"The Forgotten Peninsula" (1961), Joseph Wood Krutch

Why does the year's shortest month always seem so long? That's a philosopher's question that refuses to be answered simply. Here in Atlanta, the weather's a crap shoot. It's either too cold or, teasingly, surprisingly warm -- the first yellow flowers appeared on my front lawn overnight last week. They're sure to be smothered by March's cold snap and blackberry winter.

The only solace in February, really, is its brevity; imagine how long winter would seem if the month had a full supply of thirty-one days.

Now's a good time to think warm thoughts, or at least read about those magical places near the tropics where the weather is considered more a state of mind than something to survive. In 1959 the author and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch made a return visit to Baja California, the peninsula to the west of Mexico bordering the Sea of Cortez. The result was his 1961 book, The Forgotten Peninsula. Krutch, who lived in the Sonoran desert near Tucson, called himself "a collector of deserts"; he was in awe of the variety of plants and animals he found in the arid regions of the North American continent. Even as an experienced adventurer, he found the Baja's desolation and remoteness a challenge, best dealt with some humor:

"Even properly equipped, the traveler inclined to say, 'I'll
be in San Ignacio or Mulege or what-not next Tuesday'
had better remember the oriental story of the pilgrim who,
when asked where he was going, replied, 'To Damascus,'
and refused to add 'God willing.' As a punishment for his
impiety he was turned into a frog and spent nine years in a
puddle by the roadside. When at last he found himself
restored to human form and met again the mysterious ques-
tioner he replied to the reiterated inquiry: 'I am going to
Damascus or back to the frogpond.' There are not many
frogponds in Baja but one could easily find oneself stuck
twice in the same arroyo."

I discovered his writing through a battered copy of A Desert Year, which I read during one of my first February trips to Tucson in the early 1990s. Although the march of time (and progress) was rapidly changing the landscape of the Sonoran desert then, I was still able to see much of the beauty and uniqueness of the land that had so captured Krutch's imagination. Of course, my initial trips into the desert involved much use of a Dodge van and a rented, shiny-red two-door Neon, with frequent stops at the ubiquitous Circle K markets that spring up like cactus roses in the wet season.

I did manage, eventually, to get to Organ Pipe National Forest and Joshua Tree, places where the Milky Way galaxy is a real, astronomical phenomenon and where it did get truly, beautifully, dark. It's a rare treat in these United States of Kilowatt Hours.

This vast emptiness was disappearing quickly back in 1959, after centuries of desert solitude. Krutch's final chapter describes, with some regret, the hotels and airport strip being constructed at the tip of the Baja ("eight thousand feet; obviously intended, ultimately, at least for jets," a companion informs him). Soon to become a wintertime haven for the footloose and fancy-free 1960s jet set, Cabo San Lucas is now the site of rock festival and spring break, where rocker Sammy Hagar meets you at the dock and personally escorts the visitor to his own Cabo Wabo Cantina. So it goes.

Krutch himself was aware of this dilemma between the demands of nature and the wants of civilization. It's a question that dogs man endlessly; one observer of Krutch's writings has called it, simply, "the right question." Krutch wrote: "Has anyone even raised the question of how populous, how mechanized, how complicated, and how abundant a society should be if what we want is not numbers, mechanization, complexity, and abundance for their own sake, but the best life possible for a creature who has the needs, the preferences, and the potential of the human being?"

In 1959, still, there was desolation and mostly-uninhabited Baja, with native flora and fauna. The Forgotten Peninsula traces the region's natural, political, and religious history with an expert eye toward irony and, eventually, resignation to encroaching progress and its economic benefits. As always, the secrets of a wilderness discovered are likely to disappear once the secret's out, but Krutch seems to be describing Baja just before the marketplace and time's march changed it forever.

Baja California, First view of the Sea of Cortez (Alex Brumbaugh Photography)

I opened the book to a chapter entitled "Seeing it the hard way" and was charmed by the easy way Krutch -- who was 66 in 1959 -- battled obstacles natural, mechanical and cultural in his Baja pursuit. Here is his description of his entry into the Baja country fifty years ago this week. February, it seems, has always been a good time to travel south.

"It was February 27, 1959, a little less than two years after
my first introduction to Baja. Our company assembled at
San Diego; we ran the 120 miles to Mexicali in a little over
two hours and we were in Mexico by mid-afternoon. The
first twenty miles of paved road crosses farming country,
irrigated from the Colorado River, and not very different
from the lower Imperial Valley of which it is an extension.
It is part of the ancient delta, relatively prosperous and
"developed." Then the population thins rapidly, poverty
begins to take over, and soon the road, though still well-
graded and paved, is running through some of the dryest,
most barren and rugged country anywhere in Baja. ...

There was acre after acre of purple sand verbena, and of a white
evening primrose perhaps four inches in diameter, growing
close to the ground. The Mojave in California is perhaps as
nearly incredible in one of its best years, but I have never
happened to be there at such a time and this was the most
magnificent display of desert flowers I had ever seen. Now
and again it would thin out, then recover its profusion,
though perhaps it was never again quite so astonishing as
over the first fifteen miles south of San Felipe.

Purple sand verbena, from the Backroads website

We had already said good-by to paved road, not to come
upon it again for six days and 650 miles. Though the sandy
road out of San Felipe continues fairly good for fifty miles
we saw no car upon it and no human being until we came
to the tiny sport-fishing camp at Puertocitos. Just south of
Puertocitos the moderately good road gives out and during
the next few hours we averaged only about twelve miles per
hour despite a truck made for rough travel and capable of
absorbing a good deal of punishment.

'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way.' So runs Tolstoy's famous pro-
nouncement and one might borrow the formula to state an
equally profound truth: All good roads are alike; every bad
road is bad in its own way. We were to meet all of the latter
in the course of the trip and several of them during this
second day, including the terrifying sort which consists of
all but impossible grades strewn with boulder-sized rocks
and clinging to the sheer wall of a canyon whose bottom
lies hundreds of feet below. They are also, just to cap the
climax, barely one car wide."

Reading description of desert, mountain, or jungle as well-written as this is a great tonic for the mid-winter blues. Whenever I get the urge to visit the Sonoran desert (or until I decide I've had enough of raking leaves, and just move to the desert and rake the sand in my front yard) the writing of Joseph Wood Krutch will do just fine. I'll probably miss the February jonquils, though I'll enjoy the winter's cactus roses.

Ginsberg & Kissinger, 1971: "Om Land Security"

Without much further comment (which would be wildly superfluous in any case -- disentangling the decade of the 1970s is tougher than explaining the 1960s, for those of us who lived them: the remnants of a bad acid trip, mostly) here is an item in the March 2009 issue of Harper's magazine. It details a recently-declassified telephone conversation between Allen Ginsberg and Henry Kissinger. Nixon is in the White House promising "peace with honor" in Vietnam, Elvis wants to be a deputy in the war on drugs, "Joy To the World" by Three Dog Night is number one on the radio. (And Karl Rove is attending the University of Utah; he became the Executive Director of the College Republican National Committee in June, 1971.) How on earth did some of us survive that bad acid trip? Oh, yeah -- more drugs.

Om Land Security

From an April 23, 1971, telephone conversation between Allen Ginsberg and Henry Kissinger, then national security advisor to President Richard Nixon. Eugene McCarthy had left the Senate that January. Richard Helms was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Rennie Davis and David Dellinger were leaders in the anti-war movement; Ralph Abernathy was a civil-rights activist and President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The transcript was made public in December by the National Security Archive.

ALLEN GINSBERG: My idea is to arrange a conversation between yourself, Helms, McCarthy, and maybe even Nixon with Rennie Davis, Dellinger, and Abernathy. It can be done at any time. They were willing to show their peaceableness, and perhaps you don't know how to get out of the war, and by a private meeting --
HENRY KISSINGER: I have been meeting with many members of peace groups, but what I find is that they always then rush right out and and give the contents of that meeting to the press. But I like to do this -- not just for the enlightenment of the people I talk to but to give me a feel of what concerned people think. I would be prepared to meet, in principle, on a private basis.

Ginsberg on the phone, San Francisco June 1966

GINSBERG: That's true, but it is a question of personal delicacy. In dealing with human consciousness it is hard to set limits.
KISSINGER: You can't set limits to human consciousness but --
GINSBERG: We can try to come to some kind of understanding.
KISSINGER: You can set limits to what you say publicly.
GINSBERG: It would be even more useful if we could do it naked on television.
KISSINGER: (Laughs)
GINSBERG: What should I tell them that would be encouraging?
KISSINGER: That I would think about it very seriously.
GINSBERG: Good deal.

KISSINGER: When did you intend to do this?
GINSBERG: During the May Day meetings in Washington. They will be lobbying, and they could meet with you May 2 or 3.
KISSINGER: May 2 or 3. Damn it! I would like to do it in principle, but --
GINSBERG: It is a good principle.

KISSINGER: Now, wait a minute. I don't know about those dates, I may not be in town, but we can do it at some other reasonable date.
GINSBERG: I gather you don't know how to get out of the war.
KISSINGER: I thought we did, but I'm always interested in hearing other views.
GINSBERG: If you see Helms, ask him if he has begun meditating yet. He promised to meditate one hour a day. I still have to teach him how to hold his back straight.

Henry Kissinger on the phone, 1975 (George Washington University website)

KISSINGER: How do I reach you?
GINSBERG: City Lights, San Francisco.
KISSINGER: Where are you calling from?
GINSBERG: Sacramento, California. I just gave a talk on gay liberation to the students here, and I am going to San Francisco to join the march there. I will be at the following number --
KISSINGER: I won't be able to call you, I am leaving town. I will call McCarthy.

GINSBERG: Talk to him. I will try to arrange a private meeting. It would be good to talk to the Army too. You know, the war people and the antiwar people.
KISSINGER: It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.
GINSBERG: They might have some ideas. They have been to Hanoi.
KISSINGER: I will call McCarthy. If we can set it up on the basis of --
GINSBERG: You may have to subject yourself to prayer.
KISSINGER: That is a private matter. That is permissible.

"Literary Lives," Edward Sorel (2006)

Some claim the comics page as their first exposure to literature ("once you can read the words in the balloons, the drawings are a zillion times funnier," cartoonist Matt Groening says his brother explained to him before he could read). Edward Sorel's Literary Lives is a collection of cartoons lampooning the careers of ten writers -- in sharp, acerbic, sometimes wildly funny episodes -- and all of them are far from a Classics Comics telling of literary history. Depending on your appreciation of Yeats, Jung, and Ayn Rand (to name three whose tales appear), Sorel's pen skewers or demolishes the reputations of some of the world's prominent literary figures.

It's not surprising that the skepticism and anti-authoritarianism evident in his political cartoons surfaces in Literary Lives. He's always had a mistrust of authority, Sorel said in an interview when the book was published, in 2006. Frankly, he admits, "there may be some deep psychological need I have in tearing down people who are better artists or writers than I am." While he was creating the biographies, which originally appeared in The Nation and The Atlantic, the artist realized that "once artists or writers receive a lot of fame they seem to think of themselves as godlike, and they change a lot."

Tolstoy repents a life of dissipation at the age of 34, by Edward Sorel

This realization created a change in Sorel's approach. Tolstoy was only "just odd and kind of crazy," Sorel explained, and his first piece, on the life of Honore Balzac, turned out to be quite sad; Balzac spent much of his life trying to win the approval of his mother, and was a very sympathetic character. Not surprisingly, the Balzac biography isn't included here. Sorel told an interviewer it "wasn't funny."

After these first two installments, the artist decided to bring out the darker and more unpleasant traits of his subjects which most biographies ignore. As he put it, "avarice, duplicity, and selfishness can be amusing. Vices are amusing, and these are all writers with vices."


"They weren't all bad ... but some of the others were nasty. (Lillian) Hellman was nasty and Bertholt Brecht was one of then 10 worst people in the whole world, I'd say. And so was Carl Jung. I was not too fond of Sartre. No, they were nasty pieces of work."

The aging Yeats is shown infatuated by Maud Gonne, who turns him down; then he turns his attentions to her daughter. Norman Mailer sneaks into the hospital and suggests to his recovering wife she doesn't tell the police the truth, that he stabbed her at a party: it might hurt his New York mayoral campaign. Sorel can be gently satiric as well: he imagines Proust's hometown filled with billboards advertising madelaines and, in the Illiers-Combray town square, there's a Cafe du Temps Perdu.

There's more: During the Nazi occupation of France, where he is a successful playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre (in tuxedo) gets his cigarette lit by a German soldier. Next to Sorel's child-like script declaring A Cult Is Born, Ayn Rand holds a biblical tablet emblazened with the words Push Grab Take Keep to frenzied admirers. And, as can be expected by Sorel's distrust of idealogues, Yeats comes under fire for his admiration of Mussolini.

Carl Jung in his fantasy as an Aryan Christ, by Edward Sorel

This sort of satire lends itself to the single-panel layout of each page, as the hunan follies (and character flaws) of each artist gets the full-color Sorel treatment. Jung imagines himself as an Aryan god holding the golden-haired Brunhilde; another panel shows Jung, in 1933, suggesting to a group of psychologists that "the Jews be forced to dress differently so they are not mistaken 'for people like ourselves'."

I'll be the first to admit I can't read Ernest Hemingway -- not skewered here, but with hope there'll be more Sorel to come -- without thinking of Kurt Vonnegut's assessment of Hemingway's war novels: "He was never a soldier, and never shot a human being except, finally, himself." Exactly. Whatever a reader thinks of a writer for good or bad, casting a critical eye on the foibles of heroes is great fun in Literary Lives. It's also a hell of a lot more entertaining than the entire library of Classics Illustrated comics.

Lukas Foss, 1922-2009: "My curiosity has led me absolutely everywhere"

Lukas Foss, a composer who was also a respected pianist and conductor, died at the age of 86 on Sunday. I interviewed Mr. Foss in the early 1970s while I was attending Syracuse University. When he noticed that I had cerebral palsy he encouraged me to play piano for exercise, and performed a short piece for me demonstrating the right-hand movements. Here are excerpts from his obituary in The New York Times, by Alec Koznin.

... He took particular pleasure in finding common ground between opposing languages and techniques. ... Sometimes Mr. Foss would combine contemporary styles with those of the distant musical past. His “Baroque Variations” (1967) is a partly improvisatory, partly mischievous deconstruction of works by Scarlatti and Bach. In his “Salomon Rossi Suite” (1975) and “Renaissance Concerto” for flute and orchestra (1985), fragments of 16th-century works are refracted entertainingly through a modernist lens.

... Mr. Foss was aware that his detractors regarded his style-hopping as the sign of a dabbler, and that the critics complained that he tended to follow stylistic trends rather than to originate them. He rejected those criticisms and took particular pride in the fact that even listeners who followed his music closely never knew what to expect of his latest works.

“I would agree that my curiosity has led me absolutely everywhere,” he told The New York Times in 1979. “But I make one qualification: I’ve never done anything at the O.K. time. In other words, I’ve never been a bandwagon jumper. I’ve never belonged to any school. I’ve never written a 12-tone piece when it was fashionable to do so.”...

Leonard Bernstein, Serge Koussevitzsky and Lukas Foss, Library of Congress photo

After his arrival in the United States, in 1937, he continued his studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. After his graduation in 1940, he pursued further studies in conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood and in composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. He became an American citizen in 1942.

... He received his first important commissions in the early 1940s, including incidental music for a production of Shakespeare's “Tempest,” which he later arranged as a suite for orchestra. His 1944 cantata “The Prairie,” based on Carl Sandburg’s poem, showed that he had assimilated the pastoral American style that was Copland’s specialty at the time. Koussevitzky gave the work its premiere with the Boston Symphony, and in 1944 it won the New York Critic’s Circle Award. Koussevitzky then hired the young composer to be the pianist of the Boston Symphony, Mr. Foss remembered, “so I could have a job and compose.” ...

A turning point in Mr. Foss’s career came in 1953, when he succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. As a way to try to lead his composition students away from what he called “the tyranny of the printed note,” he encouraged them to improvise. To set an example, he formed his own Improvisation Chamber Ensemble in 1957. In his own music, improvisatory sections mingled with fully scored passages. ...

A major work from this period was “Time Cycle” (1960), a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, with either chamber or orchestral accompaniment. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere and made the first recording of the work.

Although synthesizers and tape interested him only peripherally, he mimicked electronic timbres in his 1972 wind quintet, “The Cave of Winds.” And he continued to mine the latest stylistic innovations. His “Three Airs for Frank O’Hara’s Angel,” composed in 1972, touches on moves that were then exclusive to the early Minimalists.

... Mr. Foss’s 1978 setting of the Wallace Stevens poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and his quasi-Minimalist “Solo” for piano (1981) show lingering traces of his interest in the avant-garde.

After the early 1980s, Mr. Foss’s music became increasingly listener-friendly. But he did not consider this more mellow style to be an abandonment of his earlier exploratory approach. “I’m not sure the works I’ve done since my so-called avant-garde period are less adventurous,” he told The Times in 1997. “The whole point now is that I can be just as crazy tonally as I was before atonally. Crazy in the sense of unexpected.”