Honey begins a three-part series on Helen Hunt Jackson
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
During the Victorian era on the east coast of the United States, the terrible voluminous roar of skirts worn over stockings, drawers, chemises, corsets strengthened with steel or whalebone, over as well the flexible cages of steel that supported the skirts and the layers of petticoats filled the rooms of houses.
The “angel in the house” ideal for Victorian women represented the ideology of gender: men dominated work outside the home and owned the political and legal system. Women were to raise virtuous children. Women were to be pure.
East coast privileged girls learned reading, writing and arithmetic but most people believed “important subjects” such as Latin, Greek or higher mathematics overtaxed women whose reasoning powers were too defective for such “masculine mysteries.”
Out of this white upper class female domestic milieu stepped a fleshy, very short upper middle class white woman writer with an unusually assured and balanced expression born Helen Maria Fiske in 1830 in Massachusetts. Read more
Honey Receives A Copy Of Dear Mad’m
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
A package arrived in the mail with my cousin Little Barbara’s address in the top left hand corner. I found a note inside the book in the package. Little Barbara wrote she and her sister Daina thought I would enjoy reading a book about an eighty-year old woman who begins a new chapter in her life in the mountains of Trinity County, near where our Aunt Big Barbara taught in Blanchard Flat School in Hoosimbim Mountain during the Great Depression.
I’m approaching seventy, and my cousins approach eighty. This book seemed like it would be just the ticket to a new way to look at growing old.
What reading the book — and then following up with some research — turned out to be was the revelation of a life that vividly soared without a safety net over a ranch in Stockton, literary San Francisco and a remote cabin near Happy Camp in Trinity County. The author was not an eighty-year old; she was close to ninety when she finished writing it. Read more
Honey Tracks Down Ina Coolbrith’s One True Love
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
The life of a forgotten poet reveals a pageant of changes in California consciousness, about the place of women in society, about forbidden love, about the emergence of California literature, and about the transition from the Mexican era in Los Angeles.
Ben Tarnoff’s The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature (2014) describes the contributions of four iconoclastic writers set against the background of bohemian San Francisco, an era that began with their work for the Golden Era in the last years of the American Civil War, and which continued with their creation of the Overland Monthly.
Nigey Lennon in The Sagebrush Bohemian (1990) conjectures there was a romantic relationship between Twain and Coolbrith and Harte and Coolbrith. If there had been such a three-way relationship, gossip about it would have knocked San Francisco society off its heels.
Brett Harte, one of the four, referred to Ina in 1870 as a “dark-eyed Sapphic divinity.” Coolbrith’s good friend John Muir attempted to introduce her to eligible men. The circle of writers, poets and artists she influenced called her the Virgin Poetess. Read more
Honey takes the train to Los Angeles
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
In the first car of the train from Martinez light comes through the window in front as well as through the windows on the sides. If I stand, I see the landscape rushing towards us.
The daylight is watery — as I imagine light is in the Netherlands. The land is flat around the Delta and in the Central Valley. There is so much sky and so little land seen from the train windows that it seems we must be traveling underwater. Clouds are bruised from their weight of water, and the wind pushes them into changing shapes. One is a polar Teddy bear, and he occupies most of my window.
A man I haven’t met sends me a poem, which I read on my tablet. He once wrote that he was a lesbian and in a relationship with another woman, but he is a man married to a woman. His name is Ed Underhill. I have never heard anyone call him “Ed.” Perhaps because “Ed” is too short although Americans always shorten names even the names of foreigners, but if his name is too short, he could be Edward. He writes: Read more
Honey Reveals The Truth About Jack London
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
Some of those fascinated by Jack London seem to see aspects of themselves in him.
Most of his readers think of his having an adventurous life, and he did. One of his adventures started with the great earthquake of 1906, begging rather in his own backyard when he and his second wife Charmian Kittererdge London rode their horses to the top of Mt. Sonoma and looked down at the destruction in San Francisco and in Santa Rosa. This is the journey Charmian was to call “Jack London’s magic trail,” but it was actually a trip to visit old friends, bathe in hot springs and enjoy riding through the redwoods to the Pacific Coast. The Londons were to follow much of the same journey in 1911, which he described in “Four Horses and a Sailor.”
London inherited the travel story as a vehicle for making a little money from Charmian’s Aunt Netta, a travel writer. Background for reading both Charmian’s and Jack’s writing about the magic trail is enhanced by getting to know a little about them. Jack’s life was his greatest literary inventive contribution to California, and Charmian was his hardest working assistant. Read more
Honey Sees From the Sky Descends an Angel
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
Old people comprised most of the audience when I saw Saving Mr. Banks. They sat through the film without moving their white heads and stayed to the end of the subtitles. They were entranced. They could have read the Mary Poppins series, which began in 1934, as children. They could have read the books to their children. Everyone knows Walt Disney. His Steamboat Willy came out in 1928. Each of the old people in the audience grew up with Disney animations and with Walt on television. Disneyland in Anaheim is 58 years old. I was one of the children who went to it soon after it opened.
There were no parking structures but asphalt lots. Women wore high heels, and they got stuck in the asphalt. Real leeches floated in big clear glass containers set on the counter of the Main Street pharmacy.
Both the P.L. Travers book series and Walt Disney affected the way a lot of people saw the world when they were children. The time we spent as children seems like a very long time. The beginning of summer vacation seems like the beginning of forever with adventures still unaccomplished ahead like a vista without a horizon. The older we get, the faster life goes by, and so childhood seems to us to have been a longer period than it was, and what happens in childhood is important. Read more
Honey’s Writing From The Second Gold Mountain
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
No one knows when people began to talk. One theory is that a genetic mutation in a gene such as FOXP2 allowed people to speak. It is almost impossible to imagine that one day a human baby born with the mutated gene was able to talk but his family could not. Babies learn language so there had to have been more than one baby but Noam Chomsky proposed that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual about 100,000 years ago, so Chomsky could imagine what I almost cannot.
A friend of mine today told me that alien intervention explains everything. Aliens mutated the gene. “So why,” I asked, “did a four legged mammal who walked the earth mutate into the whale? Why would aliens care?”
Other scholars place the beginning of speech as about 200,000 years ago. Neanderthal man in Europe and central Asia had the larynx, cranial capacity and the FOXP2 gene for speech and archeological evidence indicates they could talk. Neanderthal is our closest extinct relative and probably interbred with modern humans when we arrived in Europe and central Asia. Read more
Honeyed Frankenstein
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
Eighteen-sixteen was “the year without a summer.” An historic low in solar activity combined with a volcanic winter event caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped by the 1815 eruption of MountTambora in Indonesia caused severe climate abnormalities. Average global temperatures decreased by 0.7-1.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
During the wet miserable summer, nineteen year-old Mary Godwin Shelly, Percy Bysshe Shelly, aged twenty-six, Lord Byron, also twenty-six, and John William Polidori, twenty-one – Polidori was to write the 1819 short story, The Vampyre, one of the first vampire stories in English – stayed in a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. Mary and Percy had lost their first child, born prematurely. He had left his wife for her, and his wife committed suicide.
Forced to remain indoors by the weather, they read horror stories from the book Fantasmagoriana. (1813) The group also discussed experiments by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) with galvanism, the contraction of muscles stimulated by electricity.
The poets proposed a contest between all of them to write horror stories.
The framing of Frankenstein’s in the artic, its many water passages, its sense of disassociation of people from the environment, may have been drawn as some writers believe from Shelly’s fascination with indigenous people but can also be because that year’s extreme cold, and because the villa was on Lake Geneva. Read more
The Land of Mulch and Honey
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
The side yard to my house in Conquered was hard dry soil and two bushes, one of them with inedible orange berries. A wood fence faces the street, which was overgrown with two-foot tall weeds. Last winter, I planted a baby Pluot, a little pear, and an apple tree in the side yard. The Pluot is not self-pollinating. If a neighbor does not have a Santa Rosa plum, I’m going to have to buy one.
Spanish missionaries brought the European plum to California. Luther Burbank bred the Santa Rosa plum from the Japanese plum. In 1885, he imported 12 plum seeds from Japan.
Without bees, the wind pollinates a little but not enough. In agricultural areas in California, farmers have to bring in bees because pesticides kill them off. Fortunately, bees have so far survived in the cities.
My youngest grandchild wants me to get chickens. He wants me to build a chicken coop. He planted broccoli, beans and corn. He agreed to eat the corn. The corn crop grew beautifully but I only got two ears of it because of the birds that got it first. I hung a giant cloth parrot over the fence. It wobbles in the wind and scares off birds. Nothing scares off gophers but mine may be blind because they missed the vegetables. Read more
Honey does not care for Tina Fey
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Tina Fey won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. My daughter and granddaughter howled to her Bossypants Audiobook on their drive to Conquered. To laugh at the lovely Fey’s humor would be, for me, like laughing at Martian jokes of there are Martians and if they tell jokes or like laughing at Turkish humor.
Turkish humor is an oxymoron like industrial parks or military intelligence or marijuana initiative. A former colleague from Turkey – Zeynep — was funny.
Once she said something, and it was funny, and I could not breathe. My head only got larger. She said, “I know. Turks aren’t funny.” I later learned she was a Kurdish Turk. Not any of the Kurdish Turks I met when I lived in Turkey were funny and there’s also a good chance they think the term Kurdish Turk is an oxymoron.
When I mispronounced Turkish words, no Turks laughed but only looked at me with alarm. Who would know that the Turkish word “to squeeze out (laundry)” sounds almost exactly like the word for “to have sexual intercourse?” Not many I bet. It wasn’t my fault what happened next. I also could not ever get straight whether the curse on taxi drivers was, “I jump in your grandfather’s mouth” or “I shit in your grandfather’s mouth.”
I once asked a trick question on an exam on LA history: what is a zoot suit? An Armenian answered, “A law suit that goes really fast.” I’m open to the possibility Armenians are funny — after all, there was Saroyan.
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
