. Those
cops put them in a big room at the boarding school. The kids huddled up all
close together and didn’t know what to do.
After awhile, a big boy came by. He’d been at boarding school before. He
decided to play a joke on the little boys. The big boy said, “Listen, if you
don’t tell them your names, then they’ll let you loose and you can all go home.”
The little boys thought that was a good idea.
So the teachers took them into a big room and a man with a big book asked
them, “Tell me your names.” No little boy would say a word. They thought by
being quiet, then they could go on home.
But then the superintendent saw they wouldn’t say anymore, so he locked
the door and went looking for help. The superintendent found a priest and
asked them what they might do. Those little boys needed names. “At least,”
the priest said, “I can name a few.”
The priest said to the little boys, “I’m going to give you big time names. You
will never be ashamed.” “You,” he said, “you over there with the brown hair,
you are George Washington. You with the red shirt, you are Thomas Jefferson.
You with no front teeth, you are Teddy Roosevelt. And you the one with
worn-out cowboy boots, you are Abraham Lincoln. You with the green eyes,
you are Andrew Jackson. You by the window, you are John Adams.” The
priest went on and on.
The little boys didn’t know what to do. They were still named things like
Afraid Of His Tracks and Horse’s Ghost and Ground Squirrel and names like
that. But after they stayed a few years at the school, they got used to their new
names. And they kept on using those names all their lives.
So that’s why, 50 years later, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy
Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and John Adams all lived up in
Montana on the Fort Peck Reservation.
the roy hamric journal 