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TitlePeter: Just read a Niel Cassidy letter ... [sic]
AuthorEmmett Grogan
Publisher
Place
Year
Date 14/29/1967
Date 2n.d., ca.
Publication
Volume
Issue
Page(s)
MediumManuscript
Dimension
Extent
Imprint
CollationHandwritten; 2 pages
CatalogDP-017a/b
CollectionSOLA-x(PB)
Cit. No.
Keywords
Trans. Title
Section
GroupDigger Movement (Core Collection)
Sub-Group
Series
Folder
DP-017a/b
click image to enlarge
Notes
Mentions the Saturday, April 29, 1967 meeting with the Hopi. See CC-036a/b.
Abstract
This letter from Emmett Grogan to Peter Berg appears to come from the same New Mexico interval described in Ringolevio, when Emmett left San Francisco with Larry Little Bird and spent time at El Rito, hunting, camping, and trying to step outside the escalating pressures of the Haight. Written in Grogan’s compressed, half-mystical, half-mocking style, the letter moves between wilderness observation, self-scrutiny, gossip about Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, and a sharp report on a proposed New Mexico Be-In that he sees as another merchant “shuck.” Its most useful historical detail may be the way it connects Grogan’s absence from San Francisco to continuing Digger strategy: he tells Berg to make the Solstice in the park “more,” to “punch the media in the face,” and to expose the commercialization of the Be-In idea. The letter shows Grogan not as having withdrawn from the Digger scene, exactly, but as thinking from a distance—using New Mexico as a place of testing, estrangement, and renewed tactical imagination.
Full Text
eter:

Just read a Niel Cassady letter and seems all our fathers are nearing retirement - the years are pushing them into a strange calm. A tired restless soft year.

Never worked on myself as I have been these two weeks. Interesting changes. Seldom talk to strangers anymore - know to many already. 

Hunt every morning from dawn til I stop - from dusk til night - myself always as target. Not stiff anymore. Death is alert. I seem to be adjusting to life. It tastes like salt on a cold morning - or chile when you know it's going to snow and your pants are ripped. Ho hum ... the Ginsberg-Orlovsky came through - Julius speaks in rhyme to the time for a dime anytime for a brother. He cried when he left. Allen proved to be a good-polite-mad-rabbinical-man. As always. Peter was a bore.

I've seen porchipines, rabbits, robins, hawks, vultures, crows, steer, mice, squirrels, fox, lamb, deer, turkey, and tried to talk to elk, but I can't seem to want to enough to bother to try harder.

Five thousand smiles grin between the leaves of forest green browns and life is close to the decay -- bullshit. 

Saturday 29 - Larry Bird - me tumbled onto a Be-In meeting with the Hopi - Alpert, P.H.D and his friends (who ALL own or work in tourist shops here in New Mexico.) The Hopi told them to fuck off and we left, but next day we heard Be-In planned for Raton-Pass New Mexico June 21 - solstice - sent Comm. Co. a rundown on the scam - try to publicize the extent of this merchant shuck -

Fritch told me run of Solstice in park - make it  more - punch the medea in the face - put Krassner to work and make it more - and if any cows stray into the garden cut their legs off. Natural Suzanne and I live in woods in tent and drink lots of coffee and wonder when it will rain and if it does what will it mean and if it does so what. Watch a shooting star every time and it crowds my imagination. There's vastness here. Any you - Judy - and the boy should come for a-while sometime.

Thin long bird with a taste for snakes' eyes frayed tail, wildcat claws his pinions are bludgeons. Few brains, topped by a crown and a flair for swift in-fighting - try to take it from him. (The road-runner is Larry Bird's clan - he says nothing).

Natural Suzanne sends love - the wind whispers the unnaturalness of all our considerations and by god it's funny to sound like Pound taking a break translating the simple madness of a small Chinese poet who never learned to write THE in Big Letters. 

c/o Larry Bird P.O.B. 13, El Rito - New Mexico

Tell Fritch that a guy in Alberqueque, N.M. printed Doyle's poem and gave it out to 3000 people.

Grogan

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