Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
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| Undated Letter 2 (1963) |
Letter
no. (?)
AH
TAH
MAH
RAH:
All so goes well
I sit here listening to Villa-Lobos!
“Little Train of [the] Caipira”[1]
A
magnificent work
and I am exceptionally in high spirits tonight (moment) except our English teacher wants me to read that great book “The Yearling” (goddam if I am)
Ohbythe way—
“The Little Train of Caipira” is from Villa-Lobos’ “Bachanas Brasileiras No. 2.”
(I though[t] you’d be interested in that little informational tidbit)
I must say
(auld chop)
this mode of letter writing certainly beats the old way with words all in neat little lines and rows across the page with no stopping except an occasional
paragraph.
My way is not merely a——>
cummings[2] imitation,
It gives the letters room to breath[e]
and makes the writing much
more cool, calm, and clear.
Or maybe it’s just my mood tonight.
(Reader should stop here, reflect upon the above lines, go get something to eat or drink, then continue)
I have been thinking about humanity
(somewhat prompted by reading Philip Wylie’s excellent new story in “The Saturday Evening Post,”[3] and also recent events in my life.)
And am strongly tempted to laugh.
I have been taking everything far too seriously
Also allowing my “natural impulse” psychosis to offset reason
Let me explain (as though what I am about to say had any significance at all. It doesn’t, except for fools. Wise ((I hesitate to use the word “intelligent”)) people recognize what I am about to say as a fact of life): 1. Too many people are always worrying that saying or doing the natural thing might offend somebody. Thus we have liars, phonys [sic], and hypocrites (quite apart from your hypocrisy, which is open, honest and delightful). These sort[s] of people made my life a hell, and so I revolted against them. In that this was a spontaneous revolution, that is, a natural reflex action of defense against those who were hurting me, it was unplanned, confused, and only semi-successful. Are you beginning to see my point? Anyway, you know of my manic-depressive cycles of “save the world”/“f**k the world” attitudes. This was only a small part of my rebellion (and part of the unsuccessful part) a big part, and also a successful part, was my adoption of William Butler Yeats’ point of view in “Crazy Jane”[4]: “What need for clothes?
There’s more enterprize [sic] in walking naked.”
I still believe this: that a person should be unflinchingly, passionately honest a[t] all times, “walking naked.” However, before now I ran it into the ground. I decided that honestly meant doing exactly what you had the impulse to do all the time. You can see the implications here. That included saying and doing things which had no basis but my my [sic] deep neurosis—thus doing away with good judgment, making an ass of myself, etc.
Dig? —>
This leads me to something else. People never stop psychoanalysing each other. Now, I’m all for analysis but it can be carried too far. Pretty soon people stop themselves from doing or saying perfectly natural things, because “the motivations are neurotic,” and every time somebody says something honest, somebody else says: “Ha! A neurotic response, and if you don’t act a certain way, “The well-adjusted way,” you’re branded: A NUT! This is one of the things responsible for the demands made on one to conform, conform, conform, this midcentury.
Also it is responsible for the goddam hypocrisy so rampant in America today. It’s gotten so bad that people accept as a matter of course that one should lie and be phonily friendly to one’s friends, never telling them our criticisms of them, while being completely honest with one’s enemies! God, how perverted!
If the above lines sound like an angry young man said ‘em, he did. I was trying to write a lucid, comprehensible essay on a topic of little or no importance, and mother kept disturbing me, so I got all pissed off, yelled at her, and wrote those exclamatory sentences.
Now, though, I grow tired of this pseudo-philosophical/psychologic drivel, and am going to bed.
The Villa-Lobos record played through a long time ago and ended, anyway.
No sound now but crickets and the occasional flip of a biblical page from my mother’s room.
Also…
When I gave you my “Western Suite,”[5] you said you’d give me a classical album in return. Why don’t you? I get tired of hearing my same damn records over and over and over. Buying 2 or 3 new ones a week doesn’t help.
In addition…………..
Don’t forget as my Easter present (to celebrate Christ’s death just 3 months after his birthday. Isn’t that wild?!) those darts and that big picture I asked you for. Remember? I recommend dart throwing (especially at humans and pictures of them) as an excellent way of “letting off steam,” or keeping one’s neurosis level down.
I realize that I am asking you not only to part with one of your find albums, but also to spend your hard earned money (unless you care to steal the dart game) on me.
But shouldn’t a writer get something for his efforts?
Anyway, if you refuse one or both of these requests, I will toss it off with a jurez-vous[6] in your direction, but love you just the same,
as I love myself
signed,
THE WISE OLD (?) Seer and Servant
of the Lawd,
Lester Conway
Bangs, GITAFBC*
P.S. Be in Aarons[7] next Saturday. I should like to have a discussion with you. (Tsk-tsk, I shall say ((nope.))
P.P.S. Know why I say I love you? You’re the mother image. You look like my old lady.
*General in the army for Bullwinkle Corps[8]
[1]Villa Lobos, Heitor. b. 1887. Brazilian composer considered by many to be the single most significant contributor to 20th-century Brazilian art music. "The Little Train of the Brazilian Countryman" ("O trenzinho do caipira”) is the name of Villa-Lobos’s Toccata movement concluding his 1930 orchestral suite, Bachianas brasileiras No. 2.
[2] e.e. cummings
[3] Wylie, Philip Gordon. b. 1902. American speculative fiction author whose 1933 novel, When Worlds Collide, was adapted to a George Pal film in 1951 (referenced in the lyrics to the opening theme of The Rocky Horror Picture Show). The story to which Bangs alludes here is most likely “Triumph,” a Cold War nuclear war story excerpted and serialized in the Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1963.
[4] Yeats, William Butler. b. 1865. Expressive Irish poet W.B. Yeats is considered one of the most influential poetic voices of the 20th century. His inspiration to Beat poet Alan Ginsberg (compare Yeats's “The Second Coming” and Ginsberg's "Howl") is widely acknowledged. Yeats’s 1933 “Crazy Jane” poems, first published in Words for Music Perhaps, are a sequence of seven poems written on the theme of the dialogue between the self and the soul.
[5] Giuffre, Jimmy. b. 1921. American jazz composer and arranger whose Western Suite (Atlantic Records, 1960) featured a song by Thelonious Monk.
[6] jurez-vous: “Do you swear?”
[7] Aron’s Records in El Cajon; Bangs consistently misspells references to the popular chain of record stores as “Aaron’s” or “Aarons.”
[8] A 1963 animated TV spot explaining to viewers how to become members of the Peace Corps featured the cartoon duo from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Popular for many years in syndication, the show ran from 1959 to 1964 and in its last three seasons was known simply as The Bullwinkle Show.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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