La cabaña de Carl Eytel, pionero y artista de Palm Springs, en el corazón del desierto

Carl Eytel spent most of his time outside his cabin, even sleeping outside. This image appeared in the September 1948 edition of The Desert Magazine with an article written by Edmund C. Jaeger, in which he wrote, “Trying to inure himself to hardships in the belief it would toughen his constitution, he often slept through the winter nights without sufficient bedding. ‘By George,’ he would say, ‘it was cold last night. I shivered to the bone but never mind, that’s good for me.’”

Photo Courtesy Ann Jap

Carl Eytel in his cabin, Palm Springs, California, undated. View this and more in the photo gallery below.
Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum

Art in a Desert Cabin

The Desert Magazine (September 1948)

"(...) Go alone on your walks if you can, but if you must take a companion, choose one who will appreciate with you the desert’s great silence." 

(Edmund C. Jaeger. The California Deserts)

Cabins of the Brotherhood

Author Peter Wild delves into the Spartan lives of Palm Springs’ early desert rats

By Janice Kleinschmidt

Palm Springs’ pioneering painter Carl Eytel and writers Edmund Jaeger and J. Smeaton Chase would object to the view Peter Wild sees near the base of the San Jacinto mountain range.

“Late in life, Jaeger wrote a foreword to his book about the desert in which he bemoans the ravishment of the desert by overpopulation. Eytel in his letters absolutely stormed about the population growth,” Wild says, looking down at the swimming pool and buildings of The Tennis Club. He stands where Jaeger built a cabin. Wild’s multiyear research pinpointed the site and culminated in a two-volume book.

A professor of English at the University of Arizona and prolific author, Wild recently completed a study of what he calls “an artistic phenomenon with national ramifications” that took place from 1915 to 1923. Volume I of News from Palm Springs: The Creative Brotherhood and Its Background profiles Eytel, the well-read and “sometimes cranky” German painter; the deeply religious Chase, a travel writer; and the 20-some-years younger Jaeger, a naturalist, teacher, and writer. Volume II comprises letters written by, to, and between what Wild refers to as the Palm Springs Brotherhood.

“This was not a formalized band with a manifesto or anything such as that, but a loose association [of men] with commonly shared attitudes and interests,” Wild explains. “[They] often traveled together, sharing hardships as well as the joys of the trail; and they felt a deep bond in their shared values, especially in their romantic view of nature.”

Wild believes these men have something to teach us today, through the way they lived: in one-room cabins, reveling in wilderness, and conveying through painting and prose the beauty of the natural landscape.

Wanting to understand these visionaries, Wild searched for the locations of the cabins where Eytel, Chase, and Jaeger sat and discussed art, literature, and their travels. His own exploration began somewhat serendipitously.

“Some years ago, I was doing research for several books I was writing about the Mojave Desert,” he says. “To get there from the University of Arizona in Tucson, my research assistant and I had to fly into Palm Springs. We liked the place, looked around, and became acquainted with Sally McManus and Jeri Vogelsang of the Palm Springs Historical Society. Then we heard about the treasure trove of Eytel letters at the Palm Springs Art Museum. It was like catnip to a cat for me.

“It took two or three years to research the background of the letters, write hundreds of footnotes, and do all the scholarly things historians are supposed to do. It was the hardest fun I’ve ever had.”

As for the homesteads, Wild discovered that Palm Springs in the early 20th century was dotted with cabins of “romantics escaping what they perceived as the evils of civilization.” In 1908, local pioneer Pearl McCallum conveyed 2.63 acres at the site of today’s Tennis Club to Eytel for the sum of $10. When Eytel died intestate 20 years later, the property was appraised at $750.

Among the Brotherhood, Eytel was the first to build a cabin — more specifically, a “tent house” with canvas for the top halves of the sides and the roof. Over the years, he converted his humble abode to an all-wood structure, but continued to eat and sleep outside year-round. Jaeger built his cabin south of Eytel’s and about 25 feet up the hillside. He built a second cabin, for some unexplained reason, in the same vicinity. 

Wild was able to pinpoint the site of Eytel’s cabin at the end of Baristo Road based on old photographs and the legal description of the property. From there, based on Eytel’s letters, he tracked the location of Jaeger’s cabins. Chase lived “a few stone’s throws to the north of Eytel,” according to Wild, who also says the bright days of the Brotherhood ended with Chase’s death in 1923.

Construction of The Tennis Club began in the late 1930s south of where Eytel’s cabin once stood and expanded northward over the years. Several cabin remains were destroyed after the death of Pearl McCallum McManus in 1966 and purchase of the property by Harry Chaddick, “a go-getter developer from Chicago,” Wild says. “[H]e blasted away the side of that mountain and with it went cabin ruins.

“Chaddick knew darn well he was destroying cabin sites,” Wild continues. 

“In fact, with great relish he tore down the nearby ‘Pink House,’ a beautiful Palm Springs landmark formerly owned by [Pearl McManus].” 

Wild goes into more detail on the cabins in Tipping the Dream: A Brief History of Palm Springs, being released this summer. 

“I’m pretty happy about discovering the precise locations of the cabins,” he says. “Really, though, it’s the idea of the cabins that’s far more important than identifying the precise sites. In fact, I shudder to think of someone putting plaques up saying, ‘This is the site of Carl Eytel’s cabin.’ That would be to cage the ghost. … For me, it’s enough to know where the cabins once were, to go there once in a while and look around, feel the place, and not make anything more, or less, of it than that.” 

Carl Eytel, 1862-1925

Carl Eytel was born in Wurttenburg, Germany, the son of a clergyman. After high school, he spent four years studying forestry. He was drafted upon graduation and immigrated to the United States in 1885. Employed by a German farmer in Kansas, he began drawing cattle.

Accounts of mountains and deserts lured Eytel west, where he carried sketchbooks on journeys through Arizona, New Mexico, and California. He particularly enjoyed drawing and painting palm trees. 

After settling in a small cabin on the edge of Palm Springs, Eytel sold his canvases for anywhere from $10 to $50 and became known as a talented artist among visitors from around the world, many of whom were nationally celebrated artists and writers. 

Besides exploring and painting, Eytel loved to read and possessed knowledge of classics and the best literature of his day. His typical attire was khaki pants, a corduroy jacket, and Stetson with a band of rattlesnake skin.

Eytel died of pulmonary tuberculosis.

(http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-Springs-Life/August-2007/Cabins-of-the-Brotherhood/)

HOW WE TRAVELLED: CARL EYTEL AND THE "PHILOSOPHIC BILLY"

CALIFORNIA COAST TRAILS (CHAPTER I)

A Horseback Ride from Mexico to Oregon

by
J. SMEATON CHASE

Carl Eytel with pack burros belonging to George Wharton James, an author, and Lea Van Anderson, a friend.

Photo Palm Springs Life Archives

An untitled oil on canvas painted in 1910 by Carl Eytel.
Palm Springs Art Museum

Carl Eytel’s Twelve Apostles (undated), oil on canvas.

Collection of Palm Springs Art Museu

http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-Springs-Life/August-2007/Cabins-of-the-Brotherhood/

http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-Springs-Life/August-2007/The-Letters-of-Carl-Eytel/

http://www.ventanawild.org/news/fall05/chase/illustrations.html

El escultor ambientalista Patrick Dougherty y su cabaña

Patrick Dougherty has been building large scale stick art structures across the country. (photo: Theresa Hogue) 

A Log Home in Chapel Hill

Randy Harris for The New York Times. The sculptor Patrick Dougherty’s home in North Carolina. 

More Photos »

PATRICK DOUGHERTY, a sculptor who weaves tree saplings into whirling, animated shapes that resemble tumbleweeds or gusts of wind, likes to say that his first artwork was his house. Built from old barn timber, fallen trees and rocks he dug from the ground here, this rangy log villa started off as a one-room cabin, and is his only permanent work (most of his installations break down after a year or two in the wild).

He was 28, and in the Air Force, working in hospital and health administration, when he bought this 10-acre “farmette,” as he put it, for $10,000. “I had decided I was kind of a log-cabin frontier person,” said Mr. Dougherty, who is now 65, and an ebullient and rapid speaker whose sentences unfurl and coil around one another like vines. “My dream was to build a house. I didn’t realize my real dream, my sub-current, was to become a sculptor.”

At the time, he was also a house-husband, he said, with a young son and a daughter, and was working his way alone through the building process. Fired up by the Foxfire books, the how-to guides for the ’70s-era back-to-the-land movement, he would pore over the pages, practicing dovetails until he was pitch-perfect.

“I didn’t know much about building, and I was intimidated by people that did,” he said. “Also, I wanted to face the problems myself. It was a passage, finding my way through a house and into a life. It was a real quest.”

At 36, he went back to school, straight into the graduate art program at the University of North Carolina, 10 minutes away. His first stick work, a man-size tangle of saplings made on a picnic table at home, startled his professors, he said. They thought “it was too complete for someone who’d been blundering around in the netherworld.”

Since then, he has made well over 200 startling (and delightful) pieces for sites all over the world — woolly lairs and wild follies, gigantic snares, nests and cocoons, some woven into groves of trees, others lashed around buildings. And in August, he was invited by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to make a piece for its centennial: you’ll find “Natural History,” five winsome wind-blown pods that Mr. Dougherty described as “lairs for feral children or wayward adults,” near the Magnolia Plaza there.

Thirty-eight of these works are collected in “Stickwork,” a monograph-memoir, published last month by Princeton Architectural Press. It’s full of installation tales, like the time he camped in a Japanese temple while working on a piece and was warned by his host about the poisonous but sacred snakes that lurked there. “Don’t kill them,” Mr. Dougherty recalled the host saying. “If one bites you, call my wife and she will take you to the hospital.”

Mr. Dougherty is a very good storyteller. And there is always a story, because each piece takes at least three weeks to make, blooms before a rapt and sometimes fractious audience, and depends on the efforts of a fresh team of volunteers new to stickwork, over which Mr. Dougherty presides like an enthusiastic Outward Bound leader.

“It’s a problem-solving event, and problems arise every day,” he said. “You have to be flexible. I like working with sticks, but it’s really an excuse to have these experiences. One is to be bad and play out some kind of stick thing in a public place, like pulling your pants down, and another is this huge outpouring from people who don’t know you and walk up to you and say, ‘What is this?’ ”

The book chronicles Mr. Dougherty’s stunning output of nine works a year, every year. What it doesn’t reveal are the ways in which Mr. Dougherty and his family cope with his unrelenting schedule, and how a simple house can be a staging ground for a career.

“The cabin is pretty self-sufficient,” he said (taxes are $1,100 a year). “It has stood by me, been my cohort. There’s no rent to pay, and it’s been a good place to come home and store my stuff. It’s also a place to work ideas out. It became central to my imagining my life as a sculptor.”

Certainly the log house is as compelling and artful as one of his sculptures. Ceilings are veneered with sticks laid out in a herringbone pattern. A deer fence is like tough woodland lace. There is a small herd of outbuildings, the sides of which are layered with Mr. Dougherty’s experiments in cladding; one of them looks as if it’s lined with feathers.(...) 

By PENELOPE GREEN (Fuente: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/garden/07twig.html)

A version of this article appeared in print on October 7, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.

A view of sculptor Patrick Dougherty’s handmade log cabin and 10-acre “farmette” in Chapel Hill.
Photo: NEW YORK TIMES

Log Cabin Outhouse by Patrick Dougherty
Photo: NEW YORK TIMES

Photo: NEW YORK TIMES 

Photo: NEW YORK TIMES 

Photo: NEW YORK TIMES

Patrick Dougherty. Arquitectura natural

Este branchbender estadounidense es famoso por sus increíbles estructuras ecológicas. Comenzó su trabajo a principios de la década del 80 combinando su amor por la naturaleza con conocimientos de carpintería y botánica; explorando las más primitivas técnicas de construcción, experimentando con ramas y otros materiales provenientes de la tierra y cultivando árboles desde su nacimiento para lograr las figuras más insólitas.

Putting two and two together (2004) Richard Wunsch

Close Ties (2006) Fin Macrae

CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina – Patrick Dougherty, a sculptor who weaves tree saplings into whirling, animated shapes that resemble tumbleweeds or gusts of wind, likes to say that his first artwork was his house. Built from old barn timber, fallen trees and rocks he dug from the ground here, this rangy log villa started off as a one-room cabin and is his only permanent work (most of his installations break down after a year or two in the wild).

His first stick work, a man-size tangle of saplings made on a picnic table at home, startled his professors, he said. They thought “it was too complete for someone who’d been blundering around in the netherworld.”

Since then, he has made more than 200 pieces for sites all over the world – woolly lairs and wild follies, gigantic snares, nests and cocoons, some woven into groves of trees, others lashed around buildings. And in August, he was invited by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York to make a piece for its centennial: You’ll find “Natural History,” five winsome, wind-blown pods that Dougherty described as “lairs for feral children or wayward adults,” near the Magnolia Plaza there.

Thirty-eight of these works are collected in “Stickwork,” a monograph-memoir, published in September by Princeton Architectural Press. It’s full of installation tales, like the time he camped in a Japanese temple while working on a piece and was warned by his host about the poisonous but sacred snakes there. “Don’t kill them,” Dougherty recalled the host saying. “If one bites you, call my wife and she will take you to the hospital.”

Dougherty is a good storyteller. And there is always a story, because each piece takes at least three weeks to make, blooms before a rapt and sometimes fractious audience, and depends on the efforts of a fresh team of volunteers new to stickwork, over which Dougherty presides like an enthusiastic Outward Bound leader.

“It’s a problem-solving event, and problems arise every day,” he said. “You have to be flexible. I like working with sticks, but it’s really an excuse to have these experiences. One is to be bad and play out some kind of stick thing in a public place, like pulling your pants down, and another is this huge outpouring from people who don’t know you and walk up to you and say, ‘What is this?’ ”

The book chronicles Dougherty’s output of nine works a year, every year. What it doesn’t reveal are the ways in which Dougherty and his family cope with his unrelenting schedule, and how a simple house can be a staging ground for a career.

“The cabin is pretty self-sufficient,” he said (taxes are $1,100 a year). “It has stood by me, been my cohort. There’s no rent to pay, and it’s been a good place to come home and store my stuff. It’s also a place to work ideas out. It became central to my imagining my life as a sculptor.”

Certainly the log house is as compelling and artful as one of his sculptures. Ceilings are veneered with sticks laid out in a herringbone pattern. A deer fence is like tough woodland lace. There is a small herd of outbuildings, the sides of which are layered with Dougherty’s experiments in cladding; one of them looks as if it’s lined with feathers.

Standing in front of the house, you could see the outline of the original one-room cabin, like a child’s drawing sketched onto a proper house.

(Fuente: http://www.compasscayman.com/observer/2010/10/24/Sticks-and-stones-and-art/#comment)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/garden/07twig.html

http://www.compasscayman.com/observer/2010/10/24/Sticks-and-stones-and-art/

http://lloydkahn-ongoing.blogspot.com/2010/10/outhouse-by-sculptor-patrick-dougherty_07.html

Aldo Leopold, la ética de la tierra

Image by: Aldo Leopold Foundation 

“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.” – Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is considered the father of wildlife ecology and a true Wisconsin hero. He was a renowned scientist and scholar, exceptional teacher, philosopher, and gifted writer. It is for his book, A Sand County Almanac, that Leopold is best known by millions of people around the globe. The Almanac, often acclaimed as the century's literary landmark in conservation, melds exceptional poetic prose with keen observations of the natural world. The Almanac reflects an evolution of a lifetime of love, observation, and thought. It led to a philosophy that has guided many to discovering what it means to live in harmony with the land and with one another.

The roots of Leopold's concept of a "land ethic" can be traced to his birthplace on the bluffs of the Mississippi River near Burlington, Iowa. As a youngster, he developed a zealous appreciation and interest in the natural world, spending countless hours on adventures in the woods, prairies, and river backwaters of a then relatively wild Iowa. This early attachment to the natural world, coupled with an uncommon skill for both observation and writing, lead him to pursue a degree in forestry at Yale.

After Yale, Leopold joined the U.S. Forest Service and was assigned to the Arizona Territories. During his tenure, he began to see the land as a living organism and develop the concept of community. This concept became the foundation upon which he became conservation's most influential advocate. In 1924, he accepted a transfer to the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison where he served as associate director, and began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1928.

Often credited as the founding father of wildlife ecology, Leopold's cornerstone book Game Management (1933) defined the fundamental skills and techniques for managing and restoring wildlife populations. This landmark work created a new science that intertwined forestry, agriculture, biology, zoology, ecology, education and communication. Soon after its publication, the University of Wisconsin created a new department, the Department of Game Management, and appointed Leopold as its first chair.

Leopold's unique gift for communicating scientific concepts was only equal to his fervor for putting theories into practice. In 1935, the Leopold family purchased a worn-out farm near Baraboo, in an area known as the sand counties. It is here Leopold put into action his beliefs that the same tools people used to disrupt the landscape could also be used to rebuild it. An old chicken coop, fondly known as the Shack, served as a haven and land laboratory for the Leopold family, friends, and graduate students. And it was here Leopold visualized many of the essays of what was to become his most influential work, A Sand County Almanac.

(http://www.naturenet.com/alnc/aldo.html)

Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, on January 11, 1887. As a boy he developed a lively interest in field ornithology and natural history, and after schooling in Burlington, at Lawrenceville Prep in New Jersey, and the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, he enrolled in the Yale forestry school, the first graduate school of forestry in the United States. Graduating with a masters in 1909, he joined the U.S. Forest Service, by 1912 was supervisor of the million-acre Carson National Forest, and in 1924 accepted the position of Associate Director of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, the principal research institution of the Forest Service at that time. In 1933 he was appointed to the newly created chair in Game Management at the University of Wisconsin, a position he held until his death.

Leopold was throughout his life at the forefront of the conservation movement—indeed, he is widely acknowledged as the father of wildlife conservation in America. Though perhaps best known for A Sand County Almanac, he was also an internationally respected scientist, authored the classic text Game Management, which is still in use today, wrote over 350 articles, most on scientific and policy matters, and was an advisor on conservation to the United Nations. He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1948 while helping his neighbors fight a grass fire. He has subsequently been named to the National Wildlife Federation's Conservation Hall of Fame, and in 1978, the John Burroughs Memorial Association awarded him the John Burroughs Medal for his lifework and, in particular, for A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold, Aldo: A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 227-228.

Aldo Leopold, creator of
the "land ethic" concept.

Photo from the Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives.

The Leopold Family Shack & Farm

The Shack, a re-built chicken coop along the Wisconsin River where the Leopold family stayed during weekend retreats, continues to serve as the heart of the Foundation’s programs.

The land surrounding the Shack and farm provides a living classroom for exploring dynamic ecological relationships. Each year, thousands of visitors are inspired through tours, seminars, and workshops in the same landscape that deeply moved Leopold.

A Revolutionary Experiment

In the winter of 1935, Aldo Leopold went down a two-track sand road in search of land for a family hunting camp. Alongside the Wisconsin River, he found a “worn out” farm available for eight dollars per acre.

Running counter to all cultural currents, he bought the bleak, windswept place rather than seeking out richer land some where else. The decision proved pivotal to Leopold’s family, his relationship to the land, and the millions of readers since inspired by A Sand County Almanac.

Did Leopold realize the abandoned farm’s potential from the outset? No one knows for certain, but soon the family embraced the farm as a new kind of workshop or laboratory—a place to tinker and experiment with restoring health to an ailing piece of land. It was the sort of land common to a nation long obsessed with homesteading and suddenly stricken with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, twin specters of economic and natural catastrophe that shook the United States in the 1930s.

During weekends and breaks from school, Leopold, his wife Estella and their five children lived close to the land. Fixing up a dilapidated chicken coop, they created a home away from home which came to be known as “the Shack.” They tended a garden, cut firewood, and planted trees—eventually, some 40,000.

Doomed by Dust Bowl droughts, more than 95 percent of the pines died in the early years. Yet the family persevered, and spring planting at the farm became a rite of spring. Thousands of pines and other plantings eventually thrived, transforming the landscape into a mosaic of conifers, hardwoods, and prairie.

Photo from the Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives.

“I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” 

Aldo Leopold Shack in 2009
"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."-- Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold ShackThe naturalist Aldo Leopold and his family stayed in this shack on his farm -Baraboo, WI 

A preview of the first full-length, high-definition documentary film ever made about legendary environmentalist Aldo Leopold, Green Fire highlights Leopold’s extraordinary career, tracing how he shaped and influenced the modern environmental movement. Leopold remains relevant today, inspiring projects all over the country that connect people and land. Learn more at GreenFireMovie.com

Todos los textos y las fotos © Centro Hilton Pond
Foto de Rosalie Edge © Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Asociación
Foto de Arboretum © Centro de Visitantes de la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum
Leopold fotos históricas © Archivos de la Universidad de Washington y / o Aldo Leopold Legado del Centro

---

Photo from the Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives.

http://www.aldoleopold.org/

http://www.naturenet.com/alnc/aldo.html

http://www.hiltonpond.org/thisweek080301.html

http://alandethic.blogspot.com/2011_03_01_archive.html

http://gargravarr.cc.utexas.edu/chrisj/leopold-quotes.html#author

Hayden Carruth, el radicalismo de un poeta libertario

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)

"My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity." (Hayden Carruth)

Hayden Carruth was born in 1921, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and educated at both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago where he gained an MA. After serving in the Second World War, he became editor of Poetry Magazine, one of America's most distinguished literary journals. In his early thirties, he suffered a breakdown - succumbing to the agoraphobia which continued to haunt him all his life. In the Sewanee Review (1999), he describes his state of mind: "Agoraphobia… is the scream lurking in your gorge, so ready to burst that the least noise above a cat's purr makes you tremble: when the marching band from the high school practices in the street outside you sit in the back of the closet, when the March wind lashes the treetops at night you crawl behind the sofa."

His first collection The Crow and the Heart (1959) was written after his release from a 15 month stay in a psychiatric hospital. He has said in interview: "I was so impressed and so full of the experiences I'd had in that hospital, and the observations of other unfortunate people who were there, that I wanted to write about them." He not only felt a need to separate this experience from any writing he'd ever done, but also from any other writing that had gone before, so he invented a new form he calls a 'paragraph'. This is basically a 15 line almost-sonnet, rhymed, and written in iambic pentameters and with a tetrameter couplet in the middle. He explains why he felt this form appropriate: " 'Paragraph' originally meant a graph outside the main graph. In other words it was a mark that manuscript copiers in the Middle Ages used to indicate a break in the text."

Carruth enjoyed invention and compared his poetry to jazz : "Quite consciously in some poems, I tried to imitate the rhythms and tones and textures of jazz music. Jazz, if you analyze it, is like poetry in some respects. It's an improvisatory, impromptu art." He was a keen jazz musician and also wrote of its influence on him in an essay published in a collection of his prose pieces: Effluences from the Sacred Caves (1983.) He writes of the liberation that jazz allows a musician (and indeed poet) who improvises around a frame or structure, saying that in the process he "transcends the objective world . . . and becomes a free, undetermined sensibility in communion with others equally free and undetermined."

Carruth's agoraphobia forced him for many years to live in seclusion in the glades and mountains of northern Vermont. He said in interview that this isolation made him a "somewhat rebellious and stubborn person." and that his poetry and prose styles reflected this. He worked as a freelance journalist and also as a farm laborer. Carruth was attracted to the language and speech patterns of the people around him in the mountains : "the honest country people, the laborers, and people who had real folk habits in their speech. I loved to listen to them, and tried to imitate them in my poems."

Informed by his political radicalism and sense of cultural responsibility, many of Carruth's best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship. His 1983 collection Brothers I Loved You All, has been described as Carruth at his 'improvisational best.' The central poem of the book - 'Vermont', navigates history, politics, quirky personalities, subtle changes in diction, is part free-verse and part formal poetry.

In 1996, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey. This recognition was welcomed by the Virginia Quarterly Review for 'a poet who has never received the wide acclaim his work deserves and who is certainly one of the most important poets working in this country today. . . . [He is] technically skilled, lively, never less than completely honest, and as profound and deeply moving as one could ask.'

The title poem of the collection is included in this recording, and is testament to Carruth's honesty. This gentle, affecting poem is made more poignant by his slightly wavering delivery. 

All poems are from 'Hayden Carruth: A Listener’s Guide.' Copper Canyon Press, 1999. 

(http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=10289)

Song: Now That She is Here

for Jo-Anne

An old man now, who’s learned at last

What it means truly to be in love.

Ah, all those years of the past-

I used to think I knew but I didn’t know.

Like a neophyte in the school of lust,

Struggling with my shame and doubt,

I fell and lay low,

Because I thought I knew when I didn’t know.

Old age is failure. Natural

Exhaustion, mind and body letting go,

Words misremembered, ideas frayed like old silk.

But I am in love now,

In it totally all the time.

I have nothing else, I have forgotten my name,

I live on taters, whiskey and goat’s milk

In a little house by the wood

While a cold wind rises and the night fills with snow,

Who used to think I knew. But now I know.

Hayden Carruth and Jo Anne

Hayden Carruth: El 29 de setembre de 2008 mor a la seva casa de Munnsville (Madison, Nova York, EUA) el poeta i crític literari llibertari Hayden Carruth. Havia nascut el 3 d'agost de 1921 a Waterbury (Connecticut, EUA). Fill de l'editor de periòdics Gorton Veeder Carruth i de Margery Barrow Carruth, va passar la seva infància, marcada pels anys de la Depressió, a Waterbury i estudià a Chapel Hill (Universitat de Carolina del Nord) i a la Universitat de Chicago. Quan va esclatar la Segona Guerra Mundial va servir dos anys en les forces aèries. Va viure molts anys a Johnson (Vermont, EUA). Durant més de seixanta anys va escriure una trentena de llibres de poesia, novel·la, assaigs (sobre jazz i blues) i crítica literària (Safo, Virgilio, Blake, Wilde, Thoreau, Sartre, Carver) i ensenyà Creació Literària a la Universitat de Siracusa, on va ser professor i mentor de nombrosos joves poetes, com ara Brooks Haxton i Allen Hoey. Va editar Poetry Magazine durant vint anys i treballà d'assessor literari en Harper's Magazine i The Hudson Review. Va rebre diverses beques (Bollingen, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Literary, etc.) i aconseguí diversos premis literaris. En 1997 guanyà el Premi Nacional del Llibre de Poesia pel seu Scrambled eggs and whiskey (1996) i en 1992 fou guardonat amb el premi del Cercle Nacional de Crítics Literaris pel seu Collected Shorter Poems. Durant els últims anys residí amb sa esposa, la poetessa Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth, a Munnsville (Stockbridge, Madison County, New York, EUA). Els seus poemes, influenciats pel jazz, pel blues i per l'existencialisme, estan caracteritzats pel seu radicalisme polític i per un alt sentit de la responsabilitat cultural, retratant especialment la pobresa rural, les condicions de vida difícils de la gent i de les poblacions del nord de Vermont, els treballadors clandestins, etc. Altre dels seus temes predilectes és el de la follia i la no follia, fruit de les seves experiències quan va ser hospitalitzat entre 1953 i 1954 pels seus problemes psiquiàtrics (depressió crònica i intent de suïcidi) i amb l'alcohol. Com a crític literari fou especialista en Albert Camus. En 1998 publicà Reluctantly, una mena d'assaigs biogràfics.

( Catalan language) (http://anarcoefemerides.balearweb.net/post/104298)

Silence

by Hayden Carruth

Sometimes we don’t say anything. Sometimes

we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of

goldenrod where the garden used to be

and watch the color change form day to day, 

the high yellow turning to mustard and at last 

to tarnish. Starlings flitter in the branches 

of the dead hornbeam by the fence. And are these 

therefore the procedures of defeat? Why am I 

saying all this to you anyway since you already 

know it? But of course we always tell 

each other what we already know. What else? 

It’s the way love is in a late stage of the world. 

(from “Collected Shorter Poems” Copper Canyon Press, 1992)

“A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.” ~ Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth-b. August 3, 1921
photo by Al Campanie. 

(...) It’s hard, and no doubt unnecessary, to put a label on him. He was a rebel (if that word is still valid in this country) steeped in the old Yankee tradition. Born in Connecticut. Finding peace and himself for a long time in Vermont, a landscape for solitariness and the singular ‘leave-me-alone voice. The rural spoke to him and he to it. I’m sure the Beats would have liked to claim him. But in his ‘ordinary’ language, there was always more than a whiff of the classic. He could write, speak it out of both sides of his mouth.

Typically “Carruthian’…he challenged Frost a little (whom he seemed to love, in a New England-ish sort of way) and had a real quarrel with Thoreau. Felt he pandered to nature rather accepted the challenge for what it was…stood up to it. But that’s another story–to be found more in his prose than his poetry.(...)

(http://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/tag/hayden-carruth/)

(...) He fled to the backwoods of northern Vermont, where he began to write the poetry that would win him critical acclaim and a raft of literary prizes, including the National Book Award. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.(...)

The Cows at Night

The moon was like a full cup tonight, 

too heavy, and sank in the mist

soon after dark, leaving for light 

faint stars and the silver leaves

of milkweed beside the road, 

gleaming before my car. 

Yet I like driving at night 

in summer and in Vermont: 

the brown road through the mist 

of mountain-dark, among farms 

so quiet, and the roadside willows 

opening out where I saw 

the cows. Always a shock 

to remember them there, those

great breathings close in the dark. 

I stopped, and took my flashlight 

to the pasture fence. They turned 

to me where they lay, sad 

and beautiful faces in the dark, 

and I counted them–forty 

near and far in the pasture, 

turning to me, sad and beautiful 

like girls very long ago 

who were innocent, and sad 

because they were innocent,

and beautiful because they were

sad. I switched off my light. 

But I did not want to go, 

not yet, nor knew what to do 

if I should stay, for how 

in that great darkness could I explain

anything, anything at all.

I stood by the fence. And then 

very gently it began to rain.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/232
http://www.longhousepoetry.com/carruth.html
http://anarcoefemerides.balearweb.net/post/104298

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/hayden-carruth
http://lastbender.com/poetry/hayden-carruth-1921-2008/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/books/01carruth.html
http://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/tag/hayden-carruth/

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0504/features/carruth-print.shtml

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/pulitzer_prizewinning_poet_hay.html

http://www.ablemuse.com/v9/essay/andre-naffis-sahely/dark-pastorals-robert-frost-hayden-carruth

Paul Lutus, el profundo silencio de la cabaña y el pensamiento creativo

(...) He lives out in the Oregon wilderness in a cabin he built himself by carrying the lumber up the hill on his back and until he decided to buy his first computer (the brand new Apple II) he lived completely without electricity (...)

COMPUTER
PROGRAMMING
by Paul Lutus

Paul Lutus dropped out of the NASA rat race to live on a mountaintop for $40 a month.

Then he wrote the most popular word processing program for personal computers...

Paul Lutus is the author of Apple Writer, one of the best-selling word processing programs of all time.

You may have heard about me. In the computer business I'm known as the Oregon Hermit. According to rumor, I write personal computer programs in solitude, shunning food and sleep in endless fugues of work. I hang up on important callers in order to keep the next few programming ideas from evaporating, and I live on the end of a dirt road in the wilderness. I'm here to tell you these vicious rumors are true.

Now that I've confessed, I'll explain how I met my first personal computer. It was 1976, and I was designing some electronic devices for the NASA space shuttle. I was a college dropout whose employability rested solely on the fact that I could build things that worked (the lights on the present shuttle fleet are powered by my electronics). But I was about to drop out even further. That spring I moved to one of the wilder corners of Oregon and built a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin atop a four-hundred-foot hill. Since I didn't want a road, I carried the lumber on my back. I planted a vegetable garden. I wrote poetry and played mathematical games in notebooks. And I chose to do without electricity.

One night when I was reading Scientific American in the yellow glow of kerosene, I saw an advertisement for the Apple II. Wow, I thought, a personal computer! With a computer you could draw a world in three dimensions out of colored lines. Write stories. Play music. Locate Neptune to point your telescope. Store fantastic amounts of trivial information . . . The very next day I rode my bicycle to the nearest telephone and placed my order.

During the next few weeks I filled notebooks with ideas for programs I was going to write, in some cases setting them down in code. I also strung the oaks and madrones with twelve hundred feet of electrical cord 

to power the machine.

.

By the time my Apple arrived, I had become a basket case with my notebooks and pencil. When the machine was hooked up, I was ready to play all night. I followed the instructions to the letter, but I couldn't get into BASIC. I kept getting stuck where the instructions said "Type CONTROL B and press RETURN." I must have typed CONTROL B a hundred times, but nothing happened. Finally I abandoned the instructions and began experimenting.

It was then that I noticed the key marked CTRL. Remember, I had never used a real computer before. I had only imagined it. Instructions that come with computers should be written for people who can only imagine them. What they should have said was, "Press down the key marked CTRL. While holding it down, press the B key. Now release these keys and press the key marked RETURN."

Without intending to, I had gathered all the necessities for what would now be called an "electronic cottage." Far from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley, I began writing programs for the fun of it-programs that drew pretty pictures on the display, played music or did something elegant and mathematical. I mailed some of them to Apple Computer, which promptly offered to buy them and encouraged me to write more. Then as now, there were many more computers than programs.

I had bought the computer as a plaything, but within weeks I had been paid more than the cost of the machine. I began to think about a more ambitious project, a word processing program to "obsolete" my typewriter. Since I write a fair amount, I knew I would be able to test my program properly, which turned out to be very important.

This brings me to the day Mother Nature tested Apple Writer. I had finished my program and was using it to write the instruction manual. It was raining, so I thought it a perfect day to stay inside and work with the computer. Because I was off in a digital twilight zone, I paid no attention to the fact that I was perched on a four-hundred-foot ridge in a rain storm. I was (rather proudly) in the midst of explaining how my program would save the data in memory if the user accidentally pressed the RESET key, when suddenlybam!-lightning struck a tree just outside the window. Sparks flew around the cabin and my poor Apple went bananas.

At first I thought it had been completely zapped, but there were some signs of life and I restarted my program. Lo and behold, the program reconstructed the data in memory! In a moment the display appeared, with the cursor sitting beside the last word I had typed in. This despite the fact that half the diskettes lying on the table had been erased by static discharges.

I mailed off the first version of Apple Writer in a big manila envelope, and after some negotiating (and a few revisions) Apple agreed to pay $7,500 for the program. It didn't occur to me to ask for a percentage of future profits, but fortunately two things happened: 1) the first version became a big hit, and 2) no one at Apple was able to make the improvements that were needed for the next version. So about two years later Apple and I decided to start over, this time on a royalty basis. Apple would market the program and pay royalties, and I would retain all other rights. At this writing, the new version of Apple Writer is yielding more per day in royalties than the original's sale price.

A Hacker's Habitat

I still live in the backwoods with my computers. Deer are more frequent visitors than people. In my pond one turtle seems to have met another, and I intend to watch this development carefully.

I want to explain why the computerized cottage and trees work so well together. First, the finished work of the computer usually weighs nothing, so a post office or telephone line is enough to get it delivered. Second, computers take over a lot of the trivial thinking we do, freeing us to be creative. I have always felt the best background for creative thinking is complete silence. Programming the present generation of computers in machine language means thinking about twenty things all at once without dropping any of the pieces.

Of course, there is one drawback to the backwoods computer life. If you're not a complete hermit, you could get lonely or want one of the many forms of night life to which most people are accustomed. I think this problem will eventually be solved by increasing the cultural attractiveness of the small town, a development that should follow on the heels of the computer revolution.

Also, I've been told that good programmers rarely have mates. This is usually offered as evidence of how asocial we are. Without fail, we're pictured as disheveled cyber-hobos hanging around computer centers, shunning serious relationships, coding for the sake of coding. I can't really disagree with this view, but there is something interesting behind it-at least for me. I began to notice, as I got more involved with computers, that acceptance by the machine required absolute precision on my part. The slightest misstep caused the instant erasure of many hours of work; the machine would reject everything with perfect dispassion until each detail was just right. Then the program would suddenly function beautifully, and never fail again.

A mistress of perfect consistency, the computer rejects all but the flawless, offering no explanation. When the acceptable is finally offered, the machine's acceptance is total, unwavering and eternal. As Einstein said in a different context: "the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and the final emergence into the light-only those who have themselves experienced it can understand."

The result of this strange relationship was that for a time I became too spoiled for the flesh-and-blood women around me. I got tired of hearing, "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times-the answer is maybe!" It's clear that person-machine relationships could be dangerous for a functioning society, but from time to time they are very tempting. On the other hand, the computer can be a powerful tool for bringing people together. I once used the GraFORTH graphics language I had written to create a "computer letter" in the form of a diskette that displayed images and messages. In one of the sequences a cabin appeared on a hilltop, the door opened, then music played. It was designed to persuade a certain someone to visit me in Oregon, and it worked.

I don't mean to create the impression that I write computer programs day and night, until in starvation I crawl to the kitchen for a carrot. This is true only sometimes; the rest of the time I'm hiking around the Oregon wilderness or bicycling alongside a river. From time to time I fly my Mooney 201 airplane, bought with my first large royalty payment, to Apple headquarters in California, or I simply fly slowly along the Oregon coast, watching for whales.

Team Troubles

There's a lot of talk these days about how the individual cottage programmer is on the way out. I don't think so, even though a team of cooperating programmers is in principle a better arrangement. My doubt springs from the fact that the best of existing programs are the product of one, at most two individuals, and that some of the teamwork experiments have turned out to be complete failures. There is a saying in the computer industry: a program that might take one or two authors six months to write will take twice as many programmers twice as long to write.

In one notable example, a large computer firm created a wonderful piece of hardware that would in principle solve all the problems of communication between functions, allowing the user to think only about the task. A crack team of programmers was put together. They would meet each day to discuss their progress and resolve difficulties, so that the entire system would work in perfect harmony.

The problem here was that each programmer thought his part of the system was more important than the others', with the the result that no one bothered to make the pieces compatible. The original idea (task orientation) became lost, but it was still possible to make all the tools cooperate in a single task (file compatibility). Then this goal was also lost. The result was that if a user wanted to move his task created with tool A over to tool B, he first had to place it into electronic picnic basket C and carry it over. In some cases one computer must be coaxed into talking to another, but this was the first time a computer refused to talk to itself. The moral? You can lead a horse to water, but first you have to find some water.

Overall, I believe the computer age favors the individual and that resistance to the individual work style is the last gasp of the dying industrial age. Many software companies put their faith in committees because they believe this is the way things have always been done. In fact, most unique modern achievements have been the product of individuals or very small groups, including relativity theory, the airplane, the laser and the computer itself.

Until now, individual achievement has been exceptional in a mass society, even though the exceptions often transform that society. The deliberate cultivation of individual creativity may end up being the most important social result of computer technology. Either that, or cottage programmers like myself will simply have more time to cultivate our gardens. (
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php)

Biography — Paul Lutus

http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php

http://friargreg.blogspot.com/2012/01/heroes-paul-bill-who.html

http://www.arachnoid.com/administration/index.html

La cabaña del viejo guardián del tulipán

“Pop” Seeley: The Old Man of the River

by Cole Thompson

"Pop' Seeley's cabin at the foot of Cold Spring Road in 1893 photograph by Ed Wenzel. (Source: New York Historical Society)

Sometime before the turn of the twentieth century, on the northernmost tip of Manhattan, a folksy, business savvy and somewhat mischievous fellow named “Pop” Seeley set up shop in a quaint little cabin in the shade of a mighty tulip tree on the shores of a then meandering and muddy creek called the Spuyten Duyvil.

Today the location of the tulip tree, allegedly the spot where Peter Minuit swapped the island of Manhattan for a handful of trinkets, is marked by a boulder with a plaque proclaiming: “According to legend, on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian Village (Shorakkopoh), Peter Minuit in 1626 purchased Manhattan Island for trinkets and bead then worth about 60 guilders. This boulder also marks the spot where a tulip tree (Liriodendron Tulipera) grew to a height of 165 feet. It was, until its death in 1938 at the age of 280 years, the last living link between the Reckgawawanc Indians who lived here.”

Seeley cabin in 1906 photo.

A stone’s throw west of the tulip would have been Seeley’s cabin…

Former resident Aimee Voorhees, who would later construct a pottery works a short distance from the Seeley cottage, described “Pop’s” home as a “small white frame house more than a century old. It was built for a retired sea captain seeking a snug harbor. We have never been able to find but his name…but Pop Seeley told us stories about him. Pop lived here until he died.” (Helen Worden, Round Manhattan’s Rim)

Inwood Hill Park, as we know it today, wasn’t even a spark of an idea when “Pop” Seeley moved into the peaceful cove now buried under a soccer field made up of landfill from later subway digs—at the time, Inwood Hill was referred to locally as Cold Spring Mountain. (...)

Tulip tree in 1913

Seeley Cabin in 1904 photograph.

Seeley Cabin in 1906 photo. (Note inset with Liebler Bottling Company sign.)

Fuente: http://myinwood.net/pop-seeley-the-old-man-of-the-river/#more-9243