Anyone in New York City able to go catch the auction? Lots close on Dec. 8th as i understand… Would make a heck of a Christmas present ?
Anyhow, Dharma Bums has a $240K USD opening bid with $300-500K estimate {my guess is $650K+ USD}
Including: “a green quarter morocco slipcase and chemise.” {best feature!}
Any of you in the area to go document the proceedings? (and say “hallo” to the new custodian)
Kerouac Big Sur Postcard
There are a whole bunch of other Kerouac artifacts up on this auction block including many typed letters including to Allen Ginsberg and other notable characters.
While most items, starting obviously with the original rolled typescript of “Dharma Bums” are a couple $,000 beyond me, can’t help but notice this original Kerouac Postcard from Big Sur which seems like it should *really be* in my kura studio – I mean it hits all of my marks right?
The price is not as eye-watering and the postmark is lovely. Estimate 1,000 – 2,000 USD Starting Bid 600 USD
My dear Dad passed on on this day (3:30 AM PST at home in Surrey BC, I was on the Night Shift holding his hand), 2014.
Yesterday I’m holding my boy Ichiro Stanley while his mother sings in an afternoon across the Pacific in Japan.
In a minute-ish will get up, drink coffee (Ichi is grinding beans), wear the red velvet rope he insists upon and make scrambled eggs for us 3.
Later we’ll sharpen knives, then we’ll go out to the kura barn and set up a drum set.
Two months from yesterday, we 3 will ride a big jet liner and make our way to light incense and maybe leave an orange at his marker.
So we go on, oh how we go on.
Bonus
Axe Handles BY GARY SNYDER
One afternoon the last week in April Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet One-half turn and it sticks in a stump. He recalls the hatchet-head Without a handle, in the shop And go gets it, and wants it for his own. A broken-off axe handle behind the door Is long enough for a hatchet, We cut it to length and take it With the hatchet head And working hatchet, to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle With the hatchet, and the phrase First learned from Ezra Pound Rings in my ears! "When making an axe handle the pattern is not far off." And I say this to Kai "Look: We'll shape the handle By checking the handle Of the axe we cut with—" And he sees. And I hear it again: It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the Preface: "In making the handle Of an axe By cutting wood with an axe The model is indeed near at hand." My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen Translated that and taught it years ago And I see: Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on.
Jason welcomes under-qualified window-washer Dave Olson & his fantastic beard & beautiful hands for a natter about punching or hugging Dostoevsky, see-through loincloths, meeting REM, borrowing mustard from Allen Ginsberg, dodgy Greyhound stations, working out the writing life math, and how cheerleaders are people too. There's ropey Egyptian history, a savage polemic, the details of hippy teacher Mr Boris's new motorized home, a few bits & Brother Bobs of Dave's early poetry & prose, & Jason getting his King Tut timeline wrong by only 3700 years. An unnerving—if not terrifying—time is guaranteed for all. Music by the outrageous DJ Max in Tokyo. Many thanks, wherever & whoever & however you are, for listening.
PPS more should be said about this wonderful conversation and yes, I have scans of more of the artifacts {and about Jason & my correspondence} so pardon brevity, I’m in a fog
grab your passport, map and suitcase and let’s go Go GO!
A rollicking mixed-media revue of a groundbreaking exhibit in Japan featuring a stunningly-reproduced facsimile of the taped-together sc/roll manuscript of what became Jack Kerouac’s seminal, counter-culture-sparking novel “On The Road.”
Blurb: A lively conversation between storymaker Dave Olson and with Professor & President of Beat Studies Assoc., Matt Theado of Kobe City University Dept of Foreign Studies, at BB Plaza Art Museum in Kobe, Japan, summer of 2021 after the event was delayed for a year for *public health conundrums* and re-imagined to include a truly remarkable collection of ephemera, chapbooks, broadsides, posters, typewrtier, records, various editions of On the Road, related book, maps, Japanese language glossary and much more – most provided by Kazu-san of Flying Books of Tokyo.
The fast-placed video includes many artifacts from the exhibit and from the host’s life of travels and evidence of “living beat” to connect the experience to *anyone’s* life (that means “you” if you choose).
Oh so glad you stopped by for “Kerouac in Kobe”
Riffs:
Logistics of creating the”authorized forgery/reproduction” of the noted taped-together original manuscript & how the original plan of bringing the original manuscript (and Mr. Jim Canary) was thwarted
The symposium of writers, scholars, translators held at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies (YT archive)
Observations about Jack’s process in writing the work (and dispelling the myth of a benzadrine-induced manic type-athon) including the importance of “working with you got,” notebooks, list taking, knowing where you are going
How he immediately re-typed on “regular paper”, changing names and making ready for publication
Scenes of life of America in transition at the time, the embrace of bohemian culture
Blurb: On our meandering adventure of a honeymoon in May-June 2019, we travelled by many means of convenience including a wide variety of trains, rental cars, occasional coach buses and what not. See the whole Shinkonryoko Scrapbook for a mixed-media ephemera overview and a list of places visited for the curious.
i see you too
As such, in Kanazawa, Ishikawa-ken (a city filled with exceptional museums – by my standards, especially small, specialized, and a little bit quirky) we visited the D.T. (Daisetz) Suzuki Zen museum.
This esteemed gentleman was largely the driving force for introducing the concept of Zen Buddhism to the “west” in contemporary times. He spoke several languages and traveled widely, certainly influencing notable figures as Alan Watts and Gary Snyder and possibly you.
the restraint of *not* filling walls with *everything all at once* is not something i am accustomed to :)
The museum is a modern, rendered concrete designed by Yoshio Taniguchi largely assembled rectangles with a water courtyard with large windows playing with light against the garden.
As one might expect, lots of space for contemplation throughout the buildings, long empty hallways, simple signage, a few large pictures and wonderful scrolls.
the scholar and teacher DT Suzuki doing his scholarly pursuits
This shelf, containing “danger on peaks” was itself dangerous and not aesthetically pleasing so now it is a garden planter box
March 13, 2022: I went to sleep last night – first night without a fire in the stove for some time – on tatami mats reading “Danger on Peaks”, dedicated to Carole, woke up as my Ryoko took little Ichiro to school, recalling Gary writing about being a 63-year-old stepdad taking a 10-year-old to school in the carpool, and thinking of myself at 10 years old on 95th Ave. in Surrey, getting ready for church the Sunday morning when Mt St Helens erupted, remembering the feeling of the unusual rumble (was not an 18 wheeler), and thinking of Gary coming down the mountain as a 13-year-old to learn that Japan was bombed and “nothing will grow there for 70 years“ and how Hiroshima is just down the road from me, indeed wonderful noodles, activists & parks.
Poured fresh French Press coffee, and picked up my robot and read Wang Ping’s remarkable recounting moments with the axe handle, with the boy-now-man (about my vintage) who the axe handle was created with, with the poet (who had been just up the road in Kyoto, probably pass through here at some point), together throwing hatchets into a stump, then into a barn (no food allowed to prevent pests, like my kura), pulling out Ezra Pound and Han Shan, pages falling open to the exact place, and marveling at the un-coincidence of it all. Such treasure.
It’s all about the cycles as Gary said to Lew. Or was that vice versa?
Also, Ichiro – a year and a half old – loves no toy more than the brush and scoop to clean the woodstove & darling Ryoko now has the skill to light the store with a single match with help from my special arts and crafts made from egg cartons, soy paraffin and sawdust learned from my mother, her ashes on the altar.
Hail the fire queens, axe carvers, and pantry mice!
Written (maybe March 2021?) in reply to an association/community of creatives riffing off the Jack Kerouac writing for Japhy Ryder (*cough* modeled after Gary Snyder) about a rucksack revolution.
My feeling is the beat generation, the lost generation, romantics, punks/hippies/pranksters and/or whatever movement you want to namecheck are labels of convenience (we love to categorize) and – importantly – don’t live fossilized in amber.
Ergo: people who are creating today *honestly and authentically* are part of a continuous strand which occasionally picks up names along the way.
daveo
stash your gear in a rucksack and go be in the world
We are a *new* movement whether it has an “name” or not. If you are writing, sharing, wondering, wandering, rambling, sharing, filling notebooks with joy & impunity, endless letters to lovers you’ll never meet & living full on, going going going.
We are who we are, regardless of generation and accidental timings of birth or state of the world, we take in all that came before us and (perhaps) we spark what will come after us. We are the rucksack revolution who found a place to sit calmly, share widely, create honestly, give openly, inspire gently and carry-on intrepidly through it all.
Indeed for decades when I would ramble on about these literary heroes, most people would stare blankly, even lots of Deadheads didn’t trace the lineage but now, what was once “counter culture” has bubbled up into consensus reality so often.
We are the ambassadors and the diplomats but also the practitioners … and we have mighty tools available to us! So many writers were never “known“ because a suit in a New York City office didn’t *take a chance* on them (their efforts sequestered in shoeboxes in attics and lost to unknowing grandchildren or recycle bins) but now all of us can publish everything / all the time / everywhere and (importantly) cultivate a community like one does with a garden.
Now I’m so pleased and proud to help amplify these classic & contemporary stories in Japan through exhibits and examples, plus – again importantly – inspiring other people to create their stories and sprinkle them out to the universe in whatever form they choose.
Fck Stats, Make Art.
Right here / it’s all about the cycles: they showed us the way, keep your notebooks handy & pencil sharpened, remember to share, remember to seek, & remember to go go go.
“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures …”
Jack Kerouac *fictional quoting* Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums
The great poet Gary Snyder’s “entire” collection of published – and previously uncollected works – was recently assembled and published by the “Library of America” (realizing here I don’t really know exactly what the Library of America is but certainly recognize their distinctive cover art).
Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems | Myths & Texts | The Back Country | Regarding Wave | Turtle Island | Axe Handles | Left Out in the Rain | from No Nature | Mountains and Rivers Without End | Danger on Peaks | This Present Moment | Uncollected Poems, Drafts, Fragments, and Translations
Poet Wang PingSensei Gary Snyder
Anyway, to commemorate the occasion, there was a video-teleconferencing-event with various collaborators, writers, enthusiasts, naturalists, acquaintances, a noted elected official, and so on providing personal anecdotes about esteemed Mr. Snyder as well as reading a few particular favourites from his extensive canon.
For my own reference (and yours), here are a couple of screenshots from (what was the early morning in Japan) event with Gary and Poet Wang Ping who shared her wonderful story about Axe Handles which includes a real life incident involving *the* axe handle, the real kid (now adult), and the actual Ezra Pound book – whew.
