Such big numbers are an abstraction, but every person has a life story. Lisa Gray-Garcia recounts hers in her memoir “Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America,” and how we react to it may tell more about the reader than the author.

Born the daughter of a successful but “very odd” surfer-psychiatrist who abandons his family in Los Angeles when she is four years old, Gray-Garcia recalls this period as the end of a “mini-chapter of privilege, comfort and security” for her mother, whose own mother struggled with a lifetime of poverty, and writes that “at four years old I wasn’t really sure what happened, I just wanted my mama to stop crying.”

Thus begins their saga of scrabbling to keep any kind of home, moving to Fresno, Mexico, back to Los Angeles and then up to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s. Lisa and her mother attempt businesses such as making and selling clothes, to stores and on the street, with marginal success but are beset by constant setbacks from borderline slumlords, overdue bills, police, broken cars, illness without health insurance and various human predators, “crisis building upon crisis,” as she summarizes the vicious circle.

Lisa skips a whole year of school to bring in money, resorts to shoplifting and gets busted, and learns many ways of hustling for survival short of actual prostitution. In fact, she avoids any sort of entanglements with men. Hearing the voices of schoolgirls, she recalls longing “to worry about my clothes, homework, boys. … The desperate bone-aching desire to be normal, to go back to school, to have friends, and to not have to worry about money ever again.”

Instead, she keeps working at selling T-shirts (illegally), eventually on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where she again gets arrested for overdue parking and “fix-it” tickets, or DWP — “driving while poor.” She dreams of suicide and violence, and, when she is called “trash” by a landlord, “I just cringed, agreeing with his assessment as most beaten down people do, loathing myself and my mother for our poverty even more than he did.”

After yet another eviction, one she calls illegal, Lisa and her mother decided to move into places “without paying any money at all. I later found out this was called ‘squatting,’ and it had been done successfully by other very low-income families and later transformed through several forms of resistance into something called ‘homesteading.’ “

From her now-politicized language, this might be seen as a turning point for Lisa. Although she has always worked hard to support her dysfunctional mother, they both begin to see their struggle in a broader context, via courses they visit at local colleges and “personal-as-political” art projects they mount in their storefront living spaces. Financial survival remains a constant strain, but a chance meeting with a sympathetic public-interest attorney allows her to write her way out of some community service and of her “trash” self-image. “Without Osha Neumann’s innovative advocacy, I would never have had the privilege to write, to think, my vocation as a writer would never have occurred to me; and this is why I always refer to his help as the first intervention, or in some circles, the first miracle.”

Encouraged, radicalized, emboldened, Lisa has some of her essays published, founds the innovative San Francisco magazine Poor, obtains grant funding for projects, teaches others about poverty issues and achieves a degree of renown as an activist and example of perseverance. Not that this resolves her financial problems. She is still poor, she must lie to get her aching teeth treated at UCSF, her mother’s physical and mental health declines, and “nothing had really changed and yet everything had changed” as she continues to sell T-shirts on the street to keep them housed in a Tenderloin apartment.

Gray-Garcia tells her multigenerational story of poverty in unpolished prose, but it all rings even truer for that. Her nascent political analysis of why she and so many others become homeless might seem shallow and replete with stock slogans too some, but that isn’t the point. Some readers might agree with an editor who rejected one of Gray-Garcia’s stories because of “too much misery”; her book conveys a sense of hopelessness. As a San Francisco friend admitted with some shame after yet another encounter with a homeless person, “my compassion ran out years ago.” The problem is just too big, and usually, impersonal. But every person has a story, and this one is ample evidence that not all, or even most, homeless people somehow earned their fate via drinking, drugs, or sloth.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has admitted that “class warfare” does exist in the United States but that “it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Here’s one story from the losing side. Contrary to some enduring American mythologies, Gray-Garcia shows that it is possible to be smart, work hard, avoid the perils of addiction, violence, HIV and so many other afflictions that beset the poor, and still get stuck in a lifetime of poverty.

Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America by Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, CITY LIGHTS; 287 Pages; $15.95 paperback.

But this one, held in Marin on a beautiful October Sunday afternoon, well, it felt historic, and I got a bit carried away.

Walt Whitman’s legendary epic poem “Song of Myself” first appeared in 1855, self-published in Brooklyn by the then-unknown journalist and walker, who was 37 years old at the time. According to West Marinite Robert Hass, Pulitzer-winning former Poet Laureate of the United States, “it was then and is now an astonishment, perhaps the most unprecedented poem in the English language.”

Many students read Whitman in high school. Some of the hundreds of people attending the The New School’s mass reading of the poem at Commonweal last Sunday said that was indeed the first and last time they’d looked at it. But I think it a fair guarantee that nobody present will forget it now. As conceived and conducted by artist, author, and Commonweal board member Eric Karpeles, this was a literary event for the ages.

Hass himself introduced the poem, expertly, warmly, and then without fanfare launched into the first section, beginning “I celebrate myself…”. Sitting in two rows behind him, readers took their turns at the two podiums, flanking a rare and invaluable original copy of the poem in book form that stood there like some version of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, admonishing us to do it justice. There were 52 sections of the poem to be read. I did not know everyone who was reading, but of those I did know, there were yes, poets and writers, but also carpenters, dancers, naturalists, winemakers, philanthropists, scientists, healers, lawyers, actors, artists, ranchers, scholars, surfers, farmers, businesspeople…and many more.

Younger and older, each reader brought their own personality to their section of the poem, with presentations ranging from quiet and meditative to booming and dramatic. The reading flowed seamlessly, for almost two hours. As each person ended, quiet murmurs of appreciation could be heard; some of the lines prompted laughter; sometimes the mood was somber. As the poem required, we contained multitudes, contradicted ourselves, let forth a barbaric yawp, and much much more.

But it built like a symphony; the power of it was really astonishing by the end, a celebration of life and love and nature and, well, most everything, including, yes, death. Over such a long reading one’s mind can wander, and mine did, and I was already exhausted from a very demanding work week, maybe even a bit ill, and my butt grew sore from sitting, but as we neared the end I was fairly shocked to feel that if it went on much longer, I just might burst into tears — which would have embarrassed me deeply as I was in the front row of readers facing the big crowd. But then I looked around and saw tears on the faces of some others less uptight than myself, and felt vindicated that something extraordinary was indeed occurring.

The end neared; Karpeles rose to read the poem’s final section and read, quietly:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flash in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

At the poem’s final word, there was a huge collective exhale, and the whole room erupted into loud, exuberant, sustained applause and cheers. There was a sense of shared purpose and accomplishment in that room that reminded me of certain concerts, perhaps, but without the drugs. We all stood, cheering for one another, and for Whitman. We had “fetched” him, no doubt about that. Walt himself was in the room, in one form or another, for as the very first stanza of his poem holds, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Brilliant writer Michael Cunningham (another Pulitzer-winner best known for The Hours) has described Whitman as “a comfortable and comforting admixture of Everyman — the poet as regular guy — and a sort of mystical Santa Claus, a visionary Saint Nick who roamed euphorically around America, found it all profound and strange and fabulous, and left Leaves of Grass under the national tree, the greatest imaginable Christmas present, as big bruiser of a book that took a lifetime to write, that declared our land to be astonishing in all its aspects, from the mansion to the mud puddle, and all its inhabitants heroes, from the factory owner to the kid who swept the factory floor.”

I found myself wondering what this visionary roamer might have thought of his beloved America now, so much more crowded, sprawling, noisy, full of electronic news and nonsense and political insanity. Who knows. He did experience the carnage of the Civil War firsthand so perhaps he would not be very impressed. But his perspective seemed to encompass both impermanence and what lasts, and on nature in all its guises. I think he would love West Marin — saved by other visionaries from so much of “progress,” surrounded by the natural splendor he celebrated — and with some people who look just like him. In fact, I bet he’d live there. Maybe he does. He certainly did on Sunday afternoon.

People still talk of the legendary San Francisco “Six Gallery” reading that some say launched the Beat “movement” in 1955 with Allen Ginsberg’s reading of his Howl (and without Whitman, there would be no such Howl). I wonder if, over 50 years from now, this reading might join that one as a truly historic event. Again, who knows? Afterwards, I asked an elated-looking Hass if, in his long poetic career, he had seen and heard anything like it, and he replied “No. This was just amazing.”

It was an astonishment.

“The Doghole Schooners,” by Walter A. Jackson, depicts the lives and times of those vessels along the Redwood Coast during the boom days of north coast logging. Much of the book, published in 1969, is devoted to the schooners and their fates, with sections on the builders, captains and handling the boats. The book is out of print, but may be available for review through the Held-Poage Historical Society Library in Ukiah. It’s also possible Mark Scaramella will let you take a look at his copy — in the office — which is how this writer got her hands on it.

The term schooner comes from the word “scoon” which means to skim upon the water. These boats were usually two-masted, with sails rigged for and aft, easy to handle with a small crew. The first vessel to be built on the Pacific Coast is believed to be a schooner, built on Vancouver Island, Canada, in 1788. Dog-hole is the name given to the tiny ports along the Redwood Coast; according to Jackson, most of them being from northern Sonoma to southern Mendocino counties. “Some appear to have room enough only for a dog to turn around…(and) all possessed hidden or exposed rocks and reefs, deadly undertows and vicious cross-rips.” Some also had changing sandbars.

Early in the book Jackson describes life on board as being “unbelievably hard.” Yet later he says that many of the men who crewed often stayed with a particular Captain, from vessel to vessel, especially if the food was good. Jackson says that most crew were brought on board unconscious (“slugged, drugged or while drunk”) and yet the dog-hole captains rarely had to use violence to get orders followed; perhaps this is because of the good food, the more frequent calls to port and the greater equality despite rank as compared to the larger ocean-going ships; he notes that the Captains often worked as hard as the crew on these small boats.

Jackson’s book includes brief biographies of some of the early ship builders — Matt Turner, Thomas Henry Peterson and Hans D. Bendixson. He provides lists of the boats they built and details about each one. The variety of ship names is interesting — from people’s names (Agnes Nicolaison, Barbara, Helen Kimball), to the fanciful (Fairy Queen, Fayaway, Twilight) to the plain (Noyo, Home, Cabot).

Captains, Jackson notes, were from all over, but the greatest number were from Sweden, Norway and Denmark — these being known as the “Scandahoovian Navy.” He profiles a few of them, Martin A. Brandt (Denmark), David L. Lansing (New York — and, yes, the same as the street in Mendocino) who “saved the lives of several persons from a watery grave” though he is said to have “remarked that he had witnessed the deaths by drowning of at least 50 persons in the (Mendocino) Bay,” Nels Iversen (Denmark), who at under 22 years of age was the youngest man to ever get his Master’s Papers, and William H. Marsten (England).

Jackson spends some time describing loading methods. His detail is greater, but these included mill-site, where there was deep enough water, lighter, which was something like a raft either floated or pulled to a ship, slide (or apron), which was the most common, then the wire chute, which replaced the slide, where the timber was handled in sling loads, and the wharf, which was expensive and easily damaged by storm, and by a worm called a toredo.

The book includes a map of the various dog-hole ports (Bear Harbor, Kibesillah, Laguna, Whitesboro, Cuffey’s Cove, Buster’s, Stewart’s Point, Rule’s, to name a few), lists of sea miles, wrecks and their locations, ports of call and the schooners who called there, captains, owners and a long section devoted to the schooners themselves and what became of them. Let’s just follow up on the few mentioned earlier….

Agnes Nicolaison — built in 1876 in San Francisco, wrecked in Little River on August 23, 1886; she struck a rock and lost her rudder, then her anchors failed and she went on a reef and broke up in a few hours.

Barbara (2nd) — built in 1887 in Little River; she went ashore at Shelter Cover in December 1892, then was pulled off two weeks later. She wrecked at Point Arena on January 24, 1901. She was a very fast boat, making the run from Little River to San Francisco in 18 hours.

Helen Kimball — built in 1881 at Cuffey’s Cove and wrecked at the same place a few months later. Her maiden voyage included a load of four million sawn shingles and 53,000 board feet of lumber.

Fairy Queen — built in 1869 in Eureka by Bendixson, his first boat. She went ashore at Little River in September 1882 and pulled off two months later. On November 23, 1885 a great storm hit while she was at Whitesboro and she was a total loss. Two other boats were beached by that same storm but survived.

Fayaway — one of the first vessels to enter Mendocino Bay and because of what was seen from her deck, Lansing was chartered to bring the machinery for the first mill to be built there.

Twilight — built in 1874 in Port Ludlow, WA; she was put ashore at Whitesboro by a storm in November, 1892. She was still lying there when another storm hit a month later, this time pushing her so far ashore that her stern lay across the mill’s railroad. She was put back to sea February 23, 1893.

Noyo — built in 1861 in Eureka; while lying in Noyo Bay in 1864 her Captain and two crew where washed overboard but were able to swim to shore. She later went ashore at Coos Bay, OR, and was burned when the water reached her cargo, a load of lime.

Home — wrecked on Humboldt Bay bar on August 4, 1852.

As Jackson says, “Sudden death was ever waiting for the men of the sea.”

A somewhat related anecdote

By Mark Scaramella

Ms. Fashauer’s review reminded me of a story told to me by my uncle Joe Scaramella. My grandfather, Carlo Scaramella, came to the United States in the very early 1900s and began work as a laborer on the Mendocino Coast to earn money for boat passage for his wife and two kids (Joe and John) from Italy to California. One of Carlo’s early jobs involved helping load railroad ties on a Doghole Schooner operating out of Fort Bragg harbor. According to the family story, while Carlo was on the schooner the captain somehow became aware that a big storm was heading for the Coast and was expected to arrive soon. The captain decided he had enough ties and immediately hauled anchor and took off south, expecting that he could escape the worst of the storm if he could get as far away from the Mendo Coast as possible as quickly as possible. Most ship captains of the time knew the dangers involved in getting caught off the Coast in a winter storm (as described above). At the time my grandfather was renting a room with several other Italian men in Fort Bragg.

The Schooner took off to the south and by the time the Captain got around to considering the situation of my grandfather, he was already a little south of the Mendocino/Sonoma County line, below Gualala. The captain put my grandfather ashore in a small skiff. He would have to make it back to Fort Bragg on his own — presumably walking. However, the trip back, which took three days, was made more palatable because every few miles Grandfather Carlo stopped for wine at one or another Italian family home or ranch. In two cases he was allowed to stay overnight.

I suspect he might have had a ride or two in a wagon or cart for at least part of the way as well.

Just another typical incident from the early logging and shipping days on the Mendocino Coast. And a lesson in how seriously most schooner captains took the weather.

The first few times I finished writing a novel (each book representing two or three years work), I was gripped by the same terrible fear that I might die before I could make copies of the books and send them out into the world. Before the advent of personal computers and the ability to send massive documents in email attachments, making copies of fat manuscripts meant going to copy shops and leaving the precious documents overnight while copies were made. Then, exhausted from lack of sleep and worry, I would pick up the copies and mail them to people scattered far and wide, so that in the event of multiple unforeseen disasters a few copies of my masterworks might survive to be discovered by future generations, etc.

In retrospect, yes, the machinations of my deluded ego can be seen as humorous or pathetic or pathetically humorous or plain silly, but I understand now that my fear of dying before my creations had a chance to live was proof of my total immersion in, and identification with, the things I made.

On one such pre-computer occasion in the early 1970’s, I took a play entitled The Last Temptation to one of the first photocopy shops in the Bay Area, a joint in Menlo Park, and handed over my one and only copy to the friendly shop owner. He said he would have my copies ready in two days. The play was loosely based on a brothel scene from Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ and on the Pontius Pilate character in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. I was certain the play (as I had previously been certain about various novels and stories) would lift me from poverty and obscurity, etc.

On the day those ten precious copies of the play were supposed to be ready, I arrived at the copy joint and was greeted by the perturbed proprietor with the news that my play had disappeared. Please imagine a formerly sensible human being, me, with a formerly relatively low voice, turning into a screeching banshee. To make a very long story short, the employee assigned to make photocopies of my opus turned out to be a zealous fundamentalist Christian who thought the play might be blasphemous, and he had therefore taken the play to his minister to determine whether or not the thing should be burned at the stake.

I screeched at the copy shop owner to call the police. The poor man begged me to give him a little more time to retrieve the manuscript before we involved law enforcement. Then he giggled and said, “Please don’t sue me.” Later that day, he called to say my play had been returned unscathed and that he would have copies for me the next day, which he did.

In answer to your questions: Yes, he charged me full price, which I paid without protest because that’s the kind of fool I am, and No, the play was never produced.

“My work is a game, a very serious game.” — M.C. Escher

I have been asked many times in my life by well-meaning people as well as by snide creeps why I continue to write books and plays and screenplays when it appears no one wants to publish them or produce them or film them? The short answer is: I don’t know. The longer answer is: I have my theories, but none hold water. The very long answer is that I love what I do and I have never ceased to believe that whatever I’m currently creating will lift me out of poverty and obscurity, etc. In other words, it’s what I do.

There is a curious and wonderful phenomenon that overtakes many a creative person as they work on their books or songs or paintings or essays or equations or you name it. And that is, at critical junctures along the way, these creative persons are convinced they have fashioned or discovered something fabulous and original and unprecedented that will change the course of (name of art form or academic discipline) for all time and lift them, the creator, out of poverty, obscurity, disfavor, etc.

But that’s just the beginning of the phenomenon. Upon completion of that first draft or sketch or version of the thing, there dawns upon the creator the realization that the thing is not quite the masterwork he or she thought it was whilst in the throes of convincement. Indeed, the thing once thought to be marvelous now seems to be quite possibly poop. This is the moment that separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls. This is the first opportunity for the easily disappointed to decide something is a failure and to give up.

But creative people take deep breaths and sally forth into the next iterations of their works to find themselves once again, we hope, utterly convinced they have made something magnificent that will change the course etc. And this “it’s-genius-oops-it’s not-oh-wait-it-is” pattern continues until the thing is done.

I am now convinced this self-tricking pattern is genetic and responsible for most of our cultural and artistic evolution. Unless creative individuals can be repeatedly self-tricked into thinking they are making things of exquisite value, they aren’t going to spend hundreds of hours, let alone years and decades, working on these creations when they could much more easily and profitably help destroy the earth or watch television.

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” — Thomas Jefferson

One of the things I love about that Thomas Jefferson quote is that it echoes Buckminster Fuller, a primary guru of mine. (Or Bucky echoes Tom if you believe time only goes in one direction.) Bucky’s book Critical Path was a gigantic game-changer for me. I love the idea that through our work we constantly create potential landing pads for cosmic largesse, intervention, collaboration; or what Jefferson called luck, except he was being mildly facetious on one level and absolutely serious on the next level down.

Which puts me in mind of the expression: “I’m waiting for my ship to come in.” which implies you have sent your ship (or ships) out (done your work); otherwise there wouldn’t be any ship out there to return laden with largesse (luck).

Bucky also said: “I assumed that nature would ‘evaluate’ my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing it in promising ways, permitted by nature’s principles, I would find my work being economically sustained.”

Realizing that I had unconsciously lived my life that way before I read Bucky’s elucidation of the phenomenon, I decided to consciously adopt his assumption of a discerning and collaborative universe as the universal joint, so to speak, of the vehicle on which I would travel through life. And I discovered that Bucky was entirely correct. Nature does evaluate my work and provide or withhold support depending on her evaluations, but nature also evaluates all my life choices, including my choices of people to travel with; and whenever I choose people who think Bucky is a crackpot, nature withdraws her support prontisimo.

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.” — Joseph Campbell

One of my favorite recordings is Joseph Campbell at 80. For his eightieth birthday Joe gave a one-hour talk in which he attempted to sum up the philosophical gist of his lifelong studies. I’ve listened to this talk at least ten times over the years, usually when I’m feeling at low ebb about having followed Bucky’s game plan and fearing I may have made a serious mistake. Joe always cheers me up and assures me I made the correct choice for the kind of person I am.

What I find most cheering about Joe’s eightieth birthday talk is hearing a wise and erudite old person talking about traveling the path he made for himself, and how he found help and happiness along the way despite myriad obstacles and countless people telling him he was a crackpot.

Our journeys, inward and outward, are the water; destinations are mirages.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

I just finished reading an excellent book by British historian Derek Wilson: A Brief History of Henry VIII, 386 pages of densely informative prose that is certainly not brief by American standards. I do not often read history, but I’m glad I read this book because it illuminates much of what’s going on in the world today. But before I tell you a little more about Henry VIII and why his story reminds me so much of George H. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and innumerable bullies and louts responsible for the ruination of our local, national, and global societies, I thought you might enjoy knowing how I came to be interested in Henry VIII.

“Kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the natural.”— Henri Gregoire

Several years ago, I wrote a play about a history professor who has a nervous breakdown that features visitations from Queen Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter. When I came out of my trance and found that the rough draft contained a goodly amount of Queen Elizabeth data, I thought it prudent to run a fact-check on my muse and see if she knew what she was talking about. So I read two biographies of Elizabeth and was pleased and mystified to find that the information in my play did, indeed, jibe with those historical records.

If this sort of precognition seems implausible or impossible to you, well, so be it. I had never read or seen anything about Queen Elizabeth prior to writing the play. I only knew she was not the same Queen Elizabeth of my childhood who was forever appearing in National Geographics watching African warriors and soldiers dancing and marching in her honor. Twenty years ago, I wrote a novel (not yet published) in which the protagonist, a pianist and piano teacher, knows a great deal about the life and music of Felix Mendelssohn, all of which was news to me. Shortly thereafter I bought my first recordings of Mendelssohn’s music, which I loved, and I read two Mendelssohn biographies to make sure the references in my novel were accurate, which they were.

How do I explain this sort of thing? Well, if you’ve ever been struck hard and completely out-of-the-blue by thoughts of a friend you haven’t heard from in years, and then the phone rings, and you pick up the phone, and it is that very friend, or if you’ve ever for-no-reason-in-particular decided to turn right instead of turning left as you have always turned a million times before, and because you turned right instead of the usual left you saw something that cleared up a mystery or changed the course of your life, then maybe what I’m about to say will make some sense to you.

Jung spoke of a collective unconscious wherein the cumulative experience of humanity resides and may be accessed by individuals, usually through symbolic dreams. In more modern terms, perhaps there is some sort of psychic internet, if you will, from which surprising and informative responses to our thoughts and desires may come, causing us to do things or create things we might otherwise not have created or done. Or maybe I have supra-phenomenal hearing I’m unaware of and without knowing it I listened to long and learned lectures about Mendelssohn and Queen Elizabeth emanating from UC Berkeley five miles from my house. I don’t know.

In any case, when I saw A Brief History of Henry VIII advertised in the Daedalus remainder catalogue for only five bucks, and wondering if there might be any new revelations therein about Elizabeth, I decided to give the book a try.

“If you’re asking me as President, would I understand reality, I do.” — George W. Bush

Henry VIII became king when he was a teenager. George W. Bush became President of the United States and might as well have been a teenager, and not a bright one. Henry let other people run the country while he hunted and jousted and partied. George W. let other people run the country while he, I don’t know, watched television? They both had rotten fathers who thought their sons stupid. They both presided over ill-fated military adventures and appeared at staged victory celebrations—George W. emerging from a jet on an aircraft carrier, Henry arriving in a conquered French city wearing armor. The big differences seem to be that George W. only presided over the ruination of his country and the world for eight years, while Henry ruined England and France and Scotland for almost forty years, George W. wasn’t obsessed about producing a male heir and Henry was, and Henry founded the Anglican Church, had scads of wives, and was apparently lousy in bed, whereas George W. had only one wife and founded no church.

“Don’t forget your great guns, which are the most respectable arguments of the rights of kings.” — Frederick the Great

One of my favorite books is The Prince and the Pauper, which is ostensibly, fictionally, about Henry VIII’s son. Interesting note: when I tell people The Prince and the Pauper is among my favorite books, I usually get one of three responses. 1. Dickens? 2. The children’s book? 3. Never read it. When I tell these respondents that The Prince and the Pauper was written by Mark Twain, that only smart and imaginative children will enjoy it, that I think the book is Twain’s most beautifully written work, and that I’ve read it five times, my respondents are invariably surprised.

Twain vividly portrays with fiction, and Derek Wilson shows with meticulous biography, that not only does Might Make Right, but once Might has established an entrenched bureaucracy and controls all the money and weapons and commerce of a nation or a world, then absolute nincompoops can be made kings (or presidents) and the monstrous pyramid will lurch along for decades before finally collapsing under the weight of its own corruption and stupidity.

In The Prince and the Pauper, which, by the way, is great fun to read aloud with your mate or children or friends, a pauper (who happens to be physically identical down to his eyebrows to the heir to the English throne, and who learned to mimic courtly speech and manners as a means of escaping, at least in his mind, the violence and grossness of grinding poverty and an abusive father) quite accidentally switches places with the boy who would be king, and the would-be king becomes a pauper in the manner of Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Once the switch is made, the rulers of the entrenched bureaucracy conclude that the prince has gone mad rather than been replaced, and when they report their finding to Twain’s brilliantly drawn fictional Henry VIII, the king, who is dying, orders that the prince’s madness be tolerated and ignored, and that anyone spreading news of Edward’s distemper outside the castle will be summarily executed for treason. And that, from what I gather from Wilson’s biography, would have been just like Henry.

O, what a tangled web we weave;

When first we practice to deceive! — Sir Walter Scott

Lying is the primary method of rule by an oligarchy masquerading as a monarchy or as a democracy with a congress and president. I am thinking specifically of what is going on right now at the Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan, and how we, the people, are being lied to so egregiously it would be laughable except the powers-that-be, so far, are getting away with their lies and what they are lying about is the ruination of an entire nation if not a larger part of the entire world.

So why did Henry VIII lie as a way of life? Why did Bill Clinton lie with every breath he took? Why does Barack Obama lie with such maddening frequency? And how did these guys get so good at lying? My hunch is that they each developed a false persona early in life in order to survive a childhood that did not permit honesty, either self-honesty or honesty to others, and these false personas served them so well that they became, Henry and Bill and Barack, thoroughly false.

Of equal importance, of course, is why we, the people, so readily believe the lies of our lying overlords and keep electing and/or not overthrowing these monsters? After painful consideration of my own enduring gullibility, I think we believe our lying overlords (at least enough not to revolt) because the entrenched bureaucracy, by successfully controlling our religion, our media, and our education, has instilled in us from cradle to grave a foundational mythology of lies with which their current lies resonate as entirely plausible.

“The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.” — Aristotle

Regarding Fukushima, the foundational mythology says that the corporations that build nuclear power plants are inherently good. General Electric, after all, is synonymous with light bulb, and who doesn’t love a light bulb? Thus it is inconceivable to a well-indoctrinated citizenry that those who give us light and electricity to run our computers and play our video games would ever build a power plant that might turn Japan into an uninhabitable wasteland for centuries to come. Who wants to believe that? No one. And the puppeteers of king and president puppets know we don’t want to believe what may very well be true. So they say things like, “We are rigorously monitoring the situation, and we are confident the situation will be stabilized relatively soon and that negative impacts on the environment will be minimal,” when the truth is just the opposite.

Here’s a little tidbit I snatched from Reuters that sheds a tiny light of truth on what’s going on at Fukushima. “In its attempt to bring the plant under control, TEPCO is looking for “jumpers”—workers who, for payment of up to $5,000 a shift, will rush into highly radioactive areas to do a quick task before racing out as quickly as possible.” See? Clearly they’ve got things under control. And if you need some quick cash…

“Compassion is the basis of all morality.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

In The Prince and the Pauper, while the pauper is fast learning to play the part of a prince, the real prince, who had yet to solidify his false persona, is learning firsthand what life among the downtrodden is really like. And ultimately he learns what it is to sacrifice one’s self for the good of others; which is the quantum opposite of what kings and presidents learn to do. Alas.

If only Obama and Bush and Clinton would each take a turn or two as “jumpers” at Fukushima. Maybe then we would finally see the beginning of the end to the nuclear madness.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

“Give me that little book you’re reading,” she demanded, holding out her craggy hand. My face flushing, I removed it from behind our boring textbook and handed it too her.

“Hmm,” she grumbled, looking at it. “Trout Fishing in America.” Her disdain was withering. “We do not read about fishing in English class, Steve.”

Busted again. She even took the book away. But what could I do? I was addicted to Richard Brautigan’s writing.

John Ross

John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.

The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was sixteen years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of twenty, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army.

Back on the streets of San Francisco eighteen months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition.

When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of P.L. (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist. “Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19.

In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabela in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.

During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.

He died on Monday, January 17, victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda.

That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.

He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever.

He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist—that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him. It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column.

He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they huddled in front of John’s 11-inch TV watching the weekly broadcasts of NBA games.

He was a great, true sports fan, especially of basketball. One of the last times I saw him was at a friend’s house in San Francisco, in between radiation treatments, watching a Warriors game on a big screen TV, smoking what he still called the “killer weed.” Joe and I listened to him recount NY Knicks history, the origin of the jump shot, and Kareem’s last game, which somehow led to a long complaint about kidneys for sale in Mexico that had been harvested in China out of the still warm body of some poor, rural immigrant who had been legally executed for jaywalking in Beijing.

The very last time I had the pleasure of his company was at breakfast in Los Angeles when Ted and I saw him off on his last book tour, promoting El Monstruo, his loving history of Mexico City. He was in great form. His cancer was in remission—a “cancer resister,” he called himself—and he entertained us with a preview of his trip: long, tiresome Greyhound rides, uncomfortable couches, talks to tiny groups of the marginalized, the last defenders of lost causes without the money to buy his books. It would be a losing proposition, like so many of his others, all of which secure his place among the angels. ¥¥

(Frank Bardacke taught at Watsonville Adult School, California’s Central Coast, for 25 years. His history of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampled in the Vintage, is forthcoming from Verso. He can be reached at bardacke@sbcglobal.com)

I wonder how Mark Twain would feel if he knew his novel Huckleberry Finn has been rewritten in such a way that the meaning of his book is entirely changed, and that such an execrable mutation of his work is about to be afflicted on the next generation of American schoolchildren. I ask because such a crime has just taken place. Yes, it’s true, and I quote from The New York Times:

“Throughout the book [Huckleberry Finn] — 219 times in all — the word nigger is replaced by slave, a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.

“Alan Gribben, a professor of English and a Twain scholar at Auburn University, approached the publisher with the idea in July. Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.

“‘I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think I’m alone.’

“Mr. Gribben, who combined Huckleberry Finn with Tom Sawyer in a single volume and also supplied an introduction, said he worried that Huckleberry Finn had fallen off reading lists, and wanted to offer an edition that is not for scholars, but for younger people and general readers.

“‘I’m by no means sanitizing Mark Twain,’ Mr. Gribben said. ‘The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone.’ (The book also substitutes Indian for injun.)”

Should we be outraged? I suppose the publication and widespread dissemination of degenerate versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer pale next to the unending crimes against humanity perpetrated by military forces around the globe, but still, removing nigger from Huckleberry Finn and replacing it with slave is not only immoral, it is grossly stupid. For one thing, the word slave already appears many times in the original text. Clearly, Twain did not want Jim to be known as Slave Jim. Might not this so-called scholar have changed nigger to negro or some African-sounding word like jomo or kumbaya? Or better yet, why not change nigger to scholar? Scholar Jim. Yes. I like the sound of that.

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” — Ernest Hemingway

Ernest who? Wrote some book called For Whom the Bell Tolls. Now there’s a title in need of updating. Nobody uses the word whom anymore. Or the archaic verb toll. The new title should be Who Is That Bell Ringing For? Don’t you think?

But, Todd, the word nigger taken out of the context of a novel set prior to the Civil War is offensive and racist. Never mind that Huckleberry Finn is about racism and the dawning awareness in the mind of an extremely appealing everyman (Huck) that slavery and racism are deeply wrong and need to be abandoned by anyone purporting to be a decent human being. Never mind that the word nigger is to Huckleberry Finn what garlic is to good Jewish, er, Hebrew chicken soup.

“Only one thing is impossible to God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.” — Mark Twain

Indeed. Why is it even legal for this so-called scholar to rewrite Huckleberry Finn? Oh, because the book is in the public domain, meaning Twain and his heirs are long dead, so anyone who wants to fuck with, I mean, amend the original text may do so without fear of legal action against them. Fine. In that case, I want to change the ending of Huckleberry Finn, which has always struck me as weak and something of a copout. I think the novel should end with Huck coming out of the closet and admitting that he and Tom [Sawyer] have a serious thing for each other. You know what I mean by thing, don’t you? And Becky will be exposed as a cover for Tom and Huck’s, you know, hanky panky. And Jim (Jomo) should be like this totally wise prophet kind of guy who helps Huck and Tom emigrate to France where they adopt three children, a Hebrew, an Italian, and an Irishman. Yascha, Luigi, and Sean. Scholars all.

“What are the three great American things? Jazz, the Bill of Rights, and Mark Twain.” — Roy Blount Jr.

What about Moby Dick? Goodness, dick will never do. Dick means, you know, the male thingy. Perhaps the Auburn scholar would like to go through Melville’s massive tome and change all the dicks to, I don’t know, Jason? Moby Jason. No, I’m thinking scholar might be the best choice here, too. Moby Scholar. Yes. Perfect.

“There are three kinds of people — commonplace men, remarkable men, and lunatics.” — Mark Twain

There goes Mark (Samuel) again, using an inappropriate word. He used the word men synonymously with people. What a sexist! What a male chauvinist pig. I’m sending a letter to that Auburn scholar demanding he rewrite all of Twain’s nineteenth century writings to bring them into accord with twenty-first-century political correctness. Just think how women today must feel when they read quotations like that. How could Twain have been so blind and ignorant and arrogant not to know that our language would continue to evolve after his death. Some genius he turned out to be.

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” — Mark Twain

The best thing for me about this Auburn University scholar, or the damn idiot, as I’m sure Twain would have called him, blithely ruining Huckleberry Finn and making boatloads of money in the process, is that his deplorable actions have now freed me entirely from my last shreds of regret about dropping out of college in 1969 after two inglorious years of academic nonsense. There have been times in my life when money and gainful employment were hard come by, and in those dire straits it crossed my mind that it might have behooved me to earn a degree or two, but now I am confirmed in my long ago decision to remove myself from the psychic influence of that Auburn scholar and those of his kind, for they are surely bad for the mind and the heart, and most definitely toxic to the soul.

“The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” —  Mark Twain

Seriously folks, I do mourn for our culture as I mourn for our society, the lunatics having taken control of just about everything now. But comes the revolution, we will find all the copies of Huckleberry Sawyer wherein nigger has been replaced by slave, and we will burn those copies, but not wastefully. We will ignite those useless pages in woodstoves to heat our homes, the flames providing extra heat for the double good they are doing.

(Todd’s website is UnderTheTableBooks.com .)

Vasquez was a Californio, that doomed race of Spanish-descended Californians who began arriving in the state when it was a northern frontier of Mexico, some of them conquista­dores who rode in to what became San Francisco with Junipero Serra while Serra himself, ever the ascetic, walked the whole way from Mexico City.

It’s always striking how fast our history is moving, especially when you consider that Father Serra staggered into the Bay Area a mere 224 years ago. Serra’s string of missions were California for the next seventy years or so until the missions were secularized, i.e. became the private prop­erty of connected Mexicans. California became the native home of several thousand rural aristocrats presid­ing over vast ranchos from San Diego to, of all places, Hopland here in Mendocino County, the whole of it casually administered out of Mexico. These brief gen­erations of “Californios,” whose ancestral home was Monterey, which is where Vasquez and, earlier, General Vallejo, were born.

The Californios, and their gracefully vigorous rancho lives were overwhelmed by the Gold Rush of 1850, the Californios dispossessed. By then, California had been formally annexed by the United States. Vasquez was one of many dispossessed Cali­fornios who spent the rest of his life dispossessing Yan­kee travelers of whatever valuables they had on them, right down to their watches and boots, if the boots were new and the watches were gold watches. His biggest heist occurred when he and his gang robbed a whole town near what is now Fresno.

In between forays holding up stage coaches, rural stores, bars, and the occasional Anglo whore house, and in between stays at San Quentin where he organized an all-time record four break-outs, Vasquez, revered by Californios and Mexicans, depended on remote settlements of his admirers to hide him from the law, what little law there was from 1850 to 1870 or so. (Lynch law was more prevalent than the courtroom type.)

Vasquez had flair. He read poetry and even wrote some. He also sang his way into the arms of many women, married and single. Bandito is a wonderful of picture of California as it was from the Gold Rush through the full establishment of a coherent state, which only really commenced about 1880.

Vasquez, inciden­tally, hid out for a while at the Feliz ranch based in Hopland, and there’s an account of him being chased into the hills above Anderson Valley in 1865 by the legen­dary Mendocino County lawman, Doc Standley.

I was pleased to see that Boessenecker’s fascinating biography of Vasquez is dedicated to the late Jack Reynolds, who died in Willits about ten years ago. Jack’s late wife, Rosalie, is also cited by the author for her help with his marvelous book. Rosalie is fondly remembered by many in the Anderson Valley where she lived for many years following the death of her husband. The author says the Reynolds, retired from the antiquarian book business, were of huge assistance to him in locating the source material for his project. Boessenecker is clearly a formi­dable researcher.

He has tracked down people, towns and even two-shack hamlets deep in the Coast Range that haven’t existed for a hundred and fifty years. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the true history of the Golden State.

“Henry Miller has little importance in New York, but on the west coast, where he lives, he is taken for a genius.” — Simone de Beauvoir, 1953.

Re-reading the favorite books of one’s youth can be dangerous, or at least disappointing. They rarely measure up to the image and influence they had upon first encounter. That has too often been my sad experience, at least. But Henry Miller has been a happy exception.

Back in the 1970s, I drove hundreds of miles to Big Sur as soon as I had a driver’s license and a car. Drawn there by the books of Miller, Richard Brautigan, and Jack Kerouac, I was not disappointed, even though many years too late for any kind of “scene.” Miller had moved to Los Angeles; the other writers I’d read were also gone and even the short-lived “hippie” flourishing there had degenerated into something less than groovy (Although there was still a sign on the door of one local eatery reading “NO HIPPIES”).

“A serious and good philosophical work could be writ­ten consisting entirely of jokes.” — Ludwig Wittgen­stein

I first encountered the writing of Ludwig Wittgen­stein in 1967 when I was 19, a freshman at UC Santa Cruz. Wittgenstein’s little treatises The Blue and Brown Books were required reading for all freshmen enrolled at Steven­son College, the campus within the campus named after Adlai Stevenson and dedicated to the social sci­ences. I was a gung ho anthropology major, though my gung ho-ness would soon be replaced by the awareness that anthropology was a deeply conflicted realm best avoided by the already conflicted likes of me.

Books

“Rae’s eyes were red and swollen. They sat on the couch side by side, in silence, waiting for the doctor.” from Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott

The silence of the eyes rings true, and the eyes being side-by-side seems plausible, but how in heck did those eyes get onto that couch without Rae?

I was 13 and had devoured a thousand books before I discovered the first typo of my reading career, an error that struck me as a scandalous affront to the artistry of writing. I was an insatiable reader, and wanting to be a professional writer I did not skim, but read every word. And when I found passages that wowed me, I copied their lines longhand to teach my sinews the feel of great writing.

Question: does the desire to save the planet, protect pollywogs, make us carbon happy, and provide for a structure-free coastal viewshed exempt us from evil?

Have you ever been to Elk?

When I decided to build my house near Elk nearly 40 years ago, I had my first encounter with a local. A slight, wiry man in a World War Two jeep with a rifle in a scabbard on the outside of his driver’s seat sped up to our building site and skidded to a dusty stop. There was a small, needle-tooth dog yapping in the passenger’s seat. I had heard about the Elk locals — rugged loggers; sheep ranchers; and a crazy guy by the name of Bobby Beacon who allegedly locked drunken friends in coffins until they sobered up (quickly, one supposes) — but I had never met one.

The man in the jeep who skidded to a dusty stop was a local, a sheep rancher in his 60s, who had spent his life on Greenwood Ridge. His name was Francis Fashauer. In fact, the few acres I’d purchased had once been part of his family’s holdings where he and his brother ran sheep and grew apples in a never ending life time warp of subsistence versus the always encroaching forest. Rumor also informed that Francis and his brother had once been official County bear hunters whose ancestral, Germanic prowess had finished off most of the sheep-hungry bears left in Mendocino County. There were none in Elk.

So, what did this rancher want as he turned off his motor, the dust blew away, and he yelled at his dog Trail to shut the hell up? Had our dog been in his sheep? Had I inadvertently trespassed across his land when I drove down to the creek? (I had.) Was I about to receive a stern admonition about barbed wire fences making good neighbors? No. I was about to receive a large bag of vegetables fresh from his garden along with a big smiling “Welcome!” for being his new neighbor.

That’s the way it used to be in Elk.

Ted and Margie Berlincourt got a different kind of welcome when they tried to build a house south of Elk in 1994. Six years later, and after $200,000 in legal expenses, and what amounted to a modern day auto-de-fe by some of Elk’s leading serial activists, the Berlincourts finally built their home near a town where some had come to hate them for simply wanting to be their neighbor.

Ted Berlincourt has recently published a book entitled Besieged. It’s about his initial fun years in Elk as an unwitting clay pigeon strapped in a shooting gallery run by a posse of Elk locals: scenic preservationists, their media allies, self-serving County politicians, and sycophantic, obedient bureaucrats.

Greil Marcus, meet Van the Man.

One foggy afternoon long ago, I was taking a solo hike on the Marin ocean cliffs. The fog was so thick one could only see a few feet ahead. Sound was muffled too, yet I kept thinking that a voice was wafting thru the air. And it was a voice I thought I recognized.

After what felt like an hour of so of this, I nearly bumped into another figure, in cape and cap and with cane, walking slowly in the same direction. He was a short man, and I almost ran him over. “Christ, ya fookin’ startled me!” he exclaimed in a heavy Irish brogue. And then I recognized not just the voice, but who it belonged to: Van Morrison.   “I’m sorry, man!” I apologized. And then, without thinking, I launched into a little heartfelt speech about “how much I have loved your music for many years…loved your concerts…drove all over the place with your tapes playing… some of best memories in life…” etc, etc. Through all this, he just stood there, looking at the ground where the tip of his cane was grinding into the soggy soil. I finally ran out of words at about the same time embarrassment hit, and shut up. After a moment of silence, Van “The Man” Morrison looked up, slowly shook his head, and said: “I sure don’t know why people feel the need to tell me this kind of shite.”

When later I came upon Morrison singing in a pub on the West coast of Ireland — a landscape which reminded me of nowhere so much as West Marin or Sonoma — I just held my tongue. But for many years, the famously brilliant/cantankerous/mystical/bluesy/inebriated Irish musical legend lived in Marin county, and would pop up at local musical gigs, wander the streets, support his par­ents’ little record store in Fairfax (where the only clue was the whole wall of VM LP covers), and confound his almost cultish fans.

Around that time, budding musicologist and “cultural critic” Greil Marcus lived in Berkeley — he still does — and interviewed VM for Rolling Stone magazine on Marcus’ way to becoming one of the most respected — and prolific — living authors on modern music and much else. Among his many works, Marcus has written a whole book on a single album, Dylan/The Band’s “The Basement Tapes,” titled “The Old, Weird America,” exploring the confluence of sources — African, Euro­pean, and much more — that produced American folk, blues, country, and unlabeled mixtures thereof.

Now Marcus delves into what might be called The Old Weird Ireland in a new book on Van Morrison. “When That Rough God Goes Riding” — the title of one of Morrison’s songs — is, true to Marcus form, a very personal meditation, so idiosyncratic that some of it likely makes sense only to the author. The guy is all over the place, which is what his readers expect. Some of the diversions and analogies and efforts to discern and extract near-cosmic meaning from a single song or even a grunt or note had me snorting in bafflement or disbe­lief, although I certainly kept on reading and most other VM fans likely will, too.

“Van always looked to me like a half-homicidal lepre­chaun who lived under the bridge,” Marcus quotes a fellow critic. At a recent bookshop reading for this work, Marcus disdained media coverage in more recent years by writers who seem gleeful to report that VM appears older, fatter, and balder then in his early years. But beyond his 45 years of music VM is most renowned for being “difficult,” unpredictable, reclusive, and most importantly, gifted unto genius.

He’s been called the Greta Garbo of rock, and he rarely suffers journalists and most likely was not about to cooperate with this book, although I don’t know if Mar­cus even asked; probably not — Marcus is too smart for that, and like me has been dissed in person by his idol even after authoring a laudatory cover story on him. Sometimes one just can’t win.

So why suffer the scary leprechaun? Because from time to time during those decades of musical searching, he has produced some of the most stunning, lifting, and timeless “popular” music of anyone, anytime. His per­formances on record and stage can be full of exaltation, religious yearning, desire, celebration, pain, you name it. But like his few peers — Dylan, Lennon/MCartney, and, er, maybe a couple others — it’s undeniably been hit and miss. But he’s produced a few of the most beautiful love songs of all time — try “Tupelo Honey” for starters — and a few extended, unplanned séances that are inde­scribably deep. Check “Listen to the Lion,” for example, wherein Morrison lets loose what Marcus calls his inner “yarragh,” with “a voice that sounds so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it..” Or as Morrison has said, when pressed, “The question might really be, is the song singing you?”

From the start, Marcus notes, Morrison “lacked the flair for pop stardom possessed by clearly inferior sing­ers;” further, “what he lacked in glamour he made up in strangeness.” After knocking around Belfast with a blues-based bar band called Them in the mid-60s, even scoring a few semi-hits like “Gloria,” he lurched out on his own just in time for the fabled 1967 Summer of Love. But Morrison was never no hippie. He eventually moved back to England when California seemed too laid-back and New-agey, and his first solo LP’s center­piece was “TB Sheets” — “an endless cynical number about a woman dying of tuberculosis.”

When that shockingly missed the Top 40 (although “Brown-Eyed Girl” — his “least convincing recording” — did) he retreated, and “wrote a set of songs about childhood, initiation, sex and death, which finally took form as Astral Weeks.” Throw in a drag queen and some superb jazz musicians just making it up behind him, and over 40 years later, that 1968 LP remains an unsurpassed pinnacle of modern music, a touchstone for not only aging boomers but many other people of much younger vintage. It is indescribable but of course Marcus tries, and some of his passages read as if he is attempting to ape Morrison himself. But he is spot-on in noting that it is imbued with “the kind of hermetic glow that tran­scends fame.”

Astral Weeks is almost enough to make one believe in the goofy concept of “channeling.” Morrison was all of 23 years old at the time. That may be the single most astonishing factoid in rock and roll; at a minimum, it proves my suspicions that Van Morrison was born some sort of an Old Soul.

The next few years and albums were almost as amaz­ing, up through 1974’s Veedon Fleece. Since that early peak, Marcus sees Morrison’s music as “a story made of fragments” which follows “a road bordered by meadows alive with the promise of mystical deliverance and revelation on one side, forests of shrieking haunts and beckoning specters on the other, and rocks, baubles, traps, and snares down the middle.” His assessment of Morrison’s recorded output is of course subjective and questionable — he dismisses a decade and half of output after 1979, but some of those LPs feature some of his best moments. But there’s little arguing that his catalog has been a spotty one. Morrison purportedly flirted with cults like Scientology and yes, made some real stinkers in the 90s. “Sometimes you make mistakes, and some­times you’re bored” is all he has said about that.

Fame can be a curse in many ways, from the much-lamented loss of privacy onward to death of the soul. Maybe most common is when a “star” starts to believe he/she is super; art then dies. Morrison has never fully fallen for that, despite all the Grammys, election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and young idiots like me gushing at him. But Marcus perceptively points that at some point Morrison started sounding self-conscious, even like he was faking it, and for me, the real problems were when Morrison continuously complained, about the music industry, mostly. Marcus holds that this is due to the unavoidable alienation that comes with aging in a modern culture that “becomes an affront to one’s entire existence.” However justifiable, who wants to hear a wealthy musician who has largely been able to follow his muse wherever he wants bitch and moan about agents and record labels? Not me.

But then Van Morrison will show up at a club like San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, or at a big arena like UC Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, and enrapture a crowd into deep reverence, playing all of Astral Weeks as he did last year, or playing whatever he wants. Some­times he even smiles. And — not that he’d care — all is forgiven, and we are left grateful for his muse and his music. Again.

Long may he yarragh. ¥¥

(‘When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison,’ by Greil Marcus (Public Affairs; 195 pages; $22.95. Steve Heilig, a longtime music critic, was banished to the Principal’s office for shouting the chorus to Van Morrison’s hit “Gloria” in a semi-Tourette’s moment while in the third grade.)

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7088/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/5753 http://theava.com/archives/5753#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:23:02 +0000 Tom Cornell http://theava.com/?p=5753 Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City, by Anthony Flint. Random House, New York, New York 2009.

This fast-moving and gripping story, summed up in the subtitle, recalls an epic battle waged by a woman without credentials and no college degree, against a very powerful bureaucrat with very special and powerful interests behind him. Robert Moses “was responsible for 13 bridges, two tunnels, 637 miles of highways, 658 playgrounds, 10 giant swimming 17 state parks… cleared 300 acres of land and constructed towers that contain 28,400 new apartments… built Lincoln Center, the United Nations, Shea Stadium, Jones Beach and the Central Park zoo… the Triborough and Verrazano Narrows bridges, the Long Island and Cross Bronx Expressway.”

At one and the same time Robert Moses held 12 different state and city offices. He saw his proposed lower Manhattan Expressway as the capstone of his career to remake New York City, completing a web of high-speed roadways up and down and across Manhattan and eliminating “ unsightly slums“ with high-rise residential towers. He had had his way for decades, through five mayors and six governors.

Jane Jacobs was an amateur. How would this “little old lady” from Scranton even dare to stand in his way? To Robert Moses the very idea seemed ludicrous. But Jane Jacobs and the people she mobilized saved our neighborhood, Little Italy, Chinatown, the lower Eastside, as well as Greenwich Village, starting with Washington Square Park. And she turned the orthodoxy of city planning on its head.

Our pastor at that time, Father Gerard LaMountain, of Most Holy Crucifix church on Broome Street, first approached Jane Jacobs with a plea to do for our neighborhood what she had done for Washington Square and the West (Greenwich) Village. Our parish church became the meeting place for plans to protest and turn back the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Father LaMountain gathered the most diverse coalition, including Communists, Socialists, Democrats and Republicans, Catholic Workers and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an extreme right wing group. Anthony Flint mentions Rosemary McGrath of YAF as particularly effective. Rosemary and her husband Bob, a surgeon, are particularly fond of Catholic worker. They disagreed with almost everything we advocated, but Rosemary said, “You’re not like the liberals. You never know where they really stand. We know where you stand. You don’t hide a thing. You’re honest!” It was nice to hear her say that because we are careful never to blow our own horn.

Anthony Flint is kinder in his judgment of Robert Moses than Robert A. Caro in his massive 1974 study “The Power Broker: Robert Moses And The Fall Of New York.” After all, New York City, like any city, outgrew its original scheme and horse and buggy roadways. But Robert Moses’s main interest in the city was traffic control, to facilitate private vehicular traffic for cars and trucks even at the expense of public transit and the loss of neighborhoods with historical value and unique character. He intended to extend Fifth Avenue south through Washington Square Park right down to Broome St., essentially destroying the park, then to link Brooklyn with New Jersey by a ten-lane east-west highway 350 feet wide above ground level at Broome Street.

Robert Moses was also intent on eliminating those neighborhoods which he and the modernist school of architects and city planners saw as congested and unsanitary, and to replace them with sleek high-rise towers, open space, air and light. Sounds grand, but it doesn’t work. The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Robert Taylor complex in Chicago were prime examples. The open spaces were empty. People felt, and were, vulnerable in them, and in the corridors and elevators, alone in a crowd. Crime burgeoned. Pruitt-Igoe and Robert Taylor were both blasted down to be “replaced by Greenwich Village style streetscapes of smaller individual houses with front porches.”

In our old Catholic Worker neighborhood, Little Italy, there was hardly any crime on the street because Grandma, somebody’s grandma, was always looking out her window, ready to sound the alarm. People knew each other. They looked out for each other. Jane Jacobs looked out on her very similar neighborhood at the west end of Greenwich Village and saw a similar vibrant mix of apartment houses, small businesses, a bakery, a drugstore, grocery stores, churches, synagogues, a library, as well as a little park, and the White Horse Tavern (where the 50s happened: see Dan Wakefield’s “New York in the 50s”). So it is to this day. Except for gentrification, of course.

The law of unintended consequences (one might even say Original Sin) entered the picture. Those who were able to stay and chose to do so, who didn’t “escape” to the suburbs when the neighborhoods were still low rent, are sitting pretty now with rent control, or if they owned their own buildings, they are really cashing in. Renovated apartments that had gone for as little as $20.68 a month (my first rent) now go for $2,600 a month! The poor are squeezed out, and only well-heeled newcomers can think of living in what Robert Moses not long ago thought of as slums. Of course, a stratum of the very poor remains, more isolated than ever. That’s why we stay. And in the course of things, today’s prize is tomorrow’s trap. Re-gentrification eventually leads to degentrification.

Today, Jane Jacobs’ views are the new orthodoxy. Her major book, “The Death And Life Of Great American Cities,” is a classic. Jane left New York City and the United States in 1968, for Toronto. She feared that her sons might be drafted to fight in Vietnam, in a war she thoroughly detested. They might have qualified for conscientious objector status, but that is another story. She died in Toronto in 2006 at the age of 86. The story is one of personal responsibility, localism, decentralization, direct action, community organizing… Good to see how it all comes together and how it can work.

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Tom Cornell is a member of the Most Holy Crucifix Church in New York and an active member of Catholic Worker in New York City.

Orange Sunshine was a “brand” of LSD made and marketed by a band of initially idealistic young men operating out of Laguna Beach, the bucolic village ironically nestled in Orange County. Calling them­selves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, they were acid evangelists who soon became known as a “hippie mafia.”

You fell off the seat as the handlebars turned

sharp left, throwing your body onto

the hot coals of Ramadi pavement,

intertwining your legs within your bicycle.

Lifeless eyes looking to the sky,

your neck muscles twitched turning your head

directly towards us. Nothing escaped your

lips except for the blood in the left corner

of your mouth that briefly moistened them

until the sand and dust dried them out.

The blood trail went behind the stone wall

where your body was placed, weighed down

by your blue bicycle and we laughed.

I used to fall asleep to the pictures and now

I can’t even bear to get a glimpse.

Excerpted from “The Bicycle” by Jon Michael Turner

Three years ago an unusual volume was issued by Crown Books. It was signed by Cathie Black, presi­dent of Hearst Magazines, and titled “Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life).” Presented as a chronicle of how one woman broke through the glass ceiling to attain eminence in her career, it appeared to be an extravagant exercise in vanity publishing. Inspired, perhaps unconsciously, by the luxuriant fantasies and journalistic misadventures of William Randolph Hearst himself, the volume was distinctive in its design, as well as its notably disar­rayed content.

Pynchon, back in the day.

Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County is part of the so-called South Bay, south of Santa Monica. It was mostly populated by middle-class white people when I grew up there in the 1950s, and was a good place in many ways. I played volleyball on the beach, and once a year we had surfing, paddleboard and volleyball championships next to the Manhattan Pier. I graduated from the local high school, Mira Costa, in 1961.

In the first months of the summer of 1970, I was on the Oregon Coast with some friends. We rented a house and dug a garden, fished for trout and crabbed at the nearby dock in Waldport. My friend Charlie Vermont, a poet, introduced me to David Shetzline and his wife, M.F. Beal, both writers, who lived up the road from us in a place called Beavercreek. We got into some swinging scenes, did some major acid, talked about the world.

Whereever There's a Fight.

The legendary American abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed in the 1800s that “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.” And thus the long legacy of conflict whenever the status quo is challenged in arenas of what widely come to be seen – although too often not until after the battle has been won – as fundamental human rights.

There has been much to fight about in California through the decades, as presented in “Wherever There’s a Fight,” a sweeping historical survey of legal, physical and moral struggles that have shaped our state. And although the book’s tale begins only 150 years ago in the heady days of the California Gold Rush, as with the best works of history it often evokes a head-shaking wonder at how much things can change in a short time or how much some changes are still needed.

California’s first state Constitution, enacted in 1848, guaranteed the right to vote to “every white male.” In the following century and a half, American Indians were enslaved and decimated. Chinese workers were lynched and deported. Filipino farmworkers were beaten when they advocated for better conditions. Japanese were interned. African Americans were denied just about every right known to civilized society. Women were not just denied voting and reproductive rights but also knowingly used as sex slaves, while at the same time interracial marriage and “miscegenation” were banned or, at least, nonwhite men could not marry white women.

Lest these sorry episodes seem like ancient history, consider that a law banning interracial marriage stood until 1948, that baseball great Willie Mays had trouble getting a white homeowner to sell him a house in San Francisco in the late 1950s, that in 1965 Gov. Ronald Reagan called striking farmworkers “barbarians,” that California voters outlawed bilingual education in 1988 and voted to deny health care to illegal residents in 1994 and so on, right up to last year’s vote to ban same-sex marriage. Through it all, California has incarcerated people at an unmatched rate in often awful conditions and often to little useful end. The list of abuses summarized here, ranging from relatively minor to outright torture, is long and appalling.

The lessons of history should serve as good reminders for present conflicts, of course, so the documentation here is worth reading for that reason alone. But perhaps a more important reason to revisit the litany of suffering is to learn of all the brave people who have stood up and fought for rights, often with slow but real success. Some of the names here might be familiar – Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Emma Goldman and Tom Mooney, and many more – but most were anonymous “accidental fighters” until something, usually awful, propelled them into the forefront of one of the struggles.

Conflicts over publishing are also recalled, as some landmark cases defeating newspaper censorship and book banning occurred here, including the famed 1957 San Francisco trial of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Even San Francisco writer Richard Brautigan’s whimsical “Trout Fishing in America,” so popular that an Apollo astronaut named a lunar crater after a character therein, was banned from school libraries. Brautigan, in one of the rare humorous passages in Elinson and Yogi’s book, quipped, “If Trout Fishing in America can get to the moon, I think it should be able to get to Anderson High School.”

Renowned author Upton Sinclair, after being warned to “cut out that Constitution stuff” by Los Angeles police, co-founded the ACLU there. It should be noted that both co-authors are longtime current or former ACLU staff members, and that the stories they tell often feature that revered and reviled advocacy organization in a central role.

As struggles and backlashes continue, the authors suggest “even in these times – or especially in these times – it is vital to remember the lessons of history, from eras when California faced fearsome obstacles.” To that end, their own book should itself become required reading in our state’s underfunded and largely segregated schools.

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Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California. Elaine Elinson & Stan Yogi. Heyday Books; 498 pages; $24.95 paperback.