The book’s title, Easily Pleased, comes from an interview with Louie Bashell in Polka Happiness by Charles and Angeliki Keil (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1992), 141. Bashell muses:
It’s a very melodious music. Simple music and melodious; you don’t have to be a genius to play it, you know, or have good technique, or anything like that. It’s just a flowing music. Polish music has various frills and trills in it, a very distinct flavor, while Slovenian music is plain, simple notes that just move–nothing fancy. I’ve never come across a piece of Slovenian music that was difficult. The Slovenians are so easily pleased. They don’t have to have nothing special.
guardians of the grooves
Sabu Adeyola’s loose way
of playing the bass
as an example of why
flexible better than stiff
loose better than tight
light & open breathing unevenly a kind of tonglen
and then later in the day thinking
what if the best grooves are those felt by everyone because
no one person
is
holding the center
everyone is somewhere close to but not ON the beat
everyone a guardian of the groove
no one a Bully or Master of it
m.c. = mastery controlled
co-evolve
On first looking into the last poems of Charles Olson this Xmas day I made a few
connections I’ve been looking for since the early days of American Studies at SUNY
Buffalo in the late 1960s. What connects me to Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn, Jack Clarke,
Robert Duncan and through them back to Jane Ellen Harrison and the chthonic
tonic “rites before myth” fourth millennium BC is Olson’s special view of his story as
best I can hold on to it. What has literacy, and then this flood of over-technologized
information done to us humans? Are we still the same species (homo ludens
collaborans) of playful mammal, conscious of our playfulness, that we were before
the word was separated out by “Homo sap sap,” the continuum segmented, all the
juicy processes reified as structures, forms, symbolic logic?
Are flows like poeticizing and musicking, dancing-drumming-singing still capable of
putting Nature into us and us into Nature? Can enough of us in many many
different localities find our way back to what Owen Barfield calls “original
participation,” or reasonable approximations of it, so that sanity and joy in simple
living will prevail and co-evolve satisfying cultures of meaning & mystery once
again? How many different ways within each language & culture can we ask these
questions?
Some threatening ways to ask these questions: Have we just witnessed peak
diversity of species, cultures, languages, musical styles that co-evolve over time?
How long can the 6th Extinction go on before humans can no longer feed the flora
and fauna in our guts? Can co-evolution restore itself after we get back to a reduced
but balanced carrying capacity for humans and other vertebrates in each ecological
region and niche.
Three bobcats were in our front yard very recently. They seemed to be smaller than
the lynx we saw a few years ago in our backyard at Wells Hill Road, no clumps of fur
over their feet, but bigger than any housecats I know, and I’ve known some big ones.
A new feline co-evolving? An old variety of cat reviving? Black bears are back and
starting to worry people. I’m continually amazed at the variety of small spiders that
pop up in this house, or drop in with an invisible filament attached from the ceiling
onto my desk.
some weil/keil hypotheses
that it was much much better waaay back when before civ&prog set in
that wars and greed and poems of force the roots of all evil
that the best things in life are free
that women are untouchable ach tippy toes (in greek)
that factory work is stultifying to the nth degree
that need for roots can & must be met very locally
that doing some writing every day is a path to peace
that participant-observation lets Marx, Boas & us have a bigger say
that sublimating sex drives is part of saving the day
that identifying with each other is a crucial human capacity
Mother
this homo ludens collaborans
has many plans
renewing vows
supporting plants
saving bees
down on my knees
with every breath
we take in oxygen
gifts from forests, meadows, mosses & ferns
today is the day for honoring
the heroines of our times
the women who pass on
all the mothering principles
and the women who maintain respect
for Old Mothernature
the Mother of all metaphors
and metamorphoses
turning the corner
woke up around 4 and couldn’t get back to sleep
xxxxxxxxxxcounting atrocities rather than sheep
in search of primitive processesxxx now! xxxin the moment and how!
a way of catching up with angie’s loss of memories, times, and places
reading ross on fred’s eternal return last night
xxxxxxxxxxx“which frames existence in terms of endlessly repeating cycles”
from now on let’s turn each page into a stream-of-con
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxeach page like a 78 rpm record or two 45s separated by
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xtarisks *****anon
my mom’s mom used to say “think of the starving Armenians,” so mom
passed it on
& now I gift it over & over again to my kids and grandkids the eternal
heartburn
hertz shmertz over Kurds pushed to invent confederalisms decentralizings returns
why the xxxxxhurry?
cohere and co-hear the consequences of perpetual looping
make sure the songs never end (keep the Tiv rising interval in my head)
xxxxxxxxxxpauses to buy our daily bread and bits of cheeses
everything-in-process pleases
let it go
let it flow
let it grow
what do we really know?
absolutely nuthin’