Gerald Hausman

More on Maurice Sendak

2012-03-08T13:48:00.001-08:00

So many people have written me in the past couple of days saying that they too had a meeting with the Master.

A bestselling children's book author told me that his career was actually launched by Maurice because he sent out his first book in manuscript to a bunch of authors he admired and only one responded. That one was the one. Yep. Maurice. And his letter made up for the missing others.

Catherine Balkin (Balkin's Buddies) wrote the other day: "I wore the Wild Things costume a few times, once at an event where Maurice was speaking. When I came up on stage, Maurice bent toward me and whispered, "I bet you're hot in there." He was right."

Then a friend who was a both a children's author and an actor sent me this: "Did I tell you how we met? He had a condo in the same building where I was staying and one night after the ballet or opera, I saw Maurice getting out of a cab. He held the door for me, but I told him no thanks. He seemed a little put out that I had pretended to want a cab, so I explained to him that I had wanted a cab, but now I was more interested in meeting him. That cheered him up and we strolled around the neighborhood. He pointed out where he wrote Wild Things and we said we’d keep in touch. We did, and had lovely days in Ridgefield every now and then."

Maurice Sendak may not be an angel but he is a saint. In my book, and I mean book. He has helped so very many people that I know and so many more I have only read. For instance, once he told me that when Edward Gorey was not very well known and still wearing a WW I airman's hat and goggles around the streets of New York, Maurice asked him if he'd like an introduction to his editor. Gorey said, "They wouldn't be interested in me." So Maurice took that as a challenge and asked his editor if the firm would be interested in Edward Gorey. And the answer: "He wouldn't be interested in us." I don't think Maurice got EG to take off his leather airman's skullcap, but he did get him published by a major house.

There is a tendency today for authors who've "made it", as we used to say in the 70s, to forget how it was coming up. They forget -- some of them -- how much it means to a young author, would-be or not, to hear a word of cheer. Maurice, despite the curmudgeonly play-acting, is one of the few who always lent a hand, and, thankfully, still does.

the aliens among us

2012-02-13T11:47:00.000-08:00

A friend just emailed and said another friend said, "The times are changing and they've never been worse." I decided I'd see how much worse. I time-traveled via Google, to 1978.

Back then the headlines read THE GREAT GOD GASOLINE.

So I traveled back another 100 years to 1878. The headlines read FIRST TELEPHONE DIRECTORY. I looked at the fine print and it said there were 50 names in the book.

What else was going on in 1878?

Well, the Standard Oil monopoly was just getting started, which is to say, just getting omnipotent. There were the usual strikes, wars, famines, and hair-raising homocides, so I decided to tick the time clock forward to 1883 and see what things were like. That was the year the U.S. Supreme Court decided that, by birth, American Indians were aliens, and dependents.

I flipped forward to 1978. The aliens were in the news again -- new aliens, ones from other galaxies. People were seeing them everywhere.

Forward . . . back, as they say, to 2012. Aliens still in the news: illegal, once again. And what about the aliens behind podiums, they were plentifully in the news but not named as such.

"Are things worser or betterer?" my grandson asks.

George Dawson, a grandson of slaves, said only a few years ago, "Things are getting better, I do believe." If you agree, maybe you might want to do what he did -- try going back to elementary school, learn how to read, how to be polite, how to share, how to be nice. Wouldn't that be something you could call news? Mr. Dawson did it, but then again, from what I've read, he was always a nice man.

So -- worser or betterer?

Doesn't matter if we can just learn to be nice.

From Lorca to Dylan

2012-01-30T08:25:00.000-08:00

I read The Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca 47 years ago and I have been carrying them in my head ever since. Sometimes I wake and they are there. The myrtle and lime. The three hundred crimson roses. The trail of tears and tinny lights. The moon by sounding water. And then I come to this, and it always stops me:

Green as I would have you be.
Green wind. Green boughs.
The boat on the sea
And the horse on the mountain.

I remember reciting these lines to my professor, Dr. Richard O'Connell, translator with James-Graham Lujan of Five Plays by Lorca, and he smiled. "Whose translation is that?" he asked.

I told him, "Rolfe Humphries."

Doc, as we called him, looked a little uneasy. "Rolfe will forgive me if I say he got it wrong. It needs to be more like, 'Green, green, I want you green.'"

He emphasized it with his hands, clasping the air, grabbing at the invisible but palpable green. "Maybe desire is a better word than want," he said. "Have you heard it better?" he asked.

"Maybe I said, and I recited:

Green green rocky road
promenade in green
Tell me who you love
Tell me who you love

"That isn't Lorca!" Doc said.

"It's Len Chandler, folksinger-poet. I heard him sing his green song at The Gaslight in Greenwich Village in 1962. Len played the 12 string and he could really get you going with that song. Bob Dylan was usually in the audience."

"Who's that?" Doc asked.

Federico Garcia Lorca

All Is Beautiful All Around Me: Navajo Ways and Ceremonial Stories

2012-01-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

I've done a post on this book earlier, but today it comes out as a digital book on Amazon.com and Nook, so I feel I should say something about this new edition.

What can you get out of a book like this?

The stories, all of them oral renditions of Navajo healing Ways, are evocations of a culture that as Tony Hillerman says in the Foreword deserves to be called "The Enduring Navajo" . . . he also adds that this same culture is "engulfed by a dominant materialistic society." Guess which one.

Frederick Turner (Beyond Geography) said this book was "a useful map of the cosmogony of North America's most populous tribe."

Frank Waters commented: "This oral equivalent to our Christian Bible loses none of its power and significance in its easy readability."

So, I believe you could read this book to heal yourself, to remember yourself, to bring yourself back into harmony with all things, which is the Navajo Way.

You have only to look at the last line of some of the stories to understand what All Is Beautiful is about:

"And all was well."

"And his wish was done."

"But his spirit is always there on the Wind's breath."

"And life was restored to the village."

These endings are merely beginnings -- to your own well being. Don't take my word for it, read this book of beginnings wherein all things merge and are one.

The Lion and the Scorpion

2012-01-02T09:43:00.000-08:00

I still think kids are the best storytellers. Here's a story told by my grandson, Taj, when he was six. He called it "The Lion and the Scorpion." And he said it very fast and I had to really race with my pen to keep up with him. Such stories have been called "Yo Mama" but basically they're just one-upsmanship word-plays called out on every playground in America. Taj said it, I scribbled it down in my journal and then Taj illustrated it, all done -- story and drawing -- in five minutes.

The Lion say, "Can't you be my friend?"

(The scorpion raises his tail . . .)

The lion he say, "I am going to eat you for breakfast if you sting me!"

The scorpion say, "Hey, you, what are you lookin at, Turtle?"

The lion say, "Hey YOU, what you lookin at, Bird? I will eat you for BREAKFAST and LUNCH and SNACK and DINNER!"

The Year in Review

2012-01-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

One time when I was on the road doing some storytelling, I read a newspaper that was full of stuff that I thought had to be made up. Of course it wasn't. It was "real." So I underlined the headlines, one after another. And then cut them out of the newspaper and taped them into my journal and they looked like this --

Two die as car speeds off lift-bridge into river

Woman believed to have stolen baby

Police kill wandering emu in suburban St Louis

Man bites panda; panda bites man

Cat kills dog; man kills cat

Hawk attacks people

Voters decided on instant runoff

Maintenance man wins 163 million

Space station receives toxin scare

Bismarkers want world snow angel title back

***

Yes, the whole voyald, as William Saroyan once said, and all the people and animals
in it hopping and popping and scrapping. I am siding with the five-year-old Jamaican girl
who read her own one-line poem on a stage where I was proud to be part of a program with
Cedella Marley and our daughter, Mariah Fox. So what did the little girl read?

She stood before hundreds of people and shook a plastic bottle full of uncooked rice
and said in a very loud voice:

"Stop the violence NOW!"

The Blessing of the Christmas Cat

2011-12-23T07:47:00.000-08:00

From The Metaphysical Cat. . .

Thus to close the year and pass the blessing along . . . there is an ancient cat myth that says a mother cat was present when baby Jesus was born. In the dove-cooing softness of the manger, kittens were born, and a mother cat did purr.

And, it is said, this sound filled the manger with a song of blessing.

There are, indeed, many stories of this kind, proving the love of Jesus Christ for animals, especially cats. One such tale tells how Jesus found a young cat on the road during one of his pilgrimages. The cat had suffered terribly from neglect, but Jesus spoke soothing words to her, and he carried her to a village and saw to it that she was well fed. Afterward, he gave the unfortunate cat to one of his disciples, a poor widow, who asked the Master a question.

"Is this not some lost sister, that you love her so?"

Jesus replied, "Verily, she has come from the great household of the Father. And whosoever cares for her and gives her food and drink in her need, shall do the same unto me."

Painting: Holly Sedgwick
Cover design/interior drawings: Mariah Fox

A Memory of Roger Zelazny & John Colter's Ears

2011-12-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

Roger and I were in Albuquerque in 1994 signing copies of Wilderness which had just come out. A lady wearing a huge cowboy hat came up to us and asked us to sign her book. While Roger was signing, she said, "Recognize me?" I gave her a pretty good stare, then said, "I'm sorry, I don't." She turned to Roger and he smiled and shook his head. The lady said, "Maybe this'll help" and she removed her cowboy hat. Neither one of us knew who she was, and she saw that. "I am John Colter's great-great-great niece," she explained. "Our book is a work of fiction," I said, "and I've only seen one photograph of John Colter, so I'm not sure if I'd catch any resemblances." Roger chuckled and the lady asked us to look at her ears. After we gave her ears a good look, she said, "Now do you see it? It was passed on down to me. I have John Colter's ears." "Indeed," Roger said, "I think you do." That satisfied her. "You know," she mentioned, "I think you both got every little detail just right." She looked fretful, then shook her head. "Except for the ears." I suggested that we did not mention the ears because they never came up in the narrative. "And that's the problem," she admitted. "Maybe you can put John's big ears in a later edition." Well, that new edition is now published after three previous ones in different languages, and still the ears go unmentioned. I hope she'll forgive us if we leave it that way.

Three Years of Kindness

2011-11-29T08:30:00.000-08:00

A few of you have asked for more doggie quotes, so here are some from the newly published, The Mythology of Dogs.

"Friend is the name of a dog" -- Jamaica

"If a man lives up to a dog, he is a saint." -- Zanzibar

"Faith is found in the dog kennel." -- Germany

"He who would stike my dog strikes me." -- Ireland

"A dog will remember three days of kindness for three years." -- Japan

All of these are ways of saying that we love dogs not only for themselves but for what we wish to be ourselves. For more than 5,000 years we've been with dogs in caves, hovels, houses and mansions. We cannot live without them. Nor can we speak too highly of them. Which is why we gathered and collected the stories, legend and lore of over 67 breeds.

The Mythology of Dogs -- updated, revised and re-published

2011-11-27T10:46:00.000-08:00

Dog riddles and proverbs from our past show that the dog is not just an icon, but a creature whose "moral sense" as Mark Twain put it, surpasses our own.

For example, where does "dog eat dog world" come from? Our book says it comes from ancient Greece. But American Indians said it this way: "Dog won't eat bear". This meant the dog was too close in kinship to the bear to eat him. So the saying also meant: "Dog won't eat dog." In time Indians and Europeans alike were saying it that way. Today's relatively modern saying, "Dog eat dog world" is a euphemism for the human condition. It's the unsettling world we live in.

There's also "dog tired", "a dog's life", and just plain "dogged" -- all these say something about our world. But don't blame the pup, the poop, the doggie bizness, because dogs didn't come up with these phrases. They're innocent, honest, absolutely faithful, fabulous furry friends who sometimes do "talk" or say things like we do.

Once at a conference for veterinarians we were thrilled to see an entire audience of seeing-eye dogs and their partners. It was musician Paul Winter's greatest moment of glory, we think. He stood before a full crowd of dog people and doggies, and he said, "Time for the dogs to have their say, to let a little howl go out to the universe." Every dog in the place sat up and howled at the same time.

We've seen and heard some amazing things, but this was the most amazing.

All in a dog's day, and all in our book . . .

The Metaphysical Cat

2011-11-08T07:35:00.000-08:00

The thing about cats is the way they come and go. Fluidly. In The Metaphysical Cat we talk about
how cats do this and we quote authors from around the world. Here's one from a girl in a middle school classroom in Florida:

MY cat is so, so, so, you know, 'I gotta go.'
Where? is what I wanna know
but she doesn't show
because MY cat's so . . . in the flow.

There's a chapter in our book about come-and-go-cats and we mention our Siamese named Sammie. She used to disappear for weeks, months, and sometimes, years. We heard from some ranch neighbors who lived great distances away from us. They said, "I saw your cat the other day." According to our friend, the syndicated columnist (Animal Doctor) Dr. Michael W. Fox: "The dissonance between local (solar) and internal time (set by the sun's position at home) is how the translocated animal is able to find his square mile on the globe." Translation: an internal compass in the feline brain that gives the cat a geo-magnetic directional sense.

So, "this feels like home . . . this doesn't." Isn't that the way we get around as humans? We're just not as well-tuned, or well-magnetized, so to say.

This was a fun book to compile, write and experience over the years. The Edgar Cayce Foundation liked it and helped to get it translocated to many readers around the globe. Cats, we suppose, did the rest, and it's as our old friend Jeff Lindsay (author of DEXTER) says: "The book is a must-read for anyone sensible enough to live with a cat."

Happy Typers: the first ebook in America!

2011-10-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered who typed the first ebook?

And when?

I wondered until recently. . .http://www.staythirstymedia.com/201110-062/html/201110-hausman-typewriters-ebooks.html

Literary Gold

2011-09-17T07:23:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest influences on my life was my grandfather, Dwight Little. He was a headmaster, poet, collector, archivist, countryman, dyed in the wool New Englander from Sheffield, Massachusetts. This column is as much about him, and the times he lived in, as it is about me.http://www.staythirstymedia.com/201109-061/html/201109-hausman-literary-gold.html

Book Talk

2011-09-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

I've never been interviewed by a man and a dog at the same time. Especially since the dog used telepathy during this interview and the man used non sequitors. They were charming though except that the man Steven showed his teeth and I showed mine and the dog didn't show his. But other than that all went well, and I am still trying to free my foot from the sump hole.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxO7-iFbDZ8

The Parrot Detective

2011-06-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

Friends of ours have said over the years, "Why don't you write a book about George?"

"We might one day..." our usual answer.

But we had no real intention of doing it. Why? Because George is a pain in the butt. He's also a family member and we've lived with him and taken care of him for more than thirty years. We took care of his brother too, but he died.

George has been through many life adventures with us. I don't know what we'd do without him. I don't know what we do with him either. He's just there -- for weddings, funerals, parties, economic and tropical depressions -- he actually rode out Hurricane Charley in our kitchen without one single comment. But the other day when Lorry was wondering what to make for dinner and was saying something about it, George looked at her, cocked his head, said, "Need some help?"

For a Blue-fronted Amazonian parrot, George is a talker who sometimes beats the vocabulary of an African Grey, and they are often considered the most reliably talkative parrots around.

George has had many near death experiences and he has noted them verbally. When he was lost in the Florida woods for a dark dismal summer day in which hawks tried to kill him (he hid under palmettos and walked like a dog trying to find his way home), we finally met up with him on the shell road in front of our house, and he glared at me and said, "What took you so long?"

Our new book The Parrot Detective is for anyone who likes animals, reptiles, people, parrots, lizards, turtles, FLORIDA (and that includes crackers, the real kind not the made up variety) and funny stories about boys who grow up with odd family members. The narrator is Miccosukee and he lives on this crazy little barrier island where we live -- Pine Island. This is the first in a series of mysteries about our island. The next one will have more unaccountable mischief in it and more GEORGE, because that's what you asked for... literally. Kids and old timers and just about everybody else, including George himself -- he just now walked into our office! -- said, "Stop writing other stuff!" So there he is right now sitting on the Great Dane's bed. I think that's a smile on his beak.

ALL IS BEAUTIFUL ALL AROUND ME

2011-05-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

All Is Beautiful All Around Me:
Navajo Ways and Ceremonial Stories

When Tony Hillerman in his foreword to this book said that the Navajos were "engulfed by a dominant materialistic society hostile to their ways, and how they maintained a culture that values human relationships above material possessions..." he was not only honoring this one tribe, but in a way, all tribes, all people, all civilizations that simply refuse to go away when told to leave. In 1965, while camping with some of my Navajo friends, I asked how they had done it. How they had managed to survive when, in the 19th century, they were nearly eradicated by Kit Carson and the "bluecoats" who served him. A genocide had taken place, the Navajos had survived it and had become over time the largest indigenous tribe in North America and maybe even the world. How had they done it? One of my best friends said, "By not dying." All Is Beautiful All Around Me explains how to live in harmony with all things. It teaches how to live in peace in a world at war. It shows how one can "go in beauty" as Tony Hillerman says. Frank Waters, author of Book of the Hopi, said: "This oral equivalent of the Christian Bible loses none of its power and significance in its easy readability." I wanted it to be open and clear, as accessible as the storytellers who helped me to see how the tribe had managed to be what it was, is, and always will be. As a map to the human heart, this book is my favorite above all others.

The Jacob Ladder

2011-04-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

I first heard the story of The Jacob Ladder as it was told in the streets of Oracabessa where the story actually happened. The storyteller was Uton Hinds, a cab-driver, oil painter and family man. I loved the story so much that I asked Uton "Tall T" Hinds if I could record it and help him to make it into a book. He agreed. Four years later the book was published by Orchard Books, a division of Scholastic. It became a classroom text in many schools in America and the Caribbean. Life in Jamaica is rough economically. But, culturally, there's a lot of love in those St Ann hills where this story unfolds. Uton's message about forgiveness and love, about how his father -- no matter how badly he treated everyone -- was still his father and respect was due for the one "who gave me life" is worth remembering. The Christian Science Monitor commented on how carefully written this book was, and how "... native words enhance the educational value and multicultural appeal of this inspiring autobiographical story." (Courtney Williamson, The Christian Science Monitor, 2001.) Uton has traveled about the U.S. selling his book door-to-door, he is its best salesman. I heard not too long ago that some students in Miami were sad when they saw Uton's picture. "He's older than we thought." Well, that happens. The story took place in the Fifties and Sixties and Jamaica was a different time and place then and Uton was a little boy. But the story holds. It is one of my favorite books on the subject of "love your family whoever they might be" -- and I thank Uton for being tough enough to tell it the way it really happened.

The Amelia Island Book Festival

2011-02-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

From front to back this was a great festival in a town of old southern grace and gentility. Ma'am and Sir is spoken here and people hold doors for other people. The love of books as well as manners follows you everywhere you go.

I'd wanted to visit this northern province of our state, and when we were invited to tell stories, we were delighted. It never occurred to us however that little Amelia Island had been occupied by eight different nations and/or peoples. French, Spanish, British are the easy ones to figure. But then there were also Georgian patriots in 1812 who tried to establish "The Territory of East Florida."

Five years later another group took over and raised their Green Cross Flag; these were American citizens whose occupation lasted only four months. Then came the Mexican Rebel Flag, inspired mostly by a pirate named Luis Aury, who said he was holding the island "in trust for Spain." This was followed by the seven-starred flag of the Confederacy which stayed flapping until the end of the Civil War. After which came the final flag of the United States. There should now be a Flag of Tourism, but we'll let that slide for the moment.

Places of historical interest, especially when they're nestled by the sea inspire poems. But I didn't write about flags on my first night in Fernandina. It was a full moon night and I wrote about moons.

Full round cricket moon
fog moon, moss moon
peeper cheep, paper moon
Fernandina sea moon.
Haven't seen
so many moons
in many moons . . .

Three New Books

2011-02-12T07:42:00.000-08:00

Speaking Volumes of Santa Fe just re-published three of my favorite books -- Tunkashila, Turtle Dream and Ghost Walk.   These are collections of stories about Native America that I wrote in the 1980s mostly. Though it took me most of my life to collect them. I say they are new because they are newly published in fresh formats. You can buy them in ebook, paperback or audio. (We are still working on the audio versions of Turtle Dream and Tunkashila...soon come!)

I wrote Tunkashila in 1992 and it was published by St. Martin's Press in 1993. Turtle Dream was published by Mariposa in 1989 and Ghost Walk followed with the same publisher in 1991. I won't bore you with how many printings there were of the three books, but I will say they did very well.  Tunkashila was a Quality Paperback Book of the Month. Then, one day after being available for years, these favorites of mine went out of print.

Weren't readers interested in shapeshifters, monsters, demons? Weren't they curious about how Mother Earth began on Turtle's back? Didn't they care about werewolves of the Navajo and medicine men who healed with Gila Monster's gift of power? And what about Zahgotah, the Apache who changed into a bear? And Owl Boy who decided he couldn't be human any more and took to the woods?

I got many letters and emails from American Indians who praised these books because of their storytelling and their faithfulness to the original stories of The People. I grew up with one of the stories, Turtle Dream about the woman who rides into the next world on great turtle's back, a story told to me when I was five by my mother. I was honored when a Cherokee woman wrote to me and said she was naming her daughter Turtle Woman and she wanted me to know it was because of the title story of the book.

Once two Lakota brothers wrote to me. They were having an argument, they said, about the beginning of the world. "We come from the earth, like the corn, just as you say in your book Tunkashila," one brother said. But the other brother said, "You should not say that we came across the Bering Straight Land Bridge -- that is not true. Still, I like the stories."

I wrote to each brother and said, "I present many variations on the beginning of the world. All of them are true to the people who believe them. But, as for me, and what I believe, I favor coming out of the earth like the new green corn."

All three of these books are about change and changes; the earth is moving and the people are moving around. As the Navajo story says, "There is a mountain called, The Mountain Around Which Moving Is Done." We are moving all over the place today just like in the beginning. And, like in the beginning, we seem not to know where we are going. The first people, First Man and First Woman, Locust, Ant, Horned Toad, Wolf, Coyote, Nuthatch, Great Snake and all the others -- they could see themselves changing as the world changed from darkness to light, and as they moved ever upward. They came from the womb of Mother Earth and rose not on wings of light but using fingers and claws and arrows to effect their emergence.

They made it to the fourth, and some say, the fifth world that we live in now. Yes, it is all one world, with many parts, and many changes. You can look down and say, We came from there. You can look up and say, We came from there too. There are stories about many emergences; people who fell from the sky like shooting stars; people who turned into turtles crossing the great river of life. People, just like you and me, who say, as in the old Navajo story about a man meeting a star person. They eat corn together and the star person says, "This is my food too."

A Feather at the Miami Book Fair International

2010-11-23T11:57:00.000-08:00

We have a Blue-fronted Amazonian parrot named George who's been a part of our family for thirty years. George sheds his feathers, one at at a time, and we save them and give them away.

I give them to children at my storytelling events. At the Book Fair -- in the schools and at the storytelling tent -- George's feathers were a hit. I asked a question, and for a good answer, the listener got a good luck feather.

One small boy got a feather for dancing. I asked him to come up on stage and make some SSzzounds with me and he declined, so I drummed and he started dancing a nice little rhythmic dance. He was rocking, softly shuffling his feet to the drumbeat. For a while, he just hung, floating like a bee. I don't think he knew the entire audience was cheering him on. He got a nice feather for that!

My grandson and grand-daughter came up on stage, too -- that's Taj you see in the snapshot. He would've been on stage the whole time if I'd let him. Anais has never come up with me before and she surprised me by making a great growl into the mic. I asked her if she'd do another one. Her eyes drifted upward to the top of the tent. Then her eyes met mine and she said, "No!"

That's kids -- you always get the truth. Like the boy who gave me the hug and said, "Thanks for the stories" and the other boy who scowled at me and said, "Get away old man." But he got a feather too. Why not, George wouldn't want it any other way.

Just Magic

2010-11-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

We have been on the road for ten days. Sacramento, San Francisco and Sonoma. First, the writing workshop in Sacramento where we met some fine writers, enjoyed the company of Alice and Jim Carney and the whole Carney family -- wonders all! -- and saw, on Halloween night a small white angel toddle up the walkway while her mother, a large woman with a booming voice chanted, "C'mon Mama, C'mon Mama" and the barely bobbling youngster teeters up the walk with hands scribbling in the air, grasping for candy. Of all the costumes and pranksters, this is the best. But, then, it's no costume, it's just magic.

Next morning, an email from my old and dear friend Fred Burstein, reading coach extraordinaire, poet, woodsman, carver, builder, man of big shoulders and wide interests, well, this fabulous Fred sends us a poem from one of his students, Jennifer, and it goes like this:

Over Halloween we were walking back
to Grandpa's, and a cat started following us.
We walked up to a different person.
We asked if this was her cat.
She said, No, but she does know that cat.
His name is Heath. The cat stayed out
on my grandpa's porch, and Grandma Lill
brang the cat inside, and fed it.
And now Grandpa is angry cause
he don't want to be responsible
for the cat, that's why.

____

The whistler is one of those gifts you sometimes encounter when you wake up at 3 AM. We were in San Francisco on Nob Hill in Jim and Alice's guest suite which was the kind of place Jack London might've written a story in, and I was lying in bed thinking that life is sometimes so magical you can't put it into words, and right then, this whistler comes along and I try to get it down --

A solitary whistler, part swallow, part sparrow
toodling between the tides of traffic
and suddenly the traffic quits, disappears
the whistler wanders on, whistling
a person with no name, no face, no listener
in the whole sleeping city but me.

___

And then, this morning, a daft raccoon staring into the sunlight with whiskers long as broom straws. Sitting there, staring out of dark eyes, winking in the sun, saying: "I have every right to be here, the people feed me and I waddle around and look at things and take my time as I please." The dog next door ignores the raccoon, and when we pass by again, a half hour later, the masked fellow is sitting in a flower pot, as if he's a furry flower planted there. So life goes -- magic!

Some people you meet in The American Storybag are . . .

2010-10-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

Roger Zelazny
Trent Zelazny
Bob Marley
Cedella Marley
Ziggy Marley
Joseph Medicine Crow
Hilary Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Geronimo
Bob Arnold
Elisavietta Ritchie
Noel Coward
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Aram Saroyan
William Saroyan
Peter Lauritzen
Kyle Lauritzen
Sid Hausman
Dorothy and Sidney Hausman
Mariah Hausman
Hannah Hausman
Lorry Hausman
Michael Hausman
Rattlesnake Pete
Fred Maas
Gayle Ross
Roy McKay
Pansy Douglas
Jay DeGroat
Jimmie Blueeyes
Jamaica Kincaid
Holling Clancy Holling
Edward S. Curtis
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bob Washington
Kelvin Rodriguez
Hurricane Charley
Leadbelly
Elie Wiesel
Chief Plenty Coups
Jeriamiah Johnson
Tom McGirl
Uncle Bill Wooten
Doc Allen
Dr. Raymond Bunker
John Colter
Hugh Glass
Baldamar Coca
Paul Theroux
A.J. Edwards
David Kherdian
Darryl-with-no-teeth
Mango Jack
Dr. Keith Huntress
Jonathan Huntress
Gloria Vanderbilt
Eugene Ormandy
Erich Leinsdorf
Arthur Fiedler
Seiji Ozawa
George the Parrot
Odin
Harry Houdini
Bert McCarry
Ernie Tall T Hinds
Esther and Ben Stevens
Jesse Stuart

The American Storybag

2010-10-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

The stories in THE AMERICAN STORYBAG are a fleeting yet incisive look at
American life, primarily on the road, but sometimes on or in the water, and have been
collected by Gerald Hausman since 1965. Some of the tales are very brief and may be
called "sudden stories". Many of them deal with human survival - an autistic boy lost in a
trackless swamp; a young woman who falls in love with a supernatural creature; a young
man who finds himself by finding his horse. Some of the tales are mere messages left on
a cell phone. Others, like the story Bimini Blue tell about a Navajo healing ceremony
given to a famous author who committed suicide. There are stories of ghosts, demons,
fearsome predators, and wise old men who take the innocent in hand and lead them on
the road to wisdom. These are tales of innocence and anguish, fantasy and fable, humor
and heart. In them we hear the voices of a lost America - an America of folk heroes fading
fast from view and crying out to be heard.

The Reviews

"Not since Mark Twain has a writer presented classic American storytelling
so honestly. Hausman is at his best with this collection, truly entertaining."

- Hilary Hemingway, author of Hemingway in Cuba, on The American Storybag

"...it [Tunkashila] is like the wind one hears on the plains, steady, running,
full of music."

- N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize-winning authorof House Made of Dawn

"...an eloquent tribute to the first great storytellers of America."

- The New York Times Book Review on Tunkashila

Native American Animal Stories

2010-10-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

I recorded Native American Animal Stories in 1988 with jazz musician Ray Griffin in Tacoma, Washington.

In these gather-around-the-fire tales, we learn how Nuthatch sprinkled dust and the people's hair grew white, and there was such a thing as old age. Old Man Gopher brought toothache into the world. The people's teeth were white as white corn, but Gopher visited them and then they had toothaches. Horse, we learn, is a slow-footed fellow. But he becomes fast when Butterfly brings him the fast flints from Flint Mountain. These are the stories that tell us not just how it goes but why it goes. These are for sharing, healing, and just plain smiling.

May we all be together on Corn Pollen Path.

The Turquoise Horse

2010-10-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

I began writing the stories in The Turquoise Horse in 1974 in Tesuque, New Mexico.

The idea didn't come from my imagination. It came from my friend Jay DeGroat. In 1965 Jay told me about a mysterious pinto horse that he had spent months tracking and trying to get a rope around. but the horse always got away. And then he told me about the five horses of the sun. One for each color of the day and the night. The turquoise horse was a midday horse, blue as the sky at that time of day. The dark horse was a nighthorse and stars shone in his mane.

The story goes --

I sit upon a turquoise horse
at the opening of the sky . . .
My horse walks on terrifying hooves
and stands on the upper circle of the rainbow
with a sunbeam in his mouth for a bridle.
My horse circles all the people of the earth.
Today I ride on his broad back and he is mine,
tomorrow he will belong to another.

Navajo Nights

2010-10-13T07:03:00.000-07:00

In 1985 jazz musician Ray Griffin and I tried recording this audio book in Abiqui, New Mexico. We were in a canyon and there was a great echo there. But Echo stole the stories. If it had been Rainbow, the colorful one, it might have been different. But Echo is a loud person and very possessive of sound.

Where do we record this? Ray asked.

We tried various places -- his studio and another backroom studio of a friend of my brother's. The recordings did not come out well. Finally, Ray was visiting our house in Tesuque, and he went into the downstairs bathroom. This was in the deepest part of the passive solar house, buried 22 feet under the earth. Jay DeGroat, my Navajo artist friend, painted a howling coyote on the south wall of the bathroom.

Here, Ray Griffin said, is where we'll record the stories.

Every one was recorded in that holy place, the bathroom, under the ground, in the First World.

Stargazer

2010-10-13T06:42:00.000-07:00

For a while in the 1980s the most popular story on this audio book was "Star Car." This story was told to me by Jay DeGroat's father, a medicine man on the Navajo reservation. A tiny automobile that circled the earth as a comet and appeared in the desert as a flare of light. A small man inside the car drove it all around the sandy arroyos. The car was only five inches high. Jay's father also told me about Skinwalkers and how they traveled fast as light, quick as a star car. He drank the coffee I made from boiled coffee beans cooked over a fire in the old way. He was a small man in a big black cowbiy hat. He said a blessing over the house we lived in. Then he went on his way. One of the stories I recorded was begun in 1965 and the ending wasn't told to me until 1990. When I asked Jay (translator of all the stories) why it took so long for his father to tell me about Locust's bow and the arrow that opened up the underworld into the world of light, he said, "Snow on the mountain top." By which he meant two things -- the white hair I now have on my head and the snow on Mount Blanco (Sisnaajini). These are winter stories and that is the traditional time to tell them -- after the first frost. Listen well, you may yet hear the twang of Locust's bow.

Thanks to Ray Griffin for the music and the weird sounds and Kurt Mueller of Speaking-Volumes for bringing these back into circulation. May you both walk on corn pollen path.

Ghost Walk

2010-10-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

This newly released audio from Speaking-Volumes is subtitled Native American Tales of the Spirit. That idea was suggested by a Havasu friend, deep in the heart of the Grand Canyon where the stories were lived, witnessed, seen and heard. I just opened the book to page 77 and found this line -- ". . . she named nine things that she loved: the river, the toads, the wrens, the pebbles, the wolf, the trees, the sun, the canyon, and most of all, the morning." On the next page is a message that I saw posted on the community bulletin board in the village of Havasu: "White people will give up digging for uranium when mother earth's heart stops beating." There are spirits moving in and out of this book and the audio is all the more ambient and other-wordly for Ray Griffin's enchanting music. Cicadas come and go in the desert heat. Owls call. I remember diving underneath Havasu Falls and hearing voices. And hearing the corn-carrying woman whose basket was round in her arms as she walked by our tent. She wasn't a ghost; she was a presence. For as the book tells us -- among the watercress and wild celery, the cattails and watersong, Spirit prevails. Havasu is a place where earth, water and sky meet. A place where you are in the center of all things. Your inner-self expands, floats high above the red rocks with the canyon wren.

Drum Talk

2010-10-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

From 1985-1993 our family stayed every summer at Blue Harbour in Castle Garden, Jamaica, 14 miles on the double bendy road, the ziggy ziggy road up from Ocho Rios and a few miles from Port Maria and there it was, the old white block house that was once the home of playwright Noel Coward.

So this is where we spent our summers -- running an excursion camp for teens on the North Coast. A sort of outward bound, journal writing school for which Santa Fe Preparatory School gave us our accreditation. Our students were Anglo, American Indian, Latino and Jamaican. Our teachers were Jamaican.

One year we followed the world of Jamaican drumming. At night we listened to the Pocomania church drummers, with their conga echoes of Africa. Another time, junkanoo drums. Jonkonnu. John Canoe. In the streets -- "dem a loot/dem a shoot/ dem a wail."

I remember a drummer showing us how to rid a house of ghosts by drumming them into the far, flat distance of the Caribbean sea. Sometimes at night the rain on the zinc roof drummed its own tropical riddim and I always thought of Bob Marley: "The rain doesn't fall on one man's house alone." And down with the rain came the almonds off the almond trees. And they drummed too, and you could crack them open and eat them in the morning while the croton leaves glistened with raindrops in the sun.

Or the rhythmic repetition of Burning Spear: "Marcus Garvey words come to pass/Marcus Garvey words come to pass/ can't get no food to eat/can't get no money to spend." You could go and visit him in those days, down in St Ann where he had a little roadside store and eatery.

Drum beats in the hills of St Mary. At night, in the white owl pimento wood, drums. In the day on the concrete jungle streets of Kingston, drums.

In the mind, words and drums, drums and words.

So I began recording the drummers we heard. Some drummed on blackened, bottom-up pots and pans, anything to make riddim. Some drummed burra style on goatskin repeater drums. The repeater, funde, bass. Sometimes a whole bamboo forest clicked to the tune of the island wind. Natural mystic drumming.

Some rapped, ripped, rode upon their words like hill and gully donkey, up hill and down hill, singing all the while. Rushing words like rivers. Grumbling drums like thunder.

A Jamaican zinc fence of sound, one man said.

Word, sound and power, said another.

Iron, Lion Zion, said a third.

As we gathered by the river and collected the songs, stories and poems for DRUM TALK. Being there, listening and playing, talking to people like Bob Marley's old friend, Georgie -- "Georgie would make a fire light/as it was logwood burning through the night."

Of which I'll share with you . . .
Drum Talk, just released by Speaking-Volumes.

Navajo Nights

2010-09-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

It was 45 years ago that Navajo artist Jay DeGroat began telling me Dine creation tales and I started writing them down with the thought of one day making them into a book.

Our first collaboration was printed in Santa Fe and published by David Kherdian of The Giligia Press. The book was called The Shivurrus Plant of Mopant. These were not Navajo stories -- they were poems written by children in a writing workshop that I taught. Jay liked the poems and did illustrations for the book, and it was a good beginning for us.

Over the years, Jay and I did many books but my favorite collaboration is the ancient Navajo healing stories he told about Coyote and Badger and Nuthatch and the other animal people. They all became part of a series of books that Speaking-Volumes has just now re-released. Composer Ray Griffin adds unique sounds and his own brand of high desert jazz, sound effects and the voices of Frog, Toad, Bat and more. Even more than the books I've written, these live recordings bring us to a a place that has been unchanged for thousands of years. Special thanks to the one Jay, three Rays and a Rae, and one Jimmy Blueeyes.

Gerald Hausman: Gerald Hausman: Email, Bemail & Female

2010-09-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

Gerald Hausman: Gerald Hausman: Email, Bemail & Female: " My mom, pictured above, was the original bemailer. She could contact, and be contacted, by friends, family, ghosts, and unborn children. ..."

Gerald Hausman: Email, Bemail & Female

2010-09-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

My mom, pictured above, was the original bemailer. She could contact, and be contacted, by friends, family, ghosts, and unborn children. She could predict events that hadn't happened, that were happening, that were going to happen and she seldom knew one from another. Yes, she was psychic. In those days there wasn't email; there was telegraphy, telegrams. That was instantaneous mail in the 1940s. But my mom had a faster form of communication. She would think a thought, I would receive it.

Toward the end of her life she got very good at seeing newspaper headlines before they were in print. Whatever I know, whatever I think I know, I learned from her. She was the original bemailer. If she were here today, she would say -- If you be, you can send bemail. Direct transmission from one to another. God bless her, she was the best. And here is a little tribute to her favorites -- the Pony Express and telepathy.
http://www.staythirstymedia.com/201009-049/html/201009-hausman-bemail.html

Guess Who Came To Dinner?

2010-08-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

He was sitting behind the coffee-maker one morning, and there he stayed during the day, but at night he climbed the walls and ate whatever he pleased.

One day we drove to the airport and when I opened the trunk of the car, there he was, all big-eyed and smiley faced. He thought he was coming with us and he hopped on my luggage.

I transferred him from the hot trunk of the car to a nearby oak tree. What else was I to do? We were on our way out of town. When we returned, five days later, I climbed the oak tree with a flashlight looking for him. It was late and I attracted a parking lot cop who asked what I was doing.

He had a bigger flashlight and I convinced him to beam around the tree for a while. No luck. Our little friend was gone. We drove home, empty-hearted.

When we arrived home, we opened the trunk, and there sitting on my luggage was our friend, big-eyed and smiley-wily. It was night of course and he hopped on my shoulder and I put him in his safe little spot behind the coffee maker.

He was happy to be home. Late that night I heard him bouncing off the walls and Lorry said, "Good little tree frog."

Frog by Ramon Shiloh