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Ruth Stone's In the Dark (Copper Canyon, 2004) collects about a hundred poems from the octogenarian Stone's recent writings. At their best they are very good indeed, reminiscent somewhat of Anna Akhmatova: straightforward, musical, and mostly dark, with brightness thus seeming all the brighter.
One could reasonably labelEdward Abbey's Good News (E.P. Dutton, 1980) science fiction, not that the short dystopian novel is scientific, but because it imagines a future. Picture the city of Phoenix reduced mostly to ruins, where businesses and automobiles have been abandoned, a place ruled by a private army that skirmishes with dissident students and conducts public hangings. Now picture a one-eyed cowpoke, a Hopi Indian, a buxom barmaid, and an adolescent boy, whom fate (that is, Abbey) has thrown together, and watch as they struggle to resist the police state.
Prophetic if not profound, Good News spares readers much of the overblown, caricature that appears throughout The Monkey Wrench Gang. It's over quickly and there's a moral. Keep your chin up, battle back, don't give in. To paraphrase Eugene Debs, it's better to fight for what you want and not get it, than to capitulate peacefully to what you don't want, and to what, in this case, no one needs: a fascist society.
Ian McEwan's Black Dogs (Jonathan Cape, 1992) is a short novel written from the viewpoint of an intellectual middle-aged son-in-law about his wife's parents, successful pan-European authors and ex-communists whose lives have diverged, eventually focusing on one pivotal event in 1946 that led toward their moving apart.
"Looking after children is one way of looking after yourself."
"I would be false to my own experience if I did not declare my belief in the possibility of love transforming and redeeming a life."
"The kiss, the feel of it, the extraordinary fact of it, the expectation of another, and of what lay beyond, had preoccupied me for twenty-four hours."
"The more I looked across the gorge...the more I realized ... that set against the age and beauty and power of those rocks, politics was a piddling thing."
"Making a good life. What‚s the point of doing that alone?"
"This is what I know. Human nature, the human heart, the spirit, the soul, consciousness itself--call it what you like-- in the end, it‚s all we‚ve got to work with. It has to develop and expand, or the sum of our misery will never diminish. My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless."
Adrian C. Louis's Evil Corn ( Ellis Press, 2004) presents sad, bawdy, dry drunk prose poems about love for dying dogs, loneliness as a partner drifts away with Alzheimer's, efforts to stay sane as an "Indian professor" at a small Minnesota college, buying cheese puffs and Vienna sausages on Christmas Day, and other interwoven realities. Few writers offer themselves with such bold and relentless honesty, refusing to self-censor. Louis stays true to himself at the risk of appearing foolish, pathetic, or less than perfect. He's a mixed-blood Dakota kin to Charles Bukowski (when Buk was at his best).
Long may Adrian Louis continue to live and write.
Paul Fournel's Need For the Bike (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), translated from French by Allan Stoekl, consists of personal anecdotes about the author's life as a serious amateur bicyclist, from tales of learning to ride, memories of a first bike, and accounts of accidents, to sensual impressions about the aesthetic, physiological, social, and psychological experience of biking long and fast. It reminded me of Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow, another succinctly written book of anecdotes that really gets at the essence of a sport.
"Nonathletes should, at least once in their lives, indulge in the luxury of being in shape."
"To create a desire for something one needs is to engage in a labor of human happiness....That's the secret of culture, the secret of cuisine, the secret of kindness."
Helen Nearing's Loving and Leaving the Good Life (Chelsea Green, 1992) is an inspirational autobiographical account by someone who as a young woman was on track to become a concert violinist--a world traveler and consort of Krishnamurti, who then connected with disenfranchised radical scholar Scott Nearing with whom she grew a long life. Homesteading with Scott, first in Vermont and later in Maine, Helen Nearing became a prolific stone mason, maple sugar maker, and author, co-author with Scott Nearing of such books as the Thoreau-influenced back-to-the land tract Living the Good Life: How to Live Safely and Sanely in a Troubled World, first published in 1953.
For anyone interested in the "do-it-yourself" movement (more aptly "do-it-ourselves" in most cases), the Nearings remain a model of how to live authentically and simply, integrating politics, ecology, aesthetics, meaningful work, and contemplation, happily, one day at a time, for a whole life.
Scott Nearing was still chopping wood--and traveling internationally to give talks--well into his 90s. A month before his 100th birthday he decided to stop eating. He died peacefully a month and eighteen days later, August 24, 1983.
Helen Nearing writes, "The love I had for and received from Scott, the love for and from countless women and men I have known, is still vibrating in the world....There are so many threads of love in the world, so much love going on, for and from so many people. To have partaken of and to have given love is the greatest of life's rewards."
The Nearings' papers are held today at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and their Maine homestead is open to the public as The Good Life Center.
Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (Norton, 2003) is based partly on the author's own experiences as an aerobatics pilot and outdoor explorer, and those of his father. (The author's father was the sole survivor of a WWII fighter jet crash over Germany; broke both arms, both legs, and both hands upon landing; and come to consciousness to see a German farmer, in whose field he'd landed, pointing a pistol at his face. The farmer pulled the trigger. The gun failed to fire.) An excellent book, it also draws from specialized publications dealing with mountaineering accidents, river safety, etc. (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report? anyone?), as well as literature (Jack London, for example), and classical philosophy (Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, to name two).
Keys to survival, according to Gonzales in summation: "positive mental attitude," careful attention to changing reality, a sense of humor, flexibility. Ways to not survive: hubris, hurry, and a know-it-all attitude.
Mecca Reitman Carpenter's excellent No Regrets: Dr. Ben Reitman and the Women Who Loved Him (Lexington, MA: SouthSide Press, 1999) is a daughter's biography drawn largely from "dust-covered family letters" that are anything but dry. Reitman corresponded prodigiously, with family and friends, with Emma Goldman and other lovers--including the author's mother--and the diverse viewpoints these letters provide give a clearer sense of the man (than, for example, the less lively Roger Bruns biography mentioned below).
Who was Ben Reitman? A bigamist, for one thing. (In his words: "I have to stop writing so many women..."). A mama's boy. Publicist and tour manager for Emma Goldman. A public proponent of venereal disease prevention at a time when the focus was almost entirely on treatment and cure. A birth control advocate in an era when this meant going to prison for speaking on the topic. Author of Sister of the Road (a.k.a. Boxcar Bertha). Father of six children born over 41 years (the last after he died).
As Reitman wrote to his wife Rose in 1934: "I have been called in private, on the platform, in articles and in books, a liar, a thief, a cheat, a pimp, an adulterer, a robber of innocent women, a drunkard, a dope fiend, a pervert, a hypocrite, a four flusher, a bastard, a cheap organism, a socialist, an anarchist, a communist, a stool pigeon, an agent provocateur, an army deserter, a jailbird, and an ex-convict, a gangster, a bootlegger, an underworld type. A friend and pal of murderers, thieves and crooks also. I have been called a renegade Christian, a disloyal revolutionist, a cowardly radical and almost every name that one can label or discredit a man. I HAVE NEVER DENIED any of the charges."
Carpenter is astute in her assessments, writing, "I'm sure my father was... easier to love once he wasn't there to challenge any self-deception. The more I have learned about him, the stronger my feelings have become. Self-serving and generous, hypocritical and deeply insightful, dishonest in person but honest with posterity, destructive yet with immense vitality, a crackpot soapboxer with visions for a better world far ahead of his contemporaries--these are only a few of his many contradictions."
To order: $15 postpaid to SouthSide Press, 94 Pleasant St,. Lexington, MA 02421.
Henry D. Thoreau: Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, edited by Bradley P. Dean (W. W. Norton, 2004) is a diligently annotated collection of Thoreau's letters to his friend Harrison Blake -- 49 epistles written over the course of thirteen years, focusing mostly on spiritual matters. (As Thoreau writes, "I am preaching, mind you, to bare walls, that is to myself; and if you have chanced to come in and occupy a pew--do not think that my remarks are directed at you particularly, and so slam the seat in disgust.") Only one of Blake's letters--the first-- has survived the years.
Brad Dean, responsible for two previous books of Thoreau's formerly unpublished writings (Wild Apples and Faith in a Seed), sleuths out literary allusions that Thoreau himself may have not consciously realized.
On the 27th of March, 1948, Thoreau wrote to Blake: "I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest... thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. [T]he mathematician [who] would solve a difficult problem... first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your roots run. Why not see,--use our eyes? Do [people] know nothing? I know many...who, in common things, are not to be deceived; who... count their money correctly, and know how to invest it; who are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. If they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for?..."
"Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life as a dog does his master's chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not me too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good--be good for something..."
On May 2, 1848, Thoreau wrote, "I am... easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks."
How to Be A Good Library Patron/How to Be a Bad Library Patron is a little pamphlet that ought to be distributed widely in public libraries. I found its insider humor amusing and its suggestions entirely apt. Illustrated by Androo Robinson, Kelly Froh, Cole Johnson, and others. To acquire a copy, you might send a buck and some stamps to Jerianne, P.O. Box 330156, Murfreesboro, TN 37133.
Roger A. Bruns' The Damndest Radical: The Life and World of Ben Reitman, Chicago's Celebrated Social Reformer, Hobo King, and Whorehouse Physician (University of Illinois Press, 1987) is a biography of Emma Goldman's longtime lover and publicist, ribald anarchist of the gonads, a man who had "I.W.W." branded on his rear by vigilantes in San Diego.
Born in St. Paul in 1879, Reitman experienced paternal abandonment when he was a toddler, and himself left home at any early age (always to return), exploring the U.S. by riding the rails, then exploring the broader world by working as a fireman on a tramp steamer. One of the most significant events of his life was to connect in 1907 with James Eads How's International Brotherhood Welfare Association, an organization founded to help empower homeless men.
While Bruns' descriptions of the Goldman years, with their free speech struggles and government repression, are generally covered better elsewhere, he includes some choice gleanings from Reitman's unpublished autobiography and correspondence. Bruns is on target, I think, when he writes that Reitman's attachment to the anarchist movement--which pretty much ended when Goldman and others were deported in 1918--was "rooted almost entirely in his attachment to Emma Goldman.... If Emma had been a wobbly, a socialist, a labor spokeswomen, a single-taxer, or a food faddist, he probably would have been as avid an ally."
Especially good are chapters on Chicago's Dil Pickle Club c.1915-1931 (spelled here "Dill Pickle Club", Hobo College, Bughouse Square (a soapbox oration venue), and other places frequented by Reitman where diverse people came together, "hoboes with scholars, artists with political radicals, the religious with the irreligious, crackpot health faddists with doctors, eccentrics with other eccentrics." It caused me to retrieve from my shelves From Bughouse Square to the Beat Generation: Selected Ravings of Slim Brundage (Charles H. Kerr, 1997).
A shortcoming: The book glosses over Reitman's significant relationship with his mother who he predeceased.
The Emerson-Thoreau Correspondence
In 1843 Emerson and Thoreau wrote to one another, as first Emerson was in New York, and then, later in the year, when he'd returned to Concord, Thoreau was in Staten Island tutoring Emerson's nephew. The letters are an interesting blend of familiarity, news of friends and family, and discussion of editorial matters concerning The Dial, a magazine Emerson was then editing and to which Thoreau was contributing.
Thoreau writes from Concord that "Elizabeth Hoar still flits about these clearings... in all houses but her own," comments favorably from Staten Island about Emerson's young acquaintance William Tappan ("I like his looks and the sound of his silence"), reports that "I have been to see Henry James, and like him very much," and asserts, "I do not believe there are eight hundred human beings on the globe."
Emerson posts news of the building of a railroad through Concord, commenting on the slave labor of the "poor Irish," and reports that "as pussy has this afternoon nearly killed a young oriole, Edie [daughter Edith] tells all comers, with great energy, her one story, 'Birdy --sick.'"
Edited by F.B. Sanborn, and first published in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1892.
Henry David Thoreau's white hot screed "Slavery in Massachusetts" excoriates the state's elected officials and "justices" for their hypocrisy regarding slavery:
"The majority of the men of the North, and of the South, and East, and West, are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not send men to Congress on errands of humanity, but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty--while I might here insert all that slavery implies and is--it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them. Do what you will, O Government, with my wife and children, my mother and brother, my father and sister. I will obey your commands to the letter. It will indeed grieve me if you hurt them, if you deliver them to overseers to be hunted by hounds or to be whipped to death; but nevertheless, I will peaceably pursue my chosen calling on this fair earth, until perchance, one day, when I have put on mourning for them dead, I shall have persuaded you to relent. Such is the attitude, such are the words of Massachusetts."
"The judges and lawyers... all men of expediency...consider, not whether the Fugutive Slave Bill is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. Is virtue constutitional, or vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? In important moral and vital questions like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not. They persist in being the servants of the worst of men, and not the servants of humanity.... These men act as if they believed that they could safely slide down the hill a little way,--or a good way,--and would surely come to a place, by and by, where they could begin to slide up again...
"Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality,--that it never secures an moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? .... What is wanted is [people], not of policy, but of probity,--who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority. The fate of the century does not depend on how you vote at the polls... it does not depend on what kind of paper your drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of [person] you drop from your chamber into the street every morning."
"I have lived for the past month... with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know at first what ailed me. At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country. I had never respected the Government near to which I had lived, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. For my part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their attraction, and I feel that my investment in life here is worth many percent less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent back an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery.... If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it...."
"I feel that, to some extent, the State has fatally interfered with my lawful business.... I am surprised to see [people] going about their business as if nothing had happened.... We have used up all our inherited freedom. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.... I walk toward one of our ponds, but... [w]ho can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and I involuntarily go plotting against her."
Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twenty Days with Julian and Bunny by Papa (New York Review of Books, 2002) is a thoroughly delightful account from the summer of 1851 when Hawthorne took care of his 5-year-old son while his wife and daughters were away. It's laugh-out-loud funny, and also a nice description of one family's life in New England 153 years ago.
I like a writer who uses words like "unprecedentedest."
"Either I have less patience to-day than ordinary, or the little man makes larger demands upon it; but it really does seem as if he had baited me with more questions, references, and observations than mortal father ought to be expected to endure. He does put me almost beside my propriety; never quitting me, and continually thrusting in his word between the clauses of every sentence of all my reading....He asked me just now--'What are sensible questions?'--I suppose with a view to asking me some....To-day, after beating down a great many thistles, he observed, he observed,--'All the world is a great pricker!' He has an idea that I do not think him very wise; and this afternoon he asked--'Father, do you think I don't know anything?"--'I do,' said I. 'But I knew how to shut the boudoir-door, when you didn't,' rejoined he..."
Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, Volume I (includes excerpts from Twenty Days with Julian and Bunny)
The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau (Sierra Club Books, 1986) presents Robert Bly's selection of Thoreau's poetry, prose, and journal excerpts, along with brief but astute commentary. Especially unusual and excellent: Michael McCurdy's woodcuts imagining Thoreau in the woods, standing at his Walden house door, rowing a boat, poking amidst cattails, and examining a plant.
Bly writes about Thoreau, "I love his fierce and meticulous observation.... I also love the density Thoreau developed in his own personality. He got rid of the collective expectations projected on him, as the community projects on us all, and filled those spaces with more Thoreau--more likes, opinions, and original nature. He was named David Henry Thoreau, but he changed that, and became Henry David Thoreau everywhere in his body, and even in his dense and magnificent sentences. When he was an adult, he was not the sort of tree one cuts down to make a house."
Winter: From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by H.G.O. Blake (Houghton Mifflin, 1887) excerpts Thoreau's winter journals, beginning with entries for December 21, then December 22, and so on, through February 23. About twenty-one years passed--1840-1861--between the writing of the first of these entries, when Thoreau was as young man of 22, and the last, when he was a well-seasoned 43.
I've been soaking up this book slowly: its incomparably lovely prose poetry, sharp wit, deep philosophy, and precise details based upon careful observation of nature, whether of squirrel eating a pine cone, the behavior of kittens, or musing about human nature--friendship, politics, religion. The book's organization helps one see evidence of Thoreau's development over time, as more and more his writing became grounded and based upon direct experience. As I read Winter I also consulted Thoreau's complete published journals to find out what Blake's ellipses left out. It's a whole different experience reading these entries arranged day after day in the course of a year, instead of diving into a lifetime of December 31sts, January 1sts, etc.
"What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own."
"The gods neither hope nor doubt." --Feb. 20, 1840
"I am pleased to think how ignorant and shiftless the wisest are." --Feb. 20, 1841
"If the teeth ache, they can be pulled. If the heart aches, then what?" --Feb 23, 1857
"A [person] has not seen a thing who has not felt it." --Feb 23, 1860
Henry David Thoreau's "An Excursion to Canada" might be called "Thoreau Among the Francophones." It's a joy to read--and further evidence that Thoreau is a most entertaining and pointed travel writer. This long essay is filled with puns, self-deprecatory comments , descriptions of beautiful waterfalls and archaic battlements, amusing anecdotes about bilingual conversations, idiosyncratic commentary on churches, satire of militarism, a description of an omelette being made, criticism of government, thoughts about the sound of the French place names, enlightened thoughts about French-Indian relations, and autobiographical details about what to wear and carry when traveling (not to mention the difficulties of finding vegetarian fare).
It seems that Henry was a bit of a daredevil. Here he describes his efforts to gain a better view of falls over the St. Anne river which "tumbled over a precipice... how far down I do not know, but far enough for all our purposes..... It matters little whether you call it one, or two, or three hundred feet; at any rate, it was a sufficient water-privilege for us. I crossed the principal channel directly over the verge of the fall, where it was contracted to about fifteen feet in width, by a dead tree which had been dropped across and secured in a cleft of the opposite rock, and a smaller one a few feet higher, which served for a hand-rail. This bridge was rotten as well as small and slippery, being stripped of bark, and I was obliged to seize a moment to pass when the falling water did not surge over it, and mid-way, though at the expense of wet feet, I looked down probably more than a hundred feet, into the mist and foam below."
"Falls there are a drug," he exclaims, "and we became quite dissipated in respect to them." Of another falls (Chaudiagere), he writes: " I saw here the most brilliant rainbow that I ever imagined. It was just across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this tremendous fall produced; and I stood on a level with the key-stone of its arch. It was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full semi-circle, only four or five rods in diameter, though as wide as usual, so intensely bright as to pain the eye, and apparently as substantial as an arch of stone. It changed its position and colors as we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and the mist was so thick. Evidently a picture painted on mist for the men and animals that came to the falls to look at; but for what special purpose beyond this, I know not."
On forts, he writes: "I couple all fortifications in my mind with the dismantled Spanish forts to be found in so many parts of the world; and if in any place they are not actually dismantled, it is because there the intellect of the inhabitants is dismantled. The commanding officer of an old fort near Valdivia in South America, when a traveller remarked to him that, with one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces, gravely replied, 'No, I am sure, sir, they would stand two.' Perhaps the guns of Quebec would stand three. Such structures carry us back to the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean deAcre, and the days of the Bucaniers. In the armory of the citadel they showed me a clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun. I thought that their whole citadel was such a Lombard gun, fit object for the museums of the curious. Such works do not consist with the development of the intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress than liberate the mind. They are tombs for the souls of men, as frequently for their bodies also. The sentinel with his musket beside a man with his umbrella is spectral. There is not sufficient reason for his existence. Does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing with me? The fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is amusing to read in Champlain how assiduously they worked at it almost from the first day of the settlement. The founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall,—and no doubt it was a better site, in some respects, for a wall than for a city,—but it chanced that a city got behind it. It chanced, too, that a Lower Town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. It is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by palisades in the old Indian fashion,—interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business. Or is this an indispensible machinery for the good government of the country?....What a troublesome thing a wall is! I thought it was to defend me, and not I it. Of course, if they had no wall they would not need to have any sentinels."
Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty (Gibbs-Smith, 1983) consists chiefly of most of the extant letters written by young explorer Everett Ruess to his family and friends, from June 1930 to November 1934 when he disappeared at the age of twenty in remote southeastern Utah. Edited by W.L. Rusho, the book includes some bare bones biography, many black-and-white photos (some of Everett, some taken years later of country in which he traveled), many of Everett's block prints, and a few brief chapters about the search for Ruess and conjectures about his disappearance.
It was interesting --if not surprising-- to learn how substantially Ruess copied from his journals in composing his letters of 1932 and 1933. (See review immediately below.) There is also repetition here due to his sometimes writing several letters in a day, transcribing anecdotes, descriptions, and prose poetry verbatim occasionally from one letter to another.
Rusho is sometimes off target in his analysis, such as when he writes "Everett's writing had one important limitation: he was apparently unable to fully appreciate or describe the human events and interactions with the landscape he understood so well."
It was interesting to read Ruess's firsthand account of months spent in San Francisco where he ingratiated himself with Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, and spent his spare dollars on art supplies, as well as theater and concert tickets (though he sometimes managed to trade artwork for the latter, or talk himself into complimentary passes).
The book includes important photos here, some taken from the air, that document to a small degree what Rainbow Bridge, Hole in the Rock, and the confluence of the San Juan and Colorado rivers looked like before the flooding that produced the reservoir known officially as Lake Powell.
One letter to Everett from his father makes it clear that Everett's character was formed not only by his artist mother but his philosophical father. (The letter to Everett, dated Dec. 10, 1933, includes thoughtful responses to a list of philosophical questions that Everett had posed. "Eternity is just made of todays," Christopher Ruess wrote; "Glorify the hour."
Excerpts from Everett Ruess's journals and letters
Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess (Gibbs-Smith, 1998) contains the still fresh words of young artist-explorer Everett Ruess who roamed the West in the early 1930s. The journals cover the summers of 1932 and 1933, when Ruess was 18 or 19 years old, first trekking with horses in the Four Corners region, then packing with two burros through Sequoia National Park and Yosemite.
Ruess was an urbanite who'd been befriended by the likes of photographer Edward Weston, but found most of his joy in the wild where he walked, swam, slept, sketched, wrote, made friends with other outdoor humans, and "thought strange thoughts." In late 1934 he disappeared in the remote Davis Gulch region near the Hole in the Rock in southeastern Utah.
John Fahey's Vampire Vultures (Drag City, 2003) is a slender, posthumously published book of wild writings by a musician whose playing and recording can never be pigeonholed. It includes self-psychotherapeutic folk tales about "cat people" and "the great Koonaklaster," a hyper-lucid confession about "why I... do all these artistic things I do" ("to attract someone out there who I can be happy with"), thinly veiled autobiographical accounts of being sexually abused as a child, and letters, one to a would-be author who slept with Fahey and then ripped him off, one to the husband of a woman he loved (asking whether they could be friends), one to someone who cashed his checks-- who he tries to impress by making and sending a mix tape titled "Apocalyptic Indelicacies," complete with esoteric discography, that includes a love song to this very person (whose name he's forgotten).
Painful, funny, dark expressions by a driven artist staking out his place in the world, mostly with people much younger than himself.
"Right now I can hear him saying, 'Call me Fahey. I hate it when people call me John.'" (Damian Rogers from the book's front matter)
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