Friday, March 27, 2009

Denton Welch - March 27, 1915 - December 30, 1948

One of my favorite writers.  He's been called "the least known English literary genius of the 20th century."  

While riding his bike when he was twenty his spine was fractured when he was struck by a car.  In the thirteen years that remained for him he suffered and he wrote and he painted.  One of his self-portraits hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.  His books gained a cult following; this cult lives on.  Here, picked at random from his journal, is a sample of his prose; he's writing about a picnic he'd been on with a friend:

"We both felt, then, I think, how doomed we were, how doomed everyone was, we saw very clearly the plain tragedy of our lives and of everybody's.  A year after a year after a year passes, and then you look back and your sadness pierces you.  We were very sad from the drink ... we got up to go, leaving the egg-shells on the ground.  I think of those terribly sad egg-shells lying in the wood now.  I feel that I shall go back to visit them."

And, no doubt, weep at the sight of them.

*I'd give credit to the photographer of Denton Welch at the top if I knew who it was.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Tombstone Oddities #2; Mt. Auburn Cemetery; Cambridge, Mass.

This one really needs to be enlarged with a click to appreciate the amazing detail.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Memorial to "The Rebellion of 1861-1865"


In Forest Hills Cemetery; Jamaica Plain, Mass

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Holiday Dog

Jodie likes St. Patrick's Day.

But she drank too much green beer and passed out.


Friday, March 13, 2009

Grandma Luckenbill

Martha Nellie Coon Luckenbill
March 12, 1887 - May 29, 1958

I didn't get smart enough to appreciate Grandma Luckenbill until long after she was gone. Today I don't know of anyone whom I would wish to have known better than her. Here are some memories of her that belong mostly to others, since -- sorry to say -- I didn't pay that much attention.

To help her family through the depression she took in laundry and, once a week, made doughnuts which she sold around her North Manchester, Indiana, neighborhood for 10-cents a dozen. (That 10-cents would buy, for instance, a quart of milk.) She also cleaned houses for several of the store owners in town.

During the war she worked in a factory; in those days it was common to "dock" workers if they were late for work -- if, say, you were one minute late, you might get a quarter hour's pay deducted from your wages. On her way to work one morning a train was stopped on the track. Not wanting to get docked, Grandma crawled beneath the train to the other side.

She was a great cook, and didn't use recipes. One time when my sister Joan was making something she asked Grandma how much molasses to put in. "Oh, a couple glubs," Grandma said -- a glub being the vacuum-ey sound made when molasses was poured from a small-mouthed crock jug. Grandma made her own bread and wonderful cakes and pies all the way back to the days when ovens were heated by a wood fire, had no thermostats, and yeast didn't come in a package but was cultivated at home.

She had a big garden and canned vegetables and fruit, made jams and jellies, as well as a crock of sauerkraut and a crock of dill pickles for the coming winter. Joan told me that Grandma bought peaches for $1 a bushel and was really "ticked off" when they went up to $1.50. She raised and butchered her own chickens, and fried them in lard. It was said that hers was the best fried chicken around; she said that this was because she fed her chickens only cornmeal.

She read regularly from the library. Joan remembers her reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and crying over the way "poor little" Topsy was treated.

She was an expert with needle and thread. In the quiet winter nights she made quilts, generally one per winter. Toward the end she planned to make each of her eighteen grandchildren a quilt but she barely got started on this project before her death.

"She'd cuss all week and go to church on Sunday," Joan told me. She never missed going to church. One Sunday after the service she asked Joan if she'd seen the hat worn by a woman named Ruth Dawes. Joan said she hadn't noticed. "It looked like a turd on a tussock," Grandma said.

(Grandpa Luckenbill, on the other hand, did not care to step foot into a church but liked to claim, with eye-twinklings, that he'd become bald from sitting in damp churches without a hat!)

Grandma was a strong presence in any room. She had a truckload of charmingly pithy comments, some typical, some not: "Waste not, want not." "Use your head to save your heels." "What stuck the burr up her butt?" "Don't throw water on a drowned rat." "Spare your breath to cool your porridge." "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." There were many many more; I wish I could know them all.

One evening in her seventy-first year she said she didn't feel well. She lay down on the couch. The others -- Grandpa, Uncle Rupert, Uncle Gene and Aunt Tess -- were in the next room watching television. Seeing that Grandma had fallen asleep, they didn't wake her when they went to bed, figuring she would wake whenever and get herself to bed. She never did. Rupert found her in the morning, still on the couch, dead, apparently of a heart attack.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Stanley Kunitz - Provincetown Cemetery

He especially loved and lovingly tended his garden; it was situated between the sidewalk and his front door on Commercial Street in the west end of Provincetown. A small sweet man. Bent with age he would, if you said "Hi Stanley" as you passed by, look up, nod, smile, and lift a hand in acknowledgement. At least he did such one morning when I passed by.

Now he's gone but you can get to know him pretty well by reading just his last book The Wild Braid. It contains some poems, some pictures, some interviews with him, and other prose. You'll end up feeling some love for the guy.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Norman Mailer - 1/31/23 - 11/10/07 - Provincetown Mass. Cemetery

The letters and numbers on this white marble are difficult to read in even excellent light, but beneath the names of Norman and his wife Norris, and beneath the dates, is a quote from his work:  "There is that law of life, so cruel and so just that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."

This man published somewhere between thirty and forty books.  This crappy sentence and muddled idea is what someone -- perhaps he himself -- chose, among all the millions of his words, to represent him at his final resting place?  Perhaps I'm missing something.

The array of stones and shells at the right foot of the stone is attractive.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Cookie Mueller - Mar. 4, 1949 - Nov. 10, 1989

Cookie was great. No matter what she was doing -- riding in a parade down Commercial Street in Provincetown, shopping at the A&P, or helping push a stalled car -- she carried herself like a star, created her own style. I don't think she'd have stepped one step out of the house without her lavish make-up on. She was a great actress because she knew exactly how to over-act without over-acting. She delivered many lines in several John Waters movies, and she consistently delivered them perfectly.

She once, with the beat-poet Gregory Corso, stopped by where I was living just to say Hi -- she passed by often without stopping in and I was sure she'd done it this time just because she knew I'd enjoy having "met Gregory Corso" on my resume. She was sweet that way.

In the L&A market (with sexy Portuguese men behind the counter, and a motto propped in the refrigerated display case YOU CAN'T BEAT OUR MEAT) ... yes, one time in there I asked her what was up. She said she was about to leave for Italy. She seemed hardly ever to have more than a couple of nickels to rub together but she knew how to pull things off, knew how to live large on little. I asked what she was going to do in Italy and she said she wanted to write a book. I hadn't known she was an aspiring writer. Three or four months later, on one of those dismal dark Provincetown winter evenings when you could sometimes walk from one end of town to the other without running into another soul, I ran into Cookie and Sharon Niesp lugging suitcases along Bradford Street; they were just back from Italy, having just gotten off the day's last bus from Boston. I took the two largest suitcases and helped them get to their apartment. I might have been lugging in one of those luggage pieces the manuscript of what became Cookie's Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black.

I love that book of stories. Such a good simple straight-forward style. I thought it would be easy to write like that. I wrote ten or twelve stories, thinking if Cookie could do it I could do it, but only one or two of mine came out somewhat like Cookie's. It wasn't easy to write like Cookie I guess unless you were Cookie.

Tonight, remembering Cookie, it's a shock to me to think she got only 40 years of life. Somewhere in her writings she imagined death: You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won't have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free."

I took the picture above at a party after the New York premier of "Female Trouble" in 1975 -- I don't remember who the guy in the picture is, but vaguely recall he was one of the stars of the Broadway musical "Pippin IV".

Monday, March 2, 2009

Uncle Gene's Birthday

Walter Eugene Luckenbill, born March 2, 1918; died June 8, 1988. On May 21, 1943, he enlisted in what was then called the Army Air Force. Stationed in Corsica, he was on a plane that got shot down over Italy. His wife, Altessa, as well as Grandpa & Grandma Luckenbill, got the same dreaded telegram from the Defense Dept. saying that Gene was "Missing in Action." However, Gene and one other crew member, despite an assurance from the pilot that he'd be able to land the plane safely, parachuted out. They survived; those who'd stayed with the plane did not. Gene was reunited with his outfit within a month.

It was always great when Aunt Tess & Uncle Gene visited us or we visited them. Their children, Jerry and Nancy (Jerry slightly older than me, Nancy a year or two younger, and both gone now), were the most fun cousins we could have asked for.

Uncle Gene sent (or brought home) to his big sister Iris, my mother, a 5-Franc note from Corsica for her Feb. 8, 1945 birthday.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Rare Books & Van Smith

Because we had mutual friends, I ran across Van Smith in Provincetown, in Baltimore, in New York City, and finally in San Francisco. He was sweet, very wild. and fun. His demeanor was more that of, say, a construction worker than it was of a costume designer and make-up artist, which are the talents he became known for.

My favorite memory of him is from the winter of 1976 which I was spending in San Francisco. Van was there too. One day he, a couple of other guys, and I planned a get-together for lunch.

When Van showed up he said to me, "Here ... you like poetry, don't you George?" He tossed two books onto the table in front of me. There was a small pause before he added dismissively, "I don't." Then he said, "A friend of mine here in town writes poems ... he gave me them books but I don't want 'em."

I still have them. They're by a James Mitchell, are gorgeously hand-bound, handsomely printed, and presumably self-published. Several years back I saw these same two books listed for sale on a rare books website for something like $400 each.* I carefully removed mine from the shelf, wrapped them in plastic, and put them back on the shelf. These kind of things, when you're my age, you sort of wish you knew someone who would like to have them and would maybe cherish them.
* Oops ... don't buy from that website. I just found several copies of both books available at other used-book sites for prices ranging from $23 to $44.

I was sitting one morning a couple years ago in The Cottage Bakery in Orleans when I saw in The New York Times that Van had died.