Nancy Schimmel, photo by Sandy Morris
Welcome to my blog. I have been writing a biography of my mother, songwriter/activist Malvina Reynolds, but I keep getting interrupted—first by Occupy, and Occupella, a song-leading group that grew out of it, blogging at occupella.org, making a book out of the blog, Occupella: Singing in the Lifeboats. Then came The Former Guy, and now the pandemic he assisted. Both the guy and the virus are distracting, scary, and exasperating.
So on this blog I will be posting about my family (my father, William “Bud” Reynolds was an organizer of the Ford Hunger March of 1932 and other disruptions), about the process of writing the bio, and also writing about these weird times and about my own life, writing songs, walking my neighborhood, working on a fantasy novel for children. It’s a good time to be hanging out with witches, dragons and trolls. The other kind of troll.
My old blog, Writing Malvina, got interrupted too. You can find it by clicking 2010 Blog at the upper left.
Saturday, Apr 22, 2023: Sing to Wake the Power Up
Writing from a Prompt
...you have to sing to wake the power up...
. — from a video by Joy Harjo
I couldn’t find this line again in Joy Harjo’s video to see if I got it right, but it doesn’t matter to the writing, it’s what I heard, and this writing is about me, not about Joy Harjo, and she is talking about a different kind of singing and a different kind of power.
The kind I’m talking about is on view in Amandla! a video about singing in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. In one scene a street-filling crowd is singing and dancing forward. I’ve sung that way, in the Pride Parade and peace walks but we didn’t dance. I couldn’t now, but I could have then. In the video, it looks unstoppable. It isn’t, the cops have guns, but it looks, and I bet it feels unstoppable.There must have been some dancing in the Pride parades, but just having fun, not dance as a force for good.
And singing does influence the cops. Betsy Rose said she could see them relax when Occupella started singing.
I think it has to be singing--though we did hire some bagpipers to lead a peace march in San Francisco back in the Sixties and it did feel like that music was propelling us. The pipers were amused to be playing for a peace march because the bagpipe is an instrument of war. Which makes me think of St. Francis’ prayer, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace,” but I bet he wasn’t thinking about bagpipes.
I miss singing live with Occupella more than I miss singing live with the Organic Women’s Chorus or at the In Harmony’s Way song circles, because singing is my political instrument, always has been. I’ve written leaflets and letters to the editor and put money in the collection can, but it’s singing that feels right for me. It never occurred to me to run for office, though my mother and my father and my mother’s father all did, or to make speeches, though my father coached me to make my first one when I was a toddler (I’ve already written about that).
“Gonna keep on moving forward, keep on moving forward...” “ “You gotta put one foot in front of the other and lead with love...” “Round and round the picket line, round and round we go/All we get’s the runaround, the boss gets all the dough...”
It ain’t called a movement for nothin’.
Comment from Bonnie Lockhart posted 4-24-2023:
Well, yes, we did dance in the street at Pride many years with Sistah Boom! And when Sistah Boom--the all-women's samba band that played for decades of SF Pride & Dyke marches--went to DC for Gay & Lesbian Liberation (as we then called it) in 1987, a band of 50 strong, our dancers came with us! And yes, that felt unstoppable! And yes, that was both for fun and expanded freedom. My first and enduring love is singing. But for street action, there's noting quite like a big, grooving samba band moving together!
Comment from Tigran Ayrapetyan posted 5-1-2023:
Hello,
We provide funding through our venture capital company to both start-up and existing companies either looking for funding for expansion or to accelerate growth in their company.
We have a structured joint venture investment plan in which we are interested in an annual return on investment not more than 10% ROI. We are also currently structuring a convertible debt and loan financing of 3% interest repayable annually with no early repayment penalties.
We would like to review your business plan or executive summary to understand a much better idea of your business and what you are looking to do, this will assist in determining the best possible investment structure we can pursue and discuss more extensively.
I hope to hear back from you soon.
Sincerely,
Tigran Ayrapetyan
Investment Director
Devcorp International E.C.
P.O Box 10236 Shop No. 305
Flr 3 Manama Centre, Bahrain
Email: tigran.a@devcorpinternationalec.com
Comment from Waheed Mohammed posted 5-23-2023:
Hello,
We provide funding through our venture capital company to both start-up and existing companies either looking for funding for expansion or to accelerate growth in their company. We have a structured joint venture investment plan in which we are interested in an annual return on investment not more than 10% ROI. We are also currently structuring a convertible debt and loan financing of 3% interest repayable annually with no early repayment penalties. If you have a business plan or executive summary, I can review to
understand a much better idea of your business and what you are looking to do, this will assist in determining the best possible investment structure we can pursue and discuss more extensively. If you are interested in any of the above, kindly respond to us via this email. waheed@almarisinvestmentgroup.com
Waheedalgore22@gmail.com
Sincerely
Engineer Waheed Mohammed
Chief Financial Officer
Al-Maris Investment Group
Friday, Apr 7, 2023: Parts of Constellations
Another prompt write
The prompt for tonight’s write was the poem “The New Speakers” by Gloria E. Anzaldüa.
I chose this line:
We don’t want to be stars, but parts of constellations
Indeed. I just watched a seven-minute film about Ansel Adams, who was also a musician, which I didn’t know, and he talked about the photographic negative being, to him, like the score, and the print, the performance. Musicians are more likely to be parts of constellations than visual artists (unless they are muralists) or poets. And so many of my friends are both musicians and writers, or both storytellers and painters, or some kind of two-fer. So like we all contain multitudes, not just Walt Whitman. And then collaborating: Both co-writing, like Gilbert and Sullivan, and being in writing groups or critique groups. Oh, the writing I’ve heard, that will never be published but that captivated everyone in the room.
But what this poet is talking about is our words becoming part of the language, like ticky-tacky, or our political parodies becoming part of the energy of marches and demonstrations, like Occupella, and that is what I want.
Thursday, Carole and I went to one of our favorite places, Point San Pablo Harbor, just north of Point Molate in Richmond, a tucked-away place with goats and chickens and yurts and houseboats and boat-boats and now . Burning-Man-sized sculptures Art hidden in plain sight, you just need to know where it is. For us in Berkeley, the Albany Bulb is handier and better known—well, maybe not, Pt. San Pablo has a restaurant (closed until May) and band concerts and the Bulb doesn’t, just art painted on or constructed from junk.
Carole is good at asking questions and she asked a guy in a Pt. San Pablo Harbor teeshirt what he and two other guys were doing—they had a machine digging a slit several feet deep into the sod. They were putting in a power line. We told him we loved the place and Carole thanked him for keeping it up, and he said it means a lot to get recognition. So what had been fun and refreshing became also warm and fuzzy.
They have a new sculpture since we were there last, a giant lacy Victrola horn. The alligator and the bee are still there, and a couple of other old ones. We got a picture of the horn, waited for the goats to get out of the road, and headed home.
Comment from Renee posted 4-8-2023:
Love this piece- I felt like I was seeing a place I've never been to. Felt like respite- a deep breath- a gift. :)
Thursday, Feb 9, 2023: Begin Again
Another prompt-write
The obvious point where I began again was 1974-75 when I left my husband, came out as a lesbian, quit my day job and became a traveling storyteller, but I’ve written about that. I don’t refer to myself as a storyteller any more, but as a singer-songwriter. I don’t think I could put my finger on a date, though. I did both for a long time. And when I quit my job at a library I didn’t stop being a librarian. On one of my tours I was in the main New York Public Library researching a woman who captained a sailing ship in an emergency back in the day, and somebody came up and asked me a library question. They knew what I was. And libraries were a homey place for me to hang out when I was on the road. Books, chairs, bathrooms. And free.
I just read an article in the New Yorker about book banning in Florida. The order is that books can’t be available to kids till they’ve been vetted by a trained librarian. It’s a little surprising that they would trust us. I mean, after all, we read books, but it turns out there is a state training workshop the librarians are now supposed to take to, uh, learn how to be censors. What is not surprising is that there is no money to pay for the extra time it will take the librarians to look at all the books. If I’d thought, I’d have known that. When the feds started requiring that kids be given standardized tests, they didn’t provide money for testing.
When I was in college, a girl said in a way she felt sorry for me, being raised an atheist, I didn’t get to experience the breathtaking feeling of freedom she had when she realized that religion was 90% crap. (I have a list on my wall titled The Immutable Principles and one of them is Sturgeon’s Revelation: 90% of everything is crap.) So no, I didn’t get to reinvent myself as an atheist or as a socialist. I tried becoming a vegan but that didn’t work. Begin again? at 87 I don’t think so. I think I am who I am--and just trying not to be so pissy about it is enough.
I was telling my book group, most of whom are neighbors, that I’m having a hard time dealing with everything while Claudia recovers from another setback to her spinal healing and she can’t, for instance, cook, and two of them volunteered to cook something for us. From Jean we now have a yummy vegan bean stew in the fridge and from Naomi, promise of Asian style pork ribs on Friday. In the email with the offer Naomi also said her granddaughter’s basketball had gone over the fence into our yard, so I went out and got it and threw it back and had the pleasure of emailing back, “The ball is in your court.”
Comment from Carole Leita posted 2-9-2023:
Oooh. Asian style pork ribs! Can you tell I haven’t had dinner yet?
Comment from Renee posted 2-10-2023:
I love this first line soooo much.
The obvious point where I began again was 1974-75 when I left my husband, came out as a lesbian, quit my day job and became a traveling storyteller, but I’ve written about that.
Comment from Mara Sapon-Shevin posted 2-20-2023:
Love reading this story of transitions.
Comment from Hoyle Osborne posted 2-10-2023:
Sturgeon's Law has been so comforting whenever I've grown dissatisfied with current music or whatever.
Friday, Dec 16, 2022: A New Language
An old memory
Prompt:
APPROACHBy John Lee Clark
I spin around in the middle of the corridor. My cane taps against four elevator doors. I have pressed both the up and down buttons because there is a fifth elevator door. If I tried to tap all five I would come to closing doors too late. Let the fifth door open to a ghost. Let it be confused and close again.
As is too often the case with writing to prompts, I am off to a memory, and I think it’s one I wrote about before.
When I was an undergraduate at Cal, I read to blind students for some small sum per hour. This was before computers could read things to you. I read, over the years, to three different students, mainly to Manuel Urena, who came from a family of farm workers and said he’d have been a farm worker too if he hadn’t gone blind as a kid and got sent to the School for the Blind in Berkeley and gone on to Cal.
I remember trying to explain perspective to him by arranging objects on a table and showing him, by feel, what happens when you could hear around corners but not see around them. I remember when he really liked something he would say “fine as wine.” I began my practice of cutting my friends’ hair by cutting his. He couldn’t see my learning mistakes and there weren’t many. My mother had cut my hair when I was a kid so I figured I could do it too.
He used a cane, but one day he told me that he had just fallen into a ditch some guys were digging near the Life Science Building. “Hey!” said one of the diggers, “are you blind?............Oh.” Manuel laughed.
After he graduated, he married and moved to the Midwest where he had some kind of job at an agency for services to blind people. We lost track of each other.
Years later, I was in Chicago at an American Libraries Association conference in my favorite hotel, The Palmer House, and I noticed little plastic strips of Braille writing next to the elevator buttons. This was way before the ADA, and I thought, Oh, how nice of them to accommodate blind patrons, and then I found that a conference was coming in about services to blind people. I asked at the front desk if a Manuel Urena was registered. Yes. I called his room. He was there, with his wife, and they’d love to have me come up. It was evening, they were in bathrobes. We had a good visit. No ghosts at the elevators, but it was a blast from the past.
And now I want to tell you about the poet, John Lee Clark, who wrote about canes and elevator doors. He is both blind and deaf. I read an interview of him on the Poetry Foundation site (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/159192/all-sorts-of-secret-treasure) and learned that DeafBlind people used to use ASL, touching hands, but in the last few decades they have become a community and have been inventing a new language, Protactile, in which the signs are more adapted to touch, not sight, and they are composing poetry in it. It blows my mind that there is a whole new language in the world. I recommend that everybody interested in words, poetry, language, read the interview.
Comment from Renee posted 2-10-2023:
Happy I got to read this again. Love it.
Comment from Mara Sapon-Shevin posted 2-20-2023:
I learned braille in the late seventies but was disappointed to learn that they teach sighted people braille by teaching us to see it and not feel it. So I can read it now with my eyes but not my fingers. I can read well enough to notice when they put the braille elevator markings upside down (have observed this).
Comment from Jean Tepperman posted 12-18-2022:
How amazing! There really is a "language instinct!"
Sunday, Oct 16, 2022: World War I Abroad, War against Socialism at Home
Malvina in High School
Woodrow Wilson was elected on a promise to keep America out of war. My mother was in high school when he went back on that promise and the US entered WWI. Many protested, including socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. And my grandparents. Debs was thrown in jail. My grandparents were not punished directly, but through my mother. Here is what Malvina wrote about her school days.
My first grade teacher was like something out of Dickens. We called her, when she couldn’t hear, Broomstick Pulsiver--tall, thin, dark, her gray hair pulled up tight in a knot at the top of her sharp head. If you were not absolutely quiet, she would pinch your face between her thin, strong fingers and shake your head from side to side. It wasn’t that it hurt so much, it was the indignity, and the deep-down feeling that it wasn’t fair, that what you were doing wasn’t wrong.
I had better teachers after that. They were such a contrast with my first experience of school that I loved them, and learned what made them happy, and got pink certificates of promotion or A grades all my school life.
I still have the Denman Medal Malvina was given as most deserving pupil when she graduated from grammar school in 1914, her name engraved on the back. Years later, after she became somewhat famous, she was invited back to the high school she had attended, to sing at a rally against the war in Vietnam. She accepted, and told this story:
Lowell is the school from which I was supposed to have graduated. I never did. A teacher called the morning of the graduation exercises and told me that my cousin Rosie and I (we had our new-made voile graduation dresses all ready to put on) were to be made a show of in front of the whole school and visitors, publicly denied our diplomas because my parents were socialists and opposed to that war (WWI).
I had first come to the attention of the principal’s office with a premature women’s liberation movement on the school grounds. At noon, the boys could leave the grounds to play around on the streets and to get hot dogs, hamburgers, coffee and pop at the little store across the street.
I circulated a petition that the girls be allowed out of the yard at noon, also.
The answer was no. It wasn’t proper for girls to be on the street. And if they tried to restrict the boys it wouldn’t work--they’d climb the fence. The boys had de facto freedom.
Probably in the same situation now, the girls would climb the fence.
Then nothing happened except that quiet, shy me was fingered as a troublemaker.
In an undated interview, my mother told another bit of this story: “I went to the [editor] of one of the great San Francisco newspapers, The Call. He was a very famous and fine interesting man, and we asked him to help me get my diploma. He said, ‘What do you want to go to college for?’ and I was really shocked because my aim had been in that direction, and I think if I had been sharp and alert and had a little broader perspective, I would have said to Fremont Older, ‘If you give me a job on your newspaper, I won’t care about college.’” Indeed, she did work on a newspaper, The People’s World, after she had finished college.
I read everything I could get hold of. I read all the heavy books in sets in my parents’ library, and when I discovered the public library, I read whatever fell to my hands, the Red Fairy Book and the Blue Fairy Book and all the Greek myths.
[My parents] cared a lot about socialism and the socialist movement. That’s where all our friends were. That made some difficulties for Pete and me. My folks were very shy about making friends with their neighbors, and there weren’t many kids in the neighborhood where we lived much of the time.
But later, our friends were all in the Socialist Party. I remember Bill Haywood and Tom Mooney--Tom’s case dominated our lives for many years. His wife, Rena, gave violin lessons to my brother and me until we realized that we needed a better teacher.
I don’t remember ever meeting Tom Mooney or his wife, but their names were household words. Mooney was a labor leader who was framed, along with his wife and his associate, Warren Billings, for the 1916 Preparedness Day Parade bombing in San Francisco which killed ten people. His wife was acquitted. His case became an international cause célèbre and his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1939, he was pardoned and released. I have my grandfather’s photograph of himself with “Big Bill” Haywood. He was one of the organizers of the great 1912 textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, as was Arturo Giovanetti.
Our heroes were people like Arturo Giovanetti, big, handsome boisterous poet political prisoner who stopped with us and cooked great pasta dinners for the gang. There was Frank Strawn Hamilton of Jack London’s Philosopher’s Corner, brilliant intellectual and ne’er-do-well. My uncle Selig took us to visit Jack London at his ranch in Sonoma County. I don’t think Selig knew him any better than we did, but he had more nerve. London took us to see Wolf House, then building, which was to burn down before it was finished, and I remember the handsome guy, in riding britches and open neck shirt, standing in the main stone fireplace to show us how big it was. We have one picture of Bud [her boyfriend around that time] where he looks very much the way I remember Jack London. The picture is the enlargement of a passport photo taken when Bud had been at sea on a windjammer for three months.
There were big dinners at our house sometimes, and we went to Socialist Party Picnics in Oakland at Idora [amusement] Park and Shellmound Park. I was always excited at the prospect of going, but I don’t remember having much fun. I had no friends my own age. If there were any kids playing there, I would have been too shy to make friends.
I was reminded of the graduation story when I read about a new book on that period by Bay Area author Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. I’ve ordered a copy. The Espionage Act, which the FBI cited in raiding Mar a Lago, was originally enacted to persecute WWI anti-war activists. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/books/review/american-midnight-adam-hochschild.html
Comment from Nancy Schimmel posted 10-15-2022:
I looked at my June 30 post and found this: "Shit has happened before, of course. Reagan and AIDS and Three-Mile Island, and, in my younger years, The Army-McCarthy hearings and then Nixon and Watergate. I don’t so much have hope, right now, it’s more like “Fuck you! I’m not going to give in to your fuckery.” Being the stubborn two-year-old to their tantrum-throwing two-year-old. So I keep fighting as much out of habit as anything else. In my parents’ youth it was the Spanish flu and the Palmer Raids." So the Palmer Raids were part of the war on socialism I refer to in today's post.
Monday, Aug 22, 2022: I Am Not Ready to Abandon the World
Writing from a prompt
I haven’t been posting for a while, partly because we got a new dog that’s been taking my attention, and partly because the writing-to-prompt group I’m in was on hiatus, but it is going again. Here’s the latest, from Friday:
The prompt was a poem, “I Am Learning to Abandon the World,” by Linda Pastan
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
Here is my response, with some additions today:
I am not ready to abandon the world, fucked though it is. I just read an article about how the stationary testing devices for smog don’t measure much, as proven by a new mobile one and guess what? There is more air pollution in neighborhoods where people of color or poor white people live. As we’ve known for years. And the racist comments after the article were just as discouraging as the article itself. The study was done in Oakland, CA and it isn’t just where freeways are built, which I knew about, but which ones heavy trucks are allowed on, as they are on I-880 but not I-580, which goes mostly through white neighborhoods in the hills. That part could be changed.
Earlier today I looked up “Merry Minuet” (“They’re riotin(g in Africa, La-la-la-la-la la-la/They’re starving in Spain, La-la etc./There’s hurricanes in Florida…/And Texas needs rain…”) because I think of it sometimes when I read the news. I thought Tom Lehrer had written it but no, it was some other guy I never heard of. I used to hear it at the hungry i back in the fifties, sung by Faith Winthrop, my favorite of the people I heard sing there, who included Stan Wilson, the Gateway Singers and later the Limeliters. Miss Winthrop sang it more delicately, which I think was more appropriate to the tune, than the Kingston Trio, who made it popular.
My father supported my mother in her singer-=songwriter career, but he didn’t like to go to night clubs, so she went with me or with women friends to the hungry i to hear the Gateway singers and the Limeliters sing the songs she wrote for them. I usually went with my friends who had all been counselors together at Camp Kilowana in the hills between Calistoga and Middleton. Some of this group also sang with my mother a few times. Later I went to the hungry i with my then husband, Jerry, who was a traditional jazz banjo player and played with Turk Murphy’s band now and then, so he was at home in the club scene. We had met at a folksong evening I’d gone to with my mother. The kids I ran with in high school had been trad jazz fans.
Tom Lehrer’s song “Pollution” has been going through my mind too, also triggered by the day’s news. I learned it in the San Francisco Lesbian Chorus, where I met Claudia back in 1981. My life would have been quite different without the particular sound track it had.