Lake Rotomahana, New Zealand: Once were Travertine Terraces

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Coastal geology & environment, Environmental, Geography, Natural Environment, Regional History, Science and society

There’s only a handful of natural travertine rock formations𝔞 in the entire world, but after 1886 there was was one less. In that year in New Zealand’s Rotorua/Bay of Plenty area, the terraced hot springs wonderland known to Pākehā New Zealanders as the “Pink and White Terraces”𝔟 (Ōtukapuarangi and Te Tarata) were obliterated from sight in a massive eruption from nearby Mt Tarawera (Māori: “burnt spear/peaks”)𝔠.

🌋 Charles Blomfield’s painting of the volcanic occurrence

Fallout from the volcano’s eruption blanketed some 15,000 sq kms of countryside with ash in the air travelling as far away as Christchurch, over 800 km to the south. The explosion of volcanic craters reduced Lake Rotomahana (“warm lake”) to mud and ash. The deafening noise and lightning of the dome volcano exploding caused some in Auckland to think that Russian warships were attacking the city [‘The Night Tarawera awoke’, New Zealand Geo, www.nzgeo.com]. The human casualties were almost all Māori, about 120 people died, as well as 10 Māori settlements destroyed or buried.

Blomfield’s painting of Te Tarata

19th century tourist attraction
Nature’s violent removal of the Rotomahana travertines brought an abrupt end to a lucrative little 19th century tourism earner for the local region. Artist Charles Blomfield who painted the two terraces on multiple occasions was an eye witness to the tourist boom, observing groups of “moneyed people” bathing in the hot springs𝔡 while their lunches of potatoes and koura were cooking in the boiling pools (NZ Geo)𝔢. Village residents benefitted—some Māori guides netted incomes of up to £4,000 a year—but the First Nation community also copped the downside from the economic boost, rising illness and rampant alcoholism [‘Tarawera Te Maunga Tapu’, Rotorua Museum, www.rotoruamuseum.co.nz].

Lost and found?
For 120 years New Zealanders thought that all trace of the iconic terraces—the two largest known formations of silica sinter on earth—had vanished. Scientific curiosity in recent decades has speculated whether the terraces has been destroyed altogether or perhaps permanently entombed. Recently, Geologists, drawing on Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s 1859 topographic and geological survey of Lake Rotomahana as a primary source, believe they have found traces of the lost White Terraces in the naturally-restored, crater-enlarged lake [‘A natural wonder lost to a volcano has been rediscovered’, Robin Wylie, BBC, 28-Apr -2016, www.bbc.com]. The terraces are thought submerged under sediment and 50-60 m of lake water.

🔻 1860 lithograph of Hochstetter talking to the Māori rangatira of the White Terraces

New Zealand’s miniature ‘Pompeii’
Right in the firing line of Mt Tarawera when it exploded in 1886 was the tiny village of Te Wairoa and its inhabitants the Tuhourangi people. Engulfed and obliterated by the eruption, it became known as the “Buried Village” of Te Wairoa. These days it has brought back tourism to the area. The excavated village is New Zealand’s most popular archaeological site.

(Source: Flickr.com)

Postscript: the Rotomahana travertines are destroyed but is at least one terraced hydro-thermal springs in the North Island remains. Wairakei Terraces, situated 90 km south of Tarawera in Taupō, is a smaller version of the Pink and White Terraces. This commercial operation is a combination of the synthetic (man-made geyser) and the natural (pink, blue and white silica steps).

🔻Pamukkale, Turkey

🌋 one of the most outstanding examples of travertine formations on the planet is the “Cotton Castle” of Pamukkale in eastern Turkey, with its glistening white-terraced geo-thermal springs sharing the site with the ruins of a Greco-Roman city Hierapolis, making it a world-class tourist magnet. Other extant travertines include Badab-e-Surt in Iran, Mammoth Hot Springs in Wyoming, USA, and Egerszalok in Hungary.

Pink Terraces (Photo: Charles Spencer/ Te Papa)

•••➖•••➖•••➖•••➖•••➖•••➖•••

𝔞 travertines are formations of terrestrial limestone and calcium carbonate deposits around mineral (especially hot) springs, which are often terraced  

𝔟 their names in the Māori tongue translate respectively as “fountain of the clouded sky” and “tattooed rock”

𝔠 nicknamed Te Maunga Tapu (“the sacred mountain”), the volcano lies within a caldera (collapse crater) area

𝔡 the actual numbers of Europeans who visited New Zealand’s version of the “8th Wonder of the World” was not as high as might be thought, owing to the terraces not being easily accessible – from the closest settlement Rotorua it was a trek over hills by horse or buggy followed by a canoe trip and the last section on foot [New Zealand’s Pink and White Terraces’, (Tourism NSW), www.media.newzealand.com]

𝔢 English novelist Anthony Trollope was one of the European ‘celebs’ who fronted up to bathe in the pools and sleep in a whare (Māori hut) next to the terraces (NZ Geo). Trollope found nothing like its waters in the world – “you strike your chest against it, it is soft to the touch, you press yourself against it and it is smooth” [Australia and New Zealand, (Vol.II, 1873]

 

City Lights Bookshop: Shakespeare and Company’s “Symbiotic Sister”

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

In 1953, two years after George Whitman resurrected Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop that was to become its trans-Atlantic soul mate, City Lights, opened its doors in the North Beach area of San Francisco🄰.

(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Two landmark ‘indie’ bookshops
The story of Shakespeare and Company’s evolution into an legendary bookshop has been sketched in a previous blog piece: ‘Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company’, 21-July-2021. On the other side of the Atlantic another distinctive stand-alone bookshop was staking it’s undeniable claim for iconic status in the world of independent booksellers.

A literary community
Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisaged City Lights as “a literary meeting place”—just like Whitman and Shakespeare and Company—a haven for aspiring writers to hangout and find creativity. A poet himself, Ferlinghetti attracted an emerging group of fiction writers and poets that coalesced into the “Best Generation”, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. The Beat writers and poets found themselves a comfortable niche hanging out together in the basement reading room of City Lights.

(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Not only that, Ferlinghetti was proactive in his support for the Beats’ budding careers by starting a publishing arm at City Lights, bringing to the public collections of poetry, offbeat and radical books ignored by the mainstream press. Ferlinghetti’s disavowal of the commercial mainstream saw him promote alternative newspapers and magazines as well (‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101’, Sian Cain, The Guardian, 23-Feb-2021, www.theguardian.com).

(Image: citylights.com)

Maverick bookseller 
City Lights was always an innovator in the bookselling biz. It arose with the onset of the paperback revolution, a wave that the San Fran bookshop happily rode. Hard covers were expensive so City Lights became the first all-paperback bookshop in the US (co-founder Paul Martin’s idea). The bookstore bucked the bookselling status quo – before City Lights came along readers could only buy paperbacks from drugstores, bus stations and newsstands (‘The Beat Generation in San Francisco’, Bill Morgan, www.citylights.com). Ferlinghetti’s store was a democratising force in US bookselling, City Lights’ paperbacks were cheap, all budgets could afford their quality pocket books. City Lights’ innovativeness extended to opening hours. Unlike the bulk of mainstream American bookshops who usually closed early in the Fifties, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night.

🔺 the ’emperor of City Lights

Bookshop outreach
The bookshop extended outreach activities to the local community. The store maintained a community bulletin board, disseminating info for the North Beach literary set, thus helping to foster the local counterculture community. Ferlinghetti also furnished the City Lights store with letter racks for itinerants who frequented the triangular storefront to collect their mail.

The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).

🔺 Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1950s

Political poetics
The character of City Lights reflected Ferlinghetti’s own political and social activism. The “philosophical anarchist” was a bulwark for left causes, eg, using the bookshop venue to host many sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War (“books, not bombs”). Ferlinghetti believed that poetry was a social force capable of raising the consciousness of the people.

Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)
Precarious business model? 
Profitability was not City Lights’ raison d’être. Staying out of “the red” was a constant challenge. To stay afloat sometimes the publishing side needed to bail out the retail sales which was losing money and at other times it was vice versa (Cain). What didn’t help matters financial were the activities of shoplifting gangs in the Seventies which targeted the bookshop. And if it wasn’t them it was insiders like poet Gregory Corso helping himself liberally to the till (Morgan).

Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)

Footnote: the extent to which Shakespeare and Co and City Lights can be called sister bookshops comes down largely to the personal visions of their founders Whitman and Ferlinghetti🄴 who were both lifelong book tragics🄵, “(sharing a) love of literature and poetry (and a) devotion and commitment to the power of words” (‘The Beats go on…’, Alix Sharkey, The Guardian, 02-Mar-2002, www.theguardian.com). For Whitman and Ferlinghetti however, the bookshop was more than a receptacle for selling books, it filled the roles of haven and incubator in nurturing new writers as well as a hub for the local literary community. Sister bookstores they may be but they are clearly not identical twins when it comes to the interiors and decors of the two bookshops…City Lights’ book displays are neatly-ordered and arranged whereas Shakespeare and Co is clutter central to the max!

City Lights (Photo: Literary Hub)

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights. The New York born, Paris educated, bookseller and publisher, died on 22nd February 2021, aged 101.

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🄰 City Lights’ address, 261-271 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133, places it technically within Chinatown but the store identifies with the adjoining precinct of North Beach

🄱 ‘Howl’, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ was a thunderbolt against the conservative poetry establishment of Fifties America, the prototype for a new poetry which immersed itself in “wide-eyed truth-telling”

🄲 the basis of the acquittal was a precedent called on in later attempts to overturn bans on works like Tropic of Capricorn and Naked Lunch

🄳 although often associated with them, City Light’s publishing arm never confined itself to the beat writers, it also publishes the work of non-Beat luminaries like Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Malcolm Lowry

🄴 strictly speaking Ferlinghetti wasn’t the founder of City Lights, that was sociology academic Paul D Martin but Ferlinghetti got into the business on the ground floor in 1953 and took sole charge of the bookshop within two years after Martin left

🄵 Whitman literally slept in a room in the store overflowing with books

Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company: Modernist Literary Salon and Sanctuary for Aspiring Writers Rolled into one Parisian Bookshop

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Society & Culture

(Image: Aprendiz de Viajante)

Beach on the Seine
A must-visit in Paris for the literary and artistic set or even the mildly book-curious is the iconic “Shakespeare and Company” bookstore situated near the Latin Quarter and across from Notre Dame. It’s address is 37 rue de la Bûcherie 75005, V, but it wasn’t always there. Shakespeare & Co founder, American expat Sylvia Beach, started the legendary Left Bank bookshop at 8 rue Dupuytren in 1919. Within three years Beach moved the shop to the 6th Arrondissement at 12 rue de l’Odéan, across the street from La Masion des Amis des Livres owned by Beach’s future ‘bestie’ and amour Adrienne Monnier. This bookshop was the template Beach used for her own serious literature bookshop-cum-lending library.

𐅉 Ulysses – Joyce and Beach at Shakespeare & Co

Beach’s lifeline for Joyce’s untouchable manuscript
Beach is probably best remembered for giving James Joyce his big breakthrough in the literary world, publishing Ulysses in
1922 when nobody else would touch it…the abstruse, controversial novel went on to become a masterpiece of modern literature. Over time Shakespeare and Company acquired a more lasting fame as the hub of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Aspiring British, Irish and American writers, prompted by a post-WWI favourable pound and dollar exchange rate against the French franc, flocked to the creative milieu of Paris where they discovered the unique appeal of Beach’s Anglophone bookshop🄱 (The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham, 2014).

𐅉 Hemingway & Fitzgerald (www.pinterest.fr)

“The Lost Generation”
In the interwar years Beach’s bookshop became a haven for the Anglophone literati…habitués included the likes of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the “Lost Generation” of American intellectuals, modernist writers and artists including Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ford Maddox Ford, Man Ray, etc. Hemingway and other illustrious names belonged to the store’s lending library, borrowing books when they couldn’t afford to buy them. At the same time French intellectual writers such as Gidé and de Beauvoir also benefitted from Sylvia’s efforts to get their work better known in the US. The bookseller also gave crucial assistance to various avant-garde ‘little magazines’ in getting their publications off the ground by distributing their editions (Shakespeare and Co: The world’s most famous bookshop at 100‘, Cath Pound, BBC, 19-Nov-2019, www.bbc.com).

𐅉 a young George Whitman

Shakespeare and Company redux
In 1941 with occupied Paris under the Nazi swastika, the shop was closed down and Beach interned for a period after Sylvia refused to sell the last copy of Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. The closure was permanent but the phoenix of Beach’s bookstore did rise again, reinvented by another American expat a decade later. In 1951 WWII veteran George Whitman opened a new, independent English-language bookshop – effectively “Shakespeare and Company Mach II“, though originally called Le Mistral. Later Sylvia Beach apparently anointed Whitman’s bookshop as the true and worthy successor to her original Shakespeare and Company (after Beach’s death in 1962 Whitman renamed the bookshop “Shakespeare and Company”) (‘Bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Paris’, by Els, www.flickr.com).

(Source: another mag.com)

“The Beat Generation”
Within a short time Whitman’s Mistral bookshop was fulfilling the same service to Paris-based Bohemians as Beach’s had for the Lost Generation of writers. Le Mistral, the second coming of “Shakespeare and Co”, became a mecca for a new literary generation in the Fifties, the ’Beat’ Generation and its writers including Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Greg Corso. Other English-language expats to frequent the bookshop at this time include Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Ray Bradbury (‘Shakespeare and a Company (Bookshop), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

𐅉 Quote from medieval Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz

Tumbleweed Hotel‘s quirky tariff
George Whitman maintained Sylvia Beach’s tradition of putting aspiring young writers up for the night (or several nights)…in return for a very basic cot or even a bench, the guests were required to work in the store, read a book and write a one-page autobiography🄲 (‘A Brief History of Shakespeare and Company, Paris’ Legendary Bookstore’, Alex Ledsom, Culture Trip, 26-Feb-2018, www.theculturetrip.com.

𐅉 Sylvia Whitman (Photo: nicethingspalomas.com)

Generation-and-a-half change
George Whitman died in 2011 at 98…the last 10 years of his life was a struggle of wills as the increasingly wildly eccentric George sought to push back against the attempts of his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman🄳 to modernise the bookshop🄴. Since becoming sole proprietor, Sylvia has moved Shakespeare and Company forward with the times—web-based online transactions, modern accounting practices, the addition of a café, etc—but she still runs a lending library and a second-hand book section, hosts book launches and regular author readings by Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, etc in the shop (‘In a bookstore in Paris’, Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair, 21-Oct-2014, www.vanityfair.com).

(Photo: www.minute.net)

📚 📚 📚

Some takes by visitors on the physical layout of Whitman’s bookshop:

° “a Tardis – modest enough on the outside, a labyrinth on the inside” ~ Jeanette Winterson

° “Shakespeare and Company has the rambling lucidity of an unkempt boudoir” ~ Penny Watson, ‘A tale of two bookshops’ [SMH, Dec 1-2, 2007]

° “a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books” ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

📚 📚 📚

𐅉 Sylvia Beach (Source: ricorso.net)

 

Footnote: for the literary expatriates who frequented Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop served a number of purposes. It functioned as a sort of support network club where the expat writers could meet other members, could draw inspiration from its environs, they could read a wide range of quality literature including books banned in the US and UK, and they could write in its rooms🄵.The bookshop was a “sanctuary for progressive writers and a hub for innovative publishing” (Pound). Some of the expat artists and writers even used Beach’s bookshop as their postal box for receiving mail in Paris (Birmingham).

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🄰 Joyce ‘repaid’ Beach by later defecting to a new publisher at a time the bookseller was in a financial jam

🄱 Beach couldn’t however replicate the triumph of getting Ulysses into print with DH Lawrence’s controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover 

🄲 the senior Whitman described these blow-in visitors as ’Tumbleweeds’, estimated to number around 30,000 since 1951

🄳 named in honour of the original Sylvia Beach

🄴 George was resistant to changing even one iota of the seemingly chaotic structure of the shop; he didn’t believe in phones or credit cards or computers (Handy)

🄵 Whitman gave the store’s rooms whimsical names like “Old Smoky Reading Room” and “Blue Oyster Tearoom”

Lawrence’s New Mexico “Shangri-La”

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Biographical, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Society & Culture

In his semi-autobiographical, Australian novel Kangaroo, DH Lawrence’s protagonist Richard Somers remarks that he’ll “probably repent bitterly going to America”. This echoes Lawrence’s own equivocation about America. In correspondence, Lawrence thought America “the land of his future” but this was tempered by a pessimism that the United States would be ‘barbaric’ and he would hate it⌖ (Letters IV:141, 151, ‘Manuscripts and Special Collections’, D. H. Lawrence Research – The University of Nottingham, www.nottingham.ac.uk).

The call of Pueblo lifestyle
In the end what clinched it for Lawrence was an invite from New York art patron Mabel Dodge Sterne to visit Taos, New Mexico. The promise of Taos captured DHL’s imagination…remote (7,000 feet-high, 23 miles from the nearest railway), 600 free Indians unspoilt by western capitalism and modernity, “sun-worshippers and rain makers” (D. H. Lawrence and the American Indians’, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56, Issue 2,  Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).

DHL was enchanted with the idea of the primitive lifestyle of native Americans, their spiritual faith and traditional connexion with the earth.

Taos Pueblo (Source: http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/)

Lawrence envisaged that this could be the utopian community, the free and open, instinctive society, ‘Rananim’, that he had been trekking around the world trying to find. Mabel also lured Bert to Taos with the prospect of dazzlingly spectacular scenery.

Mabel Dodge (Luhan) & her Amerindian husband (Photo: Santa Fe New Mexican)

In search of healthy air
DHL had another motive for choosing New Mexico, being potentially beneficial to his precarious health. His tubercular condition was not diminishing at allq. The climate in Taos—high and dry with famously good and clean air— was one that might bring about a cure for his infected lungs (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd), www.newmexico.org).

Desert Rananim?
As his letters show, Lawrence was in love with the desert landscape of New Mexico to an intoxicating degree – overwhelmed by the strangeness and beauty of the place, even a bit awestruck and fearful. When the writer visited the wilderness of Western Australia earlier, he experienced similar vibes from the bush environment (‘Looking for Lawrence’).

DHL waxed lyrical on the experience later, ” I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever …. the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend”: he wrote how the person who lives there “above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day” (‘Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers is D. H. Lawrence’, (2017)).

At Taos Lawrence found himself the unwilling object of a love triangle with host Mabel vying with wife Frieda for his attention, which stiffled his creativity somewhat. He did however manage to finish the final chapter of Kangaroo during his initial sojourn in Taos.

The Lawrence Ranch

Ranch life in the high country
Lawrence returned to England in 1923 keen on recruiting members of the British artistic fraternity for his New Mexico ‘Rananim’. He returned the next year but with only the one recruit, artist Dorothy Brett☼, whose presence added a further tension to the feminine rivalries at Taos. This led to Mabel giving the Lawrences their own ranch way up in the mountains (8,600 feet above sea-level) and about 20 miles from Taos—the only property the couple would ever own—the Kiowa Ranch (now the D.H. Lawrence Ranch)✪. When not beavering away on new manuscript projects, Bert kept busy at the ranch chopping wood and constructing log cabins, as well as taking hikes in the mountains.

(Photo: www.taos.org)

Ambivalence towards Amerindian culture
Once Bert got to see Amerindian religious ritual and customs up close, much of his pre-visit  enthusiasm dissipated (“not impressive as a spectacle”, he noted). He still admired the “Red Indian” but felt the native American culture had been debased by American ‘progress’ and modernity, reduced in Taos to that of a tourism attraction (essay ‘New Mexico’, (1928); ‘D.H. Lawrence and the American Indiana’s, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56 Issue 2, Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).

⇪ ‘St Mawr’ set partly in New Mexico mountains juxtaposes the vitality of nature with modern degenerate civilisation

Lorenzo’s literary output in the Southwest
DH Lawrence visited Taos, NM, three times during the period 1922-25 but only for a total of 11 months altogether. ‘Lorenzo’, as his patron and admirer Mabel Dodge fondly called him, never fulfilled the fervent hopes of Mabel by writing the great novel of the Southwest or even of New Mexico…but he did manage to produce a solid body of work while residing in NM including the novellas St Mawr and The Woman Who Rode Away, the travel book Mornings in Mexico, as well as writing part of the novel The Plumed Serpent at the ranch (after research conducted in Mexico).

Lawrence’s TB condition worsened in Europe and the novelist died in 1930 in the south of France, still proclaiming to friends a heartfelt desire to return to his beloved Taos. Frieda, who returned to live in Taos, afterwards had her late husband’s remains exhumed and shipped back to be interred on Taos soil.

 

Kandy, 1925 (Photo:www.lankapura.com)

End-note: Lawrence in the tropics
Lawrence’s global search for an alternative to modern, industrialised ‘civilisation’ landed him in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on route to America. Lawrence’s anticipation of a good time in Ceylon was dealt a harsh blow by reality. The Lawrences stayed on the edge of the  forest in Kandy, their attempts to sleep plagued by unbearable heat—”the terrific sun … like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you”, and the local fauna —“horrid noises of the birds and creatures … hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day”  (Letters IV: 214, 227 Notts U). The one bright spot was the Raj Pera-Hera festival which DHL enjoyed, inspiring him to write a poem, ‘Elephant’, the sole literary fruit of his five weeks in Ceylon.

 

Huxley & Lawrence in Taos

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⌖ San Francisco, the Lawrences’ entry point to the US, Bert, pernickety as ever, found less than prepossessing – “noisy and expensive”

☼although writer Aldous Huxley did visit Lawrence in NM

✪ in return the Lawrences gave Dodge the MS for Sons and Lovers, which proved to be far more valuable than the ranch