When she reached Hawai’i, Pele, sometimes known as Madame Pele or affectionately as Tutu Pele (grandmother), dug numerous fire pits into the earth creating an archipelago of volcanic upsurges. One version of Pelehonuamea’s origin: she is the daughter of the Tahitian fertility goddess Haumea who had to flee in a canoe after seducing the husband of her elder sister, goddess of the sea. Pele is often depicted as a mountain-shaped woman cradling fire in her hands, as though they were a caldron, or crater. “There’s nothing to do when Pele makes up her mind but accept her will.”

“Our deity is coming down to play,” said Lokelani Puha, a hula dancer and poet, and resident of the Big Island who was evacuated from the lava’s path.

Some Hawaiians consider Kilauea the embodiment of Pele, honorifically Pelehonuamea, a divine female force, “the woman who devours the earth.” This Remarkable Read is prompted by a confluence of my appreciation of Peppo’s art and mind, and the current activity of the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island. More recently, the same shelf offered up a volume of less gravitas, though one equally fascinating: a saddle-stitched paperback, unpaginated – but containing about sixty pages: Peppo’s Pidgin To Da Max, an alphabetical dictionary of Hawaiian vernacular, composed entirely of adroitly-drawn black and white cartoons augmented with word balloons and sly, witty captions of surpassing political incorrectitude. The most august volume I have found there is a leather-spined 1843 second edition of Alexander Morison’s Physiognomy of Mental Diseases replete with remarkable engraved depictions of such states as “Religious Monomania” and “Insane Propensity to Burn,” in both their manic and passive phases and spread over some several hundred pages. The book recycling shelf in the laundry room of the building where I live in Chelsea, New York, is a never-failing wellspring of remarkable reads.

Pidgin to da max book