New Books of Note, Gordon Ball, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Schumacher

Gordon Ball has a new book out, a collection of stories set in Post WWII Tokyo called On Tokyo's Edge: Gaijin Tales from Postwar Japan. Published by Red Mountain Press, this slender paperback is handsome, the printing crisp and clean. Simple, sometimes quirky, sometimes achingly innocent, the stories, like the book's design, are elegant and unadorned. Their spare sentences belie richly textured snapshots of the emerging life of a boy named Robert. Gordon Ball is a renown experimental filmmaker and these stories almost feel like scenes from a reflective cinematic movie. 

Michael Schumacher, Ginsberg biographer (Dharma Lion), edited First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, new from the University of Minnesota Press. Among the uncollected interviews included in this timely release is "Ginsberg in Washington: Lobbying for Tenderness," not so much an interview but an article by Don McNeil originally published in the Village Voice in 1966 describing Ginsberg's testimony before a Senate subcommittee investigating LSD.

 "Whatever prejudgment you have about me, or my bearded image, I hope you will suspend it so that we can talk together as fellow human beings in the same room of Now, trying to come to some harmony and peacefulness between us." (AG)

Finally, Grove Atlantic has released The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beat Generation, a volume of Ginsberg's lectures given during the course he devised and taught first at Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College.

"Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Bill Morgan, and with an introduction by Anne Waldman, The Best Minds of My Generation presents the lectures in edited form, complete with notes, and paints a portrait of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors, and fellow revolutionaries."

The 20th anniversary of Allen's death comes next week on April 5, 2017. That books by and about him continue to appear reinforces the notion that his voice is one still to be heard, that his words and ideas remain germane in a world that, in some ways, has manifestly changed since he was alive, but that in other ways, in the ways of war and police state violence and planetary peril and political corruption and Moloch-esque greed, heartlessness and abuse of power, are much the same. 

Allen Ginsberg would surely be active and vocal in resisting the toxic political madness burbling in the un-drained swamp of today's Washington D.C. I asked Anne Waldman how she thought Allen would be dealing with the current times, and she replied:

Allen would be in the resistance struggle and trying to communicate with the other side! The 2018 mid term election important need ! to act now-

I'm trying to rise to all the occasions I can, not stop and be loving and encouraging to others... and keep travelling..

I'm curating a festival at Casa Del Lago in Mexico City next week ..

Performed at Jaipur festival in India

And did Keynote there. 

Naropa New Weathers theme will be

Strong this summer June 11 til July 3...

Trungpa warned about fascist 

Takeover and here it is

Pathological sociopaths!

Why a lot of folks went to Halifax...

Onward and best.. remember your wisdom even if we don't make it

We just have to try

Very best

Anne 

Troubling Times

City Hall, Worcester, January 31, 2017

Troubling times come to all nations eventually, even "exceptional" ones like the United States. 

Unfortunately, what is exceptional about the United States is not what politicians and the ruling class would have us believe, that we're a welcoming, tolerant country founded on principles of liberty and equality, that we alone among the world's nations have the moral authority to script the planetary moral code.

All it takes is intellectual courage and the willingness to examine History through a lens wiped clean of nationalism to discern that America as a moral beacon is an obvious falsehood. Though the national myth suggests a nation of toleration & freedom made steadfast by the rule of law, the truth is something else.

A careful and honest appraisal of the nation's past - from slavery to Manifest Destiny and the genocide of the Native Americans, from Jim Crow to Joseph McCarthy, from Selma to Saigon - reveals a history stained with violence, xenophobia, venality, and cruelty. This is simply true.

History continues. History , in fact, is not the past, it is the Present. We lurch forward now into the era of the Ignorant Beast. Ban the immigrants. Restrict the vote. Deport the Other. Make America White Again.

Yet there is another story within the story, an aspect of the National Narrative that cannot be denied or erased - Resistance. At every step of the bloody way, the Beast has been confronted by the people. The underground railroad. Geronimo. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The Suffragists. SDS. The Black Panthers. AIM. The levitation of the Pentagon. The Women's March on Washington. The list is long, prestigious, awash in sadness and punctuated with triumph.

Today our turn has come to continue writing the story line of Resistance. We must take strength from the examples of our predecessors, we must incorporate the lessons of their movements into our own, and we must decide, each one of us, what our role is to play in the gathering struggle.

Responding to the anti-immigrant actions of the Beast
Worcester City Hall, January 31, 2017

Observed

Whole Foods parking lot, Hadley, MA
February 19, 2017

"... dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom."

The bumper sticker on the far right reads "Howl if you (heart) City Lights Books." 

I'm always happy and surprised to see one of those but it's pretty cheesy & cliched, a bumper sticker no where near creative enough to represent either the great poem or the famed book shop & publisher.

But still, I take heart in seeing it on a car in America. 

"America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

And slapping my Ginsbergian politics & my organic gardening enthusiasms on my tail gate, too.

The View from the Road

ND and I drove from Woo City to Baltimore, MD where we stayed overnight before driving on into the heart of D.C. Saturday morning. 

NJ Turpike
January 20, 2017

If you drive along the northeast corridor on a Friday afternoon at any time of the year you are likely to encounter a traffic nightmare at some point. Doing so while hundreds of thousands of other people like yourself are also driving toward the capital means that, collectively, you overburden the infrastructure. 

Particularly the bridges. Getting to and getting across both the George Washington Bridge and the Delaware Memorial Bridge was insane. Semi-organized chaos. Everyone's rage and frustration is constrained by sheer helplessness. Once you enter that fray, belted inside your car, you are completely contained by the crush of vehicles on all sides and in all directions. You literally go with the flow.

The GW Bridge is truly terrifying, an engineering miracle that's the architectural equivalent of a gargantuan iron dragon, a beast so hideous and frightening, so noisy, tense and simmering with coiled violence, that you grind your teeth and grip the steering wheel tightly with both hands while crossing it. 

In fact, just getting to it puckers the sphincter. You speed along on RT 95's battered pavement and cross that majestically wretched yet somehow captivating sprawl of the Bronx, and everyone is in a hurry and the energy is RELENTLESS and AGGRESSIVE and, not wanting to jinx your passage, you desperately try to avoid thinking about what you would do if you got a flat tire.

NJ Turnpike

The folly at the Delaware Memorial Bridge was the funneling of four jammed lanes of traffic through toll booths and then forcing them to merge down to two lanes. Kafkaesque absurdity. It took 30 minutes to inch our way about three miles before finally getting onto the bridge itself.

Despite those choke points, our spirits soared periodically when we saw other cars full of people that were obviously heading toward the Women's March like us. We fed on that portent, that fleeting connection to strangers, and we comforted ourselves with the thought that something positive was coalescing across the land. For the first time in a very long time we began to sense the awakening of a common purpose. 

The Women's March on Washington the following day was an gigantic expression of common purpose; you didn't have to sense it, you heard it in the roar of solidarity of 500,000 people, and you saw it in the packed city streets around you, and around the country.

American highways are harsh, unforgiving landscapes fraught with danger. You'd be advised to adopt a survivalist mentality when venturing onto them. 

To survive, you must know what is going on around you at all times. You must anticipate the unexpected and take nothing for granted. You must always know your escape options. 

You must always expect that someone will do something incredibly stupid that could jeopardize your life. 

Hope and Despair 2017

Where do we go from here? On Friday, January 20, the nation swore in the 45th president of the United States, a serial liar and raging narcissist. To put it in locker room talk (a vernacular the president-elect admittedly understands well), we swore in a real dickhead. 

Washington D.C.
January 21, 2017

A day later, more than half a million people, the majority women, thronged the very same national mall where the inauguration was held, and manifested a profound demonstration of opposition to the new administration. And not only in Washington D.C. People took to the streets in massive displays of principled resistance around the nation - Boston 200,000 people, NYC 250,000, Philadelphia 50,000, L.A. 750,000, Chicago 200,000, Denver 100,000 - and around the world.

History provides plenty of examples of societies slipping into authoritarianism, fascism, or simply devolving into corrupt and/or incompetent oligarchies. It's naive to comfort ourselves with "it can't happen here" smugness. We are not an "exceptional" nation as politicians of all stripes aver. We are as susceptible as any nation state to dissolution, chaos, and violence. 

So it seems quite apt, even necessary, that on the day following the installation of such a crass and unpredictable president, the People gather in the nation's public spaces to remind the new administration that women's rights matter and that we, as a vigilant and passionate body politic, are watching. 

Infitnite Jest: Interlude

Like the growth of the Giant Sequoia, reading Infinite Jest takes time ... though ideally not three thousand years.

The President Tree
Sequoia National Park, California
September 21, 2016

Infinite Jest: Pages 67-128: Kate Gompert suicide watch, surprised blue eyes, Steeply and Marathe, Gerhardt Schtitt and E.T.A.

We are moving slowly. This is hyperbolic understatement. "We" meaning the initial trio of readers, the three Jest-a-teers, each of us in Life's full embrace. 75 pages a week? More than a month has passed and even I, the docent, have only gotten to page 128 (though that does include thirteen pages of footnotes, wink) (but still).

I will say this. It's fucking awesome the second time.

This time around I'm savoring everything. Circling whole sentences with admiration and awe. Making notes in the margins. HFS. WTF. WOW.

Poor Kate Gompert.

There are dark halls and sad places

... the sour odor of medical waste awaiting collection ... (p69) Kate Gompert in the psych ward

... sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. (p71)

On a single page, we get circumorals, thigmotactic, dentate, and synclinal. (pg75)

The Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.) and Gerhardt Schtitt, the Head Coach and Athletic Director who ... has the creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously. He has surprised blue eyes and a vivid white crewcut of the sort that looks virile and good on men who have lost a lot of hair anyway. (p80)

Surprised blue eyes.

We also get a hefty dose of the tennis student-players themselves, teenage boys mostly, but also some girl players, and we start to form a picture of the culture at E.T.A. (which, I should say, is an abbreviation I find jarring and unpleasant to behold; it makes me think of the Basque separatist group ETA).

Hmm, but maybe that's DFW's point, to subtly insert the acronym of a famous international separatist group so that the fictional Quebecois separatist group in IJ seems completely plausible.

Note (from Google):

ETA (Basque: [eta], Spanish: [ˈeta]), an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna(Basque pronunciation: [eus̺kaði ta as̺katas̺una]; "Basque Country and Freedom") is an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization in northern Spain and southwestern France.

Perfect entry for Marathe and Steeply (Marathe p87, Steeply p88) ... though not before the Infinite Jest entertainment cartridge strikes! (p87)

The first time I read this section, I had no idea what the fuck was going on. It was surreal and disconnected to anything that came before it. Who ARE these people and are we really talking about a guy in a wheelchair and a guy in drag way the fuck up on some cliff overlooking a city in Arizona?

Actually, yes. and - SPOILER ALERT - Marathe is a member of the A.F.R, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, the Wheelchair Assassins, ... pretty much Quebec's most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell; and  Steeply is an Unspecified Service's field operative. (We'll have to deal with what "O.N.A.N" is later on).

Marathe to Steeply (a LOL margin note), commenting on Steeply's woman's disguise:

And your tits, they have become cock-eyed, I will tell you, Services Without Specificity, they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently. (p92)

Steeply is described as some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport athlete now become fat. Priceless.

Hal at E.T.A. The Halster. Halorama. Halation. (p97). I've written in the margin "Hal is the young, troubled, genius".

Hal Brushed

Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish, only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unbearable even w/o sunscreen, his untanned feet the color of weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. (p101)

Hal is a stoner. This is DFW knowing what that means and describing Hal as if he, the author, were stoned and noticing Hal. There's a scene in the boys locker room, a bunch of kids are sitting around tired after a huge practice. In the margin I have written next to this "This is deep noticing!"

Hal's face's reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then if he moves his head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical tang in the next tile. (p104)

Are you fucking kidding me?

And then, 16 pages later, Mario, Hal's weirdly deformed (elephant head, claws for hands) younger brother, gets sexually molested by U.S.S. Millicent in the thicket on the perimeter of the grounds. I know. WTF.