A holiday weekend browse: book reviews from other sites

A round-up of books for skip-the-yardwork Memorial Day weekend reading: Here are some titles reviewed by others that are worth a browse. Order these right here on Bellemeade Books using the Amazon.com search box -- and no one will know you never even got out of the hammock today.

Wendell Berry

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, Wendell Berry, Introduction by Michael Pollan (Counterpoint Press). If you aren't already familiar with Wendell Berry's essays and his fiction, Bringing It to the Table is an excellent introduction, and if you're already an admirer, wanting to spread the word to people on your holiday gift list, this book is a fine addition to Berry's recent publications. Born in 1934, Berry has been publishing poetry, fiction in long and short forms, and essays since the 1960s; he has been working a farm in Kentucky for about as many years. In an essay from 2006 he recalls, "In 1964 my wife Tanya and I bought a rough and neglected little farm on which we intended to grow as much of our own food as we could." Although he came from a farming background, he asked for advice from an organic gardener who was his editor at the time, and seeking out the source of that man's principles, he discovered The Soil and Health, by the British agricultural scientist Sir Alfred Howard. Berry says of Howard, "I have been aware of his influence in virtually everything I have done, and I don't expect to graduate from it. That is because his way of dealing with the subject of agriculture is also a way of dealing with the subject of life in this world." (Jim Quitsland,Sound Food)

What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation: Mark Greif, et al (n+1 Books) All descriptions of hipsters are doomed to disappoint, because they will not be the hipsters you know. But to those of you who are reading What Was the Hipster in 2050, I can only say: Everything in this book is true, and its impressions are perfect. When we talk about the contemporary hipster, we’re talking about a kind of cross-subcultural figure who emerges by 1999 and enjoys a fairly narrow but robust first phase of existence from 1999 to 2003. At which point the category of hipster seemed about to dissipate and return to the primordial subcultural soup, for something else to take over. Instead what we witnessed was an increasing spread and durability of the term, in an ongoing second phase from 2003 to the present. The truth was that there was no culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young and, more often than not, funny-looking. (Anonymous, Atomic Books)

Fishers of Men – The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest, Adam Elenbaas (Tarcher Press): The cross-generational stories surrounding Elenbaas and his father, and his father and grandfather, sanctify the Freudian influence on drug writing. From the opening chapter when his father lays bleeding, holding a hunting knife, till the final modernist resolution, redefinition of all the relationships occur. It’s very reminiscent of the poem "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you.” The Freudian model, which places so much emphasis on a child’s relationship with its parents as a foundation for personality structure, is being played out once more as a literary structure: “One of the most intense psychological settings in the world – the visionary space of ayahuasca” (201). The combination of the psychedelic experience and psychodynamic models is firm territory, not only in Fishers of Men, but in modern drug writing generally. (Rob, editor, The Psychedelic Press UK)

Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation: Ann and Samuel Charters (University Press of Mississippi): ... Holmes, a good friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and a founding member of the original Beat circle in New York City, also wrote several novels that were respectably reviewed. But he lacked the charisma and theatricality of the later Beat writers, and struggled for literary success even as his friends reached explosive levels of fame. It's only because of these legendary friends, and not because of his own fiction, that John Clellon Holmes merits an extensive literary biography by Ann and Samuel Charters today. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation is unusual among literary biographies because its hero never had a breakout success. Instead, he filled out his career with dead end manuscripts, odd magazine assignments and college teaching jobs. In this sense, Brother-Souls is actually a more accurate glimpse of how most writers live than any typical biography of a famous writer. (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

Bob Dylan, born May 24, 1941

Bad company, San Francisco, 1965

Robbie Robertson, Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in the alley behind City Lights Books. This photograph is in the booklet that comes with the bootleg series vol. 4 Dylan CD set, Bob Dylan Live 1966, The Royal Albert Hall Concert.

Larry Keenan:

This session was arranged the night before at a party after Bob Dylan's concert at the Berkeley Community Theater. Allen Ginsberg introduced me to Dylan and we arranged to do a photo session (for the Blonde on Blondealbum) the same day as the Beats last gathering at City Lights Books. At City Lights we hid out in the basement with Dylan and when the people started to break the door down we climbed out a window and ran down the alley and took this photograph. I was in college and living at home during the Beat period. I had to mow the lawn before I could borrow the car and go to San Francisco to shoot this photo and the City Lights Books "last gathering of the Beats" event.

Image and text from the series of photographs by Larry Keenan, introduction by Mary Sands, at the Empty Mirror Books website.

"Directions." Gene Murtha

"Directions"

(Gene Murtha)

Let us walk for awhile. Bring along the pick ax, spade and knapsack hanging in the shed. You will find them on your right just inside the split barn door.

Walk through the trellis in the rear garden, it is the trailhead that leads through the forest. Be careful, there are roots to your left sticking up from the grade from an old pin oak—I don't want you to spill me, well, not yet.

Follow the trail until two paths merge, then stop. Take the pick and break up the hard pan. You will find ribbons of clay and sand. Mix them together with the shovel to create loam.

Add the ashes from the velvet bag that you will find inside the sack, this will improve the soil too. If you feel inclined to say something over my remains, then, that is fine, but it is not important, since you have done enough.

It will be spring soon. Already, you can hear the chickadees.

recycle day
a washed out worm
in the rain puddle

"Directions" by Gene Murtha was originally published in contemporary haibun online.

"Visions & Affiliations," edited by Jack Foley: 65 years of Bay Area poetry

At the San Francisco Chronicle, Evan Karp writes about a new book covering sixty-five years of Bay Area poets and poetry. The resulting lavish and entertaining two-volume chronology is just part one of a continuing timeline being compiled by Jack Foley, who in the article says he and his wife Adelle struggled to find the right way to tell the history.

As he told Karp about fashioning history from so many creative strands, Foley said, "That's the problem with multiplicity: How do you find a form that will express it, but which is not totally chaotic. The right kind of chaos rather than the wrong kind."

The force of creative chaos that runs through the Bay Area history from 1940 to 2005 is less an organizing principle than, in Foley's words, a human response that defined character: "As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality." Here's a brief excerpt from Karp's SF Gate article:

Jack Foley, 71, took a decade to write his 1,300-page book, Visions and Affiliations, which offers a timeline of poetic and social events from the years 1940 to 2005.

If Jack Foley were a book, he’d be a 1,300-page chrono-encyclopedia of Bay Area poets and poetry that spans 65 years and is written in the present tense. But that’s just the latest chapter in the rich and ongoing story of the Oakland poet and critic.

Foley, 71, describes both himself and the book, “Visions and Affiliations” (Pantograph Press), which he has spent over a decade composing, with the same statement: “In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality. As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. And the circumstances change in response to those selves.”

In the house in the Maxwell Park neighborhood that he has occupied with his wife, Adelle, since 1974, Foley laughs, “That means I’m crazy, right?”

“The problem with unity,” he continues, “is that in order to achieve it, you leave all these things out that might glitter around it and contradict it. So you don’t want unity, because it simplifies. What you want is to have something like the feeling of the complexity of life as it is.” ...

As Adelle Foley noted in a follow-up letter to the SF Gate article further explaining the book's wide focus: while Bay Area poetry is covered extensively the book is broadly about California poetry and features, among many others, such Angelean luminaries as “Tommy the Commie” (Thomas McGrath), Philomene Long, William Pillen, Amy Gerstler, and David St. John.

For an excerpt from Visions and Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline 1940-2005 there is more at Jack and Adelle Foley's web page.

Tonight in Decatur: preserving Georgia's waterways

The second of three programs, part of the Decatur Arts Festival, brings an author with special interest in the Georgia outdoors tonight at 7:15 pm to the Decatur Library. 

Joe Cook is the executive director of the Coosa River Basin Initiative and coordinator of Georgia River Network’s Paddle Georgia Event. His new book, Etowah River User’s Guide, is a helpful and handy look at the biologically diverse and beautiful Etowah River in North Georgia. Printed on waterproof paper by the University of Georgia Press, the book offers a fascinating history of the area and information valuable for novice or experienced paddlers as well as fishermen. It also will help explorers understand the threats facing the river and what steps can be taken to protect it for future generations.

The Etowah River is a 164-mile-long waterway that rises northwest of Dahlonega, Georgia, north of Atlanta. Its name is the Cherokee version of the original Muskogee word Etalwa, which means a "trail crossing". On Matthew Carey's 1795 map the river was labeled "High Town River". On later maps, such as the 1839 Cass County map, it was referred to as "Hightower River", a name that was used in most early Cherokee records. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names officially named the river in 1897.

The Etowah even has a place in country music. The "Et-ee-waw" is home to country singer/songwriter Jerry Reed's fictional character "Ko-Ko Joe," the 'Etowah River Swamp Rat.' In the 1971 song, Joe lives off 'monkey meat and mashed potatoes,' and enjoyed a brew called 'Mojo Claw,' that he brewed from 'old dead stumps on the banks of the Etowah.' In the song, the Etowah River floods, and the despised-by-the-townspeople Ko-Ko Joe saves a child that was swept away in the flood, providing the moral to the story 'be careful what you say my friends / about folks you don't understand.'

For more information about tonight's event visit the Georgia Center for the Book website.

Burroughs at the Apocalypse: summoning the Ancient Ones for the end times

Every so often, mankind enjoys scaring itself out of its wits on a grand scale by contemplating the end of the world. It can be a lucrative business: many religious sects actively scare the money right out of the wallets of the faithfully-afraid on a weekly televised basis, in fact.

The thrill of contemplating The End led me to re-consider the growing contributions to Apocalyptic fiction (secular division), and pulling down William Burroughs' truly scarifying Cities of the Red Night. Published in 1980, Cities of the Red Night is part of a trilogy (including The Place of Dead Roads in 1984, and finally, The Western Lands, 1988) in which Burroughs is the master of disaster from the personal to the universal, the greying misanthrope giving reign to his darkest thoughts about the human condition.

Those waiting for the ride of the Four Horsemen or the arrival of the Heavenly Legion will have to re-calibrate their calendars for another season. Burroughs's catalogue of horrors is strictly of the human-derived fetishes and obsessions that flesh is heir to -- and the good Doctor Benway relishes describing in Technicolor detail every physical failure the body can provide. 

The book is dark and discomfiting, and very trippy. Plague, check. 18th-century pirates, check. A crew of very ill, very doomed lost boys, check. But there's also a contemporary element of detective fiction slamming the elements of time and space together like H.G. Wells after dropping a tab of LSD in a visit to Owsley Stanley: a time-tripping Apocalypse that would make the Mayans tremble with anticipation.

Here's a brief sample, certainly not for the squeamish, but who really expects the end-of-the-world to be a polite waltz? This is merely the Invocation and a summoning of forces to witness the End of Days, which (after all) is merely the beginning chapter to something else. Burroughs dedicates his tale to those who have been waiting ... waiting patiently ... since ancient days:

Everyone's Uncle Bill: "Everything is permitted"

This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of Death, dark angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind.

To Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities.

To Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, to the Akhkharu, who suck the blood of men since they desire to become men, to Gelaland Lilit, who invade the beds of men and whose children are born in secret places, to Addu, raiser of storms, who can fill the night sky with brightness, to Malah, Lord of courage and bravery, to Zagurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in unnatural fashion, to Zahrim, a warrior among warriors, to Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers, to Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches-the-Dew-of-Morning, to Zuhuy Kak, Virgin Fire, to Ah Dziz, the Master of Cold, to Kak U Pacat, who works in fire.

To Ix Tab, Godess of Ropes and Snares, patroness of those who hang themselves, to Schmuun, the Silent One, brother of Ix Tab, to Xolotl the Unformed, Lord of Rebirth, to Aguchi, Master of Ejaculations, to Osiris and Amen in phallic form, to Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One, to Ah Pook the Destroyer, to the Great Old One and the Star Beast, to Pan, God of Panic, to the nameless gods of dispersal and emptiness, to Hassan i Sabbah, Master of the Assassins.

To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested ....

NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

An LA Times reviewer wrote of the book: "... In it, the world ends with a bang — and a barely perceived whimper, disguised by the wicked smile of one of the most dazzling magicians of our time." The Invocation is a kind of Dante-esque welcome to the hell-on-earth in Cities of the Red Night, if the reader can stand it. 

It's just a shame all of Burroughs's invocation of the spirits wouldn't fit on an interstate billboard: now, that would really be a traffic-stopping event.

"Salinger": a new documentary ignites controversy with fans and family

J.D. Salinger has made his final lope into the New Hampshire woods near Cornish, and with his death the reclusive author leaves behind a literary industry of the ever-hopeful. Those who waited for decades will have to wait even longer for the Salinger estate to decide when, or if, any of the rumored fifteen unpublished novels will see print.

That decision will likely be a crapshoot. The most appropriate gesture from the author who shunned any contact with "a reading public" for over fifty years would have been an early morning, January 1, 2010 birthday auto-da-fé in his leafy woods, flames licking the ink right off the burning pages.

In a recent Guardian UK article there is news that while the literary world waits for more Salinger to be revealed in print, a new documentary is creating its expected controversy among the author's fans and relatives.

. . . Called simply Salinger, the film is the brainchild of Shane Salerno, who has spent nine years writing, producing and directing the project, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. The move is a major shift in career for Salerno, best known as a writer of mainstream blockbusters such as Alien vs Predator: Requiem and Armageddon. 

But the promise of lifting the lid on the life of one of America's most revered writers has proven a massive lure to Hollywood. Salinger has been bought up by independent film mogul Harvey Weinstein after he reportedly saw a private screening of it at 7.30 on the morning of the Oscars. Even though the screening did not apparently include all of the film's most confidential revelations, he snapped it up immediately. 

In fact, so impressed have its backers been with what Salerno and his team have uncovered they are also releasing a TV show based on the documentary and have struck a deal with publisher Simon and Schuster to bring out a book called The Private War of JD Salinger. 

With Salerno not giving press interviews, there has been feverish speculation about details of new love affairs and rumours of unpublished manuscripts. One of the few hints is a statement Salerno made announcing the book deal. "The myth that people have read about and believed for 60 years about JD Salinger is one of someone too pure to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being. Our book offers a complete revaluation and reinterpretation of the work and the life," he said. . . .

No one else of his stature has made such a celebrated career of non-publishing, although most authors achieve that goal without even trying, and with much less celebrity. Over the years Salinger's active disinterest in publishing was by turns puzzling, exasperating, and -- at end -- inexplicable. He maintained his privacy even as it took on the cast of an angry author hiding in the woods away from the rest of the world, and he became quite incensed at its decades-long attempts to lure him and his manuscripts into the daylight.

The closest we're allowed to approach Salinger is, apparently, still in biography and memoir, even though those have been discouraged and actively litigated against. The most recent biography, Kenneth Slawenski's J.D.Salinger: A Life, presents the most rounded portrait of the reclusive writer to date, although it doesn't get closer to his manuscripts than the familiar published titles.

Salinger's claim was that he was writing only for himself, and fair enough. Slawenski argues that Salinger came to regard writing as a meditative form of Vedatic belief, but his literary disappearing act now reaches a logical climax. Many writers' unpublished manuscripts become even more of a fetish-object after an author's death and it's unrealistic to think interest in what Salinger left unpublished will diminish -- at last, though, he will rest peacefully where no one can come knocking.

In death Salinger (and his estate) still has control over those unseen pages, but the ensuing years of rumors and leaks, con and craft, or sheer contentiousness among surviving parties, could be more damaging than any unwanted attention the author experienced while he was alive.

Salinger fought to exhaustion efforts to publish a biography by Ian Hamilton in the 1980s, and the case traveled as far as the Supreme Court before Salinger won a decision. In his original letter of refusal to Hamilton, the author claimed to have “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Ironically, death may turn out to be a most unexpected court of appeal.

Although the passage of time itself may puncture Salinger's carefully-crafted privacy, personal memoirs can be just as damaging. Salinger's New York Times obituary contains an extended reference to two unflattering portraits (one from his daughter, Margaret) which writer Bruce Weber summarizes as adding "creepy" elements to the Salinger history:

"Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box."

It's simple to say that most writers write to be read; Salinger's reputation rests on astounding success with, in total, four published works and a lengthy novella in The New Yorker. That's certainly plenty enough to say that Salinger achieved as much as he wished, reached what is charmingly called "an audience" and then -- suddenly -- publicly withdrew. In his New York Times obituary the author is quoted from 1974: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

Point taken. The rest is cantankerous silence, apparently. Readers and the publishing world can tease themselves that they may eventually find a key to the bottom drawer of Salinger's desk; maybe the key is resting forever with Salinger, there in his suitcoat pocket. If he has any last, lone word about it, the author won't be breaking silence any time soon.

American letters makes heroes of its voluble writers. Many despite the ravages of drink, drugs or age created a lifetime's worth of published work: Twain, Faulkner, Wolfe, Fitzgerald; Hemingway's novels have a bar-room talker's bark. Salinger is frequently mentioned in their company, but in death his purposeful career of disengagement may make his unpublished work -- if it does ever surface -- an interesting aside to his privacy, not a part of his genius.

(drawing of J.D. Salinger from Time magazine, 1961; photo of the author at a car window, 1990s, courtesy of Philadelphia CityPaper.)