Ithaca, Sale, Fariña, Pynchon

I’m wrapping up the content for the Spring issue of Green Horizon Magazine.

A section will be about the idea that we can start building the new society within the shell of the old by establishing networks of ecovillage communities. Those networks could become the basis for a new bioregional reorganization of society.

So there will be articles about ecovillages and articles about bioregionalism. The former will, of course, mention the Ecovillage at Ithaca (as exemplary) and the latter will, of course, mention the writings of Kirkpatrick Sale. Well, it turns out that Kirk grew up in Ithaca and he recently, in old age, moved back because he wants to be buried there.

When he went to college at Cornell (in Ithaca) Kirk was a rabble-rouser along with friends Richard Fariña and Thomas Pynchon.

- — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkpatrick_Sale

Sale grew up in Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, New York, and would later say of the village that he “spent most of my first twenty years there, and that has made an imprint on me — on my philosophy, social attitudes, certainly on my politics — that has lasted powerfully for the rest of my life.” He graduated from Cornell University, majoring in English and history, in 1958. He served as editor-in-chief of the student-owned and managed newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Sale was one of the leaders of the May 23, 1958, protest against university policies forbidding male and female students fraternizing and its in loco parentis policy. Sale and his friend and roommate Richard Fariña [who later married Joan Baez’s sister, Mimi] were charged by Cornell. The protest was described in Fariña’s 1966 novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. In 1958 he collaborated with Thomas Pynchon on an unproduced futuristic musical called “Minstrel Island.”

Upon graduating in 1958, Sale married Faith Apfelbaum, who later worked as an editor with Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Amy Tan. Faith died in 1999. Sale subsequently married his long-time partner Shirley Branchini in 2019 [at the age of 82!].

Sale worked initially in journalism for the leftist journal The New Leader, “a magazine founded in 1924 in part by socialists Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs,” and The New York Times Magazine, before becoming a freelance journalist. His second book, SDS, was about the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society. The book “is still considered one of the best sources on the youth activist organization that helped define 1960s radicalism.” In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Subsequent books explored radical decentralism, bioregionalism, environmentalism, the Luddites and similar themes.

Sale has donated 16 boxes of materials — typescripts, galley proofs, correspondence, etc. — for each one of his books to the archives at Cornell University, where they are available for public inspection. [I shall at some point take advantage of that … will schedule a perusing afternoon at Cornell on one of my trips to Ithaca. Maybe I’ll see the 1990 letter where I invited Kirk to be a presenter at a Rutgers event. I had also invited Howie Hawkins. Kirk thought maybe I was a member of the Left Green Network setting him up for a night of criticism re: “Deep Ecology vs. Social Ecology”! I wasn’t, but he canceled out on his participation.]

In 2020 Sale moved to another village outside Ithaca and will be buried nearby.

- — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon

While at Cornell, Pynchon started his friendships with Richard Fariña, Kirkpatrick Sale and David Shetzline; Pynchon would go on to dedicate Gravity’s Rainbow to Fariña, as well as serve as his best man and as his pallbearer.

[Richard Fariña had shown a lot of promise as a writer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fari%C3%B1a
On April 30, 1966, two days after the publication of his novel, Fariña attended a book-signing ceremony at a Carmel Valley Village bookstore. Later that day, while at a party to celebrate his wife Mimi Fariña’s twenty-first birthday, Fariña saw a guest with a motorcycle, who later gave Fariña a ride up Carmel Valley Road. At an S-turn the driver lost control. The motorcycle tipped over on the right side of the road, came back to the other side, and tore through a barbed wire fence. The driver survived, but Fariña was killed instantly. According to Pynchon’s preface to Been Down So Long, the police said the motorcycle must have been traveling at 90 miles per hour even though “a prudent speed” would have been 30 miles per hour. Fariña is buried in a simple grave, its marker emblazoned with a peace sign, at Monterey City Cemetery in Monterey, California.]

Together, Fariña and he briefly led what Pynchon has called a “micro-cult” devoted to Oakley Hall’s 1958 novel Warlock. Pynchon later reminisced about his college days in the introduction he wrote in 1983 for Fariña’s novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, first published in 1966. He reportedly attended lectures given by Vladimir Nabokov, who then taught literature at Cornell. Although Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon, Nabokov’s wife Véra, who graded her husband’s class papers, commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting as a mixture of printed and cursive letters, “half printing, half script.”

In 1958, Pynchon and Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical, “Minstrel Island,” which portrayed a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world. Pynchon received his B.A. with distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in June 1959. After leaving Cornell, Pynchon began to work on his first novel: V.

- — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -

https://www.cayugaheightshistory.org/205-oak-hill-road.html

Cayuga Heights History Project

Full House History: Mark Eisner, “A History of 205 Oak Hill Road, Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, New York”

The early history of student activism at Cornell, in the late 1950s, is associated with the history of this handsome 1929 brick, stone, and stucco house. In 1958, Cornell President Deane Malott and his wife were living in the home. Kirkpatrick Sale, who grew up nearby at 309 The Parkway and went on to become a prolific author on environmentalism, politics, and other subjects, was a leader of a Cornell student protest outside the Malott’s home. At issue was a university policy forbidding unchaperoned parties in off-campus housing, which the protestors thought was the “last straw” in attempted control over student life. Sale and his Cornell roommate, Richard Fariña, who fictionalized the era in his 1966 novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, were part of the protest. Fariña’s friend, Thomas Pynchon, described the scene at the house in the introduction to Fariña’s book:

“This extraordinary meddling [by the university in student private life] was not seriously protested until the spring of 1958, when, like a preview of the ’60s, students got together on the issue, wrote letters, rallied, demonstrated, and finally, a couple of thousand strong, by torchlight in the curfew hours between May 23rd and 24th, marched to and stormed the home of the University president. Rocks, eggs, and a smoke bomb were deployed. Standing on his front porch, the egg-spattered president vowed that Cornell would never be run by mob rule. He then went inside and called the proctor, or chief campus cop, screaming, “I want heads! . . . I don’t care whose! Just get me some heads, and be quick about it!” So at least ran the rumor next day, when four upperclassmen, Farina among them, were suspended. Students, however, were having none of this — they were angry. New demonstrations were suggested. After some dickering, the four were reinstated. This was the political and emotional background of that long-ago spring term at Cornell.” [Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to Richard Farina, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, Random House, 1966.]

The student protest was likely an impetus to move the next Cornell president farther north in the Village and away from the campus boundary. Protests such as these set the stage for the much more serious student radicalism to come, including the controversial Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Kirkpatrick Sale went on to write the most comprehensive book about the history of SDS.

Another Cayuga Heights resident was an active member of the radical SDS Weathermen. Robin Palmer, who lived at 206 Oak Hill Road, facing the President’s house, was later imprisoned for his role in plotting the bombing of a New York City bank. The Sale and Palmer families were both vital members of the Cayuga Heights’ community.

Kirkpatrick Sale’s parents — Cornell English professor William M. Sale Jr. and Helen Sale — owned the Community Book Shop at Community Corners. Looking back fondly on his youth spent in the Village, Sale published an article in the Front Porch Republic [May 29, 2009] called “Growing Up Village” in which he describes how the Village influenced his views on the subject of “human scale.”

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/05/the-importance-of-growing-up-village/

The Importance of Growing Up Village

Cold Spring, NY, 2009.

Leopold Kohr, the author of the great classic, The Breakdown of Nations, once said that his approach to the world — in favor of smaller nations, smaller institutions, smaller associations — was due to his having been born in a small village, Obendorf, just outside of Salzburg, Austria. When your childhood is spent within limits, he used to say, where you get to know a good number of people well and also a lot of people no closer than to say “hello” to, you have some approximate experience of how humans lived for many eons before anyone ever thought of cities.

There is much murkiness here, but the general anthropological opinion is that the original African Homo sapiens settlements consisted of bands of between 25 and 50 people, within tribes that might have been between 500 and 1,000, and this is how we lived for at least 250,000 years. It is, as they now say, encoded in our genes. “the social organization based on the hunter-gatherer ways of life,” as the eminent microbiologist Rene Dubos has said, “lasted so long–several hundred thousand years–that it has certainly left an indelible stamp on human behavior…. The genetic determinants of behavior, and especially of social relationships, have thus evolved in small groups during several thousand generations.”

And so it is that I was born in a village in upstate New York and spent most of my first twenty years there, and that has made an imprint on me–on my philosophy, social attitudes, certainly on my politics — that has lasted powerfully for the rest of my life — even though I spent thirty years of it in its antitheses, Manhattan. I don’t know what the population of Cayuga Heights — overlooking Cayuga Lake, as you might expect — was in the 1940s, but I seem to remember it as being something just over a thousand.

The local elementary school was small and the classes no bigger than twenty, if memory serves. I can remember when it was proposed that the school shrink from eight grades to six, with students to be bussed down to a junior high school grades seven to nine, and I can remember facing what I thought was a large crowd in the school basement when I was one of two students allowed to speak up against the change. I lost then, and not for the last time in a worthy cause, but something in my genes flatly resisted the idea of leaving a human-scale school for the vagaries of education down in the city of Ithaca. All right, not a big city — I guess about 20,000 then — but it seemed big enough to me.

Not only was the community small but it had something it called the Community Corners as its economic hub, and that was no more than a grocery store, dry cleaners, book store, and maybe a small variety store. I worked in the grocery in the summers for three years, and my impression is that the Corners functioned less as an economic hub — it couldn’t have been doing that much business, and larger, fancier stores were available a few miles away in downtown Ithaca — than a social one. People would gather and talk in knots, in the parking lots, on the sidewalk, at the meat counter in the back, and so many people used to come through the checkout line at my cash register on Sundays with only one or two items that I used to wonder whether they had come out of necessity or just to see other people after church.

The fact that my end of Cayuga Heights blended in with some farms as it went northward, not all of them working but still with open fields where birds sang and fireflies danced in droves, also had some effect on me growing up. I used to skate and play hockey on the pond at one place where the old farmer never even seemed to venture outside in the winter, and I would ride my bike down dirt roads that seemed to lead nowhere past farmhouses and barns that varied from spanking neat to decrepit. Somehow I had the sense that I was connected to people who knew the land, knew how to grow things (besides a Victory Garden like my father had), had some solidity and longevity in place (unlike my family, new to the village).

So I want to argue that in some sense it was inevitable that when I began to formulate a politics, it had to be in opposition to the big, the oppressive, the autocratic, the expansive, the all-embracing, in favor of the communitarian, the local, the democratic, the human scale. I guess it was as a first taste of this that I led a demonstration of some 3,000 students at Cornell University in 1958 against an authoritarian university that declared it was acting in loco parentis (when one of the reasons people liked college is that they escaped their parents), decided to forbid “petting and intercourse” by undergraduates, and diminished student self-government. And not long after that I was led to Murray Bookchin and his arguments for anarcho-communalism, which were in some ways (though I didn’t think of it at the time) a kind of working-out on a grander scale the experience I had had subliminally as a kid growing up in Cayuga Heights.

After that, a career writing about decentralism, participatory democracy, human scale, small-is-beautiful, the corruption of centralized American government, the evils of discovery and conquest, the tyranny of the Industrial Revolution, and now most recently secession and self-determination may be no more than something based on “the genetic determinants of behavior” growing up village.