The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias

The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land, creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Here, the last of those rogue souls offer a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the tail end of a grand social experiment. David Jacob Kramer Photography by Michael Schmelling September 9, 2021 An abandoned structure at the Nonagon commune in Humboldt County. • There was an aphorism in the movement: “Bad roads make good communes.” And the road we're on today is bad. Several miles inland from California's foggy coastline, we're driving down a single lane hemmed in by 50-foot fir trees and then turn onto a rocky dirt path, joggling our rented SUV. Photographer Michael Schmelling and I are in Mendocino County, about a three-hour drive north of San Francisco, looking for what remains of perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of rural communes established across Northern California in the late '60s and '70s: Table Mountain Ranch. The entire expanse—which once was a kind of American Arcadia, home to scores of hippies who'd fled San Francisco to live a new, idealistic kind of life—now looks deserted. We pass tree stumps, logging equipment, and mounds of dirt. The only sound is the chirping of birds. Eventually, in the middle of an open field, we come upon a peeling wood building where a lone man is perched up a ladder. Ascetically thin, with long red hair and a patchy beard, he tells us that he's one of Table Mountain Ranch's last remaining members. Now in his mid-70s, he's wary of supplying his name, wary of being somehow “on the map” after so much time off the grid, so I tell him that I'll refer to him as Jack Berg. Attempting to set the foundation for a second-story balcony, he struggles to balance on the ladder while positioning a two-by-four, an unlit roach in his fingers. As we look on, he brusquely puts us to work, chastising Michael for snapping a picture instead of immediately helping with the load. Berg is restoring the Whale Schoolhouse, a progressive academy founded in 1971 that became the pride of communards across the Albion region of Northern California. Fifty kids, from elementary to high school age, were enrolled here, but it's sat unused for decades—and now Berg is moving in. “Nobody cared about this building,” he says. “It was disintegrating.” He takes us inside. It's a single room, the size of half a tennis court, with old class pictures on a corkboard. A circular window overlooks an empty field that had long ago been a playground. Special Limited Offer Subscribe to GQ 1 year for $15 $10 Subscribe One of the last remaining residents of Table Mountain repairs an old schoolhouse. At one point in 1970, Table Mountain had over a hundred residents, some living in tipis, some in cabins, some crashing in the open air. It appears that before it became a commune, the 120-acre property had been a dude ranch, and the cabins and outbuildings were constantly being expanded in an endless ad hoc construction project. Residents scavenged materials from an abandoned hotel in nearby Fort Bragg and chicken coops from a Jewish communist chicken farm a few hours' drive south, in Petaluma. The living was primitive: There was no electricity or telephone lines, and the toilets were compostable. Residents shared their money and meals. This was the vision of one of Table Mountain's founders, a former Navy pilot named Walter Schneider, who discovered the deforested property from the air and, according to Berg, purchased the plot with cash he made trafficking pot via plane—and with his friend's inheritance. Countercultural luminaries moved up from the Bay, like Allen Cohen, founder of Haight-Ashbury's foremost underground newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle. A close friend of Timothy Leary's, Schneider brought the famed professor for weekend visits. “Walter and Tim came up here looking for a place to drop acid,” Berg explains, “to retreat from the city and do their thing.” Berg first came to Table Mountain Ranch to visit his sister, then a resident, and never left. He doesn't remember precisely when that was, just that it was around the time Schneider finally got arrested for smuggling weed. Berg didn't know it then, but when he joined the commune he became part of the greatest urban exodus in American history. From the late '60s to the mid '70s, nearly a million young people went back to the land. Nowhere was the urge to reconnect with nature more keenly felt than in San Francisco, where droves of young people were suddenly fleeing a city overrun by heroin, speed, and bad vibes. Cops were shooting down Black Panthers in Oakland and the military was tear-gassing students in People's Park in Berkeley. Vietnam veterans were looking for a salve for their PTSD. Faithful Marxists aimed to put their ideals to the test. Some just wanted to get high in the woods. This movement found its epicenter in a sunny swath of Northern California between the Bay Area and the Oregon border, a region where plots of land were going cheap, decimated by a century of logging and an economic downturn. Thousands of cooperative communities like Table Mountain Ranch sprouted up along the coast and the inland forests. Residents taught themselves to farm, practiced free love, and built their own homes. A deserted cabin at Table Mountain Ranch. It was a grand social experiment, but the promise was often rosier than the reality. Most found the grind too hard going and the poverty too bleak, and within a few years returned to the city and more conventional lives. But a small number stuck it out for decades, long after the Summer of Love had dissipated, and a handful of them still live in communities scattered across Northern California. These flinty souls remain a study in principled self-reliance and human ingenuity, having supported themselves and their families for years through subsistence farming and sundry side hustles: ceramics, teaching, salmon fishing, instrument making, firewood hawking, and weed growing. These residents are now in their 70s and 80s. For some, the isolation has become challenging due to medical needs, yet they continue to remain, some living like hermits, others as community activists. Although the last holdouts within these fading utopias are all uniquely compelling characters, it's the question of what they'll leave behind that has drawn us here. Living in strange homes of their own creation, forever fearful of building inspectors and outsiders, they've kept these structures hidden and shrouded in mystery. Will these dwellings languish as ruins of a lost civilization, relics of a long-obsolete 20th-century idea? Might some, like Berg's current project, be outfitted for new uses? Many seem on the brink of collapse, and before they're gone, I want to know what lessons they could teach us. As the light begins to fade, Berg walks us into the woods on a tour of the property's most neglected structures. We trek down a damp glen, which becomes darker and colder as we walk under a thick canopy, and in a small clearing come upon a shack with a mossy dome and triangular windows. The foundation is sinking into the earth. This would have been a sunny spot 50 years ago, when the land was newly decimated by logging. Still, Berg thinks the builders were foolish for choosing this side of the hill. He struggles to remember who they were, mouthing names to himself as we continue. Deeper into the woods sits a cabin with walls aslant, its windows knocked out. “The design is impractical,” says Berg. “I think it's humorous architecture.” He pauses, considering the structure's design. “Some are really beautiful, though. This is beautiful.” Both structures are beyond repair. Berg has long planned to burn them down, following in a tradition among communards of destroying properties they've abandoned so that the state doesn't have the chance to condemn and bulldoze them. But he hasn't brought himself to do it yet. ________________________________________ A cabin at Table Mountain Ranch with a geodesic dome. It was at a used-book store in San Francisco that I first developed an interest in these strange structures. I'd been thumbing through an issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of self-help advice and product reviews, founded and edited by Stewart Brand, that became the bible for back-to-the-landers when it was first published in 1968. (Steve Jobs would later call it “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”) What struck me most was the opening statement: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” I found a particularly unshakable fantasy in the “Shelter” section, which told the stories of people who had built their own homes and, in some cases, formed their own societies. Did I need to continue grinding away in the city in hopes of one day maybe owning my own home? Was I going about my existence all wrong? A generation had already put this alternative lifestyle to the test. I wanted to meet those who were still living the fantasy. On a Mendocino community Facebook group for back-to-the-landers, I found a man named Ron Blett, who lives on a five-acre plot a short drive from Table Mountain Ranch. In April, Michael and I visited him at his cabin, a simple structure he has continued to renovate over the years, and which features a stained-glass window salvaged from an abandoned church. Blett is 78 years old now; tubes from an assisted breathing apparatus dangle from his neck into his knapsack. After dropping out of Western Michigan University, during his final semester, in 1968, he headed to California, borrowed $1,200 from friends, and built the house he still lives in. The commune never had a name; he just started letting friends live on the land. At its peak there were 16 residents in cabins that he'd built. Now those original tenants are gone, and all that's left are the cabins, some shake-shingled, fitted with odd, mismatched windows. The homes' chaotic design reminds Blett of an experiment he'd read about where spiders were dosed with various drugs. “If you look at a normal spiderweb,” he says, “then you look at a spiderweb on acid, that's how these homes appear to me.” It's common in Northern California to find people who abruptly dropped out of society, never to return. Monty Levenson lives 50 miles from Blett, up a winding mountain road outside the town of Willits, on the northern edge of California's redwood forests. His home is a minimalist, pragmatic structure that befits his no-nonsense personality. He came out here with little more than his books, 500 of them, and an intent to focus on his doctoral thesis. But he soon abandoned his studies and began to pursue a different kind of knowledge. “I felt I didn't know anything, really,” he says. “After going through the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement, I started thinking, Do I really want to be a professor training other professors who will in turn train other professors?” Levenson sought to move beyond talk of revolution; he wanted to embody it. “My impulse was to do something with my life, that just by being here, I would be making it a better place,” he says. “That's what came out of the '60s, the sense you could create your own reality. In 1968 in Paris you'd see the phrase ‘Be realistic but demand the impossible’ spray-painted on walls. I needed to manifest that.” Archival Images: Courtesy of Harriet Bye, Monty Levenson, and the Fischbach Family. Levenson, who's in his mid-70s, has a short white beard and the same intonations as Bernie Sanders—a contemporary of his at Brooklyn College. The curriculum there hadn't prepared him for building his own dwelling. “The only wood I ever held in my hand was a pencil,” Levenson says. “This thing where we're going to change the world? I didn't know how to wipe my ass.” His methodology was “trial and error—mostly the latter. You make a lot of mistakes, and if you survive them and you have half a brain, you figure it out.” When Levenson arrived, the land had been ravaged by loggers. “It was ecocided,” he says. “Destroyed. Deemed worthless land that was being sold to unsuspecting hippies. And it backfired.” He expanded his home, where he lives with his wife of 37 years, Kayo, and reared four children, three of whom moved to Brooklyn as adults—an irony not lost on him. He's recently built a meticulously crafted sauna and a Japanese-style bath house, both straight out of a high-end eco-retreat. Unlike many back-to-the-landers, Levenson never cared to live on a commune and has always resided in a private abode with his family. “I don't like going to meetings and I'm still that way,” he explains. “If you want to do something, sometimes the most efficient way is to do it yourself. I wanted to make my own decisions, and if I made mistakes, then I dealt with them myself.” For all his plucky gripes, Levenson is a student of Zen and has become a world-renowned craftsman of the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute that dates back over 1,200 years. A big break came when he was personally invited to include one of his instruments in a 1971 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Ever since then he's been backlogged with orders. At one point, he refers to a Japanese saying: joshaku shushaku—mistake upon mistake compounds to become the sum total of one's knowledge. Then he blows the flute for us, eyes closed. It's a pure, swelling sound that fills the room and seems to transport him to another place. “We were kindred spirits forging a world we wanted to live in, connected to the earth organically and spiritually.” Richard Evans The audacious confidence of building one's own house according to one's own vision tends to be reflected in back-to-the-landers' other creative pursuits. Laird Sutton is an artist, Methodist minister, and sexologist who has spent his life intermingling these disciplines. For years he commuted into San Francisco from his ranch in Bodega, an intentional community about an hour-and-a-half drive north of San Francisco. He built his home there in 1968 and has continued to tinker with it over the years. His front window, made of curved plexiglass, like a cockpit, overlooks the hillside; it once displayed a collection of ancient erotic art. One of a handful who remain on the community's land, Sutton lives with his 15-year-old Labrador, Maggie (whose bloodline he has traced back to J.R.R. Tolkien's own dog), and a library of sexological literature. With his long hair—he hasn't cut it since 1967—bushy eyebrows, and hoary beard, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Gandalf, and speaks with no less gravitas. He felt a deep connection with the land, and he pledged to never leave, despite the commute. An intentional community requires harmony not only with its members but with the earth itself, he explains. The land, Sutton says, “can decide that people aren't good and drop a tree on their house.” He tells the story of a troublesome member who woke up in such a scenario. The woman was unhurt but rattled enough to leave. “The land spoke,” Sutton says. “I won't say divine intervention, because when you say that, you're talking about somebody up there. We're talking about the intervention of the living ranch, because everything here is alive.” ________________________________________ Richard Evans poses beside a geodesic stained-glass window he made for Tommy and Karen Hessler’s home in Humboldt County. The back-to-the-land movement consisted of predominantly white heterosexual youth from middle-class backgrounds. And so Richard Evans, who is Black and gay, found himself a double anomaly, not just on the commune he lived on near Garberville but in the broader Humboldt County region. In his 20s he'd spent time at a pansexual urban commune in the Haight, Kaliflower, that was known for creating the elaborate costumes worn by the legendary avant-garde drag performance troupe the Cockettes. But Evans had always loved nature and wanted to be nearer to it. In the early '70s, he found some friends willing to pool their finances to purchase land up north and was dispatched to find a parcel for the crew. For six months he camped and fished, scouring territory all the way up to Oregon. “I never met another Black kid hitchhiking,” he says, noting that times haven't become any more encouraging. “Nowadays I don't see women hitchhiking, either. It's unimaginable.” In San Francisco, he says, “the Summer of Love was a huge heart opening. What changed?” When Evans finally found a fitting plot, he called up his friends and they established a commune there named Narnia. For his personal living quarters, he built a geodesic dome with wood salvaged from a demolished school. Domes were frequently found on communes, their technical experimentalism and trippy look symbolizing a certain lifestyle. Evans beside the same window in 1972. Archival Image: Courtesy of Richard Evans But living in his dome alone meant that there was a part of Richard Evans not being expressed. Narnia's other residents were three heterosexual couples, and with the exception of a few lesbian communes, he knew of no queer communes so far up north. He was on his own, in a sense, and came to develop a deep sense of self-reliance, one he still retains. The first thing to look for on new land, he tells me, is a stream: You can't live without drinking water. And so Evans taught himself how to dowse for underground springs by reading an article in the Whole Earth Catalog. Lloyd Kahn, the former editor of the “Shelter” section of the Whole Earth Catalog, still lives on the half acre he and his wife purchased in Bolinas, a coastal community in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, in 1971. Now 86 years old, with bushy white hair, he is, after Buckminster Fuller, the most famous proponent of geodesic domes. His Domebook, volumes one and two, sold hundreds of thousands of copies before he pulled them from print, renouncing geodesic domes as impractical—they can't be sealed against wind and weather, and barns were simply better structures. His agent couldn't dissuade him. “I didn't want any more domes on my karma,” he says. Kahn now largely espouses simple stud houses, with vertical walls and simple roofs, inspired by the conventional farm structures he would see on the side of the road. “I had to admit I was wrong in front of a quarter of a million people,” he says. “It was great. People are so disinclined to admit mistakes. That's part of learning. If you're experimenting, there are going to be failures. You acknowledge them and go from there.” Laird Sutton, a Methodist minister and sexologist, at home. He runs his own press, Shelter Publications, out of an office he built with recycled lumber from an old Navy barracks. He's published dozens of books on alternative and mobile living spaces and he maintains an Instagram account where he features examples of spaces he finds captivating. Every day he gets emails from people gushing about how his work inspires them. On YouTube you can find his tutorials—how to shoot and vacuum-pack squab, for instance, or ferment pickles. Kahn disapproves of the sloppy construction typical of commune dwellings. “I thought those places were abominable,” he tells me. “You could build anything you wanted, so terrible stuff got built. Those loose anarchistic ones are probably gone now. Good riddance, I think. I was into building and growing food—other people were into communicating with dolphins.” To Harriet Bye, another Albion settler, the Whole Earth Catalog and other similar publications enforced gender stereotypes. Even the catalog's introductory statement catered to a male perspective. So, with a collective of other local women, Bye created a female-oriented magazine called Country Women in 1972, mailed out from Table Mountain Ranch. “We had to do [a publication] that directly spoke to women being able to take on a lot of these things that were considered men's work,” she tells me. Country Women had themed issues like “Women on the Land,” “Anger and Violence,” and “Sexuality,” but it also offered advice for, say, how to deal with an outbreak of white cabbage moths. The magazine was launched the same year as Gloria Steinem's Ms. and found a similar audience, with its distribution at one point hitting 9,000 copies. The attic of Laird Sutton’s cabin in Bodega, California. We're sitting outside her wood-shingled home, a short drive from the commune. Bye first bought land in 1969, on her 26th birthday, securing an acre and a half with a $750 down payment and a $40 monthly mortgage. She built this house herself, affixing the shingles in a pattern that wasted the least amount of material, initially using a cookie sheet as a T square. In those days, she says, everyone salvaged material. Part of this was principle, part of it was practical. Most new settlers didn't have a ton of money, Bye among them. At one point she came upon a house in San Francisco where the windows were being removed and the contractor offered them to her for free. Bye launched a reused-window business that her husband still runs. A good portion of all the hippie homes in the area got their windows from her. There are fields of them stacked across her property. “It's obvious now that we have limited resources,” Bye says. “They are beautiful things, so who wants them destroyed?” A few roads over lives Ted Thoman, a tall, soft-spoken man with a long white ponytail under a Greek fisherman's cap. He designed his seven-sided, single-room house around the windows he'd scored, the biggest one from the side of a gas station. “Windows are cheaper than a wall,” he tells me over a breakfast of eggs and coffee inside his light-filled abode. After we eat, Thoman sets down a metal tube used to tighten nuts and bolts. In the small opening at the top are hefty buds of weed grown on his property. “An after-meal digestive?” he offers. Up a ladder is a 12-windowed attic loft, once the bedroom for two kids and now webbed with wire for drying weed. Back-to-the-landers started cultivating marijuana for their own consumption in the mid '70s, and in the ensuing decades, their isolation, dedication to the crop, and general disregard for the law would turn Humboldt County into one of the epicenters of America's illegal cannabis industry. By the 1980s, former hippies who had once disavowed materialism were turning hefty profits; some built private “pot palaces” and became disconnected from the communes that first brought them into the countryside. Not Ted Thoman, though. He grows for himself and his friends. When we leave, he hands me a full baggie for later. ________________________________________ The steam room on Monty Levenson’s property in Mendocino County. Constructing a home with next to no money demands feats of creative resourcefulness. Back in the 1970s, free building materials were everywhere—if you knew where to look. Jon Turner's house, a two-story, gable-roofed structure in Mendocino County, is fabricated from 2,000-year-old redwood logs he pulled out of the Albion River. His ceiling is the height of a gymnasium because he couldn't bring himself to trim the ancient logs, he explains. He never put a single architectural sketch on paper. Turner wears a leather jacket and a white handlebar mustache; in an adjoining garage, he rebuilds Harley-Davidsons. When he first moved here, from San Joaquin County, just east of San Francisco, he eked out a living as a commercial fisherman. But he found that a century's worth of logging detritus made it hard to navigate the river. So one day he put on goggles, dove into the muck, and discovered buried treasure. The detritus was actually the butts of redwood logs, called “sinkers,” that nearby mills had discarded over the past century. Turner was savvy enough to know that this was the best part of the best lumber on earth, wood with a tight grain and no knots. And the logs were killing the river—redwood is toxic to the river ecosystem, and the logs trapped silt, contributing to the depletion of the local salmon population. Turner was determined to extract the logs, but not even the California Fish and Games Commission had figured out how to do so without ripping up the riverbed. At a junkyard he scored four military-surplus fiberglass pontoons, which he says were used during World War II to clear land mines from rivers. These pontoons each held up a custom-fabricated steel A-frame, from which he dropped a winch line affixed to a pair of century-old logging tongs he'd sink to the bottom of the river in the hope of latching onto a submerged log. With luck, tiny bubbles would emerge. “Then you'd get this whiff like raw sewage,” Turner says, “and you knew it was starting to break loose.” “That's what came out of the '60s, the sense that you could create your own reality.” Monty Levenson Turner has piles of the logs in his front yard, the biggest of which, he says, is 11 feet in diameter. With about 96 percent of old-growth redwoods in California already plundered, it's illegal to touch one today. Turner has never intended to sell his materials, but he collaborates with an architecture firm near Lake Tahoe specializing in chalets. He shows me a magazine featuring one of his projects, for which he'd constructed a two-story wine cellar and a redwood slide that goes from the upstairs into a game room. Turner fabricated the slide himself, bending the wood by creating incisions in the top, a technique he perfected on a piece of celery. After a few years on the property, Turner faced every back-to-the-lander's worst nightmare when a building inspector showed up at his home and cited him for a host of infractions, including a lack of grade stamps on his lumber. He says he'd searched for a grader to approve the quality of his lumber but, with the mills long gone, was unable to find one. So he researched the qualifications required to hold the position, which appeared to be the possession of a rubber stamp used for this purpose. Turner had one made up. He claims the inspector came back round and checked the infraction off his list. That was the easy one, he says. For years he fought other alleged violations. Known as getting “red-tagged,” these coding citations became a means of harassing the community. In 1974 state inspectors deployed low-flying planes to search out illegal structures across Mendocino County. A task force patrolled the hills, tagging premises with notices that deemed them “unfit for human occupancy.” The fines were unfeasibly high, frightening many off the land. I was told of a Vietnam-veteran neighbor who was so triggered by the planes he ran screaming for cover each time. Correcting the building code infringements led to absurd alterations. Inspectors told Ron Blett that two doors were required between a bathroom and a kitchen. So he installed a wall made of two doors. “The inspector counted the doors and checked the box,” he recalls. “Not everything made sense.” Ultimately a group of Mendocino commune residents fought back against the capricious regulations in court, helping to establish a new code designed for owner-builders who sought to live inside their homes. Monty Levenson still grows angry when he thinks back to the inspectors' regulations. “They were trying to put people away for exercising a fundamental human right: to create shelter and manifest their personal freedom,” he says. “It's a money game. I couldn't afford to go to a lumberyard. And the quality of that material was inferior. It's bullshit. It's ironic that the state destroyed the entire area, and then when we move onto it they're like, ‘Oh, let's play fair here.’ But they underestimated us.” ________________________________________ Levenson’s wife, Kayo, displays her work mending his jeans. Levenson plays one of the shakuhachi flutes made in his workshop. The movement wasn't about living in isolation. Residents of these communes didn't seek an escape from society so much as the chance to create it anew: a generous, civic-minded, highly social culture with regular potlucks and solstice blowouts. “We were kindred spirits forging a world we wanted to live in,” Richard Evans explains. “Connected to the earth, sustainably and organically.” Michael and I are driving Evans through Humboldt County to visit some old friends, blasting a reggae show on KMUD, the community-funded radio station he helped found. Evans didn't get rich growing pot, but at times he made enough to survive, and rallied those who were better off to support a range of community initiatives, from the radio station to a volunteer fire brigade to local schools. He now serves on the board of a community center organizing camping trips for at-risk kids. We're headed to see an example of his three-dimensional stained-glass-window installations. To build them Evans tweaked the mathematical principles he loved in geodesic domes, reimagining them in multicolored glass dodecahedrons and polygons. Over the decades, he's created scores of these windows for hippie homes across California, but he's only aware of a few that remain intact. Evans was inspired by similar windows at Druid Heights, a communal outpost formed in 1954 in the Muir Woods National Park that he loved to visit. It was known for its extravagantly experimental hand-built architecture, for low-key performances by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, and for being the final home and resting place of the philosopher Alan Watts, credited for popularizing Eastern thought and spirituality within the American counterculture. Evans found that sculptural stained-glass work was a natural fit in this pocket of strange organic forms, inspired by mandalas and the dwellings of Pacific Islanders. But when Michael and I later trudge through the ruins of the structures, now overgrown with nature, we can't find anything that looks like his artistry. All the glass has been smashed. It feels like the remnants of a lost alien civilization. Evans left Narnia in the late '70s and returned to San Francisco. “Being the only gay person for 2,000 miles was no fun at all,” he admits. In the city he fell in love and soon persuaded his partner to move up to Alderpoint, in Humboldt County. They built their own house, where they lived happily for 13 years, until his partner died of complications from AIDS. The disease was poorly understood back then, and particularly dire in rural areas. Evans is now a volunteer counselor in a Bay Area support group for those diagnosed with AIDS. Late in the afternoon, we arrive at the home (and weed farm) of Tommy and Karen Hessler, who've been close friends of Evans's for more than 40 years. The three rarely see one another these days, and they hug excitedly. Tommy dresses like a farmer: cowboy hat, shirt tucked into jeans. He and Karen built this rambling home themselves in 1972 and has kept it off the grid, installing solar panels—back-to-the-landers were early adopters—and watering crops from a well on their property. The Hessler family is soon to launch its own prepackaged weed brand on the market, called Amaranth Farm. Tommy claims to be one of the first weed farmers in Humboldt County, having started his operation in 1969. It's just one of many successful crops they've farmed over the years. Their vegetables have been found in plenty of local restaurants and grocery stores. Now he's dedicated to passing on his knowledge: A recent college graduate is working on their farm, learning how to cultivate crops. “Once you teach a man how to shelter himself and feed his own face, then fuck you,” Tommy explains. “You can say that to everybody. It's a powerful thing. They don't want to teach you that. In fourth grade they should put seeds in your hand. They want control. But nobody else is in control—you are.” Yet the obtuseness of weed laws drives him nuts. It took the couple years to get the necessary permits. Karen had to use her iPad to navigate the intricacies of “track and trace,” the process by which each individual plant receives a barcode and can be followed from seedling to dispensary shelf. It's all too much for Tommy, who rarely even uses his cell phone. Luckily, the Hesslers' adult children help them run the business. The farm supports the family, and the kids are committed to keeping it alive. At the front of the house is one of Evans's stained-glass window installations, looking like a giant purple chrysanthemum. Inside, new colors appear as the sunlight streams through: blue, maroon, and orange. The Hesslers have looked after the artwork over the decades, and it's still in near perfect condition, a mark of its craftsmanship. Evans beams as he looks at his handiwork: “The integrity of color on the glass tints hasn't dulled over time.” ________________________________________ The collapsing roof of a structure at the long-abandoned Nonagon commune in Humboldt County. When members trickle out of a commune but retain their stake in the property, ownership can become a tricky issue. Often co-owners will refuse to sell their share because of ideological reasons—many members of Northern California's communes acquired land to liberate it from logging and developers. This is why large, expensive swaths of land sometimes remain uninhabited even after all members of a commune have long since decamped. On a cold and foggy morning, we set out to explore one such abandoned commune, based on a tip and vague directions. It's said to be located many miles up and down twisty, muddy logging roads and over streams with plywood bridges in an area of Humboldt County that's recently come to be known as Murder Mountain. The moniker isn't for the treacherous roads. Since the 1990s, the burgeoning cannabis industry has brought cartels and gang violence to the region. We're nervous about taking wrong turns. Popular wisdom here says you should never go down a dirt road you don't know. As the sun pierces through the gray sky, we turn a sharp corner to come upon multiple structures frozen in time. The commune was once known as the Nonagon, named after the nine-sided main house. We step inside the decaying abode to find it empty and surprisingly pristine but for mouse droppings and an antique fridge. A spiral staircase has a raw branch as a handrail; the door latches are out of The Hobbit. Deeper in the brush, we find a smaller cabin, its roof sagging so low its collapse seems inevitable. This home is literally about to go back to the land. Few know it exists here, and I wonder whether Michael and I will be the last to see it standing. As I walk through the door, Michael starts taking pictures as if it might collapse then and there. Inside, a few volumes on hermetic philosophy and a soggy copy of Ram Dass's Be Here Now still sit on a shelf. Some kind of animal has left a nest in the closet. A mandala tapestry is pinned to the ceiling. There's a rocking chair in the corner. The original members of this commune have moved on or passed on, and much as I'd like to know their stories, there's nobody here to tell us what happened. David Jacob Kramer is a writer based in Los Angeles. This is his first story for GQ Style. A version of this story originally appeared in the GQStyle Fall/Winter 2021 issue with the title "The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias." Source: https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias?utm_source=pocket-newtab

'Poet Warrior' Joy Harjo Wants Native Peoples To Be Seen As Human

Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/07/1034751793/poet-laureate-warrior-joy-harjo 'Poet Warrior' Joy Harjo Wants Native Peoples To Be Seen As Human September 7, 202112:46 PM ET Terry Gross

Joy Harjo's memoir is Poet Warrior. She plays saxophone and recites poetry on her new album, I Pray for My Enemies. Shawn Miller/W.W. Norton Joy Harjo, the nation's first Native American poet laureate, has a very clear sense of what she wants to accomplish with her writing. "If my work does nothing else, when I get to the end of my life, I want Native peoples to be seen as human beings," she says. Harjo, who lives in Tulsa, Okla., is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Her new memoir, Poet Warrior, tells the story of her sixth-generation grandfather, who survived the Trail of Tears, the 19th century forced march in which the U.S. government moved Native people from their ancestral homeland in the Southeast to territory that later became Oklahoma. Harjo's memoir is also a personal story about how she learned to find herself in the spiritual world. She's had several dreams that have marked major turning points in her life — including one in which she carries her seventh-generation granddaughter into the world. "It was one of those dreams that I know that it happened, it is happening or it will happen," Harjo says. "The world that we live in is not just the 3-D physical world, but we live in a world that's so multi-dimensional and it's so deep and it's so mysterious. ... There's always something to learn.” Interview highlights On respect being key to her beliefs and center to her work I've come to realize that what has motivated my art-making is really a strong need for justice, for "people" to be treated [with respect.] And then when I say people, I also mean animals and insects and the birds and the earth and the earth person that we are all part of — that there's a key element and that's respect. And my work has always been motivated by that need for respect. On how her ancestors were forced off of their lands in the Trail of Tears A Treacherous Choice And A Treaty Right President Andrew Jackson went against Congress to remove Southeastern Native peoples from the lands there into Indian territory, or what became known as Oklahoma. Of course, we did not go willingly. There were several scuffles and fights and even massacres against this illegal removal. But we were force-marched from our homelands. I think a lot of America thinks it was only the Cherokee — or the so-called "five civilized tribes," that included the Muscogee (Creek) — but these kind of removals or forced migration or marches happened all over the country. We were moved because a lot of people wanted those lands. They were very rich, the Southeast [lands], were very rich in resources and water and animals and plants and so on. But we lost probably at least half of our peoples on that march due to hardship, freezing, violence, rape, all kinds of things that happened on those different removal marches. History In The 1920s, A Community Conspired To Kill Native Americans For Their Oil Money I think a lot of America, when they think back in history and see Natives, we were hiding out in the woods, wearing rags and so on, but we had huge societies. I have a great, great, great uncle who had the largest horse-racing establishment on the Eastern Seaboard, a Muscogee (Creek) man and half Irish. And they wanted that, they wanted what we had. On the Native empowerment movement of the '60s In the late '60s, I was at Indian boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, not your usual boarding school, but it was an arts school, and I remember hearing about Martin Luther King being killed and all of that was on the news. And we were all young Native artists there, from eighth grade to two years postgraduate, and we were working on art and we'd stay up late nights talking and making art together and talking about what it meant to be a Native person and about history and about how our art was part of history making. On her early activism I remember sitting as a young person, as a student, sitting in on meetings with coal companies, uranium companies in the Southwest, with Native peoples attempting to get a voice in or attempting to turn the story towards respect for the Earth, the respect for the people, to take care of the quality of water, the quality of people's lives. And I remember at one point going out to do a story, just after the [1979] Church Rock uranium spill, and there were children out playing in the water and in the livestock and the Navajo speakers were saying, "We need a word." How do we come up with a word that will tell the people that even though you can't see it, there is something dangerous here that can harm you and you can't use these waters, when it was the only source of water for their livestock? Joy Harjo Becomes The 1st Native American U.S. Poet Laureate On loving books as a child The only book we had in our house, I think, was the Bible. And I liked the pictures, often there were pictures in those books, or at least the one we had. And when I went to first grade, when we started to learn how to read, I was so thrilled about what happened with symbols and that suddenly it opened up a world to me. I read all of the books in the first grade classroom and was sent into the second grade, and it became like a hunger for me. I liked the sounds, of course, I like the sound that words make. I like the percussion, the percussive elements and the images and so on. Just like the same kind of thing I heard in my mother's song-making. But the more I read and the more the ability grew, the deeper I could read, the more stories and I could be transported in — much the same way that I could be in that kind of visionary dream world when I was younger. And when we get to about 7 — and I think this happens to a lot of us — we forsake those realms of knowing and understanding, and reading helped give that back. On her belief that babies are born with help from their ancestors I don't believe that we come into this world alone. We have assistance from, I guess, what people call the "other side." There's interaction that goes on. I've learned this, especially being an artist of a writer, a musician, that there's resonances. ... I have always felt ... my great grandfather, Henry Marcy Harjo, around me exactly when I needed him or his wisdom. And I think it's true for everyone. I have been at the births of several of my grandchildren, and someone always walks them in, so that when I was writing this memoir and I had a dream towards the end of writing it, and in the dream, I was carrying my seventh generation granddaughter into the world. It's a ritual we all do, you know, where you open the blanket and you look at them and you admire them and you look at who's coming in and you welcome them. And sometimes you can see their gifts and what they're bringing in and you give them a blessing.

Lauren Krenzel and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz , Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web

Thi Ca Đương Đại Mỹ. Phần 8: Thơ về Thiên Nhiên

Tân thế giới đã thu hút người Mỹ trong suốt thời kỳ cách mạng hồi cuối những năm 1700, khi đó Philip Freneau đề xướng việc ca ngợi cỏ cây cùng thú vật bản địa tại Mỹ châu như là cách định hình danh tính Mỹ.  Siêu nghiệm luận và khuynh hướng yêu chuộng nông nghiệp tập trung vào mồ́i liên hệcủa nước Mỹ với thiên nhiên vào thế kỷ 19 và đầu thế kỷ 20.

Ngày nay các mối quan tâm về môi trường là nguồn hứng cho một loại thi ca Mỹ mãnh mẽ, chuyên nói về sinh thái.  Cố thi sĩ A.R. Ammons là ông tổ mới đây của loại thơ này, và các nhà thơ thổ dân/người da đỏ như cố thi sĩ James Welch và Leslie Marmon Silko không bao giờ đánh mất đi lòng kính trọng thiên nhiên.  Các nhà thơ đương thời bám rễ vào cách nhìn tự nhiên bao gồm Pattiann Rogers (1940 --) và Maxine Kumin ̣(1925--).  Rogers làm nổi bật lịch sử tự nhiên, trong khi Kumin viết về đời sống riêng của mình và việc nuôi ngựa ở nông trại với đầy xúc cảm.

Mary Oliver (1935--)  

Một trong những nhà thơ viết về thiên nhiên được ca ngợi nhất là Mary Oliver.  Là một nhà thơ dễ tiếp cận nhưng lại làm người đọc phải sững sờ, Oliver gợi lên những hình ảnh sinh động mạnh mẽ về cỏ cây và muôn thú.  Oliver sinh ra tại bang Ohio nhưng sống nhiều năm ở vùng New England, và thơ của bà, giống như thơ của Robert Frost, lấy cảm hứng từ phong cảnh đa dạng và bốn mùa thay đổi của vùng này.  Oliver tìm thấy ý nghĩa khi tiếp cận với thiên nhiên, tiếp nối truyền thống Siêu nghiệm luận của Henry David Thoreau và Ralph Waldo Emerson và sáng tác của bà nặng về mặt đạo đức.  Tác phẩm của Oliver gồm American Primitive (1983), New and Selected Poems (1992), White Pine (1994), Blue Pastures (1995), cùng các tiểu luận đăng trong The Leaf and the Cloud (2000).

Đối với Oliver, không một sự kiện thiên nhiên nào quá nhúng nhường khiêm tốn đến độ không cho chúng ta những cái nhìn sâu thẳm vào bên trong, hay là cái mà Emerson gọi là "những sự kiện tâm linh," như qua bài thơ "Con Rắn Đen" (1979) của bà.  Mặc dù người phát ngôn trong bài thơ, tức người lái chiếc xe hơi, chỉ được nhắc đến kín đáo qua cái chết của con rắn, bà dừng lại và nhặt xác con rắn ra  khỏi con lộ --một nghĩa cử tôn trọng.  Bà xem con rắn như "người anh em bị chết," dù nó là một con vật thường bị gán cho những tính cách xấu xa, và bị nói đến một cách tiêu cực qua sự chết và Phúc Âm Kinh Thánh, và bà trân quý vẻ đẹp sáng bóng của nó.  Con rắn dạy cho bà về cái chết, nhưng nó cũng dạy bà về sự khởi đầu hay làm mới lại và niềm vui trong cuộc sống, và bà lái xe đi tiếp, vừa nghĩ về "ánh sáng nằm giữa từng tế bào" mời gọi mọi sự sống được tạo dựng "hãy hướng tới trước/hân hpoan suốt mùa xuân"-- luôn luôn không hề biết chúng ta sẽ kết thúc cuộc đời mình ở đâu.  Lời kêu gọi hãy tập trung vào giây phút hiện tại (carpe diem) là lời mời gọi chúng ta hãy ý thức hân hoan và sâu sắc hơn

   

 

 

Khi con rắn đen Lấp lánh trên con lộ buổi sáng Và chiếc cam nhông không thể lách tránh nó Cái chết, chuyện xảy ra như thế. Giờ đây nó nằm cuộn lại, vô dụng Như bánh xe đạp cũ. Tôi dừng xe hơi Đem xác con rấn bỏ vào bụi cây Nó trông đẹp và lấp lánh Như chiếc roi da thắt bím, Nó đẹp và yên lặng Như người anh quá cố Tôi để nó nằm dưới những chiếc lá Rồi tôi lái tiếp, suy nghĩ Về cái chết: đột ngột, Gánh nặng khủng khiếp, Chắc chắn rồi sẽ đến. Nhưng Bên dưới lý trí là đốm lửa tươi sáng hơn Mà xương luôn luôn thích Đó là câu chuyện về cái may mắn vô cùng Nói với quên lãng: không phải tôi! Đó là ánh sáng nằm chính giữa từng tế bào Đó là cái đã gởi con rắn đến đây nằm cuộn mình trườn ra phía trước Suốt mùa xuân len lỏi qua những chiếc lá xanh Trước khi ra đến con lộ. Trước khi ra đến con lộ. Thơ của Oliver tìm thấy đủ cách để ca ngợi sự kiện đơn giản mà siêu nghiệm khi được sống. Trong bài thơ “Con chim ruồi dừng lại nơi dây hoa loa kèn” (1992), bà nhắc nhở chúng ta rằng phần lớn hiện hữu là “chờ đợi và hồi tưởng,” vì phần lớn thời gian trên thế giới nàymặt , “chúng ta “không có ở đây,/chưa ra đời, hoặc đã chết.” Nhiều bài thơ của Oliver, như bài “Poppies” (1991-1992) khiến người đọc lập tức nhớ ngay đến cố thi sĩ James Wright. Bài thơ bắt đầu với việc mô tả những cánh hoa màu cam xoè to đong đưa/ trước gió, trọn cả vườn hoa nhô cao.” Bài thơ kết thúc với lời trêu nhạo cái chết “: “Ngươi làm gì được/ nó? –đêm xanh sâu thẫm.”

How a Young Ernest Hemingway Dealt With His First Taste of Fame

How a Young Ernest Hemingway Dealt With His First Taste of Fame A recently published batch of Ernest Hemingway’s letters could change the way we think about the author’s influences, relationships with other writers and views on race. The Conversation • Verna Kale How was it? Save stories you love and never lose them. More from The Conversation • The White Supremacist Origins of Modern Marriage Advice 392 saves • Hidden Women of History: Enheduanna, Princess, Priestess and the World’s First Known Author 226 saves • Five Books From the 19th Century That Will Help You Understand Modern America Better 86 saves Ernest Hemingway with a bull near Pamplona, Spain in 1927, two years before ‘A Farewell to Arms’ would be published. Photos from the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. When he published “The Sun Also Rises” in 1926, Ernest Hemingway was well-known among the expatriate literati of Paris and to cosmopolitan literary circles in New York and Chicago. But it was “A Farewell to Arms,” published in October 1929, that made him a celebrity. With this newfound fame, Hemingway learned, came fan mail. Lots of it. And he wasn’t really sure how to deal with the attention. At the Hemingway Letters Project, I’ve had the privilege of working with Hemingway’s approximately 6,000 outgoing letters. “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 4 (1929-1931)” – edited by Sandra Spanier and Miriam B. Mandel – brought to light 430 annotated letters, 85 percent of which were published for the first time. They offer a glimpse at how Hemingway handled his growing celebrity, shedding new light on the author’s influences and his relationships with other writers. Mutual Admiration The success of “A Farewell to Arms” surprised even Hemingway’s own publisher. Robert W. Trogdon, a Hemingway scholar and member of the Letters Project’s editorial team, traces the author’s relationship with Scribner’s and notes that while it ordered an initial printing of over 31,000 copies – six times as many as the first printing of “The Sun Also Rises” – the publisher still underestimated the demand for the book. Additional print runs brought the total edition to over 101,000 copies before the year was out – and that was after the devastating 1929 stock market crash. In response to the many fan letters he received, Hemingway was typically gracious. Sometimes he offered writerly advice, and even went so far as to send – upon request and at his own expense – several of his books to a prisoner at St. Quentin. At the same time, writing to novelist Hugh Walpole in December 1929, Hemingway lamented the amount of effort – and postage – required to answer all those letters: “When ‘The Sun Also Rises’ came out there were only letters from a few old ladies who wanted to make a home for me and said my disability would be no drawback and drunks who claimed we had met places. ‘Men Without Women’ brought no letters at all. What are you supposed to do when you really start to get letters?” Among the fan mail he received was a letter from David Garnett, an English novelist from a literary family with connections to the Bloomsbury Group, a network of writers, artists and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf. Though we don’t have Garnett’s letter to Hemingway, Garnett appears to have predicted, rightly, that “A Farewell to Arms” would be more than a fleeting success. “I hope to god what you say about the book will be true,” Hemingway replies, “though how we are to know whether they last I don’t know – But anyway you were fine to say it would.” He then goes on to praise Garnett’s 1925 novel, “The Sailor’s Return”: “…all I did was to go around wishing to god I could have written it. It is still the only book I would like to have written of all the books since our father’s and mother’s times.” (Garnett was seven years older than Hemingway; Hemingway greatly admired the translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy by Constance Garnett, David’s mother.) An Overlooked Influence Hemingway’s response to Garnett – written the same day as his letter to Walpole – is notable for several reasons. First, it complicates the popular portrait of Hemingway as an antagonist to other writers. It’s a reputation that’s not entirely undeserved – after all, one of Hemingway’s earliest publications was a tribute to Joseph Conrad in which Hemingway expressed a desire to run T.S. Eliot through a sausage grinder. “The Torrents of Spring” (1926), his first published novel, was a parody of his own mentors, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein and “all the rest of the pretensious [sic] faking bastards,” as he put it in a 1925 letter to Ezra Pound. But in the letter to Garnett we see another side of Hemingway: an avid reader overcome with boyish excitement. “You have meant very much to me as a writer,” he declares, “and now that you have written me that letter I should feel very fine – But instead all that happens is I don’t believe it.” The letter also suggests that Garnett has been overlooked as one of Hemingway’s influences. It’s easy to see why Hemingway liked “The Sailor’s Return” (so well, it appears, that he checked it out from Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. lending library and never returned it). A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune praised Garnett’s “simple but extremely lucid English” and his “power of making fiction appear to be fact,” qualities that are the hallmark of Hemingway’s own distinctive style. The book also has a certain understated wit – as do “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms.” Garnett’s book would have appealed to Hemingway on a personal level as well. Though it’s set entirely in England, the portrait of Africa that exists in the background is the same sort of exotic wilderness that captured the imagination of Hemingway the boy and that Hemingway the young man still longed explore. Imagining Africa But Hemingway’s praise of Garnett leads to other, unsettling questions. From its frontispiece to its devastating conclusion, Garnett’s book relies on racial stereotypes of an exoticized, infantilized Other. Its main character, an African woman, brought to England by her white husband, is meant to command the reader’s sympathy – indeed, the choice she makes in the end, to send her mixed-race child back to his African family, hearkens to an earlier era of sentimental literature and decries the parochial prejudices of English society. However, that message is drowned out by the narrator’s assumptions about inherent differences between the races. Garnett’s biographer Sarah Knights suggests that Garnett was “neither susceptible to casual racism nor prone to imperialist arrogance,” yet Garnett’s 1933 introduction to the Cape edition of Hemingway’s “The Torrents of Spring” claims “it is the privilege of civilized town-dwellers to sentimentalize primitive peoples.” In “The Torrents of Spring,” Hemingway mocked the primitivism of Sherwood Anderson (cringe-worthy even by 1925 standards), but as Garnett’s comment indicates, Hemingway imitated Anderson’s reliance on racial stereotypes as much as he criticized it. What, then, can we glean about Hemingway’s views on race from his exuberant praise of “The Sailor’s Return”? Hemingway had a lifelong fascination with Africa, and his letters show that in 1929 he was already making plans for an African safari. He would take the trip in 1933 and publish his nonfiction memoir, “Green Hills of Africa,” in 1935. The work is experimental and modernistic, but the local people are secondary to Hemingway’s descriptions of “country.” Late in life, however, Hemingway’s views on Africa would shift, and his second safari, in 1953-4, brought what scholar of American literature and African diaspora studies Nghana tamu Lewis describes as “a crisis of consciousness” that “engendered a new commitment to understanding African peoples’ struggles against oppression as part, rather than in isolation, of changing ecological conditions.” Hemingway went to Africa in 1934. But back in 1929, when Hemingway was wondering what to do with an ever-growing pile of mail, that trip – along with another world war, a Nobel Prize and the debilitating effects of his strenuous life – were part of an unk nowable future. In “The Letters 1929-1931” we see a younger Hemingway, his social conscience yet to mature, trying to figure out his new role as professional author and celebrity. Verna Kale is an Associate Editor of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway and Assistant Research Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-a-young-ernest-hemingway-dealt-with-his-first-taste-of-fame?utm_source=pocket-newtab This post originally appeared on The Conversation and was published November 0, 2017. This article is republished here with permission. Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, and the Art of Revision “In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.” Brain Pickings • Maria Popova How was it? Save stories you love and never lose them. More from Brain Pickings • Zadie Smith on the Psychology of the Two Types of Writers 1,817 saves • The Daily Routines of Great Writers 7,944 saves • How to Read Like a Writer 2,316 saves Hemingway (left) and Samuelson fishing and talking in Key West. “As a writer you should not judge. You should understand,” Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) counseled in his 1935 Esquire compendium of writing advice, addressed to an archetypal young correspondent but based on a real-life encounter that had taken place a year earlier. In 1934, a 22-year-old aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson set out to meet his literary hero, hoping to steal a few moments with Hemingway to talk about writing. The son of Norwegian immigrant wheat farmers, he had just completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but had refused to pay the $5 diploma fee. Convinced that his literary education would be best served by apprenticing himself to Hemingway, however briefly, he hitchhiked atop a coal car from Minnesota to Key West. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson later recalled, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.” Unreasonable though the quest may have been, he ended up staying with Hemingway for almost an entire year, over the course of which he became the literary titan’s only true protégé. Samuelson recorded the experience and its multitude of learnings in a manuscript that was only discovered by his daughter after his death in 1981. It was eventually published as With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba (public library) — the closest thing to a psychological profile of the great writer. Shortly after the young man’s arrival in Key West, Hemingway got right down to granting him what he had traveled there seeking. In one of their first exchanges, he hands Samuelson a handwritten list and instructs him: Here’s a list of books any writer should have read as a part of his education… If you haven’t read these, you just aren’t educated. They represent different types of writing. Some may bore you, others might inspire you and others are so beautifully written they’ll make you feel it’s hopeless for you to try to write. This is the list of heartening and hopeless-making masterworks that Hemingway handed to young Samuelson: 1. The Blue Hotel (public library) by Stephen Crane 2. The Open Boat (public library) by Stephen Crane 3. Madame Bovary (public library) by Gustave Flaubert 4. Dubliners (public library) by James Joyce 5. The Red and the Black (public library) by Stendhal 6. Of Human Bondage (free ebook | public library) by W. Somerset Maugham 7. Anna Karenina (free ebook | public library) by Leo Tolstoy 8. War and Peace (free ebook | public library) by Leo Tolstoy 9. Buddenbrooks (public library) by Thomas Mann 10. Hail and Farewell (public library) by George Moore 11. The Brothers Karamazov (public library) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 12. The Oxford Book of English Verse (public library) 13. The Enormous Room (public library) by E.E. Cummings 14. Wuthering Heights (free ebook | public library) by Emily Brontë 15. Far Away and Long Ago (free ebook | public library) by W.H. Hudson 16. The American (free ebook | public library) by Henry James Not on the handwritten list but offered in the conversation surrounding the exchange is what Hemingway considered “the best book an American ever wrote,” the one that “marks the beginning of American literature” — Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (public library). Art by Norman Rockwell for a rare edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Alongside these edifying essentials, Hemingway offered young Samuelson some concrete writing advice. Advocating for staying with what psychologists now call flow, he begins with the psychological discipline of the writing process: The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. Then, echoing Lewis Carroll’s advice on overcoming creative block in problem-solving, Hemingway considers the practical tactics of this psychological strategy: The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along. Every day go back to the beginning and rewrite the whole thing and when it gets too long, read at least two or three chapters before you start to write and at least once a week go back to the start. That way you make it one piece. And when you go over it, cut out everything you can. The main thing is to know what to leave out. The way you tell whether you’re going good is by what you can throw away. If you can throw away stuff that would make a high point of interest in somebody else’s story, you know you’re going good. He then returns to the psychological payoff of this trying practice: Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it. When Samuelson asks how one can know whether one has any talent, Hemingway replies: You can’t. Sometimes you can go on writing for years before it shows. If a man’s got it in him, it will come out sometime. The only thing I can advise you is to keep on writing but it’s a damned tough racket. The only reason I make any money at it is I’m a sort of literary pirate. Out of every ten stories I write, only one is any good and I throw the other nine away. Hemingway tempers this with a word of advice on ambition, self-comparison, and originality: Never compete with living writers. You don’t know whether they’re good or not. Compete with the dead ones you know are good. Then when you can pass them up you know you’re going good. You should have read all the good stuff so that you know what has been done, because if you have a story like one somebody else has written, yours isn’t any good unless you can write a better one. In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better, but the tendency should always be upward instead of down. And don’t ever imitate anybody. All style is, is the awkwardness of a writer in stating a fact. If you have a way of your own, you are fortunate, but if you try to write like somebody else, you’ll have the awkwardness of the other writer as well as your own. Hemingway shows off a 324-pound blue marlin as Samuelson (far left) admires it. In a sentiment that calls to mind Neil Gaiman’s magnificent commencement address on the only adequate response to criticism, Hemingway cautions Samuelson about the petty jealousies that arise with success: When you start to write everybody is wishing you luck, but when you’re going good, they try to kill you. The only way you can ever stay on top is by writing good stuff. With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba brims with the celebrated writer’s wisdom on literature, life, and the creative experience. Complement it with Hemingway on knowledge and the dangers of ego, and his short, spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech, then revisit the essential reading lists of Joan Didion, Leo Tolstoy, Susan Sontag, Alan Turing, Brian Eno, David Byrne, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Patti Smith. How was it? Save stories you love and never lose them. This post originally appeared on Brain Pickings and was published January 1, 2016. This article is republished here with permission. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/hemingway-s-advice-on-writing-ambition-the-art-of-revision-and-his-reading-list-of-essential-books

Những bài học từ nhà văn Ernest Hemingway quen mà lạ

 Lê Quỳnh, BBC News Tiếng Việt

10 tháng 7 2021

60 năm sau ngày ông tự sát, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) vẫn còn được nhớ đến với không ít ý kiến trái chiều về di sản nghệ thuật và con người nhà văn.

Đằng sau gương mặt đầy thu hút, Hemingway phải đối mặt với cuộc chiến suốt đời chống lại chứng trầm cảm, nghiện rượu và các vấn đề sức khỏe tâm thần, tất cả góp phần dẫn đến cái chết của ông bằng cách tự sát vào ngày 2 tháng 7 năm 1961.

Đầu năm nay một bộ phim tài liệu dài sáu giờ, của Ken Burns và Lynn Novick (những người trước đó làm loạt phim The Vietnam War), đã ra mắt, về nhà văn Hemingway.

Ken Burns nói: "Ông là một người đàn ông bị dằn vặt vì nhiều thứ. Tiền sử bệnh tâm thần trong gia đình, tự tử trong gia đình, rối loạn căng thẳng sau sang chấn (PTSD) từ Thế chiến thứ nhất và các tình huống khác, một loạt chấn thương sọ não trong suốt cuộc đời, nghiện rượu, tự dùng thuốc cần thiết để sống tiếp."

Không chỉ Hemingway phải chịu đựng, mà nhiều thế hệ của gia đình ông đều đối mặt với những vấn đề tương tự, và một trong những cháu gái của ông gọi là "lời nguyền Hemingway." Ông là một trong năm người tự tử trong ba thế hệ của gia đình Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway sinh ngày 21 tháng 7 năm 1899, tại Cicero (nay là Oak Park), Illinois, là con thứ hai trong gia đình có sáu người con.

Bố mẹ ông là Clarence "Ed" Hemingway và Grace.

Ed là một bác sĩ thành đạt còn bà Grace là một cựu ca sĩ và giáo viên dạy nhạc.

Phần lớn thời thơ ấu của ông bị chia cắt giữa ngôi nhà của gia đình ở Oak Park, Illinois và một ngôi nhà trong rừng ở Michigan, nơi Ed truyền lại tình yêu săn bắn và hoạt động ngoài trời cho con trai. Nhưng Hemingway có mối quan hệ sóng gió với cha mình, người mặc dù vẻ ngoài điềm tĩnh nhưng có thể là một kẻ bạo lực, độc đoán.

Hemingway cũng có một mối quan hệ căng thẳng với mẹ mình. Khi Hemingway còn là một đứa trẻ, mẹ thường mặc quần áo cho cậu và chị gái như một cặp song sinh.

Người vợ thứ ba của Hemingway, nhà báo Martha Gellhorn, sau này quy kết những khó khăn của Hemingway với phụ nữ, bao gồm cả sự không chung thủy, tàn nhẫn và bỏ rơi, là do mối quan hệ của ông với Grace. 

Hành trình xê dịch

Hemingway rời nhà khi còn là một thiếu niên, trở thành phóng viên của Kansas City Star trong sáu tháng.

Năm 1917, Hemingway nộp đơn đăng ký nghĩa vụ quân sự cho Thế chiến thứ Nhất. Tuy nhiên, ông đã bị từ chối vì thị lực kém. Thành ra ông đăng ký với một đơn vị cứu thương tình nguyện của Hội Chữ thập đỏ, và chuyển đến Ý vào tháng 5 năm 1918.

Tháng 7 năm đó, Hemingway đã bị trúng đạn súng cối khi đang giao hàng tiếp tế cho các binh sĩ trên tiền tuyến. Anh tiếp tục công việc để đưa lính Ý đến nơi an toàn, và chính phủ Ý đã trao tặng anh Huy chương Bạc Dũng cảm.

Hemingway đã nằm trong bệnh viện ở Milan để hồi phục. Tại đây, anh gặp và yêu nữ y tá Agnes von Kurowsky.

Đạo diễn phim tài liệu mới ra gần đây về Hemingway, Ken Burns, nói trong một phỏng vấn: "Ông suýt chết, nằm viện hàng tháng trời, vừa tự hào về điều đó, nhưng cũng ám ảnh vì nó."

Chàng trai trở về Hoa Kỳ vào tháng 1 năm 1919, tưởng rằng Agnes sẽ theo cùng, nhưng cô đã chọn một người đàn ông khác.

Sự từ chối của cô đã ảnh hưởng đến một số tác phẩm của ông, bao gồm cả cuốn tiểu thuyết Giã từ vũ khí (1929).

Trở về Mỹ, ông kết hôn với người vợ đầu tiên, Hadley Richardson. Họ có một con trai, Jack, vào năm 1923.

Năm 1921, Hemingway nhận công việc phóng viên nước ngoài cho The Toronto Star, sau đó ông và Hadley chuyển đến Paris.

Nhiều nhà văn và trí thức Mỹ sống trong khu phố Montparnasse, bao gồm Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, và Ezra Pound. Họ chia sẻ sự thất vọng khiến Gertrude Stein gọi họ là "Thế hệ đã mất". Hemingway sẽ miêu tả họ trong cuốn tiểu thuyết đầu tiên Mặt trời vẫn mọc (1926).

Nhưng tính khí thất thường của Hemingway, dẫn đến xung đột với người vợ Richardson và bạn bè.

Văn phong độc đáo

Văn phong của ông là một cuộc cách mạng. Các nhà văn tại Việt Nam thường nhắc tới nguyên lý Tảng băng trôi" (Iceberg Theory) của Hemingway. Đó là sự kiệm lời, hàm súc trong câu chữ, và nhà văn không công khai phát ngôn ý tưởng của mình mà xây dựng hình tượng có sức gợi mở cho độc giả.

Đạo diễn Ken Burns nhận xét: "Sẽ có những thăng trầm và ông ấy sẽ bị từ chối vì những nguyên do có thể là nghệ thuật hoặc văn học, nhưng ông sẽ tồn tại vì tác phẩm quá tuyệt vời."

Đầu năm 1926, Hemingway bắt đầu ngoại tình với nhà báo Pauline Pfeiffer, và nhanh chóng ly hôn với Richardson. Hemingway và Pauline kết hôn vào tháng 5 năm 1927.

Vào tháng 12 năm 1928, khi Hemingway 29 tuổi, cha ông đã tự sát, tự bắn mình bằng khẩu súng lục của gia đình sau một thời gian dài gặp khó khăn.

Hemingway vô cùng chấn động trước cái chết của cha, mà phần lớn ông đổ lỗi cho mẹ mình.

Ông cũng hư cấu các sự kiện trong cuốn tiểu thuyết năm 1940, Chuông nguyện hồn ai, trong đó cha của nhân vật chính tự sát theo cách tương tự.

Ông trở lại Tây Ban Nha một thời gian ngắn để nghiên cứu về đấu bò tót cho tác phẩm Chết vào buổi chiều (1932). Năm 1933, Hemingway và Pauline đi săn ở Đông Phi, nơi truyền cảm hứng cho một tác phẩm, Đồi xanh của Châu Phi (1935).

Hemingway đảm nhận vị trí phóng viên chiến trường ở Tây Ban Nha vào năm 1937, nơi ông đưa tin về Nội chiến Tây Ban Nha. Tại đây, ông gặp nhà báo đồng nghiệp Martha Gellhorn, người sẽ trở thành vợ thứ ba của ông vào năm 1940.

Năm 1940, Hemingway mua một ngôi nhà ở Cuba, và mặc dù ông tiếp tục đi khắp thế giới, nhưng đây sẽ là nơi ở chính của ông trong 20 năm tiếp theo.

Kinh nghiệm của ông về cuộc chiến đã dẫn đến việc ông viết Chuông nguyện hồn ai (1940).

Hemingway lại trở thành phóng viên nước ngoài trong Thế chiến thứ hai. Trong khi làm nhiệm vụ, ông đã gặp và yêu nhà báo Mary Welsh và kết hôn vào năm 1946.

Ông xuất bản tác phẩm tiểu thuyết lớn cuối cùng của mình, Ông già và biển cả, vào năm 1952, đoạt giải Pulitzer năm 1953 và giải Nobel Văn học năm 1954.

Cùng năm đó, Hemingway suýt thiệt mạng sau hai vụ tai nạn máy bay khi đi du lịch ở châu Phi.

Tai nạn khiến sức khỏe thể chất và tinh thần của ông suy giảm nghiêm trọng.

Khi ông và người vợ thứ tư, Mary Welsh, trở lại Cuba vào năm 1957, ông bắt đầu viết hồi ký về những năm đầu của ông ở Paris.

Nhưng ông đã phải vật lộn để hoàn thành tác phẩm, và sự thất vọng càng làm nhà văn trầm cảm thêm.

Khi tình hình chính trị ở Cuba trở nên tồi tệ, Hemingway và Welsh ra đi vào tháng 7 năm 1960, và trong vài tháng sau đó, Hemingway ngày càng trở nên cô lập, tin rằng mình đang bị FBI giám sát.

Vào mùa thu năm 1960, cặp đôi định cư tại một ngôi nhà mới xây ở Ketchum, Idaho.

Sự bất ổn của Hemingway ngày càng gia tăng, khi ông trở nên tin rằng mình đang trên bờ vực phá sản.

Tự sát

Ông lại phải nhập viện vào tháng 4 năm 1961 và được điều trị bằng sốc điện nhiều hơn.

Hemingway thuyết phục các bác sĩ của mình rằng ông đủ khỏe để được ra về vào cuối tháng Sáu.

Vào một buổi sáng Chủ nhật - ngày 2 tháng 7 năm 1961 - nhà văn thức dậy sớm. Ông rời khỏi phòng ngủ và đi xuống tầng hầm của ngôi nhà. Tại đó, ông mở khóa tủ súng và lấy khẩu súng yêu thích cùng một số đạn dược.

Sau khi thi thể của ông được tìm thấy, vợ ông, Mary, nói rằng đó là một tai nạn, và nhà văn nổi tiếng đang lau súng thì vô tình cướp cò. Tuy nhiên, sau này, bà thừa nhận rằng nhà văn đã tự tử.

Nguyên nhân?

Năm 2006, Tiến sĩ Christopher D. Martin, một bác sĩ tâm thần và là người hâm mộ Hemingway, đã xuất bản một nghiên cứu nhằm làm sáng tỏ lịch sử sức khỏe tâm thần của Hemingway.

Tác giả nói có "bằng chứng đáng kể" cho thấy Hemingway chịu rối loạn lưỡng cực, nghiện rượu, chấn thương sọ não. Cuối đời, Hemingway cũng có các triệu chứng rối loạn tâm thần có thể liên quan đến căn bệnh tiềm ẩn, nghiện rượu và chấn thương sọ não.

Theo ông, Hemingway đã áp dụng cơ chế tự phòng vệ, bao gồm tự uống thuốc với rượu, lối sống thể thao năng nổ, chấp nhận rủi ro và ham viết lách, để đối phó với đau khổ gây ra bởi căn bệnh.

Martin cũng tìm hiểu sâu về tiền sử trầm cảm của cả cha mẹ ông, cho rằng Hemingway có thể mang khuynh hướng di truyền đối với bệnh tâm thần, cũng như sự giận dữ sâu sắc chưa được giải quyết đối với cả cha mẹ.

Trong cuốn sách Hemingway's Brain năm 2017, bác sĩ Andrew Farah lập luận rằng các triệu chứng của Hemingway gần giống với bệnh não chấn thương mãn tính (CTE) do hậu quả của nhiều chấn động nghiêm trọng trong cuộc đời. Theo Farah, Hemingway đã phải chịu ít nhất 9 lần chấn động hoặc chấn thương não nghiêm trọng.

Ông Farah nói: "Tôi đã dành toàn bộ một chương cho A Moveable Feast vì đây là tác phẩm cuối cùng của Hemingway và chắc chắn được viết trong thời điểm ông suy sụp. Tại thời điểm này, CTE và chứng mất trí nhớ hỗn hợp đã lộ rõ, và cuốn sách được in lại rất khác so với bản thảo gốc mà ông ấy để lại, vì đã được vợ ông và người biên tập tại Scribner's chỉnh sửa rất nhiều."

Tuy nhiên, một giả thuyết khác cho rằng Hemingway bị một chứng rối loạn di truyền hiếm gặp dẫn đến không thể hấp thụ sắt. Nếu không được điều trị, nó có thể dẫn đến mệt mỏi dữ dội, mất trí nhớ, trầm cảm và tiểu đường, tất cả đều ảnh hưởng đến cả Hemingway và các thành viên khác trong gia đình.

Nhưng cũng như các phỏng đoán khác về nguyên nhân gây ra sức khỏe tâm thần của Hemingway, các chuyên gia không thể chắc chắn 100%.

Chỉ 5 năm sau cái chết của Hemingway, chị gái Ursula, người phải chiến đấu với cả căn bệnh ung thư và chứng trầm cảm, qua đời do cố ý dùng thuốc quá liều.

Leicester, em trai duy nhất của Hemingway, tự bắn mình vào năm 1982, sau nhiều năm yếu đi vì các vấn đề sức khỏe bắt nguồn từ bệnh tiểu đường.

Năm 1996, vào ngày giỗ của Hemingway, cháu gái của ông là Margaux đã tự kết liễu đời mình bằng cách dùng thuốc quá liều.

Bài học

Trong một phỏng vấn, bà đạo diễn Lynn Novick nói: "Ông ấy thực sự phải chịu đựng rất nhiều cảm xúc theo những cách mà tôi sẽ không bao giờ hiểu được. Tôi cũng thấy những phần hành vi của ông thật kinh khủng, thật sự khủng khiếp. Tôi sẽ không bao giờ muốn kết hôn với ông ấy!"

Ông Ken Burns thì nói: "Huyền thoại cũng là sự thật, ông ấy yêu thiên nhiên, là một nam nhi theo nhiều cách khác nhau, là một kẻ hiếu chiến, nghiện rượu, là một ngư dân biển sâu và một thợ săn."

"Điều đằng sau thú vị hơn nhiều, dễ bị tổn thương, sự tò mò về cách suy nghĩ của phụ nữ, sự uyển chuyển về giới tính sẽ gây sốc mạnh đối với mọi người."

Burns giải thích:

"Có những truyện ngắn mà ông ấy viết cách đây 100 năm rất ấn tượng về khả năng đi vào bên trong làn da của người khác giới...Tất cả các bà vợ của ông ấy đều được yêu cầu cắt tóc và ông ấy để tóc dài và họ đảo ngược vai trò trong đời sống tình dục của họ."

Khi được hỏi người xem có thể rút ra bài học gì từ đời Hemingway, bà Lynn Novick nói:

"Ông ta có khả năng tuyệt vời biết thưởng thức cái đẹp, sống trong hiện tại, nhìn thế giới xung quanh rõ ràng, nhìn thấu những điều nhảm nhí và đạo đức giả. Ông ấy cũng có kỷ luật đáng kinh ngạc. Dù gặp thách thức, ông ấy đã cố gắng làm việc mỗi ngày."

"Mặt khác, ông quá khao khát danh tiếng và khao khát được công nhận đến nỗi nó đã trở thành một nhà tù. Hình ảnh bản thân mà ông ấy thể hiện, được bao quanh bởi những người muốn gần bạn vì bạn nổi tiếng. Đó là một sự tồn tại trống rỗng. Ông ấy đã trả giá cho điều đó."

Source:

https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/world-57787197