Ella Young Remembered: Interviews by James D. Cain

Posted on April 13, 2024 by geoffcain

Cover of the boo "Ella Young Remembered" interviews by James D. Cain.Exciting news! My dad’s book is finally out:
Ella Young Remembered: Interviews by James D. Cain in paperback. The book is from interviews my dad recorded in the 60s and transcribed by the indefatigable Linda Rosewood. This book is being sold to support the work of the Tulsk Productions which has created radio plays for RTE on Ella Young and is currently working on and raising money for a film.

It is also available in a Kindle Edition (ebook).

From the back of the book:
“Ella Young immigrated to the United States in 1925 at the age of 58, disillusioned by Ireland’s civil war. In America she found a revitalizing natural beauty and a wide circle of friends among the artists and bohemians of the mid-century.
Through her stories, beliefs, and poetry, she restored people’s connection with the sacred in nature. She taught that the land holds spirits, that you can talk to a mountain, and that humans are part of the planet, not here to dominate it. This connection of ecological consciousness to daily life was Ella’s wisdom for her time and ours.
Despite her influence and timely message, very little documentary evidence of Young’s life exists. Ten years after her death in 1956, historian James Cain interviewed six of Young’s friends, recording first-hand memories. Ella Young Remembered makes the transcripts of these interviews available for the first time.”

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Ella Young: Halcyon Days

Posted on October 22, 2022 by geoffcain
Image of Ella Young

Ella Young by Ansel Adams

I got this email from Dorothea McDowell: if you are interested in Ella Young, Irish American history, GLBT history in America, or from the California Central Coast, you have to at least take a look at this project. Dorothea’s previous work captures the history and the poetic dimension of the life of Ella Young. And of course, I want to encourage you to donate something because every donation no matter how small will help move this project forward. Thanks!

Hello friends,

You are receiving this email because you and I have a connection to poet, storyteller, and mystic Ella Young. You have most likely helped me in my research into Ella Young for my book, Ella Young and Her World, or for a radio play produced for RTE in 2020 The Morrigan, or perhaps you have assisted as part of our current project, Halcyon Days, which will tell the story of Ella’s life and influence in America.

You can listen to The Morrigan for free. If you haven’t heard it in a while, give it a listen. It’s really quite good.

Under the name Tulsk Productions, the same team are working with me on Halcyon Days, about Ella’s life in America and her enduring cultural influence. This time, we will produce a limited-series podcast, available online, and hopefully broadcast in Ireland and the States. Eventually, we hope to raise enough money to make a film.

For now, we are raising money for the audio program. Have you seen our website at EllaYoung.org? We also have a short video on YouTube about the project.

In November, I’m traveling to California with our producer Linda Rosewood. (We’re funding the trip ourselves.)

Linda may have been in touch with you already. She lives in Ireland, but is a native Californian. Linda is our liaison to all things related to Ella Young in America. She has been finding new friends and grant writing opportunities.

Through her contacts, she has arranged for me to visit the redwood grove where Ella’s ashes were scattered. You can imagine what this pilgrimage will mean to me. We will also be visiting Ella’s home in Oceano and the settlement of Halcyon.

My dates in California are November 13 to 20. If you would like to meet up, please let me know.

I have one request. Will you visit our website, share it with your friends, and consider making a small donation to support Halcyon Days?

This time of year many charities need your support. But right now, even $1 or $5 donated before my California trip will have a big impact. Because I will be meeting with funding organizations, if we can show many individual supporters, they know that their contribution will have a bigger impact.

Your donation is tax-deductible in the US because we have fiscal sponsorship by the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco. Clicking the “donate” button on EllaYoung.org will take you to their site.

Donate to Ella Young / Halcyon Days.

Even if you can’t make a donation now, I hope that you don’t mind if you receive an email from me now and then updating you on our progress. If you’d rather not hear from me, just let me know with an email reply.

Is mise le meas / Sincerely yours,

Dorothea McDowell

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The Morrigan – A Radio Play about Ella Young

Posted on October 13, 2021 by geoffcain
A photo of Ella Young by Ansel Adams

Ella Young, Oceano, CA

The Irish branch of the organization, Women in Film and Television International, had one of their board members, Marissa Aroy, direct a play based on a biography of Ella Young, Irish poet, revolutionary, and mythologist, written by Dorothea McDowell (the script was written by Daniel Brennan). The play explored her life in Ireland up to the time of the Easter Uprising. They will be working on another play about her later life in California where she taught at UC Berkeley for a while, lived on the Central Coast and knew people like Gavin Arthur, Ansel Adams, Robinson Jeffers and many other artists and writers. Dorothea contacted me about my father’s research into Ella Young’s life. I have posted links to that research here before but I will post them again and a link to a recording of the last play in the comments below. Here is the announcement of the play from Dec. 2020: https://wft.ie/radio-play-directed-by-wft-ireland-board-member-marissa-aroy/.

The recording of the radio play is here on Archive.Org.

This is a link to some of my dad’s research here on this blog.

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A Very Short Trip in a Driverless Car

Posted on September 20, 2021 by geoffcain

I am pretty excited about this. The Amsterdam Quarterly just published my short story “A Very Short Trip in a Driverless Car” in their issue on “The Future” – it is a satire on our over-reliance on technology and AI. This is also a rare dovetailing of my literary and my work in education technology. 

Geoffrey B. Cain – A Very Short Trip in a Driverless Car

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Aviya Kushner’s Wolf Lamb Bomb

Posted on June 29, 2021 by geoffcain

The cover of Aviya Kushner's book Wolf Lamb BombI just finished Aviya Kushner’s new book of poetry Wolf Lamb Bomb (Orison Books, 2021). I was so taken with her book The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau / Penguin Random House, 2015) that I pre-ordered her book back in January. The Grammar of God is a book about her relationship to Hebrew and the scriptures while living in a country with a long history of translations of the scriptures read by non-Hebrew reading people. As convoluted as I made that sentence, The Grammar of God demonstrates Kushner’s love of language at every turn, so I was very excited by this book of poetry. I have written previously on The Grammar of God on my education blog Brainstorm in Progress.

I read Wolf Lamb Bomb as a poetic response to 9/11, the rise of anti-Semitism, and the current violence in Israel. It is a very contemporary book, but unfortunately, this book could be situated in nearly any generation. It faces big issues through an intimate conversation between the poet and the prophet.  The whole book is a gem, I read it in one sitting, which is not how I do things: I am more of a ruminator. It is 68 pages with notes linking poems and lines back to Isaiah at the end.

For myself, there is so much packed into this little book – which is one of the purposes of poetry. It gives you everything that the headlines have to leave out. I particularly liked the poem “Shard” because throughout reading the book, I felt like this poem really brought the poet and the prophet together. The poem “Ancient Hebrew” is a funny look at language and how changing one letter affords multiple meanings, and it is a look back at her book The Grammar of God.

All while I was reading her book, I kept going back in my mind to the book of Isaiah and how much influence the book has had on poetry: in my own reading in English Lit, I have Milton, Matthew Arnold (esp. his criticism), Whitman, Yeats, T.S. Eliot and on up through Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. I am sure there are many more connections.

And here’s how I judge art: art is good art if it leads you back to great art or inspires its creation. So yes, I have to go back and read the Book of Isaiah again. But it is not that simple! What translation? At 60, do I finally break down and learn to read Hebrew? I am still working on English, and I was born speaking English! If you want to know what non-Hebrew readers are up against, just read the “Lilith” article in Wikipedia: the variations in translation and mistranslation are staggering. Fortunately, Kushner’s Grammar of God has some recommendations!

 

 

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Conversations about Ella Young: My Father’s Research

Posted on January 31, 2019 by geoffcain
Photo of Ella Young by Edward Weston

Ella Young (Wikipedia)

My father, Jim Cain, did some research for a possible book on the Irish poet and story-teller, Ella Young back in 1966. Ella Young was from Ireland but made her home on the Central Coast of California where my family also grew up. In the course of my dad’s research, he was able to interview some very remarkable people including the son of a U.S. President, Gavin Arthur, who decided to live in the Nipomo dunes with other artists as a “Dunite.” He also had a chance to meet with the photographer Ansel Adams. These recordings are out there in the literature (distributed by others) with no attribution. They are cited correctly at the Dunes Center website but that page link is broken on the main site (it can still be found through a Google search). These recordings should be out there at historical sites and in academia, freely available for those who want to know or research the people and that time – they just need to be properly cited.

NOTE: I will be adding to this post after I interview my father on Feb. 16, 2018

Conversations about Ella Young

Gavin Arthur Talks About Ella Young, (Cain, James D. Recorded Interview, c. 1966)

Part 1 (11:56)
Part 1 (11:56)
Part 3 (06:52)
Part 4 (14:01)
Part 5 (06:28)

Ansel Adams Talks About Ella Young, (Cain, James D. Recorded Interview, c. 1966)

Part 1 (16:02)
Part 2 (19:35)
Part 3 (02:41)

John & Gundrun Grell Talk About Ella Young, (Cain, James D. Recorded Interview, c. 1966)

Part 1 (12:50)
Part 1 (12:50)
Part 3 (03:03)

Jane Thompson Talks About Ella Young, (Cain, James D. Recorded Interview, c. 1966)

Part 1 (10:13)
Part 2 (08:38)
Part 3 (03:57)

W.W. Lymann Talks About Ella Young, (Cain, James D. Recorded Interview, c. 1966)

Part 1 (10:50)
Part 2 (05:40)

Bonus Material

Not my dad’s research but it was included at the Pismo Dunes Collaborative website along with my dad’s work:

Ella Young interview from KPFA:

Part 1 (11:02)
Part 2 (10:05)
Part 3 (06:34)
Part 4 (05:25)

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Song of Granite

Posted on September 30, 2018 by geoffcain

Back in January, I went to go see “Song of Granite” which was directed by Pat Collins and starred Michael O’Chonfhlaola, Macdara Ó Fátharta, and Colm Seoighe among others. A great cast! It is a wonderful film – it is about the Irish singer, Joe Heaney, who sang in the a capella sean nos tradition of Western Ireland. It is a really good movie. It has a beautifully paced, fragmented story that is necessary to describe this enigmatic person. My young cousin, Colm Seoighe, plays Heaney as a boy and sings and dances beautifully – we are all looking forward to great things from this one – his singing and dancing is obviously from the heart. Gorgeous!

You have to see this film. It is in black and white, and my sister, Shannon O’Donnell, said that this was good because it rescues it from being a postcard from the West of Ireland. The film connects us with nature: the cold, the wild life, the peat and the granite. Poetry and music become forces of nature just barely contained by Heaney. The music becomes as real and tactile as the granite fences he mends.

The movie speaks to our capacity for poetry and art. Some of my favorite moments are when Heaney tries to describe what it is like to “get” a song – we have to grow to contain it, much like we have to grow for this movie. 

Song of Granite is now available on DVD or free on Amazon Prime. 

 

 

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Théâtre de la Mode at Maryhill Museum

Posted on March 29, 2018 by geoffcain

Ferdiand de Saussure, überarbeitet, reworked

Ferdinand de Saussure, (Wikipedia)

Recently, I was at a conference on Meditation & Mindfulness, a Reading Apprenticeship sponsored event. One of the great things about conferences is that you get to meet different instructors and benefit from their different approaches, skills, interests, and passions. One of the first sessions I got to participate in was with John Falconer and Heidi Sheneberger, both great instructors (by which I mean knowledgeable, skilled, enthusiastic, and compassionate). And what is fun about these conferences is that you sometimes get to discover what teachers are passionate about. One of the things that Heidi is passionate about is fashion. She talked a little about what she did in school and some of her favorite books on fashion history and I was on the edge of my seat. I have felt that this is a long neglected area of culture in critical theory: fashion as text, fashion as a presentation of self, or fashion as communication. This is an area of study that is very familiar to French and Italian theorists but does not seem to have really caught hold in the U.S. I have long been a reader of Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes, and interested in semiotics and how the ideas around semiotics lend themselves well to interpreting fashion. I have been very interested in the “Semiotics of Fashion” because of this. According to Wikipedia, the Semiotics of Fashion “…is the study of fashion and how humans signify specific social and cultural positions through dress. Ferdinand de Saussure defined semiotics as ‘the science of the life of signs in society.’ Semiotics is the study of signs and just as we can interpret signs and construct meaning from text we can also construct meaning from visual images such as fashion. Fashion is a language of signs that non-verbally converse meanings about individuals and groups. It holds a symbolic and communicative role having the capacity to express one’s unique style, identity, profession, social status, and gender or group affiliation.”

Photo of Roland Barthes from Wikipedia

Roland Barthes (Wikipedia)

Heidi talked at the conference about the Maryhill Museum of Art in Maryhill, WA (which is out in the middle of nowhere) and recounted seeing the “Théâtre de la Mode,” which is a fashion exhibit from the end of World War II.  At the end of the war, fabrics and other resources to put on fashion shows were in short supply, so they came up with this new kind of exhibition to replace the traditional fashion show.

The exhibit first debuted at Louvre’s Museum of Decorative Arts in 1945. It featured the fashions of post-World War II France which featured 1/3rd size mannequins wearing fashions created by the finest Parisian designers. The opening event reportedly drew 100,000 visitors. It toured throughout Europe and came to the U.S. in 1946. According to the Maryhill website, “the exhibition languished in the basement of San Francisco’s City of Paris department store. The sets were destroyed, but the mannequins were saved by Alma de Bretteville Spreckels who championed their acquisition by Maryhill Museum of Art.”

The Maryhill Art Museum has nine of the re-built sets and restored mannequins dressed in the latest fashions of 1946. Each year, three of the nine sets are on display. Seeing fashion out of the context of what is now a traditional fashion show, and in the context of history, is important – it helps buttress the idea of fashion as a text and allows us to see fashion in new ways.

The sets currently on display include Jean Cocteau’s “My Wife is a Witch” and Jean Saint Martin’s “Paris Sketch,” both sets recreated by Anne Surgers in 1990, and Anne Surgers’ “Street Scene,” a replacement for Georges Wakhevitch’s “The Port of Nowhere.” All three sets feature 1946 evening and day wear by some of the top Parisian designers, including the house of Worth, Ana de Pombo, Lucien Lelong, Nina Ricci, Lanvin, Rochas and Balmain.

One of the things that I found fascinating about the exhibit was the contrast between the fashion exhibit and the Native American dolls in the Native American art section.

Fashion dolls from the Theatre de la Mode exhibit

Maryhill Museum entrance to the fashion exhibit

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Liquid Media in a Strangely Liquid Society

Posted on March 24, 2018 by geoffcain

Image of Italian writer, Umberto Eco.

Umberto Eco. (Wikipedia)

This morning is a morning of cascading ironies. One of my favorite writers is Umberto Eco. I love about half of his fiction enormously. I like his writings on semiotics, and his essays are all gems – especially the collection “Travels in Hyperreality” which includes a semiotic critique of the Madonna Inn – considered a cultural treasure in my home town which was just down the road from there. So I am reading this morning “Chronicles of a Liquid Society” a collection of Eco’s posthumous articles that he wrote for newspapers – he is noted for his humorous analysis of popular culture in that realm. There is on page 47, a discussion about email doubles and people who have registered email accounts using his name. He says the same thing has happened to Salman Rushdie and even, Dante Alighieri! He lists a few of Dante’s literary dopple-gangers. One of the addresses that he published was one of my own! I have used DanteSB@yahoo.com since the mid-90sP.47 from Umberto Eco's Chronicles of a Liquid Society as a spam dump or throw-away email address. The cascading ironies around this is how I sometimes used this email address – for instance, I ran a Nomic game for instance that was based on secret societies that were definitely influenced by his book “Foucault’s Pendulum.” I created the DanteSB (which stood for “Dante, Santa Barbara”) in case I needed to put an email address on the net. Dante has always been a favorite writer as well. At the time, I saw the internet and its layers of access (gopher space, WAIS, MUDs, MUSHes, etc.) as circles of hell. So I adopted that name. Occasionally I would get email from people who thought it meant “Dante’s Beatrice” but they were to be sorely disappointed. I always wanted to meet Umberto Eco – I even emailed him in Milan on my first trip to Italy to let him know that I was in town. I can’t remember what email address I used for that. I invited him out for a coffee like he was supposed to know who I was. But at least, most finally, I made my way into one of his books posthumously, through the nether regions of the web.

 

 

 

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Abbas Kiarostami’s “Where Is My Friend’s House?”

Posted on January 26, 2016 by geoffcain

English: Abbas Kiarostami, 65th Venice Film Fe...

Abbas Kiarostami, 65th Venice Film Festival (Wikipedia)

I have been looking for Abbas Kiarostami’s “Where Is My Friend’s House?” for some time after Werner Herzog recommended it at his Rogue Film School site. I found an old VHS copy called “Where Is The Friend’s Home?” at the Humboldt State University Library, but I was really happy to find an updated version from the Criterion Collection on Hulu. I can think of no better time to highlight Kiarostami’s work when US and Iranian politicians are busy dehumanizing one another. Once again it is art that reminds us of our universal humanity. Kiarostami manages to perfectly capture the world-view and ethical code of every eight year old beautifully. The cinematographer, Farhad Saba, captures the color and texture of every wall throughout the villages as well as the spatial dimension that all children reside in. The film tells the story of Ahmed, a schoolboy attempting to return his friend’s notebook in a neighboring village. It is getting late and Ahmed has not yet bought bread for the family, but his friend faces expulsion if he does not turn in his notebook the following day. This film is a metaphor for contemporary civil duty, loyalty, and simple everyday heroics.

The film is among the top ten in the BFI list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 14.

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