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Greetings Digesters!
How are things? Good, we hope!
Things are pretty good here. Still absorbing September 8th's transcendent ((folkYEAH!!)) David Crosby show. That's a shot from the concert above, courtesy of our pal Terry Way. (Keep scrolling for more!)
In other news, yesterday Magnus had a great chat ( listen here) with friend and neighbor Butch Kronlund, Dan finished building an invisbly new gate out front, and we're ramping up for Oct. 6's big redwood auction—your last chance to get slabs from the mythical tree (1) that fell on HML's property back in 2012!
Oh, and did we mention Philip Glass is coming back? That's but another teaser to incentivize you to scroll on. So start scrolling!
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Philip Glass returns to Big Sur and Carmel!
The Philip Glass Days and Nights festival returns from Oct. 5 - 13. Check out the full schedule here.
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The 5th, and concluding, installment of the story about the Hermitage.
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"Intellectual work has always held a place of honor in monasteries, though it is less emphasized by some Orders than by others. Scholarship as such is by no means out of place in the cloister, although when it involves too much travelling and too heavy a correspondence it tends to interfere with the peace of monastic solitude. We must always remember that silence, solitude, recollection and prayer are the most important elements in the monastic life."
Says Michael Bede in his pamphlet "The Hermits of New Camaldoli" : The chief work of a hermit is prayer. His day begins at 1 :30 a.m., when the church bell bids him rise for matins. Wearing over his white tunic and scapular the ample white hooded cowl with its wide sleeves, similar in shape to the cowl of the Benedictines and Trappists, he goes to church for the first and longest office of the day. Its slow chanting keeps him in choir until about 4 a.m., when he returns to his cell for private prayer and the study of the Holy Scriptures. At 6 o'clock after half hour meditation, he rejoins his brethren in the Church for the recitation of Prime, after which the hermits who are priests return to their cells to offer Mass in the tiny chapel which forms a part of each cell; the lay brothers and the choir monks who are not ordained serve the Masses of the hermit-priests. A light breakfast of bread and coffee is taken after Mass, and the hermit then devotes himself to spiritual reading until 9 o'clock, when terce and sext are chanted in the church, followed immediately by the conventual Mass, which is always a sung Mass when the number of monks is sufficient. The remainder of the morning, until the office of none at 12:15, is spent in study and manual labor, always in solitude except perhaps at harvest-time when it may be necessary for the hermits to help gather in the crops. Except when they dine together in the refectory on certain great feasts, the hermits take their meals in their cells, alone, the food being prepared in the communal kitchen and brought to each cell by a lay brother, who deposits the tray in a hatch in the wall of the cell, neither seeing nor speaking to the hermit within. The Camaldolese diet is meatless, unless a monk is ill enough to go to the infirmary, where meat may be served. During the two monastic Lents, before Christmas and Easter, eggs, butter and cheese disappear from the menu; on all Fridays the diet is reduced to bread, water and a serving of vegetables. Dinner is followed on most days by a period of solitary recreation, but outside the two monastic Lents and fasting days, twice a week talking is allowed at this time and the hermits may, if they wish, go for walks in the forest outside the cloistered bounds of the hermitage after vespers, which are sung in choir at three o'clock in the afternoon. After a light supper, the hermits close their day with a short spiritual reading in common, compline, mental prayer and the rosary. Then the great silence descends over the hermitage, and the hermits retire for a few hours' rest before the bell again summons them to matins and the beginning of another day."
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At present there are about thirty odd members of the New Camaldoli community, and their main task is still awaiting them. Namely, to build the Hermitage and the Church. The Hermitage will consist of about twenty-five cottages, each with its own patch of garden and each containing four rooms : bedroom, chapel, study and lavatory. Each cottage and garden will be encircled by a wall to ensure privacy and solitude. Lay brothers will be passing the hermits' food through chutes in the outer wall. The present orchard will be extended to produce apples, pears, peaches, apricots, lemons and oranges. Eventually the hermits hope to have an extensive vineyard and a 70 acre vegetable farm. Originally there were plans for a dairy to supply milk and cheese, but the two cows which had been donated by friendly ranchers have been returned to the donors. Because of the nature of the surrounding pastures the milk was found to taste of various herbs, sage one day and mint the next. * To supplement their meatless diet, some of the brothers may be delegated to fish in the ocean below or in the nearby creeks. Fish may also be planted in the unused swimming pool, inherited from the previ-ous owners. The hermits are also hoping that some of the visitors and guests will offer to help in the various tasks involved in the completion of the whole foundation.
Note: As we go to press (Anno 1958) we are informed that the hermits have just received a gift of 21 goats, 15 of which are milking. And thus the dairy problem has been solved again and they won't need to buy milk from the mail man.
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Michael Bede concludes his pamphlet with the following: "Surely there is providential fittingness in the fact that the Camaldolese hermits have found their American home in the Big Sur region of California. The Big Sur is a place for pioneers. First settled by white men less than ninety years ago, it has so far retained much of its pristine wildness and breath-taking beauty, where its steep and heavily-wooded mountains rise above the blue and white-capped sea. The first settlers' huge tracts of land have scarcely yet been broken up; the Camaldolese have secured 500 acres, ensuring solitude. Their neighbors are ranchers, close to the elemental soil-and artists, close to the creative spirit, for the Big Sur happens to be also one of the most vital American centers of avant-garde literary and artistic endeavor. And now new pioneers have come: with the blessing of the Bishop of Monterey-Fresno and the prayers of many friends in heaven and on earth, under the lovely patronage of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a new Camaldoli is born in the New World.
"Come and see".
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The waning literary leanings of American adults. Percentage of adults who read fiction:
1982 56.40%
1992 54.20%
2002 46.60%
2008 50.20%
2012 46.90%
hmm...
Source: National Endowment for the Arts
Famous authors & their favorite books!
The folks over at Mental Floss dug deep and listed the favorite books of some of the world's best writers, including Henry Miller.
(Fun fact: John Steinbeck's favorite book was Le Morte d'Arthur, a collection of Arthurian tales by Sir Thomas Malory. Who knew?)
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"Earthly Powers" is awesome
Check out this great homage to the latter book—Burgess' magnus opus—in the Guardian. Money quote:
[The book's] cleverest trick in this clever book is the storytelling itself. It’s gripping. It feels real and solid. There’s emotional weight. There’s drama and pathos.
At its heart, Earthly Powers remains an immersive and compelling page-turner. Burgess may constantly remind us not to take things at face value – but he also ensures that we can’t help but do so.
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Ephraim Doner, Famous for his Obscurity by Willam Webb
Whether it was Ephraim's intention to remain obscure is anyone's guess, for there are abundant reasons why he should not be, and only his own reason why he chose to be. All that can really be said is that he deliberately avoided taking any of the steps that might have led out of obscurity. For Ephraim is a man of extraordinary accomplishment, passion, and wisdom. And is a superb cook, the talent of which he is probably most proud. Perhaps it was his brief association with Chaim Soutine in Cros de Cagnes that led him to think, like Soutine, that his paintings weren't worth much, but were better than any others. However it was, only a few select souls have ever seen these paintings, and certainly no gallery owner ever has. So there the paintings lie, piled in a corner in daughter Natasha's former bedroom, awaiting the time when their custodian can no longer decline to show them. They will remind one of Soutine, surely, with their impetuous brushwork, and the heavy impasto, but, quite unlike the tortured Soutines, they are mostly jolly treatments of their subjects, often in the Hasidic spirit of dance, song, celebration. While the paintings languished Doner made something of a living decorating ceramic tiles. Some of the spirit of the paintings spills over into these tiles, but because of the nature of the medium, and Doner's less than proficient technical ability with the chemistry of glazes and the firing, each batch of tiles came from the kiln as something of a surprise. You never could tell how they'd come out. The glazes, often crazed, sometimes flowing over the lines of the drawings, underglazes leaking through, and sometimes only a hint surviving of what the drawing had intended, gave a feeling that you were looking at some archeological relic hauled from an ancient grave, tarnished by the ages. They are prized by all lucky enough to own one or more. Our first meeting was over the Ping-Pong table, and I was clobbered. I later learned that Ephraim clobbered everybody, even those Chinese experts who were completed befuddled by the roars of
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"...this incredible Ephraim, he is the apotheosis of the one and only: man in the image of the Creator:"
- Henry Miller
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
the Lion of Judah, self-proclaimed at the height of the frenzy, doing his Hasidic dance at his end of the table, smashing the ball with uncanny aim directly at a well charted ridge in the table that deflected it to no-man's land somewhere in the bushes. Doner owed his legendary Ping-Pong skills to Henry's tutoring, this being a shared indulgence in those days when Henry would stop chez Doner on the way back from town to Big Sur. Ephraim quickly showed a knack for the game, and before long was beating Henry in 'love' games, until finally no one could beat him. Doner and Henry met in Paris. The story of this meeting may be apocryphal: Henry, down and out, bedraggled, standing in line at a Paris pissoir is noticed by Doner, passing by. Is he American, Doner asks. Yes. He looks hungry. Is he? Yes. Come along, then. (No one remembers whether Doner cooked up something or not. Just that Henry got fed.) They met again some years later in New York. Doner and Abraham Rattner had become friends, and with Rattner, Henry was cruising America to catalog its failures. They were accumulating a bonanza of data in New York when they happened to run across Doner. The affinity was immediate, but the geography was against much developing. Not until the mid fifties, when Ephraim moved to Carmel Highlands, did he and Henry meet again, and this time their friendship flourished through the rest of Henry's years. By this time Doner was solidly married to his beloved Rosa and their daughter, Natasha, had become the bright kid that so enchanted Henry. Rosa got a job with the Carmel School District as headperson of the Bay School, a venerable institu-tion for pre-schoolers located on the shore of Carmel Bay, near Point Lobos. Rosa had a special way with kids, and soon it seemed that everybody who is anybody on the Monterey Peninsula had gone to "Rosa's School" when they were tykes.
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"The blaze of gaiety kindles in the mind vivid, bright flashes beyond our natural capacity, and some of the lustiest, if not the most extravagant, enthusiasms."
- Montaigne, Essays III,
trans. Donald M. Frame
Don (as Ephraim came to be known in the neighborhood) and Rosa soon became the most prominent and constructive citizens this privileged community had ever known. Carmel Highlands, where my wife and I lived for ten years, is remarkable for the diversity of its citizens. It is more than tolerance that holds it all together, allows it to work effectively for community goals, maintains the lively intellectual atmo-sphere, and nurtures the warmest friendships of neighbor to neighbor. Parties in Carmel Highlands are amazing affairs. Not only the neighbors will show up, but sedate, conservative outsiders as well, even the high rent types from Pebble Beach will be mingling quite pleasantly with flamboyant neo-hippies from the Big Sur woods. After much wondering about this I have con-cluded that the adhesive which holds all this together is none other than Ephraim and Rosa, whose attendance at all social functions in the Highlands was de rigeur. Ephraim could always be counted upon to put on a performance at these gatherings. He knows everyone, remembers names of acquaintances met only once, and something also of their life histories, and trots out all this miscellany, weaving a complex tapestry of all the gallants and the ladies assembled, and by the time he's done with all the toasting, the jousting, the singing, dancing and wisecracking, there isn't an awkward or uncomfortable soul in the house. A character like Ephraim inevitably is surrounded with an aura of apocrypha. Among this is the notion that once every year Doner reads, cover to cover, Don Quixote and Dostoyevski's The Possessed. If these are indeed favorite reading matter, so is the Bible. The Book of Job and the Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) are obvious favorites. While he proclaims himself a "born-again" atheist, few would doubt that he is carrying on a continuous dialog with God, whether God knows it or not.
(to be continued )...
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"Good Things We Learn From Plants"
Our friend Victoria Stöcker book, "Good Thing We Learn from Plants," is a fantastic print documentarium that explores plants through diverse viewpoints and formats including articles, essays, poems, illustrations and photographs by Victoria and contributors.
Readers may learn about space gardening, the world's tallest trees, native flora, a mobile greenhouse and plant music.
And let's be real—it's never to early to start thinking about Christmas gifts. Check out the book here!
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From the Department of Good Local News...The entire archive of Carmel Pine Cones (from 1915 to the present) is now available and searchable online, thanks to Harrison Memorial Library.
Check out the full archive here. (3)
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Photos from the David Crosby show!
Courtesy of Terry Way. Here are some money shots! (4)
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Stick a fork in us - we're baked!
See you next month when we may very well have some exciting news to report re: the redwood auction, the new gate, and oodles of other exciting developments.
See you then and thanks for your support!
Love,
Magnus, Mike, Julia, Iguana John, Jack (Kerouac) and Alice (in Wonderland)
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(1) Lovingly referred to as "Henry's Erection"(2) Hat tip to Keely who initially ordered "Earthly Powers" at the Library, which allowed Mike to read it.
(3) Here's the Pine Cone's February 3, 1915 edition!! (Top news story: "Forrest Theatre is World Famous.")
(4) Here's a cool and often overlooked Crosby tune from his Byrds days.
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