A Jaime De Angulo Reader

Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Books. Very Good. 1979. First Edition Thus; First Printing. Paperback. First Edition Thus (1979) ; First Printing thus. Very Good in Wraps: shows mild rubbing to the panels and outside edges; a hint of creasing near the outside edges of the panels and a very fine crease to the backstrip; the expected very light tanning to the text pages due to aging; a very faint thumb-smudge to the fore-edge; the binding is square and secure; the text is clean. Free of any creased or dog-eared pages in the text. Free of any underlining, hi-lighting or marginalia or marks in the text. Free of any ownership names, dates, addresses, notations, inscriptions, stamps, plates, or labels. A handsome copy, structurally sound and tightly bound, showing mild wear and minor, unobtrusive imperfections. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. (9 x 6 x 0.8 inches). Edited by Bob Callahan. Language: English. Weight: 14 ounces. First published in 1973. Trade Paperback. Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) was a linguist, novelist, and ethnomusicologist in the western United States. He was born in Paris of Spanish parents. He came to America in 1905 to become a cowboy, and eventually arrived in San Francisco on the eve of the great 1906 earthquake. He lived a picaresque life including stints as a cowboy, medical doctor and psychologist, a decade of field work in Native American linguistics and anthropology, and over forty years participation in the literary-artistic-bohemian culture of the San Francisco Bay Area. De Angulo began his career in field linguistics and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1920s. During the next decade he and his wife lived for intermittent periods among several native Californian tribes to study their cultures, languages and music. As a linguist he contributed to the knowledge of more than a dozen native Northern Californian and Mexican Indian languages and music-systems and collected additional field data on their cultures and oral traditions. De Angulo was particularly interested in the semantics of grammatical systems of the tribes he studied, and was a pioneer in the study of North American ethnomusicology, particularly in his recordings of native music, and he was especially concerned to develop an existential understanding of Native American cosmology, social psychology, values and culture. From the perspective of the academic scholarship of the period, this amounted to "going native." His key exposition of this matter is “Indians In Overalls”, first published in 1950. His involvement in Native American research effectively came to an end following the death of his son Alvar in an automobile accident in 1933, near Big Sur. He retired to the isolated hilltop ranch there where he had lived intermittently for many years, and which he had first homesteaded after the 1915 failure of his ranch in Alturas. His writings took a turn into fiction and poetry, much of which he presented as alternative techniques of presenting in accessible format the ethnographic detail he had collected. This was especially true for his bestseller, 'Indian Tales'. Much of his fictional work attempted to recognize and embrace the native "coyote tales", or the trickster wisdom inherent in native storytelling. Ezra Pound called him "the American Ovid" and William Carlos Williams "one of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered." de Angulo also went on to tutor numerous famous authors including Jack Spicer in linguistics, and Robert Duncan in North American shamanic sorcery; he appears as a character in Jack Kerouac's books. The San Francisco Beat generation found in him an ‘‘Old Coyote, ’’ an anarchist hero and talented subversive. De Angulo shaped and diversified the scholarly picture of the native Californian landscape. His re-envisioning of the ontological status of Native American cosmology and ethnology anticipated the 'Deep Ecology' and 'Back To The Pleistocene' thought of the 1990s. He was friend and colleague to poets, composers, and scholars such as Harry Partch, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, Henry Cowell, Carl Jung, D. H. Lawrence, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and many others and an important participant in the San Francisco bay area's literary and cultural avant garde. ; Large 8vo 9" - 10" tall; xvi, 253 pages .