On December 29, 2013, I posted this on the Facebook of Charles J. Shield who wrote ‘And so it goes’ the biography of Kurk Vonnegut, my idol…..

“If Lucia had her way, she would go with a Dance Drama, a tale of how a classic Anglo-Saxon novel is assimilated into the Hippie Dance Music Culture. The Grateful Dead will do Finnagan’s Wake, and, here come the Lucettes! Turn down volume on India dance and leave Love song.”

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/…/05/21/love-dance-6-4/

On Christmas Day, my Muse, Rena, wrote me a four page letter that she mailed on January 3rd. I opened this letter on January 9th. and wept tears of joy. I feared she might be dead. Tomorrow, the four page letter I wrote will be opened by the woman who had a profound influence on my life, and the life of my late sister, for after Christine saw a photo of the painting I did of my Muse, she took up art.

Rena studied classical ballet, jazz, modern dance, and tap. She attended the Academy of Washington Ballet, the London School of Contemporary Dance, and studied and apprenticed with Susan Alexander, former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. If Rena would accept I would like her to be the principal choreographer for ‘Love Dance’

‘Love Dance’ was conceived while I was on the train going south to visit my daughter and grandson. I believe this was 2010. I was playing a cassette tape I had ‘The Best of Love’. All of a sudden I am a young man dancing in this musical with Rena Christensen who I learned five years earlier was a dancer and choreographer. I played this tape several times as I visualized what this tribute to Rock and Dance would look like.

This suggestion got some response that appeared to mock me. One of Charles’ friends suggested this ‘far-out’ idea be kept for the archives. When I told Marilyn about the response, and how I later found out Vonnegut met with the Jefferson Starship in 1971 to discuss incorporating Kurt’s ideas into their music project, she told me that Jeff Pasternak had given her a call, and wanted her advice. Jeff was writing a play, and his female character needed a cathartic experience. Jeff could not come up with anything. neither could Marilyn.

This was January 2. We were at the Granary where I read some of my poems, while Marilyn’s husband’s Jazz band accompanied me. The next day, Rena mailed her letter.

Marilyn’s sister co-authored ‘Fela’ that is now a hit in New York. Bryan’s song was inspired by what I said to him when he asked me for advice about the relationship he was having with Christine who had a relationship with my friend from England that resembles the movie ‘Across the Universe’. The last time I saw Rena was when we went and saw ‘Yellow Submarine’ in Lincoln Nebraska.

It appears that Vonnegut was asked to contribute to ‘Blows Against the Empire’. This Broadway Musical is writing itself. I posted the following on the 28 and 29th.

Greg Presco: Charles, I hope I am not stepping on any toes, here. Were you thinking of authoring Lucia Joyce’s biography. I just googled her and her father and his work. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a poet, and when I began authoring poetry (while in a trance) at twelve, my mother and aunts became alarmed because they were bid to loathe their father. I wrote this poem a year ago to a young woman who worked at Starbucks. I read it with an Irish brogue.

Greg Presco” Charles has lobbed some balls across my plate with his steam motorcycle and Joyce. In my un-finished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ the last hippie of the future channels a Nazi whose love for wood-burning cars allows him to get near the hard-water German is making, and helps sabotage the plants. These A-bombs would be delivered with V2 rockets. My ex had shown my Pynchon’s books, but, I found them a hard read.

Greg Presco: My other grandmother was a friend of Joaquin Miller and lived up the road from Gertrude Stein. Her best friend was an Isadora Duncan freak. https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/…/viola-duncan-of…/

Greg Presco: Finding herself stuck between two droll and dusty bookends, two avant guard writers who expect at least one avant absurd poem from her, Lucia finds her breakout moment when she meets Antonin Artaud at the Moulin Rouge. Back at his garret they do mescaline together, in the form of Peyote buds Antonin has brought back from his trip to the States where he witnessed the Ghost Dance. Teaching her some of the moves, Lucia goes into a trance and into the future. In her vision quest she finds herself on the dance floor of the Filmore West gyrating to the Grateful Dead. The first Dead Head is born!

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tdr/summary/v045/45.3savarese.html

http://psypressuk.com/2011/10/12/literary-review-the-peyote-dance-by-antonin-artaud/

Originally published in France under the title ‘Les Tarahumaras’ (1947), ‘The Peyote Dance’ by Antonin Artaud describes the author’s experiences with Peyote and the Tarahumara in Mexico, in 1936. Written over twelve years and covering Artaud’s stay at a psychiatric hospital in Rodez, the book is an important work of drug literature, so far as it provides an intriguing discourse on a possible essential value in psychedelic drugs.

rtaud’s assertion is so explicit that it can be taken as a veritable declaration of principles, especially when one considers the fact that his text “On the Balinese Theater” was, of all the articles collected in The Theater and Its Double, the first to be written. The last to be written, on the other hand, was the emblematically titled “Oriental and Western Theater,” written in December 1936, shortly before Artaud’s departure for Mexico. All the other texts in The Theater and Its Double fall in between, from “Metaphysics and the Mise-en-Scène” (December 1931) and “The Alchemical Theater” (September 1932) to “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)” (October 1932) and “Theater and the Plague” (April 1933).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blows_Against_the_Empire

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB0GepZMzKU

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/muse-of-the-love-dance/

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/07/27/all-muses-come-to-helicon/

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/the-dharma-bum-fashion-dance/

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/the-black-doll/

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/viola-duncan-of-fruit-vale/

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/return-to-zabriskie-point/

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/anna-and-darian-dance/