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The Sons and Daughters of Los Culture and Community
in L A Wide Angle Books 1st Edition David E. James
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): David E. James
ISBN(s): 9781592130139, 1592130135
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 30.82 MB
Year: 2003
Language: english
The Son s and Dau ghte rs of Los
Copyrighted Material
In the series
Wide Angle Books

edited by Erik Barnouw, Ruth Bradley,
Scott MacDonald, and Patricia Zimmermann
The Sons
and Daughters
of Los
Culture and Community
in L.A.
EDITED BY
David E. James
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122
Copyright © 2003 by Temple University, except
Introduction and Chapter 12 © 2003 David E. James
All rights reserved
Published 2003
Printed in the United States of America
i§ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The sons and daughters of Los: culture and community in L.A. / edited by
David E. James.
p. cm. - (Wide angle books)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-59213-012-7 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 1-59213-013-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Los Angeles (Calif.)-Sociallife and customs. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)-
Intellectual life. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)-Social conditions. 4. City and town

life-California-Los Angeles. 5. Popular culture-California-Los Angeles.
6. Arts-California-Los Angeles. 7. Arts and society-California-Los Angeles.
1. James, David E., 1945- II. Series.
F869·L85 s65 2003
3 06 '.09794 '94-dC2I 2002028939
and Los drew them forth, compelling the harsh Spectre
Into the Furnaces & into the Valleys of the Anvils Death
And into the mountains of the Anvils & of the heavy Hammers
Till he should bring the Sons & Daughters of Jerusalem to be
The Sons and Daughters of Los
-William Blake, Jerusalem
Contents
Acknowledgments IX
1. INTRODUCTION: THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF LOS 1

David E. James
2. PERIPHERAL OUTLAWS: BEYOND BAROQUE AND THE

LOS ANGELES POETRY RENAISSANCE 15
Bill Mohr
3. THE LOS ANGELES WOMAN'S BUILDING AND THE

FEMINIST ART COMMUNITY, 1973- 1 99 1 39
Laura Meyer
4. FORTIFYING COMMUNITY: AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

AND CULTURE IN LEIMERT PARK 63
Eric Gordon
5. CONSIDERING THE ART WORLD ALTERNATIVES:

LACE AND COMMUNITY FORMATION
IN LOS ANGELES 85
Claudine lse
6. NOT HISTORY: REMARKS ON THE FOUNDATION FOR

ART RESOURCES, 1977-1998 108
Sande Cohen
7. HIGHWAYS PERFORMANCE SPACE:

COMMUNITIES-IN-TRANSIT 128
Meiling Cheng
Vlll CONTENTS
8. SIGNIFYING NATIONS: CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE

KOREAN COMMUNITY IN LOS ANGELES 153
Jiwon Ahn
9. ALL OVER THE MAP: A HISTORY OF L.A. FREEWAVES 174

James M. Moran
10. SELF-HELP GRAPHICS: TOMAs BENITEZ TALKS TO

HARRY GAMBOA JR. 195
11. UNORTHODOX MYSTICS: SWANS THAT FLOCK TO THE

VEDANTA SOCIETY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 21 I
Nithila Peter
12. POPULAR CINEMAS IN LOS ANGELES: THE CASE OF

VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS 23 I
David E. James
About the Contributors 25 3
Acknowledgments
Early stages of the research for this volume were assisted by funding from a grant from
the James Irvine Foundation to the Southern California Studies Center at the Univer-
sity of Southern California. We thank the Foundation and also Professor Michael Dear,
Director of the Center, for their support. From this project's inception, Professor Dear's
initiative and many forms of generosity have been crucial. We also thank Mr. Bernard
Stanley Hoyes for permission to use his print, "Block Party Ritual," © 2002 for our
paperback cover; this serigraph was pulled at Self-Help Graphics as a special project
for the Grand Performances 2002 Summer Concert Series.
Sande Cohen, Tomas Benitez, and Harry Gamboa Jr. were especially generous when
the project most needed them. We particularly thank Erika Suderburg and the other
reviewer (who chose to remain anonymous) who initially evaluated the manuscript; their
enthusiasm for the project overall and their very valuable suggestions for correction and
improvement aided us enormously. We would also like to thank Elizabeth Yoder for
her intelligent and sensitive copyediting.
Prefatory notices of this kind commonly acknowledge in some more or less per-
functory fashion the editor of the press who has overseen the publication. In this case,
however, that acknowledgment must be very specific and categorical. Everyone con-
nected with this project is deeply indebted to Micah Kleit, the Temple University Press
editor who first accepted it and has since guided it through to completion. As will
become evident, the essays collected in this book generally (though not in all instances)
run counter to the orthodoxies of the discipline in which they find themselves. As a con-
sequence, until we encountered Mr. Kleit, everyone we contacted refused to consider
publishing it; no university press would even look at the manuscript. Had it not been
for his courage and initiative, this particular work of the "Sons and Daughters of Los"
would never have seen the light of day. Thank you, Micah.
Published with the assistance of the
Southern California Studies Center
of the University of Southern California
David E. James
I Introduction:
The Sons and Daughters of Los
In the initial stages of the project whose results are collected in the present volume, we
approached popular culture in Los Angeles using as a heuristic the idea of "grassroots
cultural organizations." By this we had in mind the more or less ad hoc instances where
people who were marginal to the city's established cultural institutions came together
to share their poetry, painting, dance, and other forms of art, and in so doing created
communities that then developed lives and momentums of their own.! Conceived in dis-
satisfaction with both industrial and other publicly sanctioned forms of culture, they
generally produced themselves as demotic alternatives to establishments that they per-
ceived to be alienated and compromised. Within the frame of this guiding orientation,
the associations we explored were diverse in respect to both their internal organization
and their eventual relations with the dominant cultural institutions. Growing from the
initial efforts of very small groups, in some cases only one or two people, they were
originally independent and autonomous, at least to the degree to which these concepts
can presently be meaningful. But as they developed wider constituencies, they inevitably
became affiliated in various ways with the kind of organizations with which they had
before been in conflict, both public-such as city, state, and federal agencies-and pri-
vate-such as foundations and corporations. Despite these affiliations, their creativity
remained to some degree refractory, still honed on a stone of critical alterity.2
With the exception of the Vedanta Center (an earlier and somewhat differently con-
ceived initiative), the associations we examined were formed in the tide of populist
social contestations mobilized in the 1960s and were mostly shaped by the ideas in
which social and political identity were conceptualized and lived in this period, that
is, through struggles for civil rights by ethnic and sexual minorities. The local emer-
gence and self-assertion of these political identity groups were of course part of national
movements; and indeed, the remarkable ethnic diversity and other demographic fea-
tures of Los Angeles ensured that they were also often affected by global issues, espe-
cially by population shifts and changing patterns of migration. On the other hand, the
2 DAVID E. JAMES
more immediate motive in their creation was usually an interest in a particular cul-
tural form, often a medium with a distinctive and integral relationship to the devel-
opment of the specific social group. For example, though African Americans in the
city have made public art in the form of murals for many years, the combination of
indigenous and European elements in the traditions of mural painting developed in
post-revolutionary Mexico became a primary reference point in the assertion of a
Mexican American identity in Los Angeles.
Even if they were locally forged and were not quite so thoroughly constitutive, sim-
ilar relations have obtained between other groups and specific mediums. Performance
art, for example, has proven particularly valuable for women and for gays and lesbians.
So the current flier distributed by a performance collective that is the subject of the one
of the essays below announces: "This workshop is for gay men to gather together and
create community through performance."3 Sometimes a given medium and the institu-
tion that developed around it proved valuable for different groups at different times;
thus, when the poetry center Beyond Baroque became a focus for minority poets, part
of its constituency changed from what it had been in preceding periods when it revolved
around beat and punk subcultures. And though most of the associations studied here
based themselves on mediums with less rather than more concurrent commercial via-
bility, sometimes these and parallel communities have flourished by employing the art
forms of the culture industry itself-film, television, and recorded music. Visual Com-
munications (VC), the Asian American community cinema considered in Chapter 12 is
such an instance. Like all attempts to create popular practices of commercial cultural
forms, VC and similar popular cinemas have to construct themselves both within and
against the immense social authority and economic resources of the industrial usage of
the mediums in question, so they have been especially precarious, though by the same
token their achievements remain of special interest.
But whatever the relative importance of their immediate aesthetic or social motiva-
tions, the organizations examined in this volume all have in common a foundation in
integral human usefulness, the noninstrumental exercise of the creative faculties. All were
created by people, some of them oppressed or otherwise marginalized and disenfran-
chised, who found cultural activity to be a means of self-realization and communal dis-
covery. All were sustained as popular activities in which people developed forms of sym-
bolic self-expression and joined with others of similar interests. Within the communities
they formed, art was not engaged primarily as the production of commodities, so its
role in increasing the value of invested capital or in preserving the system of capitalism
as such was negligible. Even though their existence has been besieged and importuned
by a rampant market economy, they have known from the beginning what William
Blake, as he lived through the emergence of the commodification and industrialization
of culture in the late eighteenth century, came at last to understand: "Where any view
of Money exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only."4 Nor were their practices ini-
tially supported by the institutions of the established museum and conservatory cultures,
for since their interests were no more purely aesthetic than they were purely social, they
could not be coerced into the defensive, putatively extra-social reservations premised
INTRODUCTION 3
on aesthetic autonomy. Initially, they were opposed to both the sublation of popular
participatory culture into haut bourgeois, fetishized real estate and the entertainment
industries' commercialization of it into standardized, marketable commodities. Their
point of origin and their ongoing aspiration was thus popular activity prior to both poles
of the contemporary "high/low" bifurcation of cultural possibilities and prior to both
forms of reification by which social creativity is assimilated into complementary frac-
tions of capital.
Sailing without regard to the Scylla and the Charybdis of the high/low binary, pop-
ular cultural activity finds itself and its constituencies outside both arms of corporate
culture-the industry and the museum-and as a consequence, it has hardly developed
a theoretical armature of any general social leverage or persuasiveness. A full theoret-
ical elaboration of such a contrary model of contemporary popular culture cannot be
attempted here, and any assessment of the implications of the communities (anti-
capitalist? proto-socialist?) that such an elaboration might subtend must remain pro-
visional. On the one hand, the complexities of both crucial terms-"culture" and "com-
munity"-bespeak the huge social transformations of the period of advanced capitaLS
A comprehensive encounter between the two terms would have to include the way they
have been constructed in the fields of sociology, social and cultural anthropology, urban
geography, and the various minority studies areas as well as in the specific disciplines
of poetry, art history, performance art, video, and other artistic mediums. On the other
hand, the available data about actual community cultural projects is extremely limited;
and indeed, the present project should be understood as a contribution to the collec-
tion of primary material upon which more generalized hypotheses about new forms of
progressive popular culture could be elaborated.
Though specific theoretical presuppositions are implicit and sometimes explicit in each
of the essays below, the alternative theories of popular cultural production they pro-
ject are subordinate to the historical details, the aesthetic achievements, and the vary-
ing social possibilities of the individual case studies. Any attempt to deduce or synthe-
size a general theory of a genuinely popular culture from them would necessarily involve
a critique of the institutions and the theoretical apparatus that presently legitimize and
naturalize capitalist culture as a whole. In lieu of such a general theory and propaedeu-
tic to it, here we will only sketch the environment in which the sodalities studied below
came into being, the cultural conditions in the city in which they were created, and hence
give some concrete grounding for their various innovations and interventions.
Such a geographical focus on Los Angeles may well initially appear to be Quixotic
if not misguided, for the city is famous for being the center of industrial culture-the
capital of the culture of capital-and, at least until recent developments in museums
and art schools reversed this, hostile to autonomous art. But what has appeared to be
the city's categorical anomalousness is in fact a compounded prototypicality that gives
the present project a more-than-regional significance. For if the specific urban and spa-
tial structures developed in Los Angeles are, as many claim, the model for future cities,
and if the culture industries located in it have a global hegemony, then the conditions
that variously shape, inhibit, but also nurture the emergence of truly popular cultural
4 DAVID E. JAMES
communities in Los Angeles may reasonably be considered to exemplify a general sit-

uation, and the specific institutions and histories examined below have implications
about alternatives to capitalist culture more generally. Here, then, we will be concerned
with a pattern of homologies and other relations between social space and culture in a
city whose drastic reconfiguration of both appears to be historically prototypical.
Whether despising Los Angeles or celebrating it, whether understanding it (as they
used to) as an exception or (as they now do) as a paradigm for future conurbations all
over the world, geographers have recognized it as a distinctly new kind of metropolis.
The great nineteenth-century cities, they argue, were each composed of a vertically
expanding core surrounded by dependent rings. But Los Angeles developed as an
agglomeration of separate communities dispersed across the desert plains between the
San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. There successive waves of immigra-
tion-Spanish invaders in the colonial period, then Anglos and other Europeans from
the Midwest and the South, Blacks and Mexicans, and most recently, Asians-ereated
distinct enclaves, many of them internally homogenous and largely segregated from each
other. Together these formed, not the radial melting pot of the modern city, but a
polynucleated postmodern megalopolis.
In the phrase of Robert M. Fogelson, one of its pioneering historians, the Los Ange-
les that became a great city did so as "a fragmented metropolis."6 Its fragmentation
only intensified over the last third of the twentieth century when it became ethnically
and culturally one of the most diverse cities in the nation. Changes in U.S. immigration
laws in the mid-1960s, combined with the city's expanded role as a center for Pacific
Rim capital and with the Reagan administration's neo-imperialist ventures in Meso-
America that made it the premier port of entry for immigrants, simultaneously trans-
formed the city's demographic structure. But fragmentation had characterized its devel-
opment from the beginning; and awareness that phased immigration, voracious
peripheral growth, and horizontal rather than vertical development was producing an
unprecedented galaxy of unintegrated satellites is itself anything but new. Postmodern
geography now proposes a "Sixty-Mile Circle" of "at least 132 incorporated cities" or
"the most differentiated of all cities," "a combination of enclaves with high identity,
and multiclaves with mixed identity ... perhaps the most heterogeneous city in the
world."7 But before World War II, well before Los Angeles became so conspicuously a
microcosm of global diaspora, the 1939 WPA guide to California described it as "nine-
teen suburbs in search of a city"-already a tripling of the "six suburbs in search of a
city" noted in 1920S witticisms. 8 And, summarizing in the midst of the urban expan-
sion, for the rubric to his 1946 chapter on the "Los Angeles Archipelago" of "social
and ethnic islands, economically interrelated but culturally disparate"-still the best
analysis of the historical evolution of the city-Carey McWilliams quoted one Charles
A. Stoddard, who in 1894 had noticed that "Southern California is made up of groups
who often live in isolated communities, continuing their own customs, language, and
religious habits and associations."9
Reinforced by the long history of anti-labor politics that hindered transethnic work-
ing-class consciousness and solidarity, the social dispersal that allowed immigrant groups
INTRODUCTION 5
to settle in relatively homogeneous and autonomous clusters produced a distinctive seg-

regation. Though historically these communities all too commonly become visible to
the hegemony at moments of racial or cultural strife-the anti-Chinese riots of the
I870S, for example, or the military's terrorization of zoot-suiters in the I940s, and the
uprisings of Blacks in the I960s and Latinos in the I990s-all the while, within them-
selves they have nurtured and sustained local traditions of enormous and distinctive
vitality. The barrios of East Los Angeles and the neighborhoods of South Central L.A.
(where African Americans have preserved the customs of the rural South and even
echoes of Africa), and more recently the "little" Asian cities of Tokyo, Manila, Taipei,
Saigon, and so on have all lived as vibrant and substantially self-sustained cultural
milieus. Re-establishing some of the elements that formed the land- and city-scapes of
other spatialities-the family structures, the customs, and the festivals, but also the cre-
ative rhythms of street behavior and social living-these communities have fashioned
themselves between the cultural patterns of their originals and those of their new envi-
ronment, forging a new local life for often globally distant identities. Io
Spatiality in Los Angeles is thus structured between two primary vectors: a cen-
tripetal pull toward the Hollywood/downtown core, which has always been and remains
the focus of the civic, economic, and transport networks of the basin; and the centrifugal
pull generated by the semiautonomous industrial and residential enclaves. If the segre-
gated peripherality of these enclaves precluded their full integration and representation
in the city and full participation in its rewards, it also compensated by allowing a spon-
taneous culture to flourish and to mediate in some measure the social traumas that per-
vade the postmodern city-for which, again, Los Angeles is recognized as the prototype.
The global movement of capital that impelled many of the population flows that cre-
ated the city also devastated its social fabric. In the past quarter-century, massive if selec-
tive deindustrialization and the growth of precarious low-income jobs, especially in the
service and tourist industries, have been compounded by white-collar crime; virulent
police corruption and brutality; and the exploitation and destruction of the land, water,
and air. Trickling down to the lives of working-class people, these socioeconomic devel-
opments manifest themselves in unemployment and underemployment, poverty, home-
lessness, and alienation; in crises in public health, housing, and education; and in sus-
picion and conflict among sexualities and ethnicities. With the world-historical victory
of neoliberalism, similar and in some cases much worse forms of intertwined social
destabilization, atomization, and massification have become globally pandemic. But the
paucity of attempts to address them in Los Angeles have been no less extreme than the
economic developments that produced them. Paralyzed by what has been called "a col-
lective or civic aversion to dealing with social, economic and political problems," local
governance has not begun to address the erosion of the older forms of urban commu-
nity adequately. Instead, "governments and populace have colluded in a decline of the
commonwealth ... the collapse of community." 11
In this, again, the city is a paradigm of the widespread lived experience of loneliness,
alienation, and social impotence; of the cultural attenuation and anomie that are now
more intense and inescapable than even during the upheavals and dislocations of high
6 DAVID E. JAMES
modernity. Then, at least, however corrupted its actual instantiations may have been,
socialism as a political philosophy sustained the ideal of a nonexploitative human com-
monality, whether projected as popular participatory control over local life or as a
future classless society. But now it is the market, abetted wherever possible by military
power, that administers the world; and free-market fundamentalism appears locally, not
in communal social projects, but as privatization. In the telling image of one popular
analyst, we now go "bowling alone"; for, as a more abstract one reminds us, the
"gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves
all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer ... is the testimony of the dis-
solution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community." 12
Though this crisis in community is a cultural crisis in all senses, it has been enacted
especially dramatically in the industrialization of older forms of culture and in their
transformation into the business of entertainment during their assimilation by, and inte-
gration into, first finance and then corporate capital. Summarily designated as "Holly-
wood," the corporate entertainment industry now comprises virtually all forms of film,
television, and recorded music and all their various satellites, spin-offs, franchises, and
surrogates, their pimps and proxies. These industries have now extended to the spheres
of politics, sport, religion, and other distinct areas of public life, reconstructing them
within its own values and priorities, commodifying what once were popular activities
and turning them, too, into entertainment. The traditions that inform the culture of pop-
ular participation may be implicitly or residually present in industrial culture, but only
as they too are reduced to entertainment.
The resulting divided culture, the culture of separated, monopolized industrial pro-
duction and of popular consumption, is the culture with which Los Angeles has become
globally synonymous; and locally it is so overwhelmingly powerful that the forms of
popular cultural practices in the city that are the present concern have become virtu-
ally invisible. For Hollywood's ubiquitous and all-pervasive presence in Los Angeles
makes its attractions and rewards the context for all popular cultural activity. So great
is the gravitational pull of the industry's stars and its star system that all other arts are
forced to revolve around it. The structural core-periphery tensions that shape the city
geographically and economically thus generate parallel determinations within its cul-
ture: the minority arts of the local communities in Los Angeles are created in the ten-
sion between the centrifugal pull of independent and indigenous aspirations and the
centripetal pull of corporate capitalist culture. In Los Angeles, culture and geography
are reciprocal: the social tensions of cultural marginality are isomorphic with the city's
spatiality.
Until the 1950S, "Hollywood" designated simply the companies that manufactured
films and recouped their expenses and profit in theatrical ticket sales. But since then,
their production has simultaneously diversified and consolidated what before were sev-
eral separate industries, while, especially with television, distribution sites have metas-
tasized throughout the range of once-public places running from homes and schools to
prisons and hospitals. The limits of the film text itself have eroded and fused into all
its marketing extensions-sequels, T-shirts, theme-parks, lunch boxes, toys, comic books,
INTRODUCTION 7
video games-the miasma of hype that makes it hard to imagine, let alone glimpse, any
space outside the business.
This apotheosized culture-as-capital is identified with Los Angeles more completely
than an art form was ever before associated with a single place. Infants together in the
first decade of the century when the movies were little more than a cottage industry,
the city and the industry fostered each other's growth to maturity. Late in 1907, the
Selig company built a stage on Olive Street for the shooting of The Count of Monte
Cristo, and two years later the company established a permanent base in the city.
Other companies followed, including a troupe of Biograph players to shoot the local
epic Ramona and the Keystone Comedy Company. By 1912, more than seventy pro-
duction companies in Los Angeles employed three thousand people. During the teens
of the twentieth century, the manifest advantages of the region's year-round sunshine
and topographical variety persuaded even more companies to relocate to the region,
and eventually some of them merged into larger combines that joined film production
and distribution-the vertical integration of the industry. By mid-decade the industry's
annual payroll had reached $20 million, and the identification of Hollywood the
medium and Hollywood the city was established, with 60 percent of U.S. films being
produced there. l3 In the post-World War I years, the studios surpassed the French, Ital-
ian, and British film industries to become the single most important source of pro-
duction; and by the 1930S, the American film industry was dominant throughout the
world. Even Carey McWilliams's unusual rhetorical excess does not seem an inap-
propriate summary of the city's debt to the medium: "If ever an industry played the
Fairy Prince to an impoverished Cinderella, it has been the motion-picture industry in
relation to Los Angeles"I4
After World War II and Hollywood's second major global expansion, the other
branches of the entertainment industries were assimilated to it. Though the rise of tel-
evision coincided with a series of crises in the 1950S that forced the industry to restruc-
ture, in the early 1970S it again reinvented itself. Generating subsidiary industries as
well as accelerating the development of other labor-intensive craft industries in the area,
Hollywood attracted all the other components of the broadcasting industry. Since then,
the television industry has itself expanded enormously, and the two industries are now
completely integrated, not only with each other but also with the popular music indus-
try, whose move west became conclusive in the 1980s. The strength of the industry's
infrastructure and the abundance of creative and technical workers in the area supported
the economic explosion of the 1990S, lifting Southern California out of the slump
caused by cutbacks in the defense industries. With the expanded need for products to
fill the new multichanneled global television systems of the decade, by the turn of the
twenty-first century the annual business of the entertainment industries based in Los
Angeles had grown to $40 billion, with more people in Los Angeles working in Holly-
wood than in electronics and aerospace combined.
The concentration of control over these media industries by a small number of cor-
porations increased rapidly during the 1990S, paralleling the longer-standing global-
ization of the market. Japanese corporations began to invest heavily in the industry in
8 DAVID E. JAMES
the late 19 80s, with Sony buying Columbia Pictures in 19 89 for $3-4 billion, and Mat-
sushita buying MCA (Universal) in 1990 for nearly $7 billion. IS Though film pro-
duction had been controlled by a handful of major studios since the 1930S, by the late
1990S the six largest of them accounted for 90 percent of theatrical revenue, and all
but 16 of the 148 features Hollywood released in 1997 were produced by only six firms.
By that time, six firms also effectively monopolized more than 80 percent of the coun-
try's cable television, and only four companies controlled one-third of all radio sta-
tion income. 16
Especially after the deregulation of the communications industries in the 1996
Telecommunications Act, the elimination of restrictions on corporations moving across
different branches of the communications industries led to enormous increases in con-
glomeratization. Just to take one locally important example, the Walt Disney Company,
with annual revenues of only $2 5.4 billion (by comparison, General Electric, owner of
NBC grossed $129.9 billion in 2001): among Disney's movie holdings are Walt Disney
Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, and Miramax Film Corporation; it
owns the ABC television network, together with the Disney Channel, Soap Net, all divi-
sions of ESPN, and 80 percent of A & E and the History and Biography Channels. In
addition to Disneyland itself, its theme park holdings include Disney World, Disney
Cruise Line, and Disneylands in Paris, Tokyo, and one planned for Hong Kong. As well
as extensive holdings in book publishing, it owns half of U.S. Weekly, Discover, and ESPN
magazines; fifty radio stations; 741 Disney stores; and extensive theatrical interest.J7
This list is just a selection, and diversification of an equivalent or greater extensiveness
has been documented for AT&T, Sony, AOLffime Warner, Vivendi Universal, Viacom,
and one or two more of the integrated communications and entertainment cartels.
Some indication of the momentum of this consolidated corporate ownership of Amer-
ican culture is revealed in the periodic summaries by one of its most important ana-
lysts, Ben Bagdikian. When he published the first edition of his book The Media Monop-
oly in 1983, fifty corporations dominated mass media in the United States. By the
second edition in 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine; by 1997 that
number had been further reduced to ten; and by 2000 he found that only six dominant
firms controlled more of the industry than the combined fifty seventeen years earlier. 18
Manufacturing the culture that is marketed and consumed all over the world, the Los
Angeles entertainment industry has become the vehicle, not so much of an American
imperialism as of the imperialism of capital itself, inflating into a global omnipotence
the implications of the Supreme Court's 1915 diagnosis that "the exhibition of moving
pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, like any
other spectacles." 19 Just one instance of this voraciousness may suffice: the case of
Jurassic Park. The film was not only "accompanied by over 1,000 products identified
as official Jurassic Park merchandise, distributed by 100 official Jurassic Park manu-
facturers around the world," but the Jurassic Park logo from the merchandising was
displayed in the film itself in the park's gift shop; thus, the "film itself was a tie-in,"
intradiegetically displaying its combined merchandising, product placement, and other
forms of economic proliferation. 2o
INTRODUCTION 9
Though cultural activity has always been subject to economic transactions, only in
the recent past have the culture industries themselves become so thoroughly integrated
with each other, with all other forms of material production, and with the state. Train-
ing the world in consumerism, entertainment becomes capital's mode of operation. As
Theodor Adorno, writing half a century ago in Los Angeles, noted, culture has amal-
gamated with advertising. 21 Or as a Coca-Cola marketing chief more recently remarked,
it is the medium in which capital operates: "The culture that comes out of L.A.-films,
television, recorded music, concerts-is the popular culture of the world and it is
through that culture that we communicate with the consumers of Coke. "22
Guy Debord and others among the Situationists, the French philosophers who have
provided the most profound analysis of the assimilation of human life into this cultural-
economic system, designated it as the Spectacle. In the "Society of the Spectacle," the
immediate relationships among people appear to have been replaced by relations
between people and images, an imaginary relationship that also has the effect of con-
cealing the actual social relations created by the capitalist system's production of mate-
rial wealth. The symbol and fulcrum of this condition, Los Angeles is thus the Capital
of the Spectacle, and the comprehensive form of the city's economic, spatial, social and
cultural alienation is ontological: "The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spec-
tacle is everywhere."23 Though the ruin of community, the alienation of the imagi-
nation, and authentic social relations that constitute the Spectacle now affect almost
everyone in the world, they affect people in Los Angeles especially powerfully and com-
prehensively. At once a cynosure and an ignis fatuus, and alternately enriching and
depleting all other arts in the city, Hollywood attempts to frame all cultural practice
in Los Angeles in its own economic imperatives and entrepreneurial ambitions; life there
is enthralled by it.
To designate as "popular culture," not Hollywood itself, but practices outside and
opposed to it, contravenes what has become the term's dominant usage, its reference
to the consumer culture produced by capitalist industries. This recent transformation
and narrowing of the concept of popular culture is not accidental, but rather it has
accompanied parallel transformations and narrowings in the cultural field as a whole.
Commodity culture's colonization of all areas of life-the individual psyche, the pub-
lic realm, the political process, and indeed all forms of art-now appears to be so com-
plete that, it is often argued, any popular practice outside it is impossible if not incon-
ceivable. Responding to the preoccupation of the cultural field by capital, many
journalists and academics have made corresponding investments. Whereas early at-
tempts to legitimate the study of what was then called "mass culture" approached it
as sociological or ethnographical data, more recent methodologies employ aesthetic
criteria that allow for newly positive understandings of its social role. So though the
fact of the structural integration of the dominant forms of contemporary culture in
the general operations of capital is indisputable, its implications are Widely disputed.
More or less determinist positions like those of Adorno and the Situationists mentioned
above, for example (that are rooted in Hegelian analyses of capitalism's intrinsic alien-
ation and so propose that cultural domination and exploitation follow necessarily
10 DAVID E. JAMES
from the economic structure of the entertainment industries) have become key points
of reference, usually negative ones, in contemporary debates over the social implica-
tions of the mass consumption of culture produced by corporate interests.
On the one hand, it is argued that corporate culture, especially broadcast television,
has been pivotal in the disintegration of the democratic process, the collapse of com-
munity, the rise of the New Right, and the emergence of a universal cynicism. 24 But as
with all other forms of capitalist production, the culture industries' constant need to
reconstruct themselves produces disjunctions and contradictions that render the over-
all system unstable and vulnerable to intervention by the people involved in its various
stages. So on the other hand, other commentators emphasize the possibilities that the
industrial production of entertainment does not preclude authorial self-expression dur-
ing the process of its manufacture, nor does mass consumption of it preclude the audi-
ences' parallel assertion of their own identity and creativity, specifically their ability to
mobilize their own critical, against-the-grain reception of its intended messages. When
such creative responses to entertainment become socially extensive, they produce fan
cultures that may elaborate the imaginary identifications we all make with others who
share our tastes into virtual or even real communities that become to various degrees
independent of the original mass media sources. The Grateful Dead and Star Trek fan
cultures are among those most often cited as sustaining such communities. Indeed, an
entire academic discipline, Cultural Studies, now exists, premised on the moments of
autonomy and alterity that the system as a whole allows and thus on the supposition
that resistance to capitalist culture is marshaled within its own processes.
Though the Cultural Studies literature is now so immense that every position on the
question of the relation between culture and political economy in these industries can
somewhere be found in it, its main tradition derived from the work of the Birmingham
Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970S and 80S. The Birmingham group
initially formulated itself around the investigation of the more or less delinquent activ-
ity of specifically working-class subcultures: dress, hairstyles, dance movements, and so
on-the traditional field of anthropology or sociology rather than of aesthetics per se.
It proposed that these subcultures reflected the transformed class tensions of advanced
capitalist society and were, at least partially, ritually symbolic continuations of earlier
and more overtly political working-class social contestations. In this formulation, pop-
ular culture was understood to comprise "Resistance Through Rituals";25 that is, specif-
ically working-class opposition to the dominant culture, which in Britain at that time
was still the culture of the bourgeois and the aristocratic establishment, not yet melted
into air by the entertainment industry.
The primacy of this working-class resistance to a dominant culture was largely lost
in the Americanization and "postmodernization" of the Birmingham project that pro-
duced contemporary Cultural Studies. Occurring during the Reagan/Thatcher era's
assaults on trade unions and all other forms of working-class self-organization, the trans-
formation of the discipline entailed parallel offensives; the term "popular culture" was
decisively relocated from the working-class oppositional subcultures to the entertain-
ment industry, which in the United States (and increasingly so in Britain and the rest
INTRODUCTION II
of the world) had itself become the dominant culture. Its exclusive reference became
the consumer culture manufactured by corporate industries rather than street-level
attempts to resist or transform it, let alone to sustain alternatives to it. Popular culture
was now produced by corporate capital, not by the people. As the term acquired the mar-
ket definition of popular, its specific associations with the working class and hence the
possibility that culture could focus structural social resistance were dumped. In a period
where the significant crises in capitalism were explained as crises in over-production, to
be assuaged by increasing the consumption of commodities of all and every kind, the
academic study of culture followed suit by deploying itself primarily around the con-
sumption of commodity culture. 26 The academy became yet another stage where cap-
italist culture as a whole was legitimated and naturalized; affirming, rather than inter-
rogating the status quo, Cultural Studies amalgamated with advertising.
Though the present work does not assume that any autonomous sphere of popular
culture, whether specified as the activity of an ethnic or sexual minority or as some frac-
tion of the working class understood more generally, may now exist outside the grav-
itational field of the culture industries, it is oriented to those popular practices that
attempt to produce themselves outside their priorities and processes and thus outside the
field that Cultural Studies now demarks. Though they are surrounded by, and inevitably
linked to, Hollywood, the initiatives considered in this book are displaced from it in mul-
tiple ways, but especially in being pursued as essentially amateur practices; and almost
all are in mediums that the entertainment industry has not completely colonized.
Hollywood and Los Angeles, the industry and the city, culture and geography form
the context, comprise the cloth on the edges of which participatory popular cultures
weave new forms of community. In this they mark the continuation of the cultural resist-
ance that began when the arts were first industrialized in the print business of eighteenth-
century England. William Blake earned a meager living for himself and his wife on the
edges of this industry, but he devoted himself to the composition of epic poems that he
illustrated and engraved himself, the two of them coloring the printed sheets by hand.
In these poems, Blake detailed a mythology describing the emergence of the modern world
system-the specters of science, imperialism, the industrial revolution, and commodity
culture-but also envisioning revolutionary republican attempts to humanize it. He
coined the name Los for his central figure, an anagram for Sol, the sun, that also punned
on the loss that surrounded him. Blake imagined Los as a blacksmith, hammering out a
vision of a fully human, fully emancipated commonality. In the furnaces of his imagi-
nation, Los labored to build Jerusalem, or Liberty, by producing a genuinely popular
culture, a Republican Art such as could be made at home like Blake's own, or one owned
and exhibited by the general public, like early Renaissance frescoes-or modern murals.
Some two hundred years later, the word Los became current among working-class
Latinos, many of them displaced from their homelands by the global forces of capital
and empire, as the name for the city in which they made their homes, a city where they
hoped to find liberty and fellowship and which they sometimes illuminated with exqui-
site, spontaneous frescoesP From one of the first to the most recent scenes of crucial
cultural resistance, the Sons and Daughters of Los continue to contend in their furnaces.
12 DAVID E. JAMES
Notes
1. My own role and investment in this project followed from previous work in the study of
popular culture, particularly independent cinema, and in the study of Los Angeles. This introduction
draws on several of my previous publications, especially Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popu-
lar Culture (London: Verso Books, 1996), and on a history of non-studio filmmaking in Los Ange-
les currently in process, parts of the introduction to which I have adapted here. Agreement with
the principles expressed in this introduction should not be ascribed to the other contributors.
2. Constrained by both space and hindered by the difficulties of finding scholars willing to
commit their time to topics of this kind, our survey is by no means exhaustive in its account of
cultural communities that have either existed in the recent past or are presently coming into being.
Prominent among the omissions are the Social Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), the Wal-
lenboyd and the Boyd Street Theaters, the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, various
public television initiatives, and Pasadena NewTown. Of new organizations, the many forms of
community that are growing around the Internet (the Los Angeles Alternative Media Network,
for example) are beyond the scope of the present volume, as are organizations specifically respon-
sive to very recent immigration, such as the Mayan organization, IXIM, and the Salvadoran Amer-
ican National Association. On these last, see Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Seek-
ing Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2001), 66-67. Our concerns here include attention only to those grass-
roots community movements that developed specifically around cultural activities; for the role
of parks, neighborhood and homeowners associations, community newspapers, public libraries,
and the like in creating communities in Los Angeles, see Metamorphosis Project White Paper
Number One, The Challenge of Belonging in the 21st Century: The Case of Los Angeles (Annen-
berg School for Communication, 2001, <http://www.metamorph.org/vault>). Another major
omission here is the many communities that have formed around music. These include classical
music, ranging from the "Evenings on the Roof" of the 1940S and the "Monday Evening Con-
certs" (for which see Dorothy Crawford, Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts
in Los Angeles, 1939-1971 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]) to the music and
sound events organized by Cindy Bernard, initially the late 1990S at the Sacred Grounds coffee
house in San Pedro and then at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House
in West Hollywood. And they include more popular practices of music, of which the Los Ange-
les Punk movement in the 1980s and South Central Hip-Hop in the 1990S are the most impor-
tant recent examples. These latter were not examined here because mostly (though not entirely)
they developed in nightclubs, record labels, or informal tape distribution mechanism that grew
on the edges of, or within, the music industry itself.
3. "Highways Spring 2002 Schedule," notice for "Gay Men's Performance Workshop."
4. "The Laocoon," The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed., David V. Erdman
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), 272.
5. For user-friendly introductions to these concepts, see Raymond Williams, Culture (London:
Fontana, 1989); and Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (New York:
Tavistock Publications, 1985).
6. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993).
7. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social
Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 224; Charles Jenks, Heteropolis (London: Academy Editions,
1993),17 and 32.
INTRODUCTION 13
8. WPA Guide to California (New York: Pantheon Books, [1939]1984), 208; Kevin Starr,
Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920S (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), 84·
9· Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: Peregrine
Smith, [1946] 1973),314.
10. The notion of "cultural bifocality" or pluralism is now more germane than older assim-
ilationist models of acculturation; see Hamilton and Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global
City, 9.
I I. Greg Hise, Michael J. Dear, and H. Eric Schockman, Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand
Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), I I.

12. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), I.
13· David Bordwell et aI., The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Pro-
duction to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 123. By 1922,84 percent of U.S.
films were made here.
14· McWilliams, Southern California, H I .
IS. Five years later, Matsushita sold 80 percent of MCA to Seagrams for $S.7 million. These
figures are taken from Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyn, and Adam Finn, Global Television and
Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 23.
For a complete analysis of the effect of the corporatization of the media system, see Robert W.
McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1999).
16. Figures in this paragraph are from McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 17-18.
17. Selected from listings in "The Big Ten," The Nation, 274, I (7 January 2002), 27-32.
18. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 6th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), xxi.
19. Mutual Film Corporation v Ohio Industrial Commission. See Richard Koszarski, An
Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928 (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of Californian Press, 1994), 199.
20. Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1994),20S·
21. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 161: "So completely is [culture] subject to the
law of exchange that is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer
be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising."
22. Quoted in Andrew Jaffe, "The Hollywood Threat to Madison Avenue," Los Angeles
Times, I I September 1991, B7. The article reported that the Coca-Cola Company had retained
Michael Ovitv and his Creative Artists Agency to "put it in touch with 'global pop culture.'"
23. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, 1995), 23·
24. Some recent examples of such wholesale critiques include Pierre Bourdieu, On Television,
trans. Priscilla Ferguson (New York: New Press, 1998); and Jeffrey Scheuer, The Sound Bite Soci-
ety: Television and the American Mind (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999). Robert
D. Putnam has argued that television watching is negatively correlated with civic participation
and social involvement: "Television ... is bad for both individualized and collective civic engage-
ment, but it is particularly toxic for activities that we do together.... Just as television privatizes
our leisure time, it also privatizes our civic activity, dampening our interactions with one another
14 DAVID E. JAMES
even more than it dampens individual political activities" (Bowling Alone, 229). On the other
hand, some recent empirical evidence from Los Angeles is equivocal about the negative effects
of television, finding that whereas it had a direct negative effect on the relatively privileged west
side of the city, it had "indirect positive effects" among the largely immigrant populations of East
Los Angeles; see Metamorphosis Project White Paper Number One, 34.
25. See Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures
in Post-war Britain (Birmingham, U.K.: Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1976).
26. As Nicholas Garnham has noted, the emphasis in affirmative Cultural Studies on cul-
tural consumption rather than production "has played politically into the hands of a right whose
ideological assault has been structured in large part around an effort to persuade people to con-
struct themselves as consumers in opposition to producers"; see "Political Economy and Cul-
tural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. I
(1995): 65·
27. On the urban writing of working-class Latinos in Los Angeles, see Susan A. Phillips, Wall-
bangin': Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). The city is des-
ignated as "Los" on a map on page 151. As part of his California Trilogy, James Benning made
a wonderful film in 2001 about Los Angeles that prominently featured its Latino citizens; he titled
it Los.
Bill Mohr
2 Peripheral Outlaws:
Beyond Baroque and the
Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance
In the encyclopedic history of post-World War II little magazines entitled A Secret

Location on the Lower East Side, the notion of community as a primary mode of lit-
erary identity is invoked by many of the featured editors, several of them the most sig-
nificant poets of our time. 1 In their brief recollections of their experiences in the small
press world, "community" remains undefined, a gesture used to conjure a nostalgic
glimpse of the glory days of baby-boom idealism. But however unfocused the idea
might be for these writers, community formation was one of the central concerns of
non-university poets in this country between the end of World War II and the begin-
ning of the Gulf War.
Poet and critic Michael Davidson was one of the first to examine the relationship
between poets and concepts of community during this era, emphasizing in his book The
San Francisco Renaissance that while a poetry of place was important for Jack Spicer,
Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, and other major figures of the movement, nothing could
have happened "without the sustaining fact of community-the circles, salons, and bars
in which artists could invent out of the earthly city a heavenly city of fulfilled poten-
tial."2 The sustained invention of community, however, often involves an aspiration
toward social autonomy that immediately conflicts with the kinds of valorization pro-
vided by bourgeois culture. And poets at the margins on the West Coast during this
period often required more than salons and bars to overcome their isolation and other
disadvantages.
In the much smaller and more fragile beat poetry scene that evolved in Los Ange-
les during the mid- I 95 as, the poets who emerged during the turmoil of the Vietnam
War dedicated themselves to a different intersection of social settings and alternative
institutions. I will argue that the struggle to form and define a community and to artic-
ulate its relationship with the erratic circumferences of often-improvised poetics was
16 BILL MOHR
especially crucial to the majority of poets living in the city. Their need to articulate an
artistic identity beyond individual authorship became an almost constitutive thirst, in
large part because the entertainment industry dominated cultural production in South-
ern California.
In no other major region of the United States have poets had to confront on a daily
basis the cultural and economic repercussions of the entertainment industries whose
hegemony is so complete that, as Horkheimer and Adorno argued, they no longer feel
the need "to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce."~ While Horkheimer and
Adorno's claim that "under monopoly all mass culture is identical"4 and other aspects
of their critique of "the culture industry" overstated their case as a deliberate provo-
cation, poets in Los Angeles did not see such an analysis as much of an exaggeration,
and their attempt to contest the commodification practices of the culture industry
resulted in a distinct set of alternative communities and institutions.
I will examine in particular Beyond Baroque, a literary arts organization established
in a storefront building in Venice, California, in 1968 that nourished the development
of several communities of poets in Los Angeles as they were interwoven with several
other subcultures. I will focus on these communities and on their practical, quotidian
address to the contestation over canon formation long before it became a crucial mat-
ter of debate in the academy. Finally, I will also consider how these poets' proximity to
the film and music industries has contributed to their peripheral status within Ameri-
can poetry.
Many alternative literary arts organizations have flourished at various points in the
past half-century: St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City; the Loft in St. Paul, Min-
nesota; and the now-defunct Intersection in San Francisco are some of the main ones.
All of these are known for their workshops and reading series, and St. Mark's became
famous for its production of mimeographed publications, but only Beyond Baroque
brought together a multitude of complementary literary activities as a means of gener-
ating community during its development into a poetic cynosure in Southern California.
When Beyond Baroque shifted from its original site to its current location in 1979, the
task involved moving a small press library of several thousand titles, Compugraphic
typesetting and paste-up equipment, and a stockpile of back issues of its own publica-
tion as well as more than a hundred metal folding chairs that provided the basic seat-
ing infrastructure for its workshop and reading audiences, to all of which was soon
added a literary bookstore.
Although Beyond Baroque's reading series and workshops continue to serve as its most
publicly visible means of attracting poets, its distinctiveness among alternative literary
organizations derives from its early emphasis on incorporating as many aspects of lit-
erary production as possible at one site. From 1975 to 1985, in particular, Beyond
Baroque provided the poets in Los Angeles with the opportunity to have a poem cri-
tiqued on Wednesday night, test the revision out loud at an open reading during the
weekend, typeset and paste it up for publication during the following week, and sub-
sequently bring it back from the printer to be shelved at the library and sold at the book-
store. The impact of these syndetic activities on the formation of poetic communities
PERIPHERAL OUTLAWS 17
in Los Angeles manifested itself in the almost kaleidoscopic permutations engendered

by each individual's distinct sequence of participation. Beyond Baroque presented very
little in the way of impediments to an artist's decision about how mature she or he was
as an artist, and its institutional projection into the development of the community con-
tinually favored potential rather than enactment. Perhaps most importantly, poets min-
imized the notion of institution even as their accumulated palimpsests of place reinforced
their community.
In analyzing the emergence of poetic scenes or schools, one must be vigilant in cal-
culating the disparity between artistic institutions and individual artists, for it is all too
easy to be seduced by casual transitions between these categories. For example, Christo-
pher Beach's recent examination of postmodern poetry, Poetic Culture, announces that
its "focus [is] on a dynamic tension that informs all aspects of contemporary poetic cul-
ture-the tension between the level of community and the level of the institution." 5
Beach claims that communities, "which evolve organically out of the needs of the par-
ticular groups of poets," are "a mediating link between individuals and institutions."6
But his suggestion that poetic communities are organic is made without providing any
historical context of the implications of such a claim. The yearning for gemeinschaft
implicit in his claim cannot be detached from the contingencies of social resources
available to poets. The dichotomy between individual and institution, which Beach
suggests is almost reductively distinct, occurs because he defines institutions as a "form
of social organization structured by some force outside the immediate control or juris-
diction of the poets themselves."7
One obvious problem is that some organizations that possess many of the features
of an institution are also legal entities operated and directed by members of a com-
munity. In the literary world, these institutions would include such places as St. Mark's
Poetry Project, the Loft, and Beyond Baroque. One of several major problems I have
with Beach's definitions is that he does not consider that a community's first function
could be to serve as a mediating link between individuals in one community and those
in other contiguous communities without any particular emphasis on institutional
affiliation.
In contrast with Beach, British sociologist Anthony P. Cohen emphasizes the func-
tion of the boundary in comprehending the meaning of a community. Cohen argues that
community suggests "simultaneously both similarity and difference," that is, the peo-
ple within a community have similar desires and expectations to such a degree that they
perceive themselves distinct "in a significant way from members of other putative
groupS."8 Cohen points out that the boundary is the crucial element that embodies this
sense of discrimination, but says that "not all boundaries, and not all the components
of any boundary, are so objectively apparent. They may be thought of, rather, as exist-
ing in the minds of their beholders. This being so, the boundary may be perceived in
rather different terms, not only by people on opposite sides of it, but also by people on
the same side."9 The understanding of a boundary in this way permits the heterogene-
ity of a community to become visible to outsiders, and to reduce the oversimplifications
that the apparent homogeneity of a community can attract in the analytic process.
18 BILL MOHR
Cohen's analysis allows us to take into account the fluidity of social life and how
human beings are capable of negotiating several boundaries simultaneously. "Com-
munity is how we learn culture," Cohen insists, and how we learn to "be social." 10 This
process is, therefore, one of the major elements that must be addressed if we are to con-
sider the question with which Cary Nelson concludes his very fine examination of mar-
ginalized poets: What is "the social meaning of a life lived on poetry's behalf?"ll I would
like to suggest that the social meaning Nelson envisages is intimately connected by the
desire of poets to form communities with porous boundaries, and this strategy com-
plicates any community that is contiguous with a popular culture aggregated on behalf
of other cultural economies and ecologies.
The emergence of several different poetry communities in Southern California dur-
ing the past fifty years has passed almost unnoticed. A wide range of seemingly com-
prehensive and all-inclusive texts, from Alan Golding's From Outlaw to Classic:
Canons in American Poetry to Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum,12
almost completely overlook the existence of a polyphony of communities in this region.
Beach's book gives two-thirds of a paragraph to the region: "Los Angeles has quietly
emerged as an important center of West Coast poetry, where a form of populist per-
formance poetry variously called 'Standup Poetry,' 'Easy Poetry,' or 'Long Beach
Poetry' has combined stand-up comedy and post-Beat poetry exemplified by Charles
Bukowski." 13
Setting aside for the moment the slightly dubious conflation of Los Angeles and Long
Beach, I would observe that perhaps no better indication of a community boundary
could be offered than Beach's assessment of a quiet evolution. For if this scene quietly
became important, it certainly did not seem quiet to those who participated in it. Beach's
observation not only establishes that there is obviously a boundary between that scene
and those outside but also how considerable a distance separates even an apparently
congenial critic from the entrance points to the other side of that boundary.
Beyond Baroque's establishment, development, and survival has been the result of the
work and constitutive aspirations of a large number of editors and writers-more than
can adequately be described in this article. I will trace some of the most stalwart con-
tributions to Beyond Baroque's growth as various programs flourished, declined, and
occasionally experienced a renaissance. Before I begin, however, I need to emphasize
that Beyond Baroque hardly constitutes the first attempt to create a poetic community
in Venice, let alone in Southern California.
The beat poetry scene in Venice during the 19 50S had been vivid enough to catch the
attention of Donald Allen, the editor of The New American Poetry,14 the most signifi-
cant anthology of what eventually became known as postmodern poetry in the second
half of the twentieth century. Allen included in his volume the work of Stuart Perkoff,
who tried to form an alternative community of poets and collage artists in Venice
West. 15 The scene eventually dissolved in the aftermath of hard drug use and the pres-
sures of governmental bureaucratic hostility, but its history is an important segment in
the larger contestation between an underground arts world and the increasingly cor-
poratized existence of cold-war America.
Nor did communal poetic activity disappear from Los Angeles between the disinte-
gration of Venice West and the first stirrings of activity at Beyond Baroque. The Watts
Writers Workshop served as a gathering place for African American poets who were
not merely responding to the massive urban ghetto rebellions that stunned the city and
the nation in the mid-1960s but were attempting to generate their own versions of ear-
lier poetic revivals such as the Harlem Renaissance. This workshop involved many
genres and was not limited to poetry. Though one of the plays developed in the Watts
Writers Workshop, Big Time Buck White, ended up getting a Broadway production,
the poetic legacy of the Watts Writers Workshop remains its most significant accom-
plishment. Many of the poets who emerged from it, including K. Curtis Lyle, Kamau
Daaood, and Quincy Troupe, are still writing today.
Beyond Baroque: The Early Years
In the years after the dissolution of Venice West, Venice was much more isolated from
Los Angeles than it is today, and the neighborhood maintained a reputation as one of
the more disreputable, if not tougher parts of the city. Marina del Rey, the world's largest
man-made small craft harbor, was still on the drawing boards, and the southern edges
of Venice meandered into fields dotted with wild mustard that stretched to the Ballona
Wetlands. Its northern border was marked by a defunct amusement park on a pier that
was frequently set on fire by transients and amateur arsonists. The community adja-
cent to the north, Ocean Park, was hardly distinguishable from Venice even in the early
1970s, when Ocean Park's main street had several rescue missions. But Venice also dis-
tinguished itself from the other nearby coastal communities in that it was home to the
most substantial neighborhood of African Americans and Latinos on the West Side. The
Oakwood section of Venice, in fact, remains the only Southern California minority
neighborhood that is close to the beach.
In early 1968, George Drury Smith's life gave only the slightest hint that he would
become the progenitor of a literary renaissance in a community already known for its
bohemian tolerance of artists and cultural cast-offs. Born in 1927 near Dayton, Ohio,
Smith had only occasionally visited Venice on weekends while he was working as a dis-
trict training supervisor for Pam Am in Los Angeles between 1955 and 1957. He lived
in Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco for the next six years. In 1965 he got a teaching
credential and began working as a language instructor in the Santa Monica school dis-
trict while also working on a masters degree at UCLA.
When Smith was 40, both his grandmother and his mother died, and he decided to
use his inheritance to launch an experimental literary magazine. This was a project he
had seriously considered as early as 19 64, when he had gone so far as to do a mock-
up of a cover and a title page accompanied by an editorial introduction. His second
attempt began at offices at 73 Market Street in Venice, but in July he chose to estab-
lish permanent headquarters by purchasing a lot with two buildings on West Washington
Boulevard just north of its intersection with Venice Boulevard,16 Across the street was
20 BILL MOHR
ILLUSTRATION 2.1.
George Drury Smith at
Beyond Baroque, 1974.
Photograph by Bill Beebe.
Courtesy of the author.
a junkyard called Ma Klein's Appliances and a lesbian bar, and down the street was
Brandelli's Brig, a bar frequented by pool-playing bikers.
Beyond Baroque's front building was three stories high; in the rear was a one-story
"pagoda-style" building that had once served as an old railroad station on Venice
Boulevard. The larger building was "a wreck," according to Smith. "It had no running
water, and all of the windows were broken."l? He steadily worked to fix the building,
a task that proved far easier than launching a commercially successful experimental lit-
erary magazine. The initial issue of Beyond Baroque, a name Smith says came to him
in a dream,I8 failed to make much of an impact, especially in terms of subscriptions.
Needing to generate some revenue, Smith started a prepublication service called Bay-
rock Publications, which included an IBM compositor. He also decided to open the west-
ern half of the first floor of the front building once a week to the public, which in Venice
at that time included everyone from aspiring musicians and drug addicts (not neces-
sarily distinct categories) to individuals so removed from any identifiable classification
that they could only be described as drop-outs from the hippie culture. Every Thurs-
day evening was devoted to "Happenstance": "There is no format and there are no rules.
This is conceived as a poetry reading and rap session where anything can happen. Why
not come, relax, chat, do your thing, while drinking coffee. You don't have to read any-
thing, but most people do sooner or later." 19
Venice was certainly not the only place in Los Angeles where such invitations were
being issued to young people embroiled in artistic experimentation in hopes of renew-
ing the beats' challenge to suburban tract culture. Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood was
also the staging ground for confrontations between police forces and those who espoused
street life and improvisatory dancing to rock music. In 1967 a young poet named Frank
ILLUSTRATION 2.2.
Beyond Baroque, 1974.
Photograph by Bill Beebe.
Courtesy of the author.
22 BILL MOHR
Souza had opened up a coffeehouse with a performance space called The Bridge on Ken-
more Avenue. Joseph Hansen, a concisely ironic poet who went on to write the David
Brandstetter mystery series, started a poetry workshop that quickly developed a repu-
tation for blunt, savvy criticism. John Harris, a poet who had been born in China and
spent part of his childhood there with his missionary parents, found Hansen's feedback
bracing, and his poetry quickly improved.
When Souza closed The Bridge, Hansen and Harris searched for another place to con-
tinue the workshop. Harris heard about Beyond Baroque from a newspaper announce-
ment, and together they went to Beyond Baroque on a Thursday evening. The free-form,
"let it all hang out" attitude of the Happenstance evening did not blend well with the
more craft-oriented poetics of Hansen and Harris, and their first evening there quickly
escalated into a caustic flurry of boasts and rebukes over the virtues of spontaneity and
revision, which Smith resolved by opening his front-room space to Hansen and Harris
on Wednesday evenings.2o
Although the Thursday evening event soon ceased its informal presentation, its titu-
lar energy certainly continued to influence how individuals found their way to Beyond
Baroque. Like many of the young poets who would arrive at Beyond Baroque during
its first ten years, Jim Krusoe was the first in his family to attend college and also had
a disaffection with the society that provided that education. After graduating from
Occidental College, Krusoe moved to Venice, wrote poetry, and worked at various jobs,
including a stint as a field worker for the health department of Los Angeles County.
His first encounter with Beyond Baroque occurred in 1969 as he was moseying to the
store to buy a quart of blue paint for a table he had picked up at Ma's Appliances. He
noticed a store with five vacuum cleaners in various stages of assembly perched on its
front windowsill accompanied by a sign in black and gold lettering: Beyond Baroque.
"I walked by this print-shop sort of place, on West Washington. It looked intriguing,
so 1 stuck my head in to see what was up. There was George, up to his neck in these
little snippets of paper, pasting up the second issue of the magazine. We started up a
conversation, found out we had similar tastes, and 1 wound up volunteering to help
him read manuscripts. "21 Krusoe went on to do far more than screen the increasing
influx of manuscripts. From the inception of the Friday night reading series in 1971,
he chose and introduced poets with a deft aplomb in which even his compliments con-
tained an implicit critique of the poet's work. Perhaps most importantly for Beyond
Baroque, Smith decided in the mid-I970S to make Krusoe the assistant editor in charge
of both Beyond Baroque's NEW magazine and a new book publishing venture.
By 1970, Smith's original intention to start an experimental literary magazine focused
on fiction found itself expanding to include the work produced by poets at the Wednes-
day night workshop as well as poets from the larger Venice community like Lynn Shoe-
maker. Shoemaker had dropped out of a Ph.D. program at the University of California
at Davis in part because of his disenchantment with academic poetry. By 1968, he was
living in Venice and becoming involved in the resistance against the draft and the Viet-
nam War. 22 He also joined the all-volunteer staff of the Free Venice Beachhead, a monthly
newspaper devoted to revoking the annexation of Venice by Los Angeles and the estab-
lishment of a counter-culture city. The secession movement never reached fruition, but
throughout the 1970S the desire to return to Venice's original autonomy reinforced the
artistic groundswell. Shoemaker became the managing editor of the third issue of Beyond
Baroque, which was guest-edited by Hansen and Harris and focused on the "New Venice
Poets." This issue included not only members of Beyond Baroque's workshop but also
Jack Hirschman, who had recently lost his job teaching at UCLA and was living on Quar-
terdeck Street in Venice, and John Haag, a community organizer.
A year later Shoemaker edited a follow-up anthology, Venice I3, which focused only
on work from the Beyond Baroque workshop.23 Smith served as the printer for this book
but was not himself the publisher. The major addition to the lineup was Harry Northup,
an actor born in Kansas in 1940 who had moved to Los Angeles in 1968 after several
years working in New York and who eventually appeared in many films directed by
Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme.
Smith was diligent about mailing out press releases for all Beyond Baroque's activi-
ties. Northup's inclusion in Venice I3 and the announcement in a newspaper of his par-
ticipation in its publication reading caught the attention of Leland Hickman, a poet and
actor who had also recently moved to Los Angeles. Northup and Hickman had known
each other in New York but had lost touch with each other, and Hickman surprised
Northup by showing up at the reading. 24 By late 1971, Hickman, too, began attending
the Wednesday workshop and sharing portions of his long poem, Tiresias, which quickly
became recognized in the workshop as a major work-in-progress. During workshops,
Hansen often cited Hickman's "Lee Sr. Falls to the Floor," which had originally appeared
in the Hudson Review and had been selected for the American Literary Anthology in
1968, as an exemplary poem that younger poets should study for the lyric recoil of its
dramatic imagery:
his breathing unthrobs
Rerun that. The fumes

tremble in the terrifying heat
Lee Sr. falls to the floor
Rerun that Lee Sr crumples

angular on linoleum
gasps in the kitchen glare
Rerun Lee Sr falls down

in jockey shorts A wooden
chair topples on its side smacks
the floor back goes
his balding head clawed
by ache
Rerun the gasp25
24 BILL MOHR
In ~h~ course of this four-page poem, each successive amplification of Hickman's cin-
ematIC ImperatIve reveals the starkness of his father's accidental death, but the resig-
nation expressed at the end of the poem was only temporary.26 His long poem, Tire-
sias, involves a journey home as harrowing as anything in the plays of Eugene O'Neil
or Sam Shepard.
Far more sexually explicit than Ginsberg's Howl, Hickman's long poem provided
Beyond Baroque's Wednesday night workshop with a chance to assert itself as a pub-
lic group when many of its members attended Hickman's first sustained reading of por-
tions of the poem at Papa Bach Bookstore in October of 197I. The attendance of the
Beyond Baroque workshop community at that reading, in fact, signaled the beginning
of many links between the workshop and Papa Bach, which was primarily known at
the time for its double feature of draft counseling and the best selection of Marxist lit-
erature in Los Angeles. The workshop and the store went on to become far more
involved with each other's fate. Workshop leader John Harris eventually owned the
store, and he expanded the size and scope of the store's new magazine, Baehy. Hick-
man became its editor for ten issues. He would later build on the experience he gained
there in handling a large-page publication when he began his own magazines, Boxcar
and Temblor.
New issues of Beyond Baroque were slow to be assembled, and between them Smith
began to publish small saddle-stitched pamphlets of mainly local literary news together
with a few poems, which he called NewLetters. By 1972, Beyond Baroque had incor-
porated as a nonprofit foundation and was using bulk-rate postage to distribute a sig-
nificant chunk of NewLetters' print run of 1,500 copies. These issues not only served
to publicize events at Beyond Baroque and at independent bookstores such as Papa
Bach's, but they also gave detailed directions on how to get to Beyond BaroqueP
The Friday night poetry reading series for which Beyond Baroque became most
famous was quite sporadic in its early years, and attendance was unpredictable. Jim
Krusoe remembers six people showing up to listen to Kenward Elmslie, and "three of
them left at intermission. "28 Other events, however, were more indicative of the future:
Jack Hirschman's readings on September 25 and October 24, 1972, brought a heavy
response. This galvanized attention so much that a few months later Smith noted in
NewLetters that "recent presentations at the Center have found people crouched in the
doorway, hoping to hear a note or a word, and perhaps gain entrance after intermis-
sion. "29 Audiences eventually proved so indefatigable that loudspeakers had to be placed
outside the building so that the crowd on the sidewalk could hear the poems being read
inside. Of course, the phrase "hoping to hear a note" reminds us that Beyond Baroque's
early programming was not simply literary or restricted to the contemporary. A music
series directed by Smith focused on performances of Early Modern compositions and
attracted an audience quite distinct from the poetry crowd. In addition, Smith curated
the exhibitions of visual art that rotated in tandem with the seasonal reading series.
Smith managed to accomplish all this while working at other jobs to support him-
self, jobs that fortunately brought him into contact with individuals who supported
Beyond Baroque at critical moments. One of his jobs was doing production and edito-
ILLUSTRATION 2.3. Alexandra Garrett, editor and indefatigable supporter of

Beyond Baroque. Photograph by, and courtesy of, George Drury Smith.
rial work for a local weekly newspaper, The Argonaut, whose publisher, David Asper
Johnson, allowed him to use its photo-typesetting equipment to set issues of New-
Letters. 30 Although the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was eventually to
have a major impact on arts funding in the United States, Beyond Baroque received
little grant support during its first five years, marking a substantial distinction between
it and other community-oriented literary projects of the same period. The Poetry Proj-
ect at St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, for instance, was begun with federal money, in part
because it located itself at a place that already had larger social recognition and cog-
nizance as a cultural site. 3I In contrast, Beyond Baroque was begun in a converted store-
front, and its total assistance from government agencies in its first five years was less
than a thousand dollars.
The survival of Beyond Baroque during these early years largely happened because
of the devotion of volunteers such as Alexandra Garrett, a reticent poet who had been
the only woman in Tom McGrath's poetry workshop in Los Angeles during the 1950S
and who had worked as an editor and major fundraiser for Coastlines in its final years.
Garrett contributed thousands of hours to Beyond Baroque and was the founder of
Beyond Baroque's small press library, which is the largest such public, non-university
collection on the West Coast.
26 BILL MOHR
In 1974 Smith applied for, and received, an Expansion Arts grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts, which enabled him to open up the larger back room of Beyond
Baroque's first floor to accommodate larger audiences for readings. The grant money
that became available was in part due to the recession between 1973 and 1975, which
was so severe that the federal government finally attempted to ameliorate its effects by
employing individuals in arts activities for the first time since the Works Progress Admin-
istration.
Smith's transformation of Beyond Baroque from a for-profit publishing venture to a
nonprofit arts center enabled him to snag some funds from the Comprehensive Employ-
ment and Training Act (CETA) and use them to hire several people for tasks around
Beyond Baroque. One of them was a young poet from Florida, Exene Cervenka, who
recalls that when she arrived in Los Angeles in 1976, "I'd never lived in a city before,
and didn't know ... what I was going to do except keep on writing, which I'd been
doing for seven years. So I got a job (CETA)typesetting at Beyond Baroque and a place
upstairs. I didn't have anything. No stereo, no radio, no TV.... All I had in my apart-
ment was a clock.... The workshops were the place where you could have your stuff
read and commented on honestly. No pretense-people either liked it or they didn't,
and they told you why. "32
A handsome musician and poet from Baltimore who called himself John Doe began
attending the workshops about the same time as Cervenka, and by 1977 they had
moved together to Hollywood and with Billy Zoom and Don Bonebreak formed a
band they called "X." Their Beyond Baroque roots revealed themselves in their first
show at the Whiskey rock club on Sunset Boulevard in July 1978: the lyrics to their
songs were only partially decipherable through the mesh of punk-inspired riffs, but after-
wards I heard them tell Jim Krusoe that one of the songs they performed included lines
from his first chapbook, Notes on Suicide. 33
A "Golden Age" of Los Angeles Poetry
By the mid-1970S, Beyond Baroque's publication projects had split into two: one pub-
lication retained the eponymous title, while NewLetters evolved into NEW magazine.
NEW also changed its appearance: instead of a 32-page issue that was erratically pasted-
up, it was printed on newsprint in runs of 16,000 copies in 1976; and its circulation
eventually peaked at 25,000,34 Bundles of NEW were placed around the city at restau-
rants, bookstores, and record stores for free. When Beyond Baroque received a grant
to produce full-length poetry books, the same strategy was adopted, though the paper
was of a bit higher quality.35
The Linocomp typesetting equipment that Cervenka worked on had been acquired
through an NEA grant in 1975, and the machine was in constant use by poets in the
community. Jack Grapes and Michael Andrews, for instance, were running a reading
series at the Alley Cat restaurant in Hermosa Beach and were producing perfect-bound
anthologies, each featuring a cluster of poets. Like Harry Northup, Grapes had arrived
in Los Angeles in 1968 in hopes of making a career out of acting. He had grown up in
New Orleans, home of The Outsider and Loujon Press, which had selected Los Ange-
les poet Charles Bukowski as "Outsider of the Year" in 1963 and had published the
first substantial collection of his work, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands. As a young
poet, Grapes had corresponded with Bukowski, but he had moved to Los Angeles, not
because of a desire to live in proximity with his poet-hero, but because he had a part
in a television pilot. However, the poetry community proved to be the most important
part of his artistic development. He began to attend the Beyond Baroque poetry work-
shop around 1973. "The poetry community-working with a community of poets-
renourished my identity as an actor. I re-connected with myself as an artist again, and
I felt grounded. It made a difference to my work as an actor to belong to a community
of poets," Grapes recalls. He also makes a distinction in the kinds of social relation-
ships that this workshop encouraged. "The thing about the Beyond Baroque poetry
workshop was that it wasn't about being a star. As opposed to acting in commercials,
the poetry work felt grounded in the soul, in an organic, centered, truthful place. The
odd part was that it wasn't long after I made this change that I went out on interviews
and I got parts. "36 Grapes quickly became not just a participant in the Wednesday
night workshop but one of the poets who defined the community that was solidifying
around Beyond Baroque. He met another poet and photographer, Michael Andrews,
who had a letterpress that he used to issue broadsides on paper almost as thick as corn
tortillas; and together they formed Bombshelter Press, a reference to the structure that
housed the letterpress.
Perhaps the youngest and most ambitious poet to show up during the early part of
Beyond Baroque's second decade was Dennis Cooper, who had started a little magazine,
Little Caesar. Cooper was enamored with the New York School of poets, especially the
second and third generations emerging from the St. Mark's Poetry Project and Anne Wald-
man's World anthologies, whose work blended Frank O'Hara's famous "I do this, I do
that" jaunty poetics with more than a touch of diaristic self-promotion. Cooper's eclec-
tic editorial blend of punk and popular music, film criticism, and a huge swath of casu-
ally deft poetry attracted a vociferous readership and led him to establish Little Caesar
Press. Although Cooper had financial resources in personal family money far surpass-
ing any other Los Angeles poetry editor, he still had to do an immense amount of the
production labor himself. At that time, Cooper was probably the fastest two-fingered
typist on the West Coast, and he poured vast amounts of time into typesetting issues and
books that caught the high tide of independent bookstores such as George Sand, Chat-
terton's, Either/Or, and Intellectuals & Liars that stocked and sold small press produc-
tions. Many independent bookstores had at least intermittent poetry reading series, and
the emergence of the Woman's Building as a significant site of literary production con-
tributed to a growing sense of critical artistic mass assembling itself in Los Angeles.
The response of Los Angeles Times critic Robert Kirsch in the late spring of 1979 to
the anthology I edited and published through Momentum Press, The Streets Inside: Ten
Los Angeles Poets, seemed to provide additional confirmation that clusters of poets were
assembling in Los Angeles who were sympathetic to each other's texts and poetics and
28 BILL MOHR
who, Kirsch observed, appeared to know each other, based on textual references and
dedications of individual poems. However, Kirsch indicated that categorizing these
poets was not going to be an easy task. "Call them no-school," he proposed-and no
other reviewer has ever written a more accurate sentence. Kirsch also made it clear that
this group of poets had achieved substantial significance: "If this were San Francisco,
where such things are more readily recognized," he wrote, "this would be called a
golden age of Los Angeles poetry."3? Kirsch's death in the early 1980s was probably
the single most devastating blow the Los Angeles poetry scene ever suffered, for there
was never again a voice at the Times that spoke up so generously on behalf of South-
ern California's poets. 38
"Coming Attractions": Beyond Baroque

and the "Little Caesar" Generation
By the late 1970s, the renaissance of poetry in Southern California was not limited to
Venice-Long Beach, for example, was beginning to develop its own scene. But between
1974 and 1979, the reading series at Beyond Baroque under Jim Krusoe blossomed.
More and more poets, including figures such as the then relatively unknown Alicia
Ostriker, began to show up for the workshop and to find enough encouragement there
to participate in the Friday night reading series. The small amount of space for all these
events, though, continued to pose a major problem, and the need for a single building
that could house all Beyond Baroque's activities and accommodate the increasing audi-
ences propelled the search for another location.
Ironically, the passage of Proposition 13 in 1977, which devastated school budgets
and led to the eventual decline and virtual demise of the Southern California region's
Poets-in-the-Schools program, also provided Beyond Baroque with an alternative plan
for expansion. 39 The shortage in city government revenues forced the closing of vari-
ous city agencies and structures, including the Old Venice City Hall, which had been
built around 1907 and which served Venice until it was annexed by Los Angeles in 1927.
In late August 1978, the city administrative board recommended that Beyond Baroque's
application to use and maintain the space be accepted.
The move was made during the following summer, and an official "gala opening"
occurred in late October 1979 with a weekend that included poetry readings by Kate
Braverman and Wanda Coleman and a Renaissance music concert the following night.
The transition to the Old Venice City Hall was marked by several major organizational
shifts. On September 30, George Drury Smith resigned as president and chairman of
the board of trustees, and James Krusoe resigned as vice-president. 40 After ten years of
unceasing struggle, Beyond Baroque had found a home that could provide enough space
under one roof for all of its activities, and Smith felt his task was complete.
Although this new space was less than a half-mile away from the original site in
Venice, the move marked a major shift in Beyond Baroque's social and poetic empha-
sis. If working-class poets had dominated the development of Beyond Baroque's first
ILLUSTRATION 2.4. Beyond Baroque's home on Venice Boulevard in the Old Venice
City Hall. The reading room and performance space is to the right of the main
entrance. To the left is the small press library and bookstore. Upper stairs to the
right is the main office. Photograph by, and courtesy of, Bill Mohr.
decade, the second decade was marked by the presence of a new wave of poets from
the middle class whose families were familiar not just with college but with private col-
leges. Cooper took over the Friday night reading series from Jim Krusoe, who had
managed to nurture it to a vibrant pitch without any budgetary support whatsoever.
Cooper, on the other hand, was able to guarantee poets from out of town a reading
fee, although the need for Beyond Baroque to show income from its events in order to
apply for grants required that the days of free admission be relinquished. Charging
admission for the first time in Beyond Baroque's history did not create a crisis. But
Cooper's shift in programming and his unwavering loyalty to the perpetrator of an egre-
gious act of plagiarism did eventually cause significant splits in the community.
Another split on the administrative side had serious consequences for Beyond Baroque's
relationship with third-world and minority communities in Los Angeles. In 1977 Mana-
zar Gamboa, a poet on parole from San Quentin, showed up at Beyond Baroque, work-
ing as a volunteer. By 1979, he had become administrative vice-president, and when
Smith resigned as president, Gamboa took over and immediately made several signifi-
cant changes. NEW magazine became Obras, and the reading series concentrated on
third-world readers. Attendance declined precipitously, but even more foreboding was
Gamboa's lack of action in applying for grants. 41 The board of directors decided to
30 BILL MOHR
replace him with Jocelyn Fisher, who had been working as the librarian. The aftermath
of this transition included a schism within the workshop community, with some mem-
bers claiming rights to the name "Venice Poetry Workshop" and moving it next door
to the Old Venice Jail, which had been taken over by the Social Public Art Resource
Center (SPARC).42
Fisher started another publication, Poetry News, which lasted for almost twenty issues.
One of its most controversial articles was by Dennis Cooper and addressed the mount-
ing factionalism in Los Angeles poetry. Cooper remonstrated the "first generation" of
Los Angeles poets for being unwilling to analyze their poetic situation and was rather
dismissive of their stature within American poetry.43 His assessment was considerably
off the mark on several points, especially in his derogatory assertion that these poets were
virtually unheard of outside Los Angeles County, and reveals more about Cooper's own
ambition than about the complex situation that the Beyond Baroque poets confronted.
Perhaps the most salient figure Cooper neglected was the Los Angeles poet whose pres-
ence had the greatest international impact, but who never read at Beyond Baroque.
Cooper's omission of Bukowski from his article was particularly egregious given the fact
that Bukowski was not simply a poet but had also edited a poetry magazine, Laugh Lit-
erary, and had been one of the three editors of the first significant anthology of Los Ange-
les poets in the 1970S.44 Whether or not many of Beyond Baroque's first generation of
poets were directly influenced by Bukowski's deceptively minimalist prosody, the fact
remains that many of them took an oblique courage from his triumph as a working-class
poet and found reinforcement in his choice of labor itself as worthy subject matter. As
David James has pointed out, Bukowski's success "ensured that the characteristic poetic
voice of the city would be decisively working class. "45 A simple contrast between the
covers of a magazine such as Bill Mohr's Momentum and Cooper's Little Caesar pro-
vides a blunt distinction between the first and second generations of Beyond Baroque
poets. Momentum featured work order and unemployment claim forms on its cover,
whereas Cooper's covers emphasized glamorous figures of popular culture. Cooper's
comment becomes absurd within the context of Bukowski's success, not to mention that
Bukowski's own favorite poets, such as Gerald Locklin and Ron Koertge, had had
notable small press success in the area since the late 1960s.
The notion that nobody north of Oxnard or east of San Bernardino or Riverside had
heard of the first generation of Beyond Baroque poets would be laughable if it had not
been so effective in allowing Cooper's efforts to be framed as the most important period
of Beyond Baroque's history, which is implicitly the message of his biographical note
in Paul Hoover's The Postmodern Poets. 46 Certainly, the former co-editors of The Lamp
in the Spine, Patricia Hampl and Jim Moore, who lived in Minnesota, would look
askance at Cooper's poetic cartography, given that they had published a half-dozen of
the leading Los Angeles poets in their magazine during the early 1970S and that these
poets were intimate friends with other poets in Los Angeles who had published in mag-
azines ranging from The Paris Review to The Hudson Review.
Cooper's flippancy generated more consternation than he probably expected, in part
because his apparently sincere belief in the diminutive status of the older generation of
Los Angeles poets did not waver even in the face of obvious contradictory evidence.
Momentum Press, for instance, had reached far beyond than the ears of the literati of
Santa Barbara: its publications were being ranked with the best that the major New
York publishers could offer; and six months before Cooper made his comment, Leland
Hickman's Great Slave Lake Suite had been nominated as one of the five best books of
poetry published in the United States during 1980. Cooper's analysis also completely
fails to take into account the international reputation that Los Angeles poet Paul Van-
gelisti had achieved through his editorial projects with his magazine Invisible City,
which he co-edited with John McBride in San Francisco, and their Red Hill Press, not
to mention with his own anthologies of Los Angeles poets.
Cooper felt that controversy was healthy, but many in the scene who had emerged
as poets either through the workshop or by giving publication readings at Beyond
Baroque felt that he was succumbing to the aura of East Coast hierarchies in which
poets were ranked according to their publications and fame rather than being appreci-
ated and acknowledged for the quality of their work itself, even if it were only being
published in magazines that were primarily edited in Los Angeles. The focus, then, on
appearing in local magazines was fundamentally a desire to confront the mass culture
machine with as much activity as possible. If the goal of these industries was to satu-
rate the national market with its commodities, the desire of one portion of the poets in
Los Angeles was to issue a direct challenge to hegemonic social and economic practices
by emphasizing the local first with activity that featured an artistic element that is very
difficult to market.
In contrast to the big screen with Dolby sound, poetry as a genre insists that silence
serve as the primary agent for the emotional manipulation of an image and that this
silence simultaneously enact itself in a communal debate over how it should be recorded
and represented on the page and in performance. Often only audible in the white space
that a reader encounters as she reads to herself, this conversation about the silence sur-
rounding and permeating a poem is all the more radical in a town that packages sound
tracks at maximum volume.
"Poetry," David James argues, is "of all the arts the least useful to the film industry,
and in its recent forms least compatible with its ethos" and "has recognized the impos-
sibility of its profitable marketing by constructing itself in antithesis to everything
assumed by Hollywood. "47 At least part of the strategy on the part of poets in Los Ange-
les in choosing to work in a city that embalmed itself in the pathos of its own indus-
trial entertainment was to remind those in Hollywood, who assumed that everyone had
their price, that their home ground served as an organic site of resistance. In Los Ange-
les the best minds of this generation were not destroyed by madness, but rather, they
were engaged in a proliferation of cultural work that refused to succumb to two quite
different but equally manipulative ideologies of the imagination: Hollywood, and the
"establishment versus avant-garde" binary of East Coast-West Coast literary rivalries.
The poets in Los Angeles were less interested in how the poets elsewhere perceived them
than in how their activities as poets served to confront the city with a community that
preferred to keep the definition of that term as open and empty as possible. The poets
at Beyond Baroque's workshop as well as the workshops that spun off from it took pride
in not being easily classified.
32 BILL MOHR
By this time, poets were arriving in Los Angeles for a variety of reasons. Charles
Harper Webb moved to Los Angeles in 1981 after a long career in the Seattle area as
a rock musician. Webb had been publishing in dozens of little magazines ever since 1971,
and he had also edited a little magazine, Madrona. Hollywood was certainly part of
the lure for others, such as Suzanne Lummis and Michael Lally. Lally worked prima-
rily as a television actor, while Lummis has written critically acclaimed stage plays as
well as establishing herself as a potent actress. Lewis MacAdams moved to Los Ange-
les from Bolinas and became involved with a variety of ecological causes, including the
founding of the Los Angeles River Project.
Other poets would arrive who were less sympathetic to the home-made poetics of
Los Angeles. Doug Messerli moved his Sun & Moon Press to Los Angeles because his
significant other got a major curatorial job at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Years earlier, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press had stated publicly that Los Ange-
les had only one significant poet: Charles Bukowski. Martin eventually moved his oper-
ations to Santa Barbara and then to Santa Rosa. Messerli, an enormously successful
small press publisher who views the bulk of the local scene as provincial, took up Mar-
tin's vacated post in Los Angeles as skeptic-in-residence.
Other people were arriving in Los Angeles as refugees from state-sponsored terror
approved by an evil axis of C.I.A operatives, illegal weapons smugglers, and perjurers
in the Oval Office. These crimes did not pass unnoticed by Los Angeles poets any more
than did Allende's murder in Chile in 1972. If poets in Los Angeles such as Ron Koertge
and Jack Grapes were becoming known for a jaunty, self-deprecating sense of humor,
others included in their stand-up repertory a refusal to succumb to the big chill that
seemed to erase directly political poems from many of the little magazines and antholo-
gies of the mid-198os. More typical of the reaction in Los Angeles to the turbulence of
the time would be Aleida Rodriguez's poem, "I've Got Something Personal Against the
Bomb" or Eloise Klein Healy's "El Playon De Chanmico":
Where are the human beings?

There are some dead people by the road.
There are some dead people by the volcano
and it has been silent for years.
Where are the human beings

at £1 Playon de Chamnico?
There is no smoky plume
to frighten them.
The earth is not quaking.
No fresh stone flows
on the lava bed.
Where are the human beings

to bury the dead
who mold into one another
a piece at a time
There is a soccer game

and aren't they going?
There is Mass today
and won't they be praying?
See, they have their arms

around each other
by the side of the road. 48
Beyond Baroque continued to struggle financially. It did acquire a new typesetting

machine, a Compugraphic 7500 that made publishing a great deal easier since every-
thing that was keyboarded was recorded on a floppy disc, but the number of typefaces
did not significantly increase. The building itself deteriorated. The smell of mildew per-
meated the entrance hall. Mice ran with impunity across the workshop floor and hopped
into trash cans in daylight in search of crumbs from discarded chip bags until two young
cats were brought in by Alexandra Garrett, and they eventually stemmed the infesta-
tion. Other rodents were more determined.
Beyond Baroque attempted to organize a poetry component for the 1984 Olympic
Arts Festival, but U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz led an attack on UNESCO,
which would have provided a large chunk of the festival's funding. When the United
States withdrew its funding of that sponsoring organization, poetry became the only
major art form not to participate in the Olympic Arts Festival. Compared with the hor-
ror Schultz unleashed in Central America, the cancellation of a poetry festival is hardly
a criminal act, yet the connection between the two is not negligible. Such rejection did
not deter the poets in Los Angeles from speaking out. "Flowers for Nicaragua" in
1986, for instance, was one of many benefit readings which occurred in support of the
Sandinista government.
Cooper departed for New York in 1984, and none too soon as it turned out. If
Beyond Baroque were a stock on Wall Street, it could be said that Cooper sold the day
before the market crashed. The budgets at Beyond Baroque may not have seemed abun-
dant at the time, but in retrospect they came to be viewed as rivers of milk and honey.
In 1985 the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts chose to award
the Poetry Project at St. Mark's in New York a grant and rejected Beyond Baroque's
application. Rumors circulated in Los Angeles of displeasure of NEA officials at the
sight of political posters at Beyond Baroque concerning anti-nuclear weapon demon-
strations. Regardless of the reason, Beyond Baroque faced the most severe crisis of its
existence. The band X gave a benefit concert that cleared more than $10,000, which
kept the organization going, though in a rather dilapidated condition. When news arrived
of the NEA decision not to fund Beyond Baroque, poet Jim Cushing wrote an article in
which he described Fisher's office: "A square area of plaster the size of a bulletin board
has fallen off the wall, exposing the boards. Beneath this ruin is a green plastic waste-
basket full of rainwater. A sign over her desk reads, 'Metaphors be with you.' "49
The poets who rallied to save Beyond Baroque were not rewarded. Although a poet,
Dennis Phillips, was the primary administrative person from 1985 to 1988, the general
34 BILL MOHR
cultural shift toward prose and the novel that was occurring on a national level found
Beyond Baroque's poetic community too exhausted to offer substantial resistance when
the organization also tilted in that direction. Benjamin Weissman, a prose writer who
displayed little knowledge of contemporary poetry and who was openly disdainful of
many of the oldest poets associated with the original Beyond Baroque workshop, main-
tained control of the reading series until almost the mid-point of the 1990S. But even
as the poets associated with Kirsch's "golden age" floundered, survival brought Beyond
Baroque an odd kind of fame. By the late 1980s and early 1990S, it had begun to be
recognized as such an important institution that a multitude of writers as prominent as
Ann Beattie, Charles Baxter, and Raymond Carver gave readings to standing-room-only
audiences. Weissman certainly did not exclude poets from his series, but readings by
the oldest members of Beyond Baroque's poetic community became rarer and rarer as
well-established figures such as John Ashbery, Philip Levine, Mark Strand, and Edward
Hirsch were given precedence in snagging the slots left over after fiction writers were
selected. Weissman's tenure was marked by Beyond Baroque's growing reputation
among nationally recognized writers as one of the best places to read on the West
Coast, and audiences continued to embrace the reading series. His dismissal by Beyond
Baroque's next president, D. B. Finnegan, served to release long-dormant resentments
and festering disputes within the poetic community, and eventually it led to outright
power-play politics and to Finnegan's resignation. Weissman himself left within a year,
and Beyond Baroque limped along under the direction of Tosh Berman, son of the
famous collagist, Wallace Berman.
The backdrop for this bleak period was the disappearance, one by one, of the book-
stores that had been most supportive of the small presses in Los Angeles: Intellectual
& Liars, Papa Bach, George Sand, and Chatterton's. The Los Angeles Times announced
in 1985 that it would no longer run reviews of poetry books; what little was reviewed,
such as Poetry Loves Poetry, the anthology of Los Angeles poets from Momentum
Press, failed to address the extraordinary diversity of work being done in Los Angeles
by poets such as Doren Robbins, Michael C. Ford, Wanda Coleman, Laurel Ann Bogen,
David Trinidad, and Amy Gerstler. Between 1980 and 1985, the magazines and small
presses that had provided a core group of Los Angeles-area poets their primary visi-
bility ceased operation: Bachy, Invisible City/Red Hill Press, Momentum/Momentum
Press, and rara avis, which was edited by Aleida Rodriguez and Jacqueline DeAngelis,
faltered without completing all of the projects they yearned to produce.
Poet-actor Harry Northup responded by starting a reading series at the Gasoline
Alley coffee house on Melrose Avenue and eventually launched a poets' cooperative with
Holly Prado, Cecilia Woloch, James Cushing, and Phoebe MacAdams named Cahuenga
Press. New magazines did sprout up: Rob Cohen's Caffeine adopted Beyond Baroque's
strategy from the 1970S and distributed its post-punk pages free throughout Los Ange-
les. Leland Hickman began a ten-issue run of Temblor, a magazine crafted by a master
typesetter whose years of editorial labor provided a major forum for the maverick
experimental poets featured in Ron Silliman's In the American Tree. 5o Jim Krusoe
coaxed Santa Monica Community College into starting a literary magazine called Santa
Exploring the Variety of Random
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rollo Learning
to Read
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Title: Rollo Learning to Read
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROLLO LEARNING

TO READ ***
The
Rollo Books
by
Jacob Abbott.
New York: T.Y. Crowell & Co.
YOU CAN SEE THE RAFT, &c.—Page 121.
ROLLO LEARNING TO READ.
THE ROLLO SERIES

IS COMPOSED OF FOURTEEN VOLUMES, VIZ.:
Rollo Learning to Talk. Rollo’s Museum.
Rollo Learning to Read. Rollo’s Travels.
Rollo at Work. Rollo’s Correspondence.
Rollo at Play. Rollo’s Philosophy—Water.
Rollo at School. Rollo’s Philosophy—Air.
Rollo’s Vacation. Rollo’s Philosophy—Fire.
Rollo’s Experiments. Rollo’s Philosophy—Sky.
A NEW EDITION, REVISED BY THE AUTHOR.
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by

PHILLIPS, SAMPSON & CO.,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
NOTICE TO PARENTS.
In those intervals of rest which the serious cares and labors of life
imperiously demand, a man may find the best amusement for
himself in efforts for the amusement of children. This little work and
its predecessor, “Rollo Learning to Talk,” have been written on this
principle.
Parents find it very difficult to employ little children. “Mother, what
shall I do?” and sometimes even, “Mother, what shall I do after I
have done this?” are heard so often that they sometimes exhaust
even maternal patience. These little volumes will, we hope, in some
cases, provide an answer to the questions. The writer has
endeavored to make them such that children would take an interest
in reading them to themselves, and to their younger brothers and
sisters, and in repeating them to one another.
The difficulty with most books intended for children just learning
to read, is that the writers make so much effort to confine
themselves to words of one syllable, that the style is quaint and
uninteresting, and often far more unintelligible than the usual
language would be. The author’s design here has been, first to
interest the little reader, hoping, by this interest, to allure him on to
the encounter of the difficulties in the language, and to the conquest
of them. Hence, the more difficult words and phrases, in common
use, are not avoided, for the very object of such a reading book
should be to teach the use of them. They are freely introduced and
rendered intelligible by being placed in striking connections, and
familiar, by being frequently repeated. By a wonderful provision in
the structure of the mind, children thirst for repetition,—the very
thing essential to give security and permanence to the knowledge
they acquire.
The subjects of the articles, accordingly, and the method of
treating them, are in the highest degree juvenile. But the language
is mature. For it is language which we wish to teach them, and
consequently we must keep, in language, a little above them,
advancing continually ourselves, as they advance.
J. A.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
How Rollo learned to Read 9
The First Lessons in Looking 22
Tick,—Tick,—Tick 26
Jonas 31
A Little Letter 41
Rollo’s Dream 44
The Cold Morning 59
How to Read Right 64
Climbing up a Mountain 77
Rollo getting Ready for his Father 80
The Way to Obey 84
Rollo’s Breakfast 88
Fictitious Stories 95
The Fly’s Morning Walk 98
Waking Up 101
Rollo’s Prayer 109
Bunny 111
The Raft 116
Contrary Charles 122
Frost on the Windows 132
Shooting a Bear 135
Jack Hildigo 145
How to Treat a Kitten 152
Overboard 166
Old Things and New Things 171
Selling a Boy 174
ROLLO LEARNING TO READ.
HOW ROLLO LEARNED TO READ.

Should you like to know how Rollo learned to read? I will tell you.
It is very hard work to learn to read, and it takes a great while to do
it. I will tell you how Rollo did it.
One evening Rollo was sitting on the floor by the side of the fire,
playing with his blocks. He was trying to build a meeting-house. He
could make the meeting-house very well, all except the steeple, but
the steeple would tumble down.
Presently his father said,
“Rollo, you may put your blocks into the basket, and put the
basket in its place, in the closet, and then come to me.”
Rollo obeyed.
Then Rollo’s father took him up into his lap, and took a little book
out of his pocket. Rollo was glad. He thought he was going to look
at some pictures. But he was disappointed.
He was disappointed; that is, he found there were no pictures in
the book, and was sorry.
His father said,
“I suppose you thought there were pictures in this book.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rollo.
“There are none,” said his father; “I have not got this book to
amuse you. I am going to have you learn to read out of it, and
learning to read is hard work.”
Rollo was very glad when he heard this. He wanted to learn to
read, so that he could read story books himself alone, and he
thought that learning to read was very pleasant, easy work.
His father knew that he thought so, and therefore he said,
“I suppose you are glad that you are going to learn to read, but it
is harder work, and will take longer time than you think. You will get
tired very often, before you have learned, and you will want to stop.
But you must not stop.”
“What,” said Rollo, “must not I stop once—at all—all the time, till I
have learned to read?”
“Oh yes,” said his father; “I do not mean that you must be
learning to read all the time;—you will only read a little while every
day. What I mean is that you must read every day, when the time
comes, although you will very often think that you are tired of
reading so much, and had rather play. But no matter if you are tired
of it. It is your duty to learn to read, and you must do it, if it is
hard.”
“I do not think I shall be tired,” said Rollo.
“Very well,—you can see. Only remember if you should be tired,
you must not say so, and ask not to read.”
Rollo’s father then opened the book and showed Rollo that it was
full of letters,—large letters, and small letters, and a great many little
words in columns. Do you know what a column is? There was also
some very easy reading in large print, but no pictures.
Then Rollo’s father explained the plan by which he was to learn to
read. His sister Mary was to teach him. Mary was to call him to her
every morning at nine o’clock, and teach him his letters for a quarter
of an hour. She was to do the same at eleven, and at three, and at
five. The rest of the time Rollo was to have for play. Mary was to
take three or four of the letters at a time, and tell Rollo the names of
them, and make them on the slate, and let him try to make them,
and let him try to find them in books, until he should know them
perfectly. She was to keep an account of every day, marking the
days when, for any reasons, she did not hear him, and putting
down, each day, the letters he learned that day, and as soon as he
had learned all his letters she was to tell his father.
If he should at any time refuse to come when she called him, or
come sullenly or in ill humor,—or if he disobeyed her, or made her
any trouble, wilfully, she was to put the book away at once, and not
teach him any more that day, but at night tell his father.
When Rollo’s father had thus explained the whole plan, he said,
“Now, Mary and Rollo, this is a hard task for both of you, I know. I
hope you will both be patient and persevering,—and be kind to one
another. Mary, you must remember that Rollo is a small boy, and
cannot learn as fast as you might expect or wish,—you must be kind
to him and patient. Be sure also to be punctual and regular in calling
him at the exact hour. And Rollo you must be patient too, and
obedient, and you must remember that though it is hard work to
learn to read, you will be very glad when you shall have learned. You
will then enjoy a great many happy hours in sitting down by the fire
in your little chair, and reading story books.”
Soon after this Rollo went to bed thinking a great deal of his first
lesson, which he was going to take the next day.
Do you not think now that it would have been better if Rollo’s
father had tried to make learning to read more amusing to his little
boy? He might have got a book with letters and pictures too,—or he
might have bought some blocks and cards with letters on them, and
let Rollo learn by playing with them. That would have been more
amusing. Do you think that would have been a better way? I think it
would not. For if Rollo had begun to learn to read, expecting to find
it play, he would have been disappointed and discouraged a great
deal sooner. He might have looked at the pictures in his book, or
played with the cards or the blocks, but that would not have taught
him the letters on them. It was better that he should understand
distinctly at the beginning that learning to read was hard work, and
that he must attend to it as a duty; thus he would be prepared for it
as it was, and find it more and more pleasant as he went along. But
if he had expected that it would be play, he would only have been
disappointed, and that would have made it harder, and made it take
a great deal longer time.
Rollo liked reading very well for a day or two, but he soon became
tired. He thought the quarter of an hour was very long, and that
Mary always called him too soon. He was mistaken however in this,
for Mary was always very exact and punctual. He found too that he
got along very slowly. It was a good many days before he could say
the first few letters, and he thought it would take a great while
before he should have learned them all. One pleasant morning,
when he was digging with his little hoe, in the yard, Mary called him,
and for a minute or two he had a great mind not to come. But then
he recollected that if he did not, she would immediately put the book
away and tell his father at night, so he threw down the hoe and ran.
But it was very hard for him to do it.
In a few days one thing surprised both Mary and Rollo. It was that
he learned the second four or five letters a great deal sooner than
he did the first. They did not understand the reason of this. The
third lesson was learned sooner still, and so on, the farther they
went down the alphabet the faster Rollo learned.
One evening when Rollo had learned about half his letters, his
father took him up in his lap, and took a small round box out of his
pocket, with a pretty picture on the top. Besides the picture there
were three letters; they were these, A, B, C. Rollo looked a moment
at the picture, but he was more pleased with the letters than the
picture. He was very much pleased to see those letters,—the very
letters which he had learned, on the top of such a pretty box.
“Oh there is A,” said he, “and B, and C, on the top of this pretty
box. How funny!”
Then his father opened the box and poured out a great many
beautiful round cards into Rollo’s lap. There were beautiful, painted
pictures on one side and letters on the other. Rollo was most
interested in looking at the letters.
“Oh, father,” said he, “what beautiful cards! Why did you not buy
them at first, and let me learn my letters with them?”
“Because,” said his father, “if I had bought them at first, when you
did not know any of your letters, you would have not been pleased
with any thing but the pictures, and rolling the cards about the floor.
Or if I had given them to Mary to teach you your letters from them,
then you would not have liked them any better than your book. But
by letting you learn for a time from your book, till you know a good
many letters, you can understand the cards, and you notice the
letters on them; and when you play with them you will remember a
great many letters on them, and thus you will become more familiar
with them.”
“With what?” said Rollo.
“With the letters,” said his father.
“What is familiar with them?” asked Rollo.
“Why you will know them better, and remember them longer,—and
you will know them quicker when you see them again in books. That
is being familiar with them. Do you not think you will like this box of
cards a great deal better now, to play with, than before you knew
any letters?”
“Yes, sir, I was very glad to see the A B C on it.”
After this Rollo played a great deal with his cards, and though he
did not learn any new letters from them, they helped him to become
familiar with the letters as fast as he learned them from his book.
The last part of the alphabet Rollo learned very fast, and at length
one evening Mary and Rollo came together to their father, telling him
with smiling faces that he had learned them all.
Then Rollo’s father gave him a long lesson in reading little words—
he gave him a great many columns, so many, that it would take a
good many weeks to read them all. Mary was to hear him four times
every day. Then he read the easy sentences over in the end of his
book, and a good many others in another book, until at last he could
read very well alone. It took a long time, however, to do all this
reading. When he finished learning to read he was more than a year
older than he was when he began. The stories in this book are for
him to read, so that he may learn to read better. You can read them
too. Farther on in this book I shall tell you more about Rollo.
In reading these stories Rollo found a great many words which he
could not understand. He always asked some one what these words
meant, for he wanted to understand what he read perfectly. His
father advised him to read his story book aloud too, unless when it
would disturb some one, because by reading aloud he would learn
faster.
THE FIRST LESSONS IN LOOKING.
When the baby was very little indeed, and first began to open his
eyes, his mother saw that the bright light of the windows dazzled
them, and gave him pain; so she shut the blinds and put down the
curtains.
When the baby was so very little, he did not know how to look
about at the things which were around him. He had not learned to
move his eyes steadily from one thing to another. He could not take
hold of any thing, either, with his hands. He did not know that his
hands were made to take hold of things with. His mother held a
handsome ivory ring before him, and endeavored to make him see it
and take it. She put it in his hand, but he did not know how to hold
it, and it dropped upon the floor.
The baby was very weak too. He could not walk nor sit up, nor
even hold up his head. Unless his mother held his head for him, it
would drop down and hang upon his shoulder. Once she laid him
down upon the bed, and she went away a minute or two. While she
was gone he rolled over on his face, and was so weak that he could
not get back again. I do not think he knew how to try. His mother
came back and lifted him up, or perhaps he would have been stifled.
One day his mother said, “Oh, how many things I have got to
teach my little child. I must teach him to look, and to hold up his
head, and to take things in his hands, and I must do all these things
while he is quite a little baby.”
She thought she would first teach him to look. So she let in a little
light, and when he was quiet and still, she held him so that he could
see it. But he did not seem to notice it, and pretty soon he went to
sleep.
The next day she tried it again; and again on the following day;
and soon she found that he would look very steadily at the white
curtain, or at the place where the sun shone upon the wall. She did
not yet try to make him look at little things, for she knew she could
not hope to make him see little things till he had learned to notice
something large and bright.
When Samuel was lying in his mother’s lap, looking steadily at
something; she was always careful not to move him, or to make any
noise, or to do any thing which would distract his attention. She
knew that children were always puzzled with having two things to
think of at a time, and she was afraid that if while he was thinking of
the light and trying to look at it, he should hear voices around him,
he would stop thinking of the light, and begin to wonder what that
noise could be.
In about a week, Samuel had learned his lesson very well. He
could look pretty steadily at a large bright spot when it was still.
Then his mother thought she would try to teach him to look at
something smaller. She therefore asked his father to buy her a large
bright orange, and one day when he was lying quietly in her lap, she
held it up before him. But he would not notice it; he seemed to be
looking at the window beyond.
Then his mother turned her chair gently round, and sat with her
back towards the window so that he could not see the window, and
then he looked at the orange. Presently she moved the orange
slowly,—very slowly,—backwards and forwards, to teach him to
follow it with his eyes. Thus the baby took his first lessons in
looking.
TICK,—TICK,—TICK.
One morning I was going to take a journey. I was going in the
stage. I expected that the sleigh bells would come jingling up to the
door for me at seven o’clock. So I thought that if I wished to be
ready, I must get up at six.
I went into my little room where I was to sleep. There was a clock
on the wall, by the side of my bed. It said tick,—tick,—tick. “I am
glad,” said I to myself, “for now I can see what o’clock it is.” So I put
my lamp down on the floor, and put my spectacles behind my pillow,
and then laid down and went to sleep.
By and by I woke and thought I heard a little noise. I listened. It
was the clock, saying tick,—tick,—tick; and I said to myself, “I
wonder what o’clock it is?” So I sat up, and took my spectacles from
behind my pillow, and put them on my nose, and looked up at the
clock. The lamp which was on the floor shone upon the clock so that
I could see, and I saw that it was only three o’clock, and I said, “Oh,
it is only three o’clock. It is not time for me to get up yet.” So I took
my spectacles off of my nose, and put them behind my pillow, and
laid me down again. The clock kept saying, tick,—tick,—tick.
Pretty soon I went to sleep, and I slept an hour. Then I awoke and
said to myself, “I wonder what o’clock it is?” So I sat up, and took
my spectacles from behind my pillow, and put them on my nose, and
looked up at the clock. The lamp which was upon the floor shone
upon the clock, so that I could see, and I saw that it was only four
o’clock, and I said, “Oh, it is only four o’clock; it is not time for me to
get up yet.” So I took my spectacles off of my nose, and put them
behind my pillow, and laid me down again. The clock kept saying all
the while, tick,—tick,—tick.
Pretty soon, I went to sleep, and slept some time. Then I woke,
and said to myself, “I wonder what o’clock it is?” So I sat up, and
took my spectacles from behind my pillow, and put them on my
nose, and looked up at the clock. The lamp which was upon the floor
shone upon the clock, so that I could see, and I saw that it was only
five o’clock, and I said, “Oh, it is only five o’clock. It is not time for
me to get up yet.” So I took my spectacles off of my nose, and put
them behind my pillow, and laid me down again. The clock kept
saying all the while, tick,—tick,—tick.
Pretty soon I went to sleep, and slept some time. When I woke, I
said to myself, “I wonder what o’clock it is?” So I sat up, and took
my spectacles from behind my pillow, and put them on my nose, and
looked up at the clock. The lamp which was upon the floor shone
upon the clock, so that I could see, and I saw that it was six o’clock.
Then I said now it is time for me to get up. So I jumped up and
dressed me, and looked out of the window, and there was a
beautiful, bright star shining in the sky. The star was up before me.
When I was ready I opened the door to go out; but the clock still
kept saying tick,—tick,—tick. I wondered what made the clock keep
going so all the night and all the day, and I went back and opened
the door to see. And what do you think I found? Why, I found a
great heavy weight hung to a string, and the string was fastened to
some of the little wheels up in the clock. The weight kept pulling
down and pulling down all the time, slowly, and it pulled the string
down slowly, and the string made the wheels go round, and the
wheels made the hands go, and some of the little wheels made that
noise I heard,—tick,—tick,—tick.
What do you think happens when the weights which make the
clock go get down, down, to the very bottom of the clock? Why,
then they have to wind them up to the top again, and they begin
anew.
JONAS.
One fine summer evening a gentleman came riding down a hill in a
country covered with pleasant farm houses, green fields, and little
groups of trees. He had a small boy in the wagon with him.
There was a brook at the bottom of the hill. A bridge was built
over the brook, and the road passed over the bridge. The horse and
waggon, with the gentleman and his boy in it, went swiftly over the
bridge and up the hill; but just as they began to ascend, one of the
traces broke.
One of the traces? What is a trace? Do you know my boy? The
traces are those long, stout straps of leather which pass along the
sides of the horse, and are fastened to the waggon. The horse
draws a waggon, or a chaise, by means of the traces. Therefore they
are always made very strong. You can see a picture of some traces
in “Rollo learning to Talk,” a book about as large as this, at the story
of a Goat for a Horse. The next time you take a ride, I advise you to
look at the traces on the horse, and see how strong they are. See
too how they are fastened to the horse, and how they are fastened
to the chaise.
If one of the traces should give way, that is, should break, in
going up a hill, what do you think would be the consequence? Why,
the waggon would go back, partly held by the other trace. That was
the way with this waggon; it went back, the horse was frightened,
the gentleman jumped out, the boy called out, “whoa,—whoa,—
WHOA.”
It did not do any good. Boys had better be still when there is any
difficulty.
The waggon backed until, just as it was going off the bank, a boy
ran up and put a stone behind the wheel. That stopped it.
This was not the boy who was in the waggon. It was another boy.
The gentleman had not seen him before. He had on light colored
clothes, a patched jacket, and an old straw hat; one side of the brim
was almost worn out with catching butterflies; the knees of his
trousers were stained with the grass. The gentleman looked at him a
minute, and said “thank you, my boy.” Then he began to look at the
harness. When the gentleman had examined the traces, he found
that the leather was not broken; it was only the tongue of a buckle
by which the trace was fastened that was gone; for the harness was
new, and the waggon was a handsome one.
“I wish I had a piece of twine to fasten it with, till we get home,”
said he to his son, as he felt in his pockets. He then looked around
to see where the little fellow was who had trigged the wheel. Do you
know what I mean by trigging the wheel? The boy was sitting on the
trunk of a tree, by the side of the road, and as the gentleman turned
around to see him, he was just pulling out a long piece of twine from
his pocket.
“Here is a string, sir,” said he; and he got up and came to the
gentleman. He seemed tired however, for he went back and sat
down again immediately.
“I thank you,” said he, “but I am afraid it is not strong enough.”
“You can double and twist it,” said the boy.
They twisted the string, and then doubled it and twisted it again,
and so tied the harness. The gentleman and his son then got into
the waggon again, and were going to ride up the hill. The gentleman
hesitated a moment whether he ought to offer to pay the boy for his
string or not. Do you think he ought to?
“I would pay him,” whispered his little son; “he looks like a poor
boy.”
“Yes,” replied his father,“but perhaps he would make a bad use of
the money. Perhaps his father and mother would not like to have
him have any money.”
“Why cannot you ask him?”
The gentleman then turned to the boy who was still sitting on the
log, and said,
“What is your name, my little fellow?”
“Jonas.”
“Where do you live?”
“Sir?”
“Where do you live?”
The boy hesitated a moment as if he did not understand him.
Then he said,
“I don’t know sir.—I don’t live any where.”
The little boy in the waggon laughed.
“Don’t know where you live?” said the gentleman. “Well, what are
you doing out here?”
“I have been catching butterflies.”
“Where did you come from?”
“I don’t know sir.—I came from the city.”
“The city! What city?”
“I don’t know sir,—the city back there. I don’t know what the
name of it is.”
JONAS SITTING ON A LOG.—Page 86.
“Do you live in the city?”
“No, sir, I am not going to live there any more?”
“Do your father and mother live there?”
“My father is dead; and I have not got any mother.”
“What has become of your mother?”
“I never had any, sir.”
The gentleman smiled a moment when he heard this answer, and
then he looked serious and concerned and paused a moment. He
seemed not to know what to do.
“But, Jonas,” said he again, “you say you do not live any where;
where do you get your food and sleep?”
“Sir!”
“Where do you sleep at night?”
“I slept in Mr. Williams’ shed last night.”
“And where do you expect to sleep to-night?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Where did you get your breakfast this morning?”
“A man gave me some.”
“And where did you get your dinner?”
“I have not had any dinner, sir.”
“No dinner!—I should think you would be too tired and hungry to
chase butterflies, without any dinner.”
“I was too tired, and so I stopped.”
The gentleman, after talking with the boy a little longer, concluded
to take him into his waggon, and carry him home.
“Jump up behind into my waggon, Jonas,” said he, “and I will give
you some supper.”
So Jonas jumped up behind and rode home with them. You will
hear more about him hereafter, for who do you think this gentleman
was? Why it was Rollo’s father, and the boy who was riding with him
was Rollo himself. Jonas lived with Rollo a long time, and became a
very industrious, useful boy. He used to take care of Rollo, and play
with him.
A LITTLE LETTER.
This is a letter written to a little boy about as large as you. James
is the name of the boy. James’ uncle wrote it.
The letter.
“Dear James,
Do you want me to write you a little letter about a robin? I
think you do. Well; I will write it. Now I will begin. A robin is a
bird. A robin has two wings and two legs; he flies in the air; it is
his wings make him go. When he comes down to the ground,
he hops along on his two legs. When he sees a worm he picks it
up with his bill. Do you know what his bill is? It is a mouth.
Then he picks it up just as the hen does, and eats it. Now for
the story.
Near the house where I live, there is a field; and in the field
there is a tree. I was walking in the field, and went near the
tree; as I went near it, a bird darted out of the tree, and sung
out very loud; it made me start. When I saw it was a bird, I
looked among the leaves and branches of the tree, and found
there a pretty robin’s nest, and three eggs. Only think, a
beautiful nest, with three eggs. I looked at them for a minute,
and then went away and left them there. The next day, I walked
down to the tree again, to see the nest and the pretty eggs. I
pulled away the leaves, but the nest was not there. I stooped
down on the ground, looked into the grass, and there I saw the
robin. The poor robin was dead, the nest was torn in pieces,
and the eggs were broken. I would send you one of the eggs,
but it is broken so much, that I think it will not do. When the
little robin was alive, he sung pleasantly, he made him a nest,

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TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Intellectual life. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)-Social conditions. 4. City and town

1. INTRODUCTION: THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF LOS 1

2. PERIPHERAL OUTLAWS: BEYOND BAROQUE AND THE

3. THE LOS ANGELES WOMAN'S BUILDING AND THE

4. FORTIFYING COMMUNITY: AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

5. CONSIDERING THE ART WORLD ALTERNATIVES:

6. NOT HISTORY: REMARKS ON THE FOUNDATION FOR

7. HIGHWAYS PERFORMANCE SPACE:

8. SIGNIFYING NATIONS: CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE

9. ALL OVER THE MAP: A HISTORY OF L.A. FREEWAVES 174

10. SELF-HELP GRAPHICS: TOMAs BENITEZ TALKS TO

11. UNORTHODOX MYSTICS: SWANS THAT FLOCK TO THE

12. POPULAR CINEMAS IN LOS ANGELES: THE CASE OF

About the Contributors 25 3

communities in Los Angeles may reasonably be considered to exemplify a general sit-

to settle in relatively homogeneous and autonomous clusters produced a distinctive seg-

Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), I I.

In the encyclopedic history of post-World War II little magazines entitled A Secret

in Los Angeles manifested itself in the almost kaleidoscopic permutations engendered

Beyond Baroque: The Early Years

his breathing unthrobs

Rerun that. The fumes

Rerun that Lee Sr crumples

Rerun Lee Sr falls down

ILLUSTRATION 2.3. Alexandra Garrett, editor and indefatigable supporter of

A "Golden Age" of Los Angeles Poetry

"Coming Attractions": Beyond Baroque

Where are the human beings?

Where are the human beings

Where are the human beings

There is a soccer game

See, they have their arms

by the side of the road. 48

Beyond Baroque continued to struggle financially. It did acquire a new typesetting

Title: Rollo Learning to Read

Author: Jacob Abbott

Engraver: William Jay Baker

Release date: April 12, 2020 [eBook #61817]

Credits: Produced by David Edwards, David E. Brown, and the

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROLLO LEARNING

THE ROLLO SERIES

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by

HOW ROLLO LEARNED TO READ.

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