Happy Ninetieth Birthday, Gary!
Link here to the video:
Gary Snyder 90 Birthday Reading from “Little Songs for Gaia”
Happy reBirthday, Gary Snyder!
Botanist Tim Hogan Reviews Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth and Writes on “The Green World”
Tim Hogan, Zen Mountain Man and Collections Manager of Botany at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History, just shared his review of Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
After quoting Paul Shephard saying that “the ‘civilized mind’ attempts to simplify and level the world, whereas the ‘[indigenous] mind’ is not afraid to become enmeshed in its complexity,” Tim concludes (p. 108):
Futureprimitive bioregionalists find solace in such views, acknowledging the transformation toward an ecological civilization, if it is to be realized, will be multigenerational. Arne Naess, the founder of Deep Ecology, is reputed to have said he was pessimistic about the 21st century but optimistic about the 22nd. If we are to make it through the coming decades, Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth may be viewed as one of the maps that helped pull us through.
Also see Tim’s informative long essay on plants, the miracle of photosynthesis, and threats to species diversity:
Tim Hogan, “The Green World,” The Ecological Citizen 3, Suppl A (2019): 13-21. [PDF]
Smokey the Bear Sutra (1969) and Smokey’s Rebirthday (2019)
This morning Meri reminded me that today is the 75th rebirthday of Smokey the Bear, so together we read out loud, antiphonally, the Smokey the Bear Sutra under the Sunflowers of Vairocana and over breakfast.
Of this Smokey the Bear Sutra, Katherine McNeil has this in her bibliography (Entry A 20):
Single leaf broadside.…Printed in black on light yellow paper. Published anonymously. According to Snyder, he had “Smokey” printed on the occasion of the Sierra Club’s Biennial Wilderness Conference in San Francisco, February 1969. He took the text to East Wind Printers and paid them $110 to print up 1,000 copies. The next day he and friend Keith Lampe distributed the broadside in the lobby of the San Francisco Hilon Hotel, site of the conference. An unknown number of subsequent printings were made [“It just goes and goes”] and the Sierra Club was the last known proprietor of the plate. The poem was later collected in the Shaman Drum Press publication The Fudo Trilogy [Entry A 46]. (Katherine McNeil, Gary Snyder: A Bibliography (New York: The Phoenix Bookshop, 1983), pp. 38–39).
So this from our library as well:
~ ~ ~
Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago,
the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite
Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements
and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings,
the flying beings, and the sitting beings — even grasses,
to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a
seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning
Enlightenment on the planet Earth.
“In some future time, there will be a continent called
America. It will have great centers of power called
such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur,
Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels
such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon.
The human race in that era will get into troubles all over
its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of
its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”
“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings
of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth.
My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and
granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that
future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure
the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger:
and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”
And he showed himself in his true form of
SMOKEY THE BEAR
—Gary Snyder, Smokey the Bear Sutra (preamble)
“Fieldwork: Gary Snyder, Libraries, and Book Learning” in A Sense of the Whole
Available here is a PDF of Appendix 3:
Mark Gonnerman, “Fieldwork: Gary Snyder, Libraries, and Book Learning,” in A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder’s Mountain
Gonnerman_Gary Snyder and Book Learning_A Sense of the Whole 2015
Saburo Hasegawa and Isamu Noguchi Exhibition (Yokohama! Queens! San Francisco!) and Books
The other day, Meri Mitsuyoshi caught a Wall Street Journal article introducing Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. This exhibition opened at Japan’s Yokohama Museum of Art (January 12–March 24), is currently at the Noguchi Museum in Queens (May 1–July 14, 2019), and will be at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco this coming September 27–December 8, 2019!
This superb (by all accounts) exhibition is curated by Dakin Hart, Senior Curator at The Noguchi Museum, and Mark Dean Johnson, Professor and Gallery Director at San Francisco State University. In addition to a bilingual exhibition catalogue, there is The Saburo Hasegawa Reader, a new and no-cost download from UC Press:
https://luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.70/
Materials by and about Hasegawa have been difficult to come by and now, suddenly, we have this treasure trove! Thanks to everyone at UC Press who made The Saburo Hasegawa Reader possible and available as an open access monograph.
Readers may remember that Gary Snyder attributes the start of Mountains and Rivers Without End to a conversation over tea in San Francisco with Hasegawa on Shakyamuni Buddha’s birthday, April 8, 1956, as noted in his “The Making of Mountains and Rivers Without End” essay (M&RWE 155) and also here (see top entry):
[Initial 山 河 Conception: 8:IV:1956 occurred during a long talk with Hasegawa Saburo on Sesshu.]
From Eliot Weinberger, “Gary Snyder: The Art of Poetry LXXIV.” The Paris Review 141 (Winter 1996): 89-118, available via this link. A video of this Paris Review interview is available here on YouTube.
Here’s the Journal article mentioned above: Larry Esplund, “‘Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan’ Review: Beauty without Borders,” Wall Street Journal (3 June 2019), p. A19, available here as a PDF.
Meri and I enjoyed an afternoon at the Noguchi Museum several years ago. When I commented on how good it will be to see this show at the Asian, she sighed and said, “Yes, but the light at the Noguchi . . .”
ADDENDUM:
I am happy to report that Meri & I were able to catch this exhibition at the Asian Art Museum on October 27 as part of our wedding anniversary day adventures:
Three Interviews with Richard Powers (links and printable PDFs)
Here I’ll attach two recent interviews with Richard Powers, author of The Overstory (2018) in a PDF format that makes them easy to print out and read with pen in hand, which always enlivens the reading experience for me:
1] Everett. Hamner, “Here’s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers,” Los Angeles Review of Books (7 April 2018). at http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers .
Powers Overstory LARB 7 April 2018 [Printable PDF]
2] Nick Hunt, “Older than Writing: A Conversation with Richard Powers,” Dark Mountain 15 (Spring 2019), at https://dark-mountain.net/older-than-writing .
Richard Powers Dark Mountain Interview 7MAY19 [Printable PDF]
As he tells in these interviews, Powers’ research adventure that became The Overstory begins with his escape from Silicon Valley into the Santa Cruz Mountains and an encounter with an old growth redwood, Methuselah, who converted him into a new awareness of the more-than-human world that sustains our own species being.
3] You may also enjoy this Shakespeare and Company Bookshop interview with Richard Powers by an excellent (and anonymous, so far as I can tell) interlocutor on YouTube (1 October 2018):
Back from Kitkitdizze with Qionglin Tan and Yingying Deng from Hunan University
Professor Qionglin “Joan” Tan, Yingying “Hannah” Deng, and I visited Gary Snyder at Kitkitdizze on 8 February 2019. There we caught up on news from the Center for Gary Snyder Studies Joan founded at Hunan University in 2015.
Joan, Gary, Hannah (8Feb19)
Professor Tan’s advisee, Ms. Deng, a Changsha native, is enjoying a dissertation research year at UC Berkeley.
Gary & Joan (8Feb19)
Joan is the author of Han Shan, Chan Buddhism, and Gary Snyder’s Ecopoetic Way (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009) and has translated a number of Gary’s books into Chinese.
Gary & Mark at Kitkitdizze (8Feb19)
We stopped by the Snyder archive at UC Davis, headed to Kitkitdizze the next day, and paid our respects to Mt. Tamalpais on the return trip to Berkeley.
Hannah on Tam (9Feb19)
A Sense of the Whole/Bioregional Thinking/Gary Snyder/Mountains and Rivers Without End/Uncategorized
Paul Nelson of Cascadia in Dialogue with A Sense of the Whole
Thanks to Paul Nelson for reading and thinking with A Sense of the Whole, as noted here (see link below):
Living in Place with Peter Berg and Gary Snyder in Mind: Becoming Cascadian Retreat Handout
Here is the handout I created for a breakout session at the inspirational “Becoming Cascadian” retreat hosted by Paul Nelson and Bhakti Watts in the Cedar River Watershed on the shore of Lake Washington this past May 31–June 3.
Becoming Cascadian Handout MG V.18
Our time together featured presentations by Andrew Schelling and Tetsuzen Jason Wirth, who took us into an in-depth exploration of the Kubota Garden, founded by Fujitara Kubota, who emigrated from Shikoku via Hawai‘i in 1907.
Kazuaki Tanahashi Publishes ‘Painting Peace: Art In Times of Global Crisis’ (2018)
Kazuaki Tanahashi kindly sent me his latest book from Shambhala Press: a retrospective review of his paintings accompanied by stories that invite the reader to become better acquainted with the good life of this wandering Berkeley-based artivist (activist artist).
Kaz’s book contains a chapter about his painting, Bristle Cone Pine, two scrolls that played a key role in our Mountains & Rivers Workshop.
The PDF via the link below contains the Table of Contents and the “Bristlecone Pine” chapter (pp. 192–97).
Kaz Peace Painting 2018 Bristlecone Pine
I’m enjoying the practice of perusing one chapter from Painting Peace each day.
Thank you, Kaz.