San Francisco Diggers

February 21, 2019 4:26 PM

Chuck Gould - The Do was the thing
Phyllis Willner - For the Duration of Our Parallel Flow
posted by unliteral (5 comments total)

This was a wonderful read. It brought back some of the zeitgeist and sensation of that time.
posted by Oyéah at 6:12 PM on February 21, 2019

Feel you Oyéah. We might be in a small audience here though. Phyllis, although fractured, really captured it for me but Chuck really brought it home with his honest and “tough reckonings”.
posted by unliteral at 3:08 AM on February 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

My parents were Bay Area back-to-the-landers from this generation and I've always been entranced by those times and how that era even existed. I read both interviews and they connected a lot of dots; I read Peter Coyote's "Sleeping Where I Fall" many years ago and now I need to search for "Ringolevio" by Emmet Grogan to connect more...
posted by evelvenin at 3:54 AM on February 22, 2019

Ringolevio was an amazing read for me back in the day. It’s been in many years now so I don’t know how it would hold up. These interviews don’t show Emmet in a very good light but I remember the book with great fondness.
‘Entranced’ is a perfect description for these times, I felt the same, experiencing this from afar and out of time and wishing that I had been a part of it as a teenager, but I was young and in another country. I’ll chase up ‘Sleeping Where I Fall’ and look forward to going back just for a little time, because you can’t stay there.
posted by unliteral at 4:25 AM on February 22, 2019

I have a few books of Brautigan and spend some time with them occasionally and this really shook me:

I didn’t like Brautigan. I never considered him to be a hippie or anything. I thought he was a bad poet. That’s all I know about Richard Brautigan. I didn’t care for his style. I thought it was bullshit with the hats and scarves. I thought he was something of a weird guy and using us.

I like his poetry. So this is a bit hard to reconcile.
posted by unliteral at 5:26 AM on February 22, 2019