Month: September 2021

Oh those Golden Dawns

Posted on by Liz

Storytime! Brought to you by two small poetry books I just found in a box. In 1988 or so I went to the Yeats International Poetry School in Ireland and it was an interesting round of small workshops and classes (Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and a guy named Tom Paulin who clearly didn’t want to be there) And deadly boring poetry readings / drinking sessions where Yeats’s grandnieces’s cousin would play the harp and someone would beatifically recite When I went out to the hazel wood on a little stage while people chain smoked.

Most of this trip is a haze to me because I had a killer sinus infection and a fever for half of it and had to stay in the horrible youth hostel on codeine and antibiotics absolutely dying while brutally healthy German girls played the guitar and sang far into the night, but I do recall amidst the nervous chain smoking academics and the earnest poets these two complete weirdos absolutely swanned into the entire scene and they were real live serious devotees of Aleistair Crowley.

The guy was small, skinny, ferretty, wore a giant gold medallion and I believe often some sort of robe and he would stroke his little goatee like a caricature supervillain while he talked in a weird nasal voice about the Order of the Golden Dawn in its modern day incarnation, and how he was a Druid. He came across as just a giant creep. The girl in this couple was more interesting and nice, with a giant smile, tall, floofy blond hair, big chunky hippie jewelry, kind of seemed rich, and had a cheerful breezy manner — and she would talk constantly about druid sex magick. I actually liked her. One could not figure out why this perfectly nice lady hung upon every word of the fool Druid.

I thought they were hilarious especially because everyone was so disapproving of them (why were they THERE? I mean, I get why, but, ?! somehow? Money?! They were both Yeats Enthusiasts and were also very clearly out to do lots of psychedelic drugs and sleep with anyone who was interested in a little Druid Sex Magick as a palate cleanser between the Baileys and the bee-loud glades. (I did not partake) I also didn’t think either of them wrote very good poetry (neither did I but I had an excuse: being 18 years old)

So coming across these books, I looked them up. The Druid died in 2014 and you can read all about him and his translating and how he liked to spend summers in the basement of the Cairo Museum. I wonder if he was a legitimate translator, or what? https://www.darengo.co.uk/terence-duquesne/

The druid Priestess, Dwina, now that I look her up, seems to have been in a long and successful open marriage with Robin Gibb from the Bee Gees. Interesting! “Dwina Gibb, his second wife, whom he met through her cousin in 1980, when she was running a beanbag factory in London while trying to make it as an artist….. The couple lived together in the Biscayne Bay mansion once owned by President John F. Kennedy and a 100-acre Oxford, England, estate, where tapestries and tarot-card tiles adorn the walls of their 12th century converted monastery and the Gibbs built a druid place of worship.”

It was truly hilarious like being inside A Dance to the Music of Time, maybe at the end where Widmerpool goes running off in robes or whatever. Maybe it’s time to re-read that whole series again!

Making a pass

Posted on by Liz

From a Twitter thread the other day on odd books no one has ever heard of, I made a list and read through a few young adult and children’s books. One of them, Redwork, was described as the quintessential situation where a young person has a weird bond with an old neighbor who is witchy & mysterious. I read through it – the 14 year old protagonist becomes fascinated with his downstairs neighbor who was a WWI vet and has become both a hoarder and a backyard alchemist – And there is some light psychic phenomena –

But the odd thing about this book is it had the vibe of a book that would have been out of date even in the 70s. I mean, maybe? Did movie theaters have double features, and (teenage) ushers that actually ushed, showing you to your seat with a flashlight, and supervised, and would kick you out for talking or throwing popcorn or smoking in the non-smoking section of the theater (!?!) I don’t think so but correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe it was by an author who grew up in like, 1940, trying to make his story seem current by having the kid’s mom be a single mother trying to get her Ph.D. (or something, though that part was as unreal as the alchemy) And nothing ELSE about the book situated it in time, really. Paying for a gallon of milk with pennies would have been more than difficult in 1990. Maybe we can date it from the wages – 4 hours times 3 nights a week brought take home pay of 40 dollars (no taxes mentioned and it seemed to be pay in cash)

Anyway, the worst bit was that the mean bullying head usher sexually harasses and assaults the young women and girls who work at the popcorn counter and everyone who works there knows it and a sexual assault on a young teenager was clearly described (in the mop closet, horrors) And the characters describe it as the bully “making a pass at her”. It didn’t feel like the author making any sort of point but more like that is the language HE was using about the incident.

What the ever living fuck and how was this book published like this in 1990?

People are so gross sometimes. It was also a totally mediocre book of the genre of “kid meets witchy old neighbor”. One star.

Lots of bookshelves

Posted on by Liz

As I sit down to write I’m mostly thinking about putting up more bookshelves. Neighbor Colin, who is a retired carpenter, gave me two long, long redwood boards which are at least 100 years old and have been weathering outside. We scraped them a little and hosed them off, and he split them lengthwise for me so now I have four very long and narrow shelves.

Today I plan to start sanding the boards by hand and then oil them. To avoid hurting my hands with repetitive motion, I’m figuring to sand, then oil one board, then hang it and arrange some books. Most of my books are out of boxes now, but double or triple stacked.

It’s so exciting to have them all back after their 10+ years in storage. While unpacking I felt my brain sort of waking up in different places – all my poetry books in Spanish – a ton of feminist science fiction – weird literary criticism – a huge section of the history of sexuality – all my zines and papers and letters and notebooks and other projects.

So that’s going on with me and actually generative creativity is in tension with the amount of domestic work to get the books and papers out and up — and the feeling of this enormous backlog of my own work that is a huge mess. I glimpsed entire book projects and zines that I forgot even existed – an entire Manifesto – Oh, help!

So, a little “curation” and archival ordering, a little spelunking through lost caverns, I hope will be balanced by new ideas & new writing.

Wish me luck with the sanding, as I’m a little afraid I’ll do it “wrong” by my neighbor’s judgement. He loves every piece of wood like a brother. As we were out on the sidewalk scrubbing dirt & lichen off the boards, he looked around dreamily at the painted Victorians of our street, & said, imagine if there was NO PAINT on all these, just beautiful, beautiful wood, century old virgin redwood and pine… Grain exposed… the history…

And the sins of our other neighbors, or contractors they hired in the past, have been pointed out to me: SOMEONE USED AN ORBITAL SANDER ON THAT REDWOOD!!!