Copyright 1993 The Columbus Dispatch
The Columbus Dispatch
September 19, 1993, Sunday
SECTION: FEATURES ACCENT & ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. 1I; IN ESSENCE
LENGTH: 651 words
HEADLINE: MEMORY GETS HEAVY WHEN YOU'RE STONED IN YOUR OTAGE
BYLINE: Mike arden
I was getting stoneder and and stoneder.
After reading that choice quote from Haight Ashbury Flashbacks, the
memoirs of aging flower-child guru and acid-trip guide Stephen Gaskin, I
decided that, instead of providing the author with a typewriter to show
how many brain cells he fried in the late '60s, someone should give him a
talk show.
I met Gaskin a couple of years ago at The Farm, a rural Tennessee commune
and tofu factory he formed in 1971 with a bush caravan full of love
children and earth-lickers to whom he had become the all-knowing godhead
and chief righteous dude of the cosmos.
He has shepherded that hearty band all the way from flashbacks to hot
flashes and is (I swear) building a nursing facility called Rocinante
where, aged and toothless, they one day will sit around and complain about
stems and seeds in their Metamucil.
Gaskin seems to fit perfectly as their all-wise earth father. But, as
memoirs go, he just doesn't translate well on paper. Moreover, his persona
(read ego) cannot be savored in all its splendid enormity unless one
watches him in action.
So, for you long-in-tooth hippies who now think about the good old days
only when you hear ''Grandma, how did all of these Zig Zag papers get in
this Santana album jacket?'' here is my script submission for the pilot of
The Sinsemilla Years.
Camera zeroes in on a lone figure in a tie-dye caftan sitting cross-legged
on the moonlit beach at Pacifica. To the distant echo of My Sweet Lord,
his fingers and hands flutter and wave before him like those of a belly
dancer, though his facial features mirror the serenity of one lost in deep
meditation. At the precise moment we are certain he will topple over and
begin snoring, he speaks:
''Peace, my lovely cosmic munchkins. Come, sit down. Rest. I can see that
your pilgrimage to reach me has been a long one, and you are late. I hope
your karma didn't break down. Get it? Never mind. It was just an old
hippie joke we used to tell when we wore younger men's sandals.
''But you are weary from your journey. Do not worry. I have Ben-Gay,
arthritis pain formula, and Depends for those who need them.
''Just before you arrived, I was remembering those wonderful good old days
when we used to barf peyote and worry about paraquat - my, that was fun -
and I recalled an acid trip that permitted me to glimpse just how the
world would one day end.
''At the time, I was teaching Om 201 at the Free Peoples Night School and
String Art Conservatory in San Francisco. I was living with five or six
people who later decided to move to Oregon and get into pine sap. Anyway,
it was a day of huge antiwar protests in Washington, and we were watching
these poor, innocent protesters on the tube being beaten by the pigs, and
we said, 'They can't get away with that. We've got to do something.' So we
decided to do this Baggie of acid caps Moon Flower had been hiding for a
real special occasion.
''I must have eaten about 1,500 mikes of this stumff, and it was powerful.
''Someone wanted to hear some sitar music, but we had sold all the records
to buy grass except for the Cowsills. I wasn't into Indian Lake, so I went
out to the kitchen and started going through the refrigerator. That was
where I found a small plastic container of leftover LeSeur peas in
congealed margarine. I knew there was a message there, but I had to get
closer. So I astral-projected myself into the container just as margarine
slabs, like chunks of the polar ice cap, began breaking off into the peas.
''I said, 'Wow, so this is how the world will end.' What a mind-blower.
''And that was how it happened.
''I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yawn, but the power of that memory has tired
me greatly. Someone get my Dulcolax . I must sleep now. Peace. Godspeed.
Help yourself to those roaches I left over there by the King Don
wrappers.''
Copyright 1992 The Atlanta Constitution
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
May 3, 1992
SECTION: DIXIE LIVING; Section M; Page 1 LENGTH: 672 words HEADLINE:
Old-time hippies have a new idea Age of Aquarius meets Golden Age at
health-care commune
BYLINE: By Phil West
Summertown, Tenn. - Stephen Gaskin and his painted school bus led a
caravan of hippies in 1970 to 1,800 acres of rough ridge country, where
they founded a back-to-basics collective called The Farm.
The former English professor from San Francisco still lives on The Farm
(90 miles southwest of Nashville), is married, has two sons in public
school and drives a Volvo station wagon.
But Mr. Gaskin, 57, has a new vision. He has bought 100 acres adjacent to
The Farm for a project he calls Rocinante, a non-profit community for
elderly people who are too self-sufficient for nursing homes but still
need someone to look in on them daily. Construction is expected to kick
off this month.
On the other end of the lifeline, Mr. Gaskin plans to move The Farm's
midwifery operations into Rocinante (pronounced roh-see-NON-te). Since
1971, midwives have handled 1,804 births at The Farm and outside the
community. There are four midwives, with a fifth coming back in June.
"What we're trying to do is get the generations to work together. You get
the wisdom from the old people," Mr. Gaskin said, "and you get the muscle
and energy from the young people."
The project would help the elderly stay out of nursing homes. Eventually,
Rocinante doctors and nurses would see to residents' needs as their health
deteriorated. At first, Rocinante will have one resident doctor.
Finally, Mr. Gaskin envisions a hospice for the terminally ill. He said
Rocinante will not need to be licensed until it begins offering skilled
nursing care. Costs at the facility will not exceed what Medicaid will
pay, he added.
Mr. Gaskin believes that up to 25 percent of the nation's elderly will be
candidates for facilities like Rocinante by the year 2000.
"By the turn of the millennium, a lot of old folks won't be covered," he
said. "They'll slip through the nets."
Through The Farm - which is flourishing with 270 residents - Mr. Gaskin
and his followers "did learn some things about living together. I thought
that if we could create an infrastructure to share that, we could get
those folks together, a bunch of old folks who would not like to go into a
nursing home."
Rocinante could be the answer for some, Mr. Gaskin said.
"There certainly is a need for alternatives to institutionalization
available to people at a reasonable cost," said Enid Kassner, senior
policy analyst for the American Association of Retired People.
"People have to become poor to afford Medicaid or be rich to afford
continuing-care retirement communities, generally group living," Ms.
Kassner said. "Those are very good, but they tend to be available to
people with quite large incomes or assets."
About 4.4 million Americans 65 and older have difficulty with daily
activities but are not ready for skilled-care nursing homes, according to
the U.S. Census Bureau.
The number could reach 5.4 million by 2005, Ms. Kassner believes.
The Census Bureau projects that by 2000, there will be 34.9 million
Americans older than 65 and 4.6 million 85 or older.
"I would say it's correct in identifying a trend" toward alternatives to
institutionalization as more people grow older, Ms. Kassner said.
One reason the need for elderly care has grown is that more care- givers,
usually women, are entering the work force, said Joyce Berry, commissioner
of the U.S. Administration on Aging.
"We think there is a growing need in light of the fact that there are a
growing number of people 80 and over who are frail, who basically don't
need to be in nursing homes but have maintained themselves in the
community," Dr. Berry said.
"There is a need for care for seniors outside institutions," she said,
"but the more preferable type of care is care inside the home."
Mr. Gaskin's plans include 40 single-and double-occupancy rustic cabins.
"We'll have some [cabins] for people who can chop their own wood," he
said, "and some with oxygen plugs in their rooms.
"What you do is take graceful care of your old people," he said.
Copyright 1991 Gannett Company Inc.
USA TODAY
October 15, 1991, Tuesday, FINAL EDITION
HEADLINE: A rebirth of midwifery
Ina May Gaskin could be called the mother of The Farm. Wife of Farm
founder Stephen Gaskin, she has become the name in the world of midwifery.
''We have the wrong people in charge of childbirth,'' says Gaskin, 51,
whose book Spiritual Midwifery has become the bible of home delivery. ''We
don't have women in charge.''
But they do at The Farm, where more than 1,800 babies have been delivered
in 20 years.
''You could think of us as a plant that fell on fertile soil,'' Gaskin
says. ''We're like the mouse that roared. We went from being hippies doing
natural childbirth to birthing centers to birthing rooms in most major
hospitals in America. And it's all so common sense, you kind of wonder how
the whole culture could have missed it.''
Copyright 1979 The Washington Post
The Washington Post
May 20, 1979, Sunday, Final Edition
A Commune's Last Stand in The Tennessee Hill Country; The Farm: 'If You
Stay Two Weeks You'll Never Leave'; The Farm's 1,200 'Technicolor Amish'
Are Keeping the '60s Spirit Alive With Soybeans and Solar Power
BYLINE:
By Alice Alexander, Special to The Washington Post
DATELINE:
SUMMERTOWN, Tenn.
They call it the Farm. Eight years ago they drifted out of San
Francisco, a counterculture ark, and sailed south and east to the rolling
Tennessee hill country to sow soybeans and solar power side by side with
tobacco base and barbecue stands.
It's the biggest and most prosperous commune in the United States today,
say sociologists. Old-fashioned hippies a la mode. A long-haired last
stand, whose 1,200 members sport their unshorn locks and patched blue
jeans as if to testify that a generation of disco, cocaine and conspicuous
consumption never happened.
The Farm was born in the fall of 1970, when a man named Stephen Gaskin led
a caravan of psychedelic schoolbuses on a cross-country hegira, searching
for a homeland where the spiritual currency wasn't bankrupt and the
acreage was cheap.
For the first four years the Farm folk lived in the converted schoolbuses
and in surplus army tents heated by wood stoves in the winter. The
construction crew, which contracted to build condos and apartments off the
Farm, provided nearly half the commune's income; but they dreamed of
self-sufficiency. They styled themselves "the technicolor Amish," a Gaskin
phrase, and they eschewed meat and alcohol, tobacco and leather. They
practiced group marriage and smoked the marijuana that they grew to attain
a "spiritual high."
In 1971, Gaskin was arrested for the "manufacture of marijuana," which he
claimed was necessary for the "religious" smoking ceremonies. Gaskin
appealed his subsequent conviction and sentence (one to three years) all
the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to review the case.
Gaskin served nine months in the Tennessee state prison.
Today Farm residents still live ascetically, at least by contrast to the
culture that surrounds them. But the old schoolbuses, those not yet sold
for scrap, sit rusting in the sun. To house their families - half the
population of the commune is under 18 - the men have built the shanties,
cottages and two-story, hippie-style chalets that line the graveled lanes
winding through the woods. The houses are all furnished with trickle-watt
electricity and hot and cold running water. The use of marijuana and the
practice of group marriage are banned now, and total self-sufficiency no
longer seems a priority.
Highway 31 is a two-lane blacktop winding west from Nashville toward
Summertown. It curves past the phosphate plant and coil-spring factory in
Mt. Pleasant, past the gentle hills flecked with frame houses and rusted
auto parts. Palm readers and Pentecostal preachers hang out signs along
the road.
Many of the farmers and the shopkeepers in the neighborhood remember
watching the 6 o'clock news the week the county sheriff's office came out
to confiscate the marijuana and arrest the commune's leader. And although
many neighbors have grown tolerant - "They don't bother us and we don't
bother them," says a market owner philosophically- many others tend to
temper Christian charity with skepticism.
"What do you mean, no drugs?" A woman in a silvery bouffant, sipping
coffee in the Southern Drive-In in Summertown, says the Farm kids often
fill prescriptions at the drugstore where she works. "And I could sit here
all day long and say I was Queen Mary if I cared to. What's more." she
said, the way it looks to her, "they don't use soap and they don't get
married.
"And if my child was to come to me and say she aimed to join them, I'd say
'Fine, and you just take the gun and shoot yourself.'"
Last year six Cobra helicopters from a nearby Army base swooped down over
the commune, frightening some residents, in a maneuver one Farm Member - a
Vietnam veteran - claimed to recognize as an "attack formation."
"Now why" asked an Army spokesman caustically, "would a Vietnam veteran be
living in a commune?"
Not far around the bend from the Southern Drive-In, the highway dips and
pauses by a trailer and an empty field. A sign points right to Drakes
Lane. The rutted, gravel road leads round another bend to an iron-barred
gate and a blue-roofed brick gatehouse. Two hand-lettered signs read: The
Farm. Please Stop Here.
Back when the Farm was in its uptight adolescence, the gate was more than
merely a border crossing. It functioned as a propaganda station where the
Farm kids boldly passed out joints of homegrown weed, says a Nashville
social worker who visited it in 1974, and peevishly harrassed the
visitors: Why did they wear leather boots? Why did they smoke cigarettes?
Why are they wearing jewelry?
But next to an annual motocross event in nearby Lawrenceburg, the Farm is
the biggest tourist attraction going in these parts; and nowadays the gate
is more like a welcome center on the interstate.
Fifteen thousand visitors filed through here last year, checking in and
out at the logbook. The shelves are stuffed with matter from the Farm
printing shop. A young man in the corner monitors the work crews on a CB,
thumbing through a copy of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."
The gate crew has a short rotation. "We get burnt out pretty fast
answering the same questions over and over," explains a man cheerfully as
he flips through a commune phone directory. The directory reads like a Boy
Scout campsite compendium - Adobe House, Laughing Creek, Philharmonic
Hall. He adds in afterthought, "You know, you'll never understand this
place unless you stay awhile." A grin. "And if you stay two weeks you'll
never leave."
Philharmonic Hall. A mellow stone's throw from the nearest neighbor
dwelling, it perches halfway down a hillside sheltered by a grove of
spindly oak saplings that bend double underneath the weight of ice.
Philarmonic Hall is a work in progress. Years ago it was a broken-down
schoolbus with kerosine lamps and sleeping bags. The bus gave way to a
surplus Army tent; the tent acquired floor, porch, roof and bedrooms, bit
by bit, year by year. These days the house is half finished outside in
sheet rock and old barn siding, filled inside with rumage sale of sofas
and tie-dye. There's a saying in Summertown: "If you want to get rid of
something, just call the Farm; they'll come haul it away and live in it."
Philharmonic Hall is home for 36 people and one black-and-white cat named
Sapphire. Except for those who'd stayed at home to mind the babies,
everyone had been to Sunday services in the greenhouse, where they sat
under dripping glass eaves, straight and sober with all the rest of the
Farm inhabitants, all 1,200 navels synched in harmony, chanting a single
syllable: "ooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmm."
It was January, a freezing slate-colored Sunday afternoon. Inside the hall
things were warm and rowdy; the juices, as the Farm people like to say,
were really flowing. Bob Marley wailed on someone's tape deck. It was time
for Sunday lunch, and the 36 souls in Philharmonic Hall were moving on the
beat.
Lunch was soyburgers on wheat rolls, with green pepper relish and onion on
the side - Big Macs for vegetarians. The women in their long skirts and
plaited hair were tending the enormous gas stoves in the kitchen; their
men were stoking the boiler in the basement. The children crept and
crawled and scampered underfoot and sometimes tugged at the long pigtails
of the grown-ups.
"Is that your tape recorder? Can I play with it? I could sing a song into
it. I could help write in the note book."
"Anna. Cool it." Anna's father, Phillip, leaned forward to adjust the
volume on the color TV set, where the Steelers were murdering the Oilers.
"Hey. Did you ever hear the joke about why the elephant tiptoed past the
medicine chest?" Childish squeals. "So as not to wake up the SLEEPING
PILLS. Get it?"
"It's not the noise," said Andrew, a young man with a Sunday School face
framed in darkly curling hair and beard. "It's the way you don't dare to
leave your coat on a chair and expect to find it there next day. I'm not
used to living with a lot of people, and everything's some kind of toy to
the kids."
Andrew had been a burnt-out case, he explained. "I left home at 15. I did
a lot of chasin' and a lot of bein' chased. I traveled lots, to places
like Montana." Then Andrew holed up in a cabin by himself and started
reading. One day he read about the Farm.
Andrew had a girlfriend now in another house, but his chasing days were
over. "Here they tell us to try to fall in love with the whole Farm before
we throw in with a lady. Kissing is okay but, uh, we're supposed so save
the other stuff until we're married."
Kay, like Andrew, was a newcomer to the Farm. Blond, anxious, with
handsome features that always seemed to settle into worried frowns, Kay
was into Jesus. "Listen to the words of that song," Kay said deliberately.
"The end is surely coming. Do you suppose people think what happened in
Jonestown could ever happen here? Do you think it could?"
"We're making quite a statement here, you know," said Sam.
A longtime resident who'd left behind a vegetarian restaurant in San
Francisco, Sam had a kind, proprietary face and an easy laugh.
"We could be into disco. Something wild and crazy. People always asks us
what we do for fun here - no bars, no cocaine, no chasing foxes. They
don't understand it can be a turn-on to live with other folks, to look
into their eyes and let them know you care."
Sam's wife, Ellen, nodded. "I never leave the Farm. Lots of folks here
never go off . . . A cop-out? Well, you can't get stronger living in a
ghetto collecting welfare or walking on a beach looking at the sunset. It
doesn't work that way."
Ellen met her husband on the Farm. She'd left behind a comfortable home in
the suburbs of a nearby city where she lived with her parents."The maid
came Wednesday. There wasn't any dust anywhere.I saw the kind of person my
mother had become and I knew I had to leave."
"What we're doing here," Sam said, "is something we can pass along. A time
capsule into outer space. We think it's going to last."
"If I could find a woman who would take my kids," a tall, thin man named
Chico said, "I'd leave tomorrow. I miss the road life." Chico was a
mercenary ironworker making, so he said, 100 grand a year, supporting a
big cocaine habit. He'd gone to Boston where his ex-wife and son were
living, and found his wife had gone.
"There was Mark, trying by himself to look after his stepbrother and
stepsister, and there wasn't even any food in the refrigerator." So Chico
loaded the kids into his van and brought them to the Farm. "They're safe
here; they're getting a good education. Besides, no court in the country
would award me custody."
Chico smiled a streetwise smile. "It's not so bad. You've heard what they
say here. 'We're out to save the world.' There's nothing wrong with that,
now is there? For all I know, they might even do it."
Later Farm spokesman said that Chico and Kay had been what is called "on
sanctuary," and therefore their views were not wholly representative of
those of the group.
It's not easy to explain the Farm, says some of the media crew whose job
it is to explain it.
There is a lot to learn. A casual afternoon visitor departs with a head
full of statistics about the soy dairy, the work crews and the solar
panels on the schoolhouse, feeling more puzzled than before he came.
The Farm, most important, is a collective. Everything is free, from food
to clothing to medical care to housing; but as a collective, the Farm
takes control of the assets of anyone who joins, as it frankly says in its
literature.
The backbone of the Farm economy is still the constructive crew. Farm
Foods and The Farm Press augment the income.
Cash flows for each of the last four years, according to the Farm, have
exceeded $1 million. That breaks down to $1,000 in expenditures per person
per year, well below the definition of the poverty level, but double their
per-capita expenditure in 1973.
Food on the Farm, mostly endless variations of soybeans, is plentiful. Two
hundred-fifty of the Farm's 1,764 acres are planted in soybeans, greens
and wheat; there are 900 fruit trees and grape vines.
There is a Farm band, a Farm radio station, a Farm phone system; a
healthcare system with two M.D.s, a clinic and an ambulance; a midwife
crew that delivered 1,000 babies last year (half to off-Farm mothers); a
teaching staff of 39; a tribal council of a dozen.
There is even Farm-style foreign aid. Spurred by reports that relief
efforts to Guatemalan earthquake victims were hampered by lack of
manpower, the commune founded PLENTY, a nonprofit relief organization
which aids impoverished nations.
Then there is Stephen Gaskin.
"Stephen," as he is always called, is the leader. At 44, he is older by a
decade than most of his flock. His sandy-colored hair is long and thinning
on top; often he dons a beaded skullcap or some other kind of headgear.
His socks seem never to match. With his Fu-Manchu and long, gaunt limbs,
he looks the part of Farm guru.
Gaskin talks, and the Farm listens. A man on the media crew says Gaskin
has "a good F.M. voice." He tends to lapse into early Haight-Ashbury -
"Ain't that right, man?" - but he strews his speech with historical and
literary anecdotes and he is engaging and articulate. The media crew tapes
all of Gaskin's rambling Sunday-morning services, and all his speaking
engagements on the road. Transcripts are available.
A Denver native and an ex-marine, Gaskin took his master's degree in
creative writing from San Francisco State University. He was still a grad
student when the first tidal wave of acid washed over California. It was a
turning point: "Before I tripped I don't think I'd ever really
introspected in my life."
("He was always very handy," remembers an instructor, Dr. James Leigh.
"One had the impression he was bucking for a full professorship." Later
on, Leigh says, "He worked this acid-messiah routine pretty nicely on
these kids."
In response, media spokesman Leigh Kahan said: "I was at San Francisco
State at that time, too. It was a pretty weird place.")
Gaskin taught a class at an experimental college in San Francisco, and
soon 2,000 people were crowding into parks and rock halls to hear his
gospel - eclectic monotheism blended with bits of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in
hip clothing. "There's only one church, and your membership button is your
bellybutton. Deep down I think all of us know that."
He brought his people out of the land of Wavy Gravy and war protest to
Tennessee, to a ridgetop strewn with blackjack oak where the thunderstorms
are so fierce it was said even Indians had feared to settle there.
He led them through the first year when the whole experiment nearly went
under, when they almost starved and froze and when they came down in
droves with boils and hepatitis. He led them when they overplanted and the
crops lay rotting in the sun. He led them when the mood in the Tennessee
backcountry turned nasty and a kid was beaten up and had his head shaved.
While his marijuana case dragged on, he led them from his jail cell, where
Farm people visited him with soy cheese pizza and tape recorders.
"But we got the feeling," says a man who visited the farm in 1974, "that
we could ask 600 people the same question, and we'd got 600 answers, all
the same, all beginning, 'Stephen says . . . '"
"Gaskin is an organizer and he does that well," says Ron Roberts, an Iowa
sociologist whose works span the 150-year history of communes in
America."But what he also does, to insure his own survival, is to demand a
commitment so enormous - so enormous, that pretty soon no one can ever pry
loose."
Disputed Leigh Kahan, "It's much easier to leave than it is to get in."
Roberts visited the Farm in the early '70s. When he wrote about it later
he labeled it "authoritarian."
"Bull," says Gaskin angrily."I've heard all that before. Can't we talk
about something more original?"
Then he talks about it anyway. "I'm not like anyone else in my league," he
says. "I don't live on some island in the Caribbean. I don't have any
six-figure bank account. I eat the same food, wear the same clothing, live
in the same kind of housing as anyone else on the Farm. This isn't any
middle-class guru racket here."
He says this without irony. Throughout the interview he sprawls in bed,
shoes off, one sock orange and one sock green, answering the stacks of
mail. A half-dozen women in attendance bring him dishes of tortillas and
soy yogurt, hand him letters, or sit quietly and listen.
One letter is from Fletcher Knebel, author of "Seven Days in May"; Knebel
is writing Gaskin's biography. How much does Stephen's wardrobe cost? He
wants to know. What does he usually have for lunch?
Gaskin is a spokesman of a sort. When the Jonestown story broke, an NBC-TV
crew raced to Summertown to interview him. The crew filed a tape dubbed
with simply "Unlike Jonestown."
He says he spends more time off the Farm now, touring with the Farm Band,
than he does on. "It's much too big for just one person to run it anyway."
"It's not that Stephen's profile is lower," says a man on the media crew.
"It's more like ours are higher."
Sunday mornings Gaskin takes the stage and holds a mike and in his F.M.
voice he tells his people:
"If you love someone, look into their eyes and let them know. Then there's
no problem of male chauvinism."
"I once met a man I thought was a hippie. He drank a lot and wrote poetry
and read some Hemingway. And I thought he was a hippie!"
"The eleventh commandment after the first ten ought to be: You do TOO know
what I mean!"
After services, Gaskin stands around and shakes the hands of his
parishioners. They embrace his bony body. They ask him for advice.
Perhaps it is that simple.
Gaskin says his parents come to visit on occasion. Once, he says, his
father told him, "You've made this place what it is. And now it's up to
the others to carry it on."
Philharmonic Hall is drawing the curtains and getting ready for bed.
"You will tell the truth about us?" Kay fretted. "It is a sin to lie, you
know."
Chico leaned forlornly against the window, looking like a man who wanted a
cigarette before he went to bed, dreaming maybe of the road life.
Sapphire the cat was out. The cooking chores had been posted on the
kitchen wall; the dishes sat stacked and gleaming by the sink.
Quilts, books and mittens lay scattered on the sofa in front of the TV.
Tomorrow, Andrew declared, he would find his coat, which was missing from
the chair where he had left it.
Upstairs a baby cried. Giggles and whispers were muffled under covers.
"Did you ever hear the joke about why the elephant tiptoed past the
medicine chest?"
"Anna. Hush now. It's bedtime."
"Goodnight, Philip."
"Goodnight, Anna."
"Goodnight."
GRAPHIC: Pictures 1 and 2, The gatehouse at the Farm, left; although
horses are used to cultivate some of the fields, above, most of the work
is done with tractors; Left and top photos by Mark Lyons for The
Washington Post; Picture 3, and at right, Stephen Gaskin, leader and
founder of the Farm. Gaskin photo courtesy of David Frohman and the Farm
News Service; Picture 4, Darryl Jordan coordinated the work and designed
the planting of The Farm's two-acre vineyard; photo by Mark Lyons for The
Washington Post
And this fragment, about another sort of utopian:
Edward Abbey: What is worse, political correctitude or equal opportunity offensiveness? Here, as a reminder that no hero is a saint, is an excerpt from "Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections From the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989," with original drawings by Edward Abbey, edited and with an introduction by David Petersen (to be published by Little Brown in November). This is the last entry, dated Feb. 2, 1989. Abbey died on March 14, 1989.
Why book reviewers hate my books:Because the books are really no good? Perhaps. But I think I've got a better explanation. Almost all reviewers, these days, are members of and adherents to some anxious particular sect or faction. I.e., they are lesbians or New-Agers or fem-libbers or (even worse) male fem-libbers or technophiles or self-hating white liberals or right-wing conservatives or Growth maniacs or Negroes or female Negroes or Third-World lesbian militant Negro poetesses or closet Marxists (Marxoids) or futurologists or academical specialists or Chicano ideologues or ballerinas or Kowboy Kultists or Kerouac Kultists or Henry James Minimalist Perfectionists or one-tenth Chippewa "Native American" Indians or at very least all-inclusive Official Chickens -- Correct-Thinking Liberals etc. etc.
As such, any member of any one of those majority minorities is going to find for certain a few remarks in any of my books that will offend/enrage "s/he" to the marrow, leading invariably in turn, on the part of such sectarian book reviewers, to a denunciation not merely of the offending passage, but of the entire book, and not merely of the book, but of the author too.