Robinson Jeffers and Big Sur

"NO major American poet has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers," poet/critic dana gioia wrote in 1987, lamenting the lack of scholarly attention, an up-to-date selected poems, or a full-dress biography of this california writer who was once read voraciously and still inspires environmentalists.

a few things have changed since then, but the great poet of california's central coast is still widely overlooked. HERE is my humble attempt to try to bring this austere and charismatic man some attention. this is basically a travel piece about big sur and carmel, but with jeffers's life, work and times -- mostly the 1930s -- providing the framework.

so we visited Tor House -- the stone house jeffers had built, and the tower he built, almost single-handedly, for his wife by rolling stones up from the pacific -- the point lobos state park he captured in verse, as well as the henry miller library, dedicated to a writer who knew and admired jeffers.

while watching at the pacific's waves slam into the towering rocks, it was hard not to be struck with jeffers' vision of the california coast as both the geographic end of western culture's grand experiment and a renewing source for it.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

TODAY i'm wishing a happy 105th to one of the greatest writers this country has known, and one i've come to appreciate more as i've revisited him for the sake of my son. (i only regret that the good doctor did not have the good fortune to be born an aquarius.)

there are many wonderful authors for little kids -- lucy cousins, eric carle, byron barton, ezra jack keats -- but for an adult who loves the sound of language, what an electric jolt it is to get to the point where you can read junior dr. seuss! even a simple, almost monosyllabic book like

"hop on pop" is quite ingenious.

perhaps my favorite of his, and certainly the most poignant of his books, is THE LORAX. here is a recent LAT story, not by me, about that book and how is speaks to both the past and present of the green movement.

part of what has struck me as i've read the book for the second and third time on the same day to my son ian is how stodgy the lorax himself is. that is, here is a book written effectively, in "the 60s" (it came out in 1971), with an enviro/countercultural message, and where the hero is someone who represents not youth but the wisdom of the ages. in fact, the once-ler, the spirit of full-speed-ahead capitalism and innovation, has a younger, more dynamic spirit and actually calls the doomy lorax "dad" in a condescending way. we have geisel, an older liberal, looking at his times and coming to an original conclusion about what's needed. it also presages the way al gore was often portrayed.

(a great overlooked book is "on beyond zebra," which posits a kind of psychedelic alphabet that picks up where ours lets off. appealed to my childhood love of codes and hidden things.)

but you've surely got your own favorites. either way, happy birthday to the good doctor!!

Photo credit: Flickr user 31

GREAT OVERLOOKED NOVEL

Over the last couple years i covered books, mostly novels, almost exclusively, and there's no way anyone can read everything. but let me call james howard kunstler's "world made by hand" my favorite undersung novel of '08, or something along those lines.

the book is the tale of a little village in upstate new york in a world suspiciously like ours, but after resources have run out almost entirely. the residents have returned to a kind of rustic 19th century simplicity -- they homebrew beer, shop for stuff in an elaborate town dump, wish they had electricity, worry about some religious zealots wandering up from down south, etc... alan weisman, who wrote the wonderful/chilling "the world without us," called it "a poignant, provocatively convincing novel," which sounds about right.

i can just add that nothing i've read captures so well the tone of life after the economic meltdown. it's not exactly reassuring, but shows how life can and will go on, in ways both better and worse. here is a NYT essay (not by me) on this and its precursor "ecotopia."

kunstler is a left-leaning social critic (and longtime novelist) and i must say, i had all the reasonable fears of a novel penned by such a fellow. (i mean no disrespect -- some of my best friends are lefty social critics.) but i was completely unprepared for how lyrical and gently persuasive the book is -- for me certainly more affecting (sorry, cormac mccarthy) than the grim and powerful "the road."

the author's earlier books include the acclaimed, "the long emergency," which is an important jeremiad about the coming collapse of oil, environmental devastation, etc -- well written, tirelessly researched, etc, but kind of relentless as a read. this one is like, i dont know, dylan's john wesley harding record or "music from big pink" or something.

but dont take my word for it -- "world made by hand" just came out in paperback.

Photo credit: Grove/Atlantic and Flickr user 8

FIRST POST: BACK FROM THE DEAD + NYT

Hi Gang, I'm glad to report that after a period of enforced silence I'm back with a few stories I'm proud of.

Here's the first, a New York Times piece on a 70s cult novel called "Ecotopia."

The novel is not as well written or nuanced as Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia," which by coincidence i reread at about the same time (that is tough company)... but it's a "novel of ideas" that you can read on an airplane, and how many of those are there? my story concentrates on the way the book anticipated some of the environmental movement and the michael-pollan eat-local thing. "ecotopia" was green before green was cool, you could say.

This blog will keep interested readers up to date on my stories, which will be appearing in numerous places now, as well as various thoughts-of-the-day on interests such as wine, science-fiction, indie-rock and California weather. At least, I think so.

Cheers,

Scott

Photos courtesy Callenbach