History of My Reading: To Stony Creek and Buffalo 1969-70

Stony Creek, Connecticut 1969/70.  BK photo.

 After my months in Berkeley, I flew to Chicago in late October or early November 1969.  I visited for a few days with Jeremy Gladstone (a friend from Knox College) who was back from Europe and staying at the family home in Park Forest until he sorted out his next move.  In Europe Jeremy had acquired a taste for Pernod, one of the anise-based French liqueurs, a legal form of absinthe.  He showed me how to drink it over ice, with water.

  One evening he invited a group of former Knox friends, and initiated them as well.  I’m pretty sure Howard Partner was among them.  We sat around a table drinking Pernod.  I think it was on this occasion that I got a better appreciation for how far apart these Chicagoland suburbs really are.  It took longer for everyone to get there and to get back than the time we spent together.

 My next stop was the family home in Greensburg.  This was likely a short visit because I was soon on my way to rejoin Joni in Connecticut.  I got myself there by first going to Washington for the second Moratorium demonstration against the Vietnam War on November 15.  This turned out to be officially the largest Washington demonstration of the war.  I may have gone down with my friend Mike or maybe I met him there because he was stationed nearby.  He had been drafted into the Army the year before.  So I marched against the war in the company of an active duty soldier (or in his case, chaplain’s assistant.) 

Many demonstrators from distant places came on rented buses, and so my plan was to find a bus returning to New Haven and hitch a ride. Not really a mad strategy in 1969.  In any case, the plan worked. Mike and I found a bus going to New Haven and they had empty seats.  I even got acquainted with someone on the bus who offered to put me up for the night when I couldn’t reach Joni upon our arrival.  In the morning I met his wife, and he and I traded versions of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” (I knew the Nashville Skyline version in G, he knew the original version in C.) Then I called Joni again and she came to pick me up.

 Joni had found a small place in a village called Stony Creek, directly on Long Island Sound, about eight miles from New Haven.  As I recall, it was three rooms in a building set back from the main drag, Thimble Island Road.  Though oysters and lobster fishing were part of its identity, the “stony” in Stony Creek likely came from the quarry.  Before it closed at the beginning of the 20^th century, it supplied pink granite for the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, and the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Probably Thimble Island Road.  BK photo.

 With a population of about a thousand, Stony Creek was part of the town of Branford, Connecticut.  An article I clipped from the New York Times a decade later began with the quip of an unnamed critic: “Every town has its village idiot, but only Branford has an idiot village.”  This article made much of Stony Creek’s resistance to change; specifically to tourism.  I don’t know if it’s still that way, though photos on line don’t give me that impression.

 The 1979 Times article suggested that many residents were employed at Yale, and perhaps that was the case to some extent also in 1969.  Across the Sound from Stony Creek there were houses where groups of Yale Law students lived.  One of them was named Bill Clinton. His girlfriend Hillary was often around.  Joni’s brother-in-law was at Yale Law, and she attended a party over there sometime before I’d arrived.  Perhaps they met. 

I don't know if it was a cultural high point but in the late 1930s, Stony Creek had a summer theatre, operated by two women who also interned for the legendary Mercury Theatre in New York, run by John Houseman and Orson Welles, often the star in its productions.  This is how Stony Creek hosted a Mercury Theatre show for a week prior to its Broadway debut. Unfortunately the tryout was so dismal that the show never opened--only those who came to Stony Creek, like Katharine Hepburn, ever saw it. She stole one of the actors, Joseph Cotton, for her 1939 Broadway hit, The Philadelphia Story, which revived her career. 

That New York Times article sings the praises of Stony Creek in summer, but I saw it only in the dead of winter, intermittently from November through February (with some time back in Greensburg for Christmas, which extended well into January to avoid Joni’s parents, visiting her and her sister.  They were not my allies.) 

BK

 Still, even though it was dim and frigid (or sunny and slushy) much of the time, I liked our corner of Stony Creek by the Sound. The Sound wasn’t the ocean but it was something, and it was always there.  I wrote this about it:

 Dredging the gray sky,/the winter wind sears home./Against the window/it pours/stinging rain from the sea./Though it does not leap into the warm kitchen/I go out to meet it/greet it/say hello/and come back in.

 Something about that dynamic suited me then, and still does. Besides the Sound, there was very little else in Stony Creek, at least within walking distance, except farther down Thimble Island Road there was a small store--and a public library.  It was (and is) the Willoughby Wallace Library, built in 1956 thanks to a bequest by the eccentric but public-spirited Mr. Wallace, plus an architect’s donated design, and donated town granite.  

So this bright substantial building was pretty new when I discovered it, amazed it was there.  I was inside it just after 3 in the afternoon, and found it was a prime hangout for high school students after school.  They sat around sunny tables, munching candy from the store and debriefing the day: who got in trouble on the bus that morning, who got ripped last weekend, plus demonstrations of how Martha and Jennifer walk. (As well as casting suspicious glances at the possible narc with the long hair, taking notes.)

 Around 4, they were replaced by a noisy bunch of grade schoolers.  “I wonder what menstruation means?”  I watched a third grader look over a Jimi Hendrix album.  Others laughed over the magazines, or broke into whispery, gossipy groups. 

 The library became my regular destination—walking past the abandoned offices of Pacific Sanchero, Permittee, and the house with the multicolored design painted by a summer tenant, who also inscribed on its wall “Latch onto a feather.”  In relatively good weather, I could sit on a stone bench outside, if it wasn’t already occupied by the aforementioned students.

 It was in this library that I discovered an author I would follow for the rest of his life: Ronald Sukenick. Very likely his latest book was on display, with a title bound to catch my eye: Death of the Novel and Other Stories.  (The “death of the novel” was a thing, long before—and much different than-- the death of the author.) 

Sukenick

The stories amazed me—I hadn’t read anything like them before.  Today some might qualify as “metafiction,” or be called deconstruction.  At the time they felt to be attempts to find new forms commensurate with the current fractious and fractured reality, as well as further forays in expanding the possibilities of writing by essentially playing with some of those possibilities.  These stories were basically comic, and in a sense conventional—the experiments were part of the story, as for example, when he includes a transcript of a conversation with his wife with a tape recorder between them.  When the conversation becomes uncomfortable for him, he wants to turn the tape off.  (At least that’s how I remember it, from a re-reading ten years ago or so.)

 So I was delighted to find in the library stacks a copy of his novel, Up, published the previous year.  It also played with narrative—the initial character was a writer, so part of it is about a character he’s writing (Strop Banally), including the changes he’s making along the way (the character’s hair color, etc.)  It also threads other narratives, but again includes critiques of their discontinuities and excesses as part of the story.

 Sukenick seemed only a little older, and I immediately bonded with our similarities in outlook and literary attempts, ignoring many differences.  Writing conventional narrative seemed superficial and false to many in those nuclear psychedelic Vietnam Nixonated days.  I didn’t get all he was doing or trying to do, but I was attracted to the mosaic form and the irreverent style I’d been drawn to in the Beatles, Vonnegut, Donleavy, Joseph Heller, etc.

My Sukenick collection, minus "Mosaic," hiding somewhere

 But Sukenick became a hard author to follow—even as a reader.  Those first two books were from major publishers, but subsequent ones were from small presses, including the organization he helped to start, the Fiction Collective.  At least a few times I found his books on carts of university bookstores sale books.  I found his 1986 novel Blown Away (Sun and Moon Press) deep in a pile of discount books on my last visit to the Harvard Coop bookstore.  But I managed to get copies of all of his novels, and one collection of stories.  I still have most of them, including his last, easily the best fiction I’ve read about 9/11, Last Fall.  I even have his extremely useful book on Wallace Stevens, Musing the Obscure, from his earlier life as a very perceptive and methodical literary scholar.  He died in 2004.

 Sukenick was a named character in Up, and the novel followed other characters (his boyhood friends mostly) who also were a little older than me.  There were retrospective scenes from their past, though I wasn’t much interested in them at the time. (Now they seem vivid.) What impressed me was that this was contemporary fiction about contemporary times and people.  Characters smoked dope and talked about revolution (though usually their complicated reasons for supporting it and not supporting it simultaneously.)  They were out of school (though some were teaching) and trying to find a place in a society they feared and loathed. That got my attention, as I was just beginning that journey.

 When I wasn’t in Stony Creek, I was in New Haven, a 20 minute bus ride away.  My efforts to find a job—desperate, muddled and halfhearted simultaneously-- were focused there. I checked bulletin boards and the newspapers, including the Yale student paper. 

 In one of those papers I saw an ad for volunteers for a Yale psychology department experiment “in learning” that paid $25 for a few hours.  I called the number and asked for more information on what this experiment entailed.  My first suspicion was that it involved drugs, and at this point in my life I wasn’t eager to let others experiment on me. The female voice on the other end assured me there were no drugs but when I asked other questions she was persistently evasive. That turned my suspicions into alarm bells.  As much as I needed the money, I didn’t participate.

 Years later I realized that this was very probably an early iteration of the famous (or infamous) Milgram experiments. (This was pretty much confirmed for me in a book by psychologist Elliot Aronson when he described what subjects were told the experiments were about—precisely what that ad said.) 

The Milgram experiments were one of the most often cited psychology experiments of modern times.  Participants were instructed to give electric shocks to people in the next room if they answer questions incorrectly.  With each wrong answer the shock is intensified, until the victim can be heard screaming in pain and begging to be released from the experiment. The victims weren’t actually getting shocks—they were in on the con.  The experiments weren’t about learning; they were to see how many people will follow instructions and administer the shocks, even after hearing cries of pain and the begging. 

 The answer was a shockingly high percentage of them.  I first heard it reported as 100%.  Later the figure given for those willing to administer the maximum voltage was 64%.  The experiment is usually said to prove two main points: that people will do what authority tells them to do, and that people will do so in situations even if they believe that they wouldn’t, regardless of their personal ethics.

 But here’s the problem.  To make such an inference about people in general, the participants had to accurately represent the population.  This is the fatal flaw of most such psychological experiments (participants are mostly students who always need money, and overwhelmingly white.) In this experiment, those who actually participated had to be willing to take the unquestioned word of authorities, without knowing what they were getting into, just to walk in the door. So they were self-selected pre-disposed. But how many people like me smelled something fishy and just didn’t participate?  On the other hand, how many participants needed the $25 enough to do what they were told?

 Think about it: this was Yale in 1969 and 1970.  There were antiwar protests on campus.  William Sloane Coffin, an advocate for defying the draft and therefore the authority of the government, was a campus hero.  Part of the huge generation gap was the distrust many younger people had for the honesty and veracity of those in authority in the government, the university  and big business.  Scientific research secretly funded by the military was a big issue on many campuses.

 So if you were against the killing and the maiming in Vietnam, to the extent of resisting the government’s orders to do so, or even if you were a stoned peace and love hippie, how likely is it that you were going to push a button to cause somebody pain?  I’ve seen photos of these experiments—there was no long hair, no countercultural clothing in any of them. 

 (These experiments, now considered unethical, are often cited along with the equally notorious Stanford  experiments that purported to prove that people given the role of prison guard invariably act in sadistic ways towards prisoners.  This was a much-cited finding in the corporate world of the 1980s and 1990s, though the experiments have largely been discredited.) 

My perspective on the Milgram experiments led to my skepticism of many psychological experiments, and books about them.  I found support in the work of eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan, particularly in his book Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, in which he gently but definitely questioned whether universal conclusions about behavior can be based on small numbers of culturally identical subjects in a laboratory setting.

 In any case, the stark divide in the late 1960s was something I keenly felt.  Even before the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, there was amply evidence of systematic lying in high places.  All our literature, movies and music questioned the moral authority if not the intelligence of those running things.  Apart from my ignorance of how the “adult world” worked, and how I could possibly find my way into the elements of it I still respected, my general attitude was both baffled and adversarial.  How could I make a living, and not lose myself?  I had too much yet to learn.

 “Out of college, money spent,” went the Beatles’ lyric, “see no future, pay no rent/all the money’s gone, nowhere to go.  But oh that magic feeling/ no where to go...”

 Apart from visits to my Knox friend Mike Shain, who for some reason now forgotten was living in a New Haven rooming house, with a sign on his door that said “Home of the Bobby Dylan Conspiracy,” I gravitated towards Yale. The academic campus was still the only industrial site I knew, and where I was somewhat comfortable.  I went to readings and knew how to get myself invited to the parties afterwards.  I believe that’s where I heard poet Kenneth Koch read.

He read a long poem that may have been called “Eyes.” In any case, it was my inspiration for a long poem I later wrote called “Ears,” which was published a couple of times in the mid-70s.

  I heard the poet Bill Knott, who at the time was writing under the name of St. Geraud.  I was astounded by his poems—they were the most unrelenting and mind-blowing surrealist poems I’d encountered. Also very short.  He may have read on the same bill with Koch or perhaps another poet, because I remember him being at the after-party and he left without much notice. Later I happened to be in the living room of this house when the doorbell rang and I answered it.  It was Bill Knott, looking shamefaced about returning.  I laughed.  I loved it.

 I met poet Michael Benedikt and we began a correspondence when he was back in New York.  He was interested in my writing that I sent him. This was some rare encouragement.  I was still sending things out and getting them back.

 Thinking back, it seems obvious that this would have been a good moment for a mentor to appear in my life. But it didn’t happen then, and never happened.  I later depended greatly on the faith of several editors, but they were all more or less my contemporaries.  This, like everything else, was as much my fault as anyone’s, and equally a sign of the times. 

I did manage a fair amount of writing at Stony Creek. Apart from verse and short fiction, and the usual endless notes on the novel I wasn’t writing, I once simply let go and wrote a sustained prose fiction called “Apostrophe S.”  Influenced by Sukenick but more by Vonnegut in its tone, I wrote it late at night, in the warm quiet kitchen, while Joni was asleep. I often had the company of our two kittens, named Abbey and Rhoda, who prowled around the pale plywood plank I was writing on, and chased my pen across the yellow legal pad.

 What survives of “Apostrophe S” seems to include elements added later.  Perhaps a wise editor could have helped me develop the good parts (some were quite funny) into something publishable, but in retrospect, the best part of it is remembering the experience of writing it. 

 But I did write something while at Stony Creek that was more of an indication of a direction I would later follow.  It’s not much remembered, but in late 1969, there was a brief but intense frenzy over an assertion that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash some three years before, and been secretly replaced by a lookalike.  Then the Beatles had seeded various songs with clues.  This “Paul is dead” theory led to top 40 stations all over America airing the “evidence” as well as lots of Beatles songs.  It made the news (Huntley-Brinkley, Time Magazine) and a New Haven moviehouse advertised a special showing of Yellow Submarine with the line, “Paul is alive and well in Yellow Submarine!”  Sales of Beatles albums shot up.

 But what apparently impressed me most was how seriously the high school students I saw in Stony Creek were taking it.  I realized that this was a contemporary subject of interest to my generation and younger that I knew something about, both in terms of the Beatles and what are now known as “conspiracy theories.”  The long piece I wrote about it, entitled the “The Paul Is Dead Theology,” was the kind of cultural reportage and analysis that in the not too distant future I would be writing and publishing.  But at that moment, though Michael Benedikt especially liked it and tried to get it published, it only joined my manuscript pile of futility.

 The article asserted knowledge concerning what high school students were talking about that I probably didn’t derive just from hanging around the Stony Creek library.  Joni was teaching high school, and we talked about her students.

We had happy times in Stony Creek. The music I associate with those wintry days includes the Band albums and The Papas and the Mamas, especially the song "Safe in my Garden." But our garden was not so safe. Our problem was the future, and the nature of our future together. These issues were the sources of tension, and along with external and internal pressures, were more than an undercurrent to those months.  But as far as I knew we’d come to no conclusion. 

Stony Creek sunset. BK photo.

Apart from manuscripts, I’d sent out various proposals, applications and inquiries.  I applied for a summer arts workshop at Cummington, in western Massachusetts.  I was in touch with Knox friend Steve Meyers who was in graduate school in Buffalo.  He was enthusiastic about the English department there, and urged me to come up and check things out. Perhaps I’d come to the reluctant conclusion that I didn’t know how to do anything that paid a salary except maybe teach, and if I was going to have to make a living that way, I would need an advanced degree.  Or maybe I was just looking for some income for a few years, burrowed into books.

 So one cold March morning I slid a duffel bag and my guitar case into the front trunk of Joni’s yellow VW bug. We drove first to the dump in a frozen field of thin snow, and I unloaded a bag of garbage.  I got back into the car and she drove me to an interstate ramp, so I could begin hitchhiking up to Buffalo.  After a brief farewell, she drove away.  It would be the last time I saw her.

 Shortly after I got to Steve’s in Buffalo, her letter arrived inviting me not to come back.  Over the next weeks we talked on the phone a few times and exchanged letters, but the situation didn’t change.  I was dislocated and bereft on many levels, but I don’t think I really blamed her. I certainly saw the justice of her point of view. 

 If Sukenick’s Up has a theme it would probably be to “be true to the discontinuity of experience.”  Even then, the 60s seemed an especially discontinuous and contingent time, so it seemed writing should express it.  But discontinuity is also a theme of youth.  All experience that falls outside the expected, the changes and rapid twists and turns, especially when moving among “worlds” of what passes for the traditional or normal and what seems to be new, as well as crossing undefined geographical, socio-economic (class) and other borders, is experienced as discontinuous.  It’s only later that it’s possible to sense the patterns, the continuities, even if they never become entirely clear, or they are multiple.

 There may be accidents or missed opportunities or stupid moves and so on, the memory of which may keep us up at night, but ultimately they become elements in the pattern.  For example, had a certain letter arrived a few days earlier when I was in Berkeley, my life might have taken me in a different direction, perhaps to western Canada.  And so on.  Or as we said a lot in those days, so it goes.

 In a way that’s what this project is about: partly through the agency of reading, seeing where things fall into the pattern that time has made, that can only be seen retrospectively.  In a larger sense, that’s a project of old age. 

 Events of all kinds contribute to the pattern—things that happened and did not happen, as well as things read or thought or felt or heard or seen, or desired, or feared. The influence of others at a particular time, or the lack of it. The picture will never be complete, because memory and various kinds of records of the time are almost guaranteed to be incomplete, if not distorting.  But it’s pretty clear what the pattern is of: it’s how you got to where you end up.

Virgil Thomson (r)

 Sometime in the early 1990s, I had the television on, not entirely absorbed in what I think was a documentary film about the American composer Virgil Thomson.  There was a brief scene, apparently filler, of Thomson at a party. He was talking to a young man, who I imagine was troubled about his career or his life.  Thompson was looking at him intently, and said very carefully and earnestly: “The outcome of everything is the way it happens, and the way it happens is the story of your life.”

 It took me awhile to accept this but that’s the pattern.  That’s the retrospective continuity: the story of your life. And as I am finding now, it begins to become visible when the story is pretty much over, and you’re in the coda, or maybe the last act.

 In Buffalo it was still winter.  I slept in Steve’s living room, for longer than I intended.  Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album had come out, and I learned the first song on the second side, “The Only Living Boy in New York.”  I played it so much that a friend of Steve’s thought I’d written it.  I also liked “Papa Hobo” from that record.  Together they represented my moment. 

Bobbie and Bob Creeley

The only reading I remember was from the bookshelf in that living room: several books by William Carlos Williams, notably his essays In The American Grain.

I must have also been reading Robert Creeley’s newer poetry, since he was teaching in Buffalo, and I was seeing a lot of him.  I attended at least one of his classes, spoke with him in his office, and was at an epic party in which, at one end of the host apartment, Robert Creeley held court, surrounded by others, and at the other end, his wife Bobbie Creeley was equally the center of attention.  When Bob mentioned Bobbie's enthusiasm for palmistry and I held up my liberally creased hand, he immediately sent me to Bobbie (later known as writer and artist Bobbie Louise Hawkins), who, as predicted, exulted in the challenge.  

 I was deliberately spending time at the English department building, particularly one long row of offices, belonging to (among others) poet John Logan, fictionist John Barth, and literary critic and gadfly Leslie Fiedler, as well as Creeley.  I learned enough about them to find the ways they decorated the window in the door to their offices appropriately expressive.  Logan’s window looked like stained glass, Fiedler’s was psychedelic, Barth’s was blacked out, and Creeley’s was clear.

 I met a lot of people in the department, as well as other of Steve’s friends, especially at the almost weekly huge communal meals.  Steve remembers that we both brought guitars to a class he was teaching and improvised a song with lyrics by T.S. Eliot.   

 But it was also a moment of crisis for SUNY Buffalo, eventually including street demonstrations.  After awhile police of various kinds were called in, and there was barricades and tear gas.  Steve and I mostly listened to the reports each evening on the campus radio station.  But we also attended meetings, including a big one of the faculty (that included graduate TAs) in the College of Arts and Letters.   The issues were wide-ranging, including academic freedom (unjustified suspensions of faculty) and others I’ve frankly forgotten. 

Leslie Fiedler

 Leslie Fiedler spoke about how serious it was to call for the resignation of a university president—and why he was calling for it now. A resolution of no confidence passed overwhelmingly (according to my notebook.) Then a student came in shouting that police were on their way to a particular campus building, and so all of us marched arm in arm to that building, where nothing happened.

 There was another moment I had reason to remember later.  Before the meeting started, someone behind us cautioned that people chatting with each other needed to be careful what they said because there were probably FBI undercover agents in the crowd.  What seemed a tad paranoid though not crazy turned out to be broadly true, when the extent of FBI infiltration of antiwar and related groups was revealed.  Some agents were even provocateurs, pushing radical groups to violence.

 I’d never entertained participating in premeditated political violence, and I was skeptical of its benefits versus its human and moral costs. My attitudes towards “revolution” were also complicated. I was selective in what I felt needed to change, and how to go about obtaining that change.  Some of these attitudes were not quite conscious, so I learned something from a moment in Buffalo.

 Richard Ellmann, author of the biography of James Joyce that had meant so much to me, was teaching at the university (though I never met him.)  But I read somewhere that his collection of Joyce memorabilia was on display that month at the university library.

When I went to see it, I couldn’t find it.  A library official asked if he could help me, and when I told him, he said that unfortunately the display had to be put back in storage because of the ongoing strife in the streets.  He must have seen my expression of dismay—I’d never dreamed that angry students would sack the library but at the same time, it didn’t seem like an outrageous precaution.  And I suppose that, with my long hair and jeans, I was a bit ashamed to be a cause of such anxiety.  But he saw right away that I was a Joyce enthusiast, and sympathized.  

SUNY Buffalo campus

At some point in my Buffalo exile, I made a trip over the Canadian border for a quick visit with Bill Thompson, my former housemate our senior year at Knox.  I met his friends from the University of Hamilton where he was (or had been) a graduate student.  So cold and insistent was the Buffalo winter that it actually was warmer in Canada.

 It was at the University of Hamilton that I had my first exposure to what was then called Women’s Liberation.  I attended an open forum on the subject, run with  authority by leaders of a campus Women’s Liberation organization.  It was an eye-opener, or as we would soon learn to say, a consciousness-raiser.  A lot of their points I experienced as valid immediately, and others it took a short while to admit.  I was troubled however by how the women leaders treated a woman in the audience, who said she didn’t think women had to have a career to feel liberated or be fulfilled—she felt liberated working in her garden.  They fell on her like a ton of bricks.  Today it seems like a first iteration of the “woke” moment: it’s liberating side, and it’s tyrannical side.

 

I was still in Buffalo in April (where it was still winter), for the very first Earth Day.  Some 20 million Americans marched or otherwise participated.  It was a big deal.  (I wrote more about this here.)  I heard Ralph Nader speak, and engaged a garage mechanic in a conversation about how ecology could generate jobs. 

 In general Buffalo had calmed down in late April, until President Nixon announced the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, widening the Vietnam war. The university, along with colleges across the country, immediately erupted.  On May 4^th, National Guard troops shot and killed four Kent State students.  The war, it seemed, had come home.  There were larger protests at even more colleges, and a national student strike. For those of us a little older, Kent State crystallized a feeling we’d had for years: that we were enemies in our country.

 The University of Buffalo was shut down, and Steve and I spontaneously decided to head back to Knox College in Illinois, perhaps from some homing instinct in this crisis time.

 I had miraculously (and largely through the efforts of Robert Creeley, I’m convinced) been accepted into the SUNY Buffalo graduate English program for the following fall.  But I no longer saw myself staying there. Whatever I was going to do or be next, it wasn’t going to be in academia after all.  In the immediate sense I’d abused Steve’s hospitality for too long.  So I knew I wasn’t going back to Buffalo.

 I had also been accepted at the Cummington, Massachusetts summer arts community, all expenses paid.  Before and after that, I was back to “nowhere to go.”

 We got in Steve’s MG, and by the time we got to Ohio—and drank coffee while being stared at by truckers—we realized that outside of Buffalo, and despite the ongoing crisis, it was spring. 

 The story of that Galesburg visit—including my participation in The Students Are Revolting and the takeover of an administrative office, as well as the political books of the time—is told in a prior post indexed to this series, published on the 50^th anniversary of these events.  Next in this sequence, I’ll pick up the story at Cummington and Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of 1970.

Hiding in a Drop of Water

Hiding in a Drop of Water

 It is early morning and death has forgotten us for

 A while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.

 I am ready to praise all the great musicians. 

 Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.

 Surely you must have realized this from hearing

 The way strings cry out no matter who hits them.

 From the great oak trees in the yard in October,

 Leaves fall for hours every morning. Every night

 A thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.

 When Rabia’s donkey fell dead in the desert, she shouted

 To God, “Is that the way you treat an old woman?”

 The donkey stood up, and they went on to the Meeting.

 It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.

 It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water

 That lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.

 Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel

 Stops turning, you will still be way up 

There, swinging in your seat and laughing.

 Robert Bly

 1926-2021

"Rabia" was a Sufi saint.  "Kaaba" is the most sacred site in Islam.  "Gautama" is the Buddha.   The Ferris Wheel was invented in the late 19th century by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. of Galesburg, Illinois. He later founded a business in Pittsburgh.  Poetic license or Bly's wry joke, the point is made.  RIP to an essential voice of the 20th century and beyond.  His work lives on.

Freedom 2021

In November 2014, the 85 year old Ursula K. Le Guin used her brief speech accepting her National Book Foundation Medal to issue a pointed warning.

 “Hard times are coming,” she said, “when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom...” 

 To further emphasize this point, when the address was published in Le Guin’s last collection of nonfiction, Words Are My Matter, it was—it is—titled “Freedom.”

 Le Guin’s speech concentrated on commerce: on the commoditization of literature and commercial censorship.  (Her epic words—“We live in capitalism, it’s power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings”—transcend her subject.)

 Perhaps her most chilling phrase is “writers who can remember freedom...” The assault on this kind of freedom was and is ongoing, and in the seven years since, it has gotten worse.  Commercial censorship (actual and de facto) continues, and the banning of books has gone from an accelerating danger to a trend.  The most prominent and vicious cases are driven by racial fearmongering and cynical rabid right politics.  But elements of the left, or education bureaucracies trying to interpret sensitivities, are also guilty of going overboard with censorship.

 Censorship takes away access to creative contributions to our understanding, and often the textures of history.  It also discourages free expression in the first place, by means as complex as shaming and self-censorship, as well as economic intimidation.

  “...as the mind recaptures its capacity to create/and the soul may regain its freedom,” wrote the African American poet and painter Jesse Murry. It includes the individual soul of the one who creates, but also the soul of the one who apprehends the creation, and ultimately the soul of the community, in small or at large.

 But freedom to create and the freedom of access is also related to a freedom under even greater assault in 2021: freedom to seek, discover and speak the truth, or even all the uncertainties that sometimes are the best we know.

 Elements of the rabid right, led by or playing into the hands of white supremacists, are using the largely phantasmal specter of critical race theory to prevent a generation from learning about racism and racial history in America.  At their behest, teachers are fired, curricula changed and books banned.

 But extremists on the other side are playing right into their hands with their own broad brush of censorship and personal destruction known (and this time, I’m afraid rightly known) as cancel culture.  

Ursula K. Le Guin did not address this, and perhaps fortunately, she did not live long enough to watch the reputation of her father assaulted by a literal cancellation, when the University of California at Berkeley erased the name of her father Alfred Kroeber from Kroeber Hall, center of the anthropology department that he essentially created.

 In an article published in the LA Progressive entitled “Cancel Culture Hits Berkeley,” professor of medical anthropology Nancy Scheper-Hughes wrote: “To negate or ‘cancel’ Alfred L. Kroeber is to censor and defame one of the most distinguished anthropologists in America.”

 She notes that the decision was based on a report “prepared hastily and secretly.”  It was not shared with the anthropology faculty, but some of those who made the decision “clearly knew little or nothing about” Kroeber’s legacy or contributions, “and even less about Kroeber’s lifelong relations with Native Californians who worked closely with him to create one of the largest archives in America on the indigenous languages and cultures of California.”

 Kroeber’s cancellation came at the behest of some academics and activists (including some Native Americans) who made various accusations about his work with California Indians and specifically the man known as Ishi, believed to be the last member of the Yahi tribe in the early 20^th century.

 Scheper-Hughes, who has solid credentials and expertise in these matters, goes into great detail about Kroeber, Ishi and the various issues involving Native Californians.  While she finds serious fault in some areas, and does not spare the anthropology department in general, especially for its treatment of Native remains, she finds that many of the accusations are overstated when they are not untrue. 

 She also provides instances that show that this damning critique of Kroeber is by no means shared by all California Indians—especially not by elders who knew him. She quotes an official statement from the California Council of Indians in 1950, shortly after Kroeber’s death, expressing gratitude for his work and friendship, “and in later life our greatest hope for long-delayed justice.”

 Her lengthy article, with links, footnotes and citations, may contain assertions open to debate. But at least she provides the basis for debate. She writes that the report against Kroeber however consisted of undocumented accusations. Nevertheless, Berkeley decided to mollify the accusers by erasing Kroeber’s name from their campus, which he helped put on the map.  Then again, unlike the namesakes of other buildings, he wasn’t a big donor.

 Cancellation in this case threatens to wipe out a legacy.  In others it ends careers and reputations. As justified as it might be—or at least feel at the time--it is very much akin to capital punishment without trial, rules of evidence or presumption of innocence.  There is no balance or proportion or context.

 And it sends out ripples, first of guilt by association.  Scheper-Hughes also asserts that to cancel Kroeber “also means negating and deriding Kroeber’s wife, Theodora Kroeber, the author of Ishi in Two Worlds, and Kroeber’s daughter, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, who produced beloved books that were inspired by Kroeber’s ethnologies of Native Californians...”

 Which makes one wonder: if this had happened in Le Guin’s lifetime, would she have been free to imagine those worlds?

 Because it also sends out ripples of fear.  In his time, Alfred Kroeber did the unconventional.  He documented and helped to save Native languages that the rest of society were happy to see die. He was friends and collaborators of individuals that many of his peers considered savages.  He took risks and made mistakes, but he was far ahead of his time in his beliefs and his search for justice and truth.

 Yet in 2021, from the right and the left there is this assault on the very idea of truth.  The far right has gone so far as to deny facts of which there is visible and audible evidence from a thousand cell phones in Washington on January 6. My generic Google news aggregator every day posts “fact checks” painfully debunking the most viral and preposterous assertions and conspiracy theories claiming to be facts.  In a throwaway comment in a book review, a writer this week asserted what is apparently a common observation: “Posts on social media aren’t expected to be strictly truthful by their billions of users.”  

 It’s bad enough that the rabid right, now running a major political party with apparently great success, values successful trolling over truth, to the extent that truth to them is a concept without content.  Facts are just agents of manipulation.  More basically, facts are judged according to how they comport with positions and prejudices. At bottom they are expressions of displaced emotions—usually from the dark side of the unconscious.  It doesn’t take long for them to be multiplied as expressions of group emotions: of a mob. 

 But now elements of the left are reportedly joining in this assault.  In support of “White Accountability,” some scholars have prepared lists of qualities and behaviors that are White vs. those that are of non-Whites.  (Eric Levitz in New York Magazine reproduces one of these lists.)  As Levitz points out, they may have some validity as cultural abstractions or tendencies in specific contexts, but not as blatant racial characteristics.  As such, they are in themselves racist, tragically lending validity to a typical rightward charge of racism against whites.

 Perhaps worse is their misuse.  If calling for evidence and logic are White, and therefore don’t apply in, say, accusations of racial “micro-aggressions,” then we are once again left with no basis for ascertaining fact.   One can understand the force of grievance.  But there must be arbiters, and there must be standards of evidence, or there is no justice possible for anyone. 

 There is truth in emotion, but it is alone not the test for the standards of fact that must be the common ground of a democratic society, or academic institutions.  No institution, no country, can remain free without some standard of fact.  Imaginative literature as we know it isn’t even possible.

 In some of its manifestations, cancel culture expresses frustration with a justice system that bottom to top is rife with corruption, bigotry and the law of money.  But denying the very basis of justice invites a vicious circle of tyranny.

 A healthy society can’t just erase the history it doesn’t like, or believe it is repudiating it by selecting scapegoats. Taking down statues may be right and cathartic but hardly sufficient.  Evaluation and judgment using the conceptual tools we’ve paid for so dearly are needed. Historical context is a vital opportunity for learning.  Freedom to explore it is crucial.  For one thing, such inquiry is the basis for knowing what should be changed, and therefore of political and institutional action.

 With the Supreme Court set to end a woman’s right to choose and send this nation hurtling towards the previously fantastical vision of A Handmaid’s Tale, freedom of expression is hardly the only freedom under mortal assault.

 But when we are relegated to one of two increasingly extreme and rigid camps, with money as the only common executive in chief, freedom to search for, discover and express truths is being overwhelmed, and a new Dark Age approaches with the seeming inevitability of a Greek tragedy.  Freedom in this spiraling down no longer defines the society—the “free society”—but becomes just another word for nothing left to lose.

Politics 2021

 I don't write much about politics here anymore.  Why warn of what everyone knows is happening?  Just because the Rabid Right misuses Nazi analogies, doesn't mean they don't apply.  We are Germany in the early 1930s.  Our march to 21st century virtual reality fascism seems inexorable, if not inevitable.  

How many times did political pundits declared the Republican party discredited, disreputable and dead as they crossed one normative line after another?  But Republicans either quit or got with the fascist program, or else were punished and purged.  Now they are all but officially the American White Supremacist Fascist Party, even if many of their officeholders have zero integrity or commitment to democracy or even an ideology, and are only interested in retaining personal political power at any cost and the open taps of certain corporate supporters.

But the clincher is Covid.  Republican officeholders are creating conditions for more people to get sick and die so they can blame it on Biden.  They are sacrificing actual real lives (though mostly old people) for political gain.  Usually politicians don't do this so blatantly.  But is the American public alarmed and outraged?  Nearly 800,000 deaths officially--half a million people over 65-- and certainly many more than are officially counted, apparently aren't enough to matter.  How many lives will it take till we know that too many people have died?  The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.

Whatever the historical analogies of our current rigid political and cultural divisions, the mutual disdain and distrust in any government (or science or anything else) by what seems like a substantial proportion of the population--this polititcization of everything--offers gloomy prospects for effective response to future national challenges, including the foreseeable effects of climate distortion.  And that's regardless of any electoral outcomes.   

The electorate in 2021 seems composed of one-quarter Rabid Right fascists and one-quarter surly and impulsive voters, unable or unwilling to absorb or judge crucial information, whose voting patterns is little more than acting out.  Because of them (and Democrats who didn't vote), Republicans successfully market-tested their fascism in this year's elections.  Who would have believed that fulminating members of a party that says what everybody saw happen on January 6 didn't happen, would actually win the next elections. (We will see if these elections were won on national issues or local issues plus the respective candidates.  Less publicized were some recent local elections that Democrats unexpectedly swept.)

The other half of the electorate broadly agree with one another, but obsess on what fractures them from the others.   They can be coalesced around a candidate like Obama, or to oppose a Trump.  But in 2021 no Obama is apparent. 

 President Joe Biden is fearless and a smart political operator--he knew enough to ask for more than he expected to get, and he still may wind up with several multi-trillion dollar changes for the better.  But the default position of the American media and public is to listen to very little of what a President says.  Even a politician with the skills of an FDR would find it difficult to get through.  Homegrown Hitler did, but being the Troll-in-Chief only gets you attention and a cult of personality --it can't get bring a country together around a vision or a program.  Demagogues have the advantage of evoking the violent dark side; it's harder to guide the light.  

Making a speech while standing in front of a broken bridge or a sparkling solar panel doesn't get you more than a sound bite that comes and goes.  Not since JFK and LBJ has there been a Democrat who could command attention over the noise, at least enough.  Whatever it takes to "communicate" these days, Democrats haven't yet figured it out.  In 2021, it's hard to see where that skill or voice will come from.  It's also not clear who will replace Biden and Nancy Pelosi--the Last American Hero--in effective legislating.

President Biden is less than one-fourth into his term. Things can change (though I wouldn't count on the egregious abortion/choice issue, to do it.)  Whether or not voting rights legislation is possible or can come soon enough to govern the rules for 2022 or 2024 is one of the big questions for the coming year.

But Biden will still be President for both those elections.  In the coming year--and certainly by 24--the White House should be seriously gaming out federal responses to various alarming possibilities, just as if they were the Pentagon preparing for various war scenarios.  For it seems that if the Republicans haven't gerrymandered themselves into power, they will try to negate elections and elect themselves at the state level.  And if that doesn't work, armed insurrection is next on the menu. 

 Before January 6, 2021, that might have seemed like paranoia.  Not now. So what will the federal response be to an insurrection taking over the government of Georgia?  Of Michigan?  Of reversing the outcome of federal elections?  Some folks need to be thinking about this now, and getting reliable resources ready. For the United States has enemies, foreign and domestic--and the most obvious right now are the domestic.

TV and Me: A Million Year Journey to Johnny Jupiter

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story. First of a series.

Once upon a time, television began.  It was before wall-sized flat screens, streaming, HD, 3D, 4k, 5D...

 Actually, the story starts earlier.  Maybe a million years earlier.  Or at least several hundred thousand...

 Once upon a time, people talked.  Occasionally one person talked to a group of others.  They gathered in front of the fire in winter to hear a storyteller tell them the history of the world and their people, the adventures and fatal mistakes of their hunters. Or children gathered around an elder, or heard bedtime stories from their mother. They heard tales of animals and humans, and how they changed into each other.  They heard how the leopard got its spots and how the coyote lost its tail.  They heard stories about children lost in the forest, and people who were way too greedy. 

Listening to stories—and watching the storyteller-- around the fire must have been a part of life for a very long time.  When people were alone, they might stare into their own small fire, and think about the stories, and daydream their own...

 Eventually a number of people acted out such stories as moral tales and histories.  They might include music of the drums and flutes, and interludes of jugglers, tumblers and clowns, as well as painted masks and regalia.

 
Often these stories, told or acted out, were repeated.  Some were ceremonial, but others were teaching stories.  Some were scary, some made you laugh.  People might hear or see the same story told many times, and they might notice that one storyteller was better than another.  In this way, they distinguished between the teller and the tale.

 Other stories were told in pictures.  You might need special credentials to look at the ones on the walls deep in caves, but others were scratched into rocks for everyone to see.  Later other kinds of pictures told a story, in paint, in stone, and in stained glass.

 Eventually these elements combined in theatre.  They all had one thing in common: in order to experience the story, you had to be at the place and at the time they were told. 

There was one exception.  Somewhere in this history, years after writing developed and spread, years after books were copied out and stored in libraries, the invention of the printing press quickly made it possible for almost everyone who could read to acquire and read books.  Books told stories to you alone, anywhere you were, including your home. 

 Even before that, writing had changed things.  When the priest and the rabbi read from sacred texts, they clearly weren’t making up the stories.  Somebody else was the author, divine or otherwise.  There was another step between the story and you.  So in a way the story came from far away.

 Print led not only to books but to shorter packages of stories that were different every few months, or every month, week, or every day.  They were periodicals: chiefly magazines and newspapers.  Some were topical, some political. Some publications serialized the fictions known as novels. As more people became literate, especially from the early 19^th century well into the 20^th century, periodicals of various kinds gained almost universal readership, at least in cities and towns.   

 Daily newspapers carried stories (news, sports, weather) about a reader’s town or city, and stories that everybody in the country was following.  Immigrants learned English by following the stories told with crude drawings and brief words on “the funny pages.”  Some cartoon strips told a single story each day, usually humorous.  Others spread out a dramatic story over days or weeks or months: tales of adventure in exotic places, detective stories, science fiction, romance—every kind of story that books or periodicals told, and a few more.  Soon the comic strips spawned their own periodicals called comic books. 

People were learning all the ways stories could come to them.

 In the midst of this hubbub of storytelling, along came moving pictures.  Audiences by now knew about stories (maybe true, maybe not; not actually happening now, but on the other hand, actually happening now) and the conventions of theatre (with actors who weren’t really the characters but on the other hand, they were; and that the living room on the stage wasn’t really the living room of those people, but in a way, it was.) Now they had to learn how to see stories in motion: that the train coming at you is not actually coming at you, but then again, it is.  And that the music someone is playing on piano or organ over in the dark corner is related to what’s happening on the screen.

 Then moving pictures began to talk and sing, scream and explode.  The organ in the corner became a symphony you couldn’t see.  But what all these forms of storytelling had in common, together with other entertainment like the circus and the ballet, concerts and vaudeville, not to mention sporting events and public speeches, was one thing: you had to be there.  Even though, for the stories, you weren’t there: you didn’t have to be in Rome for a story about Rome, but you did have to be in the place the story is told, such as the theatre or the movie palace. 

No sooner had movies become the chief means of entertainment (with most Americans in 1930 going to the movies at least once a week) than there was something new, called radio.  Now voices told you stories from far away, when you were in your own living room.   They were like books that talked and sang and made funny noises to remind you of doors slamming, cars careening and guns firing.  They were the opposite of the old silent movies you could see but not hear; they were movies you could hear but not see: movies for the ear.

 At first it was called “the wireless” because it carried sound like a telephone but without telephone wires.  It had its technical problems, and remained a novelty through the 1920s. But the broadcasting of news, music, sporting events and a growing number of other kinds of stories began to fill the day in the 1930s.  Radio exploded.  Only two out of five American homes had a radio in 1931.  A year later, the proportion was one out of three.  By 1938 the conquest was nearly complete, as four out of five homes had a radio, usually in a prominent place in the living room.

 Radio presented actual stage plays or more often, plays meant to sound like stage plays, beginning with an announcer whispering that the curtain is going up, followed by applause. 

It told all the stories that movies told, and sometimes featured the same actors. You could go to the movies and see Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, and come home to listen to Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. Radio presented the entertainers of vaudeville and Broadway musicals, as the movies did.  Somehow radio even transcended its own limitations: for awhile its biggest star was a ventriloquist and his dummies (Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.)  A man whose gimmick was that he could make dummies talk without moving his lips was a sensation with audiences who couldn’t see him.

 And radio soon learned to tailor its storytelling to its main advantage: it was in the home, every minute of the day.  It took the kind of stories that appeared in romance novels and especially romance comic strips (sometimes with the same characters), crossed them with the movie serial, and told them incrementally in fifteen-minute segments, sometimes at a pace that would make a snail impatient.  These were the daytime dramas, the daytime serials, otherwise known as soap operas.

 Pepper Young’s Family, Hilltop House, Stella Dallas, Mary Noble, Backstage Wife...Soap operas were designed for women who were at home during the day and could listen with less than full attention while doing their domestic chores.  They became very popular.  The ten of them on the air in 1934 more than tripled to 31 by 1936, and then nearly doubled again to 61 by 1939.  Radio had invented a storytelling form.

 The next step seemed inevitable: a storytelling device in the home like radio but that told stories with the moving pictures and sounds so far available only in movie theatres.  America was introduced to television with a broadcast and on-site demonstrations at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, called The World of Tomorrow.

 That broadcast was of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s opening remarks, but almost no one had the equipment within range to see it.  For most people, television remained the world of tomorrow through World War II, though TV sets began appearing in bars and other public places, especially in New York, which was to be the early center of television broadcasting.

Some television stations started broadcasting in 1947, but really it was 1948 before there was anything like a menu of regularly scheduled programs for at least part of the day. 

 By 1949, television was becoming part of everyday life.  People had once again gathered around the hearth to listen to stories on the radio.  Now they were again looking into flickering light, but not into the hearth fire: they gathered in front of the flickering images telling them stories on the TV set. 

 The first programs included boxing and wrestling matches: motion that a single fixed camera could capture in a confined space with good lighting.  Religious services and other ceremonies were also broadcast, partly for the same reasons.

 But soon television was producing versions of every kind of story told in every previous form.  Tales of heroes and heroines from books and comic strips and movie serials were told in 15 and 30 minute chunks. Stage plays or stories pretending to be plays got the same sort of treatment as radio, with the whispering announcer and the shot of the audience applauding. (One of these reached back beyond radio to the beginning of storytelling with its title, Fireside Theatre.)  

Soon the full panoply was on view: musicals, vaudeville, song and dance, detectives, cowboys, space ships, cops and robbers, classic drama, melodrama and soap opera, movie cartoons, news broadcasts, interviews and documentaries.

The arrival of movies, radio and television as storytelling media came so close together in time that there were many performers who had begun on stage but then proceeded through all three.  Jimmy Durante went from vaudeville to Broadway musicals and New York nightclubs to movies and radio before becoming an early television star—and he was far from the exception. 

 Almost all the television program forms began elsewhere, often coming directly from radio or the movies, and this became part of the story of early television as I experienced it, beginning in the late 40s and mostly the early 1950s.   

 But before I begin at the beginning of that part of the story, I want to remember Johnny Jupiter. 

I lived more than thirty miles from the nearest television stations, though the primary one at this time  happened to be located in an unlikely pioneer city for both radio and television: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Other stations were broadcasting from farther away.

 In those circumstances, television in the late 40s and early 50s was a sometime thing.  At first it wasn’t on at all most of the time, as new stations tested their equipment. I recall being restless while accompanying my mother on a visit to the home of a family friend, and persuaded to calm down because a program was scheduled to start on their television set.  Although we were “early adopters,” we didn’t have a set yet; almost no one did.  So I was excited.  I waited, with decreasing patience.  And finally the little television set came to life-- with a program on how to freeze ice cubes in a new refrigerator.  It was likely a filmed segment of a late 1940s program, “In the Kelvinator Kitchen.”  Pre-Betty Furness. 

But even when real programs were on for some part of the day, reception was dicey at best.  I'm guessing we got our first television set by 1949 (maybe a year later or earlier.) We had one when we lived in the “foundation,” the basement of our house not yet built. By 1953, we had a television set in the living room of that house, hooked up to an antenna that lay across the top of the chimney.  On most channels what I saw was the sight and sound we knew as “snow,” a cacophony of dots in shades of gray and black accompanied by a brash hissing noise.  Or if not snow, then a picture jumping up and down, appearing and disappearing among bouncing and waving lines (which the “horizontal” and “vertical” controls on the set were supposed to fix, but seldom did.)

 Eventually we got two or three channels clearly enough to watch, at least at the TV’s less temperamental moments.  One of them was more reliably clear: WDTV Channel 3 in Pittsburgh (channel 2 after 1952), the Dumont network channel.  The Dumont network, begun by an early television technology pioneer and maker of TV sets like the one pictured, was one of the major networks (though it didn't make it beyond the 1950s), along with NBC and CBS, both powerhouses in radio. ABC soon got in the game. 

In those earliest days, relationships of individual stations to networks were more fluid.  WDTV was Pittsburgh's only station for a long while, and it broadcast shows from basically everybody.  But it was primarily a Dumont station, so among my earliest TV memories are Dumont programs.   The most poignant for me now is Johnny Jupiter. 

The premise of Johnny Jupiter was that an earnest old janitor at a television station (played by Vaughn Taylor) turns the dials on a television looking for something to watch, and accidentally tunes into the planet Jupiter, and two of its inhabitants, Johnny Jupiter and the robot B-12.  But he doesn’t just see and hear them.  He talks to them, and they talk to him.

 Johnny Jupiter and B-12 were hand puppets with the voices of the program’s writers, Jerome Coopersmith and Carl Harms.  They were two figures with the proscenium of a television screen around them, with the janitor, Ernest P. Duckweather, standing beside them on the other side of the screen.  But they were all inside my television proscenium screen.

 As far as I recall, mostly what they did for a half hour was talk.  Duckweather described Earth customs and behavior, which sounded ridiculous even to Earthlings, and Johnny Jupiter described the alternatives on Jupiter.  This for me was a very early initiation into societal satire.  Most of it was beyond me at age 6 going on 7, but not all of it. It wasn’t long before I was engaging in it myself. 

But the reason I start this series with Johnny Jupiter, which is not the first television show I remember, is the strange magic of it, and its premise.  Here was this barely believable medium of stories come to life in my living room, though my access to them was always a bit uncertain, according to the moods of weather and whatever else affected television signals. When it worked, it was like magic.

 And here was Ernest P. Duckweather, like me hoping for something to watch he’s never seen before, tuning into not just another city or state, but another planet. Not only that, but he interacts with the beings there.  If television was possible, it seemed to me, something like that might also be possible. Who knows what this magic box could really do? After all, you could talk to people on some radios.  And wouldn’t it be wonderful if someday I turned the TV on and found Jupiter myself? 

Johnny Jupiter was broadcast weekly on the Dumont network for only four months in 1953.  The next year it was on ABC, with a different, younger Ernest P. Duckweather (played by Wright King), and the program was transformed into more of a situation comedy. (A few episodes of the ABC series which ran from September 1953 to May 1954 have survived (mislabeled) on You Tube and elsewhere. As far as I know, nothing of the first series is available to see.)

 But WDTV in Pittsburgh didn’t broadcast it after it went to ABC.  It wasn’t on the only other station we got reliably in 1953 and 1954, Channel 6 in Johnstown.

 Still, clacking through the stations one day I discovered it was broadcast on one of the fainter and more distant stations, possibly channel 7 (Wheeling, West Virginia) or channel 9 (Steubenville, Ohio), both of which broadcast ABC shows, among others.  But try as I might, every week at that hour, I couldn’t bring it in for more than a few minutes at a time.  Occasionally the snow would slightly clear, the horizontal and vertical stop jumping long enough for me to see the outlines of the new Duckweather and Johnny Jupiter, and to hear some distorted lines of dialogue.  But soon it would fade away.

  And that became part of television, too: the elusive promise unkept, and the potential unfulfilled. But there were also more wonders along the way.    

Happy Thanksgiving

 

Variations on a Theme

 Thank you my life long afternoon

 late in this spring that has no age

 my window above the river

 for the woman you led me to

 when it was time at last the words

 coming to me out of mid-air

 that carried me through the clear day

 and come even now to find me

 for old friends and echoes of them

 those mistakes only I could make

 homesickness that guides the plovers

 from somewhere they had loved before

 they knew they loved it to somewhere

 they had loved before they saw it

 thank you good body hand and eye

 and the places and moments known

 only to me revisiting

 once more complete just as they are

 and the morning stars I have seen

 and the dogs who are guiding me

--W.S. Merwin

 Last Thanksgiving I posted a Merwin poem that some readers found a little too, let’s say ironic. So even though this is a poem of spring, there’s giving thanks in it. In that way it can be read as saying that gratitude can be felt any day, in this case in long old age, and perhaps Thanksgiving symbolizes that. For me this poem has the additional benefit of expressing several specific reasons for my own daily gratitude, including the (endangered) snowy plovers of our own North Coast beaches.

Window on Beings and Doings

Smooth is the skin of the woman who irons. 

Tall and bony, the man who repairs umbrellas.

 Plucked, the woman who sells chickens. 

In the inquisitor’s eyes shine demons.

 Coins lie behind the usurer’s eyelids. 

The watchmaker’s whiskers mark the hours.

 The janitor has keys for fingers.

 The prison guard looks like the prisoner and the psychiatrist looks crazed.

 The hunter becomes the animal he pursues. 

Time turns lovers into twins. 

The dog walks the man who walks him.

 The tortured tortures the dreams of the torturer.

 The poet flees from the metaphor in the mirror.

 --Eduardo Galeano

 from his book, Walking Words

 I heard Eduardo Galeano read from this book before I’d read anything he’d written. That’s fitting enough for an introduction to a poet. But in this age, it happened through my earphones on a bright sunny day as I walked up Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill Pittsburgh, listening to him being interviewed on All Things Considered, probably in 1993 when Walking Words was published.  I likely took a few more steps to try to find it at Squirrel Hill Books.

 Eduardo Galeano was a walking poet of the world. Born in Uruguay, his ancestors were Italian, Welsh, German and Spanish. He was an editor, journalist, novelist and poet. He wrote books like Walking Words, an amalgam of verse and tales from Latin American folk traditions, and uncompromising political books like Open Veins of Latin America. He was on death lists of several South American right wing governments. He also was considered the preeminent writer on international soccer, i.e. futbol. He died in 2015.

 As for the photo above, I’m the man this dog walks. His name is Howdy.

Update: RIP poet Robert Bly.  His death was announced Monday.