Summer Of Love
Ed McClanahan's Clear Moment
by Dan Barth on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 09:51 am
(Daniel Barth has written for LitKicks on writers like Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac. Here he introduces another underground favorite. -- Levi)
If Tom Robbins writes the way Dolly Parton looks, as one reviewer has suggested, then Ed McClanahan’s prose resembles Dolly’s more voluptuous sister. McClanahan is the anti-Hemingway, a man who never met an adjective—or digression, aside, simile, extended metaphor, or play on words—he didn’t like. Here’s a representative passage from his latest book, O the Clear Moment:
Les Mouches
by Levi Asher on Monday, October 26, 2009 10:56 pmBeat Generation, Being A Writer, Comedy, Comix, Economics, Events, Existential, Internet Culture, News, Poetry, Psychology, Publishing, Summer Of Love, Visual Art
1. A creepy publicity stunt involving flies carrying little paper advertisements at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Doesn't this make you feel bad for the flies?
2. San Francisco Beat/hippie poet Lenore Kandel has died at the age of 77. Here's an appreciation of her work by John Yates.
3. Carl Jung's awesome visual side.
4. A detailed financial biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (And why not? Money was certainly among his major themes).
5. East Village poetry legend and perennial Presidential candidate Sparrow and LitKicks poet Mickey Z. are creating a poetry anthology together and they say:
Calling all feminists, wizards, Queer theorists, ex-Black Panthers, Christians, Green activists, avant-gardists, Kabbalists, vegans, Hawaiian nationalists, kickboxers, Punks, Hip Hop evangelists, New New Leftists, pink-haired emo warriors, organic gardeners -- submit your work for "The Big Book of Revolutionary Poetry," edited by Sparrow and Mickey Z. Send up to 3 poems to: sparrow44@juno.com or info@mickeyz.net
Go for it, I say.
6. Guernica Magazing is turning 5! Jonathan Ames, Howard Zinn, Katie Halper, Mia Farrow and David Byrne will be joining the party this Wednesday, October 28. Wish I could make it (but I can't).
7. The eternal philosophical battle over the real-life ethics of German intellectual Martin Heidegger goes on. Personally, I don't agonize over Heidegger's Nazi past, because I never thought much of his work. You can find the same message -- the utter immediacy of existence -- in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard or Sartre, and with a lot more finesse and humor.
8. Building a brain inside a supercomputer. And here I am just trying to get Drupal to work.
9. I recently posted about Fall 2009 books I'm looking forward to; little did I know that Orhan Pamuk and Kurt Vonnegut books were coming out too ...
10. Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid is rocking the cash registers. My stepdaughter reads these books and I think they're hilarious.
11. I love this, from McSweeneys: YouTube Comment, of e. e. cummings?.
12. HTMLGiant on Glimmer Train: "Winning one of their ubiquitous contests is like winning $2 on a $2 scratch ticket or a free small soda during McDonald’s Monopoly promotion." They also admit that Glitter Train was once "a decent, if not rather traditional literary magazine". I used to read them, but I don't read print literary journals much at all anymore.
13. If you've been reading my memoir, some of these events will be familiar: A History of the Internet from 1969 to Today.
14. Speaking of bygone times, one-time high-rolling community website GeoCities is shutting down. Caryn is sad about this, and xkcd posted a tribute.
The Lunch at 50
by Levi Asher on Friday, August 21, 2009 04:25 pm
1. If you're in Chicago next week, you may want to join a 50th birthday party for Naked Lunch, the novel by William S. Burroughs that invented trippy postmodern noir way before Thomas Pynchon had the same idea. The Chicago birthday party (featuring folks like John Giorno, Bill Ayers, Penny Arcade, Peter Weller and James Grauerholz) is tied in to a new documentary movie, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, directed by Yony Leyser that looks quite good.
2. I'm also really looking forward to a documentary film called One Fast Move and I'm Gone about Jack Kerouac's crack-up novel Big Sur. The film's original soundtrack ought to be something special: a series of original compositions based on Kerouac's Big Sur by Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Son Volt's Jay Farrar. Song titles include "California Zephyr", "Breathe Our Iodine", "Final Horrors" and "The Void".
3. Charley Plymell on S. Clay Wilson.
4. Bill Ectric interviews poet and lyricist Pete Brown.
5. Paul Krassner writes about Woodstock in the Huffington Post.
6. Boing Boing on Alan Turing.
7. Kevin Birmingham's upcoming book about the writing of Ulysses sounds quite good.
8. You're a Good Man, Gregor Brown.
9. Xkcd ponders the Kindle.
10. Beauty Road-Test: KO Nailpolish by Laura Albert.
11. Fernando Pivano, the translator who introduced Beat literature to Italy, has died.
On Value and Price
by Levi Asher on Monday, July 27, 2009 11:46 am
1. I'm glad to hear the New York Times will probably not put its core news content behind a payment wall after all. Instead, they're test-marketing some extraneous "gold" and "silver" plans that I hope New York Times loyalists will pay up for, though the author of the article linked above is skeptical that such loyalists exist.
But the comments to my previous posts on this topic indicate that the Times does have its loyal enthusiasts. Meanwhile, one of these posts is apparently causing John Williams to wear out his neck muscles shaking his head in disagreement. He quotes novelist Katharine Weber's response to me, as follows:
But Levi. Could you have reasonably refused to read the NYT twenty years ago if you had to buy it at a newsstand or pay for home delivery instead of just having free copies handed to you on the street or dropped in your driveway? ... Much has changed, yes. But has the economic rule which used to be as certain as the laws of gravity, the rule of paying for things of value, really begun to vanish? How is this not a zero sum game?
Williams calls Weber's comment "succinct and totally sensible", and says:
I'm still waiting for a substantive response to this line of thinking. There have been plenty of cultural developments that I love in the past 10 years: Netflix, iTunes, The Wire. One way or another, I pay for all of them.
I can't turn down a direct challenge, so I'll try to offer a substantive response to the idea that we must pay for things of value. However, I find the idea almost too childish to entertain. First of all, just as we can name things of value that we pay for, we can also easily name things of value that we don't pay for. The Office. Music on the car radio. Outdoor sculptures and great urban architecture. Oh yeah, and then there's free news and commentary on the Internet which, plain and simple, we are already not paying for.
If we want to examine this classic "rule of paying for things of value", let's consider one of the many masterpieces of nature: the orange. This weekend I bought an entire bag of delicious fresh Florida oranges -- marvelous, ingenious, healthy and beautiful things, really -- for about two bucks. Taken purely for its value, a single orange could easily be worth five dollars. Likewise, taken purely for its value, a bottle of corn-syrup-flavored orange soda shouldn't cost more than ten cents. But these hypothetical prices don't correspond to the real world. We never actually pay for things according to their value. We pay for things according to the law of supply and demand.
When John Williams declares that we pay for things according to their value, he is doing no more than expressing a keening wish. Declaring that we pay for things according to their value is like declaring that we will stay young forever, or that there will be no more crime. It's nice to think such things, but they never were true and they're still not.
I wonder if John Williams will consider that a substantive response. If he does, maybe he should pay me.
2. Here's a really sweet story about the married couple on the 'Woodstock' album cover.
3. Speaking of the New York Times, Gregory Cowles has uploaded a particularly good essay on Nabokov's Lolita to the Paper Cuts blog.
4. Scott Esposito on Intense First Person (a narrative stance I tend to use a lot myself).
5. Way back in 1935, Walter Cronkite interviewed Gertrude Stein.
6. Basil Wolverton was okay, but if you're talking about classic Mad Magazine you're talking about Harvey Kurtzman.
7. Nicholson Baker ponders the Kindle in the New Yorker and, not surprisingly, the essay soars above most of the other commentary on this hot topic. "I changed the type size. I searched for a text string. I tussled with a sense of anticlimax." It's no surprise to anyone who's read Baker's previous works on library science and antique newspapers that he will ultimately not choose to embrace the Kindle.
8. Speaking of the New York Times (and their home delivery problems) again: hah.
Maybe ...
by Levi Asher on Monday, July 20, 2009 12:59 pm
1. Maybe ... if the New York Times needs to do a better job of managing costs, they can start by not giving us three copies of the New York Times Magazine when they deliver our Sunday paper?
Oh well. At least if Caryn or I make a mistake on the crossword puzzle we'll get a chance to start over. A couple of chances.
And while we're here, a few more links:
2. I really like this Millions article by Noah Deutsch about the word 'trope', which has become a popular meme.
3. Here's a real treasure, though I don't know who has the time to enjoy it all. International Times was a highly influential British underground publication of the hippie era, edited by Miles, aka Barry Miles, who has also written books about the 1960s, the Beat Generation and Pink Floyd. Every single issue is now available online. (There was a time in my life when I would have had both the free time and the desire to read every single page, yes, every single page, of this archive.)
4. Aram Saroyan on Beat America.
5. The New York Times has given Ben Mezrich's Facebook history The Accidental Billionaires a terrible review just on the morning I began reading it. I'm forging ahead anyway, and I'll tell you what I think.
6. O Book Publisher of the Future, tell us about the Handy E-Book Helper *.
(* = Props to anyone who can identify the TV show I am referencing here.)
The Blog and Turfs
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 03:49 pmClassics, Fantasy, Fiction, Internet Culture, Language, Modernism, Nature, News, Postmodernism, Summer Of Love
1. How delightful to learn that James Joyce may have invented the word 'blog' during a typical conversational ramble in Finnegans Wake! Here it is in context:
Now from Gunner Shotland to Guinness Scenography. Come to the ballay at the Tailors' Hall. We mean to be mellay on the Mailers' Mall. And leap, rink and make follay till the Gaelers' Gall. Awake ! Come, a wake ! Every old skin in the leather world, infect the whole stock company of the old house of the Leaking Barrel, was thomistically drunk, two by two, lairking o' tootlers with tombours a'beggars, the blog and turfs and the brandywine bankrompers, trou Normend fashion, I have been told down to the bank lean clorks? Some nasty blunt clubs were being operated after the tradition of a wellesleyan bottle riot act and a few plates were being shied about and tumblers bearing traces of fresh porter rolling around, independent of that, for the ehren of Fyn's Insul, and then followed that wapping breakfast at the Heaven and Covenant, with Rodey O'echolowing how his breadcost on the voters would be a comeback for e'er a one, like the depredations of Scandalknivery, in and on usedtowobble sloops off cloasts, eh? Would that be a talltale too? This was the grandsire Orther. This was his innwhite horse. Sip?
Enough puns for you there? I assume that "blog" is a play on "bog" (and in fact the word "blog" has always seemed to carry an appealing sort of Joycean phlegmatic physicality). Pictured above: an Irish peat bog.
Interpretations of the Author: Works featuring Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Dickens, Michael McClure
by Levi Asher on Monday, May 25, 2009 06:34 pmBeat Generation, Being A Writer, Biography, Classics, Fiction, Film, Love, Mystery, Postmodernism, Summer Of Love
Here are three works offering creative interpretations of noted authors and their works.
Love As Always, Kurt Vonnegut As I Knew Him by Loree Rackstraw
Loree Rackstraw was a fiction student at the Iowa Writing Workshop in 1965 when she first heard of and met Kurt Vonnegut, a new teacher at the workshop who'd by then gained only slight fame for Cat's Cradle.
The then-clean-shaven novelist was struggling at this moment to break through a memory block and write a book about the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. Rackstraw became his lover and close friend, and her new memoir chronicles how Vonnegut's life changed when he finished his Dresden book, originally titled Goodbye Blue Monday but eventually called Slaughterhouse-Five, and rocketed to wealth and fame.
Rackstraw remained his sympathetic sometime-lover after his divorce and remarraige, and the stories she tells are refreshingly modest -- she doesn't claim to have been Kurt's greatest muse, though she may have been an important part of his support system.
Fittingly, this is a kind book. Rackstraw remained a writing teacher at Iowa and an editor of the North American Review, and her book offers appealing cameos of Andre Dubus, Richard Yates, Geraldo Rivera (who, I'm surprised to learn, briefly married Kurt Vonnegut's daughter), John Irving and even, in a late chapter, Jon Fishman of Phish, a dedicated Vonnegut fan. My only complaint, and a surprising one regarding a memoirist who spent her life writing and editing fiction, is with the prose itself. Many sentences are stiff and clumsy. One characteristic paragraph confusingly begins:
That 'Slapstick' was not a rave, critical success was a disappointment -- and also one that Kurt himself severely awarded only a grade of "D".
This from a lifelong writing teacher? Such stylistic blunders are strange to see, but it doesn't mar the value of this book for anyone wishing to learn more about the gentle soul of Kurt Vonnegut. He earns here a rare honor among celebrity writers: a romantic literary tell-all that only upholds his adoring popular image.
The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl
I've enjoyed all three of young novelist Matthew Pearl's historical/literary/mystery mashups, from The Dante Club to The Poe Shadow to the newest, The Last Dickens, which describes a murderous rivalry between American publishers following Charles Dickens' sudden death. Dickens left his serial novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, and his books apparently sold so well that the fate of the Boston publishing firm Fields and Osgood (formerly Ticknor and Fields) hangs in the balance as many parties race to discover the ending Dickens must have had in mind (coincidentally, another novel called Drood by Dan Simmons is also based on the fate of Dickens' final work).
Like The Dante Club, still my favorite Matthew Pearl book, The Last Dickens is filled with appealing scenes of soon-to-be-legendary early American publishing personalities hard at work. James R. Osgood of Fiends and Osgood is the hero, and the unscrupulous Harper Brothers are the heavies (today, Ticknor and Fields has been lost inside the wayward Houghton-Mifflin firm, while HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch). We also meet Frederick Leypoldt, editor of a new journal called Trade Circular and Publishers' Bulletin, which would eventually become our familiar Publisher's Weekly, along with an array of literary waterfront pirates known as bookaneers.
The historical material is delightful, and I hope Matthew Pearl will keep exploring the early publising scene in future works. But his novelistic formula -- wrap a great author in a fictional mystery and aim for the bestseller list -- may be wearing thin, and I found The Last Dickens less satisfying than his books on Dante or Poe. This may be due to my lack of particular interest in Charles Dickens -- sure, I loved Great Expectations, but Dickens was never in my personal pantheon -- and is surely due to the fact that I've never read The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I'll always be interested in any book Matthew Pearl writes, but I hope his next novel will move beyond what has now become too limiting a formula for an author of such wide talent and knowledge.
Curses and Sermons by Nic Saunders
This 15-minute video, a production of London's 14167 Theatre company, brings stunning visual techniques to a motif first explored in Beat poet Michael McClure's experimental play The Beard, which presented characters based on Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow negotiating and finally consummating a sexual encounter.
Here, the male and female characters are simply called "The Cowboy" and "The Stranger" respectively, but the basic setup remains. Not every experimental play needs to be enhanced with cinematic visuals, but they work well here. The characters dig deep holes in the ground, perhaps as symbolic preludes to making love, and travel through psychedelic filters until they finally, as Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow eventually must, make love. The film ends happily, a satisfying exploration of an enigmatic work.
Love As Always, Kurt Vonnegut As I Knew Him by Loree Rackstraw
Loree Rackstraw was a fiction student at the Iowa Writing Workshop in 1965 when she first heard of and met Kurt Vonnegut, a new teacher at the workshop who'd by then gained only slight fame for Cat's Cradle.The then-clean-shaven novelist was struggling at this moment to break through a memory block and write a book about the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. Rackstraw became his lover and close friend, and her new memoir chronicles how Vonnegut's life changed when he finished his Dresden book, originally titled Goodbye Blue Monday but eventually called Slaughterhouse-Five, and rocketed to wealth and fame.
Rackstraw remained his sympathetic sometime-lover after his divorce and remarraige, and the stories she tells are refreshingly modest -- she doesn't claim to have been Kurt's greatest muse, though she may have been an important part of his support system.
Fittingly, this is a kind book. Rackstraw remained a writing teacher at Iowa and an editor of the North American Review, and her book offers appealing cameos of Andre Dubus, Richard Yates, Geraldo Rivera (who, I'm surprised to learn, briefly married Kurt Vonnegut's daughter), John Irving and even, in a late chapter, Jon Fishman of Phish, a dedicated Vonnegut fan. My only complaint, and a surprising one regarding a memoirist who spent her life writing and editing fiction, is with the prose itself. Many sentences are stiff and clumsy. One characteristic paragraph confusingly begins:
That 'Slapstick' was not a rave, critical success was a disappointment -- and also one that Kurt himself severely awarded only a grade of "D".
This from a lifelong writing teacher? Such stylistic blunders are strange to see, but it doesn't mar the value of this book for anyone wishing to learn more about the gentle soul of Kurt Vonnegut. He earns here a rare honor among celebrity writers: a romantic literary tell-all that only upholds his adoring popular image.
The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl
I've enjoyed all three of young novelist Matthew Pearl's historical/literary/mystery mashups, from The Dante Club to The Poe Shadow to the newest, The Last Dickens, which describes a murderous rivalry between American publishers following Charles Dickens' sudden death. Dickens left his serial novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, and his books apparently sold so well that the fate of the Boston publishing firm Fields and Osgood (formerly Ticknor and Fields) hangs in the balance as many parties race to discover the ending Dickens must have had in mind (coincidentally, another novel called Drood by Dan Simmons is also based on the fate of Dickens' final work).Like The Dante Club, still my favorite Matthew Pearl book, The Last Dickens is filled with appealing scenes of soon-to-be-legendary early American publishing personalities hard at work. James R. Osgood of Fiends and Osgood is the hero, and the unscrupulous Harper Brothers are the heavies (today, Ticknor and Fields has been lost inside the wayward Houghton-Mifflin firm, while HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch). We also meet Frederick Leypoldt, editor of a new journal called Trade Circular and Publishers' Bulletin, which would eventually become our familiar Publisher's Weekly, along with an array of literary waterfront pirates known as bookaneers.
The historical material is delightful, and I hope Matthew Pearl will keep exploring the early publising scene in future works. But his novelistic formula -- wrap a great author in a fictional mystery and aim for the bestseller list -- may be wearing thin, and I found The Last Dickens less satisfying than his books on Dante or Poe. This may be due to my lack of particular interest in Charles Dickens -- sure, I loved Great Expectations, but Dickens was never in my personal pantheon -- and is surely due to the fact that I've never read The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I'll always be interested in any book Matthew Pearl writes, but I hope his next novel will move beyond what has now become too limiting a formula for an author of such wide talent and knowledge.
Curses and Sermons by Nic Saunders
This 15-minute video, a production of London's 14167 Theatre company, brings stunning visual techniques to a motif first explored in Beat poet Michael McClure's experimental play The Beard, which presented characters based on Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow negotiating and finally consummating a sexual encounter.Here, the male and female characters are simply called "The Cowboy" and "The Stranger" respectively, but the basic setup remains. Not every experimental play needs to be enhanced with cinematic visuals, but they work well here. The characters dig deep holes in the ground, perhaps as symbolic preludes to making love, and travel through psychedelic filters until they finally, as Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow eventually must, make love. The film ends happily, a satisfying exploration of an enigmatic work.
Filming Further
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 03:04 pm
1. According to Rolling Stone, Gus Van Sant's film version of Tom Wolfe's 60s-culture classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test will start shooting soon, and may feature Jack Black (bad idea) or Woody Harrelson (slightly better) as novelist and psychological adventurer Ken Kesey. Woody Harrelson might actually make more sense in the role of Beat legend Neal Cassady, who drove the bus called Further during the real-life cross-country journey chronicled in Wolfe's book. He seems too old to play then-young Ken Kesey in this story, while Jack Black would have to severely rein in his comic instincts to avoid overpowering the role. I hope Gus Van Sant knows what he's doing here.
2. Meanwhile, George Murray of BookNinja gives a hopeful nod to Steve Jacobs' soon-to-be-released film version of J. M. Coetzee's powerful Disgrace, starring John Malkovich.
3. A Bertrand Russell comic? Okay, though Russell was mostly bested by his star student Ludwig Wittgenstein.
4. The story of William Warder Norton, founder of the influential book publishing firm that bears his name.
5. Philip K. Dick and Jack Spicer.
6. Denis Johnson's newest novel is called Nobody Move.
7. The earlist known dust jacket for a book has been found.
8. New Directions has a blog.
American Sages: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Pete Seeger
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 09:03 amAmerican, Beat Generation, Ecology, Indie, La Boheme, Love, Music, Nature, Poetry, Summer Of Love, Tributes
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, global activist and indie publisher extraordinaire, turns 90 years old today. Here's his Litkicks biography page, and here's the poem we've been running on this site for many years:
The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum
Outside the leaves were falling as they died
A wind had blown away the sun
A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room
Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!
The great folksinger Pete Seeger will also turn 90 on May 3, and New York City will celebrate him in big style on this date at Madison Square Garden featuring performers like Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Arlo Guthrie, Dave Matthews and John Cougar Mellencamp. That's going to be some hootenanny birthday party. Pete Seeger and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are two American sages, feisty, stubborn and deeply politically engaged. What blacklisted Communist Pete Seeger and embattled Howl publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti had in common is that they both loved to fight for their causes. They both wore out their competition.
S. Clay Wilson Hospitalized
by Levi Asher on Saturday, November 22, 2008 12:58 pm
Legendary underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson was found lying unconscious on a San Francisco street, possibly the victim of a hit-and-run or a mugging. He is in serious condition (but improving) at San Francisco General Hospital, but will not be able to pay his medical bills. Jeff Weinberg of Water Row Books (which has supported his work for decades) sends this note:
"I have started to ask my customers to help S. Clay Wilson by donating whatever small amount they can to help him out this holiday season. As a self-employed artist, he's screwed. Every little bit can help. All gifts will be designated on a card I'll send Wilson with every angel's name and address.
Please make check out to 'S. Clay Wilson' and mail it to Water Row Books, PO Box 438 Sudbury MA 01776"
(More from Comics Reporter)
