Counter Culture Chronicles

SNYDER, GARY - Melbourne Poetry Festival 17/10/1981

"Gary Snyder (1930) is an American poet, author, translator and environmental activist. Snyder was born in San Francisco but raised in Washington state and Oregon, where he developed his love for literature and nature and his interest in Native American peoples. Snyder entered Reed College, Portland in 1947 and published his first poems there the next year. He graduated with degrees in anthropology and literature in 1951. After having worked as a timber scaler at Warm Springs Indian reservation and having become interested in Zen Buddhism, Snyder returned to his native San Francisco to immerse himself in poetry but would continue to do odd jobs in the rural parts of Oregon and Washington each summer. In 1953 Snyder enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley to study Asian culture and languages and won a scholarship for a year of Zen training in Japan in 1955. Once there, Snyder studied Japanese and officially became a Buddhist. The following decade Snyder divided his time between California and Japan, becoming a prominent exponent of the San Francisco Renaissance and hooking up with the burgeoning Beat scene on one side of the Pacific and steeping himself deeper in Zen on the other. In 1986 Snyder became a professor in the writing program of the University of California, Davis, but in his own work shifted focus from poetry to environmental issues the following decades. Snyder was awarded the Levinson Prize from the journal Poetry, the American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award (1986), was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987), and won the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry and, that same year, the John Hay Award for Nature Writing.

The cassette released by Counter Culture Chronicles in 2020 contains a recording of Gary Snyder in Melbourne, 1981. Snyder is not so much heard reading his poems as giving them breath and soul. They come alive by means of his warm voice, sense of rhythm and personal experience that underly his poetry. The poems range from Changing Diapers to fragments of Snyder’s epic poem Mountains and Rivers without End, which took forty years to finish and wasn’t completed until 1996." - Counter Culture Chronicles.

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After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
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