[Landline] "You ready, girls?"

Chrissie Hynde's genius, Jane Wodening's life, Diane di Prima's occult library, more

Maybe we take Chrissie Hynde for granted? We shouldn’t, she’s a crucial part of rock n roll, absolutely sui generis in her hippie-to-punk-rocknroll life/career/attitude¹, and come on, she’s composed so many all-time classic songs, by turns sensitive and sassy, venomous and poetic, frank and intelligent. All this in spite of losing half of her (as they say) extremely scorching band to drugs/death so early in their career. How potent a powerhouse the Pretenders were in their original formation can be viewed at many points (“The Wait,” “Up the Neck,” “Tattooed Love Boys,” “Bad Boys Get Spanked,” “Precious,” “Brass in Pocket”) in this full-length, made-for-German-TV live concert from 1981 that recently appeared on youtube to (as usual for the Pretenders!) not nearly enough fanfare:

An admiring English author addressed her directly as “you absolute legend” in a “celebrities, colleagues and fans ask Chrissie questions” article that ran in the Guardian earlier this year, and that seems like the right way she should be spoken to, even if she shies from it, to a degree, as she does here in one answer:

When I was 17, I read Charlie Mingus’s autobiography. He described this island, this colourless island, where musicians and artists lived. And that’s how I’ve always thought of it. Writing music is not about gender, race, or any belief system, none of that sort of thing. I have been asked hundreds of times over the years, especially by female journalists, if I had to work harder because I was a woman. Or I had to fight more. But the truth is, I actually feel I was probably given more credit than I was due, because I was a novelty. I was a girl doing this.

I should add here that, to my enduring regret, when Arthur magazine went down for the count in late 2008 as the economy collapsed, the issue that didn’t make it to the printer featured a massive interview with Chrissie by Oliver Hall, with photography by Lauren Bilanko.² (You can see the piece online, here.)

Chrissie Hynde by Lauren Bilanko for Arthur magazine, 2008.

Thank you kindly to Michael Smallhead for hipping me to the fantastic obituary of the remarkable Jane Wodening (formerly Brakhage [yes, that Brakhage³]) by Penelope Green that ran in the the NYTimes earlier this month. Here’s a representative this excerpt from the obit:

…But Mr. Brakhage, never totally faithful, left Ms. Wodening for another woman, and in 1987 the couple divorced. The children had left home, the cabin was sold, as were the animals, and Ms. Wodening took off in a bright yellow Honda Civic kitted out so that she could live in it. (The back seat was removed, among other interventions.)

For three years she spent months at a time on the road, touring the country, camping in arroyos, mountain trails and friends’ driveways, even working for a spell as a tour guide at an archaeological site near Barstow, Calif., in the Mojave Desert.

For most of her adult life, she was Jane Brakhage. When she returned from her car travels, transformed, she changed her name. She settled on Wodening, meaning child of Woden, the Anglo-Saxon god; since her family lineage stretched back to the early Britons, it felt somehow appropriate, she said. And she bought property near Eldora, Colo., about 20 miles west of Boulder, a mountainous site where she lived in a Hobbit-like shack with no electricity or running water — but thousands of books and a typewriter — living a hermit’s life for the better part of a decade.

It agreed with her.

When her family worried about communicating with her in an emergency, she became a ham radio operator, learning morse code to do so, and found community among other hammers, as they called themselves, who were mostly men and introverts like herself. Her call sign ended with the letters HPH, to which she gave the phonetics “Hermits Prefer Hills.”

“To become a hermit and at the same time to become popular was not only paradoxical,” she wrote in ‘Living Up There,’ her memoir of her years in the mountains, “it was a tremendous delight.”

Ms. Wodening was the author of 14 books, including “Wolf Dictionary,” about how wolves communicate with one another. She had a loyal following and small but steady sales.

Read the rest of the obituary here; the whole thing goes on like this. Fantastic! When I get some more dollars I’ll be buying some of those 14 books, yes ma’am, but for now I’ve started listening to Jane read Living Up There on my afternoon walks (thank you, public library/Hoopla). So good, so relevant — how a mother of five grown kids, just divorced, made a new, extremely radical life for herself in her early 50s.

HPH

By the way: I discovered via Granary Books that Wodening also made tremendous collage scrapbooks from the 1962-66 period, some (many?) of which have been digitized and are viewable online via the Yale University Library. Granary describes these scrapbooks thus:

Wodening combines textual and visual material in meticulous arrangement on each page, with elements created by Stan Brakhage, the Brakhage children, as well as friends and correspondents from the era who were active in the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde movements. She collaged together letters, poems, and artworks by Robert Kelly, Carolee Schneemann, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Anger, Jack Collom, Jonas Mekas, Robert Branaman, Michael McClure, Joseph Cornell, Wallace Berman, Guy Davenport, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Denise Levertov, and others, creating her own narrative from the voices of friends in her life. She would often combine found images of saints, snowflakes, butterflies, tigers, landscapes, and other evocative terrain with newspaper and magazine clippings, children’s drawings, postcards, photographs, cards, stickers, stamps, notes, pamphlets, film strips, broadsides, family photographs, and other media.

Here’s a couple representative pages…

Just fantastic stuff to browse through, a pageant of un-random bits of wisdom and beauty to get lost and then further lost in. Renewing and invigorating!

Sideways to this, while on the Granary site I came across the recently published THE CATALOG OF THE DIANE DI PRIMA OCCULT LIBRARY, edited by M.C. Kinniburgh. Wait, what! Here’s how they describe it:

Several years in the making, this catalog contains introductory essay, photographs, and complete bibliography of poet Diane di Prima's occult library—a collection she alludes to her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman.

The library contains numerous themes that appeared in di Prima's poetry, including alchemy, medieval mysticism, premodern history, the Kabbalah, Aleister Crowley, psychedelics, crystal healing, and more. Many of the books were inscribed by friends or annotated with reading notes by di Prima, which the bibliography notes.

Click on the image above to download a PDF of the entire catalog, courtesy Granary.

You can purchase a copy of the second printing of the catalog from Granary here. Very generous of everybody involved to make a PDF of the entire catalog available for free here. And if you don’t yet know who the ferociously talented and politically committed Diane di Prima was, go here.

out of room but more soon,

stay fierce, stay safe, get beautiful,

Jay Babcock

Arizona

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1. See Chrissie’s (typically underrated) 2016 autobiography, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender.

2. That feature only happened because Chrissie come across a copy of Arthur No. 30 at a shop in Akron, and got in touch with us. Still can’t believe that happened; still can’t believe we couldn’t follow through on what we started. So it goes, but goddammit anyway. This was the cover, click on it to see details and a PDF of the entire issue:

Art direction by Yasmin Khan and Michael Worthington

3. Stan Brakhage, film artist, 1933-2003.