Bob Dylan, born May 24 1941

From Chronicles Vol 1:

On the corner I put the dime in the slot and dialed the operator for long distance, called collect and the call went right through. I wanted everyone to know I was all right. My mother would usually give me the latest run of the mill stuff. My father had his own way of looking at things. To him life was hard work. He’d come from a generation of different values, heroes and music, and wasn’t so sure that the truth would set anybody free. He was pragmatic and always had a word of cryptic advice. “Remember, Robert, in life anything can happen. Even if you don’t have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don’t have that you don’t want.” My education was important to him. He would have wanted me to become a mechanical engineer. But in school, I had to struggle to get even decent grades. I was not a natural student. My mom, bless her, who had always stood up for me and was firmly on my side in just about anything and everything, was more concerned about “a lot of monkey business out there in the world,” and would add, “Bobby, don’t forget you have relatives in New Jersey.” I’d already been to Jersey but not to visit relatives.

Lou snapped the big tape machine off after listening hard to one of my original songs. “Woody Guthrie, eh? That’s interesting. What made you want to write a song about him? I used to see him and his partner, Leadbelly-they used to play at the Garment Workers Hall over on Lexington Avenue. You ever heard ‘You Can’t Scare Me, I’m Sticking to the Union’?” Sure I’d heard it.

“Whatever happened to him, anyway?”

“Oh, he’s over in Jersey. He’s in the hospital there.”

Lou chomped away. “Nothing serious I hope. What other songs do you have? Let’s put ‘em all down.”

Captain William Kidd, pirate: rum, fact, and fiction

May 23, 1701: 

Captain William Kidd is fed rum and brandy until he cannot stand and paraded in a cart through the streets of London as hysterical crowds scream and cheer. He is hanged, but the rope breaks, depositing him in a heap of mud, while other condemned men swing overhead. Still in a drunken stupor, he is pulled dripping from the slop and hanged a second and final time. 

His corpse is tarred and placed in a cage and hung on the Thames shorleline as a warning to pirates, where it would remain for nearly two years. An epitaph as abominable for its poetry as for its sentiment is nearby:

Reader, near this Tomb don't stand 

Without some Essence in thy Hand; 

For here Kidd's stinking Corpse does lie, 

The Scent of which may infect thy!!

There is no question Kidd was a pirate, since he was hired for that job by King William III himself. In their charges, the government claimed that his piracy strayed beyond  approved targets -- that is, the government felt the pinch themselves. The truth is hard to know, but it seems likely that Kidd was a scapegoat for powerful interests involved in multiple duplicities concerning the distribution of his booty.

Robert Ritchie's biography Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates unravels some strands that bind the facts of high-seas piracy with the romantic fiction that followed it. It's as lively a tale-spinning biography as Kidd himself would enjoy. The author of the Flashman series of historical fictions, George MacDonald Fraser, had words of high praise when the book was published in 1988: The most detailed record I have ever seen of a pirate voyage, with its origins and aftermath; I doubt if there is another like it.

William Kidd was born 22 January 1645. He became one of the two or three best known pirates to emerge from an era in which piracy was an enterprise as much as a threat. His checkered legacy gave rise to legends of buried treasure that still attract treasure hunters today. 

Kidd never set out to become a pirate. There is every reason to believe that his eventual trial and execution for piracy -- which has become the stuff of romantic derring-do and outfoxing authority -- was the result of an establishment cover-up, and that crucial documents that could have led to his acquittal were withheld by the British government. 

Sun Ra, born May 22, 1914

"I was busy studying my psychic things, trying to find out what makes this planet tick, and why is everything going wrong, and why people are headed toward nuclear annihilation. So I was busy trying to find out, where does God stand; why doesn't he do something? I had to find out: why? And that's what I was doing; I was researching."

Sun Ra

[Herman Poole Blount]

May 22, 1914 - May 30, 1993

Poet and publisher Jonathan Williams: "presentable, always presentable"

"Jonathan, you can't call a book Palpable Elysium in the America of 2002. Nobody knows those two words anymore. You have to call it Heaven in Yo Hand."

(Robert Kelly of Bard College to Jonathan Williams)

Jeffery Beam interviewed Jonathan Williams for RainTaxi in an article that appeared in the issue of Spring, 2003. Like many of Williams' indirect verbal ambles the conversation, as they say, takes the long way round.

In 2002 Mr. Williams had published A Palpable Elysium, his book of photographs featuring artists of all stripes. The book included portraits from an astonishing variety of folk from Williams' social circle: San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, Henry Miller, the Georgia folk artist Eddie Owens Martin a.k.a. St. EOM, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, Father Thomas Merton, and a large selection from more than three thousand photographs.

There are also graveside visits to artists Williams admired and whose work Williams wanted to support, among them H.P. Lovecraft, Wallace Stevens, Erik Satie, and James Thurber.

Eddie Owens Martin (St. EOM) by JW

The full RainTazi interview can be read at the Jargon website and is worth a long, leisurely read and a porch sit on a hot August afternoon. Here is a small extract of JW's meandering style where he discusses his time at Black Mountain College, his early career as a publisher, and ultimately why his interests take flight in so many directions. But first a comment about JW's style of dress, which has almost always included a suit and tie since the 1950s:

JB: Somehow the tie and everything else confuses people....

JW: Oh yeah, I’ve had that happen. I went into The Cedar Tavern in the Village one day in 1958 or whenever. That’s where a lot of the Black Mountain people who lived in New York hung out. And I had been out trying to sell our Zukofsky book, our Robert Duncan book, our Denise Levertov book, and I think maybe The Test of Poetry. I was going around to places like Scribner’s and Brentano’s and some of the bookshops on Madison Avenue, and I was tired of carrying this heavy briefcase.

For the purpose I had set out to do, I was wearing a brown worsted suit, a beige Oxford cloth shirt, a striped tie, black socks, and brown shoes (well polished). So I walked into The Cedars, and way in the back was, of all people, Gregory Corso. I’d never met him, and he’d never met me, but before he shook hands he said, “Why are you wearing those silly, awful clothes?” (laughter) Well, that was all I needed to hear from him (more laughter), so I went back to the bar and left them to it.

So, you’re right, clothes can be misleading. Take Jack Spicer, who was gay as three grapes. I had not met Spicer and I wanted to. This was 1954 in San Francisco. Somebody with me said, “Hey, it’s Halloween, let’s go to The Black Cat.” It was right next door to the police station, interestingly enough, but they didn’t hassle the gays. I asked, “How will I know Jack?” My friend said, “He’ll be the only guy wearing a business suit!” (laughter). I really liked that. People ought to dress they way they want to, unless it frightens the police sergeant.

Charles Olson writing the "Maximus Poems"

at Black Mountain, by JW

JB: I think of your photograph of Charles Olson at Black Mountain where he doesn’t have his shirt on. When you were at Black Mountain did you continue to dress – had you already developed this formal way of dress? And while you were there did you stand out as someone who was less relaxed in the way they presented themselves?

JW: Well, I was the only person at Black Mountain who had, you know, been to prep school and gone to Princeton and spent time in New York and all that. I didn’t dress any differently than anybody else did, I don’t think, at Black Mountain. Certainly, none of the faculty made a thing of it …

Lou Harrison was rather dressy, but nobody else. Lou had a long-time San Francisco / New York background. I don’t think anyone wanted to stand out, particularly, at Black Mountain. I often wore a blazer on Sunday morning in case people got religion and somebody needed to pass the collection plate.

JB: Like a good southern boy.

JW: Yeah. (laughter)

JB: Presentable. (laugher)

JW: Presentable. Absolutely. Always presentable.

JW, by Rueben Cox (2001)

JB: Is there an easily defined artistic aesthetic that describes what, and how, and why you do what you do?

JW: Uncle Remus says: “Hit run’d cross my min’ des lak a rat ‘long a rafter.” I have a mind like that. It darts and shimmies all the time. It thinks of six things (besides sex) all at once. So the trick is to slow down, focus, concentrate. Someone said that craft is perfected attention. I like making well-crafted books, and poems, and images. Because it pleases me so to do. And it’s nice to please some of one’s friends now and then. I have never cultivated a commercial audience. I try never to do anything just for money — I seem to have been quite successful at that.

My things are for one or two people at a time. My old friend, Ephraim Doner (whose father had been an Hassidic rabbi in Poland), once told me about “The Lamed-Vov.” In the ancient Hebraic tradition the Lamed-Vov were the 36 great souls of the earth. Wonderfully, they never knew they were great souls, but Yahweh knew. If suddenly they dwindled to less than 36, then Yahweh would pull the plug and go to work on a better animal. As long as we can sell 36 copies of a Jargon book, we will keep at it.

Mick Jagger, [great-grand]daddy rolling stone at 70

Mick Jagger, Denmark 1963

Mick Jagger, 70, is a great-grandfather. Imagine that. Literally a generation ago (or several), the frontman for the Rolling Stones gave pop culture a whole new level of sex and suggestiveness that shocked parents and seemed to liberate teenagers in a way the moptop Beatles never could. And now Sir Mick seems to be giving Sir Paul another rivalry that would have seemed impossible back in 1964: changing the great-grandbaby's nappy.

 Sympathy for the devil indeed.

Whether one wants to imagine the aging Stone still gathering no moss at least onstage, Sir Mick has always been quick with his lip in interviews. While he squirmed at the idea of sitting still for interviews he always knew their value as publicity and gamely cooperated -- unlike Dylan or even Mick's partner in rock, Keith Richards, for example.

There will always be more re-packaged hits for the Stones' many music labels, who have never been shy about mining gold from the band's half-century of pop history. And if the home-life gets sleepy between his great-grandpa chores and batting away rumors of touring with the Stones, Mick can revive his supergroup with Eurythmics legend Dave Stewart, reggae star Damien Marley, jazz soulstress Joss Stone and Indian musician and producer A.R. Rahman.

Here's Mick in 1995, talking to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone magazine at the ripe old age of 52, looking back at a professional career that even then had spanned 33 years. And although the Stones are more an industry than a rock band at this late date, who's to say that Mick, Keith, and Charlie won't continue to put on a show as long as there's a five-pound note left in the Bank of England's vaults? But who's counting, indeed: Last July the Stones staged the 50 And Counting tour.

Sir Mick, 2011

WENNER: What did you think was going on inside you at 15 years old that you wanted to go out and roll around on a stage?

JAGGER: I didn’t have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, “Well, I can do this.” And I liked doing it. It’s a real buzz, even in front of 20 people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes at me, I wouldn’t have gone on with it. But they all liked it, and it always seemed to be a success, and people were shocked. I could see it in their faces.

WENNER: Shocked by you?

JAGGER: Yeah. They could see it was a bit wild for what was going on at the time in these little places in the suburbs. Parents were not always very tolerant, but Keith’s mum was very tolerant of him playing. Keith was an only child, and she didn’t have a lot of other distractions, whereas my parents were like “Get on your homework.” It was a real hard time for me. So I used to go and play with Keith, and then we used to go and play with Dick Taylor [who was later in the Pretty Things]. His parents were very tolerant, so we used to go round to his house, where we could play louder.

WENNER: What was it like to be such a success at such a young age?

JAGGER: It was very exciting. The first time we got our picture in the music paper called the Record Mirror – to be on the front page of this thing that probably sold about 20,000 copies – was so exciting, you couldn’t believe it. And this glowing review: There we were in this club in Richmond, being written up in these rather nice terms. And then to go from the music-oriented press to national press and national television, and everyone seeing you in the world of two television channels, and then being recognized by everyone from builders and people working in shops and so on. It goes to your head – very champagne feeling.

WENNER: You became quite the pop aristocrat in swinging London.

JAGGER: Well, it’s quite a while until all that. But the earlier bit was even more exciting. The suits, the ties and getting ready for “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” the innocence and naiveté of it all, and famous photographers wanting to take your picture and being in Vogue. In England they were very ready for another band. It was funny, because the Beatles had only been around a year. Things happened so quickly. Then there were a lot of popular bands, and all these bands were from the North of England. Most people in England don’t live in the North, and people are snobby in England, so they wanted a band from the South. We were it. ...

Jumpin' Jack Flash, 1980

WENNER: Can you define rock & roll for me? What is it about? Is it about sex, violence, energy, anger?

JAGGER: All those things: energy, anger, angst, enthusiasm, a certain spontaneity. It’s very emotional. And it’s very traditional. It can’t break too many rules. You have certain set rules, certain forms, which are traditionally folk-based, blues-based forms. But they’ve got to be sung with this youthful energy – or youthful lethargy, because youth has this languorous, lethargic, rebellious side to it as well. So they can be sung as an alternate mode of thrashing, this slightly feminine languor, the boredom of youth as well as the anger, because youth has those two things. To represent those emotions, this form seems to work very well.

WENNER: Boredom and anger, which are both a form of rebellion.

JAGGER: Yeah, a statement of rebellion. Drawing the line where your generation is. ...

Rosemary Tonks, 1928-2014: the case of the poet who disappeared

"The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas"

(Rosemary Tonks)

I have lived it, and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilisation,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.

…Their idea of literature is hopeless.
Make them drink their own poetry!
Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.
It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he
Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two hours in the hole − and talks
− Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It’s…damnably depressing.
(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning
In the little dish…And when he calls out: ‘Ha!’
Madness − you no longer possess your own furniture.)

On my bad days (and I’m being broken
At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw…

I grow coarser; and more modern (I, who am driven mad
By my ideas; who go nowhere;
Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)
All right. I admit everything, everything!

Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)
He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone’s ill
At the last minute; and they fly in
A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano.  He wants to help her
With her arias.            Old goat!  Blasphemer!
He wants to help her with her arias!

No, I…go to the cinema,
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum,
…the fogs! the fogs!  The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud − that bangs
And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles − taciturn, luxurious.
…The drugged and battered Philistines
Are all around you in the auditorium…

And he…is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,
He wants to make me think his thoughts
And they will be enormous, dull − (just the sort
To keep away from).
…when I see that  cigarillo, when I see it…smoking
And he wants to face the international situation…
Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!

− All this sitting about in cafés to calm down
Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!
The idiotic cut of the stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café-nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.

Some quotes from The Guardian’s obituary for Rosemary Tonks (1928 – 2014): 

The poet Rosemary Tonks, who has died aged 85, famously “disappeared” in the 1970s. The author of two poetry collections and six published novels, she turned her back on the literary world after a series of personal tragedies and medical crises which made her question the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing spiritual quest. 

...  Living for the next four decades as the reclusive Mrs Lightband in an anonymous-looking old house tucked away behind Bournemouth seafront, she cut herself off from her former life, refusing to see relatives, old friends, or publishers like me who hoped she might change her mind and allow her poetry to be reissued. As far as the literary world was concerned, she “evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat”, as Brian Patten put it in a BBC Lost Voices half-hour feature, The Poet Who Vanished, broadcast on Radio 4 in 2009. ... 

Moving into the Bournemouth house in 1980, she completed the obliteration of the person she had been, consigning an unpublished novel to the garden incinerator…

One writer commented in 2009 on Tonks's unusual creative history that "[s]he stopped publishing poetry in the early seventies, apparently converting to Christianity, and in the late seventies she vanished entirely. Apparently she lives in some kind of garden shed or something and won’t communicate with anyone at all. Though how melodramatic this account is, who can say. I’ve even seen one account that says she packed it all in after seeing the ghost of Baudelaire." 

Here are more links to information:

one is the BBC "Lost Voices" presentation, two is an appreciation at The Dabbler, three is a remembrance at Culture Critic, and four is a 2011 blog entry, "Waiting for a left-wing bureaucrat to make a heart-beat," at Superintendent Idle Tiger. [Photo: Rosemary Tonks in the 1960s, by Jane Bown.]

25 suggestions for Memorial Day weekend reading to combat brain-freeze

Admit it: the long Memorial Day weekend is approaching and you just can't decide if you're ready for another beach book, or picture-perfect book about barbeque, or breathless celebrity tell-all brain-freeze. Besides, you have to save something nap-inducing for the long, lazy days of summer, still a month away. What to read now?

Tyler Coates, online at Flavorwire, offers a smart list of 25 essential non-fiction books -- some serious, some humorous, ranging from gimlet-eyed memoir to astute history -- with lesbian / bi / gay / transgender authors and subjects. Several recommended titles qualify as classics (Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant, Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On), and there are more recent books of lives led in- or out-of-the-closet. 

As with any online list, readers have responded with their own additions. The genderbending A Low Life in High Heels by Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn would be a good, entertaining extra. Coates makes the point that the broad selection, with topics from gender politics to AIDS to literary outlaws, isn't meant to be complete. At the very least, The Life of Roman Novarro (André Soares) qualifies as both a Hollywood bio and a beach read that could make it to the waterside before before Labor Day. An excerpt from the list and Coates' comments:

The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser. Kaiser’s historical look at how gay men informed the culture of America’s urban areas — particularly New York City — spans 56 years from the periods of silent acceptance, the tumultuous pre-Stonewall years, the empowering ’70s, and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s.

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. This collection of speeches and essays from the influential and outspoken Audre Lorde touches on racism, sexism, and homophobia without losing a sense of hope for positive results in the face of class struggles. 

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring. A contemporary of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Samuel Steward lived an extraordinary secret sexual life which he chronicled in great detail in a collection of journals.  

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel’s gorgeous and heartbreaking graphic memoir follows the artist as she grapples with both her own sexuality and the revelation that her cold, distant father led a secret life as a gay man. 

Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas. The internationally renowned poet shares his life story, from his adolescence spent fighting for the Castro regime to his imprisonment for his sexuality to his flight from Cuba to his deathbed in New York City. 

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein. Legendary transgender activist and writer Kate Bornstein details her transition from a heterosexual man to a lesbian woman in this modern classic about challenging gender and cultural norms. 

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio. Bayard Rush was responsible for teaching the principles of non-violent protest to Martin Luther King, Jr., yet his status as an openly gay man in the midst of the civil rights movement kept him from being recognized for the efforts and activism he accomplished. 

Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro by André Soares. This biography tells the story of the first Latin American movie star, whose death was one of the most shocking scandals of the early days of Hollywood. 

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncy. Chauncy’s history of gay life in New York decades before the impact of the Stonewall riots is a surprising account that defies the notion that homosexuality was hidden out of view until the 1960s.