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RYDING_THE_BURN

                                           September 7, 2007

My choice this year for
book to be read at
"Burning Man" was Gary          I like to think of
Snyder's "A Place in            reading in public as
Space" (1996)                   a simple form of
                                performance art.         (Lesser minds call
                                                          this "posing".)
   There were three
   different reasons:

   o  Green was the theme, and Snyder
      is Mr. Deep Ecology.

   o  A recent addition to our camp
      was Pierre, a man doing a         [ref]
      photo-blog roughly retracing
      Kerouac's "On the Road".                Snyder is my pick
                                              for most interesting
   o  My own goal was to do a Sun Ra          of the Beats.
      focused event, and the similarly
      titled "Space is the Place" is              One of the better
      a major Ra work.                            Kerouac books,
                                                  "The Dharma Bums",
                                                  features Snyder under
                                                  the name Japhy Ryder.





I have much to say
about this book...

   wild mind... the need to preserve           WILD_MIND
   wilderness within and without.

         clever, poetic, but not
         quite right, is it?

                                BURNING_WILD


  Snyder doesn't use the phrase "deep ecology" (he
  pushes for a "depth ecology" in one essay, though),
  but he's often called it's "poet laurete", and I        DEEP_ECOLOGY
  wouldn't be suprised if he's one of the sources of
  the idea.

    In Deep Ecology -- and with Snyder, I think --
    ecologies (watersheds) are regarded as having
    rights; there's a a mystical sense that the
    biosphere is not only alive, but must be
    treated with the same respect as a human being.

       There's one interesting essay in this
       book where he uses the phrase "wildness"
       the way someone like Kevin Kelley                   CONTROL
       would use "out of control" -- and he
       does much with that notion of the wildness
       within  -- evolved language, unpredictable
       thought -- this is an essay I want to work
       over closely.



                                      There are other oddities
                                      in his thinking that
                                      are probably examples of
                                      errors, or at least dated
                                      thinking.

                                      E.g. he likes the idea of
                                      ancient matriarchies, ala
                                      Graves' "White Godess",
                                      and cites Taoism as an
                                      echo of the early dominance
                                      of the female.





           There's much other good
           stuff in here:

           the history of poetry
           (both beat and buddhist)

           the problem of preservationism
           applied to ethnicities...


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