Beerspit Night and Cursing

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Author: Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli
“to promote civilisation.”) In issue number 4 she gave this explanation of its forbidding title: “A = the direction of the will UP & P = the kulchur born in one’s head or wotever/ authority is E.P.—one might have not been listening for real but more or less that is wot one recalls.” The anagogic is a spiritual interpretation of a text, and paideumic derives from paideuma , a term Pound picked up from ethnologist Leo Frobenius to describe “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” (or, more simply, the culture taught by educators). Typed by Sheri and mimeographed in purple ink, the magazine was sold at City Lights bookstore and mailed to select friends and libraries. She usually ran off only fifty copies of each issue, so not surprisingly few copies exist anymore, and few if any libraries have a complete set of all nine published.
    A typical issue would consist partly of contributions by others and partly of Sheri’s own writings, drawings, and commentaries on the other contributions. Pound is frequently quoted—the first issue, in fact, reprinted a 1928 essay of his entitled “Bureaucracy and the Flail of Jehovah”—and two issues were devoted to H.D.’s work. Four issues were published between September 1959 and March 1960, but publication lagged after that; numbers 5 and 6 appeared in 1961, but number 7 didn’t appear until April 1966. Two final issues, unnumbered and consisting mostly of Sheri’s own work, appeared in 1970. The places of publication track Sheri and Gilbert’s movements during that period: the first four issues were produced in their cottage at 15 Lynch Street on top of Nob Hill, number 5 was issued from San Gregorio, and number 6 from Half Moon Bay, both small towns down the coast from San Francisco.
    While still in San Francisco Sheri reestablished her connection with the Beat Generation, especially since many of the Beats she had known earlier in Greenwich Village migrated to San Francisco in the late fifties. She was introduced to Jack Kerouac during one of his visits there, though he apparently already knew who she was, and Allen Ginsberg visited when in town. Sheri became friends with most of the major Beat writers in San Francisco—Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman (with whom Sheri was especially impressed)—and dabbled in the North Beach scene, a mother hen to the younger beatniks. But mostly she kept to herself, drinking vodka and producing her magazine.
    In the early sixties Sheri decided she wanted to get out of the city (though Gilbert would continue to work there as an auto mechanic). She first moved down to a cabin in La Honda, but found the towering redwoods too oppressive, so instead moved into some cabins on the coast about halfway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, where Tunitas Creek empties into the Pacific Ocean. She would live there at “the Creek” for the next twenty years, though for a mailing addresses she rented a post office box up in Pacifica, about twenty miles north. While Gilbert worked in the city Sheri spent her days writing, drawing, painting, and making jewelry, at night studying The Cantos by the light of an old kerosene lamp.
    In 1964 Sheri gave her first and only one-woman show. A Cleveland advertising copywriter named Reid B. Johnson had developed an interest in her work when making a documentary radio program on Pound while he was still incarcerated at St. Elizabeths. In the course of corresponding with him, Pound sent Johnson a copy of La Martinelli , which so impressed him that a few years later he decided to organize an exhibit. The show ran for a month in September 1964 at the Severance Center in Cleveland, and was the subject of a photo-essay in the local paper.
    Details are sketchy on Sheri’s life during the second half of the sixties. She developed a strong interest in astrology, drawing up charts of friends, and delved deeper into the occult philosophy of mystics like
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