reportage regarding lami@50, mostly by Pinky Kushner, who met Alden Van Buskirk at Washington University in St. Louis and married his Dartmouth friend Peter Kushner, now a scientist in San Francisco:
LAMI@50 event in San Francisco, by Mark Weiss (c)(p)2011 Earthwise Productions
i am forwarding this to a dr. donald miller in seattle, a dartmouth alum whose post i found trying to fact check a point someone made that richard eberhart had attended the “howl” reading in sf (and wrote for ny times about it) and then jack hirschman had done his own reading of “howl” in hanover — which presumably made an impression on Alden Van Buskirk.
also, i noted that recent DAM alumni mag has article on jazz group from that period — i am curious if any of them knew Van. (blurring distinction between straight jazz and the new thing)
for pinky’s account below my only quibble is that it overstates matson’s role in the event and underplays those of matt gonzalez and bob rosen, who guided my actions. john paige and i had several conversations and a meeting. also, garrett caples — brought in by highsmith — i think coordinated the speakers unless he delegated that to matson.
i’m more concerned with the idea that we can, as peter, pinky and i discussed recently, keep some momentum going with more events and readings, and hopefully get some interest in a reissue of “lami” or a new pub with some of “lami”, the two or three early poems paige/ceeley has, some letters perhaps and a bio. Andrew Hoyem the publisher is thriving since 1965 mostly as Arion Press; knows of recent activity.
Dartmouth club of bay area (james von rittman) may help promote local follow up events.
I am also interested in the jazz angle. Lauren says she has a recording of Van playing piano.
Also, and this is esoteric and for Peter and Pinky primarily, I passed on news of Rachel Kushner to Dartmouth classmate 1986 (which by the way is 25 years ago, hardly “recent”) Melinda Lopez a Cuban American playwright who says she then immediately ordered Rachel’s book.
mark weiss
dartmouth1986
in san francisco/palo alto
(650) XXX-XXXX
dr. miller link:http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller19.html
—– Forwarded Message —–
From: Pinky Kushner <pXXXXXXXX@mac.com>
To:
Sent: Sunday, January 8, 2012 2:47 PM
Subject: lami@50
From: Pinky Kushner <pXXXXXXXX@mac.com>
To:
Sent: Sunday, January 8, 2012 2:47 PM
Subject: lami@50
Greetings 2012!
Below is an informal write-up by me with help from Peter of the event lami@50 that occurred here in San Francisco, December 20, 2011. Separately I will send out a pdf file of David Rattray’s story “Van”, published in Bomb many years ago put into pdf form through Olga (BOMB No. 40, Summer 1992, pp. 66-69). If you haven’t received a copy of the dvd and want one, let me know and I will send it.
All the best,
Pinky (and Peter)
Lami@50
As many of you know, Peter was contacted by his longtime friend from Dartmouth College, John Ceeley, a poet writer, who told him of a wonderful surprise. A group unknown to John or Peter had become fans of the poems in the book called “Lami” written by Alden Van Buskirk, a mutual friend from Dartmouth, who died December, 1961, a year after graduation. To celebrate the 50 years since the poems were created, this group was planning an event of readings and remembrances called lami@50.
The principal instigator was another Dartmouth alum, Mark Weiss, who graduated only recently but had curiously made a connection to Lami. Apparently, Mark had gone to an event last spring where Ferlinghetti was present. Mark, being always the Dartmouth enthusiast, asked Ferlinghetti if he had ever been to Dartmouth.
Ferlinghetti replied he had, to visit Jack Hirschman. Jack was poet laureate for San Francisco in 2006 and had taught at Dartmouth College during Alden’s time there. Jack, we think, then told Mark about Lami and Alden Van Buskirk. Later and now it was just before the event, Jack asked Mark if he had contacted Clive Matson. And Clive then told Mark to contact Martha Muhs, Alden’s girlfriend from St. Louis, and Ceeley, who then contacted Peter. Both Ceeley and Martha live in the Oakland/Berkeley area. (John Ceeley is now officially John Paige, having taken on his mother’s maiden name.)
lami@50 was to be a poetry reading on December 20, at Books & Bookshelves, the bookstore of another San Francisco poet, David Highsmith. (As its name implies, the friendly little bookstore sells books, almost exclusively poetry books, and bookshelves.) Ceeley said he was lining up readers for the poems and for MC, the poet Clive Matson, who—as it came out during the event—had years previously been the one who painstakingly taken Alden’s scraps of papers with handwritten poems on them and put them into type for David Rattray, who then organized these poems into the volume Lami, published by the Auerhahn Society press in 1965, with 1,000 copies printed.
The story of how these poems got into press is actually quite interesting and involved the forthright—some might say pushy—ingenuity and dedication of Allen Ginsberg. Apparently, Ginsberg thought the best way to force its publication was to get individual poems in press. He then worked hard until an impressive list of journals agreed—Evergreen Review, City Lights Journal (2), The Second Coming Magazine, Eco Comtemporaneo, Intrepid, Fuck You, The Moving Times and Poetry. With such a fine publication list, Lami could not be refused.
Back to the event planning, Peter and I began hunting down other friends of Alden’s who might be interested in attending the event, mostly folks from very far away. That task involved quite a bit of google searching. Peter contacted Dartmouth friends, Seth Zimmerman, Dave Greenspan, Francis Dauer. Some Dartmouth buddies Peter discovered had passed away, GV, LH and DS. Another friend of Alden’s from high school, Stan Munsat, also could not make it. Peter found a likely candidate for Alden’s younger brother, Rob, is a professor at SUNY, at Oswego, NY, who confirmed that he was indeed Alden’s brother, Robert Van Buskirk. Rob passed the message along to Alden’s sister Lauren.
Peter, I am Lauren Van Buskirk Pike, Alden’s younger sister. My brother Rob forwarded your email re: the fiftieth celebration of my brother’s book.I would love to hear more about the event (location, attendees, etc) and am interested if anyone has thought about making a video to share. I remember a few of my brother’s friends, especially David Rattray, but many others I never met.so any information or visuals you could provide would be appreciated.
Would love to know where you and my brother Alden met.. Dartmouth?? St Louis?? California???
Look forward to hearing from you…..
Yours,
Lauren
We were elated and Lauren did come.
My own connection to the event was that Alden, after graduating from Dartmouth College, came to Washington University in St. Louis, where I was an undergraduate. Alden was in several of my classes, which because they were graduate level courses, were small, allowing all of us to get to know one another.
I took on contacting friends of mine who had been part of the group in St. Louis. Gary and Marilyn Merritt, Bill Sutherland, Olga Bornstein Wise, and Jim Bryan. Jim was a difficult google search, but he was found and came.
Wow! Pinky, this is amazing. A surprise out of the past. I rode with Alden and David Rattray from St. Louis to Texas where they dropped me off that summer. Then didn’t we meet out of nowhere in Paris that fall in a hostel at Pigalle? And then again in Tubingen the next spring? Am I imagining these things? I don’t see how I could possibly go to San Francisco next week. But if I could be in St. Louis and Texas and Paris and Tubingen all in one year, well, I better take a deep breath and get a little younger. Do you have frequent flyer miles? I don’t anymore. Will you be home this evening? Can I call you at 9 here, 6:00 there? It’s wonderful to be back in touch. I’ve been missing those olden days.
Love,
Jim.
I also contacted Craig Dworkin, a professor at the University of Utah, whom I had discovered a few years back had put a scanned version of Lami up on his website. I got a nice response.
Dear Pinky,
Thank you so much for writing — and for thinking of me!
It’s a fine coincidence, because I’ve been thinking of LAMI all last week, as it happens. Getting a reading-copy PDF of the poems on-line has long been on my to-do list and I’m finally — miraculously — getting around to it.
So this gives me a good excuse of a deadline — I’ll have it up before the 20th in sympathetic celebration!
Sadly, I won’t be able to make it in person — my stepdaughter will be recovering from surgery then (nothing major, but she’ll need me around)
Hoping that this finds you happy and well,
::Craig
John Ceeley worked on the speakers, collecting them, organizing them, making sure we all didn’t read the same selection fromLami. Garrett Caples of City Lights put together a flyer announcing the event.
For us, the event began in the afternoon of the 20th with a phone call from Lauren, who said she had arrived by plane from Florida, would be here only for the event and would leave early the next morning. Jim Bryan had already arrived from Virginia the night before, with a backpack and a computer bag in hand. Lauren caught a cab to our house, walked in, full of light and energy. We exchanged tales from long ago.
Lauren was a young teenager when her brother had died. She recalled his funeral in their hometown of Rutland, VT and how David Rattray was so bereaved and had wept and wept. She didn’t remember Peter at the funeral, but he was there. We had a bite to eat on Irving Street before we were due at the bookstore. And then we walked into the bookstore.
During the day, in its wonderful natural daylight, the lighting in the store is a bit subdued. That night, it was full of light and had a good number of people already assembled, a full 40 minutes before the event was to begin officially. Lauren asked Peter, “How will I know Jack Hirschman.” Peter told her that would be no problem as Jack could be relied on to come and give her a huge hug as soon as he discovered her. Without any prompting Jack met expectations.
Lots of people came, perhaps 50. We sat around on benches and chairs that David Highsmith sells there, arranged into rows. Jim was especially pleased to be sitting between the lovely Martha and John Ceely. I sat across from Lauren towards the front.
Peter sat next to me and beside Jack Hirschman.
The luminaries who read besides the poets Hirschman, Matson and Ceely, were Matt Gonzalez, a well-known progressive and former supervisor in San Francisco, student of literature and long-time fan of the book Lami, and the poets, David Highsmith, Garrett Caples, and Diamond Dave Whitaker. Clive Matson was also MC and did a wonderful job.
Peter, Martha, Jim, the organizer Mark Weiss, and I also read.
Photos of the event have been posted by David Highsmith on flickr and a leading social media format.
STATE POPCORN
As a postscript to the event, those of us who knew Alden met over at Martha’s house a week later. This included Jim Bryan, who was still in the Bay Area. We exchanged various tales. We were joined by Tony Sargent, who in a poem in Lami is referred to as the biophysicist. Alden knew him and Jim Reinhardt in Oakland in 1961. Tony told how he had been interested in psychedelic drugs and had shared with Alden how a psychedelic compound is found in heavenly blue morning glories and how to take it. According to Tony, the description of this process first appeared in press in a poem by Alden (entitled 9-17-61).
Here’s the link to the on-line version of Lami, on Craig Dworkin’s website at the University of Utah:
An interview with Jack Hirschman that gives the fuller picture of how Dartmouth College was the East Coast connection to the West Coast poetry of the Beat Generation:
Here’s the link describing Jack’s anointment as poet laureate:
Here’s Mark Weiss’ announcement of lami@50 with his description of how the event came about:
By the way, PNH is not a kidney disease. Here’s more information about PNH:
And attached is a description of Alden Van Buskirk’s actual disease that was written up and published by his doctor in St. Louis, who at the time was a young medical student, probably on a hematology rotation, where he died.
At one point during the event, Jack referred to Alden as a possible Olympic skier. Alden had grown up skiing and was a superb and stylish downhill skier, who teasingly would imitate Stein Eriksen, but his skiing declined in the years as his disease inexorably progressed. Peter was his ski buddy.
Stay Tuned!! Wah Hoo Wah! And “FY” lives, too!
edit to add, January 12, 2012: I met Andrew Hoyem, the founder of Arion Press of San Francisco, who published Alden Van Buskirk “LAMI” in 1965, and among other things, he pointed out that The New York Times published today an article on Ed Sanders whose “Fuck You” literary magazine published previously parts of “LAMI.”
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 
Partial List
Matt Gonzalez, Jack Hirschman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
David Highsmith, Garrett Caples, John Paige.
John Ceeley, Lauren Van Buskirk Pikes.
John Mitchell, Clive Matson, Martha Muhs, Andrew Hoyem
Sarah Hartwell, Dartmouth Archives.
Bob Rosen — IS BOB ROSEN’S STEP-DAUGHTER HERE?? —
Don Cherry, Doctors Richard Shapiro and Brian Edward Moore
who lived at Richard Eberhart with David Rattray and
Melinda Lopez — Thurston Moore.
Terry Acebo Davis, Guillermo Gomez Abascal
“no vale la Pena”
David Womack
David Hess
David Rattray
poem?
Franz Kafka seven three
Tom Stoppard seven three
1964 thru 1977
Published with Notice
95 years after publication date.
Nineteen seventy eight to one march eighty nine
70 years after
d
e
a
t
h
ifaworkofcorporateauthorship95yearsfrom publicationor120yearsaftercreation
whatever
expires
fir
st
You express interest in Van’s experience in a Dartmouth jazz group. Your best bet will be to contact Jim Reinhardt, now an architect in Hawaii, who played bass with Van. I was Van’s drummer during our sophomore year, but Jim played with him a lot longer.
I can offer this. Van was hands-down the best jazz pianist I ever played with, always exciting, always unpredictable– I never was sure he was going, though once we got ‘there’ it was invariably right. Not unlike Monk, of whom he was a big fan, though Van did not copycat. ‘The sound of surprise,’ as somebody once called it.
It pissed him off that jazz critics had declared Monk to be a primitive with little command of the keyboard. Van would take to the keyboard to show what he mean. He’d play Well You Needn’t, first mimicking John Lewis, then Monk. ‘Watch my hands,’ he’d say, using ‘proper’ hand position for Lewis, then switching to Monk’s unorthodox flat-handed, extended fingers approach. His Lewis was precise, crystalline, springy. His Monk percussive, punching, elliptical. ‘Monk’s technique is perfect,’ he’d proclaim, ‘for what he plays. It’s a new way of playing the piano. The jazz writers are fulla shit.’ (I think this wd have been 1958-9.)
Van was at his best when he’d stretch out for multiple choruses. Great storyteller, great narrative, everything added up as if composed, and yet, as I said above, we never knew where he was/we were going until we got there. Sometimes he’d toss in mini-tutorials along the way, knocking out a half-chorus of Fats Waller/Basie stride, then Bud Powell, then Monk, then all over the place, flying off in all directions, anticipating Cecil Taylor, Ornette, free jazz in general. This against hard bop bass/ drum support from Jim and me.
I’m a real fan of Van’s poetry, bought Lami on publication, have turned dozens of people on to his writing. I remain an even bigger fan of Van the pianist, who might have been a major contributor to our ‘native art form’ if he’d wanted to. And had he lived long enough.
Final chorus. Van had returned to San Francisco the final year of his life for treatment of that awful blood disease. I’d been out of touch for a few years, but Reinhardt (by then a Berkeley grad student) had remained close. Jim, Van and I jammed a couple of times that year, and it didn’t go well.
I was still playing a sort of simplified Blakey/Klook ‘pocket’ groove. They weren’t. Van had become a lot more aggressive, a lot less laid back, less puckish, more declarative more abstracted. Not exactly like Herbie Nichols or Cecil Taylor, but in that general direction. To me, both Jim and Van seemed to be playing way ahead of the beat; to them I was lagging. Didn’t mesh and finally Van had no patience or interest in continuing.
It was confounding to me and somewhat painful. Couldn’t really figure it out, b/c my playing was right in synch with the guys in my regular group. My guys LIKED my time. Fifty years later, having learned about Van’s rages during that final year–fueled by his awareness that his life was slipping away–it makes sense to me, and soothes any hurt feelings I may have possessed back when.
Today I realize how fortunate I was to have orbited in Van’s genius.
editor: that’s fucking awesome, sir. I love that kind of jazz-inflected narrative not quite lyrical writing. “John Burks on Alden Van Buskirk on Thelonious Monk” Wah-hoo-wah. And the other thing is that, to my mind, part of Van’s legacy is Rachel Kushner, who was in the news for refusing an invite for the PEN awards in New York, for not wanting to condone Charlie Hebdo’s baiting, in that or at least they told me Peter met Pinky while visiting Van in St. Louis. LAMI LIVES you betcha.