Books

Books

Hostile Man meets -the Eco-structure...

THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG Portola Institute, 558 Santa Cruz, Menlo Park, Calif., 94025. $5 per catalog or $8 for two different catalogs and four Difficult But Possible Supplements per year.)

THE BUST BOOK

(New York Regional SDS, 133 Prince Street, New York High School Student Union, 208 West 85th Street, New York Movement For A Democratic Society, 225 Lafayette Street, New York. $50.)

“We are gods and might as well get good at it.” -

Whole Earth Catalog

If we are to celebrate our divinity we must begin at the beginning. We must answer the simple question — who, what, why, where, how. We must construct the good and overthrow the evil.

We who seek to build need tools. “The Whole Earth Catalog functions as an evaluation and access device.” We who seek to build have and will meet with repression from those who are ignorant and those who fear the day of reckoning. The Bust Book is an aspirin for legal headaches.

The Whole Earth Catalog and the Bust Book are Yang and Yin. Racine once wrote a story called “The Louise and the Universe.” The Catalog is the Universe of our reality. It provides bits of information to be processed and stored for use. Information on books and boots and tantra art and “TheWay Things Work.” Information to make your system go. The Bust Book is the Louise. Written for a specific purpose. To hold the Man at bay while the builders labor.

The Catalog and the Book are for our Movement because they are for our people. The Catalog transmits the wisdom of users, the book formulates the wxperience of doers. The Catalog speaks of many things, and is a form of art; the Book tells of many hardnesses, and is a form of politic. Both are written in the language of free men. Both celebrate a vision of a day when good will rule. Both deny the illusion that that day has already arrived.

The Catalog and the Book are compelling works of truth. Put out by collectives, they convey the beauty of shared conceptualization. The Catalog is many - separate works that come together to form a whole well worth a seemingly high price; the Book is a collective epic that will strengthen our cause by helping to keep us free. Together they manifest the kind of world that graces the Catalog covers and validated the accompanying caption. Yea and verily: “We can’t put it together. It is together.”

Abraham Peck SEED

... and is defeated

A LONG TIME COMING AND A LONG TIME GONE, RICHARD FARINA, RANDOM HOUSE

The stage lights up and Dick Farina is saying “It’s not raining here.” All the while he and Mimi are getting soaked as they perform at the Newport Festival. But the weather hardly touches them. The puff of happiness they ride on is an umbrella too. Then the stage lights go out again — Dick is dead. A book of Dick’s essays appears. Notes by Mimi. Underground Camelot is exposed, and its two mythical hippie rulers are shown to be just frightened children trying to shield themselves from personal fears and from a decaying world.

Dick’s genius was that he could transform his fears — demons, as Mimi called them — into fascinating stories, adequate poetry, and exciting music. His audiences benefited from his neuroses as he kept creating trying to purge his tormented soul. He wrote of chasing wolves, of fighting with the Irish nationalists, of terminal cancer, and of walks along the Seine. His experiences were varied, his imagination boundless, and the truth became so unimportant.

Mimi said he was always “deathy” and grew more so as the end was near. She said he knew it was coming, and afterward she thought he came back to her one night. Somehow she didn’t seem to grasp the meaning of his demons. She and her sister Joan Baez (who wrote the introduction to the book) accepted them as poltergeists whose presence had to be accepted rather than challenged. And Dick was content to carry mystical hairs in his wallet, maybe all the while knowing that his creativity was inextricably tied to those demons that tortured him.

But more than understanding maybe, Mimi gave him love. And her notes indicate that he left behind an almost helpless child who would cling to every experience they shared and continually marvel that she could have made him happy.

Drawing primarily on his experiences, both with Mimi and before they met, Dick wrote beautiful and iron stories about wars and beautiful people and all the things he ultimately rejected in life. Only occasionally did he write of his dedication to nonviolence and his hippie way of life. And when he did, it was always in the form of a dispassionate essay that he sold to Mademoiselle or a magazine like it. He seemed not to be able to express his beliefs, only his emotions.

Joan Baez wrote than Mimi and Dick never got to enjoy the recognition his writing and their music would ultimately bring. Their finest album, Recollections, presented Dick as an accomplished songwriter, musician, and producer; and Mimi as a fine singer. And Dick’s final book, A Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone, brought him alive to the public as perhaps his actual presence was never able to do.

Now that all the fruits of Richard Farina’s talents have been bared, the traditional legend can begin to develop. First he will emerge as a romantic revolutionary who does classical guitar arrangements of ‘Three Blind Mice”. And then he will be a dedicated pacifist and hippie commie freak who took on a Bircher in an amusement park and managed not to get killed. But finally he will emerge as a manchild who desperately sought to rid his life of fears that wouldn’t go away. And the last is the real legend — if legends can be real — and Dick knew when he got on that motorcycle for the last time he was finally going to pack up his sorrows. The stage lights up again.

wendy WIN