AtDTDA 32: Fantasia on a Fantasia of Thomas Tallis Pt. 1

[kelber at mindspring.com]

My mother was no hippy.

She grew up in poverty.  Her Communist father  had left them flat broke, to go off and organize the unemployed.  My mother, with her brother and mother, spent her childhood getting evicted from tenement apartments, crowded in with relatives, including male cousins who'd grab her and feel her up every chance they got, left with relatives upstate during the summers when her mother got work as a chambermaid in the Catskills.  My mother would take refuge whenever she could in the library, her favorite authors being Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontes.

She grew up to be a proper-looking middle-class lady, a self-hating Jew, an Anglophile, a card-carrying Communist, a prig who looked down on my father's working-class family, an ardent feminist, a fighter for civil rights, and a committed anti-war activist.  I grew up going to anti-war demonstrations.  We marched with the Women's Strike for Peace contingent.  We never spat at returning vets, we chanted "bring the boys home."  My mother loved the hippies we met at demos, she thought they were adorable and probably secretly lusted after the hippy-boys.

Hippy is a positive word for me too.

Laura

 

-----Original Message-----
>From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net
>Sent: May 9, 2008 7:16 AM
>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: RE: AtDTDA 32: Fantasia on a Fantasia of Thomas Tallis Pt. 1
>
>            Jill:
>            This is, in all respect, just a post about what hippy means 
>            to me, and not about the community in which Robin grew 
>            up and shared much joy. . .
>
>. . .and much, much pain. . .
>
>            Many life situations shared by country people and hippies 
>            might have been the same. I just can't shake the perjoritive 
>            of hippy. Hmm. Maybe I should look at that.
>
>Go ahead, don't stop on my account. . . 
>
>            The word hippy never brought me a positive feeling to me, 
>            overall. And when I think of who Tallis had in mind, hippy 
>            was far from it. I kind of thought about people who woke up 
>            early, worked hard as a member of a small rural community. 
>            A school teacher mother who walked 5 miles through rain and 
>            snow, to a one-room school house to teach in rural West Virginia. 
>            People who lifted and carried heavy loads from barn to truck... 
>            I have been listening to pop country music this week from the 
>            early 70's and some of the lyrics, "here in topeka, the rain is a 
>            droppin' the faucet's a drippin' and the kids are a-bawlin'". Now 
>            Loretta was singing about the contrast between the glitz and 
>            glam of the hollywood elites and the country people. But hippies, 
>            at least at the time, was a perjoritive word for other self centered 
>            peoples interpreted by country people, well it wasn't good to be a 
>            hippy to everyone. 
>
>I suppose additional context would be helpful right here. I play blugrass/old 
>timey music on Wednesday nights, supporting Kenny Hall's Voice and 
>Mandolin. I was installing flooring with rednecks in Fresno in the early 
>seventies. Heard a lot of them Billy Sherrill productions while inhaling 
>psychotropic vapors. Bea/Mom was inaccessible, off in some utopia 
>that went poof in a cloud of weed smoke by the time I really could settle 
>in L.A. That was 1975 and Parquat was endemic. And I've seen my
>fair share low-life scum passing themselves off as some sort of enlightened 
>beings. It is to laugh. . . 
>
>            My impression of hippiedom was that in it's attempt to cancel out 
>            rules and open up the mind, just as many rules and laws of being a 
>            proper hippie emerged. 
>
>Hippies came from Acid, Acid came from Gaia. Now deal with it.
>
>
>            My folks lived on the other side of the country and in the 60s, 
>            during the Vietnam war, always only had thought of the act 
>            of being a soldier as a noble task of some kind. Anti war 
>            protests was one thing, but spitting on soldiers when they came 
>            back rubbed people like that the wrong way. Kinda unfortunately 
>            soured it for any good hippies that were out there. The manson 
>            kids, the scene at Altamont, etc etc, removed any last vestiges 
>            of positive ideas about hippies for people like my parents, and 
>            by extension, probably me too. But maybe I need to look into 
>            my navel here on this. 
>
>My Mom prefered to refer to herself as a "Freak".
>Compare the horror of the Manson family to the horror of the Vietnam war.
>Yesterday, at the shop, quite early in the day, a Witch and her very 
>confused husband came by, the Mrs. looking for candles and suchlike.
>He said: "Not to get too political, but what if Iran has a nuclear bomb and 
>can set it off wherever they like, isn't waterboarding justified then?"
>
>And I said "Yes, we have the stockpiles of nuclear wepons, they can go 
>off accidently, so let's start that waterboarding in the White House, where 
>the real problem exists." This caused him to foam at the mouth and stomp 
>out. Fortunately, we didn't lose a sale and I got to talk more to the lady. 
>But yeah, yesterday's Hippies are today's Witches. And Pynchon has 
>always known that. Read Gravity's Rainbow again, if you don't believe me.
>
>            But there probably were hippies who helped their communities, 
>            raised chickens, lifted loads, fixed trucks. 
>
>That would be Me, my sister, my Mom, my friends, Food NOt BOmbs. . .
>
>http://www.foodnotbombs.net/
>
>            And, there might have
>            been self centred country people. 
>
>Like President Bush? Tom Delay? Turdblossom?
>
>            So, just food for thought on the value of the word hippy. . .
>
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBAsxLKC1Dk