Literrata

RIP Johnny Otis

2012-01-19T14:31:00.001-08:00

RIP Johnny Otis. (© Maureen Hurley photo/halftone).

Johnny Otis (Mr. "Hand Jive"), surveying his Sebastopol ranch in the early 1990s. After a leisurely latte interview in his sunlit kitchen, he walked me down to the barn to show me his paintings and sculptures. Johnny was our godfather benefactor for The Russian River Writers' Guild. He called me up one afternoon after I did a front page story on him for The Paper, and he asked if I'd be willing to host a poetry reading series at his Sebastopol cafe on blue Mondays. I asked him why he called me versus myriad other Sonoma County poets and he said, "I only work with the best people, I asked around and you're the best." The only catch is you have to book someone every Monday night." We only booked two events a month. For two years, I worked my ass off rounding up poets every week. Luckily I had help: David Bromige, Steve Tills, and other Sonoma County poets pitched in. Great PA sound system. Great ambiance. Great poets. Great man. RIP Johnny.

See Dan Taylor's Press Democrat obit: Sonoma County musicians mourn Johnny Otis
(I'm quoted in it).

Captiva Island, August

2012-01-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

Neil loved Captiva Island. I was ambivalent about the Gulf: it was like murky bath water—too hot for me to stay submerged for any length of time.

I grew up swimming at Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco, where even in summer, the water is about 65° due to the frigid Humboldt current that sweeps down the west coast from the North Pole. As a kid, I thought that swimming frigid ocean water was normal. But Neil loved the warmth of the Gulf. He was basking in it. Not like Scotland.

Florida in August is far too hot for the snowbirds. Only the hardy locals and the crazies went out in the August heat. Most waited until the sun went down to venture forth into the night. The upside of it was that we practically had the beaches to ourselves.

Neil was deep in conversation with a gaggle of men who were standing chest deep with their backs to the surf, when on the crest of a small wave, several black fins appeared. Everyone blanched and the men nearly shat themselves trying to make it to shore.

Forget about the wife and kids. It was every man for himself.

They fought a losing battle against the weight of the water as they churned toward shore. A 12-year-old kid who was playing near me climbed me like a tree. Not his dad, mind you. Me. I stood transfixed with this kid on my shoulders, watching the fins come nearer.

Then someone on shore said, Awww, look—dophins! The men stopped, and pretended that it was nothing.

Rexroth

2011-12-22T00:40:00.000-08:00

The Rexroths owned a summer cabin a few ravines over from us. After school, I used to ride my red mare by his place near Dead Man's Curve on the way to the Inkwells. I remember the wooden sign, a fence plank with Rexroth painted in big black letters, rotting into the hillside. Tanoak and redwood duff. His wife used to sit in the same pew as my grandmother at St. Cecelia's Church in Lagunitas. The morning sun lit them as if from within. Sometimes my grandfather would run into him hiking up Devil's Gulch. They talked of salmon runs and politics. He religiously clipped Rexroth's newspaper columns with curved nail scissors. I remember reading the yelllowed columns as a child. No idea of him as the poet. Or me either.

Read Sam Hamill's amazing memoir on Rexroth

http://lostangelesca.tumblr.com/post/14040873919/poet-sam-hamill-on-meeting-kenneth-rexroth-as-a-young

Served!

2011-11-24T11:26:00.000-08:00

too late poem

2011-11-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

In the time that God took to make the world
I have not accomplished much of anything.

This thing called poetry does not heed beck & call

but then, the police are beating our poets with batons

to teach them a thing or two about punctuation.

The poetry prompts, dry as sawdust in the imagination
but then, we are feeding our children wood pulp
calling it food, when it's fodder not fit for swine.
Reminds me of our actor-governor-president
proclaiming catsup in school lunches to be a vegetable.
Soon Congress will be proclaiming pepper spray
a vegetable too. Cops indiscriminately hosing
students and octogenarians alike with their MDR
of OC, or oleoresin capsicum.
That's 2 million Scoville Heat Units.
I can't eat hot food. Fried habañeros send me
into respiratory distress. Breathing is not an option.
Pepper spray, banned for use in war, ir in prisons,
is OK to use on civilians. Especially students.
The 'choppers hovering overhead remind me
that I live in Oakghanistan. Occupied territories.
The scent of mace in the morning makes me nauseous.
PreOccupied. PostOccupied. Where will it all end?
My grandmother said that one day, mark my words,
They would go too far. It was always capital They.
No names. Maybe the Anti-Christ.
She was citing Tammany Hall, events of another era.
She said that the people would rise up. Never too late.
The bankers, the oligarchy. Wall Street itself.
I feel like I'm stuck in a 21st century ebook
reliving the French Revolution where
the cobra of time is flashing back on itself.
Is it because we've discovered a neutrino
faster than the speed of light,
that we've somehow upset the balance
of space itself, setting time on its ear?
It's come to this. We are rising up
with our pikes upon our shoulders
stuffing our soles with straw and cardboard
insulation against the coming winter.
Saying sabot, sabot, sabotage.
It didn't end well for the peasants.
Let them eat straw.

NB California prison regulations "prohibit the use of pepper spray on inmates in all circumstances other than the immediate threat of violence. If a prisoner is seated, by definition the use of pepper spray is prohibited. Any prison guard who used pepper spray on a seated prisoner would face immediate disciplinary review for the use of excessive force."

write an “it’s too late” poem. Nobody likes a quitter, but sometimes you have to “know when to hold them, know when to fold them…” There are times when it’s just too late, and today is the day to write that poem–before it’s too late, of course.

The scent of ____________ makes me ___________

Excess poem

2011-11-13T22:45:00.000-08:00

Without an excess of time

for art, for poetry, for leisure

or that thing called having a life
I prepare for work in the corporate world
by lining my eyes with indigo and kohl,
assuaging the tired bags with eyescream
made of rarest coffee extract
& expensive organic emollients—
really just chi-chi variants of Preparation Haich
(shhh! Lord Barrymore's "morning after" secret).

When I fill out my pale eyebrows with powder

the model Brook Shields is invoked

so that the customers will like me

as they buy an excess of food

pre arranged, pre packaged, pre

and yes, the blank space is invoked

like the fatal flaw in a Navajo rug.
No hyphen need apply
because that would suggest connection
and subject-noun agreement
when there is no ambiguity
when it come to the 1%.

The grand prix price fix is shrink-wrapped
into mortgages and loans, how mort—
death is invoked. A 99% accurate gauge.

I have few islands of time
in excess of five-minute increments
in order to write before
launching my smiling self onto the public realm

so that they will buy buy buy for The Man.

No matter that I work for a good company

we are still all drones to The Man,

to staged commerce, to the treadmill of buying.
My teeth aren't quite white enough,
I'm considered a tad too old for this job.
Should I dye my hair and drink less coffee?
I desperately need a new bra and knickers.
And Freecycle just won't do. Not enough uplift.
But I've managed to hold off for years
because I am shocked by what people buy.

Not basic necessities or staples,
but a plethora of pre-packaged luxury items—

thinking that this is their due
for having earned The Good Life.

But they are merely eating their way deeper into debt.

My register beeps in demonic supplication

& I am part of the system I refused to join for ages.

I joined—not on my own volition—

but because I am afraid of the future,

of medical bills, of paltry retirement stipends,

of the erasure of what was once good,
the loss of the idea of security,
or chicken every Sunday, the family
sitting down to break bread together.

Instead, we are the lost pieces

of a jigsaw puzzle called America

waiting for our exit line,

pursued by the bear of hunger
and want and need.

Robert Lee Brewer: write an excess poem. In today’s culture, there seems to be an excess of excess–even with the state of economy. From an excess of advertisements and political posturing to an excess of electronic gadgets and debt, there’s an excessive number of ways to attack today’s prompt.

Molly Fisk: "Exit, pursued by a bear."
- William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, 3.3

Schieffelin's Starlings

2011-11-12T12:02:00.000-08:00

Hotspur: I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak

Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him,

To keep his anger still in motion.”
—Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I.

When I was a child in the late 1950s,

I remember vast murmurations of starlings
wheeling overhead heralded winter's bent claw.

From afar, they were like bevies of Victorian ladies

rushing in taffeta gowns, accented by the thievery
of weak floorboards. Add the cicada's drone,
the breathy tide and warbling streams.

When a dark curtain of starlings drew nigh

their flight was a cacophony of screech & din,

each bird following the bird in front

like wild winter geese all in a vee—

only with no one bird in the lead.

With synchronized precision they'd weave

and bank like shoals of skybound herring,

or pond cells pulsing in a petri dish.

At dusk, gyrating flocks of starlings
would blanket the trees down by the creek.
With many false starts, they'd alight
and take flight in tight aerial formations

like apparitions of dervishing angels

before bedding down for the night to roost.

It's about group mind, pecking order
and safety in numbers. Who's gonna land
(or be eaten) first? Not me. Not me.
Not meeeeeee. And so on.

Darkfall usually settled the squabble.

A murmuration of starlings. Wikipedia Commons.

One mad March morning in 1890,

Eugene Schieffelin, an eccentric Bronx pharmacist

feloniously in love with Shakespeare's works,

let loose in Central Park some 60 starlings.

Schieffelin, a seventh son, avid Shakespeare buff,

and chairman of the American Acclimatization Society,

introduced 600 species of the Avon Bard's birds
to the New World. Most of his lunatic schemes
never bore fruit, but 16 of his Adam & Evil couples
survived harsh winter. Schieffelin introduced a plague
of feathered locusts upon the continent.

Not only starlings but also house sparrows.

But poetic justice is also served: an artist is teaching

loquacious starlings, aka poor-man's-myna bird,

to utter the name of their liberator, Schieffelin,

so their learned behavior will spread across the land—
like Nazi infiltrators trying to say Scheveningen.

Adult starling Sternus vulgaris. Wikipedia commons.

I remember one starling plummeted from the sky

and landed with an abrupt thump at my feet.

I was transfixed by all that dead beauty

still warm, but silent as the grave in my hand.
Its feathers—an aurora of indigo, teal and twilight

spangled with iridescent shooting stars.

I didn't want to bury that bird. It was far too lovely.

But I knew that death belonged to the ground,

not to the sky, or buried in my treasure box.

I'll posthumously name that dead starling

Hotspur for his bloodred feet

or Schieffelin for his gift of gab.

Perhaps Post-Mortimer would be

a more appropriate moniker.

S. v. faroensis on the Faroe Islands. Wikipedia Commons.

See more images:

Murmuration

2011-11-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

When I was a child during the late 1950s, on winter evenings, murmurations of starlings would congregate overhead. Fom the distance, it sounded like a bevy of Victorian ladies in taffeta gowns madly rushing up and down a narrow hall, or spinning angels in a tight corner, punctuated by the squeaking of weak floorboards or the mutterings of mice. And the tingling of tiny tinny bells. Add the rushing tide. Myriad summer crickets. A small stream speaking over the rocks.

At dusk, the starlings would pulse and weave in an incredible aerial dance formation before settling down for the night to roost in the trees. It's about pecking order and safety in numbers. Who's on first? Or who's gonna land first. Not me. Not me. Not meeeeeee. And so on. Darkfall usually settled the squabble.

When a curtain of starlings got close you could really hear their wings—like a quail bursting from the bush, but longer and louder, pulsing with each twist and turn. An incredible din. Each bird following the bird directly in front of him—like winter geese in a vee. Only with no one bird in the lead. Weave and pulse like shoals of skybound herring, or pond cells contracting in a petri dish. A dance orgy in flight.

A murmuration of starlings. Wikipedia Commons.

However beautiful they are, passerine starlings, like pigeons and house sparrows, are not native to the Americas. European pests, invasive species of the highest arcana.

One mad March afternoon in 1890, an eccentric Bronx pharmacist, Eugene Schieffelin who was feloniously in love with Shakespeare's works, let loose in Central Park some 60 starlings, then 60 more the following year—of which 16 pairs survived harsh winter.

But Schieffelin, who was not only an eccentric seventh son, but an avid Shakespeare buff, and chairman of the American Acclimatization Society. A deadly combination. He wanted to introduce all 600 of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's works, to the Americas. All of them.

Instead, Schieffelin introduced a bio-hazardous plague of feathered locusts upon the entire North American continent. Not only starlings but also house sparrows. Luckily, most of his lunatic schemes never came to fruition.

Ironically, starlings are only mentioned once in Shakespeare's works. So ultimately, we have Hotspur, or The Bard of Avon—who compared sparrows to angels that could awaken dreamers from their feathery beds—to blame for Eugene Schieffelin's madcap folly.

Hotspur: Nay, I will; that's flat:
He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I'll holla 'Mortimer!'
Nay,
I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him,
To keep his anger still in motion.”
—Shakespeare, Hotspur: Act i, Scene iii. Henry IV, Part I.

By the time Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the seminal book that launched the environmental movement, was published in 1962, many species of birds had died off in dramatic numbers, and some to the brink of extinction—including condors, pelicans, and bluebirds. It tool a decade before cumulative pesticides such as DDT were banned in the US.

But it seems Shakespeare's starlings weren't dying fast enough for some. The birds got a little extra goulish help from the government and Ralston as the feathered rats were ravaging agricultural crops and gobbling up thousands of dollars of feed (per day) at livestock pens—the pests were fast becoming a nuisance of starlings. Euphonic avicide poisons like Avitrol and Starlicide were developed.

But starlings proved the more resilient. From those original surviving 16 Adam & Evil pairs, 120 years later, they are now some 200 million strong in the United States alone—causing $125 billion in damage every year. That's not including the aeronautical aviation damage. Airplane engines and vast flocks of starling and blackbirds don't mix well. No-fly the friendly skies.

Like ravens and crows, gregarious starlings have a startling ability to mimic human speech—especially names. Sci-Fi-Dada artist Brian Collier is teaching wild starlings to say the name of their liberator, Schieffelin—like Nazi infiltrators trying to say Scheveningen—in the hopes that the learned behavior will spread throughout the Americas. Shades of sinister ornithology!

Starlings warble, chatter and whistle with the best of songbirds. Like parrots and magpies, these omnivorous polyglots (aka poor man's myna-bird) have impressive vocal chops. They can also mimic at least 20 different species of bird songs—including keening hawks, scolding jays and barking crows, as well as impressive renditions of metallic noises, cell phones, car alarms, yappity-yapdogs and wolf-whistles.

A few of these wandering minstrel birds made it to California in 1942, and by the 1950s, they had aggressively displaced the woodpeckers, flickers and bluebirds. Soon, there were vast colonies of starlings darkening the skies—only Hitchcock's The Birds hadn't yet been made. It was a battle of the birds versus farmers and ranchers in epic proportions.

But back to those murmurations of starlings. Enter me, as a child.

I remember one starling dropped out of the sky and landed with an abrupt thump at my feet. Dead, but beautiful vermin. An aurora of turquoise, peacock blue, indigo and purple night painted into its feathers spangled with iridescent and bronzed stars. I stared transfixed at all that dead beauty still warm in my hand.

I didn't want to bury that bird. It was far too beautiful. But I knew that death belonged to the ground, not to the sky, or buried in my treasure box.

Adult starling Sternus vulgaris. Wikipedia commons.

Think I'll posthumously christen that dead starling of my childhood Hotspur for his red feet or maybe I should call him Schieffelin for his gift of gab. Or perhaps Post-Mortimer would have been a more appropriate moniker.

Note Bene: This blog entry started out as a poem that got away. I love the imagery of collective nouns: a siege of herons (or bitterns), a parliament of fowles/rooks, a murder of crows, a bevy/covey of quail, an exaltation of larks, a charm of goldfinches, a murmuration of starlings—spontaneous metaphor based upon close observation. A sibilant rustle of wings.

I've used collective nouns in poetry lessons (see my Athena of Owls post) but I've found that they have all but disappeared from English. Within my generation, they havev become an archaic footnote. We've lost usage of our descriptive collective nouns because we've decimated so many of the vast flocks (and herds) our grandparents would have routinely witnessed. FOrget the demise of the passenger pigeon. When's the last time you saw a bank of plover?

This short video making the internet rounds is from Shannon, Ireland. Wish Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith of Islands and Rivers hadn't added the background music—so you could actually hear the murmuration. Murmuration was an entry for the WWF short film competition: Life.Nature.You. Make The Connection. Murmuration

Thanks to Murmuration, collective nouns are getting a good dust-off—as most people haven't a clue as to what it means.
Murmuration Mur`mur`a´tion
n. 1. The act of murmuring; a murmur.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, published 1913 by C. & G. Merriam Co.
2. Murmuration of starlings: a flock—Lydgate, 1470.

There are lots of starling encounters posted on the internet—and every one is ruined by "mood" music. As if the music of their wings wasn't enough.

Another more informative video—you can hear them until the Oxford vidoeoggrapher cranks up the silly mood music.
Starlings on Otmoor

There's more starling madness in The Huffington Post.

For what it's worth, I wrote of the loss of collective nouns before I found this article—well worth sharing. Michael McCarthy: From a siege of herons to a murmuration of starlings... why collective nouns are in peril

Tanzanian starling. Wikipedia

My next post I wrestled the poem Schieffelin's Starlings back out of the prose but it's still too long. Check it out.

What won’t wait poem

2011-11-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

What won't wait is getting a life

the things you once held so dear

the house, the job security,

the wife and kids living in the suburbs.

You are perusing the usual mirror

and one day it finally tells you the truth

and you find you've run out of time.

But you've grown accustomed

to looking at yourself backwards

in the mirror for so long,

that the right reflection seems wrong,

no matter what the angle of discontent.

Their voices at night through the window

invade your dreams until you are left

with nothing but the seeds of sleep

waiting to sprout in the grave

repast of your choosing.

Robert Lee Brewer: write a “what won’t wait” poem. Only you know what won’t wait. Maybe it’s falling in love or work–or death (one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems is about this topic). Something else that won’t wait is today’s prompt.

Molly Fisk: Their voices at night through the window.

or kiss me in the back of…

Unexpected poem

2011-11-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

A friend sends a photo from Jerome, Arizona.
John's wearing cowboy boots, a black Stetson,
sheepskin vest, jeans, silver buckle—
as if he stepped out of the last century.
The only thing missing are rowelled spurs
and the odor of horse shit and alkali dust.
The story abides. Jerome, a mining town
rescued from oblivion by tourists and art.
Time itself stands still like a dull dude horse
for those foolhardy enough to brave the journey.

Last and only time we passed through Jerome
was at break-neck speed, Neil had a gig in Prescott
on the other side of Mingus Mountain.

Someone in Sedona said, It's not far at all…
Famous last words. We whipped the van

up the blood-red Mogollón Rim through sage,
twisted pinyon and stately Ponderosa pines.
We slithered around hairpin turns like wet noodles.
Cleopatra Hill, stained with streaks of turquoise
and rust from open pit copper mines—a blur.

A drive by sighting. Couldn't even stop to visit.

I howled from the back seat like a dog.

My friend smiles for the unseen camera.
By the verdigris lintel of the old Connor Hotel
the bell held its tongue on the hangman's scaffold.
Jerome, dubbed the wickedest town in the West.
Worse than Body. IWW miners' strikes & deportation.
But the Labor bosses won. A real Company town.

Miners clung to dreams as underground pyrite fires

raged in the mines for decades until it played out.

Their doorways reached out like empty arms.

The copper no longer "shines like Arizona gold."
Now, a broody buttermilk sky promises snow.

Beyond the blaze of Sedona's Red Rock sandstone,
the serene snowcapped San Francisco Peaks dream,
home of the kachina cloud ancestors. Indigenous
dreams of the Yavapai, the People of the Sun,
long forgotten, but some say they still hear
the "Gaah-kaka" spirits singing at night
from the deep mines of Mingus Mountain.

Dr. John, whose ancestors fled the Ukraine,
finds tenure from Las Vegas to the Saudi Desert
where he adheres to the old ways of the Adab.
He dons a thobe & bisht vest, salwar for jeans,
a taqiyah cap, a shmaugh roped to his head
with an agal—camel hobble—for his Stetson band.
Al Qassim, a land of sand dunes & white saxaul trees.
How he left for a kingdom of camels & date palms
is a Bedouin mystery. All you need are three things:
a tent, a camel, and four wives.
He wrestles an oasis of tongues
into something resembling time present.
But the retro cowboy way also suits him.
He leans too far forward on his toes—
in his $2.99 Goodwill crocodile boots,
after months in desert sandals,
he is unused to the high stirrup heel.
All propped up and ready for the getaway.

When I was a kid, I was horse crazy.
I spent hours in the basement reading
the collection of musty dimestore books.
Zane Grey's novels: Riders of the Purple Sage
stolen herds, wild horses, star-crossed lovers,
stilted language, rustlers, and masked heroines.

All that remained of the story was the intrigue,
black Arabian stallions outracing the wind,
the lovers' escape into a verdant pocket canyon.
A cleft of blue sky. How they toppled Balancing Rock,
forever closing the only way in and out of Paradise.
The moral tenor of Mormon polygamy—over my head.
The real West was an uncharted region between towns
where anything is possible. The placenames survive:
Jerome, Cottonwood and Verde Valley. Zane's cabin
perched on the far Rim near Tonto Creek.

I've owned two pairs of cowboy boots.
The first pair were for horse shows.
I was a kid, but they were too big,
lead weights pulled me down into darkness.
A fire sale. Thank God, I never grew into them.
The 2nd pair were a flight of nostalgia.
A garage sale in Santa Fe,
down by the old Delgado Bridge
where the Rosenburgs were arrested.
Those traitorous boots wore the skin off my ankles
no matter what I did. They were inlaid
with indigo and russet leather,
with fancy stitching in floral motifs.
A shackle of hobbled beauty
with no escape, no flaw in the design.
Leaving me to ride off into the sunset.

RLB: write a poem about finding something unexpected. Maybe it’s a note from a friend or a bag filled with money (or guns). Maybe it’s finding a lover with someone who’s not you. Or finding a secluded place to sit in the middle of the forest and think.

MF: thanatopsis \than-uh-TOP-sis\ , noun;
1. A view or contemplation of death.
2. A poem (1817) by William Cullen Bryant.

Sort of poem

2011-11-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately the idea of writing a "sort of" poem
conveys the idea of being half-assed.
In other words, not really investing in the process
of either/or. Ambiguity comes to mind.
And here I am, sort of skimming the surface,
where I can be as ambiguous as I want
no decisions need to be made
just keep the cursor moving
having forsaken pen and paper for the phosphor screen.
But I am already fragmented enough
in this century of mosaic tumult.
No time for chums, our dreams are inhabited
by night crawlers, not crickets.
No sultry evenings on the verandah
as penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
or perhaps William Faulkner.
No sitting by the pool with Hemingway's 6-toed cats
or The Idea of Order at Key West.
What was that poem about anyway?
It's Sunday morning, everywhere, all at once.
Maybe the chickens crossing the road
had something to do with it.
What the mind wants. The forensics of detail.
The quay at the end of the mind
is an indelible blue ocean
whispering in the nascent spiral of your ear.
Sort of.

Robert Lee Brewer: take the phrase “Sort of (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Example titles could be: “Sort of cool,” “Sort of strange,” “Sort of not into getting out of bed in the morning,” or whatever! It should be sort of fun to read all the poems today!

Molly Fisk: chum, night crawlers, and crickets

Procrastination Poem

2011-11-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

To begin the month
with a poem on procrastination

some 13 days after the fact,

November's poetry roll booty call

expressed in prime numbers

and how I'm late —always running
late for a very important date

but I was distracted by a murmuration
of starlings which led to a long blog

that spanned the bridge of time itself

like a black river of birds in the sky

followed by the poem nearly lost

but somehow, amidst all these fragments

something was saved.

Perhaps the flutter of birdwings

in an abandoned house,

that thump against the glass—

a fallen bird, or a poem

frightened to death before its begun.

I'll get to it eventually

but for now, this will have to do.

Robert Lee Brewer: Write a procrastination poem, or as I like to call it a “I’ll get to it tomorrow” poem. Or…
Write a proactive poem, or the old “I’ll get to it today” poem.

Molly Fisk: Nov 1 prompt: Always running late...

Living Between Faultlines

2011-10-28T11:03:00.000-07:00

There's been news of lots of not-so-little earthquakes lately. Three mid-sized 'quakes (and a few mini shakes) on the Hayward Fault (San Andreas Fault's daughter-sister-cousin) in Berkeley—a fault that hasn't ruptured since 1868, and it has an eons-long distinguished track record of rupturing every 140 years. Not quite on the dot. But pretty close.

We're sort of overdue for another Big One on the Hayward Fault. Not that one can actually predict earthquakes. Not even the scientists. Earthquakes are notoriously wily. You'd have better luck at the Las Vegas gaming tables.

Living between two faultlines, I know lots of little earthquakes are always good. (No, not Tori Amos' album.) They're like little earthgasms. They relieve the stress of transcontinental strike-slip faults where the Pacific tectonic plate is crawling two inches a year north atop the subducting westward travelin' gung-ho! North American plate. It's a slow fender-bender love affair measured over eons of time—or in 140-year-increments, as in the Hayward Fault's case.

The latest Hayward Fault earthquakes are centered smack dab between the Greek Theater and the Cal Memorial Stadium which happens to be perched directly on top of the fault. Yep. In the GoogleEarth screenshot (below) you can see how the Hayward Fault literally strings "goal post to goal post." On the UC Berkeley campus you can trace the faultline by the displacement of city curbs and stadium walls. Piedmont, and Hayward too—if you know where to look.

USGS GoogleEarth Virtual tour of the Hayward Fault.

(NB: 2 more little quakes near Piedmont on Nov 5th—I guess it was feeling left out.—must be in celebration of Guy Fawkes Day! Piedmont-epicentered earthquakes are a regular occurance—the Berkeley-epicentered ones are not. Check out the displacement on the firehouse steps nest time you're in Piedmont.)

A few months ago, there was a lot of activity on the Hayward Fault beneath the Oakland Zoo which drove the lions and elephants crazy. I don't know what was roaring louder, the earth or the lions (or the San Franciscans—who felt it too).

And before that, Fremont and Alum Rock (south of the Oakland Zoo) were rattling and rolling—so clearly the tectonic stress is translating north. But there's been no major movement on the Hayward Fault for 143 years, and significantly, north of Berkeley—171 years. So you can surmise we're getting a little squirrely about those quakes stacking up on the Hayward Fault these days. It's not a case of if, but when.

The trouble is, living between two major faultlines is that The Big One could srike from either fault—or worse—both at the same time!

We were just reminiscing where we all were when the last Big One (Loma Prieta) struck on the San Andreas Fault. The magnitude 6.9 or 7.1 quake (depending upon who you talk to) struck on October 17th at 5:04 PM—during rush hour and the historic Oakland A's vs the SF Giants World Series game in 1989. Bases were really loaded and down for the count.

I was in Forestville and, like the critters, I felt the quake coming long before it struck—I was being interviewed by Susan Schwartz for a feature article in the Press Democrat. In the middle of the interview, I was suddenly nauseous like I've never been before, and exceedingly tired with a horrible stomach ache. I put my head on the table and wanted to croak. It was as if I was suddenly dead drunk or hung over. Or both.

I, who was so thrilled to finally be interviewed for all my hard work (and awards) in the local and national poetry scene—long overdue—suddenly couldn't wait for Susan to leave. I practically pushed her out the door so I could lay down.

My bloated stomach hurt so much, I took off my jeans and flopped down on the bed. Some relief, but then I thought the cats were fighting in the basement—only I didn't have a basement. Or any cats. Then the mirror moved, the knotty pineboard wall groaned and rippled like a slinky, surely I was hallucinating. WTF? The squirrels were shaking the oak limbs so hard, it was raining acorns everywhere—including my thin roof like a drum stacatto.

Then it hit me: Quake! Oops. Big one. I ran out into the driveway in my knickers & T-shirt and it was the longest 15 seconds of my life. It could be that in the hinterlands, the quake lasted a lot longer. But that 7.1 temblor was like trying to surf on a rolling barrel or stand on a bucking horse for 15 seconds. Your knees were trying to make contact with your jaw and everything else in between. The earth growled and there were myriad distant explosions—like small bombs or propane tanks blowing up.

We turned on the news and watched an image of fallen upper tier on the Bay Bridge—cars like little toys. People in them. No longer alive. Then we were cut off from all news for several hours. No TV or radio signal, no phone either. Complete isolation blackout—only the emergency broadcasting handshake noise. Only this wasn't a test. And there we were, safe in the hinterlands, imagining what it was like in the Bay Area.

We didn't yet know about the collapse of the Cypress Freeway in Oakland, or all the houses in the San Francisco Marina district on fire. Needless to say, my interview was bumped because of the earthquake. We got the news in increments.

San Andreas Fault, from the Carrizo Plain. Wikipedia Commons.

I digress in all this in gory detail, because when the Hayward Fault goes, it doesn't take much imagination to surmise that it will be much, much worse than the Loma Prieta earthquake. All the East Bay freeways and hospitals, emergency rescue and water storage facilities are perilously close to, or directly atop of the faultline. Oakland Airport is built on manmade alluvium.

And we witnessed the how the Marina sand and mud shook and liquified into quicksand in San Francisco. All major Bay Area roads and freeways will be damaged and/or blocked, there will be no water to fight the fires—save Lake Merritt and the bay itself.

Image of the collapsed Cypress Viaduct.

The Loma Prieta epicenter was not even in San Francisco, it was much farther south, some 60 miles from San Francisco in the Santa Cruz mountains—northeast of Aptos. And we were another 60+ miles north of San Francisco. More than 120 miles from the epicenter, we were all resoundly shaken. Whether the Loma Prieta 'quake was 6.9 or 7.1—the force was stupendous.

Loma Prieta was the largest earthquake to strike the Bay Area since San Francisco's famous 1906 Great Earthquake. The epicenter for the April 18 San Francisco earthquake, estimated between a 7.9 to an 8.2 on the Richter Scale, was two miles offshore at Mussel Rock, near the Cliff House. The 1906 earthquake was felt from Oregon to LA to central Nevada. Santa Rosa (some view the Rogers Creek Fault as an extension of the Hayward Fault)—was completely flattened.

Towns close to the Loma Prieta epicenter also fared badly. The 'quake flattened downtown Santa Cruz—10 miles away. Ditto Watsonville and Hollister. Loma Prieta killed 63 people total, injured 3757 more, squashed a whole lot of cars, shook houses off their foundations and left some 12,000 either or homeless or with extensive damage to their abodes.

Oakland racked up the most deaths at 42, because of the collapse of the freeways. And we still haven't replaced the Bay Bridge 22 years later. Caltrans is still working on it. It should be ready in time for the next 'quake.

Some say the Hayward Fault will rupture in Berkeley—this is all a rather moot point—as the entire Bay Area will be the epicenter. To up the ante, the northern portion of the Hayward fault hasn't moved or ruptured since the 1700s. That makes it about 171 years overdue.

Check out KQED QUEST'S Geological Outings Around the Bay: Point Pinole and the Hayward fault by Andrew Alden. And the USGS GoogleEarth Virtual tour of the Hayward Fault is pretty cool.

Screenshot from GoogleEarth USGS virtual tour of the Hayward Fault. Hwy 580 follows the fault; as does Hwy 13 north.

Much of the East Bay infrastructure where most residents live and work is on the flatlands. Alluvium and liquefaction—not a good combination. Imagine large resonant vibration waves converging at conflicting oscillations that will damage whatever the quake doesn't directly shake down. The Bay Area will be like one vast tuning fork, or glockenspiel. Increasing the damage potential by a factor of ten doesn't even begin to cover it.

Red is most susceptible to liquefaction, then orange, yellow... USGS map.

Screenshot from GoogleEarth USGS virtual tour of Hayward Fault

The East Bay is one vast sprawling metropolis that cradles major cities: Richmond, El Cerrito, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, Hayward, Fremont, and San Jose. Yep, Silicon Valley too—where the Hayward Fault merges with the Calaveras Fault. In fact, it may be one large sister-fault system. (Sugar skulls—calaveras—anyone? El Día de los Muertos is on the horizon of when, not if. And the Lawrence Livermore Lab is located where? Shades of Fukushima!)

The latest Hayward Fault quake (3.6) woke me at 5:30 AM—it was like a horse getting up and shaking dust from its coat after a good roll in the hot sand. But there were no aftershocks. So far, so good. Cosy shaking. Nowhere near as strong as the earlier 4.o. My Ansel Adams photo of the San Francisco Bay, sans bridges—is at a rakish angle, as are all the other frames on the wall. I get tired of straightening them.

And I haven't even mentioned those minute magnitudes of measurement we're so fond of quoting: a magnitude 5.0 earthquake is not just a little bigger than a 4.0 'quake—it's ten times bigger! Geology teacher and blogger Garry Hayes @geotripper explains: "Recurrence intervals are very tricky, and magnitudes differ 10x amplitude of waves, but 30x the energy release." I understand the Richter Scale is a base-10 logarithmic measurement. OK. Think exponential. But the 32x energy thing? Surface waves and body waves? Yiiii! Math/physics were never my strong suit. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that one.

Poetic justice that Charles Richter's Richter Scale inspiration was the language of measuring the magnitude scale used to describe the brightness of stars and celestial events themselves.

In his Geotripper blog, Garry advises: be "prepared at ALL times (extra water, food, radio, flashlight, batteries, first aid kit), especially in California and the Bay Area along the San Andreas and Hayward faults." I have EQ kits, stoves/heating coils and food in both cars too—plus a few bottles of vintage Russian River wine. Keys, cell, cash, wallet always always within reach. I even have a fashionista plan. Someone once said: "in case of an earthquake or disaster, grab all your dirty clothes—they're the ones you wear the most and will be most useful." (Knickers not included.)

I often check the 'quake map alerts on Twitter. Lately I've been watching the global quakes and there are many, many 'quakes that clock in at 4.0 or or so—daily. Nothing to worry about. Many tremors in Japan and Turkey. That's to be expected. Peru's been taking a bit of a shaking. Haiti's still experiencing large aftershocks as well.

Chile moved its coastline last year, growing the Andes with the big one at magnitude 8.8—the sixth largest earthquake to ever be recorded on a seismograph. Then, the released tectonic stress must also translate right up the coast. Eventually to our back door. Tremors were recorded from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Ica, Peru, 2400 km north. The epicenter was about 2 miles off the coast where the Nazca and the South American tectonic plates converge and collide and subduct—at about three inches a year.

Today: magnitude 6.9 earthquake strikes Ica in southern Peru. Right where the offshore fault comes closest to Peru. Ica, 300 miles south of Lima, is the part of Peru that juts out the most westward (like Pt. Arena in California) and it is closest to the offshore fault. Pisco (and the desert plains of Paracas as well as Nazca to the south) is no stranger to The Big Temblors: there was an 8.0 in 2007 that flattened the town.

The only reason why I seriously digress and focus on Peru's earthquakes (there are so many major cataclysms to choose from) is proximity. I've been there. And it crossed my mind that in a rather farfetched sense, they are a continuum of sister faults linked to our own infamous San Andreas Fault. I've traveled most the length of the San Andreas Fault—from Baja to Point Arena. I once snorkeled too far out off Cabo San Lucas, over the rift, and the shore dropped off so deep, that it was like looking back up into the evening sky replete with stars.

And in the skimpy midriff section of the San Andreas Fault, the Salton Sea-Laguna de Salida (I once swam there too before it dried up) Méxicali region has certainly had more than its fair share of temblors. Last year's 7.2 Baja Easter 'quake was so significant—it shook eons of dust off the nearby mountains of La Rumorosa, Tecate, like a large dog (followed by 500+ aftershocks). No rumor, the San Andreas Fault is definitely in the commute lane in SoCal. Talk about road rage!

Any quake clocking in at over a magnitude of 4.0, I take notice. I remember the Good Friday Alaska 9.2 earthquake of 1964. I was a child in West Marin and the wall up and bitchslapped me on the back of my head while I was sitting on the couch coloring. The couch then skittered across the floor like a nervous deer on pavement.

The 1980 Eureka offshore 7.2 earthquake shook Sea View Ridge, near Cazadero, so hard, I was nearly tossed from the top bunkbed. Only the rail saved me from a fall. We could hear the surf crashing nearly 2000 feet below us. The 30-foot waves pummeling Salt Point cliffs were straight out of Hokusai. I saw the sea roil up those 30-50-foot cliffs—then spray another 30 feet over our heads on the bluffs. Nothing calm about the Pacific. n retrospect, it may have been the aftermath of a tsunami. And that was a 7.2—with the epicenter far away, I might add.

"Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa" 1823-29 Hokusai, Wikipedia Commons.

I was in LA after the 6.6 Northridge 'quake in 1994—it was like a warzone. All the overpasses flattened. The ground shook like jelly for days and nights—5.0 aftershocks both woke us and rocked us to sleep.

And I can't even begin to process the damage of the Tōhoku 9.0 earthquake and tsunami— in size, scope, damage—and the damaged Fukushima reactors. Part of me is still stunned by the news. I was hiking in The Valley of Fire looking up at the thunderclouds, admiring striations of time in geologic scale, knowing there was radiation fallout being recorded in the Las Vegas desert. The geoglyphs took on a new level of meaning. Old and new. The Easter wind whistled through the sandstone like an ocariña dirge. But I digress.

Both the diminutive Caribbean (remember Haiti?) and the Cocos plates join the Pacific plate in Central America. The Cocos plate subducts beneath the Caribbean plate creating all those lovely volcanoes from México to Costa Rica. It gets complicated with the young offshore upstart, the Nazca plate, subducting and squeezing into another torrid geologic love triangle with the Pacific plate. The ring of fire.

The Nazca plate is the co-parent of several hoptspots including the equitorial Galápagos Islands. (Galápagos triple junction). I swam in a geologic rift that is splitting Santa Crúz island in twain. The landlocked channel was once open to the Pacific ocean via underwater fissures so myriad oceanic fish schooled in the brackish water. The only other time I've seen anything like that was when I swam in a Yucatan cenote at Xelhá, far from shore. (Fresh water floats on top of salt water so the sea entrance is often a deep fissure or cave.).

I spent a winter in Ica, Perú in the 1980s. It's a strange place. It never rains in the Atacama Desert or its northern sub-region, the Sechura Desert. Strange, dry landscape. Land of few rivers. I met people who had never experienced rain in their lifetime. (See my blog on Atacama Civilizations.)

And what of the anomaly of all those "waterworn" Andean boulders strewn across the floor of a desert of no rain? Now scientists say they've been joggled by earthquakes, rubbing shoulders with each other for millions of years. Rounding down those sharp edges to rounded shoulders.

It seems our continents are rubbing shoulders along the faultlines.

Mostly metamorphic rocks from the García River, Point Arena, the westernmost point in California, where the San Andreas Fault heads out to sea.

The García riverbed is also the bed of the San Andreas Fault. I expected to find quarts, jasper and blueshcist but not sandstone! I didn't find any of the usual suspects—serpentine or granite—very little by way of volcanic rock, but lots of soft gray mudstones that I never learned the names of.

The García River and the San Andreas Fault. Manchester Pomo Ranchería.

Check out Jay Quade's: Rocking Find: Boulders Rub Shoulders During Quakes.
Then there are the apocalyptic rumors to dispel: Did scientists state a 30% chance that a 6.0 earthquake will hit Berkeley, CA, within 3 weeks of 28 October 2011? Berkeley Earthquake Hoax Snopes

Geotripper—How to tell if an Internet Prediction of an Imminent Earthquake is Credible... puts the 'quake predictions into perspective.

The Pacific plate, Point Arena, the westernmost point in California, and the continental United States. To the left of this photo, whales were breeching and feeding. They come close to shore, to clear the point.

Other handy earthquake links in no particular order:
California-Nevada Fault Maps
California-Nevada Fault Map for San Francisco
USGS Earthquakes
San Francisco Earthquake History 1915-1989
List of earthquakes in California

Largest Earthquakes in the World Since 1900
Plate tectonics and People
Lists of earthquakes

Nothing to do with earthquakes: My blog on Atacama Civilizations

Disclaimer: I have no formal training in geology or earthquakes—but I love collecting rocks and well, one rock leads to another...

Point Arena harbor, Pacific plate looking south.

MAUREEN HURLEY INTERVIEW (with Terri Glass)

2011-10-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

Finally the edited interview appeared in the CPITS newsletter, but no one sent me a link. Go figure. Here's the vertical response link:

And you can also access it via the November Newsletter on the CPITS site:

MAUREEN HURLEY INTERVIEW (with Terri Glass) In November issue of CPITS enewsletter. (Unedited).

1) You became a CPITS poet teacher many years ago. Who were your mentors and what was the organization like at the time?

In 1978, I volunteered for an arts education conference at Sonoma State, The Child in Changing TImes. Sonoma County CPITS Area Coordinator, Michael Dow led a workshop circle on the main lawn and it was there I wrote my first poems. It was a matter of being at the right place at the right time. I did not actively seek out CPITS. Michael Dow tapped me for CPITS and in 1979, I began training with another Sonoma County poet, Lee Perron—who was my mentor for 20 years.

In those days, Sonoma County CPITS—we called it SOCPITS—had only a few poets on board and it was a very small rural program. Poets collectively earned about $4000 a year, total. Can I even remember their names? Rocco Tripodi, Pam Raphael (Singer), Zara Altair, Andrea Granahan....

Carol Lee Sanchez was living in Petaluma. Will Staple moved away to Grass Valley. Gail King dropped out. Mike Tuggle and Susan Kennedy were still in West Marin, but they soon moved north. Duane BigEagle and Kathryn Harer came to Sonoma County later, under Zara' Altair's AC tenure. Only Pam Singer and myself are part of that original SOCPITS team. We both trained under Lee Perron. Pam dropped out of CPITS for a while, but bounced back. I don't think Susan Kennedy is still teaching CPITS. So, Pam, Duane, Will and I are still carrying the SOCPITS legacy forth.

I don't think Michael Dow was ever interested in expanding the SOCPITS program into what it is today—so Lee Perron sort of took over Michael's AC duties. Under Lee's tenure, SOCPITS annual revenue quadrupled in size—primarily through arts education funding—multi-artist grants from the National Endowment from the Arts (NEA) and the California Arts Council (CAC). Our "Art is the 4th R" program at Healdsburg School District was a pilot project of the NEA and helped to shape arts and education guidelines. I, and other CAC artists—including Louis Valdez and Juan Felipe Hererra—were selected by the NEA to develop the national evaluation process. So we were the guinea pigs for the arts.

My first real CPITS residency at Healdsburg, I taught calligraphy and poetry to RSP/ESL students—so I've always mixed my art forms. (I was the resident calligrapher at Sonoma State—I did all the signage for events). At our CAC grant in Windsor, I taught art classes, but I did lead some crossover poetry and art classes.

What I learned from Lee was to dream big. In the 1980s, I was awarded six CAC individual Artist in Residency grants at Mark West School District—and I also was awarded a pilot CAC Artist in Libraries grant at Napa State Hospital.

Napa was one strange experience. I wanted the ground to open up and just swallow me whole so I wouldn't have to teach—like during the first days of teaching CPITS. I was terrified. I trained longer than most poets (20 sessions) because I was very shy (don't laugh!) as I had no self-confidence. Art turned me ever inward: reflective, introspective. Poetry gave me a voice, a persona, a hat—my life's work—it gave my life meaning in the broader sense. It made me a citizen of the world.

The statewide CPITS program was still tied to San Francisco State. When I came aboard, Carol Lee Sanchez was Statewide Coordinator. We had a meeting at Gail Newman's house—she may have been the SF AC. Carol Lee taught us to draw upon our communities (think local, act global). As ACs, we are mutually independent and as an organization, we are inter-dependent upon each other—this is why the yearly symposiums are so important to this unique poetry tribe called CPITS.

I also worked with John Oliver Simon documenting his Poetry Across Frontiers project. Being in Mexico, seeing the CPITS lens from the other side, and working with the Mexican poets, was riveting. It launched my own poetic Sputnik into the USSR after John & I split. Which led to my training Soviet poets, and also training Dutch poets at Poetry International in Holland.

I've taught PITS residencies to students in the Ukraine, to psychiatric workers in the Netherlands, and in Montana schools with Susie Terence and Daryl Chinn. So I've seen PITS in action from the ground up, as a field poet, as a master CPITS poet teacher, as an Area Coordinator, as a board member, and as an out of state—perhaps, out of mind—poet ambassador.

Suffice to day, Carol Lee's dream model still holds. Sure, we've had challenges keeping the nation's oldest poetry in the schools program afloat, but we're approaching our big 5-0. What other independent arts organization can boast that?

I know from the inside out that poetry really matters. It changes lives. So, it's ironic in that I hated poetry as a kid. But then, my grannie was always reciting poetry to me along with all the Irish ballads sprinkled with healthy doses of W.B. Yeats. How many kids had The Lake Isle of Inisfree or the Rime of the Ancient Mariner recited to them?. So, poetry was always in my bones. It just took a while to shine through.

2) You have been an Area Coordinator in Sonoma and now in Alameda. How long did you AC in Sonoma and what were your highlights of that experience? What is like to oversee Alameda?

Mark West USD was among the first Santa Rosa school districts to embrace CPITS. Significant in that Santa Rosa was a tough nut to crack. Without CPITS residencies in Sonoma County's largest city, SOCPITS was destined to stay rural—only in the outskirts.

My decade-long CAC residency (and other funding) began as a tiny CPITS pilot residency. I got a call from Principal Ida Victorson—when I heard that Virginian accent, I realized my hippie clothes just wouldn't do. So I raided Goodwill, found an old silk dress, lopped it off into a blouse, got a pleated skirt and some faux-pearls on credit. I got the job. I had to push-start my VW Bug wearing heels and nylons, but I landed the contract. Talk about dress for success!

The Mark West residency ran much longer than the CPITS contracts and the CAC residencies—we hosted a poetry and art exchange with the Soviet Union that eventually included many Sonoma County artists and poets—and it was funded right up to the Soviet Putscht in 1991.

I also became an AC circa the early 1980s. Zara sort of eased the AC mantle off onto my shoulders before I knew what was happening. I was able to use my success at Mark West to expand the program. We went from a tiny county program in the low $teens to $53k in 1988, and became one of the strongest and largest CPITS programs in the state. The expanded program suffered a setback during the recession in 1990, but it recovered with a little boost from the Sonoma County Community Foundation grants.

As Sonoma County AC, I invited many new poets into the program: Luis Kong (he resisted for years—and eventually became Statewide Coordinator), Arthur Dawson, Jonathan London (the children's author), Lynn Watson, Terry Ehret, Mimi Alpert, Jim Byrd—Jabez "Bill" Churchill (he resisted the longest but as we all know, resistance is futile); Lynn Marie deVincent, and Scott Reid finished training with Arthur Dawson. We had 20 working CPITS poets when I stepped down as AC after my car accident in 1997 and Arthur Dawson took the helm.

By comparison, AC-ing Alameda County is like wrestling with a huge tentacled squid—much harder to pin to the ground. It's so large, and amorphous—and mostly urban. I'm afraid Gertrude Stein was right: There is no there there. It's so much harder to sell the program in an urban environment because there are no discrete communities to tap into. No real sense of tight-knit community—like in rural areas. I've still got my training wheels on.

I've worked in Alameda off and on since the Poetry Across Frontier days—I wrote an Oakland Cultural Arts Council (OCAC) grant with Tobey Kaplan in 2004 that augmented CPITS matching money. I also received a OCAC artist in schools grant to teach art at Cleveland Elementary School in 2008-09 after two years of SPARK Arts funding from KQED dried up. Without outside grants, arts funding would be virtually non-existant in California. But even those resources are drying up. The Walter and Elise Haas Fund certainly revitalized Alameda, but now schools are far too broke to even attempt at matching the grant.

I think also, the protracted downward spiral of the economy has eroded all arts programming in a way that the Jarvis-Gann initiative (Prop 13) never envisioned. California is dead bottomth in the nation for per capita public arts spending for art and education. A sad accolade.

3) You have been active in Poetry Out Loud for the past few years. Wasn't one of your students a runner up in the state competition for 2011?

I've had two POL state runners-up from Contra Costa County: Cheryl Evans from Deer Valley High School in Antioch (third place) in 2010, and Mark Reifenheiser from Diablo Valley High School in Concord (second place) in 2011. I took over from Tobey Kaplan for Cheryl's coaching. Neil O'Neill and Alison Luterman also contributed to Mark's successful POL experience.

I also coordinated Alameda County POL as well. I was a latecomer to POL. I never expected to like POL—but it does dovetail into our CPITS work. I often tell my shy CPITS student poets how my POL students very nearly won the state finals—how performance is also an important part of poetry, and they tend to jump right up and give fantastic readings themselves. Cheryl is now taking Speech and Debate as well as Elocution in college. POL judge Brandon Cesmat featured Cheryl's own work on our CPITS blog. She made Al Young sit up and listen—I think we're going to hear more from Cheryl in the future.

4) You are a visual artist and photographer. How does these other mediums feed your poetry and vice versa. Do you combine these art forms in your teaching?

I'm a visual learner and I tend to see metaphor as a visual experience. I'm a cross-over artist, my undergraduate degrees are in painting and drawing—with a minor in clay. I'm also dyslexic. So art allowed me to access language.The words come later. But not always. Sometimes metaphors just pop into my head. Now it's a synthesis. One art form informs the other—they're a continuum of personal metaphor from the visual to the aural realm.

People were always trying to peg me as either a poet or an artist—not both. Even with my CAC grants, I was asked to choose between mediums—or forfeit my grant—there were no multi arts discipline grants. Finally Philip Horn from the CAC came down to observe me at Mark West School. He said, "I get it now, you really do blend both art forms. But you need to make that clearer in your grants." I knew what I wanted to do, I just couldn't think of a way to write about it. After a bad car accident in 1980, I found out I was dyslexic—which answered a lot of questions. It's amazing I got those grants as I could barely write—other than poetry. I literally cut and pasted fragments together to string together sentences. I was mighty glad when Apple came along. With my Apple IIc, I could cut & paste on the screen. A revolution of thought.

While finishing my BA in Art at Sonoma State, I took an integrated Expressive Arts course—and earned the equivalent of a 2nd BA, but the program was disbanded. That experience of working with my peers, and having to go out into the community launched my poetry career—as a CPITS poet, as a poetry festival organizer and as a cultural worker. I studied with SSU's incomparable Red Thomas, Mac McCreary, and Elizabeth Herron in the School of Expressive Arts—a radical interdisciplinary experiment that was associated with the psychology department. Faculty functioned as artists in residence as did the students—we designed our own course of study; and I also studied poetry with David Bromige in the English Department—to keep things balanced. Or so I thought. LOL. But then David checked himself into the looney bin and there we were, a graduate class teaching ourselves and each other. I taught a seminar on Yeats. Pern in a gyre. We were spiraling out into the community.

Those experiences launched me into a photography job at an alternative West County newspaper, The Sonoma County Stump. Again, it was a question of right (or wrong) place at the right time. Soon I was writing stories—snipping and gluing fragments to make coherent sentences (pre word-processing days), but then, the paper folded. So Simone Wilson and I frogmarched each other down to the only other alternative paper called The Paper, and coerced them to take us in.

I worked for The West Sonoma County Paper until 1996—before its last name change to The Bohemian. That's where I learned to write—on the job. One of my former Mark West students, whom I worked with from Kindergarten to 5th grade, Gabe Meline, is now the editor of The Bohemian.

I also co-chaired two poetry series: Public Poetry Center at Sonoma State, and The Russian River Writers' Guild—for 20 years. I documented hundreds of poets on film—including for the Napa Valley Poetry Conference (NVPC), and Poetry International. Perhaps the most outrageous event was when we decided to hold a NVPC in The Bahamas—with Nate Mackey, Bob Haas, and others. I taught the CPITS model to Bahamian poets.

It's a challenge to try and teach both art forms in one residency as there's so little time—poetry and art each demand their own. Often at the end of a residency, I'll schedule an extra session and teach kids contour line drawing to create illustrations for their poetry books. I also use a lot of visual metaphor props for writing prompts—writing from paintings, photographs—ekphrastic poetry.

Pocahontas—from Pocahontas, by Annie Leibovitz

5) Do you have a favorite anecdote about teaching poetry to young people?

You never know when something will resonate, or when you'll get closure. Teaching poetry is an alchemical process. You just hold your breath and wait. As W.B. Yeats scribed: Poetry is the music of what happens.

One time I got a call from Scott Meiser, a student I had in 5th grade at Mark West School. He wasn't into poetry—he was on the MBA track at college, and out of the blue, one night he sat down and inexplicably wrote a poem. He tracked me down and read the poem to me over the phone (he was in love for the first time), and then he said: "I finally got it, what you were trying to do.And I just wanted to thank you." Closure. He was 22.

Another time I was teaching a poetry unit to K-3rd grade students at The Higham Family School (Waldorf) in Santa Rosa. We met once a week in the fall, and we sat in a circle in a windowed garden room filled with sunlight and plants.

We were studying whales and the environment and we often let science inform our writing. I had one rather rascally 2nd grader named Trevor, who hated to write. He was a real rugrat—always squirming off in opposite directions. Trevor hadn’t written anything particularly spectacular during the 8-session residency; and it was our final day. Countdown.

I begin each class with typed student poems that we workshop the previous week's poems so that editing is an integral and ongoing process. Then we "freewrite" for five minutes, read a few freewrite poems—that generally reflect back on the previous week's lesson, and then move onto the day's poetry lesson.

For some treason, during freewrite, something finally clicked—maybe it was the whales. Or the prism casting rainbows.Or time itself. I remember Trevor asking if he could continue his freewrite even though our five minutes were up. I said “Of course!” and continued on with my lesson, never dreaming he was hatching such a marvel. When Trevor was done writing, he wanted to share his poem. You could see he was about to explode with anticipation.

THIS BODY IS TO ASK:

This body is to ask

this question of the mind:

Is the sun to shine on the day of my death?

Is the hole in the universe to stay as big?

Tell me, tell me, where is the answer?

Where is the answer to lie in today’s hands?

This is the breath, to breathe this air.

—Trevor Yeats, 2nd Grade, Higham Family School, Santa Rosa

And when Trevor read his poem, it transported us out of this world—we were all stunned into silence, it was that kind of good. When he read his poem, we completely forgot what we were doing, and it generated a lively discussion of the earth and the depletion of the ozone layer.

What's amazing is that the poem didn’t come out of a specific lesson plan; it was an offshoot of several topics we’d been discussing. Students imagined themselves as animals, the earth, the moon, space—asking the Who Am I question—delving deeper into metaphor. The week before, we’d written poems in response to Chief Seattle’s letter to the earth and Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend.

At the end of his poem, I told Trevor that there was a famous Irish poet, William Butler Yeats—who was his namesake. And that Trevor's poem reminded me of Yeats' poems. That's when Trevor told me that he was the great-grand-nephew of W.B. Yeats! I was flabbergasted. For a moment the ancestors breathed through Trevor and I was lucky enough to catch it combusting on paper.

As Beat poet David Meltzer said: Poetry is a two-way mirror. The inside looking out. The outside looking in. You have to be ready to reassemble the pieces. This is what we do. That's why it's such important work.

Maureen Hurley

I think the poem was also featured in the 1992 CPITS statewide anthology. The title was the name of my Sonoma County student poetry and art book for the Soviet Union. You can still find copies of it on Amazon, Google, and online booksellers. What amazes me is how far and wide the poem (and book) has traveled.

Moscow Traffic

2011-10-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

A friend posted this amazing photo of Konstantin Lakomov's on Facebook.

Ah yes, I remember it well. An American's first driving lesson in Moscow. My Ukrainian friends, writer-translator Oleg Atbashian and his cousin from Odessa were still drunk the next morning, and we had to be somewhere important at 9 AM.

They were madly popping little silver ball ginsing candies that were supposed to sober you up. Well, they didn't work. A stacatto of sugary little pellets like b-bs or cake decorations rolled across the backseat.

Since I was the only sober one in the crowd, The Cousins Karma-zov handed me the car keys to a seriously beat up rustbucket of a Chevy Nova with no shocks, bumper tied on with bailing wire. Rusted holes in the floor let wind, salt and slush in.

I was just wrapping my mind around a Nova in Moscow when...

Imagine the big Red Square circle, during rush hour: aiiii!!!!

The photo above lies— It shows lines on the road—it shows cars staying in orderly lines. It shows them patiently waiting for the babushka to cross the road.

Not when I was driving—the big roundabout was like driving like the freakin' Indianapolis 500 with bumpercars while avoiding road hazards—potholes the size of toilet bowls.

No lines on the road—it was a free for all. I was weaving the traffic thread stomping the clutch, and grinding the gears, sliding my rear end with the best of them—just to survive.

Of course, I didn't know the driving rules—or what any of the road signs meant. I watched St Basil's onion domes and the Hippodrome whizz by me three times before I could spin out of the roundabout like so much splattered paint.

Plus, I had two howling Russian backseat drivers—Yevteshenko's favorite American idiom—backseat drivers shouting directions at me in Russian and in Ukrainian. A lotta good that did. My Russian vocabulary included nostrovia and chut-chut!

It was like a scene out of Monty Python' Ministry of Silly Walks on laughing gas. I was so shaken after driving the roundabout, I had to pull over and recover. Have a drink.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

2011-10-05T18:58:00.000-07:00

"I want to put a ding in the universe."
iClouds take note.



I put an apple pie in the oven
and then sat down to Twitter
when I got the news
and then I burnt the pie
apple corpse
a curious carboniferous death notice

CPITS 2011 Symposium New Writing

2011-09-26T17:05:00.000-07:00

The fire lilies were thinking of you

all in their crimson splendor

they turned toward the sun

The heart knows what it wants

the way the foot knows the path to the barn

the horses all waiting

each one knickers in welcome

helping us load the hay into the feedbin

and how in early morning we rose

sneaking out before the dawn

to saddle up for the trail ride

the sky streakes with carmine and gold

the horses eager, snorting with each breath

anticipating the day

the lomg glide of woodpeckers from pine to oak

raucus musicians laughing in deep woods

as I imagine you now

your olive eyes flecked with green

(revised) —for Stephanie Stone

The fire lilies were thinking of you
aflame in their crimson splendor
as they turned toward the sun
like horses in the stable, tracking the hay

The heart knows what it wants
the way the foot treads on the path to the barn
the horses waiting, eagerly nickering welcomes
helping us to load hay into their troughs

I remember how, in early morning we rose
sneaking out before the dawn
to saddle up, the sky streaked with carmine & gold
our mounts eager, snorting with pleasure
each step, each breath, niggling at the bit,
dancing, they could barely contain themselves
such was their joy

But the long glide of woodpecker's wing from oak to pine
and that raucous laughter in deep woods
reminded us that we will never pass this way again

Too soon you left me at the starting line
racing toward that distant horizon
from which no traveler returns

You will never know the ache of old bones
the failing of eyesight
nor the fading of memory
that slow erasure of the past
nor the parting of childhood
but all that came of the new-mown doubts
the shifting of psyche

I am left with is the sudden silence of the woodpecker
the way darkness ate at your bones
devouring the marrow until the shone
with the ephemera of catscans and isotopes of hope

9/9/11

Steve Kowit's workshop Recall one incident, find the emotional charge, conjecture about their fate. The real task is to write a mourning poem, a poem that will move the reader (transformation). Use assonance/dissonance, metrical patterns, repetition. 15 lines (OK so I sucked at the 15-line part).

Bobcat in Ojai backcounty

2011-09-25T11:55:00.000-07:00

Bobcat, Calero Creek Trail, San Jose, CA—Wiki commons pix

When the L. rufus californicus sprinted across the road in front of us near Lake Casitas as we were enroute to Ojai, I was struck by how it resembled a cheetah—a lean greyhound body built for running, jacked up higher at the rear end than most cats—a sprinter. Gorgeous black, rufus and clouded spots, long tufted ears with black points—but little by way of a tail. Not like a cheetah's yard-long tail. Wrong continent.

But I once surprised a caracal in the trashbin at dawn. And it surprised me. It rose up, impossibly slender like Baast, the Egyptian cat god, and looked me in the eye. We stood transfixed, then it melted into the morning fog.

I didn't know what it was other than an exotic cat—but I was taking a class at Sonoma State later that morning—so I sculpted it out of clay and Dorothy recognized it and we later identified it as the escaped African cat from the Forestville Preserve.

The rangers came to to see if they could find the escaped caracal—they said she was once someone's pet—declawed, and she was pretty hungry, but tame enough. I was struck how the caracal and the bobcat resembled each other in size.

The Ojai bobcat passed so close to us as we were sitting in the rental car (we had slowed down so I could take a photo of the lake), I could see into its golden eyes for one brief instant—as it crossed the highway to the lake for its evening drink.

The photo I never took. An American lynx, a Californian subspecies. My third sighting in a lifetime. That peculiar intersection of crossed paths and time— and for a moment, the day stood stock-still.

Remembering Nick Valentine & Phil Osborn at The Paper

2011-07-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Where to begin? I find myself wandering incoherent as a cloud, woolgathering attempting to trick myself into writing this obit in medias res with a mea culpea to you, Dear Reader, and to two newspapermen I once knew, as well as to the end of an era.

What I really want to say to my blog is: Not today, Dear, I have a headache. Gutting closets, tearing the house apart and whatnot has left me stiff and the raging headache is a byproduct of—or rather, a result of old car injuries acting up. To begin my morning with tea and advil. And bad news. Ugh. If i don't just start writing—warts and all—it'll never happen. The self-imposed dreadline.

Today the bad news just kept on coming: an old friend, photographer and writer, Simone Wilson, emailed me that our mentor and newspaper legend of The Paper (now the North Bay Bohemian), editor Nick Valentine died on June 25, in Brisbane, Australia (1941-2011).

And hard on the heels of that sad news, Simone told me that Phil Osborne (1938-2011) the photographer who trained me in the darkroom arts, also died in July 15, in Cloverdale, CA.

Perhaps it's not so strange that these two men died within weeks of each other. For over a decade, Nick & Phil were the backbone and ribs of an alternative weekly tabloid newspaper owned by Elizabeth Poole that we worked for during the 1980s and 1990s. What I learned about photography and writing—I owe to these two great mentors who taught and encouraged me, and allowed me to develop my own style. Godspeed.

Nick Valentine was founding editor of The Paper: West Sonoma County's Independent Voice (1979—1993). The Paper was where I learned my varied and sullen craft: writing and photography. Jazz pianist Bob Lucas was The Paper's first publisher, he paid the bills. Shortly thereafter, Bob sold it to Elizabeth Poole whose family owned a string of newspapers back east. So you could say Elizabeth was born into the newspaper business.

One story has it that Guerneville resident Stan Buck was credited with generically naming it The Paper—the place where people got their local news. But the other story has it that when Elizabeth Poole came to work with Nick as an intern from Sonoma State, an Abbot and Costello Who's on first conversation followed. And the paper became The Paper.

During that time, The Paper evolved from a mimeographed flyer to a tabloid. Nick was editor-in-chief for ten years, focusing on local news, with in-depth political and environmental coverage pertinent to West county. Nick had a finely-honed sense of justice and strong working class ethics—he kept a sharp lookout for the rights of the little guy. Perhaps his short stint with The Russian River News—then owned by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, sharpened his political awareness.

"Poole bought the financially struggling Paper that year and kept it alive with her family’s money through the 1980s, when at its peak it was printing 15,000 copies a week. After Poole sold it in 1990 The Paper evolved into The Independent and moved to Santa Rosa where it became the Northbay Bohemian." —Frank Robertson, Sonoma West Times & News. 7/27/2011.

The financially strapped Paper offices bounced up and down the Russian River: Monte Rio, Guernewood Park, Guerneville, Forestville. When The Paper morphed into The West Sonoma County Paper, it made a break with the River and moved to the tiny hamlet of Freestone. Then it moved to urban Santa Rosa, it tried to grow up and lose its hippie duds, and then it became the The Sonoma County Independent ca. 1993 (publishers Boland-Carroll Inc.).

The Paper, 1989
Ironically, one of my writing students from Mark West School, Gabe Meline, is now the editor of the North Bay Bohemian. I must've taught him something, it's improved greatly under his tenure. Here is a link to a 25-year retrospective of The Paper from the Bohemian's rather flat lens.Then, The Paper was rebranded The North Bay Bohemian when it was purchased by Metro Newspapers (Rosemary Olson, publisher). By the time it became the Bohemian (when was that 1996?), and Greg Cahill was editor, the paper no longer had any West County roots to speak of, and I was unceremoniously kicked to the curb.

NICK VALENTINE

Nick Valentine died in Brisbane, Australia, at the age of 69 from pneumonia—complications of a lung disease. Most likely emphysema. To my way of thinking, Nick died too young. A bearded bear of a man, Nick never did take very good care of himself. Svelte dark Virginia Slims cigarettes and Coca-Cola were his mainstay.

Nick was one caf-fiend Coke-swigging smoking chimney of an editor during Wednesday-night-cum-Thursday morning production drop deadline. When the Coke ran out, Nick switched to leftover coffee sludge, spiked with condensed milk and sugar, and kept on working. I think he only missed the printer's deadline once.

Brother Toby of the Starcross community in Annapolis challenged the notion that AIDS was solely a "gay" disease by offering shelter to AIDS infected orphans. His story shepherded AIDS into mainstream consciousness.

Putting the paper to bed in the wee hours meant that we—the paste up crew, and the darkroom tech (me)—pulled many all-nighters working against time itself in the ramshackle offices above the store. Many's the time I drove home to Forestville along River Road in my VW Bug, with dawn nudging the reluctant stars out of the sky. A few times I delivered the flats to the Healdsburg printer at daybreak.

PHIL OSBORN

Phil Osborn was staff photographer and writer for The Paper from 1979 to 1990. Phil wasn't much better than Nick at taking care of himself. Except his cigarettes were more generic with a longer ash. The diabetes didn't help matters any and he loved sipping a cool one.

I was the Tuesday-Wednesday night relief shift in the darkroom. Safe to say that Phil taught me all I know about photography and running the reprographic PMT camera—the size of my VW Bug—to half-screen photos and ad art. The large format Agfa copy camera had a huge inverted bellows about 4 feet across attached to a lens that focused on a white easel. To enlarge images, I dialed in size, focus and exposure to make negative films up to a foot wide. Then I developed the film, like a print, as well.

This was all before the days of computer desktop publishing—Mac (and laser printers) were still a glimmer in both the Steves eyes. We were using Compugraphic photo-typesetting machines the size of large refrigerators. No screen. You blindly typed your text in, and got a "cold-type" film negative transfer. The printer in Sebastopol, O'Dell, was still using linotype—or "hot-lead type." No WYSIWYG until 1985. when Mac arrived on the publishing scene. Of course, Nick was in the vanguard. So you could say, I also learned to use a Mac (actually it was an Apple IIc) because of The Paper.

Gravel-voiced Phil, born in Lake City, Iowa, was a fine arts photographer who studied with Ansel Adams, so I was well schooled in the darkroom arts. There was a specific way to develop film—the shake and and inverted half roll to ensure the developing chemicals were evenly distributed. How to rub a print in the chemical bath with the hands to bring up the contrast in a blown out section with friction. In retrospect I shudder, we didn't use gloves, but at least the darkroom was well ventilated.

A member of the San Francisco Folk Music Club, Phil was also a fine musician and a former potter so we held several threads in common. I used to go over to visit Phil in his old Airstream trailer that was hunkered down in the redwood duff at Ring Canyon Campground in Guerneville and listen to him play bluegrass—on a banjo, a fiddle, a mandolin or his Martin. Phil was a master musician and square dance caller—I even went to one of his dances. He was also a talented stringed instrument repairman for Bay Area old-timey folk musicians. He talked me through the process of fixing my Martin when the tuning heads broke and cracked the top.

And like Nick, Phil was widely read and knowledgeable in many fields, so conversations with him were also educational. After a stint in the Navy, Phil went to San Francisco State and got a BA in sociology. He got married in 1961, raised a family and and became a photographer and writer. He is survived by daughters Shannon and Kelly. In the early 1970s, Phil got divorced, moved to the country, and worked as a potter—where he met Bauhaus artist Marguerite Wildenhain of Pond Farm in Guerneville—who Bob Arneson dubbed the "grande-dame of potters."

CUB REPORTERS AT LARGE

We were a peculiar, if convoluted tribe of fledgling reporters and Nick was our vision, our guide, and Phil, our eyes. I worked with reporter Simone Wilson, in a dyslexic moment, I coined the phrase "Real to Reel," which became the title of our movie column. I also covered the arts as well as being an on-call photographer. Janet Zagoria directed production layout, with Zoe Griffith-Jones who was also an editor and investigative reporter along with Ron Sonenshine and Andrea Granahan.

There was Nick's wife, Suzanne who ran the office; The Boss: Elizabeth Poole who eventually married Nick in 1991 (it's a long, convoluted story). There was Liesel Hoffman, the incredible copy editor, and many stringers, Roger Karraker, John di Salvio, Tom Roth—who became the editor for a while before he turned to politics...and many more writers whose names I can no longer recall.

Wilson, recalled working in The Paper’s cramped improvised office in Monte Rio above Bartlett’s store. “It was a great group of people. It was also kind of a zoo,” said Wilson, recalling weekly deadlines when Valentine would stockpile Coca-Cola and cigarettes to fuel late-hour production ordeals.

“Nick was a wonderful and very talented man. He knew exactly how he wanted The Paper to look,” said Wilson. “He was an artist who was able to turn typography into art, and he was a brilliant cartoonist.” —Frank Robertson, Sonoma West Times & News. 7/27/2011.

Simone and I came to The Paper from a rival alternative newspaper, Joe Leary's Sonoma County Stump—which was truly alternative. Sort of a laid-back North Bay granola version of the Berkeley Barb. I don't know how the publisher Bliss Buys or carpenter-cum-editor Joe Leary managed to charm us into staying on for two years—unpaid. The Stump office was located in the apartment above the Forestville Cantina so at least we ate well on paste-up night.

When The Stump went under in 1981 or 82, I was listed as a photographer and entertainment editor (I had the middle truck spread for an occasional poetry insert—sweet), and Simone was an ace cub reporter. We banged out stories on cloth ribbon typewriters—and later, Selectrics, and we pasted our columns directly into the newspaper layout flats—warts and all. We had no idea what we were doing but it seemed to be the right thing to be doing at the time.

When The Stump finally went under for good (it seems newspapers are like drowning sailors, they come up for air several times before they finally drown for good), we dressed ourselves up in our straightest schmatas, marched ourselves down to The Paper, situated above Bartlett's Store in Monte Rio, and convinced publisher Elizabeth, and Nick that they needed to hire us. Don't know why they believed us—they really didn't want to hire us, but we were bitten by the newspaper bug. Perhaps they saw our raw potential. And I do mean raw.

Besides, Phil had his hands full developing all the reporters' B&W film and he needed a hand—someone to take over the late-breaking stories on the nite-owl shift. I learned to roll and develop film, to print half tones, and create ad art on a big PMT camera. I became the queen of pushing Tri-X to its grainy limits.

Oddly, the Sonoma County Stump, then dubbed the Russian River Stump, had its origins in Monte Rio in 1972 to 1973, so, on some level, with a change of cast, we were right back where we started.

After a debilitating car accident in the 1970s that preempted long hours standing as a short order cook at Jenner's River Landing, Nick Valentine applied for rehab training, and studied journalism at Santa Rosa Junior College with Cathy Mitchell, co-owner with husband Dave, of Marin County’s Pulitzer-prize winning Point Reyes Light. So that was our guidepost.

Our beat was cutting edge news—even in a rural setting. Not like the Press Democrat owned broadsheet, the Russian River News that held up the status quo of middle-of-the-road journalism so dear to the dark hearts of local politicians, contractors, realtors, chambers of commerce and of course, the Board of Supervisors.

We covered local politics and corruption, the Santa Rosa sewer wars, the annual Bohemian encampment—one year Simone and I posed as hookers to get a story (women aren't allowed in the Grove so the Bohos ferried across the river to party at Northwoods Lodge owned by Manu Khomeini—a relative of the Ayatollah), we were chasing a scoop on the breaking savings & loan scandal; there were a lot of "allegedly reported" phrases from our unnamed source on German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's speech. We covered offshore oil drilling attempts, the plight of the fishermen, and the Vietnam vets suffering from the effects of Agent Orange, and PTSS.

Guerneville, the gay "boomtown" was covered in Newsweek, and overnight, the Russian River went from a seasonal summer resort, to a year-round hot gay destination and a burgeoning community of artists, dreamers, drop-outs and activists.

We covered the AIDS epidemic when no one else would touch it. Who remembers AIDS chronicler, Randy Shilts, or Brownie Marie's Cazadero arrest (my story), or the pivotal role that the Starcross monastery played in saving AIDS babies?

The drumroll included: SSUs math professor and free speech activist Mario Savio—yes, THAT Mario, Carl Jensen's Project Censored, carpenter-activist Lenny Weinstein. We covered the field reports of Earth First! eco-activist Judi Bari, who was framed by the FBI for a pipe bomb explosion that crippled her in her own car in 1990, anti-nuclear activist Mary Moore, and political activist Mark Pearlman who was slain in Mexico. And we covered the local celebs: gay activist Leonard Matlovitch, chess master and bridge champ Peter Pender of Fife's Resort, Raymond Burr, Charles & Jean Shulz.

Wisconsin native, Waukesha born William Nicholas Valentine, who went to college on an ice hockey scholarship, had ambitions of being a painter. He was a brilliant cartoonist and graphic designer, as well as a fine editor who would go out on a limb for you—and help you saw off the branch, if needs be. He taught us to take risks, to investigate further, to follow our hunches.

I remember when the late Ron Sonenshine (another one who died too young) won a journalism award for investigative reporting when he blew the whistle on Guerneville contractors cutting corners on sewage facilities.

One time when Ron went away on vacation, I was assigned to cover his quiet coastal beat when the Bodega Harbor illegal dredging scandal broke—there I was, the dyslexic darkroom girl, writing a Page One story. Sometimes after an all-nighter, we'd drive out to Goat Rock to watch the sun rise.

From 1987 to 1994 Ron was a stringer for The San Francisco Chronicle to cover Sonoma County politics. Ron's extensive reportage on Polly Klass' kidnap and murder case in 1993 put him in the limelight. He quit the Chronicle and worked for the Presidio Trust until his death at age 56, of a heart attack while running in 2005. Another good one I never got a chance to say goodbye to.

Valentine left The Paper in 1988 to work for the artbook/calenar/card publishing house, Pomegranate Publications in Petaluma. Still carried by the likes of Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, one of the popular Pomegranate postcard artbooks he designed, Women Who Dared (1991) honored 32 extraordinary women including Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, Mother Jones, Harriet Tubman. I used to go visit Nick at Pomegranate and always came away with boxes of remaindered calendars and artbooks to use as teaching aids for my CAC artist in residency program at Mark West School.

Poster of WC Handy (Hooks Bros. Studios photo ca. 1930's) designed by Nick Valentine, ca 1988 Pomegranate Publications, Petaluma, CA. Nick had a strong sense of style that was retro Art Deco, yet had a cutting edge modern flair about it.

THE WEST COUNTY PAPER

When the Paper was sold again in 1989-90, Andrea Granahan started her own coastal newspaper, Nick moved to Australia with Elizabeth. Only Simone & I stuck it out with the new owners, Jim Carroll and KQED's John Boland in Forestville, Freestone, and Santa Rosa—who dubbed it the West County Paper (the end of 1989-1991) and changed it to a semi-monthly format.

FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: Imprint varies: Guerneville, Calif., June 8, 1979 - Nov. 18, 1981, July 19-25, 1984 - Dec. 23-30, 1986; Monte Rio, Calif., Nov. 25, 1981-July 12-18, 1984; Forestville, Calif., Dec. 31, 1986-Jan. 6, 1987-Oct. 5-11, 1989; Freestone, Calif., Oct. 12-18, 1989-Dec. 17-31, 1992; Santa Rosa, Calif., Jan. 1-20, 1993-Dec. 16-31, 1993.

It was the beginning of the end of an era for independently owned alternative newspapers that covered the real news indepth instead of being codded mouthpieces for developers and chambers of commerce. We were middle sister of the Northbay trinity of feisty independent newspapers that refused to shy away from controversy: The Point Reyes Light, The Paper, and The Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Now, big newspaper conglomerates have swallowed up just about all the small alternative newspapers in America. Perhaps with the exception of Scots-born Irish journalist Alexander Cockburn's (well, Bruce Anderson is the editor/owner—but Cockburn's articles put the AVA on the indie news map) Anderson Valley Advertiser—which is quite possibly America's last independent newspaper. (Alexander Cockburn writes weekly columns for The Nation ("Beat the Devil"), the Los Angeles Times and The First Post.)

THE NORTH BAY BOHEMIAN

When Jim Carroll and John Boland sold the paper to Metro Newspapers (who morphed it into a sister tabloid of The Pacific Sun), the name changed again to The North Bay Bohemian—and by that time few of the original crew were still working for it and others coveted our jobs. So I just let it go. Besides, I was running off to the USSR and Amsterdam for long stretches of time so my stand-in replaced me. Don't even remember who it was.

By then, the zest had gone out of the alternative newspaper biz as struggling independent newspapers began fold or to conform in order to survive the times. It was no longer fun. The pulse was weak.

All of this stuff happened before the internet had taken off. I can't help but wonder that if the internet had been then what it is now, if we could have saved The Paper. Or independent publishing. Lord knows, we were always barely surviving one crisis after another with IOU paychecks stacking up like old newspapers.

Here's a a lovely letter from the SoNoMore Atomics activist Mary Moore to The Bohemian, 2/4/09:

Loved the "Field Trippin'" article by John Moss (Jan. 21), and it made me so nostalgic that I just had to write you about the many incarnations of the Bohemian that I've observed over the years.

Your birth was in Monte Rio around 1979 as The Paper and I still have many articles saved from that time. With Nick Valentine as editor and Tom and Elizabeth as publishers, this brave little weekly with beautiful graphics and extraordinary layout (before computers) became must reading for all us counterculture types. It replaced Bliss Buy's previous paper, the Sonoma County Stump as the activist publication, and was one of the reasons that we were so successful in 1980, the first year that we protested at Bohemian Grove. It took us through the early 1980s protests at Rancho Seco, Diablo Canyon and the Livermore labs as well as covering all our doings here at home.

The only problem was that it lost money in droves as it leaned much more to covering the resistance than advertising for the establishment. I won't go into why Tom and Elizabeth gave it up and left for Australia, but it's a great story. Then you moved to Freestone and later Forestville under new management, and somewhere along the line you became the Sonoma County Independent. You were still doing a good job of covering the community, but unfortunately, in order to survive, your focus started leaning more toward economic reality and the radical edge began to tarnish. When you moved into Santa Rosa and became county-oriented as opposed to West County–oriented, a lot of us old timers were a bit miffed. When you changed to the North Bay Bohemian, I really got pissed.

I gave up on you for a while and then, lo and behold, Gretchen Giles took over and slowly you have been pulling it back from the abyss. You still have way too much advertising, but in my head I do understand.

I appreciate Peter Byrne, P. Joseph Potocki and John Sakowicz's reports; they bring back that edge I have so missed. And John Moss' acid trip was just what I needed to put it all in perspective. So thanks for that, and let us never forget our roots.

Mary Moore, Occidental

Simone and I always meant to go and visit Nick in his double-wide at the end of a dirt road on the hill when he returned to Sonoma County after he and Elizabeth split up in 1999. But then I heard he'd returned to Australia where his daughter Sarah is living. No chance to chronicle the past or collect the oral histories that made our lives so rich and varied growing up into real artists on the Russian River during the 1980s and 1990s—truly we all lived a retro-Bohemian existence and Nick was a central figure, if not the reigning newspaper king of that world.

The Russian River News, the only other game in town, was the rival newspaper. We'd give each other stink eye at events. It was at best, hostile comraderie. But the times they do change and we discovered, perhaps too late that we were all comrades in arms after all. Let us never forget our roots.

From Simone Wilson whose emails inspired me to write this blog:

Maureen,

I just talked to Andrea Granahan this morning and learned that Nick Valentine has died in Australia. He'd been living there lately, probably with his younger daughter Sara. Not sure what he died of, possibly cancer that was discovered too late.

It got me thinking of all the madness of working at The Paper. Through it all, I was always very fond of Nick. He was a sweet man (grumpy but sweet!), and a brilliant cartoonist. And he gave us our start in film reviewing!

I remember him on production nights once a week, laying in a good supply of cigarettes and six-packs of coca-cola, which he would consume all during the evening. That was a balanced diet for Nick: a cigarette in one hand and a can of coke in the other.

Hope you're doing fine. Keep in touch. I'll let you know if/when I hear about a memorial.

Luv and hugs,

Maureen,

I opened the Press Demo this morning to read that our friend Phil Osborn has also died. He was living up in Cloverdale in a health care facility. I visited him there three or four years ago when he was recovering from surgery (related to diabetes) but thought he had gotten better and gone home. Apparently not, as he was still living there.

Phil continued to live in his trailer at the Ring Canyon Campground, on Armstrong Woods Rd. near Sweetwater Springs Rd., for many years. Then it was sold (I think it was shut down because of sewage problems!) and he had to move. I guess he had been living at the Cloverdale health care place for years, so whatever he had is either in storage or with his daughter Kelly.

Why he ended up in Cloverdale I don't know. When I visited him he seemed a bit disoriented ( he had just had surgery), so I didn't get a clear picture of what was going on with him. But I think he enjoyed the visit. Andrea Granahan visited him too; it was she who told me where he was.

I don't think Phil took very good care of himself (likewise Nick, alas). I know Phil had problems with diabetes for years, and that can't have helped.

I'll let you know when I hear anything about a memorial for Nick and/or Phil. I know Janet Zagoria wants to have one, and she's waiting for Elizabeth to get back from Florida to arrange it.

Whoever is in charge of the universe is doing a very poor job.

Take care of yourself, okay?

Much luv,

Simone

(used with Simone's kind permission)

SOME LINKS TO FOLLOW

The North Bay Bohemian's obit about Nick Valentine.

Frank Robertson's Russian River News—oops I mean Sonoma West Times & News obit.

Press Democrat correspondent for Bodega Bay Andrea Granahan's great obit. "Memorial plans are still in the works, but people have started calling old staffers and family members offering to bring carefully saved copies of The Paper to share with others."

Hell, Nick was so controversial, he even made the Australia & New Zealand Coca-Cola news bot: The Paper's founder Nick Valentine dies in Australia 27 Jul 2011 23:26 GMT... 1980s, died on June 25 in Brisbane, Australia. He was 69. The cause of death ... recalling weekly deadlines when Valentine would stockpile Coca-Cola and cigarettes to fuel late-hour production ordeals.

Phil Osborn's obit in The Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Phil Osborn's Iowa Daily Times Herald obit stated: In lieu of a memorial service, the family will hold a musical celebration of his life at a later date.

Phil Osborn's mentioned in the San Francisco Folk Music Club newsletter.

According to the Library of Congress, the Sonoma County Library in Santa Rosa is the only library that has all the hard copies of The Paper. 1979:6:8-1993:12:16/31; and later issues on microfilm: 1990:2:1/7-1993:12:16/31

For a sampling of pieces I've written for The Paper, click on The Western Sonoma Paper link on the right column in this blog.

Note Bene: I can't believe that this entire post disappeared when I saved it, a huge Blogger saving/publishing FUBAR—and I've lost some formatting and corrections but, luckily I just happened to have another version of the page open on my browser. Some corrections and addendum were lost.

Unfortunately, when you use Blogger, you have to SAVE and publish early and often in the midst of writing—and even so, while making corrections, it will sometimes crash. I'm a dyslexic writer which means I get it down on cyber "paper" any way I can, then I endlessly revise. And revise. And revise. Unfortunately that also means that typos and mistakes also get published as there is no interim revision status. And the more times you "publish" a blog piece, the more convoluted the embedded HTML gets, and weird typography, huge blank spaces and misalignment are then the norm. It's almost impossible to clean up a piece afterwards.

My Redhead Irish gene piece is a case in point. I'm afraid to revise it as it now "hangs' whenever I do try & save changes, and it's completely disappeared from Blogger more than once. But luckily, I had a version of it in TextEdit.

I once wrote a long convoluted piece on the Medieval world and didn't want to continuously publish it until I got it right because I didn't want the embedded HTML to get corrupted. Well, suffice to say, it hung while publishing and I lost everything. And I do mean EVERYTHING. A day's work gone. And there is no Save As Draft option in Blogger until you've already published it once —with warts and all.

OK, so I saved what I could. But perhaps after more than 12 hours of writing, it's time to put this piece to bed. Argh!

NB2 OK, I've restored what corrections I can remember—I'm sure there are still some warts and inaccurate dates. I fixed what I could. I've you've suggestions or corrections, please don't hesitate to contact me. Leave a note. Thank you for your patience.

NB3 Uh-oh, it's "hanging" again—endlessly spinning circle. Not good.

California Poets in the Schools 47th Symposium in Santa Barbara 9/9-11, 2011

2011-07-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

BREAKING NEWS: We have several "commuter" spaces available—attend the entire conference for only $200/150 for Sat only) and sleep off campus. All the single rooms are gone—but there's usually two beds per room. You could also risk it and show up—there will probably be space available somewhere. If not, then Motel 6 is your BFF. We are also negotiating for more rooms at Casa de Maria. Meanwhile, if you know a poet who is attending, you can always ask if you can share a room.

There are a few slots open for Steve Kowit's fabulous writing workshop on Friday afternoon as well. Call or email Tina ASAP to reserve a slot. info@cpits.org or 415-221-4201.
BREAKING:

Are you going to The Ballgame? Giants vs. Phillies? It's a very SPECIAL event for CPITS. The SF Giants will hand SF CPITS Area Coordinator Susie Terence and 12 Jr. Giants a big check for $10,000 to bring poetry workshops into the classrooms. Be there. Take pix, and post them on Facebook. Go Giants! Go Susie! Take me out to the ballgame...

DEADLINE TO REGISTER IS AUGUST 12. CONTACT CPITS ASAP IF YOU'D LIKE TO ATTEND.

CPITS' 47th annual poetry workshop & symposium, "Writing Ourselves True," 9/9-11, 2011 @ Santa Barbara's La Casa de Maria retreat and conference center.

CPITS' annual poetry workshop & symposium is one of the most sublime and inexpensive writers' conferences in the nation. Poets, artists and teachers are welcome. Sign up for our action-packed weekend, "Writing Ourselves True," on 9/9-11, 2001 at the idyllic La Casa de Maria retreat, a former convent in Santa Barbara. Oh, and the food's divine too.

Double click to enlarge

Visit http://www.cpits.org/events/events.htm or email TIna@CPITS.org to sign up.

Over 15 workshops offered at the CPITS' annual poetry workshop & symposium, "Writing Ourselves True," 9/9-11 @ Santa Barbara's La Casa de Maria: Friday workshop with Steve Kowit, featured reading by Perie Longo.

Perie Longo

TUESDAY’S CHILD
for Zane

…is full of grace, but much more, son
of my son, made of love and earth’s fruit,
high surf, long trails toward wide vision
this grandmother dare brag, snuggling him
first time in the holy air, he light as light,
delivered floating in his liquid orb.
His mother knew a blessing, yes,
from the start. Nothing could stop
him slipping through heaven's cracks
bent on life, though angels tried to
hold him back. What could he want
from the world with all its strife despite
the splurge of nature, tender parents,
two sisters who would care for him,
coo to see him smile, share kisses,
blankets, books, the “real” rabbit,
their princess wings if he missed
where he came from. Long before dawn
I woke in a pool of moonlight on my pillow
and thought truly, a sign from above,
if only I could call down my husband
to shout the grand news. When sun rose
I opened the door for the paper and
there over the mountains a rare dusting
of snow as glistening crown.

Perie Longo, poet- teacher
Santa Barbara

Perie will be reading with Steve Kowit on September 9 at our symposium at Casa De Maria!

Sat/Sun workshops by Blake More, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Joan Gelfand, Seretta Martin, Melinda Palacio, Karen Lewis, Phyllis Meshaulam, minerva, Claudia Poquoc, Gwynn O'Gara, Daryl Chin, Fernando Castro, Tobey Kaplan, Nan Busse, Jill Moses & Shelley Savren. Come for a day or the entire weekend!

CPITS 47TH SYMPOSIUM - Writing Ourselves True
Friday, September 9 - Sunday, September 11

La Casa de Maria Retreat Center, Santa Barbara

CPITS 47th Symposium will take place Friday, September 9th through Sunday, September 11th, 2011, at La Casa de Maria Retreat Center in Santa Barbara. Located in the Montecito foothills, La Casa de Maria is a local treasure, ranked by U.S. News and World Report 2006 as "one of the best U.S. retreats."

In addition to charming accommodations, the center provides miles of walking and hiking trails and a swimming pool. Save the date and check back for more details.

Schedule: Friday, September 9 (pre-symposium)

Writing Intensive with Steve Kowit. Includes a fabulous lunch at La Casa de
Maria at noon, followed by the writing intensive with Steve Kowit from 1 to 5pm.

Steve Kowit

Steve Kowit, our featured workshop intensive leader for our CPITS symposium
will be at Casa De Maria on Friday, September 9.

Terri Glass: When did you discover the love of poetry and who were some of your mentors?

Steve Kowit: I've been a writer since I was a kid. My first "novel," (illustrated in crayon) was about a slave rebellion. I was probably in the 4th or 5th grade. I had a schoolteacher in 10th grade, George Bailin, who was a serious poet, and so I started writing poetry because I liked him a lot and wanted him to like me. As soon as I started I was hooked. I've never stopped. Then I discovered Hart Crane and fell madly in love with his work. I didn't understand a word of it, but what sumptuous language, what marvelously ecstatic music and phrasing! I even gave a copy ofThe Bridge to a girl I had a crush on; that was also, probably, in the 10th grade. Then I wanted to write like the avant-garde, the Beats and Black Mountain people and New York School poets who were starting to make their reputations in the early 60s. The poets who published in Yugen. But one day I had an epiphany: Other than Ginsberg's work, I didn't really love their poetry. I was already in love with Dylan Thomas and Crane and Whitman, but because Whitman was a century in the past, and because of the vast range and power of his work, it was hard to use him as a model. And then I discovered Jeffers. Of course scores and scores of poets among my contemporaries have influenced me, people like Mary Oliver, Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, Ron Koertge and Ted Kooser. Far too many to name.

Terri: To what do your attribute the success of your handbook for writing poetry, In the Palm of Your Hand? Why is it the best selling book of its kind on Amazon?

Steve: I wrote it relatively unselfconsciously, in my real voice, out of my real passions and after years of classroom experience teaching poetry to talented adults. But also, I think, I wanted to make sure that it was reader friendly at every level, that it didn't sound technical or esoteric or about some sort of specialized knowledge. And I knew that a lot of the model poems were wonderful models of contemporary poetry that might disabuse people of the notion that poems are always incomprehensible and off putting.

Terri: Do you have anything special lined for the workshop intensive for our poet teachers at Casa De Maria on September 9?

Steve: I want participants to write drafts of at least three new poems, hopefully four, to look at the craft behind a few marvelous model poems, to see what makes them work as moving human communications and acts of memorable linguistic music. I want participants to dig into their emotional memories, things they've always wanted to write about, but haven't yet managed to. Have participants use language acts (questions, exclamatory one-word sentences, broken-off sentences, etc.) and other formal elements that they don't commonly use, work with tone and voice, with assonance and off-rhyme in ways that might push them further in one or another direction. Ultimately, I'd love people to end up with four first (or second) drafts that are hot, that they are excited to keep working on, that they know are going to turn into real keepers. That's what I'd want in a workshop: to produce real work, even though the poems might still be at a rough first-draft stage. But I want it all to be fun; no matter how many tears people shed at the memories or material out of which they're working, the workshop has to be fun and relaxed and full of laughs and with lots of room for lots of points of view (since most or all participants are poet teachers, they all know as well as I do, that there's no "right" way to write a poem, no "correct" process!). Ultimately it should be exhilarating, make people want to get home and write poems! An essay of mine in the current Writer's Chronicle is called "A Poet's Anti-Rule Book" and takes a skeptical view of rules for poets. The trick is to improve on the blank page... which isn't easy to do!

Terri: I look forward to seeing some hot drafts and breaking the rules with you Steve. Sounds like tons of fun!

The Blue Dress (YouTube link)

When I grab big Eddie, the gopher drops from his teeth

& bolts for the closet, vanishing

into a clutter of shoes & valises & vacuum

attachments, & endless boxes of miscellaneous rubbish.

Grumbling & cursing, carton by carton,

I lug everything out:

that mountain of hopeless detritus ― until,

with no place to hide, he breaks

for the other side of the room & I have him at last,

trapped in a corner, tiny & trembling.

I lower the plastic freezer bowl over his head &

Boom! ―

slam the thing down.

"Got him!" I yell out,

slipping a folder under the edge for a lid.

But when I open the front door, it's teeming,

a rain so fierce it drives me back into the house,

& before I can wriggle into my sneakers,

Mary, impatient, has grabbed the contraption

out of my hands & run off into the yard with it, barefoot.

She's wearing that blue house dress.

I know just where she's headed: that big

mossy boulder down by the oleanders

across from the shed,

& I know what she'll do when she gets there ― hunker

down, slip off the folder,

let the thing slide to the ground

while she speaks to him softly, whispers

encouraging, comforting things.

Only after the gopher takes a few tentative steps,

dazed, not comprehending how he got back

to his own world, then tries to run off,

will she know how he's fared: if he's wounded,

or stunned, or okay ― depraved ravisher

of our gladiolus & roses, but neighbor & kin nonetheless.

Big Eddie meows at my feet while I stand

by the window over the sink, watching

her run back thru the rain,

full of good news. Triumphant. Laughing. Wind

lashing the trees. It’s hard to fathom

how gorgeous she looks, running like that

through the storm: that blue

sheath of a dress aglow in the smoky haze―

that luminous blue dress pasted by rain to her hips.

I stand at the window grinning, amazed

at my own undeserved luck―

at a life that I still, when I think of it, hardly believe.

Steve Kowit, San Diego

Friday–Sunday, September 9-11

Check in time at La Casa de Maria begins at 4 pm on Friday. The symposium begins with a 6pm dinner on Friday, followed by an 8pm reading by our writing intensive teacher and feautured reader Steve Kowit and our honoree Perie Longo.

Saturday begins at 8am with breakfast, and workshops will run all day from 9am to 5pm. A general meeting will be held after lunch on Saturday from 1 to 2pm. Saturday evening will include an open poet reading and celebration at 7:30pm.

Sunday workshops will begin at 9:30am and the symposium will end by noon. There will be time throughout the weekend for swimming and relaxation.

Meal Request: If you have any special dietary needs or meal requests, or if you are vegetarian or vegan please inform the CPITS office so they can order meals appropriately from La Casa de Maria.

Download Conference Materials: http://www.cpits.org/events/events.htm

mail registration to:
California Poets in the Schools
1333 Balboa Street Ste. 3
San Francisco, CA 94118
415-221-4201
California Poets in the Schools

Follow CPITS on Twitter @Calpoets
Or visit/Like us on Facebook.

La Casa de Maria 800 El Bosque Road Santa Barbara, CA 93108 tel: (805) 969-5031 fax: (805) 969-2759

CPITS 2010 pix at IONS Institute, North Marin

CPITS 2009 pix at La Casa de Maria in Santa Barbara

CPITS 2008 pix at Walker Creek, West Marin

CPITS 2007 pix at Warner Hot Springs Ranch in San Diego

Across the Road from Mickey Hart

2011-07-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

August 5: Mickey Hart at Napa Valley Opera House

In the 1980s and 1990s, I lived across the road from Grateful Dead and New Riders of the Purple Sage drummer Mickey Hart in Forestville. He is somewhat of an unsung celebrity.

When his book (co-authored with Fredric Lieberman) and the accompanying CD, Planet Drum—a musical atlas of World Beat music came out in 1998, we all trekked to Copperfield's for the booksigning and reading because he was part of our community. Not because he was famous, but because it was an intensely exciting time.

I remember the book cover made for a pretty cool T-shirt. You could always spot Mickey wearing one of his album cover T-shirts walking down Main Street in Sebastopol.

Sometimes musicians would show up en masse at Mickey's place on Mirabel Road. Talk about a harmonic convergence. Especially around the Summer Solstice. It was like a Ken Kesey VW bus cavalcade meets a Star Trek convention. Locals shuffled over to join in on the fun. The surviving members of the Grateful Dead were jammin' again at Mickey Hart's place.

All manner of exotic music would take flight in the night air. Not just New Riders of the Purple Sage/ Grateful Dead music. (Evan Morgan from NRPS was my neighbor.) But traditional folk musicians showed up too.

Mickey Hart is an unsung celebrity—not because of his fame as NRPS and Grateful Dead drummer—but because few know that he is also an avid ethno-musicologist who produced dozens of ethnic and indigenous music albums. (Mickey just donated his entire collection to The Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. See SFR on Facebook).

One time I just stood in the driveway at twilight listening to the music, wild roses in my hand, too shy to go in and crash the party. It was probably far more interesting to stand in the middle of the dirt road and listen to the music from afar than to be inside.

The comforting crunch of gravel underfoot, the air redolent with night-blooming jasmine, wild Damascus roses, and the myriad warblings of a small creek for symphony. What I remember was the intensity of the indigo sky and Venus hovering on the horizon.

Ironically, I thought of another near neighbor from Freestone—Tom Waits' calliope music—Innocent When You Dream. Not his street-punky tough guy Romeo is Bleeding music but the way carousel music sounds in the distance, leaving me waltzing alone in the dust at dusk, and filled with an intense longing of something unnameable and undefined. Like a long-forgotten memory rising to the surface. Of a time that you never lived. But remembered through a veil as if escaped from dreams. Something in the air. The music of a vanishing world.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm by Mickey Hart, Fredric Lieberman and D. A. Sonneborn (Aug 1998)

Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion by Mickey Hart, Jay Stevens and Fredric Lieberman (Dec 1998)

Top Albums by Mickey Hart (See all 16 albums)

This is Your Life

2011-07-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

My great-grandmother Briget Reilly from Arva, Co. Cavan, Ireland, came to Hollywood to appear in the television show, This is Your Life.

The O in O'Reilly is a scribal error—the Express Staff reporter didn't know that her son, John changed his last name to O'Reilly—one story has it that he changed it to evade the law in order to become a policeman—thus splitting the family tree.

Another story has it that when John came through Ellis Island from Ireland, the admittance officer changed it to O'Reilly because he'd only heard of O'Reillys, not Reillys. And he assumed that John didn't know any better.

The rest of us are all Reillys. My grandfather and his siblings in San Francisco also traveled down to LA to be on the show.They were all Reillys, of course. It must've caused some confusion on the air.

I don't know if her daughter Ann Reilly Duffy from Ireland came—I doubt it. It would've given away the element of surprise. But her daughter might've traveled with her as she was old. The article used the spelling "programme" so I suspect it was an Irish newspaper—from the tone. Also the use of hanging paragraphs.

I'm trying to find out when the program aired. There's nothing to identify it in the news clipping but This is your Life with Groucho Marx was a popular television show that was on during the '50s. But there wasn't much on. The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Truth or Consequences, Queen for a Day and Western movies.

I want to say it was around 1950—before I was born. But the Wiki article states that the show began in 1952. Laurel and Hardy were on the show December 1,1954. I suspect Briget' Reillys appearance was before that as their show was filmed.

My grandfather came to San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake. 1904 or so. John came to America later. How much later, I don't know. I was trying to work it out via the dates: John was 31 years in America before he saw her. Of course, he could've gone home for a visit before then. No date on the article.

I'd give my eyeteeth to see the footage. If there was any. That was back in the days of live TV.

They gave Briget all kinds of appliances—a modern stove, a washing machine, an iron—even a refrigerator—none of which actually made it back back to Ireland. Apparently the show crew robbed the poor woman blind.

Of course Briget lived in a thatched cottage in the tiny village of Arva—no electricity, no running water, an outdoor bog. So the appliances were useless.

Walking Onion

2011-07-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

Whenever an onion sprouts in my pantry,
I admire it for a long while—
especially the purple ones
with tender jade shoots
clasped as if in supplication.

On the top of my fridge
an ichibana still life sprouts
and bends towards the light.
At the point of no return,
I stick it in a pot and let-er-rip.

Only this onion didn't R.I.P.,
it flourished, and grew long tendrils,
longer than my arms, which in turn blossomed—
or so I thought. Not blossoms,
but bright purple bulbils.

The more it tried to flower,
the more bulbils grew in its stead.
So they, in turn, flowered—or so I thought.
Soon, it was a mad daisy-chain of sprouting onion bulbs
4 generations long—all in one season
and nary a true blossom in sight, only papery husks—
It was like an Egyptian walking onion nightmare on LSD.

I wrestled down the wandering hollow stems
crowned with small onion heads
sprouting forked tongues like Medusine snakes.
Then it struck me. I've tended a Monsanto monster
genetically modified not to produce seeds.

But it seems nature's veritas found a workaround.
I'll plan the bulbils to see if they'll grow. And so on.
Take that to the afterlife, Monsanto.
Weigh it up with a feather. See where it lies.
O brave new world.

Parrot Joke Redux

2011-07-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

Awk! I couldn't find the version of the swearing parrot joke I liked—so I wound up rewriting it. The ones posted on the internet were pale (if illiterate) shades of the version I once heard—from my mom's cousin, Ranger—Big Ed Walsh. But Ranger could tell a story like no other. This pales by comparison.

So this fellow Bill inherited a particularly foul-mouthed parrot from a crusty uncle that swore so much he could make a seasoned sailor blush. He couldn't get rid of the parrot because he had promised to take care of it the rest of its natural life or forfeit the inheritance.

The parrot was so foul, the poor fellow couldn't invite anyone over. It was ruining his social life. Not to mention, his nearly non-existent love life. Once, Bill invited the parish priest over for tea. As he steeped the tea, the parrot let loose a string of invectives so vile that the priest fled, covering his ears in anguish, never to return, muttering something about his harbouring the devil incarnate.

Bill tried everything he could think of to break the crochety old parrot's nasty habit, to no avail. He tried offering savory treats as reward for good behaviour, he withheld sunflower seeds when the parrot was bad. He played it Mozart and Brahms. He slipped it tranquilizers. Nothing worked. If anything, the parrot began swearing even more!

In desperation Bill locked the parrot in the cupboard as he had a young lady coming over for dinner. The parrot thrashed around breaking the crockery while cursing a rather inventive string of invectives. The results were always the same. No matter what he did, or how he tried to explain it, his guests all fled in horror—whether it was from the parrot's words or because they thought Bill was odd locking up the parrot like that—we'll never know.

Finally in desperation, after a particularly searing swearing session, he stuck the blasted bird in the freezer to cool him off. The parrot banged around and swore a royal blue streak. Then, he was silent as the grave. The guy was quite worried, he thought he might have killed the parrot, so he opened up the freezer door.

The parrot cautiously stepped out, made a quaint little bow, and said, "Begging your most humble pardon, good Sir William. I have seen the light and I endeavor to mend my most errant ways. I will never let another foul word cross my beak again." The guy was amazed at the transformation.

Then the parrot asked, " By the way, may I most humbly inquire as to what the chicken said?"

An Irish Blessing

2011-07-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

A friend, Centa Theresa, posted An Irish Blessing on Facebook—and because she had a bungled version of it, a little research was in order. That got me thinking: what was the original version?

So I let my lazy fingers do the walking through the web instead of hauling my ass over to the UC Berkeley Library to properly look it up in the folklore archives as my professor, Alan Dundes taught me to. Version? Origin? It boils down to a matter of time. You might ask: What's time to a pig? as the punchline to an old joke goes out the door and innuendo.

Anyway, I realized I had the makings of a wee blogín so I posted it here, warts and all—for your esoteric reading pleasure. This is all rather exploratory, in that I'm posting information I've uncovered as I go, but that's how THE IRISH REDHEAD GENE MYTH blog post began: an email that grew in spurts and bits and pieces. I may continue to expand this as I uncover more information or I may abandon it by the side of the road if I lose interest. (Or if I have to go to work—which is very soon!)

AN IRISH BLESSING

May the road rise up to meet you,

May the wind be ever at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face

And (may) the rain fall softly on your fields. [may, soft]

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.

A variant for the second line could scan: And a soft wind blow gently on your back. The fourth line needs a "may" added—and the rain falls soft, not softly.

Google has a… well, a field day with the Irish version of that line: Rain fails to gently smooth your field.

That second to last line really clunks: And until we meet again... It's either a fragment and not a line on its own, or something really was lost in translation. So it probably means that the language itself is suspect. Google Translate: And together we met again. That suggests that and if we should ever meet again. Or When we meet again... There's a lot of IF in that line.

I found two Irish-Gaelic versions. They were probably re-translated back to the Gaelic from the English that was cobbled from the Gaelic and back again to the Gaelic. Got that? Think of it as a linguistic version of the game telephone tag.

This one sounds best in Irish. (There's another version posted below).

Go n-éirí an bóthar leat.

Go raibh an chóir ghaoithe i gcónaí leat.

Go dtaitní an ghrian go bog bláth ar do chlár éadain,

go gcuire an bháisteach go bog mín ar do ghoirt.

Agus go gcasfar le chéile sinn arís,

go gcoinní Dia i mbosa a láimhe thú

Google Translator's attempt at, well, translation:

Good luck the road with you.
That the wind be always with you.
That the sun shine gently on your program flowerfaces,
Rain fails to gently smooth your field.
And together we met again,
that appointments to hand mbosa God in you

And for the second Irish version Google came up with:

Go n-éirí an bóthar leat

Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl

Go lonraí an ghrian go te ar d'aghaidh

Go dtite an bháisteach go mín ar do pháirceanna

Agus go mbuailimid le chéile arís,

Go gcoinní Dia i mbos A láimhe thú

Good luck the road you
The wind was ever at your back
That the sun shine warm on your face
In the rain dtite smoothly on parks
And mbuailimid together again,
Appointments to God in you hand mbos A

Adds a whole new meaning to Poetry is what gets lost in translation. Methinks Google Translator cheated and cribbed lines two and three from English versions but completely lost it on the following lines. Translation is never a straightforward process—especially with poetry. And translating from the Irish—a highly inflected language with complex grammar rules—is harder still.

The popular version we all know and love (not) was probably composed in English; cobbling together bits and pieces of various old Irish blessings lifted from early medieval manuscripts during the rage of the Celtic Twilight.

I've always sniffed a rat with the authenticity of the popular version that's plastered on tiles and tea cozies and laden with tawdry illustrations of standard Irish clichés: shamrocks, leprechauns, rainbows and pots o gold. My grannie must've said something derrogatory about the popular version to me because the one we had on our wall was:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back
May you be in heaven a half -hour
Before the Devil knows you're dead.

That last line in Irish is: Go raibh tú leathuair ar Neamh sula mbeadh a fhios ag an diabhal go bhfuil tú marbh.

Another friend of Centa Therea, Stephen Pino, posted one he learned from his Irish mother: "May the road rise to meet you and may you die in bed and be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead." This is eeking closer to the original.

The original Gaelic blessing might have been written in the form of a triad: three lines/phrases—that's the formal poetic art form—sort of like a long-winded Irish haiku. That's how we know the other version is a fake (as it were).

Of course, there are fierce board posts on the mistranslation of that famous first line—on whether or not a road can rise up to meet you—no equal translation is possible. It means success or luck. (My favorite mistranslation of the English: Out of sight, out of mind—in Russian, it became: Invisible lunatics.)

I did find this: Go n-éirí leat: Good luck to you. (That things will rise to you). You can see that the verb to rise up is indeed in the original. It conveys how language meaning and intent shifts over the ages.

Since I really didn't mean to write this, I didn't save all my links, but I did visit these sites:

The Daltaí Discussion Board has several threads. Another example: "Go n-éiri an bothar leat" IS the phrase that is mis-translated as "may the road rise up to meet you". The misunderstanding arises because the primary meaning of "éirigh" is to rise or get up. "D'éirigh mé go moch ar maidin" - I got up early in the morning. But "eirigh le", which at first glance would seem like it means "rise with", actually means "succeed". So although the phrase LOOKS like it would mean "may the road rise up with you", it actually means "may you be successful along the road."

A Touch of Gaelic An Ancestry.com appendage, but it has some interesting linguistic bits on that first line.

Irish Gaelic Translator also had this version. But what came first? Chicken or Egg? Probably also a back translation from the English.
Go n-éirí an bóthar leat
Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl
Go lonraí an ghrian go te ar d'aghaidh
Go dtite an bháisteach go mín ar do pháirceanna
Agus go mbuailimid le chéile arís,
Go gcoinní Dia i mbos A láimhe thú

Yahoo! Answers has some interesting gleanings.

Island Ireland has many related Irish blessings:

May the rains sweep gentle across your fields,
May the sun warm the land,
May every good seed you have planted bear fruit,
And late summer find you standing in fields of plenty.

May there always be work for your hands to do.
May your purse always hold a coin or two.
May the sun always shine on your windowpane.
May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain.
May the hand of a friend always be near you.
May God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.

May the frost never afflict your spuds.
May the leaves of your cabbage always be free from worms.
May the crows never pick your haystack.
If you inherit a donkey, may she be in foal.

May the good earth be soft under you
when you rest upon it,
and may it rest easy over you when,
at the last, you lay out under it,
And may it rest so lightly over you
that your soul may be out
from under it quickly,
and up, and off,
And be on its way to God.

May the blessing of the rain be on you—
the soft sweet rain.
May it fall upon your spirit
so that all the little flowers may spring up,
and shed their sweetness on the air.
May the blessing of the great rains be on you,
may they beat upon your spirit
and wash it fair and clean,
and leave there many a shining pool
where the blue of heaven shines,
and sometimes a star.

May your day be touched
by a bit of Irish luck,
brightened by a song in your heart,
and warmed by the smiles
of the people you love.

May neighbours respect you,
Trouble neglect you,
The angels protect you,
And heaven accept you.

I posted many Irish blessings here in order to show you that there are numerous variations on the form itself. May, or Go (be) + preposition. That which will never be... You really get a sense of the culture—what was important.

See their Irish Toasts page as well. Check out their Irish-English proverbs link. Some are even posted in the Gaelic too. (Hard to find.)

Here's an interesting aside on The Compilation of Triads (and full text here) by John F. Wright. I am still searching for an article on triads in verse. Be patient. Be forewarned. Problem with this link is that all that neo-druid nonsense has to be sifted through in order to find the pearls among the dross.

The Wiki definition Welsh Triads may be more to the point. "The triad is a rhetorical form whereby objects are grouped together in threes, with a heading indicating the point of likeness. For example, "Three things not easily restrained, the flow of a torrent, the flight of an arrow, and the tongue of a fool"

And a Wiki link to ninth century Irish Triads.

Trí gena ata messu brón:
gen snechta oc legad,
gen do mná frit íar mbith fhir aili lé,
gen chon fhoilmnich.

Three smiles that are worse than sorrow:
the smile of the snow as it melts,
the smile of your wife on you after another man has been with her,
the grin of a hound ready to leap at you. —9th c.

Go n-éirí leat!

Moondance

2011-06-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

June is the full strawberry moon, Rose Moon, Flower moon. Honey Moon, Hot Moon, Planting Moon, Wat Poornima, Poson Poya,

How cool is that the MooN in GOOgle is the eclipse!

Is that Jupiter at 3 O'Clock on the moon's shoulder

The moon's mare are named for idea/emotion nouns or weather pattern

Twelve men have walked on the moon. All were ever changed. They could not go back to who or what they were. Their footprints will endure for millennia. Did they all go crazy as punishment for walking on the moon or did it merely amplify what was already there?

Two thousand miles across one moonsmile
(NY to Denver = one moonwidth).
Sting's Walking on the Moon
The moon is a fingernail
The moon's bottom is turning red.
A thousand and one sunrises and sunsets are trapped in that red penumbral glow. Dragon's blood.
Van Morrison's Moondance talking back
Coppery glow from the earth
The eye of the dragon.
Totality: It's as if all the collective sunsets are holding the moon's inner darkness in their fiery arms.
in the shadow of the moon untold sunsets trapped
Full moon is always opposite the sun.
Mirror image, alter ego.

Syzygy—a triad of sun, moon and earth
Full moon held in the sunset's arms.
It is said that when the moon is struck, it rings and reverberates like a bell for hours.
Scintillation & talk of auroras—the neon sky turns snow-capped mountains a shimmering emerald green—undulating into cherry red at the edges—a tourmaline dream.
Leaving totality, the moon appears translucent as an alabaster lamp, as if lit from within.
Syzygy—a triad of sun, moon and earth—whether in conjunction or opposition. There are craters on the moon where the sun hasn't shone for eons—or ever. Water on the moon? Or tears of the sun.
SIO2 Sigh, oh the too, too sullied flesh of the moon: sand.
The earth's shadow on the moon, blurred edge—bent light.

Looking down at the earth from the depths of space, Edgar Mitchell had an epiphany on the return trip home from the moon and cofounded IONS. The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just ...an accident based on random processes ... The knowledge came to me directly," Mitchell said of that experience.

Nous refers to "inner knowing" a kind of intuitive consciousness—direct and immediate access to knowledge beyond what is available to our normal senses and the power of reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences

On iClouds & Motherships

2011-06-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

RIP, Big Man, RIP.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." —Steve Jobs, February 24th 1955 – October 5th 2011

Today's MacWorld Headlines: Apple plans new 'spaceship'-like campus. Pretty shocking. Earth jolting even. This is not to say that the proposed Apple campus isn't cool. It's infinitely cool. I'm rapturously ecstatic. I'm over the moon.

But, speaking of moons, the proposed Apple Campus looks like Frank Lloyd Wright's futuristic Marin Civic Center in the round—perpetually chasing its ourobus-hole. Talk about One Infinite Loop! No straight lines anywhere. Even the glass walls will be curved. I wonder if there's a way to design a building as a Möbius strip, er, trip?

In an accompanying video, it was great seeing the faces of the Cupertino City Councilwo/men light up when Steve Jobs arrived. It was as if royalty, or God, himself, had stepped up the podium.

Someone in the audience bawled out to Jobs: I love you! The audience roared and gave Jobs a standing ovation before he even spoke. Now, The Woz I've had an actual conversation with (AKA the Other Steve), but not Jobs—though I've met him and seen him at MacWorld Expo. Jobs has charisma, no doubt about it.

Mission Control: Jobs jumped right into the fray and announced that the Apple Mothership will land in Cupertino in 2015. The City Council, already on cloud nine, cooed and cheered.

Jobs assured the City Council that there will be plenty of free underground parking. And Peter's Gate will be virtual as most Apple employees will live nearby the company store and will bike to work. And Jobs decreed that there will be twice the amount of trees. Not to mention more taxes for the city coffers. There was even talk of restoring the historic prune and apricot orchards.

No mention of more Apple or Macintosh trees. No iOranges either. It's been a busy two days with Jobs redefining the Mac-iVerse as we knew it. And we haven't even gotten to the Lion or iOS 5 yet! (Joni Mitchell singing: I''ve looked at iClouds from both sides now….)

Jobs said, Lo, today there is iCloud, but alas, there will be no free wi-fi for the masses tomorrow—until I pay no taxes. Cirrusly. No, cumulously. (As the city's biggest taxpayer, Apple is Cupertino's golden cash cow.) And then Jobs said: Nor will there be a Mother AppleStore in Cupertino. The natives will still have to travel to GoogleLandia to buy an iPad. (Menlo Park.)

The godseye courtyard of the Apple Mothershop will double as a collective conscousness circle. No talk of shortcut slinglines across the quad—er, the π shaped courtyard. Or into the neighborhood. Forget monorail—too old school. But strategically placed feeder slinglines (or zip lines) could do wonders for alleviating traffic jams as 12,000 employees try to navigate Apple Central each day.

O brave new world! That has such creatures in it…. I don't know whether I'm Miranda or Caliban in this dream. Jobs is clearly Prospero. In my rather delirious flight of Mac fancy, I can just see Merloch Silvermane, I mean Kim Silverman, a master magician in his own right, wizarding his way across the zócalo on a slingline with his beard and mane flying—going wheee, wheee, wheee all the way home.

Talk about magic afoot and in the air. But then, Kim is from Oz. You know, Downundah. Just don't wear yer kilt on the zip line, mate, or there'll be waaay too much latent semantic mapping coming up in Mac OS XXX.

A herd of eco-green Segways might be heeled in. My friend Dennis and Jobs used to Segway around town together. I don't know where that leaves my best friend's son, Teo Carr—still commuting, old school, via the bio-bus feeder line because SF's—a long way to Segway, I know.

The zip/sling lines could double as tin can iPhones if there's ever a power outage. Maybe Teo will get a new job description as Tin Can iPhone developer. Or maybe the slinglines could double as the world's largest Les Paul guitar. (And then the Möbius Trip Band played Stairway to Heaven).

Jobs told City Council members that no stinkin' power outages and brownouts are gonna happen on his watch. No siree! The self-sufficient eco- Mothershop will run off the grid. No mention of solar panels or wind turbines—though, just natural gas.

Hmmm. Maybe it was yesterday's solar flare acting up. According to the law of thermodynamics, I'm sure there'll be enough hot air generated for the Mothership to harvest a steady source of perpetual energy.

Jobs has been one busy man. He may have stepped down as Apple's CEO in January, but he's clearly still at the helm—I mean—bridge. He just announced iCloud computing at the WWDC, that everything will be transmitted via wi-fi or 3G. No more tethering oneself to desktop computers. No more desktop computers. The new theme song will be: I feel it in my fingers. I feel it in my toes. The iCloud is all around us, can you feel it glow?

(Miss Monday's Apple keynote? Behold, "WWDC 2011: The Musical" )

And then Jobs said: “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device—just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We’re going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud.” We've come a long way from the "interpersonal" computer, Steve.

According to Jobs, the virtual iMothership has already left the Moscone building & is floating above us in the great iCloud in the sky. Holy flying Elvises! Cirrusly out of the stratosphere. My MobileMe account—which dates back to the paleo-days of iTools, will be extended until July of 2012. After that? Pfft! It goes up in smoke.

There will be unlimited iStorage in the iCloud but I might have to sell my soul to the devil at the crossroads if I want to take my iMedia with me. No takebacks. Aye, aiii, aiii. Where's that Les Paul online guitar Googledoodle when I need it? I've got that synching feeling the network is the computer of the future and the future is happening right about…now.

This transition will take at most two hardware generations and we’re talking mobile generations, which means three years, total. —I, Cringely

How fast does news travel? At the speed of thought. Within days of its nebulous birth, the iCloud had its own entry in Wikipedia. Holy moly. And the iCloud was only released on Monday. And then, on Tuesday, Apple Starship Central was launched. it looks like God has some good online help in tech development. Clearly, God also uses an iPad. And has unlimited access to the 3G Trinity network. And on the seventh day S/He kicked back and watched PixarFlix on the iPad.

Correction: That would be Yaweh. Yaweh just tweeted that S/He uses an I Am that I amPad, not an iPad as was previously reported. And S/He wanted to clarify that there is plenty of free wi-fi iReception in the iCloud. No need for 3G. But thanks for invoking the Trinity. Muchly appreciated.

I've hauled an old dead iLamp out of the closet (that half-Wilson volleyball iMac); it's in bits & pieces on the living room floor. I'm trying to reincarnate it back into life and turn it into a headless Lazarus server—as the iLamp screen really is dead... it should be ready in time to commune with the great iMothership in the sky in July.

Yaweh also tweeted from Her/His iPad 3.0, something about a new release date for iRapture 1.2a. Apparently there was a bug or a Trojan horse in the software. We couldn't quite make heads or tails out the virtual, or carbon-based data recall date. But I'm sure there's an app in the works for that.

We did learn, however, that the road to heaven is not paved with indentations of old floppy disks, as was previously thought, but with shiny rainbow -hued DVDs—as they will no longer be needed to back up data. Hard drives are another story.

However, we are happy to report that iOS 5 will untether all handheld iDevices with a new virtual cloud clipboard. Hard- and software will be one thing. There will no longer be a division between heaven and earth. Everything will always be backed up.

Wait, that didn't come out right. I feel like I'm channeling The Macalope. There's been a sarcastic void ever since The Macalope, full of sound and furry, crossed over to Pay-Per-View.

Speaking of effluent, in OSX: AKA The Lion. there will no longer be a "Save" command in the kitty litter box. Everything will be auto-saved under the Lion's throne. Forget about Exposé and Spaces. There will be no scroll bars either. Only a light swipe on the touchpad will be needed. It comes down to a swipe and a pinch. No longer will the mice play. The big cat is here to stay. And there really will be a Mission Control. Really, really. Get ready for blastoff in July. Into the cloud. Pinch me awake, please.

Talk about walking on the moon. Cloud computing is one big step for wo/mankind. We're just getting used to the idea of global village and now we've got global skies? The sunspot's acting up again. Think of all those old Jackie Gleason reruns gliding past Alpha Centaurii. All that free range data above us is gonna clutter up the clouds and create a traffic jam all the way to Orion's Nebula.

As to the future of Microsoft? Yaweh was reported to have mooned the software behemoth while mumbling: We don't need no stinkin' blue screen of death. Let 'em eat prunes. Clearly, S/He doesn't do Windows either. What a peach! Um, orange?

Jobs has been one busy man. In just two days, Jobs has rocked the world—make that: clouds. I wonder what news tomorrow will bring. Think different. Indeed, what a long and strange trip its been.

Segue to Yaweh's iAmPhone. Jobs is on Line One. Will you hold? Muzak segue: This is the dawning of the Age of iCloud, Age of iCloud, Age of iCloud, ohhh. Fade to Stairway to Heaven. (Although some might deem The Godfather theme more appropriate. )

House lights, please. I'm afraid to wake up in case it was all only a dream.

Note bene: Also in the news today: two new ultraheavy elements were added to the Periodic Table. The two new radioactive elements only exist a fraction of a second before decaying into lighter atoms. Copernicum has lost its title as reigning heavyweight champ. Apple will begin breaking ground for the new campus in 2012. I wish they'd hurry it up— 2015 is a long ways off and it looks like Jobs' own mothership is in low entry orbit. But then, the man's fooled us before. Horsemen, pass by.

RIP Steve Jobs—1955 - 10/5/2011

If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com

Lloyd Reynolds' Calligraphic Legacy

2011-06-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

(Note Bene: This blog entry is in response to an interesting calligraphy link posted by Oregon poet Jim Carmin, whose day job is an antiquarian rare book collector and manuscript wrangler for the John Wilson Special Collections at the Multnomah Library. @JimCarmin tweeted: GIRVIN: Steve Jobs, Calligraphy, Lloyd Reynolds and Reed College. Check it out.)

About the time I began writing poetry in the late 1970s, I studied calligraphy with Sonoma State University French professor, Adele Friedman, who was a student and friend of Georgianna Greenwood; both were students of master calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds.

So depending upon how you want to count, I am within one or two degrees of separation from both Lloyd Reynolds and Steve Jobs.

At the time, I didn't have a typewriter, so I hand-calligraphed all my poems in a sort of Japanese "running grass" style Italic chancery cursive script for David Bromige's poetry classes. He seemed to like that—and told me it was a Reed College tradition: Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, etc., (all of whom I had met, so I was in good company.)

Calligraphy, a Greek word, literally means "beautiful writing." Beautiful, my handwriting was not—it was really awful and disjointed (I'm dyslexic). I hated writing, but after I studied calligraphy for a year, my handwriting dramatically improved. So did my brain. Calligraphy is much more than the sum of its parts: not only is it the art of fine penmanship, it is a state of being.

I never intended to become a scribe. Calligraphy and poetry honed my critical thinking skills and allowed me a visual workaround to combat the dyslexic roadblocks and labyrinths that had plagued me all my life. It was a major miracle that I even made it to junior college, let alone, earn a BA in Art—with a side order in poetry.

The introduction of Apple and Mac computers allowed me to write. The technology unlocked the doors of my convoluted brain. I taught myself how to write on an old Apple IIc with floppy disks. I began small, with poetry, and then branched out to write newspaper stories, and grants—which led to my life's work, teaching poetry and art to kids in the schools.

One of my first artist in residency jobs was at Healdsburg Elementary School teaching RSP/Learning Disabled kids how to write calligraphy (and poetry)—when all else had failed them. I redesigned my approach to the letters, and made up stories about them so the kids could really see the shapes as shapes—not letters. We flourished. Kids wrote poetry and their handwriting and reading skills improved.

During this time, The Calligraphy of Lloyd J. Reynolds was my Bible. I found a battered copy of the rare, o.o.p. book and it was the most money I'd ever spent on a used book.

Letters have fascinated me ever since I found their power and beauty when I was five years old. I learned to read. I was always drawing and letters were a favorite subject. —Lloyd Reynolds, Autobiographical Notes

When Lloyd Reynolds (1902-1978), a poet who taught at Reed College for 40 years (1949-1984—the year the Mac was invented), first discovered calligraphy in 1934, he said "The letters would not leave me alone…."

It was like "a bolt of lightning," he wrote: "It seemed perfectly obvious—the only logical approach is the historical one. Learn to cut reed and quill pens and write your way through the history of the alphabet!" Lloyd spent the next few years studying paleography. Connect the dots. (Autobiographical Notes).

[Lloyd] He respected students, and he added joy to the skill. Legibility, communication, clarity, and respect for others—all these were tenets in the religion of Lloyd Reynolds and calligraphy. You got as much from who he was as from what he was teaching, and that’s the talent of a great teacher. —Georgianna Greenwood (Reed, ’60)

In 1972, Lloyd Reynolds was honored as Calligrapher Laureate of Oregon‚ the first title ever bestowed in the nation. Reynolds, who revived the art of calligraphy in the West, saw it as a means to work one's way back into the origins of literature. A gateway to history.

It was also very Zen. One had to approach the blank page with a meditative approach. The mind had to be stilled. It was a true Vulcan body - mind meld. There was no room for hesitation or false starts.

I had to wipe my mind clean: in that state of mind, I could recognize the letters I needed to write, but I couldn't say what the word was nor could I spell it. If someone talked to me, I immediately made a mistake—I misspelled the word—or added the words they said—usually a noun. Wherever my mind went while I was calligraphing was not of this world—it was a tranquil white place of suspended time.

During the late 1970s and early 80s, I became the resident calligrapher / sign painter at Sonoma State University. I traded in my steel pen nibs to dance with fat greengrocer felt paint brushes, I pushed the art form into large format. My ephemeral signs and banners on butcher paper graced every corner of the campus.

I made signs for The Student Union, the InterCultural Center, Peter Scarlet's Sonoma Film Institute, and campus events including backdrops for Pete Seeger, Daniel Berirgan, The Jewish Oral History Project, Westwind, The Dead Kennedys, James Burke, etc. Many performing artists who visited SSU, took my banners home with them.

I also did some freelance calligraphy (I called my business Calligrafix). I made wedding invitations, obituaries, cards, menus, programs, tickets, etc. All our posters and broadsides for The Russian River Writers' Guild were hand-calligraphed as getting anything professionally photo-typeset on a huge Compugraphic machine the size of a VW bus—was prohibitively expensive. Hot lead press typography was still in use. Desktop publishing was still a nascent glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye.

About the time I gave up my IBM Selectric typewriter with its daisywheel fonts, is when I quit doing calligraphy. I began to use the Apple and the Mac (and a Laserwriter) with multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts. The desktop publishing revolution had begun.

This post is a funny circle back to Tim Girvin's blog about his connection with Steve Jobs, and Jobs' connection with Lloyd Reynolds and the evolution of the Mac's superb typographic legacy. Reynolds is really the godfather of desktop publishing.

I guess I unconsciously recognized Lloyd Reynold's long-reaching influence on the art of lettering and typography even on the Mac. Steve Jobs stated, "If I had never dropped in on that single course [and audited] in [Reed] college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

Interesting to note that Tim Girvn's own chancery examples look a lot like Georgiana's work. Lloyd had a strong influence. A distinctive style imprinted upon so many of us—even those of us once and twice removed from the source.

YouTube Clips:
Italic Calligraphy and Handwriting with Lloyd Reynolds
LLoyd Reynolds: Italic Calligraphy

Lloyd J. Reynolds Biography
The Dance of the Pen
'Lloyd Reynolds: A Life of Forms in Art,' on view at Reed College

Steve Jobs Stanford Commemoration speech 2005

New Grass, the 2010 CPITS anthology

2011-05-31T21:15:00.000-07:00

The 2010 California Poets in the Schools anthology, New Grass, from the Science & Spirit Symposium at the Institute of Noetic Science has arrived! Thank you Arthur Dawson and Phyllis Meshelaum for editing this anthology.
(Photos by yours truly).
A link to my poem, Mommae.

Drive by Shooting

2011-05-29T12:16:00.000-07:00

When I travel to Bay Area schools to teach art & poetry, I spend a lot of time on the road, so I started a US Highway 101 drive-by photo shoot collection, but I also took pix on the backroads. This is on Highway 128 in Alexander Valley, by Jimtown Store, near the school.

Over the years, I've created my own digital virtual auto F-stop club. :-) My only rule: the car has to be moving. No pulling over to frame the shot. There's at least a 3-second lag between what I see as the photo, and when the camera records—because we're moving about a mile a minute. So I have to pre-guess as to when the best shot is—or, rather—will be. Knowing the road, and anticipating where the best shots will be, helps. Clean windows also helps. It keeps my mind well-honed and in racer shape—no soduku for me!

I am interested in the accidental distortions, blurring, color breaks, etc. I particularly like the painterly aspect of these digital shots. Shots into the light. Into shadow. Notice how the foreground is blurred and the sign has nearly disappeared because of the low shutter speed, yet the barn and vineyard are still in focus because I've used the landscape setting to increase a sharp long depth of field.

These photos are unretouched, other than cropping them. I shoot large and crop all my photos—if only to reduce the file size. I'm far too impatient to wait and frame photos with the zoom, it takes far too long, and you lose the picture. I'm interested in zooming in on that fleeting split-second when the eye sees something as art.

In fact, the digital camera is a poor substitute for what my eye really sees. It's always taking pictures. I'm definitely left-eyed when it comes to composition. Besides, I've not the luxury of time to zoom in on something.

A trick I learned while in Lima, Peru in the early 1980s, was to take photos without looking through my camera lens. When the army invaded the capital, with tanks and guns, I wanted to document what was happening, but I didn't want to be "disappeared" so I learned to shoot blind—sans viewfinder.

This was during the pre autofocus cameradays—so I had to guess F stop, depth of field and focus without raising the Pentax K-1000 to my face. My arm became an extension of my eye. I don't need to use the viewfinder.

My camera is an extension of myself. Another eye to render the world into form and light. One time I didn't have a camera on me, so I used my MacBook to capture a rainbow over Santa Rosa. There was a huge time lag between finger and shutter. Very accidental as to when and where the photo was taken. And very low resolution. So they are more like iPhone shots than anything else.

I now use Nikon P-60s. I have two of them. Er, make that "I had…" At the end of one residency in April, a kindergartner gave me a great thigh hug for teaching her to make art—just as I was documenting their final art project—self portraits. And the LED cracked on the 2nd camera as I was carting toys in a drawing class at Alexander Valley school. Two dead cameras in two months. Ouch! The photo above was with my cheap nameless brand camera from China. It took amazing, if noisy, photos.

I can still use the Plan B Nikon via the viewfinder. But the other one has trouble focusing as the lens took a good hit on a cement floor. I am SO completely underwhelmed by the replacement Nikon L110. My first Coolpix L14 (7.1 MP) camera was far superior to this overinflated ego of a camera. Lack of saturation and inability to focus, for starters. But it was cheap. I mourn the loss of my cameras. Like missing a part of my eye.

Marin's Pastures of Plenty

2011-05-25T14:29:00.001-07:00

Heifers resting by the creek, George Lucas' Big Rock Ranch, Marin County, northern California. All these photos are © 2010 by Maureen Hurley and may not be used without express written permission from her. Please respect copyright.

There's a great SF Gate Inside Scoop blog by celebrated executive chef/restauranteur Hoss Zaré at Flytrap, who interviewed Straus Family Creamery owner, Albert Straus. Albert who majored in ice cream at Cal-Poly has revolutionized the organic dairy industry. I remember Albert's mother, tiny Ellen Straus, made the best strawberry shortcake in the world, and was also co-founder of the first agricultural land trust in the nation, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

During the late 1970s to the early 1990s, we made an annual party trek to the Straus farm, Blake's Landing Farm on Tomales Bay, to bring on the Autumn equinox. My cousin and I made wild huckleberry ice cream with Albert's fresh cream in an old wooden ice cream churn—with all the kids madly cranking away.

We shucked oysters and barbecued salmon, brats, corn and tofu on the water trough grill. We visited the creamery, we petted the cows and fed the calves. We danced in the barn and raised the rafters. But the piece de resistance was always Ellen's strawberry shortcake piled high at the Matterhorn with fresh Straus whipped cream.

So it was with delight that I read Hoss's fine interview with Albert. But it also got me thinking on how much has changed in Marin since I was a child—once dairying was an important part of Marin's culture and identity. Where did it all go? Suburbs, parking lots and malls. Like how it goes in the Janice Ian song: pave paradise, put up a parking lot.

Few people know that Marin is the cradle and epicenter of California's milk industry. During the early 1860s and 1900s, Irish, Italian-Swiss and Azorean-Portuguese immigrants realized Marin's bucolic climate, lush pastures and verdant rolling hills, were perfect for dairying. And they were right: Marin cattle produced exceptional milk.

By the 1900s, Marin supported more than a thousand dairy farms. Once Marin led the entire state of California in the production of highest quality milk, cream and cheese. Imagine producing 1.5 million pounds of butter annually. There were myriad creameries and cooperatives that helped to shape the milk industry into what it is today.

In 1862 Marin provided a quarter of California's butter…. Since the 1800s, when dairying developed in Marin, the dairy industry has been known for its high-quality delicious milk. The invention of the milk bottle in 1884 made handling and distribution of milk much easier. The California Cooperative Creamery was established in 1913 by local milk producers to process and distribute the milk products (milk, butter, cheese). —From University of California's Agriculture and Natural Resources webpage, Historical Roots of Marin Agriculture.

In a 1984 oral interview, Nicasio rancher, Earl Dolcini, said that "Marin County provides about twenty-five percent of the milk supply for the Bay Area." During the 1960s, there were 150 working dairy farms (many local dairy farms were lost when the Point Reyes National Seashore was established). By 2006, there were less than 30 working dairies left in Marin.

Some Marin dairies managed to go organic like Albert Straus who founded the first kosher and organic creamery west of the Mississippi in 1993, or find a boutique niche and develop specialty cheeses—like the LaFranchi's Nicasio Valley Cheese Company. Albert's organic milk products were good enough for Prince Charles at a royal foodie gala in Inverness. (But I'm getting waaay off track here.)

Since 1959 Marin has lost 32,000 acres of agricultural lands. (1944 census figures show 1,800 ranches, as compared to 276 today.) In the early 1970s, Marin's agriculture was threatened when plans for major highway extensions to the coast were developed. The county was rezoned to include three major planning corridors, of which two - the coastal recreation and inland rural corridors - contain most of the agriculture in Marin today. They are protected by A-60 zoning, which allows no more that one house per 60 acres. —From University of California's Agriculture and Natural Resources webpage, Historical Roots of Marin Agriculture.

I have mixed feeling about the outcome of the A-60 zoning despite Marin Agricultural Land Trust's important successes along Tomales Bay. As a teenager, I too worked on that A-60 zoning initiative—it was one of my first real political awakenings. We campaigned, we held town hall meetings, we testified at the planning commission, and felt an overwhelming sense of victory when we won.

But there was a lot of resistance to the aggie preserve movement. Many people —from developer to ranchers—didn't want land use regulated for several reasons. But we didn't listen. Then the reality of it settled in. While the A-60 zoning ruling benefitted and helped to preserve many of the threatened ranches along Tomales Bay, including the Straus Ranch, the zoning had a very different effect farther inland.

Alas, the A-60 zoning ruling backfired in the rural communities of Forest Knolls, and Nicasio, where the agricultural initiative was gutted and whittled back to A-40, A-20, and A-10; it made available large lots for the rich. The dairy cattle disappeared, or were replaced by horses.

The newcomers to Marin built lavish gated communities and huge compounds, with ecologically wasteful homes that squandered more square footage than a shopping mall, instead of adhering to the traditional Marin farm houses. (The new development raised our property taxes through the roof).

The agricultural initiative did not successfully preserve most of Marin's agricultural lands. It created estates. Like the Native Miwoks our ancestors displaced, we were being displaced by foreigners. We felt betrayed by the very cause we all believed that would preserve our way of life. The native Marinites began fleeing Marin for Sonoma County and points north because they could no longer afford to live in Marin.

A side effect, or a fallout from the A-60 zoning, the newcomers came in droves and they brought with them, their new, ugly ways. Our new landlords, having founded independent fifedoms, also barred us from the very land that we had traditional access to for decades when the ranchers still owned it. The precursor movement that led to the Marin Agricultural Land Trust inadvertently helped make Marin an exclusive playground for the rich.

(This all gets quite complicated and convoluted: during the 1960s and 70s, the Marin property tax base had skyrocketed, partially because many ranches had been turned into a vast 70,000 acre playground, the Point Reyes National Seashore, (1962-64) thus placing a higher tax burden on the rest of Marin.

Then the national seashore attracted more than 2.5 million extra visitors a year—many who wanted to move to Marin. Circa 1970, Marin real estate was suddenly booming. Every time a house sold, our property taxes went up. This was the tumultuous era that led up to the passing of Prop 13, the 1978 Jarvis-Gann Initiative to Limit Property Taxation—its passing lowered property taxes, but it also inadvertently also gutted the newly impoverished CA educational system.)

Newcomer Robert Orr bought a chunk of Mt. Barnabe, and built a castle fortress below the fire Lookout Tower. Twice I was shot at as I rode the fire roads I'd ridden on all my life—as did my grandparents. Sim Van der Ryn bought another A-40 chunk on the ridge above our house and developed his theories of sustainable living and housing there.

At least Sim Van der Ryn recognized us locals as neighbors and that we had a Spanish custom of prior access to the fire roads and so he let the horsemen pass by. But soon he moved north to Occidental, sold his place to someone who sold it to that real life maniac, Klaus Kinski—who was an irate bag of pustulence and rage on a good day.

Kinski threatened to shoot me and my aunt's lame old dog for trespassing. When a rifle is aimed at you like that, forget about eating Warner Herzog's other shoe. It was more like eat shit and die. The blood turns curiously cold, you break out into a clammy, cold sweat, you're enveloped in a suspended animation of cold fear before the adrenalin kicks in.

A childhood boyfriend, rancher, Allan McIsaac once said to me, "When a rancher switches from milk cattle, to beef, it's the beginning of the end of ranch lands." Allan was right. When the Holstein and Jersey dairy cattle were sold off, they were replaced by Herefords—beef cattle that quickly led to horses, horses and paddocks led to suburbs.

The suburbs of Strawberry, Mill Valley, Greenbrae, Bon Air, Marinwood, Montecito, Lucas Valley and Novato all were once dairy rich farms. When the McIsaacs went to beef cattle, I worried that Tocaloma would become yet another suburban casualty. But they managed to hold onto the land, thanks to Ellen Straus's lasting legacy, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

Who even remembers Roberts Dairy, Greenbrae Dairy, Miller Dairy, Butterfield's Sleepy Hollow Dairy, San Geronimo (Dollar) Creamery, Nicasio Creamery or Lucas Valley Dairy? Once upon a time there was a Marin where grazing cattle on the hillsides were enough to feed the eye.

(Thanks, Hoss, for spurring me on!) Hoss Zaré's culinary talents brought acclaim to San Francisco's Ristorante Ecco, and Aromi, (later Bistro Zaré); a pioneer in the Sow Food movement, Zaré opened Zaré Napa in 2005, but missed the City, and returned to open Zaré at Flytrap in 2008—specializing in Persian and Mediterranean cuisine.

For further reading on the dairy farmers of Marin, check out the Marin County Free Library Carla Ehat oral history project.