Analect 2.790x

7 October 2010. Hows and corses--that's how it works out sometimes. Here in Dubovsky's Appalachia, somewhere in the back country of San Diego County--the old Pala Asistencia, Temecula Grade, or Rancho Guajome, closer in. You are what you see, perhaps--the thin-branched eucalyptus on a willowy morning, Southern California light--the ocean nearby, between coast and hills. From the Tehachapis south--that's how Carey McWilliams begins his masterful characterization--An Island on the Land--quoting A.P. Jacks, an early settler: "My first impression was such as one might receive on arriving in A City of Refuge..."

The biblical allusion lost today in a sea of shopping carts and Taco Bells...but why go there. Progress, following Marx, being inevitable, whatever we might mean by the term...

Better our songs, grounded in something that grows--like the ridgeline of the hills, or a dark dark brown acorn from high in the Sierras--or more nearby, a metate of hollowed granite--rounded from decades of pounding corn, the fine meal, each cake formed by hand...

Or the estate of Martha Breasted, somewhere in Northern Kentucky, 1970--near a place called Florence, then quite remote. A winding road in summer's dusk, warm and humid, piqued light of fireflies meandering amongst the trees...

But that's not what first returns, the banjo and overalls notwithstanding. Rather those drier hills, the coastal air...

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