The Archer City Kid

On the last Friday night of March, when I got up from my computer my glance fell on a bookshelf as I passed, and fixed for a moment on one slim book: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry.  I reflected for a second that it was the book that got me started on my “History of My Reading” series here, the only successful format I’ve found for any sort of autobiographical exploration.  I’ve been researching and writing it for several years now, with 45 entries, and I haven’t gotten past 1969.

 Then I took the ipad off the kitchen counter and into my den/library/mancave to do the New York Times Spelling Bee.  Scrolling down to it I saw Larry McMurtry’s obituary.  He’d died the day before.

 McMurtry had been publishing novels for a decade before I was aware of his work.  But he certainly started with a bang—his first novel Horseman, Pass By was immediately made into Hud, a classic Paul Newman movie.  His next two novels were also made into movies, though The Last Picture Show didn’t hit screens until 1971.

 I probably was first aware of his name in connection with that film, though I have no memory of either reading the novel or seeing the entire movie.. But I probably did, at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA. when its director and co-star came to town a few years later.  McMurtry’s luck with selling stories to the movies had its downside, not so much from the flops as from the successes, particularly the iconic Lonesome Dove miniseries and the Terms of Endearment feature, which will overshadow the books at least until they become more readily available than the movies, and people who remember the movies die out. 

My first clear memory of his name is also from the early 70s, when I saw it on the cover of a novel titled All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.  The title pissed me off, because it was too close to a title I’d intended to use: Friends And Other Strangers, which admittedly I’d stolen from a Bob Dylan song (and who knows who that famous packrat stole it from.)  I think I was mostly pissed off because I hadn’t written the book yet that the title would go on, and this guy McMurtry had.

  I was resentful enough that I refused to read the book.  Then one subsequent Sunday afternoon, visiting a young woman I’d recently met, I saw the paperback of this novel lying on a coffee table, at almost the precise moment that I realized I was never going to see this woman again.  Somehow I took that as a sign that the whole point of this non-relationship was to point me back to this book.

 So I bought it, I read it, I loved it, and read it again. I liked the character of young Danny Deck and the laconic yet precise, sometimes passionate and often bewildered first person voice of the narrative.  It was a book of its time and a book of my 20s. 

 Then shortly after his novel Terms of Endearment was published, I met McMurtry in Washington.  By then I was editing an alternative weekly, Washington Newsworks, and our publisher was the sister of a McMurtry lady friend, and possibly a partner in his Washington bookstore.  So when I went to a public talk McMurtry gave, I had an introduction.

 I don’t remember anything about meeting him after the talk, except that it was brief.  I was mostly interested in getting him to write something for the paper.  What I chiefly remember is my impression of his talk.  I was astounded at his voice: indolent, insolent and insinuating, or in a word, Texan.  Of course I knew he was Texan, and that the Danny Deck novel was set in contemporary Texas.  But when I read that dialogue, I didn’t hear Texas voices in my head.  That remained true for his novels set in contemporary times that I read later.  Some essays published after his death fixated on the resonance of Texas cities and scenes in his novels.  To me all of that was irrelevant.  (In my own defense, I’ll point out that none of the major characters in the movie version of Terms of Endearment sound particularly Texan, and the words sound just fine.)

 Probably my period of sustained attention to McMurtry’s novels was in the late 70s and early 1980s—the pre-Lonesome Dove 80s.  This was the period of Somebody’s Darling (a novel about Hollywood he later denigrated), Cadillac Jack and The Desert Rose (the novel set in Las Vegas that years later he called his favorite.)  I read these, while re-reading All My Friends... and Terms of Endearment, which by then was a hit movie with Jack Nicholson and Shirley McLaine in great late performances, and Debra Winger in one of the best performances ever.

 It was around then that I had my first and only conversation with Larry McMurtry.  (It hadn’t even occurred to me when I was in Washington that I could have walked into his Georgetown bookstore and chatted many times.  Sometimes my cluelessness astonishes me. Though I recall this was also an occasional quality of Danny Deck.) 

 My Washington paper was no more, and I was back in my Pennsylvania home town when I tried to contact McMurtry for some freelance story I was working on—I don’t remember how or what the story was.  But one day the phone rang and it was him.  He didn’t have much to say about whatever it was I called him about—it must have had something to do with movies because when he demurred, he noted that he enjoyed the people he worked with there and wanted to continue. 

 So instead we talked about his books.  I proposed my theory that he’d written a kind of trilogy that included All My Friends and Terms of Endearment.  He agreed—he’d deliberately written that trilogy including those two books, but I’d gotten the third book wrong.  I thought the third was Somebody’s Darling, which does center on a character known to the main characters of the other two.  But even then, he downplayed that book.  No—I had missed the first of the trilogy, a novel called Moving On.  I hadn’t even heard of it, which seemed to delight him—he recommended it.  It was one of his books that, at least at the time, he liked. 

Nowadays, this trilogy is considered part of McMurtry’s “Houston Series” of six novels, which also includes Somebody’s Darling.  The next to last in the cycle is Some Can Whistle, which works out the final fate of Danny Deck.  I so disliked this novel that it put me off reading McMurtry for awhile. 

But on his advice I had read and liked Moving On.  Bill Holland, a musician and songwriter friend in Washington who was becoming a book scout, sent me a copy. He had a spare because it turned out to be a book club edition.  McMurtry always considered his work as a book scout and bookstore owner at least as significant in his life as being a novelist.  I wonder what he’d think about the fact that I’d sold the few first editions of his novels I owned to help finance my move to California.  He’d probably approve. 

 McMurtry subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, and became a Lonesome Dove and Old West industry with novels begetting mini-series after mini-series.  The books had a lot of charm, owing perhaps to his belief that the 19^th century western figures were basically English Victorian in speech and otherwise.  He later won an Academy Award for the script to Brokeback Mountain, from a story by Annie Proulx that he admits he should have written.

 In the week or so since I read of his death, I’ve re-read Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, which has to be a unique book in his writing career.  I noted first that his comments on the dearth of books to read in his youth was a very small part of it.  He did mention a cache of boys books that got him started, and the My Book House volumes, both of which were part of my childhood.  These are the element that got me started exploring the history of my reading. But most of the book is not about all that, exactly.  Although it is a brilliant, fertile book, it's hard to say what it is about.  The autobiographical underpinnings are obvious, but maybe it's more an autobiography of the West.

  It started out to address the assertion made by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Storyteller,” that storytelling in the classic sense has gone from the world.  McMurtry notes that this kind of storytelling—ordinary people telling stories to each other—was something he experienced in his childhood, before he’d read a single book.  But the places where these stories were told had largely disappeared.  In his hometown of Archer City, the natural gathering place was now the town’s Dairy Queen, which is where he read that essay.  He wondered if even there he could discern if stories were still being told.

 He wanders away from this promising beginning pretty quickly, though he makes gestures of returning to the topic now and again, and maybe in a subtle way he does.  Some of this book is very carefully written, deliberately so.  McMurtry’s lifelong habit was to toss off five pages at the typewriter every morning, as quickly as he could.  For at least parts of this book he wrote slowly, with a pen. 

But other parts of this short book contain repetitions that suggest chapters were cobbled together from other sources—prefaces to other writers’ books, etc.  However, in several places particularly, this book is uncharacteristically reflective.  He expresses his ambivalence at writing so much about the old West, when he knew that the Old West was basically a Hollywood myth, and that the actual era of the big cattle drives and the open range was the blip of perhaps 20 or 30 years total.  He set out to de-mythologize the West, and admits that instead he created a new myth, beginning with a Quixote story called Lonesome Dove that got out of hand.

 On the other hand, he was in his youth an actual cowboy on an actual ranch outside Archer City, and his grandparents—who lived with him as he grew up—were authentic pioneers in that part of Texas.  He was in that sense writing out of his own life and experiences.  He was especially conscious that his father maintained a lifelong commitment to ranching even though he knew it was a lost cause (he admitted to being in debt for 55 straight years.)  Here McMurtry suggests the Old West was a way for him to understand his father’s “essentially tragic” take on his otherwise happy life.

 The Walter Benjamin book’s subtitle is “Reflections At Sixty And Beyond” (He was 63 when it was published) and McMurtry becomes especially reflective in the final pages.  He writes that his major achievement may turn out to be the same as his father’s: he kept his good name and passed it on to his “gifted and responsible” son.  He considers that maybe two or three of his books are “good,” (without saying which ones.) “I would have liked my fiction to have a little more poise, a little more tact—but those are qualities that seem to have found their way into my son’s songs, and that is satisfaction enough.”  His son, James McMurtry, is a singer-songwriter, as now is his grandson, Curtis McMurtry.

 McMurtry made lit biz news in recent years when he moved back to his hometown and amassed a mammoth number of books in his Archer City bookstores, filling several buildings on its decaying main street.  The town where in his youth the only books sold were drugstore paperbacks now had more books for sale that any other town in America. When some of those buildings started falling apart, he had a huge book sale, but still retained more books than the few surviving used and antiquarian bookstores of big cities possess.  (The decline of bookstores in his lifetime is a theme he sets besides the melancholy self-defeat of the cowboy and the Old West.)

 Unlike some book scouts and bookstore owners, he loved reading the books he acquired.  He seemed to retain an enormous amount from his wide-ranging reading.  (The daughter of his close friend and writing partner Diana Ossana described him as “a data base with opinions.”)  The worst moments after his major heart surgery in the early 90s, he wrote, was when he was unable to read.  

 “In my seventh decade,” he concludes, “I feel a new haste, not to write but to read.”  It does seem that he’d stopped writing largely for love some time ago.  But he didn’t lose his pure love for reading.  He was eighty-four when he stopped, the last Thursday in March 2021.  May he rest in peace.  His work lives on. 

Poetry Monday: From The Porch

The stores were bright, and not too far from home.

 The school was only half a mile from downtown,

 A few blocks from the Oldsmobile dealer. In the sky, 

The airplanes came in low towards Lindbergh Field,

 Passing overhead with a roar that shook the windows.

 How inert the earth must look from far away. 

The morning mail, the fantasies, the individual days

 Too intimate to see, no matter how you tried. 

Yet there was always time to visit them again

 In a roundabout way, like the figures in the stars,

 Or a life traced back to its imaginary source

 In an adolescent reverie, a forgotten book— 

As though one’s childhood were a small midwest town

 Some forty years ago, before the elm trees died.

 September was a modern classroom and the latest cars,

 That made a sort of futuristic dream, circa 1955. 

The earth was still uncircled. You could set your course

 On the day after tomorrow. And children fell asleep

 To the lullaby of people murmuring softly in the kitchen,

 While a breeze rustled the pages of Life magazine, 

And the wicker chairs stood empty on the screened-in porch.

-- John Koethe

 John L. Koethe is an American poet and essayist who was born in 1945 and grew up in San Diego. He teaches philosophy at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. One of his literary models is William Wordsworth.

Unity

Congressional Republicans, when they aren’t touting authoritarian proposals or spouting QAnon nonsense, complain that President Biden isn’t honoring his pledge to work together when he doesn’t listen to their deeply unserious ideas. 

 Signing on to Republican unreality is not unity. What is unity is the response of Americans who overwhelmingly support President Biden’s efforts to address the Covid crisis, and in particular the American Rescue Plan, which became law without a single Republican vote, despite its provisions being supported by anywhere from two-thirds to three-fourths of American surveyed. 

 A similar pattern is now developing in response to President Biden’s infrastructure package. Republican leadership has denounced it in its entirety, the day it was proposed. Yet according to public polling cited by the White House, “between 74% and 87% support among Americans for seven elements: new job training for coal miners, highway and bridge work, increasing affordable childcare, expanding broadband access, expanding family and medical leave, upgrading public transportation, and investing in clean energy.” 

 Reported in Axios, this was repeated on the Political Wire which added this quote from Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post: “The media, it seems, are caught in a Republican framing of policy that does not match reality. There is not a hue and cry over a mammoth infrastructure bill. To the contrary, it is super popular. And Republicans might want to stop harping on the tax increases: Those make the bill even more popular.” 

 And what is likely to be even more popular among non-rich voters are two little publicized pledge Biden made in his Pittsburgh speech: first, “I start with one rule: No one — let me say it again — no one making under $400,000 will see their federal taxes go up. Period.” And second: “When we make all these investments, we’re going to make sure, as the executive order I signed early on, that we buy American. That means investing in American-based companies and American workers. Not a contract will go out, that I control, that will not go to a company that is an American company with American products, all the way down the line, and American workers.” 

 Moreover, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein notes, even though passing this package without Republican votes will require near total (in the House) or total (in the Senate) Democratic support, Biden has a very good chance of getting that unified support, if for no other reason than the popularity of its provisions and the behavior of voters who reward congressional candidates for the success of their party’s President.

 What is crystal clear is the need for this country to rebuild its decaying infrastructure, and to build the infrastructure of the information age. This benefits everybody—every corporation, every small business, every Republican, every American, period. We all depend on the same roads and bridges, the same Internet, the same power plants, and by the way, the same planet. 

 No corporation, no matter how many tax cuts it is provided, ever builds a public bridge. (In fact, they usually demand private bridges and roads be built for them, or they won’t come into your city or township.) It is ridiculous to be arguing about some socialist conspiracy when this is the work government—and only government—has always done.

 And in today’s world only government has the muscle to see it’s done fairly. No corporation is ever going to guarantee that only American materials will be used for anything. They don’t use American materials or manufacturing for shoe laces, why would they do it for roads?

 So why does the media insist on parroting Republican talking points? Mostly because they’re out of office and the media doesn’t have the imagination to come up with their own critical questions. It might require them to, for instance, actually listen to the Biden speeches they report on. 

 President Biden has said it clearly a number of times: his call for unity doesn’t mean unanimity, and it sure doesn’t mean giving into congressional Republicans. In his March 25 press conference he also said, very clearly: And here’s the deal: I think my Republican colleagues are going to have to determine whether or not we want to work together, or they decide that the way in which they want to proceed is to — is to just decide to divide the country, continue the politics of division. But I’m not going to do that; I’m just going to move forward and take these things as they come... All I know, I’ve been hired to solve problems — to solve problems, not create division." 

 “There is nothing we can’t do when we do it together.” President Biden has repeated this mantra time and again. When are we going to take it seriously? It doesn’t mean total agreement. It means once the commitment is made, we make it work. That’s how it worked in the 1930s, which was at least as contentious as now.

Poetry Monday: Spring

To My Sister

 It is the first mild day of March:

 Each minute sweeter than before 

The redbreast sings from the tall larch

 That stands beside our door.

 There is a blessing in the air,

 Which seems a sense of joy to yield

 To the bare trees, and mountains bare, 

And grass in the green field.

 My sister! ('tis a wish of mine)

 Now that our morning meal is done,

 Make haste, your morning task resign;

 Come forth and feel the sun.

 Edward will come with you, -- and, pray,

 Put on with speed your woodland dress;

 And bring no book: for this one day

 We 'll give to idleness. 

No joyless forms shall regulate

 Our living calendar:

 We from to-day, my Friend, will date

 The opening of the year.

 Love, now an universal birth,

 From heart to heart is stealing,

 From earth to man, from man to earth:

 --It is the hour of feeling.

 One moment now may give us more 

Than years of toiling reason:

 Our minds shall drink at every pore 

The spirit of the season. 

Some silent laws our hearts will make,

 Which they shall long obey: 

We for the year to come may take

 Our temper from to-day. 

And from the blessed power that rolls

 About, below, above,

 We 'll frame the measure of our souls:

 They shall be tuned to love. 

Then come, my Sister! come, I pray, 

With speed put on your woodland dress;

 And bring no book: for this one day

 We 'll give to idleness.

 --William Wordsworth

This poem was written in 1798, when William Wordsworth was 27 and his sister Dorothy was 26.  They are portrayed by Felicity Kendall and David Warner in the 1978 TV film Clouds of Glory, directed by Ken Russell.  This early Wordsworth poem was written in Somerset, England, in a house near woods and the sea.  I took the top photo here in Arcata in March 2019.

The Perkins New Deal

 Somebody probably not associated with the greeting card industry has designated March as Women’s History Month.  It so happens that this month I’ve been reading about the 1930s, a decade in which several of the women in American history I most admire were prominent, including Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, Eleanor Roosevelt and Halle Flanagan (who ran the Federal Theatre Project.)  But the woman I’ve been reading most about is Frances Perkins.

 Maybe it’s an oxymoron by now that this incredibly important woman in history is not very well known. But as FDR’s first and only Secretary of Labor, she was not just the first woman to run that department—she was the first female Cabinet officer in US history.  She was also one of the longest serving cabinet heads in history: all 12-plus years of FDR’s presidency. 

 She was among the most consequential cabinet heads in American history as well, mostly for the innovations during the New Deal that she advocated and worked to achieve, some of which she designed.

  And she knew what she wanted when she took the job at the crucial moment of the Great Depression in early 1933, and told FDR so: immediate federal aid to states and local governments to support relief for the unemployed; a large scale public works program; federal minimum wage and maximum hours laws; a ban on child labor; unemployment insurance and old-age insurance we now know as Social Security.  Eventually she got them all. 

 She was also an effective advocate for unions’ right to organize, and for workplace health and safety, with particular attention to the needs of women in the workplace.  All of these were new, and most were controversial and opposed by vested interests and reactionaries.  She was the model for effective compassion, for the practical heart.

 When she left office a little known and apparently unpopular figure, Collier’s magazine boldly suggested that “when the definitive history of this Administration is written, it is quite likely that [Secretary] Perkins will be hailed as the most successful of the New Dealers, for the Roosevelt pattern of government contains more of her ideas than any other of the President’s followers...What this country has been operating under for the past twelve years is not so much the Roosevelt New Deal as the Perkins New Deal.”

 But what she began did not end with the New Deal.  Consider the provisions of the new Covid Rescue Act that echo her innovations, as well as proposals for the infrastructure package.  Plus the safety net that so many of us depend on, and the further innovations that structures like Social Security have made possible, like the Affordable Care Act. 

 Nor was her contribution only in the ideas.  She knew how to get things done, to bring people and ideas together, to solve problems, gather support—and convince an often reluctant FDR.  She dealt with determined and underhanded opposition, including out-maneuvering FDR’s devious budget director.  She was an able administrator, who helped turn FDR’s idea for a Civil Conservation Corps into a reality that saved young lives and supported entire families, including my father’s.  She transformed the Labor Department from a clubhouse for cronies into a large and effective administrative arm.

 Though she also had to deal with family tragedies, she managed to survive the Roosevelt years and beyond (as FDR and Harry Hopkins did not).  She met President Kennedy, taught and lectured, describing her political experiences in a speech, part of which Laurence O’Donnell played on his MSNBC hour in 2014 or so, all when she was in her eighties.

 She taught at Cornell in her final years, and was so beloved that the male students of Telluride House, a residence for high-achievers, invited her to move in.  She did.  Secretary Frances Perkins remained at Cornell until her death at the age of 85.

Poetry Monday: The Frog After Dark

The Frogs After Dark

I am so much in love with mournful music

 That I don't bother to look for violinists. 

The aging peepers satisfy me for hours. 

 The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet. 

The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.

 The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion. 

 Bears are often piled up close to each other.

 In caves of bears, it's just one hump

 After another, and there is no one to sort it out.

 You and I have spent so many hours working. 

We have paid dearly for the life we have. 

It's all right if we do nothing tonight.

 We've heard the fiddlers tuning their old fiddles,

 And the singer urging the low notes to come. 

We've heard her trying to keep the dawn from breaking. 

 There is some slowness in life that is right for us.

 But we love to remember the way the soul leaps 

Over and over into the lonely heavens.

 --Robert Bly 

 Bly apparently started this poem with the last three stanzas, which he read to interviewer Chard DeNiord for the September/October 2011 issue of The American Poetry Review. Those are the verses that attracted me, when I found this issue in a basket of old newsprint.

  He must have added the first three stanzas later, when the poem was published in his 2011 collection Talking Into The Ear Of A Donkey and then in the 2013 Stealing Sugar From The Castle, Selected and New Poems 1950-2013. Like this one, almost all of Bly’s late poems have six stanzas of three lines each. These represent—or are at least influenced by—a version of the Persian form called the Ghazal, which Bly knew through his reading of the Sufi poets such as Rumi and Hafiz. Other American poets like Jim Harrison and W.S. Merwin adopted and adapted it as well.

 In that 2011 interview, Bly talked about the ghazal form as handling several thoughts, and balancing different subject matter. He said it preserves some wildness, and the playfulness that energized American poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, through the infusion of European poets (including Surrealists but also Lorca and Rilke) and South American poets like Neruda.

 Sound is very important in Bly’s writing and reading. He loved the playfulness with sound in Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium for example. In this poem, one way the imagery is linked is by music and musical instruments (though I'm still puzzled by the bears, and the absent frogs.) To some extent Bly organizes his poems by sound (he liked those last three stanzas because of the “o” sounds, especially in the last line), and sometimes seems surprised at the meaning that emerges, especially when other people find it first.

Adjustments (And a Thank You)

 Margaret and I just got our second Covid vaccine shot (Pfzer.)  Our thanks go out to Humboldt County Public Health and to the volunteers who organized and administered the jabs.  Compared to what we're hearing from other parts of the country, it was a painless process, even if it seemed slow at times.  All we did was fill out one form--an "interest" form, as in interested in getting the vaccine--with just basic information, especially age.  The county methodically followed the state guidance, so there was a 75 and over beginning, followed by a 70 and over, etc.  Medicare cleared the need for insurance information.  After we completed the form online, we simply waited.  As soon as enough vaccine was available, we got emails inviting us to a clinic on a specific day.  We then made an appointment on that day.  That was it. We got another invitation for our second shot, which we got three weeks and one day after the first.  No running after rumors of who had the vaccine, constantly refreshing sites for an appointment, etc.  So we are very grateful for the County's efforts.  Public Health here has been great throughout this Covid crisis. 

Now we have a couple of weeks to adjust to the end of what has effectively been a year-long quarantine.  The mental adjustment for me will begin with activity.  My car doesn't start, my phone is obsolete, I've needed a new prescription for glasses this entire year, and a haircut would be nice.  Those items are where the list begins.

I also find myself adjusting slowly to the fact that we have an actual President of the United States.  I've felt resistance to fully accepting it, having been thoroughly traumatized by the past four years.  Washington politics is as fucked up as ever, etc. but Joe Biden is more than I could have expected.  He's putting together a potentially effective government in new ways--new especially since the 1930s.  His first address to the nation on Covid was just about perfect.  The covid Rescue law is a wonder.  So if any reader has noted an absence of commentary here that might suggest a lack of enthusiasm, that's not the case.  I've just having a hard time trusting this is really happening, and may not be reversed in a minute from now.

At the moment our weather is reflecting this transitional feeling.  The winter rains have not quite ended, but the flowers are blooming.

Poetry Monday: Pennies From Heaven

A long time ago, a million years B.C. 

The best things in life were absolutely free

 But no one appreciated a sky that was always blue 

And no one congratulated a moon that was always new...

 So it was planned that they would vanish now and then

 And you must pay before you get them back again 

That’s what storms were made for

 And you shouldn’t be afraid for

 Every time it rains it rains pennies from heaven

 Don’t you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven

 You’ll find your fortune falling all over town

 Be sure that your umbrella is upside down 

 Trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers

 If you want the things you love you must have showers

 So when you hear it thunder don’t run under a tree 

There’ll be pennies from heaven for you and me.

 --lyrics by Johnny Burke to music by Arthur Johnston

top photo by Cartier-Bresson

 Popular songs have a lot in common with formal poetry, apart from their shared origins in chant and song. The best song lyrics have qualities found in poems. This lyric by Johnny Burke for instance has an initial argument or premise, and the rest of the song follows from it, until, like a Shakespearian sonnet, it is recapitulated in the final couplets.

There isn't a wasted syllable in this lyric.  The echo of the "und" sound in "thunder" and "under" is a skillful and effective internal rhyme, but more subtle is the corresponding echo of the "a" sound in "planned" and "vanish."  There are literary poems that are less adept. 

 Though this song has been recorded and performed a vast number of times, it seldom has included more than the chorus: the last eight lines. So the song really doesn’t make sense until you get to those late lines, and “If you want the things you love you must have showers...” But with the initial verse, the point is very clear, and much more powerful.

 I could find only three recordings of the entire song, beginning with the first, by Bing Crosby in 1936 and ending (for now) with James Taylor’s version in his 2020 American Standard album. Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke wrote the song and several others for Crosby’s movie titled Pennies From Heaven. His version was a hit record in 1936. These lyrics as a whole are both sobering and hopeful.

 And that’s perhaps why the version using the entire song released in 1937 by singer Arthur Tracy is the one selected for the Dennis Potter BBC 1978 miniseries and the subsequent 1981 movie, starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. Both productions used vintage recordings while contemporary actors lip-synched to them. New Yorker film reviewer Pauline Kael put her finger on why Tracy’s version is so memorable and appropriate—he sings an upbeat song while sounding like he’s on the verge of crying.

 Potter’s teleplay and screenplay were set in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the song itself was written then. It’s subject is the Depression, as its first audience would have understood. The line “you’ll find your fortune falling all over town” is a succinct description of how the Depression’s effects quickly accumulated, as people lost their savings, a major part of their income or their jobs, perhaps even their homes. Middle class people—teachers, nurses, mid-level executives—found themselves on the street. Desperation looking for solace was a natural condition. 

Within the song however, those lines function in the opposite way.  Future fortune is literally falling all over town from the sky, collected by that upturned umbrella.  This is a conceit Shakespeare might have written, if he'd been a 1930s songwriter.

  Whether Dennis Potter’s series or movie caught the more characteristic and complex moods of the Depression beyond desperation and denial is debatable. However, this lyric and its premise as metaphor stand on their own, transcending their original time. Today, as the slow end of the Covid crisis looks to be in sight, the idea of better times as a payoff for enduring hard times resonates again.

 Johnny Burke wrote lyrics for other popular songs such as “Imagination” (a hit for the Glenn Miller band), “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Misty” and a staple of my childhood, “Swinging on a Star.” (“Would you like to swing on a star/carry moonbeams home in a jar...”) 

 Thanks to the Dennis Potter films, 1930s singer Arthur Tracy came out of retirement in the 1980s for one last series of engagements at New York’s The Cookery, which also revived the careers of cherished musical elders Eubie Blake and Alberta Hunter.  Here's a link to the 1981 movie scene with his rendition of “Pennies From Heaven.” (For some reason I'm unable to embed it here.)  Although the British miniseries used the entire original recording, the MGM movie substituted a new instrumental bridge by Marvin Hamlisch. The dance sequence featuring Vernal Bagneris is itself worth seeing.

History of My Reading: To Boulder Go 1969 Part 2

 Nineteen Sixty-Nine was a prime year for the counterculture (in fact, the year it got its name when Theodore Roszak’s The Making of The Counter-Culture was published), and Colorado was one of its capitals.  It would be my first prolonged exposure beyond midwestern college campuses.

 As music was the counterculture’s living, pulsing heart, it was also the year of the music festival.  More or less invented on the model of the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas when he organized the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, music festivals of current and cutting edge rock, blues and hybrid forms happened here and there throughout 1969, culminating at Woodstock in August. 

 For three evenings and nights over a weekend in late June, there was one in Colorado: The Denver Pop Festival.   I was participating in the writers conference in Boulder until Friday evening, so on Saturday I took a bus to Denver to hear some music.

 I’m not sure why I decided on Saturday, since the Jimi Hendrix Experience headlined the Sunday lineup. And it turned out to be mildly historic: the last concert the original Experience ever played. But 1969 was a big year for Creedence Clearwater Revival, and they would close the Saturday show. 

 However I did meet a girl on the bus who claimed to be a cousin of Jimi Hendrix.  She said the last time she’d visited him backstage she’d seen the drug paraphernalia, and showed her concern.  He agreed he needed to slow it down. He was really just a sweet guy, she said.  

 It was a hot day—95 degrees in Denver, and still around 90 when I arrived at Denver’s Mile High Stadium after 5 p.m.  I either bought my ticket or already had it ($6 a night, $15 for three nights) and I was early enough to get a seat in a center section, as people were still arriving. Still, the stage was set up on the field so I was separated from it by a considerable distance.

 I have specific memories of that event, which I am able to corroborate and expand on, thanks to a Masters thesis posted online by Justin Kite of Rutgers University.  He fills in some of the history and the facts of the evening.

 As the time came closer to the scheduled 6:30 start, those in my section of the stands became aware of a crowd growing outside one particular locked gate.  It looked to be wood and wire, and thanks to our position and height, we could see at least part of it. On the inside of the stadium were contingents of uniformed police, most of them opposite the increasingly raucous crowd outside, demanding to be let in, because the music was meant to be free.

 Though I was unaware of it, there was already a history to this festival.  A similar but smaller crowd the night before had tried to force their way in, and they clashed with police, egged on by some of the performers, especially Frank Zappa.  Tonight there were more of them, and they were concentrating on that one gate. 

There was also a longer history involving the Denver police, and their successful efforts to close down the Family Dog, a club in the city that featured rock acts.  And of course, there was the ongoing tension between the straight world and the freaks, the culture and the counterculture, parents and the young. Perhaps we forget how strong the hostility and suspicion could be.

 The confrontation got louder when the first act began, a Chicago band called Aorta.  I could see the gate bulging as bodies raged against it.  Then the next act took the stage: a new Boulder band called Zephyr, which eventually made a couple of albums and is noted as the first band of electric guitar virtuoso Tommy Bolin.  Lead singer Candy Givens was the constant in various versions of the band into the 1980s.

 Zephyr had hardly begun its blues-rock set when the police unleashed their first volley of tear gas canisters at the 500 or so on the other side of the gate.  Some of them lobbed the canisters back. Tear gas came streaming down towards us. 

 The music was halted as the announcer instructed those of us in our section to come down on the field and lie on the ground, face down, until the tear gas cloud passed.  So there I was: reenacting a duck and cover drill with my nose on the grass of Mile High Stadium. In a few minutes we returned to our seats and Zephyr finished their set—but this time the band members were reportedly wearing gas masks. 

Winter at Woodstock

 The next band was Poco, the new country rock band featuring Richie Furay and Jim Messina, two members of the recently disbanded and already legendary Buffalo Springfield.  (Kite’s thesis asserts that the new band of Springfield’s main members, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was originally supposed to play at this festival, but the promoter backed out of the deal when the new lineup failed to get their first album out before the festival.)  Things quieted down enough during their set for me to hear and enjoy it.

But the blazing blues guitarist Johnny Winter got the crowd outside revved up again, and probably the police, too.  They shot off tear gas again, in greater quantity, and this time successfully dispersed the crowd at the gate.  But there was a cost, as during Tim Buckley’s set the wind caught the gas and blew it back into the stadium.  Now people from all over the stadium rushed down to the field to escape the fumes.  In the confusion, the crowd outside attacked the gate again and some got through.  There was a pitched battle between them and the police, until the festival producers opened all the gates to let everybody in.  And suddenly there was nothing to fight about.

 It wasn’t the first time I’d smelled tear gas, and it wouldn’t be the last. As singular as it seems now, it didn’t impress me at the time as all that unusual, that a rock festival would be disrupted in this way.  I was more affected by the distance from the stage.  Without my perceptions artificially enhanced (though there were probably joints making their way across the rows) I felt too detached from the performers.

 By then night had fallen and just as if none of this had happened, Creedence Clearwater Revival played a normal set.  According to Kite, even some of the police stopped to listen.  As Creedence played “Bad Moon Rising,” the full moon rose behind them.  When they noticed this, they played it again.  That’s the story.  I don’t actually remember it.  Kite reports that the young Denver Post reporter called Saturday’s the best music of the festival.

 Much of the Jimi Hendrix Experience set on Sunday night is preserved on YouTube.  Besides being the last Experience show, its other claim to fame is the pre-Woodstock debut of Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner, which flowed into “Purple Haze.”  But apparently the prior hours were dominated by noisy and constant warfare between police and gatecrashers.  Kite reports that the now iconic singer Joe Cocker, on his first U.S. tour, was found hiding in his dressing room.  “So this is America?” he asked.

 For me, there was one further outcome to the Boulder writers conference. After the open reading at the end of it, a tall man with dark curly hair sought me out to compliment my poems.  Not the Litany so much as the sound poem.  He was Arnold Weinstein from Yale, and he was accompanied by four or five acting students from the Yale Drama School. 

A few days later I ran into him again.  I was having eggs and toast at the Charcoal Chef, one of those chain restaurants that serves breakfast all day, near where I was staying in Boulder.  I was at the counter when he came in for coffee.  The jars of jelly for toast in restaurants had recently been replaced with little plastic tubs which were then, as they are even more so now, nearly impossible to open. So I simply stabbed at mine with a fork, which for some reason he really liked.

 It might have been after the reading or there at the counter, but at some point he invited me to hang out with his group, which was sticking around for awhile to work on improvisations.  Actually it was never clear to me what they were doing, or what he did, but in fact Weinstein taught playwriting at Yale, was a poet and playwright, and at that point in a long and successful theatrical as well as academic career, he had been working with Paul Sills’ Story Theater.  

 It also was never clear to me what he expected me to do. At first he asked me to fool around on piano, and then on guitar, as his students did whatever they were doing onstage.  This resulted in only one moment I remember.  I heard someone on stage say “hello” and I began riffing on it on guitar.  The actors picked it up and built it until the cast was clustered at center stage shouting a rhythmic and frantic “hello” to the (non-existent) audience. 

 It was an interesting, confusing and somewhat uncomfortable few days.  It’s too bad I wasn’t up to it, because Weinstein did several theatrical pieces that integrated music, and took them to Broadway.  I’ve also wondered who those Yale students—and one in particular--turned out to be.

 

My immersion in the counterculture began in Fort Collins, where (thanks to Mary) I had my palm read and my astrology chart done by stoned hippies around a fire. And there was a lot of talk, from the cosmic to the very personal. People just trying to figure things out.  Especially themselves.

  It continued in Boulder.  I hung out quite a bit at a bookstore called brillig (“Twas brillig and the slivy toves”—Jaberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, in which brillig means four in the afternoon, which is probably when I usually showed up at the bookstore) with their books on astrology (Dane Rudhyar), numerology, natural health remedies, cosmic philosophies, as well as books on underground filmmakers, artists, writers.  Scorned or overlooked past writers were being rediscovered, too—including Lewis Carroll. Brillig was also a great place to overhear conversations or engage in them.  (Somewhere I have a note about befriending a clerk there, who admitted she was afraid of the customers.) 

There were books reflecting the evolving sexual revolution and the boundaries of censorship: everything from Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask to newly available novels by Henry Miller and the illustrated book version of the scandalous stage pastiche Oh! Calcutta! 

 There was R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Verbatim.  George Leonard’s Education and Ecstasy, Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching As A Subversive Activity.  Zen Flesh, Zen Bones; The Book of the Hopi. All breaking accustomed boundaries around mind and body, searching for new answers and new questions.  Mind-expanding chemicals suggested untapped powers of mind, human potentials censored by a narrow, rigid society.  Cosmic feelings and new intimacies required a stubborn and sometimes misguided search for conscious and nurturing communities that honored individual freedom while withdrawing from a culture of self-righteous conflict that unfeelingly trashed the planet and mechanized non-human life. 

 The apocalyptic tenor of the 1960s had deepened towards decade’ end.  The unrelenting Vietnam war, the oceans dying, DDT and other chemicals poisoning food and the environment, were all in the summer’s news.  So there was interest in arcane takes on the patterns, on the future. Edgar Cayce’s books and prophesies, and similar approaches were part of the mood. 

I browsed the bookstore but unfortunately the only book I can remember reading specifically in Boulder—and I didn’t read all of that—was Bill Stage’s paperback copy of The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda.  I didn’t think much of it.  It wasn’t until his later book, Tales of Power, that I got deeply into his work, and went back to read what I’d missed.

 Besides the bookstore, I often gravitated to the campus.  I recall attending a public lecture by Nobel Prize winning physiologist George Wald, who’d begun speaking out against the warfare state.  He concluded his talk, accompanied by slides, by referring to the ultimate biological cause of the Vietnam War.  It wasn’t clear to me what he meant, so I stayed afterwards and asked him.  “You’re young now,” he said smiling, almost teasing.  “But soon you’ll have to make a living and then you’ll understand—Protein!” Very apropos as it turned out, though just what the direct relevance to Vietnam could be, however, still eludes me.

 A somewhat cryptic surviving note tells me that it was in Boulder that I saw the 1968 film version of Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, with David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave—the couple that had debuted together and had such a strong effect on me in Morgan! a couple of years earlier.  (I’ve now seen at least four versions of The Seagull, none I can think of on a live stage.)

 All of my experiences that summer adhere to the music that was playing in the background.  Everywhere, from Galesburg to Boulder, if a stereo was blasting, it was the Crosby, Stills and Nash debut album.  Or it was Tommy, the Who’s double album.  Or if not those, then Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

 It was one of the ironies of Boulder that it was legally dry—nothing alcoholic but 3.2 beer could be served.  (Despite my attempts at a bar called The Sink, I never quite got the taste for it.)  On the other hand, pot and psychedelics were everywhere.

 My surviving notes record that on July 30—the day I heard President Nixon on the radio declaring that Vietnam was “America’s finest hour,” I dropped mescaline for the first (and so far only) time.  Or what we were told was mescaline.  Unless you know the chemist, you could never be sure.  (I seriously doubt that I ever ingested a full strength pure psychedelic. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure some of the marijuana had an extra ingredient.)

 This event was at a cabin in the mountains about 20 miles outside Boulder.  The cabin was rented for the summer by John, a friend of Bill Stage’s who had shared the living room shag rug with me when he first got to town.  Since then he’d bought a truck and a couple of dogs—both blond Samoan huskies, more or less puppies.  One he named Kachina.  And he’d rented this cabin. 

John was the host for this event, and there were five others besides me.  I’d met four of them, including (let’s call them) Don and Susan, a couple.  We dropped in a meadow about noon, and everyone immediately left—singly and in pairs.  I eventually walked around, came upon one of the group—the only unattached woman—but she had such an evident force field around her that my smile faded and I got as far away as possible.

 So I walked, sprawled in another meadow in the sun, and heard voices of some of the others but I couldn’t see them. Then when it started raining lightly but threatening a storm, I returned to the original meadow and gathered up everybody’s gear—radio, cameras, etc. that they’d left—and took them into the cabin.

 I remember the sense of distance and perhaps alienation from the others.  I recorded a certain self-consciousness that rippled through my experiences, as if I was watching a film or a series of films, but I was also the lead actor.  My perceptions and emotional reactions were heightened, so when I saw Don and Susan in an intense couples thing, I felt both sides of that.  I had a lot of thoughts, about past and present and ongoing relationships, among other subjects. 

And eventually, through the six hours or so, I had one lasting observation.  I had enough visual hallucination to see the whirls and striations in rocks or the rings in wood as if they were in motion.  I saw them as process: for example, the rocks forming from volcanic flow.  Everything seemed to be half growing and half decaying, simultaneously on the way to life and death.

 I was also sick much of the time.  I had the sick stomach associated with mescaline but not intense enough to throw up.  Instead I had it longer.  But I wouldn’t call it a full-blown psychedelic experience.  Afterwards, John felt there had been some speed in it.

 Feeling sick wasn’t an entirely new experience in Colorado.  The altitude and the dry air played havoc with my sinuses, and often I felt lightheaded or suddenly fatigued.  Eventually I heard fluid sloshing around in my good ear, which was alarming enough that I saw a doctor.  He was a young ear specialist, and said it was the altitude.  He asked about my hearing, and I told him of my deafness in one ear.  He tested it, and thought the problem was in the middle ear.  He got very excited, because, though there was nothing that could be done for it when I first was diagnosed as a child, there was treatment now.  He was so happy that I might get my hearing back.  But he did another test and his face fell.  No, it was the inner ear after all, and still permanent hearing loss.  I had been on this roller coaster before so I wasn’t much fazed, but he took it hard.

 Throughout all this I kept writing.  Either falling asleep or just waking up on that shaggy floor in Boulder one day, I had the germ of an idea that would obsess me for decades, and lead to a novel and a screenplay in several versions. It was a good story and pieces of it have appeared in other people’s movies and in digital life since then.  But what I wrote then was a story about something happening in Colorado that summer.

 Somehow I missed the controversy that summer over a scheduled atomic bomb explosion in Colorado, the incredible purpose of which was to test the feasibility of extracting natural gas by exploding 100 to 200 underground nuclear bombs across the gas field.  There were protests organized by activists from Boulder and Denver, but apparently there weren’t very many of them.  And in early September, the bomb was actually exploded underground, with demonstrators bouncing in the air above it.  (I was gone by then.)  But eventually voters got it banned, and the idea failed anyway—too much radiation in the gas, duh.

 However, there was another controversy that did get my attention. Just about a month before I got there, a fire at the huge Rocky Flats plant that manufactured plutonium components, and was highly radioactive, got people wondering what other hazards were around them.  While I was in Boulder it was revealed that at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal there was some 21,000 clusters of nerve gas in explosive bombs—enough to kill two trillion people, if there were that many.  They’d been manufacturing it there for years.  The canisters were basically stored out in the open and decaying.  A stray bullet or a lightning strike that set off a chain reaction, a scientist said, could wipe out a lot of Colorado in a matter of minutes.

 It was insanity on such a huge scale that it called for a kind of Doctor Strangelove approach in the less that successful short story I wrote towards the end of my stay in Colorado.  Bill Stage read it and liked it, and showed it to a friend he especially respected when he stopped by.  He read quickly through it and made a face, directing his dour judgment to Stage, although I was in the room.

 I was crushed enough to remember this.  It wasn’t just that it was hard to be objective about new work, especially at a time of fluid standards, but that so much depended on the last thing I wrote.  It could be the key to my future, which would go a long way to directing my present.

 That said, reading it now, the guy wasn’t wrong.The main plot was funny, though perhaps not as ironic as I meant it, and I can see what I was trying to do with the subplot in contrast, but it was especially awful.  It was at best a shaky first draft.

 Besides which, the reality was more absurd than my story, and became even stranger.  Nerve gas production stopped in 1969, and Rocky Mountain Arsenal eventually became, first, a Superfund cleanup site, and now, a National Wildlife Refuge.

 All through my Colorado stay, I saw Joni whenever we could manage it. She visited me in Boulder at least once, when Stage was away for a few days.  She also invited me down to Denver to meet her sister and her sister’s husband when he came to town.  He was a law student at Yale.

 What she didn’t say was that her mother would also be there, for our first encounter ever. We met at some kind of public swimming pool, so I was basically on nearly naked view for judgment by the family.  Everybody got along fine, it seemed.  The only memorable moment was at poolside when I turned around to look down at the level below.  It was lined with people in lounge chairs sunbathing.  One was a teenage girl in her skimpy swimsuit who looked up at me and extravagantly licked her lips.  I turned away so she wouldn’t see me laughing.  I was living the theatre of the absurd.

 Another time I remember specifically we were together was on July 24, the day the Apollo 11 astronauts were scheduled to land on the moon.  Joni arrived with her friend Kathy, for a drive along mountain roads.  My  Boulder days were marked by the huge flat rock faces visible from Cascade Avenue and the university campus.  Now we were twisting through what were literally rocky mountains, with little vegetation.  Maybe it was my mood as much as the scenery, but sitting in the back seat while Kathy and Joni chatted in the front, I felt like I was getting a preview of the moon. 

 Kathy drove us to her house, and we watched the moon landing, and saw Neil Armstrong become the first human to touch another world, in the basement rec room.

 When we had sold and given away the elements of our Galesburg household and headed west, the ultimate goal was California.  This was a pause on our way to the Bay Area, specifically Berkeley, where we both had friends.  The last patch of the Colorado interlude was waiting for a “driveaway:” some unknown car a stranger paid an agency to arrange to be driven to California.  High and dry Colorado was not wearing well with me.  I yearned for an ocean.

 

At last we scored a car, and we prepared to leave.  I took the bus down to Denver to pick it up.  Joni met me there.  We were going to leave the next day.  She packed an elaborate picnic lunch, complete with a bottle of wine.  We went to Washington Park in Denver, near the sculpture of Eugene Fields’ most famous characters: Wynken, Blynken and Nod.  In my perennially ongoing college novel, three of my main characters being swept along by the tides of the times were Lincoln, Blakely and Nod.  Eugene Fields also figured in the mythology of the Illinois college I’d invented, since he’d been a Knox student for a year and later  a columnist in Chicago. But as it happened, he’d previously worked on a newspaper in Denver.  Of course, Joni knew all of this. The sculpture was her surprise.

 We spread the picnic out under a tree near the sculpture.  After I’d had a glass or two, Joni told me that she had decided not to go with me to California.  She was instead going to Connecticut, where her sister had secured a teaching job for her.  However, she though it was important for me to go on to California myself. She did not use the phrase “to sow your wild oats” but I thought that was the basic idea.  I could rejoin her later in Connecticut. 

 Who could blame her?  California wasn’t a plan.  It’s hard to say what it was. I won't go into the various ways I was a jerk.  Still, I drove the car to Boulder in shock.  The next day I felt worse—lightheaded, queasy, weak.  This didn't seem to be the way to start a solo drive for a thousand miles across challenging country I'd never seen.  Instead I drove the car back to the driveaway agency in Denver.  Eventually, Joni’s cousin Mary and her boyfriend decided to take his vacation in California, and they kindly ferried me along with them. Their camper wasn’t exactly a wooden shoe, but I had definitely sailed off.  They dropped me in Berkeley. 

Poetry Monday: The Latest Thing

The Latest Thing

 In the cities the birds are forgotten

 among other things but then one could say

 that the cities are made of absences

 of what disappeared so they could be there

 the flycatchers after the Algonquins

 the slaves and the buildings they had made

 the woods and the wood thrushes taking their

 songs with them when they went and the leaves

 taking the tongues they spoke until one could say

 that in the continuous sound of the city

 one white note plays on to prevent memory

 even of the city itself as it was

 yesterday in that very place or just

 before the light changed at the street corner

 it may be that the sound of the city

 is the current music of vanishing

 naturally forgetting its own song

 --W.S. Merwin

Top photo: San Francisco in the 1950s by Cartier-Bresson