Who Knew?

According to the cover of the 1990 Picador classics edition, Yeats was a looker.

Wearing...

...my designated job-interview outfit. Of course, the resumé isn't ready, and I haven't been cruising the job sites lately. Last day in present job is July 6; it's a little too soon to jobhunt seriously. Besides, if I think about it I become painfully disengaged from the present moment at work. Like right now. Just wanna go home and hide under the bed.

Pertinent horror story from library patron. They are trying to identify pueblo pots they used to own: moving van burned up between here and California and they lost everything...

Still About Kerouac, Different Shape of Degrees of Separation

About ten years later I was living at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Philip Whalen was teaching a class in writing poetry. For an exercise he asked us to write about something beautiful.

        Michael McClure is beautiful    (I wrote)
        ten years later.
        Slightly grey
        that smile
        and still the handsomest man I've ever seen.

"Kerouac thought so too," said Phil. "Huh?" I said. "He said McClure was the handsomest man he'd ever seen," said Phil.

*****************
I suppose this needs all kinds of footnotes. That in 1977 McClure had just then been at Zen Center for a reading. That in 1967 I served him mashed potatoes, or maybe it was peas, in the serving line at the free Thanksgiving dinner in the basement of All Saint's Episcopal Church on Waller Street (or maybe it was Howard Presbyterian on Oak Street) in the Haight. That in the Instamatic Archive I (still) have a picture I took of McClure and Freewheelin' Frank the Hell's Angel making music behind the stage at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967.

That Certain Amount of Experience With Scroll Manuscripts

I went back to the Museum this evening and type type typed my story. It goes:

This is the scroll story. It's a little misty as to before and after. In 1968 I was living in a carriage house on the inside of the block bounded by Haight, Belvedere, Waller and Cole in the Haight Ashbury. My downstairs neighbor had a kind of continuous open house which ran on pills for half of every month until he ran out of money. Among the people who came to Tommy's was a poet named John Foret, who evenually connected my friend Jet with Irving Rosenthal, who had just arrived from New York with a printing press and Beat Connections. I think that's how a man named Angel got into my life and my apartment. Angel had also just arrived, from Afghanistan with a leather jacket full of hashish, and so couldn't stay in Irving's commune... anyway, Angel saw the typewriter on my kitchen table and told me that Kerouac had composed On the Road in a continuous scroll on telegraph paper. I went away for a few days and Angel stayed in my apartment. When I came home, Angel was gone and my cat Pickle was lost, and there was a long long scroll typed on yellow paper in the typewriter. I rolled it up and taped it with masking tape, and kept it a long time, but Angel never came back. I've no idea what I did with it in the end, but I can see it plainly in my memory, even now 40 years later. The paper was much heavier than Kerouac's—I was quite startled when I saw how thin the Museum's scroll is. About a year later the cat reappeared for a couple of days. He seemed to remember me, but had turned into a huge wild street cat, and didn't stay.

Where the Ouzel Was

Went with PG to Cave Creek, elevation about 8800' in the Pecos Wilderness. There's as much water as I've ever seen in the Pecos River, in Panchuela Creek, in Cave Creek. It was a nearly perfect day. We saw Abert's squirrels, various butterflies, lots of juncos and an Audubon's warbler, a ouzel; and heard but not saw an owl.There was leftover snow by the caves, and a haze of pussywillow catkins, and so much water in the creek that it was not all plunging underground into the caves, as it does in normal seasons; overflow was bypassing the cave openings, and continuing on down the usually dry stretch of creek bed. Not many wildflowers yet. The iris are just coming up out of the ground and won't bloom for weeks. We saw strawberries blooming, alyssum, violets in both white and violet, a groundsel, very small red-and-yellow columbines, something tiny and white.Above, PG demonstrates the aging-librarian technique for crossing creeks in spate: the bend-over-and-clutch-whatever's-handy method. Below, she suddenly wanders off the trail and uphill into an aspen grove, looking for the owl.Panchuela Creek showing off. This is where the ouzel was.Links: the same hike in a different season of a different year. Topozone map with location of caves at center of image.