The Practice of the Wild

It was nice to read that Gary Snyder is still alive and well in American Smoke. Ian Sinclair tracked him down at his 100-acre woods in Northern California, Kitkitdizze, which he originally bought with Alan Ginsberg and Dick Baker. The name was derived from the Miwok word for bear clover, found in abundance in that part of the woods. The retreat serves as a sanctuary for writers, poets, naturalists and other sympathetic souls who share Snyder's love for nature.

He never really considered himself one of the beats, even if Kerouac immortalized him as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Snyder considers this a piece of "fabulilsm" as the climb up the "Matterhorn" was real but Kerouac turned into something larger than it actually was. It is probably my favorite of Kerouac's books, beginning in the foothills behind Berkley, where Snyder was teaching at the time, and extending inland to the higher peaks.

He was also great friends with Ginsberg but their poetry seemed to reach at opposite ends of the spectrum. They purchased the property together back in the 60s, after Snyder had returned from Japan in the engine room of an oil tanker. The wooded site became their sanctuary.

Sinclair mentions a documentary, Practice of the Wild, which was done in 2010. Snyder is interviewed by Jim Harrison, also known for his rugged outdoor approach to life, personified in his books Sundog and Wolf. Harrison is also known for his poetry. The title comes from a collection of essays Snyder published that year.

Snyder received the Pulitzer prize for his collection of poems, Turtle Island, published in 1975, which begins with a piece on the Anasazi, or ancient ones, who inhabited the Four Corners Region of the Southwest. He branches out from this starting point to take in a broad range of impressions. I particularly like "The Bath," which he describes he and his wife giving their son Kai a bath in a sauna.

Really have been enjoying American Smoke as Ian Sinclair gives marvelous insights into a wide range of poets and writers who traversed the American continent, picking up their trails at various points.

Comments

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

Search This Blog