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Moving Today

We are down for our big move from Blogger to Wordpress today. Please don't leave any comments until we are back up again.

Chris

An Astounding Letter Arrives

A rather amazing letter has appeared this morning at A Letter From Leslie On The Road - 1962. I feel like the Pig is ratcheting to something new and pretty wild. But I can't see it clearly yet.

Meanwhile, more Leslie H. of the Baby Beatniks coming up.

Report from the Bored of Directors

We, the Board of Directors of the Pondering Pig Society, wish there were more wise and clear-seeing directors on our board. We all tend to take naps in the sun after eating and drinking large lunches. But soldier on we must, providing guidance and direction to the rambling Pig Of The Grey Skies And Rain.

In our wisdom, we have decided to move the blog from Blogger to Wordpress. We hope to find a more stable and flexible support system. This means nothing to you, I'm sure, but our far-seeing decision has forced the Pig to spend several days rummaging around in instruction manuals instead of writing either his novel or his wide-ranging blog.

The new version is currently up and ready to go, but we are remiss to transfer the service until we have explored it for minefields we don't know about yet. And create categories so readers can find the good stuff. So maybe in another day.

Pigsty Is Moving Cross Town

Hey Pig Fanciers,

If you dropped by the Pigsty over the weekend you probably noticed the mess. Looked like a pig lives here. Stories were flung helter skelter over the page, margins mislaid, images in the wastebasket.

I was packing up, okay? I hadn't meant to move out, just fix things up a little. But here I go.

It was spring. Time for frolicking in the daffodils. Except here in Spokane, where it is wintertime again. Snow in your eyes time again, Freeze your patootie off time again. So I thought I'd put the miserable weather to use by staying in and creating a fresh new look for the blog, something modern and appropriate for a pig of stature.

I decided to put up a new picture, write a little poem to go under it and then have Taj Majal play the opening bars of Statesboro Blues on Henrietta, his favorite Strat. Next an animated curtain would open and Jinx The Cat would come out in a top hat to warm you up with a few cat jokes and then do the Charleston with Reese Witherspoon. Set the appropriate mood, you know? Was that too much to ask?

Well, I made a few mistakes. What do I know about HTML? CSS? I know how to make a word italic and that's about it. I can make a link if I look it up. But my creative vision overcame me. I wanted comfortable little armchairs for you all like in my living room and a fire in the fireplace where we could sit around and trade stories of famous beatniks. When the tempo slowed I could read aloud from my first edition of Thrilling Stories For Boys: Bomba the Jungle Boy Goes Over The Falls.

But it turns out wholesale blog remodeling is a little over my head. What looked great on the sketchpad didn't translate. In fact, because of one misplaced HTML bracket or something my new up-to-date blog wouldn't publish at all. And I forgot to backup my template first like all the bloggers tell me to do. And I couldn't remember what I actually changed.

Okay, so a pig is a pig. What can I do? Well, I could get help. (I know. I need help.) But all my blogger friends know even less than I do and Blogger gives absolutely no support. You made you own mess, now lie in it. That's their moral philosophy. Finally, as you can see, I did get the Pigsty back up. Looking exactly the same as it ever did.

So I'm moving cross town to the Typepad neighborhood. It's a little more upscale. They promise help if I bollox up my template again. The mess you saw was me packing up boxes and moving out of Blogger. I'm just moving in to my new digs, of course, but I'll give you the new address soon with an invitation to my open house. Maybe tomorrow. It'll be the same old blog of course, but in a slick new 2008 format. Polished steel. Robots. Gandalf the Good. Jinx the Cat doing the Charleston with Reese Witherspoon. That kind of stuff.

A Letter From Leslie OnThe Road - 1962

Leslie H. was a sister in our little San Francisco band of dirty Peaceniks. I lost touch with her years ago so I can't ask her for permission to print this letter to me. But it's a document well worth sharing - it seems to me a brilliant picture of The Life, as we baby beatniks conceived it in that long ago year of 1962.

I don't have much left from that era, but God is gracious, and left me this letter. How can I not share it with you? That it still exists is a minor miracle.

Leslie is eighteen and on the road with Peter, her lover (they married later, a true-love match.) She's living the life we loved. The long hitch-hiking journeys, the drugs, a bit of the world-weary feeling I associate with those unpsychedelicized times, the uncapitalized sentences, the eternal ongoing planning of adventures to come. And of course - the literate self-awareness and ability to express herself well on paper.

Together they make up the essence of my times, kiddos - welcome to the winter of 1962. The day I received it the snows were beginning to fall over Long Island and the first winter rains were pouring into the sewers of Lily Alley, San Francisco.

I've added a few links to references that may be obscure today.

christopher christopher christopher

how happy i am to get your lawn letter--i'm childishly delighted and even overjoyed. here for the last couple of days i had been, not homesick, but kind of surprised and sad at being 3000 miles away from anyone who really knew how i function. (this is the result of being bored silly and therefore starting to take it out on peter, but trying not to, because he really doesn't react well to threats of leaving or not sleeping with him at all.)

all this culminated last night with peter pouring chocolate milk shake on my head and i throwing my newly acquired enovid out the car window. i cried myself to sleep thinking of the past with the help of three seconal. but all is slightly better this morning--peter and i woke up early and talked and made love. so i have made him his breakfast, listened to e power biggs playing bach's royal instrument (the organ), finished sanding, oiling, stringing, and tuning our new guitar--we took off all the mexican finish and wanted to leave it like that and oil it, but we ended up some how putting mahogany varnish on it--, and teaching myself bach's minuet in g major on the piano and guitar.

a new thing for me--a snow storm the other night. if i had been younger or marguerita i would have run outside in it naked. now the snow has been here for two days and it is melting and looking a bit soiled.

we have been here for three weeks and i haven't yet seen new york city, which is why i think we hitched out here. i can't really remember why we came anymore except it has something to do with rolexin and the president and me and peter and new york/and cuba and kruschev and bombs

once i had a job for two weeks where i had to type all day.

i could tell you what happened to us hitch hiking and the people we met and what they said but it is not really very interesting or xxxxxx

(typing fades and gets scratchy-looking)

What is wrong with the fucking typewriter?

(she switches to pencil)

i will use a drafting pencil for want of a pen.

(she switches to blue ink)

i found a pen - i don't like it

(this time she switches to black ink with bold point)

here is a fountainpen. i'll use this.

anyway my point was that before i started i thought that hitch hiking to new york would be a great adventure and it wasn't at all just mostly cold and boring. i have lost all my faith in jack kerouac.

we did meet some wonderful people in madison, wisconsin. They were students and mostly hippies but some cool - not cool really, but sweet. peter and i set out to close the university of wisconsin by turning everyone on to rolaxin (romilar there) i was introduced to everyone as the high priestess of romilar. we were staying with two great friends of peter's - sam and john. one night we were all high and someone knocked on the door. john answered it and a man asked - do you have any cockroaches. sam told him - yes, but they're on our side.

the night before we left i got into a drinking contest with peter. i lost miserably. it's the first time i've ever been drunk. i vaguely remember crying for two hours about my abortion - peter was very sweet and says i really wasn't too bad. i also somehow cut off a large section of big toe. i am now firmly convinced that pot is so much better for teen-agers than booze.

i don't want to write on and on and bore you. so i will shortly close.

how are you and linda and expected baby? and working, being responsible, etc.

everyone there except peter's mother thinks we're married. address any future mail accordingly. i even have a woolworth's golden wedding band ($1.00, without tax) i am also maybe pregnant, which is fine with both of us. peter is a very fine person to have babies from.

we have plans. we will be back in san francisco by april (by way of virginia, etc.) and then peter and i will get jobs (if i am not pregnant, i will) save money until june. take a bus to mexico city - some odd $60 dollars (both) and go to mexico city college. my parents will support me - i will support peter. will have baby in mid-August and let a maid take care of him ($15 a month). i want so much to learn things! i mean, at college - therefore a maid for the baby. i am going to see all the art galleries and museums in new york (while peter works - he may be able to get a job as an artist's model for 7.50 an hour). i am going to learn to really cook - no instant anything. and find a place to practice piano, and look at new york and maybe sew pregnant clothes. - why do i always plan things?

anyway write to me - maybe often. i need it. are you kidding about the naval? tell me about it.

have you seen or heard of riley, teresa, and george. do you have addresses of the first two?

very much love to you - and i will think about you.

[this letter started out fine but it bogs at the end and is incoherent - i'm sorry]

leslie

The Novel: Progress Report

Readers of my novel-in-progress, The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship, might be wondering if I've developed an advanced case of writer's block. Or if I've become bored with the whole process. Nope. I haven't given up on the novel at all. But I've been wandering around the country a lot in its service. It's going slower.

It's not that easy to write dialogue that sounds real. And getting 1922 right is slow going. But I'm hitting it every morning. That's why the blog has been a bit sparse of late.

I love my characters. I feel honored that they've chosen me to write about them. The Hancock family and their friends in the 1920's are becoming as real to me as Paulie and Walrus and Sylyvie Potemkin are. I like spending time in their company and I hope you will too.

Chapter 36 is forthcoming - one of these days soon.

Pig Of The East Village

The talking pig and his Russian princess bride are back, so let the party roll!

We got in about 1:00 AM Friday morning after a circulation-sluggishing, butt-deadening, headache-inducing transmigration of the continent. Maybe the guys in the wagon trains had it right. Except neither of us got cholera.

We've been in New York. In the East Village to be exact. I was there to study the ways of sonic youth, the kids who wear tight black jeans with red canvas sneaks and heavy grey hooded sweatshirts under black denim jackets while crossing Positively 4th Street to somewhere romantic holding paper cups of Greek diner coffee while checking their ipods for the proper sound track.


Perhaps this is the romantic little shop they have in mind. Maybe they're on their way to see the Baroness! With her special Love Potion No. 9, sonic youth can meet their own mini-dressed easter bunny nuns.


We, however, were on our way to see the Baroness' cat Stripey.


Stripey is an elderly cat. She's seen them all pass her window: the beatniks, the hippies, the punks, the skunks, the junkies and the flunkies. They came, they got old, they OD'ed or went home, and more got off the bus. I was one myself.

When I arrived in the East Village in the summer of 1961, Bob Dylan was the rage at Gerde's Folk City. I couldn't get in so I settled for Peter Yarrow the next night. I'd never heard of him. If you're under thirty, you probably have still never heard of him, but he got big for a while with Peter, Paul and Mary. Later he used to come round the Haight a lot. I'd see him in the Panhandle sitting on a log with his girlfriend listening to Mt. Rushmore or the Dead, still just a normal person.

I stayed on East 7th Street most of the summer with Kirk, a filmmaker I'd met in Mexico the previous spring. I was nineteen. I'd already seen it all. Except I'd never seen a cockroach before. Or a bar-in-the-floor police lock to keep the junkie burglars out. Seen a few jingle-jangle mornings though.

I walked the steamy summer sewery-smelling streets all day. Ate in a cheap dairy restaurant on Second Avenue. Found out about knishes, blintzes, pirogies, kasha, borscht and I ordered more the next day. I drank beer at the White Horse Tavern and paid homage to the bar stool where Dylan Thomas had drunk himself to death eight years before.

I met a girl who worked for the Grosset and Dunlap, publisher of the Nancy Drew series. Her job was to answer all the letters from eleven year old girls to Carolyn Keene, their fictitious author. Jodie was a minion, but an employed minion working for a real publisher and she got to impersonate a famous imaginary author for a living. I was so impressed I got too wasted to walk back to Kirk's apartment and spent the night in her bathtub.

That's how it was in those days. Another thing I'd never yet experienced was sex on a first date. There were probably fast girls who did it but, as far as I could personally verify, they were all creatures of legend.


Actually, that wasn't the only part of me that was raging. My head was raging as well as my penis, and my heart was raging too. Give me love! Give me true love! Give me another burning heart like mine. Give me a star! A burning raging star, preferably a blonde one.

Now I'm back in my little gray home in the west trying to write it all down. While I was gone a girl in tight black jeans and red sneaks came by the blog and commented that my stories were rad and that she admired my being a beatnik and all. Thanks, Maya, you made my day.

We old pigs are supposed to go eat our corn. Doze in the sun. But my heart burns like it always did. It still feels young. I just try not to look in the mirror too much. I need to tell the young ones what the burning felt like in my time, how it feels to grow old but with a life behind you that's worth remembering. Build my own Brooklyn Bridge across the years between the hip generations. Except hip means something different now. I love all the old beatniks and hippies who come by the blog, but the Pondering Pig is not just for old hippies. It's for young beatniks too. And middle-aged ones. You just got have a burning heart. Or at least remember the one you used to have.




Photos by Patrushka

Lucy Lewis

I dreamed I saw Lucy Lewis last night,
alive as you and me.
"Lucy, I hardly knew yuh", I said.
"I came to your dream anyway," said she.

She smiled, but vague. I dreamed I said...

"I see you, Lucy. I see you walking across the San Francisco State commons in the fog with your dark-haired clone Lenore.

"Why, Lucy, you're still wearing your black leotards, you're still wearing your black tights you're still exhaling coolness like rose perfume, you still even have acne!

"You and George Hunter are still producing the Happening in the Gallery Lounge Spring 1964. You choreographing it, George is making space music for it at the Tape Music Center and it sounds like a snowy midnight somewhere in 1840 or 2140 or out in the galaxy far past the farthest comet.

"I'm still holding your robe! What kind of dream is this anyway? I see black lights, strobe lights every kind of night light.

"You are unearthly and George's gold front tooth is glistening wet and insane in the black light midnight.

"Who is carrying your crystal coffin? Why, it's four Rodney Albins all wearing swallowtail coats and stovepipe hats and emanating theatrical gloom! I see. They're marching the dead march for you until Lenore rises from her coffin like a ghost of love lost and dances a sad waltz in her diaphanous gown with the spotlight reflecting off cases filled with basketball trophies from 1948, 1949, 1956 and your well-trained raven and Edgar Allen Poe candles

burning my heart and fingers and then

your raven flew down from the trophy case and quoth 'Nevermore' no more."

But you said,

"Who is George Hunter? Who is Lenore? Why am I in your dream?"

And I knew for certainty you lost your memory in sorrow that will never end in this life.

Because we were standing on the fifth floor of the Hearst Building at Third and Market in San Francisco waiting for the elevator and we were saying goodbye because we would never come here no more and I was grieving too.

I was grieving for my tough newspaperman father who had his office on this very floor where he smoked Chesterfields and Camels and bashed out a daily column and put on his fedora and hiked to the Nugget to interview Lola Albright. And I will never see him no more in this life no matter how much I miss him and Lucy Lewis was come to sorrow with me

because she was the angel of grief.

But she had lost her memory.

Photo by Patrushka

For Readers of The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship

I finished Chapter 35 on Saturday. I am thrilled because it took so long and because Patrushka thinks it's pretty good. So I'm excited to get it out to you, my select group of readers, to get some feedback.

But this morning I woke up with an idea for a kind of coda to the chapter that takes place three months later, that I think will make the story better.

After that I got a notice from that the library that the books on patent law I ordered have come in, and after scanning through them this afternoon I realize I have to make a few alterations to the chapter as written. Since the story is so fantastic it some ways I want it to be balanced by being very realistic in other ways - like the rules surrounding what is and what is not an infringement on somebody's patent.

Don't worry, it's not going to be boring. I've never written a boring word in my life.

So I'm not finished after all. But I expect it will be in the mail this week.