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Morton Marcus: Good evening, everyone, this is Mort Marcus and this is the Poetry Show. A special night -- and you people recognize the strings of the wonderful Hawaiian slack-key guitar in the background -- our guest tonight is James D.

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Houston. And if you were to ask me who I thought, as many people do, is the writer who normally represents Santa Cruz, but maybe is a great California writer on the national scene because he talks about the lifestyle and what is going on under the

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surface of things here in California, both historically, socially, I would say it's James D. Houston, who has been writing for these thirty-five years, I guess, Jim, and has had fifteen books out and has now just come out with a new book which is

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called, "In the Ring of Fire," and we're going to talk to him tonight about this work. Now, many of you people out there probably know Jim Houston's work and you know that he is a prose writer. But what we are going to talk about, and why I think he

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is here, is that the beauty of his prose is that it erases the line between poetry and prose. Jim, welcome to the Poetry Show. James D. Houston: Well, thank you, Mort. It's a real pleasure and an honor to be here.

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Morton Marcus: Well, I feel the same way, my friend. Jim and I have known each other for a very, very long time. And in fact, as many out there know, one of the reasons that I'm living in Santa Cruz is because of Jim and Jeannie. Jim, what

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about this idea of poetry and prose? How do you look at the difference, if there is one, between poetry and prose? James D. Houston: Well, you know, people often say, gee, there's a sense of poetry in this- in this novel, or it's

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written in such a way that it almost reminds me of poetry. And I'm still a little bit surprised when I hear comments like that because I've always assumed, I've taken it for granted, that the music of language is part of the appeal of whatever you're

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writing. And that's one of the things I feel like you're- you're obliged to pay attention to as a writer, as a storyteller, or as a poet either way. So you know, there's a lot of aspects to the musicality of language that I've just heard

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all the writers that I grew up on, or studied when I was first getting serious about writing, people like Melville and Conrad and E.M. Forster and Faulkner and Steinbeck, you know, the tremendous musicality in the language that I just assumed was

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part of the task. So I've always aspired to that in my own- in my own work, or tried to be attuned to that. Morton Marcus: Well, that certainly is the case. When we talk about poetry, of course, we're talking about things like

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rhythm, we're talking about sound, we're talking about image and, you know, really very, very specific word selection. And I'm certain that whenever I read your work, I mean, even when I read your essays, I am struck by this all the time. Is there

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anything, let's say, that you can read us from the book which might illustrate how the- this line between poetry and prose really is almost a non-existent one? James D. Houston: Well, I think maybe the most dramatic example

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or poetic example would be in the first chapter, the introduction to the book. It's really a- what I'm trying to do in this book is explore the interconnectedness of a wide range of places around this huge region we call the Pacific

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Basin, the subtitle is, "A Pacific Basin Journey," and looking for ways that- that California and the West Coast connect to some of the shores and islands that lie farther west around the Pacific. But I start at Tassajara Hotsprings,

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right down here in the Los Padres range because in my view, that's where there's a zen center down here, Tassajara Zen Center, in the middle of classic American wilderness, and there's something emblematic about that touch point, those things coming

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together. Morton Marcus: It's sort of like where East and West come together. James D. Houston: East and West come together right there. You

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know, you have a zendo and you have mountain lions running around. I was down there last week; I'm walking down the path in the zendo, about eight in the morning and here's a doe out on this lawn between the zendo and the kitchen. And the zendo just-

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and there's a guy behind me, bangs with a mallet on a wooden gong and the deer just sort of gallops up the side of the hill and runs away and you got all those things coming together. So I tried to write about that in this opening chapter among some

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other things. And there's a paragraph right in the middle of this opening chapter that goes like this: Somehow, all of these things inhabit the atmosphere of Tassajara Canyon, where the final edge of America's

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wilderness meets Asia. Wild boar, mountain lion, temple gong, jay squawk, creek tumble, black robe, morning sutra, steam curl and morning fog, madrone and oak and manzanita, sitting Buddha, logging road.

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Morton Marcus: You know, as you've read that, and you read it to me before, but this time as you read it, it sounds exactly like something Gary Snyder would write in the same kind of rhythm and language and even ended with the idea of a

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logging road, so there's this very definite sense if I were to ask you to read that, you know, no one over the air knew that, they'd say, oh, that's Gary Snyder. So, point made. James D. Houston: Well, the difference, one big difference

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between this and a Gary Snyder poem, I guess, it's laid out in a paragraph. Each one of those phrases is just, they're in sequence and inside a paragraph. But the music is similar and what I was trying to do there was to just juxtapose those

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various images. It seemed to me that at the end, that's the end of about five pages about Tassajara, and it seemed to be an efficient way to sum up this kind of entry into Tassajara and juxtapose all these images; instead of stringing together in

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a sentence with a bunch of commas, give each one its period, you know, and move on to the next one, just jump, jump, jump like that. Morton Marcus: Jim, what I'm going to ask you to do now, if

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you want to read another little section, or- James D. Houston: Well, if we're talking about the kind of musicality, you know, maybe I'll read something- yeah. This is called, "The Pacific Basin Journey," and it's really

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divided into a series of journeys to various places around the Pacific. Tassajara is the first, and then there's a long section about Japan, and then the next section is about Hawaii. And at the end of the section on Hawaii, there's a-

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there's a chapter called, "Three Kinds of Silence," where I'm trying to compare the quality of silence in a crater on the Big Island with the quality of silence I had just felt several days before in a Zen Garden on the island of Kyushu. And it's

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the difference between that raw, wild place where there's a kind of energy in the air, even when it's quiet, it's never still and it kind of grabs you. And that other kind of sculptured silence that you feel in a Zen Garden, where a human hand has been in

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there and shaped the environment in such a way that there's a serenity about it. You don't feel serene inside a crater. There's something- there's another kind of silence, and then at the end, the third kind of silence is when I'm out at

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the end of this- at the edge of this crater at moonlight and an owl appears. So this comes at the end of an essay called: THREE KINDS OF SILENCE Another cloud has filled the sky, the light grows somehow

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larger, brighter, moving in underneath this cloud. Unaware of sound, I am watching the light, watch until the west turns red maroon, while overhead, half a moon breaks through, making shadows on the cliff where I stand. I watch the

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near-night colors merge and change until a white spirit comes rising from somewhere farther down the precipice right below me. Huge white wings are lifting in slow undulation. It is a white owl, the one Hawaiians call pueo, top lit by

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the moon. With a feathery whoosh, it swings wide, and behind that whoosh comes the non-sound of its sudden passage, a silence with a shape to it like the dark blur the owl leaves on my retina, rising, curving, swooping, gone.

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Morton Marcus: Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. I want to get back to that, because that is the third kind of silence, which is also the spiritual silence. And I want to get back to that because that is certainly a permeating theme throughout this

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book. But as you said, this book, which I certainly recommend to everyone out there who loves not only literature- you see, the thing about Jim Houston to me is that you're not only reading this beautiful language, but what has struck me

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with Jim, God, going on decades now, is this tremendous intelligence that is working with this beautiful language and insight, which certainly showed itself and many people out there will probably remember his book, "The Californians," as you try

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to grasp the essence, and the different senses of what makes the state the state, that's the kind of intelligence is being brought to bear here now, but I think has become deeper, more spiritualized, and that's really in a minute- in a way what

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you're looking for. These travels through the Pacific, really are united by this sense of the diversity of cultures in The Ring of Fire. Why don't you talk about that, and maybe start off with how that works here in California, because we've been

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hit here with this idea of almost a threat to the idea of diversity, when 187 was attempted to put through, which is, you know, no immigrants, no one except the people who are here. Just some of your ideas on that, how it fits in with the

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book. James D. Houston: Yeah, well, 18- Proposition 187 is a question in itself, that's a huge topic, which we probably ought not to get into.

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Morton Marcus: But how it relates to the book, you know- James D. Houston: The whole idea of cultural diversity is- in California, is very much a feature of our geography here. The fact that this state borders the Pacific has a lot to do with

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the range of peoples and the kinds of histories that shape so many of the people who live here. For, you know, for a couple of hundred years ships have been landing here on the Pacific routes, and people have been moving here from the

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Pacific Islands and from Asia, because this is where- this is the first place people stop when they come across the Pacific from Asia. And yet, oddly enough, the prevailing legend for the settling of California continues to be people moving

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from east to west, across the continent. This is where all the big wagon train movies come from, and this is- until about twenty-five years ago, this is where all the writers came from. One of the reasons that legend prevailed for so long is because

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most of the writers attached to the California until about twenty-five years ago were of Anglo-European background. And so that's the history that they brought with them, that's certainly the history that I grew up with because that's how

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my father got to California. He came out here from Texas during the Depression, but my wife's background is Japanese and her fathers got here traveling from west to east across the Pacific and California was not the end of the line or the last stop,

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which is the way so many people think of California's place in the North American continent. For a man coming from Asia, it was the first stop, it was the point of entry. And you've had just great numbers of people who have arrived in California,

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coming from west to east, along with all these other multitudes of people who have come to California from north- from south to north. That migration pattern predates the migration from east to west by a couple of hundred years. People were

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moving north from central and south and central Mexico- Central America and Mexico into California long before the pioneers started bringing their wagon trains across the Sierras. In fact, the first overland expedition of California was not

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a wagon party crossing the Sierras, it was the Portola Expedition coming up the coast from Baja California in 1769. And at that point, California began to be a culturally diverse region because that exploration party, led by a Spanish soldier,

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included Indios from Mexico, and Mestizos, men of mixed blood, and a couple of men of African background, as well as the Spanish soldiers. So that was a cross-cultural exploration party back in 1769. And if you want to step back one step further, the

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people who were already here before the European exploration began, lived in a land of -- the estimates around say four hundred thousand people living in what we now call California -- and those indigenous tribes had forty or fifty languages,

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different languages and many, many different lifestyles and many cultures, from the, you know, the whaling culture up in the north coast around what is now Mendocino to the desert tribes down in the Imperial Valley. Those are totally

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different kinds of people, all adapting to the to the wide geographical diversity of California, and they were coexisting. So California was a multicultural region before the Europeans got here. And then, when the Europeans got here, it

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began to be European and began to be Anglo plus Mexican, plus Anglo plus Hispanic plus Indian, and then very quickly, Polynesians added on to that. Sutter's Fort was built by Hawaiians back in the mid 18- early 1840s. Hawaiian, John

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Sutter, a Swiss immigrant naturalized as a citizen of Mexico, has a Hawaiian common law wife at Sutter's Fort in the 1840s. That's a kind of emblematic moment because that's the kind of stuff that's been going on here from the

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beginning, but it's somehow still takes people by surprise that we inhabit a region of such cultural diversity, as if it should be something else. It's never been anything else. Cultural diversity is the norm here. And one of the ways to see

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that I think with more clarity is to understand the relationship of the West Coast to the Pacific region, the history of the Pacific, and the development of the Pacific. It's- nowadays it's getting- the economic ties are getting more

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and more intense, but the demographics, the histories, the wars of the 20th century, the cultural exchanges, the influx of spiritual disciplines from Asia, all of that stuff bears upon the life that we live here.

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Morton Marcus: All right. Jim, did this book come to you as a book when you began it or was it just a series of essays on even writing assignments that you've been given? James D. Houston: Well, no, it's the idea that there was a book

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here. It came to me while we were traveling in Japan, which I write about in the introduction, getting down into the volcano country of Japan and seeing the craters juxtaposed with the hot springs really, really keyed me into the kind of common geology.

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But I had been gathering these pieces over a period of time. And during my travels, a lot of times it was- it was like an extended journal keeping. A lot of the stuff that's in the section called, "About Bali," was first published as a Bali

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notebook in Manoa at the University of Hawaii. So it started out that way, each one of these journeys was separate. But by the time I went to Okinawa, I really saw that if I could get the Okinawa piece right, that would- that would be

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the completing piece of the book I needed. There was- there was something going on there that I needed to write about. And when I got that part finished, I felt like I had all the material that I needed. But then the last stuff that I wrote was these

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connecting pieces that connect all these various journeys back to the West Coast. The West Coast is always the point of departure and the point of return. One of the things that interests me about travel, you go to a foreign country, you get

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in touch with a foreign culture, I always try to just be as open as I can to what the lessons are, what the differences are. Understanding the differences always helps me understand myself better, understanding why Bali is different from the

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United States, how Bali works the way it does, helps me to understand where I live. The idea isn't to go to another country and try to change it or try to teach those people something that I think they need to know. I go as a kind of

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witness. You know that line of Suzuki Roshi, "Zen mind, beginner's mind." He says you should always be in the beginner's mind. He says, "The beginner's mind- for the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. For the expert's

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mind, there are a few." And I always try to be in a beginner's mind, especially when I'm traveling because the idea isn't to try and change what's there, or to take America to what's there, but to see it, to learn from it, to find out what I can

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about myself and bring that back home. Because, you know, I live here, and I want to live my life here as fully and as- with as much clarity as I can. And you go into another place like Bali, it's like a mirror. Japan is like a mirror. You know, look

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closely, and then come bring that back and reflect upon it. Morton Marcus: Great. Very, very good. Why don't you read us a selection from the book? James D. Houston: Well, what do you think, should it be long or

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short? Morton Marcus: We're going to go ten minutes until we have to take a break. But while Jim is looking for something to read, let me say that the other reason that Jim Huston is on the show

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is that he will be giving a reading and a book signing from, "In the Ring of Fire," this Tuesday, that's two days from now at 7:30pm at the Bookshop Santa Cruz. So I urge you to come down -- he's a marvelous reader, as you're obviously

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hearing -- and get a copy of this book, which had a terrific review in the Chronicle two weeks ago, or three weeks ago I guess now. And what happened in the San Jose Mercury today, Jim? James D. Houston: Well, today, the Mercury News in the Sunday

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perspective section, they ran a big excerpt with a beautiful illustration. Morton Marcus: Right. James D. Houston: So that's-, that was great, a great break.

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Morton Marcus: And good and terrific reviews in Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal. It's really been just sailing along. And I just urge everyone out there to read this because, you know, Jim says that when he travels, his travels are

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touchstones of mirrors for him but you've got to understand that what- how he serves us is that he brings that mirror to us and lets us experience it through his words. And I think this is very serious stuff for us to think about, how we relate

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and where we are in relation to the Pacific Rim as a people, as a lifestyle, and as we move into the 21st century, certainly, that seems to me to be the direction things are going. Jim. James D. Houston: Well, let's see, you said about ten minutes?

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Morton Marcus: Yep. James D. Houston: Well, I've got a piece here. This takes about ten minutes to read. It's a sort of profile of a fellow that we met in Denpasar called, "The Man Who Prefers To Be Robbed In

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Jakarta." Morton Marcus: Yeah, love this piece. I was going to ask you to read this. James D. Houston: And I've always- you know, one of the

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things that as I said, I'm exploring in this book is these lines that run back and forth across the Pacific. And the fact that this guy had been to LA and back was part of what tou hed me about his story. So any ay, this is in the long section

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n Bali. It's called: THE MAN WHO PREFERS TO BE ROBBED IN JAKARTA In Denpasar, I meet a screenwriter, a fellow from Jakarta who happens to be spending a couple of weeks here.

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Denpasar is the main city on Bali. We are introduced at an outdoor restaurant and we talk f r quite a while because his E glish is very good and he is e ger to reminisce about Los A geles, where he lived for a c uple of years. "For those of u

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on Java," he says with a l ugh, "Bali is a bit like C talina Island for Southern C lifornia, a very pleasant v cation spot, and not too far f om shore." He calls himself W llie, he is dark and lean, and a Muslim, as are most Japanese. T

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ough not the kind of Muslim we m st often hear about, the d sert form Muslims, the Arabs, he Iraqis, the nomads, and the erbers of North Africa. Willie s a man of the tropics, and quitorial Muslim, who has spent ost of his life a long way from

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ecca, thousands of miles south nd west, in a humid land where angoes grow. Buddhism and induism flourished on Java for any centuries before Islam came long. Before Buddhism, there ere animal gods and volcano eities you still hear mentioned

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rom time to time, each of these ays of seeing and believing has eft its imprint and added its lavor to what is in the air of ndonesia, and in the statuary round the temples. Somehow this hole history shows in Willie's ace and sounds in his voice. He

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lso speaks Japanese, in ddition to Javanese, his native ongue, and Bahasa Indonesia, the national language. He claims to be a Muslim, his sense of humor is Indian. He is a fatalist, but a jolly fatalist. When he talks about fate, or the various forms

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of human folly, he laughs merrily. His black luminous eyes are always filled with mirth. We sip long-neck bottles of Bintang Baru and sample foods coming toward us from the restaurant's kitchen: frog legs, barbecued shrimp, the vegetable dish

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called gado-gado, the little spicy kebab sticks they call satay, and we talk about Los Angeles. I have seen just enough of his home city to have the impression that Jakarta and LA are alike in at least a few ways. There is a reliance on oil

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trading and the wealth this has generated, there is the ethnic mixing -- in this case, the Javanese and Malay and Chinese with the centuries of Dutch colonial rule still lingering. There are vast districts filled with millions of people and wide

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boulevards thick with traffic day and night. I tell him I remember secretly giving thanks that I did not have to drive in such traffic, that I could hail a cab and sit back and shut my eyes and not watch what appeared to be the utter chaos of buses,

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scooters, vans, cars, bikes, and motorcycles with protruding side cars. Willie's face lights up with shocked delight, 'No rules of the road in Java?" he says with a laugh, "quite the contrary. There are four. If you master them, you will have no

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trouble at all." "And what would those be?" I say. "Pick," he says, "big; flow; no see, n face." He takes them one at time, his shoulders happil shaking. "Flow," he tells me "has two dimensions: speed an shape. In general speed wil

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increase or decrease dependin on the number of buses pedicabs, and speed bumps to b contended with. So you ride th flow of the speed. Meanwhile remember that the concept o lanes is very fluid. As traffi lanes form and dissolve, refor

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and disappear, you always go with the flow." "Pick," he says, "a vehicle with so much as an inch of advantage on another has the right to turn first, to pass, to move. Whether this advantaged vehicle is coming from the right or left makes no

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difference. And in these decisions, courtesy is never a factor. 'Big,' no matter what el e is happening, the larger t e vehicle, the more influence t has. 'No see, no face.' Keep our eyes straight ahead. Don't ook into the faces of other dri

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ers or glance toward nea by vehicles. As long as you h ve not acknowledged anot er vehicle, you can make any m ve that comes to mind. If two c rs happen to be approaching o a two lane road, one preparing to turn left and the ot

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er preparing to pass a third c r, the game is to follow y ur chosen route and never make ye contact. Once you have so m ch as glanced at the other driv r, you bring upon yourself m re responsibility." I tell Will e, he must have survived pre

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ty well in California. "On he freeways, yes," he says, "I id very well indeed. I was fu ly prepared. But on the street ," his brown face opens wit a melancholy smile, "not so goo ." I asked him what happened and he tells me his California sto

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y. He was there as a report r, writing feature pieces fo a Tokyo paper. "I was also th re to guard my wife," he says, " ho was taking courses at U C. Here's the kind of thing I wo ld be faced with; I had been to Universal Studios for the t

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ur since I was already starting to be interested in fi m. Afterward, I was crossing he street toward a bus stop, I ad a moustache at the time wit a beard on my chin and a coat t at was perhaps looking a bit w rn and thin at the lapels. W

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ll, a woman who was standing t ere waiting for the same bus s w me coming and she cried out, ' on't you take one more step t ward me or I'll call the p lice!' She had seen my f atures, you see, and perhaps t ought I was Vietnamese. There w

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re many Southeast Asians in L s Angeles in those days. She j st assumed I was on my way to r b her or that I was somehow a d nger to her. Her cries made e eryone else turn and look at m as if I were a criminal, just f r walking toward the bus stop. A

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d this fills me with enormous s dness. In her eyes, I was a t reat. It gave me more sadness t an being robbed, though that t o was a very [cut-off] fit. A ter that experience, alas, I c uld not enjoy my stay. I was a ways on guard wondering what w

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uld happen to me next." By the e d of his tale, I am feeling g ilty for the mean streets of m homeland. Wishing things had g ne better for this g ntle-hearted and harmless man. I tell him I'm sorry he had such a difficult time. His hand t

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uches my arm, "Forgive me," he s ys, "I did not tell you these s ories in order to extract an a ology." "It must have been a r lief to come back to Jakarta," I said. He is laughing again. H s eyes liquid, luminous, f lled with amazement now. "I

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ave been robbed many times," h says, "and not only in L s Angeles. I was robbed n Honolulu, and more than once in Jakarta. I have been rob ed, though it is not the same. All these cities are dangerou , I suppose, but not in the

00:31:13.390 - 00:31:31.540

ame way. Thieves are not the s me. In Java, they use knives, not shotguns. Guns are against the law. The common citizen ca not own one. I once told a thie as I handed him my money, 'thes few thousand rupiah are all I have remaining in the world.' A

00:31:31.540 - 00:31:47.320

d you know what he did? The man anded it back to me. He was a th ef by necessity, but he was stil a man of honor. He was stealing to eat, or perhaps to feed hi family out of desperation, bu not to buy drugs. I was to ched by this. I had already

00:31:47.320 - 00:32:03.760

ost the money, you see, surren ered it to him. To get it back as such an unexpected blessing I felt compelled to reward he poor fellow. I gave him alf the money. I split it wit him." A desert has been set b fore us: rice jellies and coc

00:32:03.760 - 00:32:21.760

nut milk and some strong coffe . We sip the coffee, try th desert. "Sometimes I ask mysel why I had been robbed so oft n," he says, "and I remember th t mine was a difficult birth. It was -- what is the term -- a breech birth, all these rob

00:32:22.090 - 00:32:39.910

eries, maybe I was not suppose to be born." I hear no self pi y, the idea seems to amuse im and satisfy him. It occur to me that he has not me tioned calling the police or ooking for ways to punish any of his thieves. Somehow he sees

00:32:39.910 - 00:32:56.560

imself as both victim and accomp ice, as if since long before bi th his fate has been hurdling toward him down a two-lane road. Had he kept his eyes averted, ac ording to the fourth rule of t e road in Java, things mig t have worked out differently,

00:32:56.560 - 00:33:16.240

but he is the kind of fellow wh makes eye contact, and with th t has come this curious bur en of responsibility for wh tever befalls him. As we s p our coffee, his eyes gaze into mine, merry, ancient, boyish, da k and innocent, the vulnerable

00:33:18.820 - 00:33:32.080

Morton Marcus: And we are talking with James D. Houston tonight whose new book, his 15th, "In the Ring of Fire," has come out within the last month and a half, and who will be reading this Tuesday at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, but more of

00:33:32.080 - 00:36:18.280

that and more of Jim after a short musical break. Morton Marcus: And this is the Poetry Show once more, and this is your host, Mort Marcus, and we are talking today with Jim Houston and we will continue this conversation. We are

00:36:18.280 - 00:36:39.460

talking to Jim for two reasons. One, his book, his new book, his 15th, has just come out called, "In the Ring of Fire." And it is a group of, I would say, maybe thirty pieces. And it traces his travels from California, around the Pacific Rim and really, as

00:36:39.460 - 00:36:53.380

we have been discussing in the first half of the show, talks about the different cultures and how those different cultures are related and sort of reflect off on us We can use them as a touchstone and we're going to continue to talk about that. But

00:36:53.410 - 00:37:08.380

the other reason that Jim is here is that on Tuesday, he is going to give a reading and a book signing of this book, which has been receiving excellent reviews throughout the country, at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, 7:30pm. That's this Tuesday

00:37:08.380 - 00:37:23.080

7:30pm at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, so try to make it, Jim Houston reading his latest book. Jim, am I wrong or weren't you the first Artist of the Year in Santa Cruz County? James D. Houston: I wasn't the first, I think I was the third

00:37:23.000 - 00:37:38.390

Morton Marcus: An award, which I thought was very, very fitting. or fourth. I must say this: the image I have of Jim Houston is from an early essay of his that appeared in Holiday Magazine and it was

00:37:38.390 - 00:37:58.190

called, "As I Sit Here," as I remember. And it has him up in the cupula of the house he now owns, which he was then renting, looking out over the lagoon on which he lives and the bay, and watching a group of tractors just destroy a small forest. And

00:37:58.220 - 00:38:11.090

he places himself in this environment of an old California, a natural California, California undergoing enormous changes that he's seen since he chose to live in Santa Cruz maybe forty years ago.

00:38:12.470 - 00:38:18.600

James D. Houston: Thirty-five years- Morton Marcus: Yeah. James D. Houston: Thirty-five years in Santa Cruz. Morton Marcus: And that's always the image I get, you know, Jim

00:38:19.110 - 00:38:34.080

understanding, knowing all different aspects of the scene that's going on, and this is why I said at the beginning, there is this real sense of the world and the universe that Jim looks at, rooted in California, and therefore speaks to all of us

00:38:34.290 - 00:38:47.520

about the various ramifications of our existence in the universe, but specifically siphoned and become a concre e through the view of Californ a and now the Pacific Rim. W y don't you tell us the way y u look, let's say, at the

00:38:48.480 - 00:38:59.910

e collections of essays, what ki d of form does it have in yo r min James D. Houston: Well, there are a lot of pieces, and a lot of different pieces, might be thirty-four, thirty-five or

00:38:59.910 - 00:39:18.000

forty different pieces in here rather than a sustained narrative. And some of them are long and some of them are short. And I get the feeling from various people I've talked to now and the kind of responses I've been getting that the book

00:39:18.000 - 00:39:36.390

works as a book, not just as a collection of disparate pieces that have been gathered from here and there, and that's something that I strive for. I wanted to have a continuity and movement, and continuity and feeling, but I also wanted to

00:39:36.390 - 00:39:58.710

hold to that- some of that feeling of a journal being composed in motion. And I wanted to hold to the range of pieces, because I hope that the collection of these various pieces speaks to the- one of the themes of the book, which is the

00:39:58.710 - 00:40:14.610

Pacific- I see the Pacific region as a mandala of places, you know, mandala of interconnected places. We talked about the Pacific Rim, we talked about the Ring of Fire, you know, all these images, which are really very poetic images

00:40:14.760 - 00:40:37.620

for describing this huge region of the world. The images have a containing quality and another kind of circular image that you can lay over that as a mandala of places that are singular yet connected. And I hope that the form of the book reflects that

00:40:37.620 - 00:40:53.730

in some way. I couldn't- obviously, you can't visit all the places in the Pacific, but I'm hoping that the ones that I did visit in Indonesia, and Japan, and Southeast Asia, and Okinawa, Micronesia, and Hawaii, that they would have sort of

00:40:53.760 - 00:41:04.670

taken together an emblematic quality and represent the whole. Morton Marcus: You know, Jim, but you do use the metaphor mandala, and if you you're going to use that metaphor, mandala, then you're obviously putting another dimension in here and

00:41:04.670 - 00:41:08.280

that is the spiritual dimension. James D. Houston: Well, let's hope. Morton Marcus: Yeah. James D. Houston: Yeah.

00:41:08.450 - 00:41:26.510

Morton Marcus: And I mentioned that not only because you chose that as your metaphor, but there is so much of this spiritual sense of these places, and joining together the spiritual senses of places. We heard that when you read, "The Third Kind

00:41:26.510 - 00:41:45.680

of Silence," the rising of the owl. Speak to this, and I hope that you will be able to read some of them to us also. James D. Houston: Well, that's- in terms of these lines of connectedness that I feel moving back and forth across the

00:41:45.680 - 00:42:05.660

Pacific, the spiritual aspect is a big part of that, you know. So many of the belief modes and disciplines that we're familiar with here on the West Coast now come from Asia and have had a big effect on literature, and on architecture, and on the way

00:42:05.660 - 00:42:30.350

people gather, and their devotional activities. And a lot of my traveling has been tied to some kind of, I would say, spiritual quest, spiritual clarification. Going to Hawaii has been very important for me in that regard. A lot of people

00:42:30.350 - 00:42:48.860

see Hawaii as a kind of resort and a vacation destination, and I have never really looked at it that way. When I go to the islands, I tend to spend a lot of time inland around the- I like to go to the Big Island and be near the volcano region. And

00:42:49.280 - 00:43:12.470

I've learned a tremendous amount from Hawaiians about the sacred dimension of the earth and how something like the volcano can really reveal the sacred power of the motor forces of the universe. And so I've written a lot about that, the

00:43:12.470 - 00:43:37.460

connectedness to the land, the connectedness to the rocks, and the rocks as ancestors. And the- which is, you know, I think North American tribes had very similar beliefs. You feel it all over this continent, if you get in touch with the older belief

00:43:37.460 - 00:43:57.230

systems. It just happens that I started going to Hawaii early in life, and a lot of what I learned about these Earth centered belief systems came from there. And then going to Bali was a different kind of question. Bali is a Hindu island

00:43:57.230 - 00:44:16.070

in the middle of a Muslim- Indonesia is all Muslim except for Bali. It's this little Hindu outpost, but they have their own form of Hinduism there. And their sacred traditions run deep and it's an extremely rich place to go. And some things came

00:44:16.070 - 00:44:35.940

really clear to me there about how you can- how can you balance your life? And I wrote about that right at the end of the book. Maybe I could read- should I read part of that? Morton Marcus: That'd be great. Yeah, absolutely.

00:44:37.400 - 00:44:57.200

James D. Houston: Maybe I'll start with the first- there's a first little one half a page. See, another feature of this having pieces of various lengths, it not only speaks to the mandala of the Pacific but it also provides something for

00:44:57.200 - 00:45:11.180

every kind of reader. The reader who wants a full-length essay will find some of those in here. Readers with a shorter attention span will find the half page, get in and get out kind of essay, so that-

00:45:11.690 - 00:45:31.220

Morton Marcus: This is the kind of insight I was talking about. James D. Houston: This is the first morning on Bali. I stayed at a place called Dewi Sri and this is just: EARLY MORNING LOOK AT DEWI SRI

00:45:33.400 - 00:45:50.080

At Dewi Sri, the tiny restaurant is an open air pavilion floored with red tile. The thatch roof is raised on straight wooden legs. There are five tables. Beyond the tables, beyond the carp pool, you have a view across rice fields toward other

00:45:50.080 - 00:46:05.770

thatched roofs among the palms that line Monkey Forest Road. Very close to where I sit sipping my coffee, a family shrine is wrapped with a cloth of black and white checks that represent the eternal struggle between good and evil. And over

00:46:05.770 - 00:46:25.330

in the corner, I see a twelve foot Garuda, the feathered birdman, who is Bali's totem figure of transcendence, knees bent, eagle-faced, wings spread and rising green and red and gold. This is the amazing thing: coffee, papaya, the television

00:46:25.330 - 00:46:43.480

screen, and a deity figure all together in the same place. Imagine sitting in the United States in a restaurant decorated with the twelve stages of the cross, ham and eggs next to an altar flickering with votive candles. Would diners find it

00:46:43.480 - 00:47:03.010

appropriate? Would you sell much food? Probably not. In the United States, the realm of the spirit is one thing, breakfast is something else. Not so in Bali, where this row of rental bungalows is named for the rice goddess, where Garuda presides

00:47:03.010 - 00:47:17.920

over your banana fritter, where the masked dancer goes into the temple to bless his masks, and consecrate the dance before he steps back out into the courtyard to depict the Prime Minister, the clown, the king.

00:47:18.970 - 00:47:34.180

Morton Marcus: Great, great. James D. Houston: So there's a way in Bali that they onstantly stay in touch with he life of the spirit. They on't lose touch with the aterial world with the daily

00:47:34.180 - 00:47:52.120

atters of survival, but they ave all these gestures, these fferings, these blessings. very house, every household has family shrine out in the yard. nd three times a day, some amily member goes out places lessings on the- offerings on

00:47:52.120 - 00:48:12.070

he family shrine, so that all ay long, everybody's kept in ouch with their link to the ivine, to the ancestral world, nd they never break that. And o they stay right on the cusp etween those two realms. It elped me understand this poem

00:48:12.070 - 00:48:31.090

y Rumi, which I used in an pigraph here. It's a stanza. umi was- was the Sufi poet from the 13th century who said: The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep, you must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to

00:48:31.090 - 00:48:48.180

sleep. People are going back and forth across the door sill where the two worlds touch, the door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. And that door sill where the two worlds touch is what I felt I

00:48:48.180 - 00:49:03.030

understood in Bali. They live right there, that's where they live, and it was a great lesson. Great lesson. And, you know, the lesson isn't, "Okay, I got to move to Bali," because I know in my- I know it's not realistic, I would never move to Bali. I

00:49:03.030 - 00:49:15.150

might move there for two or three months, but I would come back here because I like it. But to bring that lesson back here, how can I stay on that door sill and live in Santa Cruz? You know, that's a-

00:49:15.570 - 00:49:33.270

Morton Marcus: That's what it's all about. And I think you know, having that sense of reality and not wanting to romanticize things, say, you know that you're not going to sink into this other world, this world of exoticism, but that you are

00:49:33.270 - 00:49:47.880

American, you're coming back to America and you're going to live here, but how do you live the full life, the life that is round and is both spiritual and material. And that, you know, just pervades this work. As we've been talking and even as I

00:49:48.270 - 00:50:03.240

read through the book, I was just thinking of how long this journey really is, Jim, because I know that you were married in Hawaii and I know you went out there to surf, and one of my favorite novels of yours, of course, is, "Native Son of the

00:50:03.240 - 00:50:21.000

Golden West," in which you see the first movement off the continent. You have the movement coming from east to west, and then picking up at various times, and finally, the main character moving off to Hawaii because we've gone beyond our

00:50:21.000 - 00:50:37.890

Manifest Destiny, if you will. And now that has become so much enlarged, you know, that- it's still that same odyssey, if you will, but now turning around and making a circle, it's come back. James D. Houston: Yeah. When I wrote, "Native Son of the Golden

00:50:37.890 - 00:50:57.720

West," I'm glad you still remember that novel, but I just didn't have the perception of that circle the way that- the way circles turn. Morton Marcus: But it's there. In that case, it's there with

00:50:57.720 - 00:51:11.670

Vandermeer riding that wave of waves, and with different characters who- they can't quite articulate it yet, you know, but I mean, it's there. And the book is still full of tremendous insight. You know, I've been hoping it would have been

00:51:11.700 - 00:51:26.270

reprinted for years now. James D. Houston: In this context, let me just throw in this line, the epigraph. It's a poetry show, so we got to have some more poetry. This is the epigraph to this book and it

00:51:26.270 - 00:51:41.270

comes from Walt Whitman's, "Leaves of Grass," which was published in 1860, which means he probably wrote it, you know, mid 1850s. It's his poem facing west from California shores, which is an extraordinary poem when you think that Whitman

00:51:41.270 - 00:51:57.500

never saw California, never saw the Pacific Ocean, never got any farther west than the Mississippi River. I think he got as far as New Orleans in his travels as a younger man, but he spent most of his life around Long Island and Manhattan, but

00:51:57.500 - 00:52:11.510

he grasped something about this part of the world that almost no one else in those days was seeing. In the 1850s, if anybody was writing about California, they're writing about the Gold Rush. And if they're on the East Coast, they're wringing their

00:52:11.510 - 00:52:25.700

hands over all the money that people have made in the Gold Rush and how they're misspending it. But Whitman saw something much bolder and broader. I just used these first four lines as an epigraph:

00:52:26.280 - 00:52:52.980

Facing west from California shores, inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves toward the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar, look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle, almost

00:52:52.980 - 00:53:03.670

circle. Morton Marcus: Great. It's great stuff. James D. Houston: Yeah. And you wonder how does he get that? How does he know that from Long Island in 1855? It's really

00:53:03.670 - 00:53:16.510

something. Morton Marcus: I mean, he was an amazing man, great American visionary, and certainly inspire other people. Oh, look at th time. I'd like to hear a littl more, and then- because Haw

00:53:16.510 - 00:53:26.770

ii does figure so much in your l fe in the last several yea s, you've done three scripts ow for Eddie Kamae, four script , yea James D. Houston: We're moving for documentary scripts with

00:53:26.770 - 00:53:30.550

Eddie, yeah. Morton Marcus: About Hawaiian music and its roots. James D. Houston: Hawaiian music and traditional culture, yeah. Morton Marcus: Right.

00:53:32.440 - 00:53:42.100

James D. Houston: The music we were listening to, by the way, was Gabby Pahinui, who formed the Sons of Hawaii with Eddie Kamae back in the 1960s. Morton Marcus: Now we'll be hearing him as we depart

00:53:42.100 - 00:53:55.210

tonight. Well, let's do it right now, and then I'll ask you to read, and we'll sign off one more. But your next book, already in the works, I know you've already been reading the galleys, why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

00:53:55.690 - 00:54:10.660

James D. Houston: Well, I've got a novel coming out early next year, called, "The Last Paradise," that is set mostly in Hawaii. I suppose it explores some of the themes that are in this book, but in a fictional way. It's about a guy from

00:54:10.660 - 00:54:22.780

Northern California who finds himself on the Big Island investigating an insurance claim. Morton Marcus: Well, actually this is not just a guy, because anyone who knows the novels of Jim Houston knows that this man

00:54:22.780 - 00:54:41.710

figures in two other novels. James D. Houston: Well, yeah it's the third novel in the saga of the Doyle family based here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And Travis is in the first of that series, the novel, "Continent

00:54:41.710 - 00:54:58.480

l Drift," which deals with Trav s when he first comes home fr m Vietnam in the 70s. Now it's the mid 80s and he's still kin of circling, trying to get his life located, and he ends up n the Big Island and gets drawn nto a local controvers

00:54:58.480 - 00:55:15.670

over geothermal drilling pr jects where a big energy explo ation company is drilling down t rough the lava to try and extra t the steam from the steam rese voirs below the lava fields. A d this of course runs cou ter to, collides with some loca

00:55:15.670 - 00:55:33.100

belief systems, the Hawaiians f el that the Big Island is the body of Pele, the fire goddess and if you're drilling down nto the lava, you're violating h r body. And so this is a classic confrontation between t o views of the earth, which is

00:55:33.100 - 00:55:52.510

earth as commodity to be pack ged and sold, and earth as ance tor to be revered and honor d. And Travis, in his m inland innocence gets drawn in o this while he also meets up ith an old girlfriend who's an island woman of mixed blood.

00:55:52.510 - 00:56:14.740

nd so they get back and fall(?) so it's partly a cross cultura romance and partly an envi onmental drama, and partly- Trav s, a guy from Northern Californ a, who's on a- at a moment i his life when he's ready for some spiritual transforma

00:56:14.740 - 00:56:21.040

ion, spiri Morton Marcus: So it's very much related to this book, why the title? James D. Houston: "Last Paradise," is coming from the

00:56:21.040 - 00:56:26.920

University of Oklahoma Press- Morton Marcus: And it will be out? James D. Houston: In probably February. Morton Marcus: Great. Well, we'll look forward to that but

00:56:26.920 - 00:56:38.230

Jim, why don't you take us out of here. I think we probably only have time maybe for a paragraph or two- James D. Houston: From Hawaii? Morton Marcus: From Hawaii, maybe.

00:56:43.870 - 00:56:52.510

James D. Houston: There's another short piece here. Morton Marcus: As long as we can do it because Billie after this only has- James D. Houston: Right away.

00:56:52.930 - 00:57:00.380

Morton Marcus: She only has half an hour, so. James D. Houston: What can I say? Gee, I don't know. I can only read one paragraph. Morton Marcus: Maybe read three.

00:57:03.210 - 00:57:10.980

James D. Houston: This is a sort of poetic look at the 'Ohi'a tree. Morton Marcus: Okay. James D. Houston: Another one of these short entries from the

00:57:10.980 - 00:57:30.310

section on Hawaii. 'Ohi'a is the tree that lives around the lava. Lava boils up from the underworld and hardens and while it is still stone, many years before the rains have crumbled off the flakes and grains tha eventually become the soil, th

00:57:30.340 - 00:57:47.410

'Ohi'a tree emerges from th rock. Its bark is gray an rough, sometimes spotted wit lichen or patches of moss. Th tenacious trunk will rise ten twelve, twenty feet with n foliage, then send up a canopy f angular limbs. It is not

00:57:47.410 - 00:58:04.540

a pretty tree in the way th t cocoa palms at the shoreline c n be pretty and picturesque, but it is an inspirational tree. A t ee with true wilderness charac er like those rams that thr ve above the treeline, or like he coyote lean and shaggy, a shr

00:58:04.540 - 00:58:20.230

wd survivor. Along devastat on trail, there are trees that w re stripped of all their lea es back in 1959 when the gre t dome shaped cinder cone call d Pu'u Pua'i first erupted. T e ground around these trees w s covered with twenty inches

00:58:20.230 - 00:58:36.880

f pumice, which cut off their ro t systems from both air and wate . Within a year new leaves h d sprouted, a short time late , aerial roots began to appea , clumps of feeder tendrils th t hang from the branches to cat h moisture from the air itsel

00:58:37.330 - 00:58:56.950

. They hang there now like thi k beards, gray where they meet t e limb, rusty through the cente , red toward the bottom, with ti y feeders poking out- tiny feele s poking out to match the 'Ohi'a s anemone-like lehua blossom , said to be Pele's flower

00:58:56.950 - 00:59:15.530

o match the red ohelo berry a d the vein red lava too. What a esson in survival; with roots uried under volcanic ash, they f nd another way to drink and br athe. Morton Marcus: Jim, thank you very, very much for sharing

00:59:15.560 - 00:59:31.820

words on the book with us. That was James D. Houston, who was reading from his new book, "In the Ring of Fire." Jim will be reading and signing copies of the book at the Bookshop Santa Cruz this Tuesday at 7:30pm. Stay tuned for "A Book Befor

00:59:31.820 - 00:59:47.360

Bedtime" with Billie Harris. Th s is Mort Marcus and the Poet y Show, saying thanks f r listening. I'll see you n several weeks, and you are bei g tuned to KUSP 88.9 FM on yo r dial for Santa Cruz, Salina , Big Sur, Monterey, and the who

00:59:47.360 - 00:59:50.960

e day. Thank you very, very mu