“Gnostic theological debates through the pageantry and panoply of the ring”

Fragments by Stephen Dobyns



Now there is a slit in the blue fabric of air.

His house spins faster. He holds down books,

chairs; his life and its objects fly upward:

vanishing black specks in the indifferent sky.



The sky is a torn piece of blue paper.

He tries to repair it, but the memory

of death is like paste on his fingers

and certain days stick like dead flies.



Say the sky goes back to being the sky

and the sun continues as always. Now,

knowing what you know, how can you not see

thin cracks in the fragile blue vaults of air.



My friend, what can I give you or darkness

lift from you but fragments of language,

fragments of blue sky. You had three

beautiful daughters and one has died.



Stephen J. Dobyns (born February 19, 1941) is an American poet and novelist born in Orange, New Jersey, and residing in Boston.



Life

Born on February 19, 1941 in Orange, New Jersey to Lester L., a minister, and Barbara Johnston Dobyns. Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967. He worked as a reporter for the Detroit News.



He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.



As a professor of English at Syracuse University, he was involved in a sexual discrimination scandal. Francine Prose defended him with faint damning of his accuser and the neo-Victorian victim-feminism policies of the school in an article that cast all parties in an unflattering light.




Works

Dobyns has written many detective stories about a private detective named Charlie Bradshaw who works out of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Bradshaw is unusual as a private eye protagonist, an ordinary man who was once a police officer. All the books have the word “Saratoga” in the title.



In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He does not shy from the low, nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason. This voice is strongly informed by his journalistic training.



For example, in the poem “Missed Chances” in Cemetery Nights, the nameless speaker wanders through a metaphorical city in which those who missed their big opportunities futilely rehearse for when that moment will next arrive. In the comic novel The Wrestler’s Cruel Study, the protagonist roams through a modern cityscape populated by fairy-tale rituals, searching for his missing fiancée, alternately aided or hindered by a Nietzsche-quoting manager and his Hegelian nemesis, to find that his wrestling matches are choreographed by a shadowy organization that enacts their various Gnostic theological debates through the pageantry and panoply of the ring, all the while learning to resolve his own dualistic nature and determine who he is behind the role he plays.



Dobyns’ poems are deeply personal, precise renderings of a speaker informed by but not limited to his [Dobyns'] experience. Though the personae in the individual poems differ, they blend together in the collections to act as a voice in wonder of the beauty and cruelty of the world we live in. One might gather that, to Dobyns, the world is a woman he falls in love with who breaks his heart but who is so beautiful that he must fall in love with her again and again.



His poetic works count among them the 1971 Lamont Poetry Selection (Concurring Beasts), a National Poetry Series award winner, and a Melville Cane Award winner (Cemetery Nights).


Cold Dog Soup has been made into two films, the American Cold Dog Soup and the French Doggy Bag. Two Deaths of Señora Puccini has been made into the film Two Deaths. The movie Wild Turkey is based on one of his short stories.



Boy in the Water is a novel about what goes on in a secluded private school in the United States.





Bibliography




Poetry

The Reason Why (1973)

▪ Concurring Beasts (1972)

▪ Griffon: Poems (1976)

▪ Heat Death (1980)

▪ The Balthus Poems (1982)

▪ Cemetery Nights (1987) ISBN 0-14-058584-2

▪ Body Traffic (1990)

▪ Black Dog, Red Dog (1990) ISBN 0-03-071077-4

▪ Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992 (1994) ISBN 0-14-058651-2

▪ Common Carnage (1996)

▪ Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides (1999) ISBN 0-14-058916-3

▪ The Porcupine’s Kisses (2002)

▪ Mystery, So Long (2005)





Fiction

▪ A Man of Little Evils (1973) ISBN 0-689-10567-3

▪ Dancer With One Leg (1983)

▪ Cold Dog Soup (1985)

▪ A Boat Off the Coast (1987)

▪ The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (1988) ISBN 0-14-023579-5

▪ The House on Alexandrine (1990) ISBN 0-8143-2183-6

▪ After Shocks/Near Escapes (1991)

▪ The Wrestler’s Cruel Study (1993) ISBN 0-393-03511-5

▪ The Church of Dead Girls (1997) ISBN 0-8050-5103-1

▪ Boy in the Water (1999) ISBN 0-312-97522-8

▪ Eating Naked [SS] (2000) ISBN 0-312-27829-2





Charlie Bradshaw series

▪ Saratoga Longshot (1976) ISBN 0-14-025196-0

▪ Saratoga Swimmer (1981)

▪ Saratoga Headhunter (1985) ISBN 0-14-015606-2

▪ Saratoga Snapper (1986) ISBN 0-670-81059-2

▪ Saratoga Bestiary (1988) ISBN 0-670-82024-5

▪ Saratoga Hexameter (1990)

▪ Saratoga Haunting (1993)

▪ Saratoga Backtalk (1994) ISBN 0-393-03659-6

▪ Saratoga Fleshpot (1995) ISBN 0-393-03805-X

▪ Saratoga Strongbox (1998) ISBN 0-670-87692-5





Nonfiction

▪ Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry (1996)

Where people climbed on the roof of Bob Dylan’s house

Woodstock Rocks On, but The Beat Is Quieter

Posted by CN Staff on February 26, 2004 at 22:17:12 PT

By Denny Lee 

Source: New York Times
 


Woodstock, N.Y. — For a place synonymous with music, Woodstock is eerily silent at night. The Tinker Street Cafe, where Bob Dylan composed two influential albums of the 1960’s — “Another Side of Bob Dylan” and “Bringing It All Back Home” — is now a hushed photography gallery.



The Bearsville Studios, where artists from the Band to Muddy Waters recorded albums, may soon become a private residence. And the Joyous Lake club, where Phish once threw surprise concerts, has been shut more than a year.



But the music lives on in ways unexpectedly chic and quintessentially bohemian. Despite a popular image burnished by countless CD reissues and VH-1 retrospectives, Woodstock is no longer just a shrine for burned-out hippies who cling to the Woodstock festival of 1969 in the tradition of former high school quarterbacks reliving past glory.



New recording studios are cutting hit records. Homegrown bands are headlining national tours. And musicians of all stripes, from chart toppers to club crawlers, continue to flock here for inspiration — and, in some cases, good real estate deals — amid the gently rolling Catskills.



Last year, according to The New York Observer and several local newspapers, David Bowie paid $1.16 million for a 64-acre property on Little Tonche Mountain near Woodstock, where he plans to build a palatial retreat for himself and his wife, the model Iman. But Mr. Bowie is only the latest and most recognizable name to be seduced by this close-knit town with a long reputation for breeding musical virtuosity.



Most are like Peter Levin, a keyboard player from Manhattan, who first came to Woodstock to get away from the cacophony of the city, but found himself in a music-minded Shangri-La. “It’s really easy to start a good band up here,” said Mr. Levin, 61. “I’m in five or six bands right now. There are musicians making seven figures living down the street from musicians who barely eke out a living.”



Two years ago, Mr. Levin bought a 150-year-old farmhouse for about $300,000. His synthesizers and entire Manhattan studio soon followed. His 30-acre wooded property provides soundproofing for neighbors.



Ensconced in a 1924 estate that sits atop its own mountain overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir is Allaire Studios, which opened in 2002. It features a 2,000-square-foot recording room with 45-foot vaulted ceilings, three Steinway pianos and 16 apartments for artists and their posses. To get there, one must traverse a private switchback to the top of Tonche Mountain.



“Norah Jones just recorded a part of her last album in here,” said Mark McKenna, Allaire’s studio manager, referring to “Feels Like Home,” which came out this month. “Musicians come here for the space, privacy and serenity.”



Recording studios are an integral part of this musical landscape. Woodstock’s history of arts and social reform may date back to 1902, when a wealthy Englishman started the Byrdcliffe arts colony. But the better part of its music heritage can be traced to 1969, though not for the reasons most people think. As every local musician knows, the festival didn’t even take place in Woodstock in Ulster County, but about 50 miles away in Bethel in Sullivan County, N.Y.



Albert Grossman, who managed the Band, Mr. Dylan, Janis Joplin and Todd Rundgren, founded the Bearsville Studios that year in a secluded field on the outskirts of town. Bearsville nurtured a local industry and today there are more than a dozen professional recording studios in and around Woodstock, ranging in size from Allaire to smaller studios like the Clubhouse. In any given month, the Woodstock Inn on the Millstream has at least one band staying there to record at a nearby studio.



After Mr. Grossman died in 1986, however, Bearsville — along with a rambling compound that includes a 250-seat theater and a second recording house — fell on hard times. The studio, where R.E.M. recorded three albums, has been put on the market by Mr. Grossman’s widow, Sally, for $725,000.



Other music landmarks have been silenced. Only one place devoted exclusively to live music is currently open in downtown Woodstock — the Colony Cafe. Otherwise, Tinker Street, the main thoroughfare, offers little in the way of tunes, except perhaps for the wind chimes and meditation bells sold at nearly every gift shop in town.



On weekends, the town swells with day trippers who dust off their tie-dyes to hunt for hippie paraphernalia. There is no shortage of marijuana pipes, patchouli, herbal chai, Afghan hats and Tibetan knickknacks. There is one Woodstock for musicians, and another for nostalgic shoppers.



“We sell mostly to tourists, Westerners and a few Dharma students,” said Sering Yoden, who owns the Tibetan Emporium on Rock City Road. On warmer days, drummers have been known to plant themselves on the village green and hash out a few beats. But on a sunny afternoon last Sunday, the only people there were four teenagers playing Hacky Sack and seven older women who were carrying signs, including one that read: “Women in Black for Global Peace and Non-Violence.”



“This is a movement to bring our silent voices into the street for a potent political voice,” said Jane Toby, 63, who teaches Italian in New Paltz, N.Y. As Ms. Toby stood in silent protest, the driver of a Subaru waved in a show of solidarity.



Subarus, however, are slowly being displaced by S.U.V.’s as Woodstock, and much of the Catskills, draws more affluent New Yorkers. “Woodstock is the next Hamptons,” declared Allen Gurevich, a commercial real estate agent from New York, who was nursing a beer at the Woodstock Lodge, a former dive bar that now serves mojitos and merlot. “We’ve got Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler and Uma Thurman.”



Mr. Gurevich, 32, who is renting a house with several friends, wants to buy something in town. But prices may be out of reach, if not for Mr. Gurevich, then certainly for many young musicians. “We’ve had a huge upswing during the last five years, especially after 9/11,” said Joan C. Lonergan, the broker at Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty. The price of a three-bedroom house on three acres averaged $349,000 last year, compared with $259,000 in 2001.



And the newer arrivals did not come to awaken their musical voice, but for Woodstock’s proximity to New York and nature. “It’s very laid back,” said Enrico Palazio, 50, who owns a supermarket in Brooklyn and has a house overlooking Indian Head Mountain. “There’s no pretension and a good amount of New Yorkers.”



But musicians are not singing the blues. Mic Todd, the 23-year-old bassist for Coheed and Cambria, an emo rock band whose members grew up in the area — and is often cited as the next big thing coming out of Woodstock — said that the town’s musical heritage is too entrenched to be stifled by rising real estate prices. “The only problem,” he said, “is that there’s no place to play in front of an audience.”



That might soon change. Janet Morra, a music promoter and fund-raiser from Croton-on-Hudson, recently made an offer for the Joyous Lake. “We want to bring live music back to Woodstock,” she said. “And we’re going to do it right this time. We’re going to have really good alcohol — all the types of martinis that money can buy. And we’re going to have disco.”



Source: New York Times (NY)

Author: Denny Lee

Published: February 27, 2004

Copyright: 2004 The New York Times Co.



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