quoth gary snyder, gussuk1, of the only bar in town, town of 3 thousand, 7 in salmon summer:
"Dillingham, Alaska, The Willow Tree Bar" Drills chatter full of mud and compressed air All across the globe, low-ceilinged bars, we hear the same new songs All the new songs. In the working bars of the world. After you done drive Cat. After the truck went home. Caribou slip, front legs folded first under the warm oil pipeline set four feet off the ground--- On the wood floor, glass in hand, laugh and cuss with somebody else's wife. Texans, Hawaiians, Eskimos, Filipinos, Workers, always on the edge of a brawl -- In the bars of the world. Hearing those same new songs in Abadan, Naples, Galveston, Darwin, Fairbanks, White or brown, Drinking it down, the pain of the work of wrecking the world
let’s complicate this—
the theory must become unreservedly international, the praxis extremely, extremely local. i think robin hood said that—
overheard at only restaurant in town: oh that into the wild’s a bad book, encourages these people coming from nowhere going nowhere dying in a bus like that guy with the grizzlies, too—
the brown bear, a magnificent, brutal creature that should be given full verbal notice on backcountry sunset saddles — but but but has it “succeeded in becoming successful”?2 🤔 —
the russians arrived before the europeans. they brought booze. they lined up native alaskans and saw how many a canon ball could go through. they interred themselves beneath white slanted orthodox signs, double crossed—
“[t]he American freebooters were rapidly multiplying in the Pacific [mid-nineteenth century]. However spacious the regions of the United States Federation may be, they do not seem extensive enough for the feverish activity and spirit of enterprise of the Americans. They look upon that continent as their patrimony. Their destiny (‘our manifest destiny,’ as they call it) is forever to expand… It had been hoped that our [Russia] colonies’ lack of resources would keep them safe from the greed of the freebooters, but it was not so”—3
“[t]he sun looks ghostly when there’s mist on the water and it’s quiet. I never knowed that before”4—
“i used to be full of piss and vinegar. now i’m just full of piss”—
“[a]nd not a word about race. The only distinction was between the civilized and the uncivilized”5—
with the Fanny Pack, the question is always what is Inside—
jeff davis, no not him, another who initiated the American occupation of Alaska, is that evil mid-19th century opportunist straight out of blood meridian: began career “fighting Mexicans in the 1840s,” accompanied Sherman through Georgia, and “went out West to fight Indians,” 1867, turned north to Sitka, AK, where “caroused, raped, and looted” Russian and Tlingit alike, dressed up a Tlingit chief in military garb at a feast, “shot up a Tlingit village”6—
subsistence fishing, hauling sockeye up on wind- and rain-battered beach, tangled netting and spruce tip seltzer—
hamilton. classist?—
a waterworld, a floodplain, a SLUICE—
“[p]erils unaccountable and unthinkable were mentioned, as well as wild beasts, hostile tribes, impenetrable forests, and mighty mountain ranges; but always from beyond came the rumor and the tale of white-skinned men, blue of eye and fair of hair, who fought like devils and who sought always for furs”—7
2022 & 2023. last summer, Dobbs, this: Student for Fair Admissions. fifty years since Sula and Exile on Main St—
4th or whichever wave colonialism in the form of gussuks connecting with the natural world in Orvis & Patawhateva.. fishing guides on the agulawok, commercial boat waiting @ harbor, easy to be rugged with engine & a ticket out—
“[i]n spite of my fear of being attacked in the [Kamchadal] cellar I continued my search but, discovering nothing more, took away with me, as proof, two bundles of fish, the arrows, a wooden implement for making fire, tinder, a bundle of thongs of seaweed, bark, and grass and sent them by my cossack to the place where the water was being taken on”8—
huber-pilled, heard of it? Huberdude says: that thing i do like once or twice a day is pretty chill if you do it like once or twice a day—
“[d]ecolonising action rescues with its practice the purest and most vital impulses. It opposes to the colonialisation of minds the revolution of consciousness. The world is scrutinised, unravelled, rediscovered. People are witness to a constant astonishment, a kind of second birth. They recover their early simplicity, their capacity for adventure; their lethargic capacity for indignation comes to life”—9
Yupik for white person
Dr King
1867 letter by Baron de Stoeckl, Russia’s Minister to the U.S. responsible for cession of Russian America (Alaska)
Days of Heaven, Malick ‘78
Chevigny, Russian America
Chevigny, Russian America
Jack London, “Lost Face” (1910)
Steller in Bering’s Voyage
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema”