The City & the Country no. 17 – August 17 2014

Beautiful soft August days, in this cool summer following an icy winter. What will be next? Another cold one? Nataka’s beautiful flower arranging sums up the glory of summer – this one I find especially lovely, in a vase she acquired for Bread Alone, the Woodstock meeting place/coffee bar/bread and pastry shop, where it sits, majestically. Amid the sunflowers and orchidacious summer lilies, bright spots of St. John’s wort berries (not the herbal wort but a kindred species) show off the golden colors.

Saturday brought a trio of poets to the Golden Notebook bookstore, where I had the wonderfully easy job of introducing them – all three of them my friends, all three of them bright with genius: Sparrow, divine comedian of verse, music and all manner of performance, Michael Brownstein, undimmed idealist and revolutionary, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, our astonishing scholar and poet, master of so many fields, trailblazing anarchist and fund of esoteric knowledge The audience burst into applause when I introduced him as a national treasure – which he is.

My friend, colleague and inspiration John Keller was with us in our country retreat this weekend, and we worked on our grammar book, 3 and a half years in the making – years of unbroken work on it – and now about to be published: grammar for the school generation no longer taught the basics; a grammar free of jargon, with a whole new approach to written English and an expository style residing almost entirely in examples. Its title: Where Did You Get That Bitch? (front cover – rear cover, Where Did You Get That, Bitch?, both with appropriate color photo illustrations). We’ve been field-testing it to our extremely enthusiastic composition classes for years. Now we’re ready to go. It was fireworks night in Woodstock, and I felt our book was being feted in the night skies!