Top o' the mornin', Digesters!
Greeting from Big Sur where, slowly but surely, we are ramping up for October 6th's redwood auction. That would explain the photos below, laid out in chronological form, from the left to right: First, the tree before it fell (the big black shape in the back on the right above the girl with the flower bouquet!), then the tree after it fell on December 2, 2012 (photographed from the opposite direction), the tree being cut, and lastly, some of the slabs stacked and ready to go.
The last 12 slabs go up for auction. This is it...the end of the line...the last waltz!
Initiate Digest sequence...now!
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|  2019 PHILIP GLASS
DAYS AND NIGHTS FESTIVAL
October 5 – 13 , Big Sur & Carmel.
w/ Foday Suso, Danny Elfman, Kronos Quartet, the Aaron Diehl Trio and more...
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"Under the Persimmon Tree" rolls on
Can't make it to our Sunday "Under the Persimmon Tree" (UTPT) program in which Magnus has conversations with friends, neighbors, and countrymen and women affiliated with the coast? Fear not! You can listen to all the talks by clicking here. Sit back, relax, and get transported to the Library! (Persimmon tree not included.)
NB. Sunday, September 8 UTPT is replaced by a singer songwriter by the name of David Crosby who will be here to sing for us!
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(The story of the founding of the New Camaldoli Hermitage. 4th installment continued from the July Digest)
Father Modotti smiled as he read the wire. He had less than $2,000 in his checking account, and what would the hermits do with a swimming pool? When he showed the telegram to his host, however, the latter said, "Don't despair. There are many wealthy Catholics in America who could easily donate such a sum to the Church." And he told him of the young millionaire who had heard the late Pope make a plea over the radio in behalf of the bombed-out convents in Italy, and who has been spending about $100,000 a year for a few years, rebuilding these convents.
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 | Exquisite reliquary of St. Romuald in gothic art wrought by
the Peruzzi brothers of Florence and treasured by the
hermits of New Camaldoli
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| "Perhaps," he added, "You ought to go out and see this man. He lives right outside Chicago." It turned out that the address given him was either wrong or out of date, as Father Modotti couldn't find that fabulous young man. And just as he was about to give up his search, an old lady waved him to a stop and told him that she saw his picture in a Catholic magazine and that she knew what he must be doing in that suburb. When told who he was looking for, she said, "I knew it, I knew it," and she then directed Father Modotti to the right house.
Upon entering the house, the young millionaire greeted him with a warm hand-shake and said that he had been expecting him. Father Modotti came right to the point and took the Anglican's telegram out of his pocket. The young man remarked that $300,000 was "a lot of money" and "have you seen the place?" Father Modotti replied that he had not. Upon which he was advised to return to California, inspect the property and telephone the young heir who would then see what he could do.
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Father Modotti, of course, was en-chanted with what he had seen and a month later the young man presented him with the deed to the Lucia Ranch (also known as "Circle M") which formerly belonged to John Nesbitt, and where the latter used to live a few years ago. It was rumored that the final price was considerably less than the $300,000.
In any case, the hermits began to move in. Two young priests arrived from Italy, one from Canada and a few lay brothers from the States. (Perhaps we should mention here the categories of the professed members of a monastery: Aside from the abbot or prior and the ordained priests there are novices, postulants and oblates who work in various capacities and skills.) Since the Monastery is self sustaining, there is a need for practically every profession. As Thomas Merton says:
*"Every monk is, or should be, a special kind of artist. Nothing is more alien to the monastic life than the cult of art for art's sake. The monk ought never to be an aesthete, but rather a "workman", a craftsman". Of course, St. Benedict by no means supposed that all the monks were craftsmen: but all ought to be able to do useful and productive work ...
* From "The Silent Life" by Thomas Merton Copyright 1957 by the Abbey of our Lady of Gethsemane. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, N.Y. 1957.
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"No useful work that can be carried on within the enclosure is foreign to the monastic state . . . Some of the monks will be almost exclusively employed at the "common work". Others will have special jobs assigned to them - anything from cheese-making to bee-keeping, from carpentry to the writing of books, from baking bread to painting a fresco. Someone will have to do the cooking" . . . "When buildings are going up, there will doubtless be a monastic architect drawing up the plans, and the monks will provide most of the labor, with a little expert help from an outside contractor. There will have to be bakers and shoemakers, and tailors. There may be weavers, bookbinders, tanners. Modern life lays a rather heavy burden of work on the monastery plumber, and electrician, not to mention the garage mechanic. (to be continued…)
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THIS JUST IN FROM MUSICIAN, BIG SUR NEIGHBOR AND LIBRARY FRIEND NICO GEORIS:
"A couple years ago some friends and I made a short video documenting the process of capturing "songs" from various plants and tre Insightses. This video was just released and it's my pleasure to finally share it with you now!"
Thanks Nico!
Nico's double LP Shirley Shirley Shirley! is available at the Library.
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|  | "What are we really hearing? As of yet...we have no idea."
Nico Georis
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Neil Young's Lonely Quest to Save Music
Ever get a slight headache after indulging in massive quantities of shoddy MP3s?
You're not alone. Most people have, and this is a bad thing, says some cat from Toronto called Neil Young.
Neil hates what digital technology is doing to music.
“I’m only one person standing there going, ‘Hey, this is [expletive] up!’ he says in this great interview with the Times' David Samuels.
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Walker Winslow at Synanon
(Chapter 3 in Henry & Friends by William Webb. Continued from the last Digest. Including some very nice photograps of Henry Miller.)
I had met Walker Winslow before I met Henry, during the late fifties, when he was temporarily dried up and was lecturing around the country on the evils of alcohol addiction. Under the nom de plume of Harold Maine, he wrote If A Man Be Mad, perhaps the most vivid description ever written of the tragic disturbances of the soul of an alcoholic.
Walker's sobriety, however, was short-lived. One day he called me to say he needed to go to the hospital and could I please take him. I found him in a converted garage in Alhambra, surrounded by total disarray. His typewriter had toppled onto the concrete floor and Walker was swaying nearby, barely conscious. I got him into my car after fetching the suitcase he insisted we take.
As we neared Camarillo, Walker began to sober up, and by the time we'd left the San Fernando Valley he began a repeated inquiry into my possible need to stop and take a leak. Not his need, mine. At length we arrived in Thousand Oaks, then but a wide place in the road with a lion farm and a gas station. I figured a pretense here might result in a different subject for conversation, so I went through the motions. When I returned to the car Walker seemed a bit subdued. I discovered later that he had hidden a bottle in the suitcase to ease him through the trip, and was concerned that I not be witness to any inappropriate behavior.
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When we arrived at the hospital Walker waited in the reception room, along with numerous others awaiting admission. I was ushered into an adjoin-ing office to do the admission paperwork and left that morose scene. But a little later when a nurse and I returned to get Walker, he had turned the place around. Everyone was jolly and talkative and the bottle wasn't yet empty. Naturally I caught hell from the nurse.
During this period I had become acquainted with Synanon, a pioneering drug rehabilitation facility in Santa Monica, directed by a visionary one-time addict, Chuck Dietrich. Synanon became infamous a few years later when Chuck enthroned himself as panjandrum of the world of dope fiends, and took on the paranoia native to this position. But in the early sixties Synanon was an experiment well worth watching. Walker eventually decided Synanon was for him, and was admitted.
Walker had been a close friend of the Millers in Big Sur, often relieving Henry and Lepska from the duties of caring for Tony and Valentine. When Walker had placed himself in Synanon Henry was eager to visit him there. One day we went, taking along my son Jonathan with Tony and Valentine. This proved a memorable morning as we all sat at a long table. Henry was delighted to see Walker, though not so delighted to see Barthold Fles, the literary agent who was also visiting Walker. The conversation became animated. Henry got off a few cracks about Fles being a fraud, part of the publishing establishment that was by definition money grubbing and dishonest. Reid Kimball, Chuck Dietrich's second in command, explained how Synanon worked and Henry was fascinated to learn that literature played an important role in the therapy at Synanon. Henry seized the opportunity to offer all sorts of suggestions about writings that might be useful, for one reason or another. Quotes from Henry's favorites were brought out for comment, how they might work in the Synanon environment, and so forth. Very lively stuff!
With Henry in such superb form I began making exposures, moving around the table, and by the end of the morning had acquired a set of photos that were astounding for the variety of expressions they revealed.
(Next Digest will include the chapter Ephraim Doner, Famous for his Obscurity).
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How to Draw Yourself out of a Creative Funk
Stuck in a creative rut? Malaka Gharib, author of the acclaimed graphic memoir “I Was Their America Dream,” provides some tips on how to coax the muse out of hiding. (Here’s one suggestion: Create a paper doll out of your college self. Cool!)
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"The Grapes of Wrath's" hard road to publication
Prior to writing his masterwork about the plight of migrant workers,” John Steinbeck famously told his agent: "“I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.”
But it wasn’t easy. Click here to read about how writing “The Grapes of Wrath” brought Steinbeck to the precipice of a nervous breakdown.
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| We just don't know how to say goodbye (so this time we won't!)
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