Thursday, March 12, 2009
Saturday, June 7, 2008
"Aunt Jane," Little Phoebe & 1880's Kansas
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"AUNT JANE," LITTLE PHOEBE & 1880'S KANSAS
Monday
May 7, 2007
Today's Quotation:
"They don't hold themselves responsible for anything; that's the whole trouble with them!"
-- from THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON by Jane Smiley (1998; page 91).
%%%
Dear Jay,
Hello again. And thanks for getting back to me. In the process of recommending Smiley's novel about Lidie Newton in 1850's "Bleeding Kansas," to you recently, I seem to have talked myself into re-reading it myself. Hence, the above quotation, one which carries almost universal applicability -- as I imagine you'd agree. As with McCullough's TRUMAN, each reading of Smiley's LIDIE NEWTON triggers a fresh stream of helpful memories.
While I understand perfectly well the value of tribal stories, oral tradition, cultural history, etc., my own experience while growing up was that neither the oldsters in my Green Family nor in my McCall Family had much of that sort of substance to offer either Kevin or me. Nevertheless, I was recently put in mind of one cloudy item of family lore which I suppose is worth preserving and passing along to your own daughter.
Let me take you back now to that afternoon in the mid-1960's when I was riding in the backseat of my parents' car (probably that big old '56 Packard) next to an aging Phoebe who was being treated to one last leisurely drive through the ghostscape of her girlhood, with particular focus on the Peoria, Kansas cemetery (where both her parents are evidently buried, along with [and I may have this all wrong] her sister Mozell [sp?] who died in her 20's, when Phoebe was a little girl in the 1880's). Because I never dreamed that things would turn out anything like they've turned out (assuming it's not still too early to apply the notion of things having "turned out" either this way or that . . . ), I neglected to take as careful notes on that distant afternoon as I would have otherwise. Never imagining that this day would ever arrive when I'd be quizzed over all that I saw and all that the oldsters said that afternoon, I let my mind wonder to such matters
as which girls I might have been able to date in the upcoming schoolyear.
Anyway, I remember that we were riding in that car together on that afternoon along an unpaved country road through a dense grove of trees which evidently had once surrounded a fairly extensive farmstead. And I remember that the minute we drew near to this haunted grove, Phoebe started talking to me about an old Negro woman whose only name she'd ever known was "Aunt Jane." This old woman was a former slave who took care of Phoebe and her younger siblings, May & Foster & Bess, when they were very small children on the Evans farm, back in the 1880's & 90's. (She may also have served as nanny to Lydia and other of Phoebe's siblings, whose names now escape me. We all know what the situation was back then with infant mortality, as well as with scarlet fever, typhoid, smallpox, influenza, etc.)
In point of fact, Phoebe didn't drag in any of this sociological garbage that I've just subjected you to, when she talked to me that afternoon about the kindly former slave woman she'd known only as "Aunt Jane." I suspect that she had very little conscious memory of her. And yet, I can't help imagining that it was Aunt Jane who kindled in Phoebe that spirit of inclusiveness she handed down to us.
BUT I COULD BE WRONG,
Galen
.
"AUNT JANE," LITTLE PHOEBE & 1880'S KANSAS
Monday
May 7, 2007
Today's Quotation:
"They don't hold themselves responsible for anything; that's the whole trouble with them!"
-- from THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON by Jane Smiley (1998; page 91).
%%%
Dear Jay,
Hello again. And thanks for getting back to me. In the process of recommending Smiley's novel about Lidie Newton in 1850's "Bleeding Kansas," to you recently, I seem to have talked myself into re-reading it myself. Hence, the above quotation, one which carries almost universal applicability -- as I imagine you'd agree. As with McCullough's TRUMAN, each reading of Smiley's LIDIE NEWTON triggers a fresh stream of helpful memories.
While I understand perfectly well the value of tribal stories, oral tradition, cultural history, etc., my own experience while growing up was that neither the oldsters in my Green Family nor in my McCall Family had much of that sort of substance to offer either Kevin or me. Nevertheless, I was recently put in mind of one cloudy item of family lore which I suppose is worth preserving and passing along to your own daughter.
Let me take you back now to that afternoon in the mid-1960's when I was riding in the backseat of my parents' car (probably that big old '56 Packard) next to an aging Phoebe who was being treated to one last leisurely drive through the ghostscape of her girlhood, with particular focus on the Peoria, Kansas cemetery (where both her parents are evidently buried, along with [and I may have this all wrong] her sister Mozell [sp?] who died in her 20's, when Phoebe was a little girl in the 1880's). Because I never dreamed that things would turn out anything like they've turned out (assuming it's not still too early to apply the notion of things having "turned out" either this way or that . . . ), I neglected to take as careful notes on that distant afternoon as I would have otherwise. Never imagining that this day would ever arrive when I'd be quizzed over all that I saw and all that the oldsters said that afternoon, I let my mind wonder to such matters
as which girls I might have been able to date in the upcoming schoolyear.
Anyway, I remember that we were riding in that car together on that afternoon along an unpaved country road through a dense grove of trees which evidently had once surrounded a fairly extensive farmstead. And I remember that the minute we drew near to this haunted grove, Phoebe started talking to me about an old Negro woman whose only name she'd ever known was "Aunt Jane." This old woman was a former slave who took care of Phoebe and her younger siblings, May & Foster & Bess, when they were very small children on the Evans farm, back in the 1880's & 90's. (She may also have served as nanny to Lydia and other of Phoebe's siblings, whose names now escape me. We all know what the situation was back then with infant mortality, as well as with scarlet fever, typhoid, smallpox, influenza, etc.)
In point of fact, Phoebe didn't drag in any of this sociological garbage that I've just subjected you to, when she talked to me that afternoon about the kindly former slave woman she'd known only as "Aunt Jane." I suspect that she had very little conscious memory of her. And yet, I can't help imagining that it was Aunt Jane who kindled in Phoebe that spirit of inclusiveness she handed down to us.
BUT I COULD BE WRONG,
Galen
.
Galen & Ginsberg in Wichita (circa 1966)
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Subject: GALEN & GINSBERG IN WICHITA; circa 1966; II
Thursday
November 30, 2006
(Before the Blizzard)
Dear Magda & Jaromir,
Now that you've had the opportunity to read a few lines of Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra," please allow me to share with you the short version of how I'm most directly connected with that poem.
Before I do so, however, I wanted to mention a very well-known and generally highly-regarded American novel from the 1920's. It' entitled BABBIT and was written by Sinclair Lewis. With regard to all that Jaromir and I have talked about over the past few weeks, it occurred to me the other day that Lewis's BABBIT may well be the one single book which most compactly contains my own vision of what's wrong with life today in Johnson County, Kansas. I understand that you're both as busy as I am nowadays, but I happen to know for a fact that BABBIT is available on both cassette and CD, in case you have time to listen to it in your car or home sometime. If, by chance, you're already thoroughly familiar with it, perhaps we could chat about it in the near future and discuss its critical bearing on our mutual discontents with our mutual culture, both global and local.
What I'd started to say before remembering that I'd meant to mention BABBIT to you (especially Jaromir) was that Allen Ginsberg's longish hallucinatory post-Beat poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" holds a rather special place in my heart. There are several reasons for this. One obvious reason is that it was evidently composed in and around and is therefore inevitably highly referential to Wichita, Kansas, the small city where I grew up and went to school.
A more personal reason, however, is that I actually had the privilege of coming into a kind of distant contact with Ginsberg when he was visiting Wichita in 1966, back when I was a junior at East High School there. How this came about was that my adoptive mother Margaret mentioned to me at the supper table one evening that she'd read in the paper that Ginsberg had recently given several performances of his (by 1966 Wichita [a la Babbit] standards) outrageous poetry at a place called The Skidrow Beanery, a rundown old 19-teenzish vacant retail space in one of the older sections of downtown Wichita, just west of the train station. At the time, I happened to be dating an unusually moxy, adventuresome, bohemian kindred spirit my age named Pam Batchelor, who was probably the only girl in a high school of 3,000 students who'd have had the spunk and grit and curiosity to let me take her to this mysterious, decadent Skidrow Beanery one evening, in search
of the legendary Allen Ginsberg.
The short version is that someone else was reading instead that evening; but Ginsberg was present, lurking in the shadows, behind one of those beaded-string curtains that were to become so modish a few years later. There he was, the living legend himself, bearded and younger than I am today, swaying silently in a shadowy haze of incense to the wildly homoerotic post-Beat-style hallucinatory rantings of a Ginsberg wanna-be who called himself something like Dallas Townsend, and who, decades later, lived across a rundown 20's-Hollywood-style 4-plex courtyard from me on South Old Manor Road and was thrilled to death to learn through casual conversation that, as a curious Ginsberg-worshipping teenager, I'd heard him read his poetry that evening in 1966 at the Skidrow Beanery.
It wasn't until 1973 that I finally got to meet Ginsberg in person and to hear him perform, when I was a grad student at the University of Utah.
To Be Continued,
Galen
.
Subject: GALEN & GINSBERG IN WICHITA; circa 1966; II
Thursday
November 30, 2006
(Before the Blizzard)
Dear Magda & Jaromir,
Now that you've had the opportunity to read a few lines of Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra," please allow me to share with you the short version of how I'm most directly connected with that poem.
Before I do so, however, I wanted to mention a very well-known and generally highly-regarded American novel from the 1920's. It' entitled BABBIT and was written by Sinclair Lewis. With regard to all that Jaromir and I have talked about over the past few weeks, it occurred to me the other day that Lewis's BABBIT may well be the one single book which most compactly contains my own vision of what's wrong with life today in Johnson County, Kansas. I understand that you're both as busy as I am nowadays, but I happen to know for a fact that BABBIT is available on both cassette and CD, in case you have time to listen to it in your car or home sometime. If, by chance, you're already thoroughly familiar with it, perhaps we could chat about it in the near future and discuss its critical bearing on our mutual discontents with our mutual culture, both global and local.
What I'd started to say before remembering that I'd meant to mention BABBIT to you (especially Jaromir) was that Allen Ginsberg's longish hallucinatory post-Beat poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" holds a rather special place in my heart. There are several reasons for this. One obvious reason is that it was evidently composed in and around and is therefore inevitably highly referential to Wichita, Kansas, the small city where I grew up and went to school.
A more personal reason, however, is that I actually had the privilege of coming into a kind of distant contact with Ginsberg when he was visiting Wichita in 1966, back when I was a junior at East High School there. How this came about was that my adoptive mother Margaret mentioned to me at the supper table one evening that she'd read in the paper that Ginsberg had recently given several performances of his (by 1966 Wichita [a la Babbit] standards) outrageous poetry at a place called The Skidrow Beanery, a rundown old 19-teenzish vacant retail space in one of the older sections of downtown Wichita, just west of the train station. At the time, I happened to be dating an unusually moxy, adventuresome, bohemian kindred spirit my age named Pam Batchelor, who was probably the only girl in a high school of 3,000 students who'd have had the spunk and grit and curiosity to let me take her to this mysterious, decadent Skidrow Beanery one evening, in search
of the legendary Allen Ginsberg.
The short version is that someone else was reading instead that evening; but Ginsberg was present, lurking in the shadows, behind one of those beaded-string curtains that were to become so modish a few years later. There he was, the living legend himself, bearded and younger than I am today, swaying silently in a shadowy haze of incense to the wildly homoerotic post-Beat-style hallucinatory rantings of a Ginsberg wanna-be who called himself something like Dallas Townsend, and who, decades later, lived across a rundown 20's-Hollywood-style 4-plex courtyard from me on South Old Manor Road and was thrilled to death to learn through casual conversation that, as a curious Ginsberg-worshipping teenager, I'd heard him read his poetry that evening in 1966 at the Skidrow Beanery.
It wasn't until 1973 that I finally got to meet Ginsberg in person and to hear him perform, when I was a grad student at the University of Utah.
To Be Continued,
Galen
.
Friday, June 6, 2008
"After-Image" by Galen Green (c. 1986)
.
AFTER-IMAGE
1.
This year’s been one in which I’ve thought of you and other friends, and wondered
How we do these passive panic dances, these old and new modes of alienation from
The light of who we are and...how we become the tree of our knowledge of what we
Want each other to see, when I think about you and you about me.
Watching a candle, I think again tonight of you and me and us and where we’d be,
If not for our brief sharing of those bright moments long ago on our way to these
True and separate moments here and now. I agree that sentimentality is hardly
Ever the right emotion. Yet, when I think of how we outgrew the past and each
Other, I close my eyes on the white after-image of memory, distant, tight.
2.
The clock on the wall tells me where to go, into the future in the only machine
I know. This jar of cider is all I have to show for the thousands of minutes I’ve
Dragged my fleshy freight from my mother’s feet where I used to play to my mother’s
Feet, which have followed me all the way to here and now. My breath just wants to
Say that it has enjoyed hosting my wonderful weight.
Watching this candle tonight, I cannot delay a moment longer in swallowing the bait
Of your face in my memory which from below consciousness swallows me. And here
I’ll stay from now until it all becomes too late to think anymore and it’s time to
Stop and grow into next year and tomorrow and time to wait and...time to sit and
Contemplate the gray.
3.
This year’s been one in which I’ve sat on the lawn and thought of you and other
Friends who’ve gone into the touchless past. Tonight, I yawn with joy and think
Of you...and prop my feet on an empty crate and rub my weary eyes and sip this
Jar of cider and the lies I tell myself as this once-bright candle dies.
The clock in my memory tells me not to treat these thoughts of you too rough,
Lest they rise and body forth into this air like the sweet reality of the you
I knew at the dawn of my days on earth: your shoulders, breasts and thighs
Composed by the gods of love, perfect, neat. This year’s been one in which I’ve
Played the pawn to the white queen of your memory, sketched on a sheet of blank
After-image, this empty street.
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986
.
AFTER-IMAGE
1.
This year’s been one in which I’ve thought of you and other friends, and wondered
How we do these passive panic dances, these old and new modes of alienation from
The light of who we are and...how we become the tree of our knowledge of what we
Want each other to see, when I think about you and you about me.
Watching a candle, I think again tonight of you and me and us and where we’d be,
If not for our brief sharing of those bright moments long ago on our way to these
True and separate moments here and now. I agree that sentimentality is hardly
Ever the right emotion. Yet, when I think of how we outgrew the past and each
Other, I close my eyes on the white after-image of memory, distant, tight.
2.
The clock on the wall tells me where to go, into the future in the only machine
I know. This jar of cider is all I have to show for the thousands of minutes I’ve
Dragged my fleshy freight from my mother’s feet where I used to play to my mother’s
Feet, which have followed me all the way to here and now. My breath just wants to
Say that it has enjoyed hosting my wonderful weight.
Watching this candle tonight, I cannot delay a moment longer in swallowing the bait
Of your face in my memory which from below consciousness swallows me. And here
I’ll stay from now until it all becomes too late to think anymore and it’s time to
Stop and grow into next year and tomorrow and time to wait and...time to sit and
Contemplate the gray.
3.
This year’s been one in which I’ve sat on the lawn and thought of you and other
Friends who’ve gone into the touchless past. Tonight, I yawn with joy and think
Of you...and prop my feet on an empty crate and rub my weary eyes and sip this
Jar of cider and the lies I tell myself as this once-bright candle dies.
The clock in my memory tells me not to treat these thoughts of you too rough,
Lest they rise and body forth into this air like the sweet reality of the you
I knew at the dawn of my days on earth: your shoulders, breasts and thighs
Composed by the gods of love, perfect, neat. This year’s been one in which I’ve
Played the pawn to the white queen of your memory, sketched on a sheet of blank
After-image, this empty street.
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986
.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
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