RIP: Literary Lioness Diane di Prima

Di Prima reads from her first book,
"This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards" in 1959

The prolific Beat poet and teacher Diane di Prima was the mother 

of five children and became a Lioness of Letters at a time when poets mostly belonged to boys' clubs. She died on October 25 at the age
of 86.

In an often-repeated anecdote from her 2001 memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, Di Prima recalls being at a "boozy, marijuana-filled party one night in New York" with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and when she announced she needed to leave at 11:30 p.m. to relieve her babysitter, Kerouac shouted, “DI PRIMA, UNLESS YOU FORGET ABOUT YOUR BABYSITTER, YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE A WRITER." 

She wrote of her decision to pursue a career in poetry, "The things I now leave behind... leaving the quiet unquestioned living and dying, the simple one-love-and-marriage, children, material pleasures, easy securities. I am leaving the houses I will never own. Dishwashers. Carpets. Dull respect of dull neighbors. None of this matters really. I have already seen it all for the prison it is."

The actress who played Don Draper's Greenwich Village girlfriend in TV's "Mad Men" read Di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) in preparation for the role. As quoted in Sisters of the Extreme, Di Prima wrote in Memoirs: "As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us—perhaps forty or fifty in the City (NY)—who knew what we knew; who raced about in Levis and work shirts, smoked dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the Black argot.....Our chief concern was to keep our integrity...and to keep our cool."

In her epic poem Loba she wrote, seemingly to the goddess Parvati: 

They call me drunkard, though I drink no liquor

I drink her nectar only; my mind reels

I sit day and night at the feet of Shiva's consort
High, not dulled with the wines of earth.  

The cosmic egg floats on the elixir of her Joy.

She delivers the low-born, I shall not leave her side. 

Virtue, ignorance, action, wisdom—these drugs delude

But when you drink Her wine, you are out of tune

And the Divine Bard loves you: she takes you on her lap.

 

and

 

Why do I regret

hours in pastel gardens where scented drugs

might have sharpened our senses?

Carolyn Cassady Steps Off the Road, Leaves Her Record

It's been reported that author Carolyn Cassady has died at the age of 90. She was the "unwilling den mother" to the Beat generation while married to Neal Cassady, the real-life inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the 1957 novel that set the Beats in motion. 

Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson was born in Lansing, Michigan on April 28, 1923. Her father was a college biochemistry professor  and her mother was an English teacher. Carolyn developed an interest in the arts at an early age and won a scholarship to Bennington College, where she studied art and drama. In 1946, she moved to Denver to work on a master's degree in fine arts and theater arts at the University of Denver. 

It was in Denver that she met Neal, Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Shocked by their free-wheeling lifestyle, she left to look for costume design work in California. Neal followed her to San Francisco and they were married on April 1, 1948 while she was pregnant with the first of their three children. 

In her book Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg (William Morris, 1990), Carolyn recounts how Neal turned her on to marijuana, telling her: "Now darling, listen to me. You must have no fear, hear me? It is completely harmless, I promise you. All the tales you're doubtless heard are entirely false, perpetrated by Anslinger and his boys to keep up employment in the narcotic squads. All this does is heighten your sensory perception, awaken your own true awareness and speed up your thought processes while giving the impression that time has immeasurably slowed. You'll see more and see better…colors…patterns…you'll hear every note of every instrument, simultaneously. You'll be amazed at how much you usually miss…You think you've heard music? You've never heard it until you hear it on tea….Then, after a while, we'll dig into that delicious pie you've made and which we were too full to eat, and you'll taste as you never have before…pure ambrosia, you'll see."

He put her on a program of smoking "Tea" every night for a week, so that she could see get accustomed to the effects and wouldn't have to worry about getting paranoid. He taught her how to inhale it and to stop after a few "respectable puffs." Carolyn writes, "Everything he had described proved true, my favorite being the sense of extended time. After savoring the pie, we lay flat on our backs by the phonograph, the music vibrating every cell. . . .I enjoyed the time extension and the second-by-second awareness, as well as the physical feeling of well-being, but I never got over the fear of being caught in an illegal act." After getting too "stoned" (feeling immobilized) at an event, she gave it up, saying she resented "control of my mind by an outside agent."

Neal worked for 10 years as a brakeman on Southern Pacific Railroad to support Carolyn and their children, but he never tamed his wild ways, cheating on her with other women and men (namely Ginsberg), and taking off to Mexico and elsewhere to score weed. She had an understandable and sanctioned affair with the more gentle Jack Kerouac while he lived with them in San Francisco, and the three shared many nights of Tea [marijuana] and conversation. She chronicled the time in her book Heart Beat: My Life with Jack and Neal (1976) which was made into a movie in 1980 starring Sissy Spacek as Carolyn and Nick Nolte as Neal. Kerouac cast her as Camille in On the Road (played by Kirsten Dunst in the 2012 film adaptation); Carolyn is also the inspiration for Evelyn in Big Sur.

Months after On the Road was published, Neal was arrested for giving away a few joints at a North Beach party and sent to prison for two years. After Neal was arrested, Carolyn said in an interview, “The very next morning the Mercury-News printed this story. This eager-beaver reporter talked to some police chief--and none of them knew nothing yet--so they make up this wonderful story about how Neal was part of a gang that was importing marijuana from Los Angeles and Mexico on the Southern Pacific trains. That’s why he could never get his job on the Southern Pacific again. Even though they retracted it, they said it didn’t matter--it was in the paper. So they never took him back, and that’s what killed him.”

After prison, Neal took a job at a tire factory and Carolyn chronicled how he escaped more frequently into smoking pot and taking benzedrine and morphine as well as "anything else available....In the next four short years I saw him pursue death with every breath of life." He joined the Merry Pranksters on some of their LSD escapades, and it's interesting to read the account of that self indulgence from the point of view of the wife left behind. On his way to getting his old job back at the railroad, he was re-arrested and ended up back with the Pranksters instead.

On February 4, 1968 Neal was found collapsed beside a railroad track in Mexico, after he had reportedly taken a barbituate and alcohol at a wedding. He died there four days before his 42nd birthday. Kerouac, who told Carolyn he would be joining Neal soon, died the following year, after drinking himself to death.

An interview with Carolyn late in her life reveals that she was instrumental in advancing parapsychology and making acupuncture legal in California. 

Here's to Carolyn Cassidy, who survived and held her family together in the face of drug-war repression, and left us her story.

(Just found: A 1950s housewife takes LSD)

Jennifer Lawrence: I Just Won an Oscar! I'm Going to Hawaii to Smoke Pot

"As if we needed another reason to love Jennifer Lawrence," said Michael Hogan of The Huffington Post after photos of Lawrence apparently puffing pot on a balcony in Hawaii appeared days after she picked up the Best Actress Academy Award for Silver Linings Playbook. 

Lawrence tripped up the steps in her big puffy gown, and was game enough to joke about it. After admittedly having a shot of booze before talking to reporters backstage, she righteously flipped one the bird when he asked the stupid question, "Have you peaked too soon (at 22)?" 

What's not to love about this woman? "She's a 22-year-old cool person," effused Hogan, and that persona was enough to win her Hollywood's top prize (probably because she should have won it for Hunger Games.) 

When Spin magazine asked her in March 2012, "What were you listening to the first time you smoked pot?" She wisely replied, "I so cannot answer that question. I'm in a franchise." (Which, you will notice, is not a "no.")

Astute observer/historian Michael Aldrich, among others, predicts that Lawrence won't suffer from the pot-parazzi pix, unlike stars of the past. "I'm remembering back to the days when any starlet (say, Lila Leeds) caught with a reefer was condemned to 'Be contrite, confess, and crusade' against the drug," said Aldrich. "These days I have a feeling there will be no contrition or confession, and if there's any crusade it's among the bloggers who have followed this on Twitter, unanimously saying 'Legalize It!'" (Leeds looks rather like Lawrence in this shot, right, from the 1947 film Lady in the Lake.)

Meanwhile, Lawrence dyed her hair back to black just after the ceremony, making her look more like someone touted as her rival, the pot-loving Kristen Stewart. Stewart didn't have a good Oscar night, appearing on crutches on the red carpet after cutting her foot two days earlier. But the previews of On the Road,  starring Stewart and another pot lover, Kirsten Dunst as Carolyn Cassidy, look like the movie, based on the Jack Kerouac novel, just might make people forget Jennifer Lawrence for a time. 

Even while Hollywood embraces pot in its stars and plots, how many other cool young chicks, and dudes, aren't as lucky as Lawrence and Stewart when the chemical McCarthyism of drug testing means they lose their job. That is, unless they work in Silicon Valley. 

See the true Hunger Games. 

Read more about the Oscars.