History of My Reading: 1969 To Boulder Go (part 2)

 Nineteen Sixty-Nine was a prime year for the counterculture (in fact, it was the year it got its name, when Theodore Roszak’s The Making of The Counter-Culture was published), and Colorado was one of its capitals.  It would be my first prolonged exposure beyond midwestern college campuses.

 As music was the counterculture’s living, pulsing heart, it was also the year of the music festival.  More or less invented on the model of the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas when he organized the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, music festivals of current and cutting edge rock, blues and hybrid forms happened here and there throughout 1969, culminating at Woodstock in August. 

 For three evenings and nights over a weekend in late June, there was one in Colorado: The Denver Pop Festival.   I was participating in the writers conference in Boulder until Friday evening, so on Saturday I took a bus to Denver to hear some music.

 I’m not sure why I decided on Saturday, since the Jimi Hendrix Experience headlined the Sunday lineup. And it turned out to be mildly historic: the last concert the original Experience ever played. (Perhaps I had other plans for Sunday since it was my 23rd birthday.)  But 1969 was a big year for Creedence Clearwater Revival, and they would close the Saturday show. 

 However I did meet a girl on the bus to Denver who claimed to be a cousin of Jimi Hendrix.  She said the last time she’d visited him backstage she’d seen the drug paraphernalia, and showed her concern.  He agreed he needed to slow it down. He was really just a sweet guy, she said.  

 It was a hot day—95 degrees in Denver, and still around 90 when I arrived at Denver’s Mile High Stadium after 5 p.m.  I either bought my ticket or already had it ($6 a night, $15 for three nights) and I was early enough to get a seat in a center section, as people were still arriving. Still, the stage was set up on the field so I was separated from it by a considerable distance.

 I have specific memories of that event, which I am able to corroborate and expand on, thanks to a Masters thesis posted online by Justin Kite of Rutgers University.  He fills in some of the history and the facts of the evening.

 As the time came closer to the scheduled 6:30 start, those in my section of the stands became aware of a crowd growing outside one particular locked gate.  It looked to be wood and wire, and thanks to our position and height, we could see at least part of it. On the inside of the stadium were contingents of uniformed police, most of them opposite the increasingly raucous crowd outside, demanding to be let in, because the music was meant to be free.

 Though I was unaware of it, there was already a history to this festival.  A similar but smaller crowd the night before had tried to force their way in, and they clashed with police, egged on by some of the performers, especially Frank Zappa.  Tonight there were more of them, and they were concentrating on that one gate. 

There was also a longer history involving the Denver police, and their successful efforts to close down the Family Dog, a club in the city that featured rock acts.  And of course, there was the ongoing tension between the straight world and the freaks, the culture and the counterculture, parents and the young. Perhaps we forget how strong the hostility and suspicion could be.

 The confrontation got louder when the first act began, a Chicago band called Aorta.  I could see the gate bulging as bodies raged against it.  Then the next act took the stage: a new Boulder band called Zephyr, which eventually made a couple of albums and is noted as the first band of electric guitar virtuoso Tommy Bolin.  Lead singer Candy Givens was the constant in various versions of the band into the 1980s.

 Zephyr had hardly begun its blues-rock set when the police unleashed their first volley of tear gas canisters at the 500 or so on the other side of the gate.  Some of them lobbed the canisters back. Tear gas came streaming down towards us. 

 The music was halted as the announcer instructed those of us in our section to come down on the field and lie on the ground, face down, until the tear gas cloud passed.  So there I was: reenacting a duck and cover drill with my nose on the grass of Mile High Stadium. In a few minutes we returned to our seats and Zephyr finished their set—but this time the band members were reportedly wearing gas masks. 

Winter at Woodstock

 The next band was Poco, the new country rock band featuring Richie Furay and Jim Messina, two members of the recently disbanded and already legendary Buffalo Springfield.  (Kite’s thesis asserts that the new band of Springfield’s main members, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was originally supposed to play at this festival, but the promoter backed out of the deal when the new lineup failed to get their first album out before the festival.)  Things quieted down enough during their set for me to hear and enjoy it.

But the blazing blues guitarist Johnny Winter got the crowd outside revved up again, and probably the police, too.  They shot off tear gas again, in greater quantity, and this time successfully dispersed the crowd at the gate.  But there was a cost, as during Tim Buckley’s set the wind caught the gas and blew it back into the stadium.  Now people from all over the stadium rushed down to the field to escape the fumes.  In the confusion, the crowd outside attacked the gate again and some got through.  There was a pitched battle between them and the police, until the festival producers opened all the gates to let everybody in.  And suddenly there was nothing to fight about.

 It wasn’t the first time I’d smelled tear gas, and it wouldn’t be the last. As singular as it seems now, it didn’t impress me at the time as all that unusual, that a rock festival would be disrupted in this way.  I was more affected by the distance from the stage.  Without my perceptions artificially enhanced (though there were probably joints making their way across the rows) I felt too detached from the performers.

 By then night had fallen and just as if none of this had happened, Creedence Clearwater Revival played a normal set.  According to Kite, even some of the police stopped to listen.  As Creedence played “Bad Moon Rising,” the full moon rose behind them.  When they noticed this, they played it again.  That’s the story.  I don’t actually remember it.  Kite reports that the young Denver Post reporter called Saturday’s the best music of the festival.

 Much of the Jimi Hendrix Experience set on Sunday night is preserved on YouTube.  Besides being the last Experience show, its other claim to fame is the pre-Woodstock debut of Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner, which flowed into “Purple Haze.”  But apparently the prior hours were dominated by noisy and constant warfare between police and gatecrashers.  Kite reports that the now iconic singer Joe Cocker, on his first U.S. tour, was found hiding in his dressing room.  “So this is America?” he asked.

 For me, there was one further outcome to the Boulder writers conference. After the open reading at the end of it, a tall man with dark curly hair sought me out to compliment my poems.  Not the Litany so much as the sound poem.  He was Arnold Weinstein from Yale, and he was accompanied by four or five acting students from the Yale Drama School. 

A few days later I ran into him again.  I was having eggs and toast at the Charcoal Chef, one of those chain restaurants that serves breakfast all day, near where I was staying in Boulder.  I was at the counter when he came in for coffee.  The jars of jelly for toast in restaurants had recently been replaced with little plastic tubs which were then, as they are even more so now, nearly impossible to open. So I simply stabbed at mine with a fork, which for some reason he really liked.

 It might have been after the reading or there at the counter, but at some point he invited me to hang out with his group, which was sticking around for awhile to work on improvisations.  Actually it was never clear to me what they were doing, or what he did, but in fact Weinstein taught playwriting at Yale, was a poet and playwright, and at that point in a long and successful theatrical as well as academic career, he had been working with Paul Sills’ Story Theater.  

 It also was never clear to me what he expected me to do. At first he asked me to fool around on piano, and then on guitar, as his students did whatever they were doing onstage.  This resulted in only one moment I remember.  I heard someone on stage say “hello” and I began riffing on it on guitar.  The actors picked it up and built it until the cast was clustered at center stage shouting a rhythmic and frantic “hello” to the (non-existent) audience. 

 It was an interesting, confusing and somewhat uncomfortable few days.  It’s too bad I wasn’t up to it, because Weinstein did several theatrical pieces that integrated music, and took them to Broadway.  I’ve also wondered who those Yale students—and one in particular--turned out to be. 

My immersion in the counterculture began in Fort Collins, where (thanks to Joni's cousin Mary) I had my palm read and my astrology chart done by stoned hippies around a fire. And there was a lot of talk, from the cosmic to the very personal. People just trying to figure things out.  Especially themselves.

  It continued in Boulder.  I hung out quite a bit at a bookstore called brillig (“Twas brillig and the slivy toves”—Jaberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, in which brillig means four in the afternoon, which is probably when I usually showed up at the bookstore) with their books on astrology (Dane Rudhyar), numerology, natural health remedies, cosmic philosophies, as well as books on underground filmmakers, artists, writers.  Scorned or overlooked past writers were being rediscovered, too—including Lewis Carroll. Brillig was also a great place to overhear conversations or engage in them.  (Somewhere I have a note about befriending a clerk there, who admitted she was afraid of the customers.) 

There were books reflecting the evolving sexual revolution and the boundaries of censorship: everything from Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask to newly available novels by Henry Miller and the illustrated book version of the scandalous stage pastiche Oh! Calcutta! 

 There was R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Verbatim.  George Leonard’s Education and Ecstasy, Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching As A Subversive Activity.  Zen Flesh, Zen Bones; The Book of the Hopi. All breaking accustomed boundaries around mind and body, searching for new answers and new questions.  Mind-expanding chemicals suggested untapped powers of mind, human potentials censored by a narrow, rigid society.  Cosmic feelings and new intimacies required a stubborn and sometimes misguided search for conscious and nurturing communities that honored individual freedom while withdrawing from a culture of self-righteous conflict that unfeelingly trashed the planet and mechanized non-human life. 

 The apocalyptic tenor of the 1960s had deepened towards decade’ end.  The unrelenting Vietnam war, the oceans dying, DDT and other chemicals poisoning food and the environment, were all in the summer’s news.  So there was interest in arcane takes on the patterns, on the future. Edgar Cayce’s books and prophesies, and similar approaches were part of the mood. 

I browsed the bookstore but unfortunately the only book I can remember reading specifically in Boulder—and I didn’t read all of that—was Bill Stage’s paperback copy of The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda.  I didn’t think much of it.  It wasn’t until his later book, Tales of Power, that I got deeply into his work, and went back to read what I’d missed.

 Besides the bookstore, I often gravitated to the campus.  I recall attending a public lecture by Nobel Prize winning physiologist George Wald, who’d begun speaking out against the warfare state.  He concluded his talk, accompanied by slides, by referring to the ultimate biological cause of the Vietnam War.  It wasn’t clear to me what he meant, so I stayed afterwards and asked him.  “You’re young now,” he said smiling, almost teasing.  “But soon you’ll have to make a living and then you’ll understand—Protein!” Very apropos as it turned out, though just what the direct relevance to Vietnam could be, however, still eludes me.

 A somewhat cryptic surviving note tells me that it was in Boulder that I saw the 1968 film version of Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, with David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave—the couple that had debuted together and had such a strong effect on me in Morgan! a couple of years earlier.  (I’ve now seen at least four versions of The Seagull, none I can think of on a live stage.)

 All of my experiences that summer adhere to the music that was playing in the background.  Everywhere, from Galesburg to Boulder, if a stereo was blasting, it was the Crosby, Stills and Nash debut album.  Or it was Tommy, the Who’s double album.  Or if not those, then Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

 It was one of the ironies of Boulder that it was legally dry—nothing alcoholic but 3.2 beer could be served.  (Despite my attempts at a bar called The Sink, I never quite got the taste for it.)  On the other hand, pot and psychedelics were everywhere.

 My surviving notes record that on July 30—the day I heard President Nixon on the radio declaring that Vietnam was “America’s finest hour,” I dropped mescaline for the first (and so far only) time.  Or what we were told was mescaline.  Unless you know the chemist, you could never be sure.  (I seriously doubt that I ever ingested a full strength pure psychedelic. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure some of the marijuana had an extra ingredient.)

 This event was at a cabin in the mountains about 20 miles outside Boulder.  The cabin was rented for the summer by John, a friend of Bill Stage’s who had shared the living room shag rug with me when he first got to town.  Since then he’d bought a truck and a couple of dogs—both blond Samoan huskies, more or less puppies.  One he named Kachina.  And he’d rented this cabin. 

John was the host for this event, and there were five others besides me.  I’d met four of them, including (let’s call them) Don and Susan, a couple.  We dropped in a meadow about noon, and everyone immediately left—singly and in pairs.  I eventually walked around, came upon one of the group—the only unattached woman—but she had such an evident force field around her that my smile faded and I got as far away as possible.

 So I walked, sprawled in another meadow in the sun, and heard voices of some of the others but I couldn’t see them. Then when it started raining lightly but threatening a storm, I returned to the original meadow and gathered up everybody’s gear—radio, cameras, etc. that they’d left—and took them into the cabin.

 I remember the sense of distance and perhaps alienation from the others.  I recorded a certain self-consciousness that rippled through my experiences, as if I was watching a film or a series of films, but I was also the lead actor.  My perceptions and emotional reactions were heightened, so when I saw Don and Susan in an intense couples thing, I felt both sides of that.  I had a lot of thoughts, about past and present and ongoing relationships, among other subjects. 

And eventually, through the six hours or so, I had one lasting observation.  I had enough visual hallucination to see the whirls and striations in rocks or the rings in wood as if they were in motion.  I saw them as process: for example, the rocks forming from volcanic flow.  Everything seemed to be half growing and half decaying, simultaneously on the way to life and death.

 I was also sick much of the time.  I had the sick stomach associated with mescaline but not intense enough to throw up.  Instead I had it longer.  But I wouldn’t call it a full-blown psychedelic experience.  Afterwards, John felt there had been some speed in it.

 Feeling sick wasn’t an entirely new experience in Colorado.  The altitude and the dry air played havoc with my sinuses, and often I felt lightheaded or suddenly fatigued.  Eventually I heard fluid sloshing around in my good ear, which was alarming enough that I saw a doctor.  He was a young ear specialist, and said it was the altitude.  He asked about my hearing, and I told him of my deafness in one ear.  He tested it, and thought the problem was in the middle ear.  He got very excited, because, though there was nothing that could be done for it when I first was diagnosed as a child, there was treatment now.  He was so happy that I might get my hearing back.  But he did another test and his face fell.  No, it was the inner ear after all, and still permanent hearing loss.  I had been on this roller coaster before so I wasn’t much fazed, but he took it hard.

 Throughout all this I kept writing.  Either falling asleep or just waking up on that shaggy floor in Boulder one day, I had the germ of an idea that would obsess me for decades, and lead to a novel and a screenplay in several versions. It was a good story and pieces of it have appeared in other people’s movies and in digital life since then.  But what I wrote then was a story about something happening in Colorado that summer.

 Somehow I missed the controversy that summer over a scheduled atomic bomb explosion in Colorado, the incredible purpose of which was to test the feasibility of extracting natural gas by exploding 100 to 200 underground nuclear bombs across the gas field.  There were protests organized by activists from Boulder and Denver, but apparently there weren’t very many of them.  And in early September, the bomb was actually exploded underground, with demonstrators bouncing in the air above it.  (I was gone by then.)  But eventually voters got it banned, and the idea failed anyway—too much radiation in the gas, duh.

 However, there was another controversy that did get my attention. Just about a month before I got there, a fire at the huge Rocky Flats plant that manufactured plutonium components, and was highly radioactive, got people wondering what other hazards were around them.  While I was in Boulder it was revealed that at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal there was some 21,000 clusters of nerve gas in explosive bombs—enough to kill two trillion people, if there were that many.  They’d been manufacturing it there for years.  The canisters were basically stored out in the open and decaying.  A stray bullet or a lightning strike that set off a chain reaction, a scientist said, could wipe out a lot of Colorado in a matter of minutes.

 It was insanity on such a huge scale that it called for a kind of Doctor Strangelove approach in the less that successful short story I wrote towards the end of my stay in Colorado.  Bill Stage read it and liked it, and showed it to a friend he especially respected when he stopped by.  He read quickly through it and made a face, directing his dour judgment to Stage, although I was in the room.

 I was crushed enough to remember this.  It wasn’t just that it was hard to be objective about new work, especially at a time of fluid standards, but that so much depended on the last thing I wrote.  It could be the key to my future, which would go a long way to directing my present.

 That said, reading it now, the guy wasn’t wrong.The main plot was funny, though perhaps not as ironic as I meant it, and I can see what I was trying to do with the subplot in contrast, but it was especially awful.  It was at best a shaky first draft.

 Besides which, the reality was more absurd than my story, and became even stranger.  Nerve gas production stopped in 1969, and Rocky Mountain Arsenal eventually became, first, a Superfund cleanup site, and now, a National Wildlife Refuge.

 All through my Colorado stay, I saw Joni whenever we could manage it. She visited me in Boulder at least once, when Stage was away for a few days.  She also invited me down to Denver to meet her sister and her sister’s husband when he came to town.  He was a law student at Yale.

 What she didn’t say was that her mother would also be there, for our first encounter ever. We met at some kind of public swimming pool, so I was basically on nearly naked view for judgment by the family.  Everybody got along fine, it seemed.  The only memorable moment was at poolside when I turned around to look down at the level below.  It was lined with people in lounge chairs sunbathing.  One was a teenage girl in her skimpy swimsuit who looked up at me and extravagantly licked her lips.  I turned away so she wouldn’t see me laughing.  I was living the theatre of the absurd.

 Another time I remember specifically we were together was on July 24, the day the Apollo 11 astronauts were scheduled to land on the moon.  Joni arrived with her friend Kathy, for a drive along mountain roads.  My  Boulder days were marked by the huge flat rock faces visible from Cascade Avenue and the university campus.  Now we were twisting through what were literally rocky mountains, with little vegetation.  Maybe it was my mood as much as the scenery, but sitting in the back seat while Kathy and Joni chatted in the front, I felt like I was getting a preview of the moon. 

 Kathy drove us to her house, and we watched the moon landing, and saw Neil Armstrong become the first human to touch another world, in the basement rec room.

 When we had sold and given away the elements of our Galesburg household and headed west, the ultimate goal was California.  This was a pause on our way to the Bay Area, specifically Berkeley, where we both had friends.  The last patch of the Colorado interlude was waiting for a “driveaway:” some unknown car a stranger paid an agency to arrange to be driven to California.  High and dry Colorado was not wearing well with me.  I yearned for an ocean.

 

At last we scored a car, and we prepared to leave.  I took the bus down to Denver to pick it up.  Joni met me there.  We were going to leave the next day.  She packed an elaborate picnic lunch, complete with a bottle of wine.  We went to Washington Park in Denver, near the sculpture of Eugene Fields’ most famous characters: Wynken, Blynken and Nod.  In my perennially ongoing college novel, three of my main characters being swept along by the tides of the times were Lincoln, Blakely and Nod.  Eugene Fields also figured in the mythology of the Illinois college I’d invented, since he’d been a Knox student for a year and later  a columnist in Chicago. But as it happened, he’d previously worked on a newspaper in Denver.  Of course, Joni knew all of this. The sculpture was her surprise.

 We spread the picnic out under a tree near the sculpture.  After I’d had a glass or two, Joni told me that she had decided not to go with me to California.  She was instead going to Connecticut, where her sister had secured a teaching job for her.  However, she though it was important for me to go on to California myself. She did not use the phrase “to sow your wild oats” but I thought that was the basic idea.  I could rejoin her later in Connecticut. 

 Who could blame her?  California wasn’t a plan.  It’s hard to say what it was. I won't go into the various ways I was a jerk.  Still, I drove the car to Boulder in shock.  The next day I felt worse—lightheaded, queasy, weak.  This didn't seem to be the way to start a solo drive for a thousand miles across challenging country I'd never seen.  Instead I drove the car back to the driveaway agency in Denver.  Eventually, Joni’s cousin Mary and her boyfriend decided to take his vacation in California, and they kindly ferried me along with them. Their camper wasn’t exactly a wooden shoe, but I had definitely sailed off.  They dropped me in Berkeley. 

R.I.P. 2022

 

I first knew of Barbara Ehrenreich from a mutual acquaintance as another freelance writer struggling to get published and especially to get paid.  This puts additional light on her most cited work, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which she documented her own experiences working at minimum wage jobs. 

 But she was also well-educated and well-connected, and was published in the best newspapers and periodicals.  Besides her single subject books, like the aforementioned 2001 volume, her periodical pieces were collected. For instance a volume covering the 1980s, which was for her (and many others) a grim and disenchanting decade, as reflected in her title: The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed.  Her 1995 collection is titled The Snarling Citizen. All of these essays exhibit her wit as well as insight. She spotted important destructive trends which unfortunately still pertain. Throughout the decades, she wrote with great acuity about the conditions and injustices women face (and she faced some painful ones herself), and for that and her lively if uncomfortable reporting on both gender and class, she deserves to be read and remembered, learned from and imitated. 

 Greg Bear was a productive and insightful science fiction writer who I met at a Star Trek convention in Seattle, where he was based.  I especially admire his visionary novel Darwin’s Radio. 

Hazel Henderson

I once saw Hazel Henderson essentially take over a World Future Society convention.  As a futurist, environmental activist and economist, she was most dynamic in person, but she reached wider audiences with her books, including Creating Alternative Futures and Building a Win-Win World.

 Suzi Gablik was an artist who wrote about art.  In 1970 she published the first in- depth book on Rene Magritte (and helped make him the highly visible artist he is today), after living with the artist and his wife. In the 1990s she broadened her conception of art to include Indigenous and other worldviews, publishing The Reenchanment of Art. As she became more concerned about self-destructive civilization, she published Conversations before the end of time, a collection of amazing interviews. Both I consider to be landmark books.

 Ted Mooney’s day job was editing Art in America (so he may have edited Suzi Gablik.)  But his contribution to literature is his individual vision in four novels, the first being the best known: Easy Travel To Other Planets in 1981, which an American literary critic placed on his list of the best 100 novels of the twentieth century. 

Roger Angell was best known for his writing on baseball in the quintessential New Yorker style, but he also wrote fiction and other non-fiction (plus the witty annual New Yorker Christmas rhymes), as well as serving as the New Yorker’s fiction editor for many years.  In that capacity he wrote me the most flattering and most heart-breaking (literary) rejection letter of my life, in which he said the New Yorker “could hardly bear not to publish” my story.  History shows they all managed pretty well. Angell was 101.

  Doris Grumbach wrote novels and was known for literary criticism in the New Republic and other periodicals.  Among those she reviewed (approvingly) was novelist Maureen Howard, a writer I also enjoyed.

I admired Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. Hilary Mantel wrote various kinds of novels and stories but is most famous for her historical fiction. Nicholas Evans was a British broadcaster and writer whose best-known book is The Horse Whisperer.

 Larry Woiwode published much-praised fiction, essays, biography and poetry from 1969 to 2022. Besides writing some 18 books, he taught writing and ran university writing programs, so his students got the benefit of somebody who walked the walk.  

Before he was a familiar narrator for historical and nature documentaries, David McCullough was a prize-winning author on mostly historical subjects.  Educated at Yale and a model of aristocratic culture, he was born and raised in Pittsburgh, which may have given him particular perspective on the subject of his first book, the Johnstown Flood.

Mike Davis wrote penetrating books about cities and their future, especially Los Angeles. From 1971 to 2012, Todd Gitlin wrote about mass media and politics. Peace activist Staunton Lynd wrote and edited books on political action and nonviolence. William Rivers Pitt is best known for his reporting and political analysis of the American war in Iraq.  P.J. O’Rourke wrote from the other end of the political spectrum, though he started out as just a funny guy. 

Then there are those who are prominent for reasons other than writing, but also published useful books. The latest name added to this year’s rolls is Barbara Walters, whose death was announced on December 30.  She was 93.  She was a television news pioneer and an expert interviewer, and she was famous.  Though I never met her, I once interviewed her on the phone for a piece on Hugh Downs.  Because of her schedule she had to call me, and I didn’t know when she would.  When she called—evidently in the makeup chair for some television appearance—I was in the shower.  So I in fact interviewed Barbara Walters while naked.

 Others who authored books in addition to their day jobs were former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (whose penultimate book was titled Fascism: A Warning), Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the Soviet Union; and for all I know, Pope Benedict and Queen Elizabeth. 

Scientist James Lovelock saw Earth as a living system, developing (with others) the Gaia Theory, and warned of the dire consequences to the planet of the climate crisis in a series of popular books.  He had 102 years of a remarkable life. Environmentalist and writer David Foreman founded Earth First!

 Revered Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh reached millions with his lectures, audio meditations and his many books. Stage director Peter Brook wrote several important books about theatre.  Before he made films, Jean-Luc Godard wrote about them, and continued to talk about filmmaking at book length.

 Print and television journalists who published books (and some who didn’t) but passed in 2022 include: film critic Sheila Benson, Mark Shields, Bernard Shaw, Bill Plante, Jim Angle, Michael Gerson, John DiStasio, Francis X. Clines, John Hughes, Ann Garrels, Richard Lopez, Shelby Scott (who I remember from WBZ in Boston), and Robert Herman.

 

Chronicled in books and other media, the legendary work of World War II and fashion photography Tony Vaccaro, and of the photos of Tim Page in Vietnam and afterwards.

 Some subjects of journalistic and other writing that should be mentioned but haven’t fit into previous categories include General Charles McGee, last of the Tuskegee airmen of World War II, and Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg; American Indian activist Clyde Bellecourt, artists Claus Oldenberg and Margaret Keane (those big-eyed figures popular in the 60s); sportscaster Vin Scully, men’s basketball great Bill Russell and women’s basketball great Lusia Harris; legal scholar Lani Guinier, co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund Art Cooley.

 In general, writers don’t get a lot of respect in America, though they may be celebrated locally or within a profession.  So whatever degree of success or failure, fame or obscurity these following writers had in their lifetimes, as long as they have a book or a periodical piece in a library somewhere, or something buried in the depths of cyberspace, there’s a chance some stranger may read it, and their words will live again.

 Also passing away in 2022 were: Andre Leon Talley, Anne Harris, Barbara Love, Geoffrey Asche, Terry Garrity (The Sensuous Woman), Carleton Carpenter, Bruce Duffy, Valerie Boyd, Leonard Kessler, Paul Cantor, Shirley Hughes, Sally Watson, Bethany Campbell, Thomas F. Staley, Sydney Shoemaker, Francois Bott, Tom Maddox, Julia Powell, Sharon Presley, JFK conspiracy theorist David Lifton, Stuart Woods, Joanna Clark, Raymond Briggs, Andrew Hubner, Helen Potrebenko, Terrance Green, Mark Girouard, Michael Malone, Antonin Bajaja, Sue Hardesty, Luis Agular, Jean Franco.

 Poets Gerald Stern, Peter Landborn Wilson, Simon Perchik, Dennis Wilson, Noah Eli Gordon. Editor and publisher Jason Epstein, and literary agent Sterling Lord (I was once represented by his esteemed agency.) Let this list also honor the writers whose deaths were unnoticed.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

Books That Matter 2022

 Lots of books are published each year, and many of them contribute in some way: they inform, remember, correct the record, advance a new idea, edify, inspire and/or entertain.  But there are a smaller number of books that matter.

Though what matters can mean different things.  Some books matter because of their consequences over time.  Novels (like plays, movies and songs) can become beloved, or in the overused term, "iconic" or even "classic." Typically they speak to different people in different ways, saying different things to each.  Yet they remain memorable for many, and eventually become cultural touchstones that nearly everyone knows at least a little.  

However, identifying such books is best accomplished years afterwards.  Less time needs to pass perhaps to see a novel's influence in the world.  For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future, published almost two years ago,  has clearly become a book that matters.  Not only is it the author's best-selling novel but it has entered into, and in some ways focused, discussions on how to address the climate crisis future, not only in the U.S. but perhaps even more strongly in Europe and internationally.  Richard Powers' two most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment, have also exerted strong responses and focused emotions, inquiry and discussion on a range of related topics: not just forest issues, but questions of what constitutes life and intelligence, and the relationships of humans to the rest of life--what is increasingly called the "more than human world."   

Nonfiction books can perhaps be more easily identified more quickly as books that matter.  Published nearly a decade ago now, Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is clearly a book that matters.  Applying contemporary economic and historical analysis to very basic questions, Picketty both inspired and coalesced important thinking about basic changes in economic structures needed to make a stable and better future.  Its analysis of the failures of today's economic order and prevailing conservative philosophy, particularly showing the dangers of the huge gaps between the few at the top and everyone else, has become influential even to approaches less radical than Picketty might favor, such as a simple return to the Keynesian economics that prevailed in the U.S. from FDR until Reagan.  That analysis which shows that prosperity is attained by supporting the middle class and public sector investment is becoming U.S. policy again under the Biden administration, in what journalist Michael Tomasky is calling Middle-Out Economics, the title of his new book: perhaps a candidate for a book that matters. (In the meantime, this Politico piece and interview is a good summary.)

But books can matter before their influence is measured simply by being crucial contributions on crucial topics. They are groundbreaking in important ways, though not necessarily unique.  Their importance depends as well on how riveting they are to read.  I have several candidates for books that matter on this basis, published in the past year or so.  It's not an exhaustive list; perhaps the minimum.  The order in which I present them does not imply rank.  What links them is that they present in a generous if not full way a dramatically new synthesis that tells us something startling about our world that upends conventional wisdom and offers a new framework for perceiving and acting in the world.  In that sense, they bring the news.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Published towards the end of last year, this book is already influencing newer work.  Its scope is enormous: nothing less than the human story.  The linear story of development (or evolution of society) is a comfortable one for many reasons.  It simplifies textbook categories, and it leads logically and inevitably to contemporary "advanced" societies, the apex of it all: from caveman to capitalism.  Who loves this story?  The same type folks who extracted "Social Darwinism" from the complexities of Darwinian evolution.  Robber barons like John D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie saw that it was good, and gave it their monied blessings.

According to the two Davids, both archaeologists, the story is wrong, right from the beginning. Modern humans weren't the sole apex of evolution--other humanoids had real societies, too, with all the elements of intelligence and expression.  We carry some of their genes. 

Society did not develop or even change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to urban.  All these forms coexisted and intermingled, and there were many hybrids.  There were urban societies without kings or rulers, and tyrannical hunter-gatherers.  The Davids may be a little judgey in their descriptions of the varieties of Native (North and South) American societies, but they make their point--they were not simple or primitive or identical; they were often sophisticated, complex, various and sometimes large.  

This book emphasized an historical point that has since been taken up by others: that the form of democracy that governed the Six Nations Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee) that lasted longer than our democracy has so far, was patiently explained to Benjamin Franklin and others by some of its leaders, and informed the formation of the non-Native American democracy.  Too bad it didn't also adopt the Prime Directive of the  Haudenosaunee: in all decisions take into account the seventh generation to come.

This book of 692 pages is replete with examples, written with verve and wit, so it can read like a wonder book.  We don't really need Marvel or the other purveyors of outsized fantasies:  it's there in the histories that have either only recently discovered or studied, or conveniently ignored because they complicate or contradict the main story--the one that has gone a long way towards the fix we're in, on the brink of destroying it all.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong 

In Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, the character that most readers noted and remembered is a woman scientist who discovers that trees in a forest communicate with each other, and help each other chemically to ward off disease.  She is ridiculed by scandalized scientists and forced out of academia until her research is vindicated, and she becomes a kind of folk hero.

 This character is based on a real life researcher, Suzanne Simard, whose book Finding the Mother Tree subsequently became popular.  But even more popular was a book on the same theme published a few years earlier by forester Peter Wohlleben, with the more arresting title The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.

 That book’s success, expanding on revelations about the complex life of the forest, led to a series of similar books by Wohlleben and many others, with titles often beginning with “The Hidden Life of” or “The Secret Life of” various animals, plants and other natural phenomena, including ice.  These books reflected new research but also observations that had gone unnoticed or derided because they contradicted established views on the natural world as comprised of simple if sometimes mysterious living objects, of interest mostly as exploitable for human ends.

 All of this helped prepare readers for the June 2022 publication of An Immense World by the much praised science journalist Ed Yong. It turns out that everything has a life hidden to humans, partly because our current preconceptions block awareness, but also because other lifeforms experience the world in vastly different ways.

 The key concept here is umwelt, named by early 20^th century zoologist Jakob von Uexkull.  It refers to the sensory world of animals, determined by what senses they have and what they can do.  As Yong demonstrates through scientists he visits, these vary considerably.  Some creatures taste with their feet, others hear ultrasound or see into the ultraviolet. They may sense electromagnetic waves.

   Senses that we share with other animals are used in different ways, and the balance among them can be radically different.  Dogs smell and hear better than they see—so their world is one of aroma trails.  Even their color vision is different, and one of the more startling illustrations in this book compares the colors in a typical room that we see, and how dogs see them.

Though sometimes based on dismissed and forgotten insights, most of the research is new, as scientists use new technologies to dispel old assumptions.  That birds can’t smell is one of them, but there are many more.  Some of these discoveries are astonishing:  for instance, the vocalizations and communication that goes on out of human hearing range.  We can detect only a fraction of whales’ songs, and it turns out that mice sing to each other.  At some points this book starts to sound like Douglas Adams’ humorous takes in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (that mice actually run experiments on humans, that dolphins can escape human catastrophe) may have more substance than expected.

 Apart from the wondrous details, there are larger points here.  Humans assumed a lot about other life based on their own sensorium, but we’ve missed quite a lot.  “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way.  To us, it feels all-encompassing.  It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know.  This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”

 But science and other forms of observation at the service of human imagination can help us see not only some of the ways other lifeforms live and communicate, but how our own activities disrupt their lives.  Light pollution wreaks havoc on various birds and other animals; noise pollution in the oceans endangers whales and other sea creatures.  

Despite the book's length, Yong's precise but informal voice and his flourishes of wit make it eminently readable, yet the science reporting itself is admirable. Even the footnotes are interesting reading. It helps that what the science is reporting remains continuously fascinating. 

 This research has greatly complicated human conceptions of what other lifeforms are, and expands the notions, extent and range of sentience and intelligence. It is this theme that James Bridle takes up in his book.

 Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence

By James Bridle 

Bridle writes and thinks chiefly about technologies, and his disquiet about the direction and limitations of artificial intelligence sent him to explore other kinds of intelligences in the natural world.

 Again, the concept of Umwelt is evoked. Bridle also refers to both Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as starting points for his own explorations.  He ranges far and wide, from our humanoid ancestors to the intelligence of slime mold, and applies his observations to the new machines.  “The idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligence is the central theme of this book,” he writes.  “It emanates from a wider and deeper dawning: the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.”

 Bridle’s cogent and provocative musings apply not only to the possible futures of machine intelligence but, as Yong’s book does, to the endangered life of this planet and the necessity to actively preserve it.  As we discover and admit the extent of intelligent life and its beautiful complexity, we are close to destroying it.

 The singular and expressive organization of information and the inspired insights more than compensate for some slackness and an editorial lapse or two. Bridle's ideas and their expression in this book merit serious attention.

This recent run of books on non-human life, culminating so far in Yong and Bridle, should end any credibility given to the traditional notion of animals as natural automatons, important only as they are useful to humans, with no feelings to consider or intelligence to respect and learn from.  Gaia expanded the definition of life, and now we grapple with kinds of intelligence not only in familiar animals but plants, microbes and other life. We'd better start learning.

 One of the ideas that Bridle interrogates is the notion promoted by digital industries and other enthusiasts that intelligence is primarily based on calculation.  That is a theme in the latest novel by Dave Eggers.

 The Every: Or At Last A Sense of Order, Or The Final Days of Free Will, or Limitless Choice is Killing The World

A novel by Dave Eggers 

The Hollywood pitch for this novel might be Alice in Wonderland meets Nineteen Eighty-Four, or perhaps Brave New World would be a closer match to its onrushing dystopia.

 In this stand-alone sequel to Eggers’ The Circle, the Facebook-like corporation has merged with Amazon (referred to here as the Jungle) to form a monopolistic continuum, not only of business, not only of culture, but of shared reality.  Welcome to The Every.

 Delaney is a young woman intent on destroying The Every from the inside.  She is intelligent, intuitive, creative and acutely observant, but the plot hinges on her also being repeatedly naïve about the outcome of her efforts, as she proposes a series of outrageous changes that turn out to be big hits with The Every users, which seems to include Everyone.

 Eggers is not shy about stating his theme early in the novel: “the war on subjectivity.”  Everything is objectified to decision by calculation. (This includes the maximum number of allowable pages in a readable novel, which is 577—as it happens, the exact length of this book.) Ironically this also results in the disappearance of actual objects and authentic life, in favor of digital imagery and ideological judgments.  The result is a society caught in self-referential stasis, that punishes difference. 

 The novel does not fall easily into political categories. It exposes corporate conformism, but also its effect of cancel culture. The reasons (or excuses) given for much of the social pressure to conform are to save the environment and promote social justice.

 Delaney is a former forest ranger, so it may have seemed natural to her to organize an outing of The Every employees to visit Pacific Coast seals, but it was a disaster from start to finish, especially when they were confronted with the realities of these animals and their lives.  This incident is outrageously exaggerated and yet totally believable, and ultimately dystopic, especially given what these previous books tell us.

 It’s also funny, as is the novel generally, in a Dr. Strangelove sort of way. It has some characteristics of a satire of a monomanical corporate culture becoming a monoculture at large. Delaney’s best friend and fellow skeptic is the first to succumb to The Every’s embrace, supplying a horror movie vibe (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)  Delaney’s own fate involves a confrontation with the head of The Every, who was the naïve young woman protagonist of The Circle.

 There are many other related issues raised in the novel, in an entertaining narrative context that feels real right now.  The story is in development for a TV series, but right now this is a book that matters.

These four books matter because they give us crucial new information that creates a new context of how we see the world, our society and ourselves.  Right now there is no more important context that the relationship of humanity to the rest of life, and secondarily to the digital life humans are creating (for if we don't solve the survival problems associated with the first, the second won't much matter.)  They are robust enough to generate further discussion, and they cry out for action. 

History of My Reading: To Boulder Go 1969 (Part 1)

Fort Collins, Colorado 1969

In June 1969 Joni and I left Galesburg and headed west.  She had her Knox College degree, though I believe we left before graduation ceremonies. Our immediate destination was Colorado, where Joni would visit with her parents and her older sister, who was also visiting from Connecticut.  I had a bed in the basement of a house in Fort Collins, and then a space on the floor in a Boulder apartment. 

 Partly this was because I was not a popular person with her parents, or at least, they did not approve of their daughter being involved with this feckless hippie with impractical dreams and dubious prospects.  And long hair.

 But I also had a reason to be in Boulder: I had applied and been accepted at a summer writing workshop, officially the annual Writers Conference at the University of Colorado.  For even with the beginning of my disillusion at the Iowa Writers Workshop, I had no other direction or vocation. 

 Even after Iowa, I kept writing and sending things out to magazines, literary and otherwise.  I still have appointment calendars from 1968 and 1969 that record nothing but notes of poems or stories sent out on that date and to which publication, and notes on the dates when they came back with a rejection slip, and notes on the date I sent them somewhere else.

 In those days there was varied advice on how to manage manuscripts.  The accepted rule then was you could submit a poem or story to only one publication at a time.  Some counseled sending a story to “top markets” first, and work down to the little magazines.  Or (with poems in particular) start with publications that favor the style or subject of your work.

 I tried them both.  I wasn’t very skilled at either, and wound up trusting to luck and serendipity, especially when desperate, which was frequently. I was also easily discouraged, so after a few rejections the stories never made it far down the supposed literary food chain. 

 This was when you actually received rejection slips and letters, instead of an unwholesome silence, a judgmental void.  There was a kind of code to rejections as well.  A form rejection slip, usual polite but impersonal, was the bottom rung.  A note or a few handwritten words indicating your work had some merit was better.  A request for more, signed by an actual editor, was near the top.

 The best rejection slips came from a small literary magazine in the Bay Area called Kayak, edited by George Hitchcock.  Hitchcock, Kayak and especially the rejection slips have become legendary. 

The slips themselves used an arcane clip art.  Apparently the art itself made pretty clear when the submission was horrible. (Fortunately I never got one of those, but I’ve seen them now online.)  The others were funny—or as funny as rejection slips could be.  The one I prized did include a handwritten request for more poems, signed by Hitchcock.  (I came across it recently and put it in a safe place.  As soon as I figure out where that is, I'll scan and post it.  This example is off the Internet.)

Kayak published mostly poetry by the likes of Robert Bly and James Wright.  Hitchcock liked the slightly surreal—right up my alley. Though I gave up before getting a poem published there, in the fullness of years I was grateful to be among the near misses. And I was able to return the compliment by favorably reviewing Hitchcock’s collection of his own work in the San Francisco Chronicle, where I mentioned the rejection slips.  His editor let me know that Hitchcock, then in his 90s, had gotten a kick out of it. 

 But during that 1968-69 year I only got a couple of poems published in a really obscure magazine called the Riverside Quarterly, besides a fiction in the first issue of Knox’s new literary magazine Catch.  My first noted literary magazine acceptance was forwarded to Colorado from the Carleton Miscellany, for, prophetically, a kind of book review or appreciation of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  Check included.

 So a writing workshop in Colorado was another opportunity for what’s now called networking, and maybe learning something useful, if not about writing, then about the writing biz.  Besides, going to school was about all I knew how to do.

  There were several name writers who taught separate workshops over two weeks in June.  I was in the class run by Harlan Ellison.  He came from a different tradition than the writers in Iowa City, or the ones we read in literature classes.  He wrote for pulp magazines and now glossy and prestige magazines, primarily science fiction but also horror and erotica, sometimes under pseudonyms, as well as nonfiction of various kinds.  He went to Hollywood and wrote all kinds of movies and television.  He won lots of awards, mostly for genre fiction.  He wrote a lot.  He’d published hundreds of stories by this time, when he was in the early prime of a long career.  His formal education consisted of 18 months of college.

 Ellison was known as a rebel, a gadfly, and an aggressive adherent and promoter of New Wave science fiction, the latest revolution in the field.  He backed up his Civil Rights and anti-war credentials with a hip look and attitude.  He came into the classroom in bright colorful shirts of a unique style—maybe Carnaby Street meets Sunset Strip.  I remember especially the huge floppy collars with a kind of exaggerated Peter Pan collar shape. Or maybe the memory is metaphorical, for that was a major impression I had—that with his boyish face, his enthusiasm and combative energy, and his small stature, he was a kind of a countercultural Peter Pan.  Although at the time I met him he was 38.

 Ellison’s brash energy and entertaining patter in the classroom perhaps obscured as much as expressed his actual intelligence. You can see something of what he was like in his interviews with Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow Show a few years later, some still on YouTube.  (He was one of Snyder’s favorite guests.) 

 At the end of our first class he gave us an assignment to write a few hundred words on the old Reader’s Digest canard: the most unforgettable character we’d ever met.  I wrote about a fictitious person based on someone I’d just met in Fort Collins, although it ended with a surreal fantasy.

  I was still sleeping in the basement of a house in Fort Collins rented by, among others, the boyfriend of Joni’s cousin Mary.  One night Mary took me to a mountain encampment of some of her freaky friends, and I set my story there.  It was centered on another young woman who was there and who Mary had talked about, but it was only vaguely based on her. The 1968 Roman Polanski film of “Rosemary’s Baby” must have been a hot topic (though I’m not sure I’d seen it) because the piece was also a kind of parody of the idea of an unusual birth.  It was called “Geraldine’s Baby.”

 I obviously had been to the University of Colorado Norlin Library by then, or at least walked up to it, because I used the motto engraved in stone above its entrance as a quote before the story: “Who Knows Only His Own Generation Remains Always A Child.”  But I took from it something other than the intended message. In just about everything I wrote, I was trying to express the realities and the points of view of my generation, and why we rejected the past; why we fought so hard to protect our innocence.

 Still, I wanted to live a life as a writer, and so I was of at least two minds—and about three hearts—about the writing biz.  I was repelled by the pretensions and fake preciousness I’d seen in the academy (and feared I saw in the mirror) but I had not given up the large ambitions. Still, I’d grown up on science fiction, and now Vonnegut and the New Wave writers were bringing contemporary ideas and approaches to it.  Besides, what fun it would be to be published in a pulp magazine!  So I was more than willing to listen to Harlan Ellison.

 These workshops were also useful as a way to evaluate where you were in relation to your peers, and to professionals.  I was pleasantly surprised that Ellison singled out my story for praise at the next class. But it also made me greedy.  Ellison had edited the New Wave anthology Dangerous Visions, and he was editing its sequel.  The next day he also praised the story of another participant in our workshop, and word went around that he bought that story for the new anthology.  I was determined to make that sale with my next story.

 At some point I moved to a more convenient distance, to a small but fairly swanky apartment on Cascade Avenue in Boulder, and a sleeping bag spot on a shag carpet in the living room.  My host was a tall man with a big beard and long hair named Bill Stage.  He had known Joni’s Knox friend Kathy, also from Denver, and he grudgingly agreed to let me stay one night.  But when he saw me he had the opposite reaction that Joni’s parents had—which was typical of those days.  Once he saw that I wasn’t a frat boy but another long-hair, he relaxed and told me I could crash there as long as I wanted.

 My longer story for the workshop was titled “Escape From Cloud Village.”  It was about a young woman fresh from college who tries to leave her planned suburb but it won’t let her—lawn sprinklers and hoses, faux antique lampposts, even her own car, conspire against her.  Looking at it now I see wisps of Vonnegut and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.  But it does anticipate in a way some of the suburban creepiness of my contemporary, Steven Speilberg.  As well as perhaps one way of looking at future events in my own life.

 The story earned me a one-on-one conference with Harlan Ellison.  I got a typed note from him on the same kind of yellow second sheet paper I used: “Bring this in to talk to me.  It is extraordinarily good.  And in some silly ways you can avoid, very bad.  We should rap about this one.  You might be able to sell it.”

 I don’t think my conference was his first of the day, for when I arrived Ellison was restless and a bit distracted.  As I entered the room he put a record on a tiny record player and began dancing with a young woman companion in her flower power mini-dress.  I didn’t know how to react to that, except that I recall I had the feeling that maybe he was trying too hard.

 I remember a sentence he complimented (“do you know how good this is?”), the word he said didn’t mean what I thought it meant (not entirely true, but he was right that it was the wrong word.)  He may have told me that the mother’s speech was too much like a speech—anyway, he should have.  And I waited for more but...that was pretty much it.  I don’t remember a clear direction or advice on publishing it, and above all, no offer to buy it for the second Dangerous Visions anthology. He was ready for another dance.

 So I left, dissatisfied. I didn’t know what to do next. I was pretty much where I’d been before the workshop.  More generally, lost in the big world, I was feeling the pressures of reality, though I fought them off.  Even as I knew my work wasn’t quite there, I didn’t yet have the experience nor the temperament to know how to make it better.  I rejected the uncomprehending, doubting or dismissive voices from outside, but their echoes were inside, and deep.  I mostly had the wild delight of creating, as I fought off the fear of a budding self or soul being obliterated. 

 As for my haughty hopes about the anthology, it would be several years before Again, Dangerous Visions was published. Scanning the contents, I don’t think that story from someone in my workshop is in it—at least I didn’t recognize the name.  I did, however, recognize many names, like Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and other established science fiction writers.  And a novella called “The Word For The World Is Forest” by Ursula K. LeGuin, which won that year’s Hugo Award and is now one of the immortals, as well as one of my personal classics.  It makes my greed especially laughable. 

 The workshops concluded with an outdoor evening of readings by participants.  It was an open reading, so I signed up to read two poems.  I didn’t get on for awhile, which turned out to be to my benefit. 

 The poems I selected were fairly long, and they were meant to be read aloud—in a way the culmination of my experiments at Knox and Iowa.  One was a sound poem titled “Notable American Fascists.”  Each section ended with a name that was well-known then, though mostly forgotten now, except possibly for J.Edgar Hoover.  The audience loved it, and excited the performer in me.  So I took the microphone off the stand and held it close to make the sounds into it.

 The other was called “Litany”: a form I knew well.  I especially remember the mornings in 6^th and 7^th grade we spent in the dark, cavernous Cathedral, drowsily listening on aching knees to one or another of the Catholic litanies intoned on appropriate days of the liturgical calendar.  I recall writing the first draft of it in Galesburg, possibly alone one night in Robin Metz’s house the previous summer, on folded gray-white paper that had been the wrapping of a book.

 My litany was full of word play and extravagant language, occasionally undercut by a joke (a series of tremulous long lines beginning with the vocative “O,” then undercut by “O Christmas tree.”)  The point of view also resonated with the 1969 audience: “Alkaseltzer of the middle class, you O most mascara-ed of mistreated infants, of wandering and wounded species, instincts gone weird beyond recall”/ O blossom of the tentative, frightened flower!”

 I don't think it holds up now, but it worked for that moment.  It benefited by being preceded by the hushed lines of short poems grounded in moments of personal experiences.  My lines released that quiet audience tension in recognition and laughter. 

 But that was turnabout—for these poems on a page would likely have been met with embarrassed silence in a workshop classroom.  They were meant for this, for performance.  So it surprises me now to realize that this was the first time I read my verses in public away from Knox College.  And it would turn out to also be the last time.

 Towards the end of the evening, Harlan Ellison swept in with his entourage, and read a poem he’d evidently just written about ungrateful students who only wanted a piece of him.  And then he swept out.

 
Another memory of this writers conference is distinct and separate from these other memories. It involves a party.

 There were always parties connected with these events involving writers, and in those days they were drunken parties. This one was at a private residence. I remember two older writers.  One was the novelist Vance Bourjaily, a writer I’d read and respected (and still respect.)

  The other was a man I’d not heard of, and whose name I can no longer remember.  (I should say at this point that in searching for a photo for yet another writer at this conference, I came upon a newspaper story about the conference itself that provided his name, which led me to more information about him. But I’m going to stick to my original plan of keeping him anonymous. However, I thought I remembered his first name—and I did.)

 He was in his late 40s but seemed older to me. I remember him in a dark suit.  He was slightly built, though perhaps a bit paunchy, with a bristly beard. When I first met him, he was an easy, nervy raconteur with a wealth of stories and gossip about other writers, artists and actors—his acquaintances ranged from Robert Frost and Joseph Heller to Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis-- and especially about editors, publishers and Hollywood producers.  He’d lived mostly in New York in the 1950s and early 60s.  I was among a small group listening to him. The theme mostly was how corrupt the whole writing game was.  Good writing wasn’t valued, it wasn’t even wanted. 

He had done a lot of writing for print—mostly magazines but also books, and some work for film and television, often using pseudonyms. He claimed he had ghost-written popular novels, including a giant best-seller by a woman novelist, perhaps Jacqueline Susann. The manuscript was so bad when he got it, he said, it nearly drove him crazy.  It cost him more than he was paid to do it. He was funny, acerbic, and seemed to know a lot.  He was smoking and drinking all the while.  We probably all were.

 After the party I caught a ride back to campus.  I was in the front seat and he was in the back with his current girlfriend. I gathered that he’d been divorced several times. He was still talking.  Now the undercurrent of bitterness in his stories became prominent. He was drunk. We probably all were.

 There was a funny conversation in the front seat, so I wasn’t paying direct attention to him.  But I could hear him getting angrier, less coherent.  His girlfriend was trying to calm him, but then he turned on her. He was nasty to her. That’s what got my attention.  That’s what made me resolve I wasn’t going to end up like him, even if it meant giving up this whole idea of being a writer.  I’m not sure all of this was entirely conscious at the time, but looking back, that’s the substance of that moment.

 It was only after I came upon his name while looking for a photo of someone else at the conference that I learned that he died just a few years after that night.  I don’t condemn his life.  He left children and now grandchildren, he had interesting and accomplished friends, he wrote for high profile publications and was by most measures successful.  But he remained for me a cautionary tale. 

Bourjaily

When we got back to campus, he was not among those of us who joined a few others in the dorm where some of the guest writers were staying. We were in some sort of lounge, and I wound up at the piano, thumping out the blues progressions that were very close to the sum total of my repertoire.  At that point Vance Bourjaily got excited, disappeared for a moment and suddenly returned with a trombone in hand. 

 I’ll never forget the expectant look in his eyes as he anticipated a mellow jazz jam.  He assumed I was an actual pianist. I wish to this day that I had come up with at least a chord progression to carry him.  I think I tried, but others intervened with their musical demands, the scene dissolved into chaos again, and in short order I left.  I was a few days shy of my 23^rd birthday. My sojourn in Boulder and Colorado was just beginning. 

History of My Reading: Billy Pilgrim in Galesburg

Standish Park Galesburg 1903

  After my last draft adventure, and my disillusion and early sorrow in Iowa City, I was back in Galesburg. Joni was completing her Knox College degree requirements the second half of that 1968-69 school year. We lived together in an apartment just off campus, not far from Post Hall, a quiet duplex (476 S. West?) with Skip Peterson’s parents (his father taught art at Knox) on the other side.

 I have a few memories of reading linked to a physical location during this time. In that apartment, in the first floor study, I recall reading Euripides’ play The Trojan Women in some collection, and wanting to adapt it for a contemporary audience of the Vietnam era. It was a great idea but too ambitious for me to actually get very far. However, in just a few years (1971) its anti-war relevance led to a feature film starring Vanessa Redgrave, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Pappas and Geneveive Bujold. 

Another physical memory is of reading a fiction paperback called Jesus Christs in a booth at Higgins Diary, which was across South Street from the main campus official entrance.  It was a quieter, lower intensity place, not as social as the Gizmo but still within the hum and buzz. I also read Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn at about the same time. I don’t recall anything about the Beagle, except it was probably the first fantasy novel I’d read since Alice in Wonderland, and that I sometimes felt like the last unicorn (and I was hardly alone in that.)

 I still have that copy of Jesus Christs by A. J. Langguth. The premise was that Jesus returned to earth many times, surrounded by different versions of his disciples and other characters from the Biblical account, often with different outcomes, and a different kind of Jesus. Some of the stories are no longer than a paragraph, others are dramatic dialogues and stories of several pages (one reimagines Jesus as a Vietnamese fighter.)

 The idea appealed to me, still only five years out of Catholic schools, and not quite a year after my own variation in my play What’s Happening, Baby Jesus? Reading the Langguth book again after a half century, some stories seem insipid but others—especially the dialogues—are absorbing. 

  I was moving farther away from straight naturalistic fiction, although I also recall we had a paperback copy of John Updike’s best seller Couples. This trend in my reading seems related to Kurt Vonnegut’s best seller of that spring, Slaughterhouse-Five. I’m pretty sure it was after I read it that I tracked down his earlier novels (apart from Mother Night, which I’d already read.)

 I probably enjoyed Sirens of Titan the most, the novel in which Vonnegut had come closest to pure science fiction (the planet Tralfamadore, which starred in Slaughterhouse Five, appeared in it.) I remember beginning Cat’s Cradle on either a bus or a train. Then Player Piano, his first novel. His novel just previous to Slaughterhouse, Good Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, had been his most popular up to then, but it was, at least initially, my least favorite. I probably didn't read all of those in Galesburg, but elsewhere in 1969, though I'm pretty sure  I read the stories in a new collection there: Welcome to the Monkey House (which included many in the previous collection I'd read.) 

 Vonnegut’s reputation exploded with Slaughterhouse-Five. Fortunately for me, I didn’t know that Vonnegut wrote most of it in the Iowa City I'd just fled, or the irony might have done me in. The evocation of the largely unknown firebombing of Dresden within the story of Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time, was a stunning tour de force, written in an unmistakable voice that resonated with the times. It was one of those books that unites people who love it. It was if we could almost inhabit it together. It wasn’t quite Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but almost. It cast a spell.

 This isn’t to say the admiration was universal or complete. It’s easy to forget sometimes that students could be at least as cynical as professors and administrators, though usually on different subjects. I still claim however, that even in those years I was not cynical. I could be sardonic, satiric, less often sarcastic, too often thoughtless of others, and at times despairing. But not really cynical. That’s also how how I understood Vonnegut to be. 

While we were in Galesburg, Joni and I both worked part time at the Knox Bookstore. That for me was pretty much the equivalent of an alcoholic working in a bar. I remember for example lusting after J. P. Donleavy’s The Beastly Beatitudes of Bathazar B as it came in, before discovering his earlier books other than The Ginger Man.

 Otherwise, a notebook from this period indicates I was reading R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite, and The Subversive Science, the ecology reader edited by Paul Shepard containing probably his most famous essay, “Ecology and Man: A Viewpoint.” This evidently sent me back to re-reading sections of Shepard’s first book, Man in the Landscape, because I also quote that in my notebook. I also seemed to be attempting—not for the first or last time— Joyce’s finnegans wake. 

 I must have also been reading John Cage again, because when we invited Robin and Lynn Metz over for dinner, and we played a game of Monopoly afterwards, I insisted on making all my moves with chance operations, by flipping coins. Robin took advantage of any resulting weak moves with a relish that I think scared him a little.

 Meanwhile I was participating in Knox life to the extent that some people might have concluded that I was either enrolled as a student or teaching classes. I went to movies, plays and public lectures, either with Joni or alone. This was probably the year I participated in guitar improvisations with Steve Meyers and Dick Wissler, that Wissler recorded. 

 Over those months I wrote reviews and articles for the Knox Student, participated in a poetry reading (noted in that year's Gale), had a jagged short story published in the first issue of the renamed literary magazine Catch, and acted in Sherwood Kiraly’s latest play in the Studio Theatre, “Smokers Cough III,” a comedy in which Norse gods intervene in an Old West poker game, or something like that. The Knox Student theatre critic told me that I was his choice for best Studio Theatre performance of the spring, but fortunately for us both, the final issue of the Student wasn’t published that year for some reason, so his article saying so didn’t appear. 

He probably did not see the show on the final night, however, because we mercilessly embroidered our performances, literally upstaging each other for laughs. An example: downstage, closest to the audience, was the poker table where much of the action took place. At one point, I (as Old Slim) wander back to the bar (upstage), and silently drink while the poker table action continues. Only this time instead of just pouring myself a drink, I spilled the bottle, sending liquid down on the town drunk, dozing at the foot of the bar under a sombrero.

 I got a big laugh, but the actors at the poker table couldn’t see me, and so they didn’t know why the audience was laughing. Then the audience laughed again, and even I didn’t know why. It was because Jim Reynolds as the drunk had upstaged me, by putting a tentative hand out as the water dripped down on him, as if testing for rain.

 If the audience thought that was a planned bit, they gave us more credit than we were due. But basically they caught on to the fact we were improvising and trying to break each other up. They laughed a lot, so it was the most fun I’ve had in a theatre, at least on stage.

 And that wasn’t all. The director was also one of the actors, so with the connivance of the author and the lighting director at the cast party the night before, we changed the ending without telling the director, just to see the look on his face when it was his turn to speak and he had no next line.

 But all this also had its weirdness. From my notebook: “Sitting in the Commons Room after everyone has gone/my life/lived here. Now I am even/quoted here./I sit here/like a vulture/ circling my own life.”

 Since I was still theoretically writing my college novel, this extra residence provided more opportunities to test and refine impressions, which is a writerly kind of vulture behavior I suppose. I noted for example (in my notebook), the feeling of fall: “Fresh warm wind blowing, bright sunshine, the cool air, the love for the people, their faces anticipated. Can’t hurry fast enough to do the next thing, to get to the Giz, see people, mind racing ahead, plotting possibilities in the thrilling wind.”

 I had become interested in writers who had attended Knox. I’d heard stories about Eugene Field, the journalist and children’s poet (Wynken, Blinken and Nod) whose checkered academic career included a boisterous year at Knox. In the 1960s he was a rarely mentioned black sheep. So I read more about him. I had already made that poem a motif in my college fiction, with my characters Lincoln, Blakely and Nod.

I’m not sure how I learned about Jack Finney (Knox class of 1934), but at the time he certainly wasn’t an honored alum either, nor very well known. That would begin to change a year or so after I dredged up a book of his short stories in the Knox library, not in general circulation (I had to sit in a silent room alone to read it), called I Love Galesburg in the Springtime. 

 The title story lovingly described the texture and architecture of Galesburg’s surviving 19th century character, while relating several incidents of the past invading the Galesburg present: like a disconnected old wall phone ringing, and a dead boyhood friend’s voice on the other end.

 Finney had written a couple of novels that had been turned into successful movies, including one of the great science fiction movies of the 1950s, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also wrote the episode of the 1950s series Science Fiction Theatre that I remembered best from seeing it at about age 9.  It also had an eerie time travel theme, this time from the future to the present. Fittingly, it was called “Time Is Just A Place.” It was directed by Jack Arnold, who made many of the other great 50s s/f movies.

 But Finney didn’t achieve fame until the success of his 1970 novel, Time and Again, in which the protagonist travels back through time to New York City in 1882. By then Finney had lived in New York for years, and employed the same loving detail about its historic architecture—including buildings no longer existing—as he did in the Galesburg story, though with much more mesmerizing effect. The novel is illustrated with period photos, a technique that later writers (notably W. G. Sebold) also employed. (Oddly, it was never filmed, though science fiction writer Richard Matheson later based his own similar story on it--with appropriate credit to Finney--which did result in an unjustly forgotten 1980 film titled Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and a luminous Jane Seymour.)

 I was immediately taken with that Galesburg story because I recognized some of the romance of the place that Finney did. Those old Victorian Gothic houses, like Anderson House where I lived my first two years at Knox, did have a feeling about them, and a mystery. In my years there I walked all over Galesburg, especially at night, often with a companion... Under the persimmon trees of Standish Park. Down the brick walks, the wide streets that might lead directly into dark fields, through the cemetery with a thrilling wind high in the trees....Following trails winding next to long sets of solitary railroad tracks...Late night blueberry pancakes at the Q, or in a hidden restaurant seemingly known only to railroad men... Standing at the kitchen door of a house hosting games of chance, to buy one of their tremendous chicken sandwiches... Or eating my first taco from a Mexican place. Sandburg and Lincoln walked these streets, as did the young Ronnie Reagan. I hadn’t yet discovered the great Dorothea Tanning, a fellow editor of the Siwasher. Finney only scratched the surface of ghostly history superimposed on the present.

 Time and Again sold very well and was highly praised by Stephen King, Carl Sagan and many others. In 1986 Finney repackaged stories from his I Love Galesburg in the Springtime collection,  together with stories from his 1957 collection The Third Level in a new book titled  About Time.  It includes "Such Interesting Neighbors," which he'd adapted for that Science Fiction Theatre episode. 

Now Knox honors him as one of their own, or at least students did, by naming a science fiction and fantasy magazine Third Level, after that first collection and its title story in which the protagonist stumbles upon an enchanted level of Grand Central Station stuck in the 1880s, and he tries to buy a ticket to the Galesburg of that era. But in 1969, it was just me reading him in the Seymour Library. 

With Finney as with Vonnegut, the characters are unstuck in time.  It strike me that this describes the situation of college students, and a fundamental quality of academia--one's mind and heart roam the centuries, temporarily inhabiting aspects of another time (including the future), through literature and art, history and other studies, as well as through films and exchanges with others in the community. And these overlap and overlay, often simultaneously.  For me this defines one of the more attractive elements of academia, though it requires a great deal of deliberate innocence to feel it and focus on it.

Unstuck in time might also describe readers in a library, including their own.

My residency in Galesburg that year had itself begun with a strange event. I was at a student party in a large and largely empty house, very dark. Very late in the evening a male student I knew approached me, and said there had been a misunderstanding with some men from town, and his girlfriend had to get out of there quickly. Could I walk her to his apartment several blocks away? I knew and liked his girlfriend (who happened to be a talented writer, and has since published novels) so without needing to know any more, I agreed.

 On our way I could see we were being followed by several men in a car driving slowly behind us in the darkness. I kept walking, my arm around my weeping companion. When I glanced back again the car was gone.

 I did get a little more of the story later, but still, there were a number of mysterious aspects to this event that I’ve thought about many times since. I guess I prefer to believe I was given this task because I could be trusted to see it through. In this, I was perhaps following an element of my own nature that I learned to value, as expressed by John Updike in a short story I first read just before my freshman year at Knox. “The Happiest I’ve Been” ends with the young narrator saying, “And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me.”

P.S. The phrase I use in the first sentence of this post ("disillusion and early sorrow") reflects my misremembering of the title of a Thomas Mann novella, Disorder and Early Sorrow.  When I was corresponding with Mary Jacobson during the summer after my first year at Knox, she mentioned that she was reading this, so of course I tried to read it, too.  And failed.  I still haven't read it.  But I liked the title.