Tag: Books

Tuesday November 10, 2020

Sarah reads Frankie the story of the Gingerbread Man as I mow the lawn. Earlier in the day Frankie and I watched an episode of the Comedy Central series Over the Garden Wall. The episode is called “Tome of the Unknown” and features a guitar-playing vegetable man named “Mr. Crops.”

The series title “Over the Garden Wall” reminds me of the next book I teach, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, as the book’s protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina flees her family’s gated community after the latter comes under attack from a group of “crazies” — people addicted to a drug called Pyro. Lauren quite literally escapes over the garden wall.

Monday November 2, 2020

“It’s All Gardening,” says Stewart Brand in his book Whole Earth Discipline. What about the Green New Deal? And what about Gary Snyder’s “Call of the Wild”? There must be room for all of these. Community gardens, community farms. Households communicating and exchanging in networks of mutual aid. Brand married an Ottawa Indian mathematician named Lois Jennings. He joined the Native American Church, consumed peyote with them in ceremony at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico in the 1960s. Brand describes the ceremony in Whole Earth Discipline, acknowledging that it affords no more than a tiny glimpse of Native American culture. Along the way he quotes Gary Snyder. “There is something to be learned from the native American people about where we are,” the poet wrote. “It can’t be learned from anybody else.” What Brand advocates is “reinhabitation” of Turtle Island. Attention to and immersion in a locale. This is an idea he draws from Snyder, who writes, “we are all finally ‘inhabitory’ on this one small blue-green planet.” To which Brand replies, “might as well get good at it.” Somewhere in the Whole Earth Catalog is a conversation between Snyder, Brand, Ken Kesey, and Paul Hawken. I’m curious to know Snyder’s thoughts on Brand, as the latter remains for me a villain of sorts — not least due to his support for nuclear power. Snyder of course scolded him for that. The two are among the handful of signatories of the “Declaration of Interdependence,” a document unveiled at a press conference at Berkeley in September 1969.

Monday October 26, 2020

Note how Leslie Marmon Silko situates the writing of her novel Ceremony in a particular place. The book conjures the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, though it was written, as Silko states in the book’s preface, “750 miles north of Seattle” in Ketchikan, Alaska. Silko moved to Ketchikan “from Chinle, Arizona in late spring of 1973” (xi). Silko describes for us the room where she wrote the book so that, when we read the poem “Ceremony” that opens the novel, it is her that we recognize as the creation-figure “Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman” (1). It is she who, with her sisters “Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i,” “created the Universe / this world / and the four worlds below” (1). So begins the ceremony of Ceremony. Silko is a writer of mixed ancestry — a borderlands figure stuck between cultures, as the Chicana cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa would say. See Anzaldúa’s famous book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza — a work that, like Ceremony, mixes poetry and prose. Ceremony‘s protagonist Tayo is another such figure. Raised on the reservation but of mixed ancestry.

Friday October 23, 2020

Books can present themselves as sacred works: “received word.” They can also serve as ceremonial objects containing the teachings of ancestors. Authors share mythoi and logoi. Exchanges occur cross-culturally. Histories are understood to unfold within and share the form of religious myths. History is the latter’s translation and dissemination across space-time. These myths and histories can be mixed and sampled, played with a difference by the storyteller, as they are by Ishmael Reed in Mumbo Jumbo. Stories can be intercut with myths as the two rhyme across time. Stories become circles within circles, as in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.

Thursday October 22, 2020

I sit on a chair and think about karmic cycles as seasons for healing. Days have rhythms, bracketed blocks of time given to care, work, and play. By the latter I mean hermetic time of inner listening, when days allow. Books about “space” turn up on shelves across from me. Books on art and architecture: Topologies, Delirious New York, The Situationist City. Further off, a book called Spaced Out. What am I seeking, up there on those shelves? Am I seeking a teacher — one who I hope will appear in my life when I’m ready? Gary Snyder studied the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism with a teacher in Japan. Of course Snyder himself is a teacher as well. I find myself reading about American Zen pioneer Ruth Fuller Sasaki. Snyder worked for Sasaki during his time in Kyoto in the late 1950s. She’s the one who sponsored his first trip to Japan.

Thursday October 1, 2020

In my teachings, I praise the Haudenosaunee — the “People of the Longhouse,” the “Iroquois Confederacy.” They’re a matriarchal decentralized democracy. Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote favorably of the Iroquois in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, though his account relies heavily upon the work of Rochester-based American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. (Morgan, by the way, is buried in Rochester’s Mt. Hope Cemetery.) Along with his work as an ethnographer of the Iroquois, Morgan served as a Republican assemblyman and senator in the 1860s. Time to dig in and study this history. Shango’s double-headed battle-axe appears, though, on the cover of Mary Daly’s book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. That, too, is a book to study. The ordinary is itself the uncanny.

Sunday September 27, 2020

A book called Realizing the Impossible called out to me the other day, the title resonating with a phrase I’d recalled in an email the day prior. A friend had recommended an article commending the importance of utopian visionary thinking in times of crisis. I replied with a line of Che Guevara’s spraypainted on the walls on the streets of Paris during May ’68: “Be realistic — demand the impossible.” Opening the book, I came upon an interview with late 60s acid anarchist Ben Morea, central figure in New York freak-left political-art groups Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, as well as — to my surprise — a later, short-lived collective called International Werewolf Conspiracy. The name pricks up one’s ears, does it not? For a short time in the late 60s and early 70s the group made and printed posters and manifestos. They’d pass out leaflets to fellow heads on the streets. Morea was friends with Valerie Solanas, author of The SCUM Manifesto. Morea wrote a pamphlet in support of Solanas when she shot Andy Warhol, an act shunned and disowned by the rest of the left and the art world. There’s a character based on Morea in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol. By 1969, he was heading the International Werewolf Conspiracy. The group’s broadsheets amplify the gothic element in Marx and Engels. The specter evoked in the first sentences of The Communist Manifesto has given way to a pack of werewolves birthed when American youth drink the era’s “magic potion,” LSD. These werewolves are thus in origin a bit like Frankenstein’s monster — one of capitalist science’s Faustian lab experiments gone awry. The pose strikes me as pure Attentat. Then again, maybe it’s just an American “horror-show” version of épater la bourgeoisie: an attempt to shock the middle class out of its complacency as the country transforms into Nixonland.

Saturday September 12, 2020

I sort through boxes of books, selecting several a day to add to shelves of bookcases around the house. Each room with its books operates thus around me as ever-expanding memory palace and cognitive map. The angel of the library arrives, or as Erik Davis says in an interview for a recent episode of Michael Taft’s Deconstructing Yourself podcast, “The archive wakes up and starts to show you patterns.” I’ve experienced and continue to experience “visits” from these “intelligences from the other side.” These are for the most part joyful occasions — growth games. One feels sized-up like Mario under the influence of flower power. Imbued with a kind of grace.

Friday August 14, 2020

Ishmael Reed may have been present at the founding of the East Village Other — indeed, he seems to have been the one who gave the paper its name! — but many of his poems of the 1960s, the ones gathered in Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970, are quite scornful in their assessment of the counterculture. In his “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” for instance, Reed calls out Theodore Roszak, noting that in the latter’s famous book The Making of a Counter Culture, “there is barely any mention of the Black influence on this culture even though its members dress like Blacks talk like Blacks walk like Blacks, gesture like Blacks wear Afros and indulge in Black music and dance” (20-21). Speaking of neglected black influences upon the counterculture, why am I only just now learning that the acid trip sequence in Easy Rider was shot at or near Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau’s tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1? Hopper and Fonda filmed the sequence guerrilla-style, without permission … while tripping on acid. Reed’s collection also includes a poem called “catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church” — a self-conscious response of sorts, I imagine, to Millbrook resident Art Kleps’s Boo Hoo Bible: The Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook. Several of Reed’s associates were participants in the psychedelic revolution — including East Village Other co-founder and publisher Walter Bowart. Bowart’s second wife was Peggy Hitchcock, the director of Leary and Alpert’s International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). Peggy’s brother Billy is the one who arranged for the Leary crew to live on the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook. Bowart went on to publish an important book on MK-Ultra in 1978 called Operation Mind Control.

Wednesday August 12, 2020

In fugitive slave narratives of the nineteenth century, and continuing in neo-fugitive works like Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, freedom requires migration north on foot, master and his minions often in hot pursuit, as in the story of Harriet Tubman. It also involves extrication out from under the master’s religion, imposed over the course of the slave’s upbringing. Divinity has to be understood and believed in by the slave as something other than the wretched white tyrant who runs the farm. This understanding emerges surreptitiously, through what Fred Moten calls “fugitive study.”