Published bimonthly by whim and fancy for the Avram Davidson Society.
Contents copyright 2001 The Nutmeg Point District Mail and assigned to
individual contributors. All rights reserved.
Henry Wessells, Editor.
Cooper Wessells, Honorary Secretary.
All correspondence to:
TEMPORARY CULTURE
Post Office Box 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043-0072
Electronym: wessells@aol.com
Use this electronym for requests to be added to or dropped from the
mailing list. Back issues are archived at the Avram Davidson Website,
URL : http://www.avramdavidson.org/
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THE ORIGINATING ADDRESS
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
SPECIAL YEAR OF THE SNAKE ISSUE
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A Journey in the Haight Ashbury, 1967
By Hugh Leddy
That summer I lived in the Haight Ashbury. Avram shared Ethan with
Grania and I called on either or both. There were some hilarious
stories stemming from Avram's rococo manner and style as he encountered
various flower-wearing representatives of the "Love Generation" -- but
on each side, the overwhelmingly literate Avram and the postliterate,
monosyllabic flower children, there gradually developed a genuine
tolerance if not a fond liking for the other.
Avram won the respect of many because "He's like from another planet! Ya
know?"
The fact he also wrote books carried almost no social cachet.
Another friend who, as it happened, was a classicist non-beat poet
encountered a similar response. Richard Gumbeiner, who loved Graves and
could and did spout for hours on things like the meaning of White
Goddess and North Wind Rising and the evolution of Western culture,
once was challenged in The Drog Store Cafe on Haight with the sentence:
"Hey, man, where did you pick up all this stuff?"
Gumbeiner looked up blankly and said, "I read it in a book?"
His audience, which had been following every word, immediately lost
interest. "If I had lied and said, 'I saw it in a vision!' they would
have been hooked forever," he told me later.
Immediate experience was the key. Personal mind-blowing rapture was all
that was sought. Nothing else would do.
Avram did not subscribe to this prevalent notion. And he was not a man
who followed the popular fad . . . to the contrary, he often set the
style and others (at least those who still read) tried to follow.
Usually without success.
But he did try LSD, just once. And the reason he tried it, I think --
he never said why -- was his conviction that a writer owed it to himself
and to his audience of readers to have as wide a grasp of human
existence and experience as it was possible to reach.
So, as he told me, he had been given a tab of acid a week or so before,
and one evening finding himself alone in his apartment, he decided to
try it. Washing it down with a swallow from a half glass of cognac or
sherry, I forget which, he sat back and waited with interest for things
to start to happen.
In about fifteen minutes they did. Sight and sounds became more acute.
He experimented with the music and volume on his stereo, looked through
several art books he took down from the shelf, found himself totally
disinterested in any text but was amused by the pictures, taken by their
form and color as suddenly they became animated. He was conscious in
some ways his reactions had slipped back to the simple and direct
perception/response pattern he had had as a child.
Eventually he grew bored with the apartment and decided to go out for a
short walk.
Let me state here that, at that time, he wandered in the most supportive
environment one could hope for if they were tripping. Having said that,
it was still in Avram's terms of reference a momentous Adventure.
He wandered up and down the Haight Ashbury, taking his time, it was a
warm summer night, and devoted himself to watching the shops and the
people. Eventually he headed back for his home digs. He was stopped
only once, when he was almost there, by a panhandler who asked in
ritualistic fashion, "Hey, man, you got any spare change?"
Avram in fact did not. He had forgotten to take wallet or any thing
else with him. He searched and found a single dime in the pants pocket
of his trousers. He held it up and out, so the other could examine it,
an object that for him conveyed a world of sudden implication and
meaning.
It was a coin, a common coin. True. But it was much more.
Through it travelled the world's lanes of commerce. People's lives were
involved by their sweat and labor to obtain just such a coin.
Children's dreams were enhanced by the candy or whatnot that such a
little coin would buy. (This was 1967, remember.) And so, in passing
from hand to hand, as it was again about to do, it supported a ramified
network of such proportions the very mind boggled to think of it. And
with that said and done -- Avram gave him the coin.
The panhandler casually accepted it and said, "Hey, thanks, Man!"
And that was it . . . .
Nothing else; but it was the perfect response.
Avram laughed about it all the way home, all the way upstairs, and when
he entered his apartment, he was still laughing.
He never took acid again.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven: Essential Jewish Tales of the Spirit
by Avram Davidson. Edited by Jack Dann and Grania Davidson Davis.
285 pp. $24.95. Devora Publishing. ISBN 1-930143-10-9.
Reviewed by Fred Lerner
Although he was interested in science fiction and fantasy from an early age,
Avram Davidson began his literary career by selling prose and verse to
Jewish magazines. Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven collects many of
these early pieces from Orthodox Jewish Life and Commentary, as well
as stories with Jewish hemes first published in SF magazines and
anthologies. Such stories as "The Golem" and "Goslin Day" will be
familiar to Davidson devotees. "Who Is Ethel Schnurr?"and "Rediscovery"
will probably not be. Many of these stories are explicitly or implicitly
autobiographical, and a six-author "Avram Davidson Symposium" and Eileen
Gunn's short biography provide additional insight into the life and
times of this Orthodox Jew and unorthodox storyteller.
Several of the pieces in this collection are nonfictional, or at least
they appear to be. (The discursive approach to tale-telling that
delights followers of Doctor Eszterhazy and adventurers in Unhistory
informs Avram Davidson's descriptions of a newly independent Israel and
its newly ingathered tribes. One suspects that his accounts of remnant
Jews in China and Sephardic life in Turkey are not overly impeded by
strict fidelity to actual events.) And some of the pieces -- "Of Making
Many Books" and most of the poems -- are polemics for Orthodox Judaism.
Which brings up the problem that this book will present for the majority
of its potential readers; that is, for the devotees of Avram Davidson's
writing who do not share his Jewish background. In this number I
include the many Jews whose religious training consisted of talmud torah
once or twice a week and ended with bar mitzvah lessons. I was only
slightly better educated, but that was under Orthodox auspices and
included a year at Yeshiva University High School (in the lowest of its
preparatory classes). So I did not find myself too far out of my depth,
and was able to recognize and understand most of the references to
Jewish religious practices, Yiddish and Hebrew expressions, and
Ashkenazic folk customs that occur throughout the volume.
Those not equipped with a more-than-rudimentary Jewish background will
find Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven harder going. That does not
mean that they should forgo the pleasures that they will find there.
However, like anyone venturing into an unfamiliar land, they would do
well to equip themselves with a guidebook or two -- or at least to jot
down the telephone numbers of a couple of knowledgeable Ashkenazim. Like
all of Davidson's writing, the pieces in this book will leave readers
with a lot of questions, and an ardent desire to learn some answers to them.
Jack Dann and Grania Davidson Davis have done us a great service by
collecting these pieces, and Devora Publishing (an imprint of Pitsopany
Press) by publishing them. Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven is a
handsome volume, with a lovely jacket illustration by the Israeli
painter Avi Katz. I wish that more attention had been paid to
copy-editing and proofreading. It is hard enough sometimes to work out
precisely what Avram Davidson is telling us -- he does not often choose
the most direct path from start to finish -- without the added burden of
figuring out what words he intended to do the telling. But this does not
detract from the fact that Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven increases
our understanding of a great writer, and provides us with examples of
his work that most of us would otherwise never get to enjoy.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Adventures in Unhistory in the Library
Several recent inquiries concerning the unavailability of Adventures in
Unhistory prompted your editor to see which libraries list it among
their holdings. (Even the most modest public library should offer
interlibrary loan services.) The OCLC record gives the following
libraries :
|
Location |
Library |
Code |
|
CA |
UNIV OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE |
CRU |
|
DC |
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PUB LIBR |
DWP |
|
ME |
BATES COL |
BTS |
|
OH |
WORTHINGTON PUB LIBR |
OWR |
|
OK |
TULSA CITY-CNTY LIBR |
TUL |
|
PA |
CARNEGIE LIBR OF PITTSBURGH |
CPL |
|
TX |
UNIV OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN |
IXA |
|
TX |
UNIV OF TEXAS AT EL PASO |
TXU |
|
VA |
ALEXANDRIA LIBR |
VAX |
|
VA |
COLLEGE OF WILLIAM & MARY |
VWM |
|
VA |
UNIV OF VIRGINIA |
VA@ |
|
VA |
VIRGINIA BEACH PUB LIBR SYST |
VPL |
|
WA |
TIMBERLAND REG LIBR |
UOJ |
Title:
Adventures in unhistory :
conjectures on the factual foundations of
several ancient legends /
Author(s):
Davidson, Avram.
Publication:
Philadelphia : Owlswick Press,
Year:
1993
Description:
xi, 307 p. : p., ill. ;, 24 cm.
Language:
English
Standard No:
ISBN: 0913896292 :
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor:
Legends -- Miscellanea.
Legends -- History and criticism.
Class Descrpt:
LC: GR78; Dewey: 398.042
Responsibility:
by Avram Davidson.
Document Type:
Book
Entry:
19930617
Update:
19930804
Accession No:
OCLC: 28289331
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Press Notices :
A short review of Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven appeared in the
Washington Post Book World (In Brief, Page T12) dated 14 January 2001.
Davidson is praised as an "eccentric modern master" in a column that also
featured a notice of the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley. The anonymous
reviewer writes :
Ursula Le Guin once named Philip K. Dick our own homegrown American Borges,
but that honor may more properly belong to Avram Davidson -- unless he should be
thought of as our Flann O'Brien. Like Borges, Davidson composed unsettling
metaphysical fables [. . .]
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
PUBLICATIONS OF THE AVRAM DAVIDSON SOCIETY
The Last Wizard with A Letter of Explanation.
Publications of the Avram Davidson Society, number one.
Size: 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches, xii pages. Second printing, May 1999.
Single copies, $10.00 (postpaid).
El Vilvoy de las Islas.
Publications of the Avram Davidson Society, number two.
Size: 6 x 9 inches, viii + 32 pages. June 2000.
Trade issue of twenty-five copies hand bound in quarter green linen with
paper-covered boards, numbered 1-25. SOLD OUT
Issue of 100 copies in paper wrappers : single copies, $13.00 (postpaid).
To order, send a cheque in U.S. funds, payable to Henry Wessells, to :
P.O. Box 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043-0072, USA
Orders by e-mail to wessells@aol.com will be held until payment is received.
Trade discount available.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Next Issue Date : March 2001
The date of the next Avram Davidson Society Meeting in New York City
will be announced.
The editor of The Nutmeg Point District Mail invites contributions on any
topic pertaining to the life and work of Avram Davidson.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +