Summer Of Love
The Seagull Is Back
by Levi Asher on Monday, August 20, 2007 10:20 pmThe Seagull is back. And I'm not talking about Anton Chekhov.
A friend of mine literally screamed -- a spontaneous burst of horror -- when she spotted the new edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a once-popular book from the 1970's, on a bookstore shelf. Richard Bach's slightly corny fable about a bird who wants to fly faster and better was the "Da Vinci Code" of its age, and people usually either like it or violently hate it. I read it when I was a kid and thought it was pretty good. Whether it deserves a comeback or not, I'm really not sure.
This book was a classic of the late hippie age, the early 70's, and as a kid I remember it showing up on the same bookshelves that would house Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I'm O.K. You're O.K. I sat down and read the whole book at one point -- you could read it in a single sitting -- but it didn't make a gigantic impression on me. I liked the positive message, but it all felt a little humorless and simplistic. But then, what did I expect? It's a book about a seagull who thinks in English.
I always felt the triumph of Jonathan Livingston Seagull was partly the triumph of great book design. The cover is as much a work of pop art as anything Andy Warhol ever did, transforming a seagull's body and spread wings into a cool, perfect white curve. The arrangement also neatly echoes the book's basic theme: the pursuit of white-light perfection. The deep blue background is bold yet calming, the typography modest and modern. I sometimes think the book designer Chip Kidd is overrated; he still hasn't done a cover as good as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I'm happy to report that the new paperback edition leaves the design mostly intact, though the book is slightly wider and larger.
The aesthetic didn't survive the transition to film, though. The film was supposed to have been really bad, and I have never met anybody who's seen it. I don't even know if Neil Diamond ever saw it, and he did the music. If you've seen it, please tell us everything you remember.
Richard Bach's follow-up novel Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah also suffered from a mediocre cover design, with a feather motif that unfortunately foretold the coming horrors of "Forrest Gump".
Richard Bach is still writing, and commands a loyal audience to this day.
* * * * *
PS: Hey, I'm a heartthrob.
A friend of mine literally screamed -- a spontaneous burst of horror -- when she spotted the new edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a once-popular book from the 1970's, on a bookstore shelf. Richard Bach's slightly corny fable about a bird who wants to fly faster and better was the "Da Vinci Code" of its age, and people usually either like it or violently hate it. I read it when I was a kid and thought it was pretty good. Whether it deserves a comeback or not, I'm really not sure.
This book was a classic of the late hippie age, the early 70's, and as a kid I remember it showing up on the same bookshelves that would house Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I'm O.K. You're O.K. I sat down and read the whole book at one point -- you could read it in a single sitting -- but it didn't make a gigantic impression on me. I liked the positive message, but it all felt a little humorless and simplistic. But then, what did I expect? It's a book about a seagull who thinks in English.
I always felt the triumph of Jonathan Livingston Seagull was partly the triumph of great book design. The cover is as much a work of pop art as anything Andy Warhol ever did, transforming a seagull's body and spread wings into a cool, perfect white curve. The arrangement also neatly echoes the book's basic theme: the pursuit of white-light perfection. The deep blue background is bold yet calming, the typography modest and modern. I sometimes think the book designer Chip Kidd is overrated; he still hasn't done a cover as good as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I'm happy to report that the new paperback edition leaves the design mostly intact, though the book is slightly wider and larger.
The aesthetic didn't survive the transition to film, though. The film was supposed to have been really bad, and I have never met anybody who's seen it. I don't even know if Neil Diamond ever saw it, and he did the music. If you've seen it, please tell us everything you remember.
Richard Bach's follow-up novel Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah also suffered from a mediocre cover design, with a feather motif that unfortunately foretold the coming horrors of "Forrest Gump".
Richard Bach is still writing, and commands a loyal audience to this day.
PS: Hey, I'm a heartthrob.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Message: You’ve Got To Be Kind
by Levi Asher on Thursday, April 12, 2007 07:03 am
Kurt Vonnegut, whose enjoyably experimental novels vastly increased my appetite for literature when I was a kid, has died at the age of 84.
A thoroughly political and philosophical writer, Kurt Vonnegut argued zealously for the place of human kindness amid the crushing tumult of modern life. His literary expressions of this messsage were sometimes simple, sometimes repetitive -- not because his intellect was limited, but because his conviction on this point was massive. "There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"
Who knows whether or not the Vonnegut Message was crystallized during the firebombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II, which he witnessed and wrote about in Slaughterhouse-Five? This coincidence of history gave him a personal vision of all-consuming hell on earth. The surreal horror of Dresden must have been magnified by the fact that Vonnegut was a German-American held as prisoner by enemy Germans underneath the city as it burned (he worked out many of his contradictory feelings about war, about violence, about human stupidity in novels like Mother Night, Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater).
My first favorite Vonnegut novel was Breakfast of Champions, in which a cloddish car dealer named Dwayne Hoover becomes convinced that other humans have no feelings, that he is the only sentient being on earth. This book exemplifies Vonnegut's freewheeling and highly personal prose style, complete (in this case) with childish illustrations designed to puncture any sense of pretension or grandeur regarding the novel form.
Another early favorite of mine was Welcome to the Monkey House, a highly accessible collection of stories. The title story involves a monkey in a zoo whose scandalous sexual behavior shocks a prudish parent.
Slapstick is considered "late-period" Vonnegut and is often not listed among his best books, but this sad apocalyptic satire has always stuck with me. In a decimated future Earth, survivors desperately try to reconnect with the distant human capacity for love by forming into arbitrary "tribes" with names like Oyster, Hollyhock, Daffodil, Amoeba, Beryllium, Watermelon, Chickadee, Helium and Strawberry. If you meet someone who belongs to the same tribe, you're supposed to be nice to that person.
Close Slapstick, and we're back in reality, where humanity divides itself into tribes called American, Mexican, French, Russian, Chinese, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Sunni, Shiite, Liberal, Conservative. The slapstick is all around us. The master satirist is gone, and the player piano plays on.
Great Chick-Lit of the 70’s (or, the Books That Raised Me)
by Levi Asher on Monday, February 12, 2007 06:52 pmAmerican, Comedy, Fiction, Film, Jewish, Love, New York City, Reading, Southern, Summer Of Love, Women
The industry is buzzing about chick-lit again. I don't know much about this whole phenomenon, except in a strange way I do, because I was raised on chick-lit. As a kid in the 1970s, the first grownup books I read (and really enjoyed) were the racy, funny and wise novels that my grandmother, my mother and my older sister left lying around the house. These books had a big influence on me, and I wonder if the chick-lit of today could possibly be as good.
Reviewing the Review: January 7 2007
by Levi Asher on Sunday, January 7, 2007 10:21 amI went on vacation and missed reviewing the last two issues of the New York Times Book Review, but don't think for a minute I didn't read them. The Book Review is like oxygen to me; I took a break from writing (which is hard work) but not from reading (which is not). If I had reviewed the last two issues, I would certainly have praised Gary Hart on Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope, Francine Prose on Dave Eggers's What is the What? and D. T. Max on Florence Noiville's biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
But that was then. This is now. I'm very happy about the news that hippie/Vietnam-era novelist Robert Stone has written a memoir called Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, and I would normally have been happy about the news that the Book Review assigned one of its better critics, Walter Kirn, to review it. Alas, Kirn's article is uncharacteristically bad. Here's his terrible opening paragraph, which seems to be a generic meditation upon the art of memoir-writing that bears no relation to Stone's actual book:
Time passes, and what it passes through is people - though people believe that they are passing through time, and even, at certain euphoric moments, directing time. It's a delusion, but it's where memoirs come from, or at least the very best ones. They tell how destiny presses on desire and how desire pushes back, sometimes heroically, always poignantly, but never quite victoriously. Life is an upstream, not an uphill, battle, and it results in just one story: how, and alongside whom, one used his paddle.
Kirn: who cares about this crap? Tell us about the book you're reviewing. I'd appreciate this unsolicited burst of metaphysics better if it actually said something, but Ludwig Wittgenstein would rightly choke on a formula like "Time passes, and what it passes through is people -- though people believe that they are passing through time." I'd like to invoke William James and ask Kirn exactly how we can tell the difference between people passing through time and time passing through people (if we can't tell the difference, according to either James or Wittgenstein or any other worthwhile modern philosopher, then the writer is simply playing with words).
Kirn starts to recover from the bad beginning with a funny riff about a thick mass of penguins representing "Stone's own generation sailing chaotically into view". But he proves too eager to mock and minimize the idealism of the 1960's, which he says "disappointed us" and gave us Timothy Leary and Charles Manson. Personally, I'd rather remember Martin Luther King, Abbie Hoffman and John Lennon, and I'd like to point out that most other decades (certainly including our current one) have disappointed us worse. Oh yeah, and what about Stone's book? I'll have to pick up a copy to get a clue what's in it, since Kirn's article is more concerned with other things.
On the positive side, Paul Gray's review of Vikram Chandra's 916-page Sacred Games is a worthy performance, and since I don't have time to read 916 pages of Vikram Chandra anytime soon, it's as close to the actual novel as I will probably ever get. Dave Itzkoff produces a lively consideration of Michael Crichton's Next, and Elissa Schappel is amusing on the subject of Neal Pollack's Alternadad.
I'm very happy (as is Ed) to see an endpaper by Richard Powers, How to Speak a Book, in which the superb novelist argues that computer-based dictation provides a more natural way to write than typing. Powers buttresses his argument with an impressive sweep of references from Milton to Dostoevsky to Beckett and Joyce, and it's an enjoyable piece, but the novelist strains credibility with this passage:
What could be less conducive to thought's cadences than stopping every time your short term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You'd be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow.
This is surprisingly weak stuff. The author of Galatea 2.2 certainly knows that the human brain is capable of allowing output processes to send repititive motion impulses to the fingers without disrupting the flow of imagination or cognition. I am typing right now, and I am also thinking; there is no conflict at all. Also, I wouldn't be the slightest bit hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow than typing. Here are just a few: crying babies, day jobs, broken limbs, noisy friends, that horrible "My Humps" song by the Black-Eyed Peas. I could go on if you'd like.
If I seem to be complaining a lot, I'll try to be nicer next week, but I also must point out an amazing coincidence of two (2) factual errors in this week's issue both relating to Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac's On The Road. George Johnson, opens his review of Freeman Dyson's The Scientist as Rebel thus:
In June 1948, as Jack Kerouac was recovering from another of the amphetamine-fueled joy rides immortalized in "On The Road", Freeman Dyson, a young British physicist studying at Cornell, set off on a road trip of a different kind.
WRONG. Jack Kerouac was on speed when he wrote On The Road years later (typing on a scroll, Richard Powers would like to know), but the Cassady-Kerouac On The Road adventures were mostly fueled by marijuana and alcohol. Walter Kirn then tells us, speaking of Robert Stone's partner-in-crime Ken Kesey, who was briefly a fugitive in Mexico:
In time, Kesey's hideout from the narcs up north becomes a Gilligan's Island for shipwrecked beatniks, including Jack Kerouac's old sidekick, Neal Cassady ...
WRONG. Neal Cassady had been escaping to Mexico long before Ken Kesey showed up there. If anything, Ken Kesey was playing Gilligan to Cassady's Skipper when he crossed the border.
I'm back, NYTBR fact-checkers. Did you think you got rid of me for good?
But that was then. This is now. I'm very happy about the news that hippie/Vietnam-era novelist Robert Stone has written a memoir called Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, and I would normally have been happy about the news that the Book Review assigned one of its better critics, Walter Kirn, to review it. Alas, Kirn's article is uncharacteristically bad. Here's his terrible opening paragraph, which seems to be a generic meditation upon the art of memoir-writing that bears no relation to Stone's actual book:
Time passes, and what it passes through is people - though people believe that they are passing through time, and even, at certain euphoric moments, directing time. It's a delusion, but it's where memoirs come from, or at least the very best ones. They tell how destiny presses on desire and how desire pushes back, sometimes heroically, always poignantly, but never quite victoriously. Life is an upstream, not an uphill, battle, and it results in just one story: how, and alongside whom, one used his paddle.
Kirn: who cares about this crap? Tell us about the book you're reviewing. I'd appreciate this unsolicited burst of metaphysics better if it actually said something, but Ludwig Wittgenstein would rightly choke on a formula like "Time passes, and what it passes through is people -- though people believe that they are passing through time." I'd like to invoke William James and ask Kirn exactly how we can tell the difference between people passing through time and time passing through people (if we can't tell the difference, according to either James or Wittgenstein or any other worthwhile modern philosopher, then the writer is simply playing with words).
Kirn starts to recover from the bad beginning with a funny riff about a thick mass of penguins representing "Stone's own generation sailing chaotically into view". But he proves too eager to mock and minimize the idealism of the 1960's, which he says "disappointed us" and gave us Timothy Leary and Charles Manson. Personally, I'd rather remember Martin Luther King, Abbie Hoffman and John Lennon, and I'd like to point out that most other decades (certainly including our current one) have disappointed us worse. Oh yeah, and what about Stone's book? I'll have to pick up a copy to get a clue what's in it, since Kirn's article is more concerned with other things.
On the positive side, Paul Gray's review of Vikram Chandra's 916-page Sacred Games is a worthy performance, and since I don't have time to read 916 pages of Vikram Chandra anytime soon, it's as close to the actual novel as I will probably ever get. Dave Itzkoff produces a lively consideration of Michael Crichton's Next, and Elissa Schappel is amusing on the subject of Neal Pollack's Alternadad.
I'm very happy (as is Ed) to see an endpaper by Richard Powers, How to Speak a Book, in which the superb novelist argues that computer-based dictation provides a more natural way to write than typing. Powers buttresses his argument with an impressive sweep of references from Milton to Dostoevsky to Beckett and Joyce, and it's an enjoyable piece, but the novelist strains credibility with this passage:
What could be less conducive to thought's cadences than stopping every time your short term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You'd be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow.
This is surprisingly weak stuff. The author of Galatea 2.2 certainly knows that the human brain is capable of allowing output processes to send repititive motion impulses to the fingers without disrupting the flow of imagination or cognition. I am typing right now, and I am also thinking; there is no conflict at all. Also, I wouldn't be the slightest bit hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow than typing. Here are just a few: crying babies, day jobs, broken limbs, noisy friends, that horrible "My Humps" song by the Black-Eyed Peas. I could go on if you'd like.
If I seem to be complaining a lot, I'll try to be nicer next week, but I also must point out an amazing coincidence of two (2) factual errors in this week's issue both relating to Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac's On The Road. George Johnson, opens his review of Freeman Dyson's The Scientist as Rebel thus:
In June 1948, as Jack Kerouac was recovering from another of the amphetamine-fueled joy rides immortalized in "On The Road", Freeman Dyson, a young British physicist studying at Cornell, set off on a road trip of a different kind.
WRONG. Jack Kerouac was on speed when he wrote On The Road years later (typing on a scroll, Richard Powers would like to know), but the Cassady-Kerouac On The Road adventures were mostly fueled by marijuana and alcohol. Walter Kirn then tells us, speaking of Robert Stone's partner-in-crime Ken Kesey, who was briefly a fugitive in Mexico:
In time, Kesey's hideout from the narcs up north becomes a Gilligan's Island for shipwrecked beatniks, including Jack Kerouac's old sidekick, Neal Cassady ...
WRONG. Neal Cassady had been escaping to Mexico long before Ken Kesey showed up there. If anything, Ken Kesey was playing Gilligan to Cassady's Skipper when he crossed the border.
I'm back, NYTBR fact-checkers. Did you think you got rid of me for good?
Reviewing the Review: November 19 2006
by Levi Asher on Saturday, November 18, 2006 09:42 pmLet's start with the most annoying article in this weekend's New York Times Book Review, in which Rachel Donadio reviews the history of literary feuds and turns up an utterly conventional set of findings. Norman Mailer, in a literary feud? Fresh stuff. But Donadio also takes a snobbish sideswipe at literary blogs:
The blogosphere would seem an ideal forum for literary feuding, but more often than not Web feuds devolve into baroque strings of sub-literate name-calling.
Yeah, we're so sub-literate here. We can barely form sentences. HALP US RAYCHL WE AR STUK IN THE BLOGISPHEAR.
Fortunately, the rest of this week's Book Review takes a surprising turn for the better. It's a theme issue devoted to "Bad Boys, Mean Girls, Revolutionaries, Outlaws and Beautiful Losers". The occasion is the appearance of several new books about Neal Cassady (a biography by David Sandison and Graham Vickers), Hunter S. Thompson (a memoir by Hunter's artist/collaborator Ralph Steadman), Allen Ginsberg (a biography by Bill Morgan), Al Goldstein (an autobiography), Edward Abbey (a volume of correspondence, edited by David Petersen), Charles Bukowski (a biography by Barry Miles), Courtney Love (an autobiography), Tennessee Williams (a reissued autobiography) and lit-groupie/short-story writer Alice Denham (a memoir of sexual encounters with the likes of James Jones, Philip Roth, Nelson Algren and Joseph Heller).
It's odd to see the NYTBR paying so much attention to the writers I love best, and in fact I feel so over-familiar with much of the material discussed in these books that I have trouble reading about it fresh (I could write a biography of Allen Ginsberg or Neal Cassady). But I found Walter Kirn's piece on Allen Ginsberg the most exciting to read. Kirn works himself up into a Ginsberg-ian state of exstasis, which is really the only appropriate way to approach the work of Allen. I like stuff like this:
Ginsberg, the hang-loose anti-Ike. Ginsberg, the organization man unzipped. The vulnerable obverse of the Bomb. He had the belly of a Buddha, the facial hair of a Walt Whitman ...
And I like Kirn's closer paragraph:
Silence -- the one mistake Ginsberg never made. And because of the work he left, the life he led and the care that's been taken preserving them, it's one that he probably never will.
John Waters' passionate tribute to his idol Tennessee Williams is a good read (and I like the well-chosen accompanying photo that shows Tennessee in exactly the clipped moustache and slick suit that would become John Waters' uniform; so that's where he got it).
Jonathan Miles does a good job of explaining why we should care about Edward Abbey, a maddened environmentalist usually at odds with the flower-power 1960's. Ron Powers has some interesting things to say about Barry Miles' book on Charles Bukowski, though Powers dismisses the biographer as "a British bookstore owner in the late 1960's". Actually, Barry Miles was a founding member of the International Times and an important creative force in the London underground scene whose life and encounters with the likes of Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, John Lennon and Yoko One could be the subject of an interesting book all its own (and if Barry's out there, I hope he'll take the hint and write this book next).
Emily Nussbaum is amusing on the topic of Courtney Love, though she focuses more on Courtney's naughty mothering habits than on her talents as a songwriter and musician (I've always been a Hole fan and I'm looking forward to Courtney's new CD). Will Blythe does a decent job of summaring Steadman's book on Hunter, which I plan to read if I can find the time. James Campbell on the new Neal Cassady biography left me a bit cold, but maybe that's only because I've always wanted to write this biography myself (and never got started).
Despite all this coverage of our outlaw favorites, my favorite literary reading in today's New York Times was a superb piece on Irish poet Paul Muldoon by Charles McGrath in the New York Times Magazine.
The blogosphere would seem an ideal forum for literary feuding, but more often than not Web feuds devolve into baroque strings of sub-literate name-calling.
Yeah, we're so sub-literate here. We can barely form sentences. HALP US RAYCHL WE AR STUK IN THE BLOGISPHEAR.
Fortunately, the rest of this week's Book Review takes a surprising turn for the better. It's a theme issue devoted to "Bad Boys, Mean Girls, Revolutionaries, Outlaws and Beautiful Losers". The occasion is the appearance of several new books about Neal Cassady (a biography by David Sandison and Graham Vickers), Hunter S. Thompson (a memoir by Hunter's artist/collaborator Ralph Steadman), Allen Ginsberg (a biography by Bill Morgan), Al Goldstein (an autobiography), Edward Abbey (a volume of correspondence, edited by David Petersen), Charles Bukowski (a biography by Barry Miles), Courtney Love (an autobiography), Tennessee Williams (a reissued autobiography) and lit-groupie/short-story writer Alice Denham (a memoir of sexual encounters with the likes of James Jones, Philip Roth, Nelson Algren and Joseph Heller).
It's odd to see the NYTBR paying so much attention to the writers I love best, and in fact I feel so over-familiar with much of the material discussed in these books that I have trouble reading about it fresh (I could write a biography of Allen Ginsberg or Neal Cassady). But I found Walter Kirn's piece on Allen Ginsberg the most exciting to read. Kirn works himself up into a Ginsberg-ian state of exstasis, which is really the only appropriate way to approach the work of Allen. I like stuff like this:
Ginsberg, the hang-loose anti-Ike. Ginsberg, the organization man unzipped. The vulnerable obverse of the Bomb. He had the belly of a Buddha, the facial hair of a Walt Whitman ...
And I like Kirn's closer paragraph:
Silence -- the one mistake Ginsberg never made. And because of the work he left, the life he led and the care that's been taken preserving them, it's one that he probably never will.
John Waters' passionate tribute to his idol Tennessee Williams is a good read (and I like the well-chosen accompanying photo that shows Tennessee in exactly the clipped moustache and slick suit that would become John Waters' uniform; so that's where he got it).
Jonathan Miles does a good job of explaining why we should care about Edward Abbey, a maddened environmentalist usually at odds with the flower-power 1960's. Ron Powers has some interesting things to say about Barry Miles' book on Charles Bukowski, though Powers dismisses the biographer as "a British bookstore owner in the late 1960's". Actually, Barry Miles was a founding member of the International Times and an important creative force in the London underground scene whose life and encounters with the likes of Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, John Lennon and Yoko One could be the subject of an interesting book all its own (and if Barry's out there, I hope he'll take the hint and write this book next).
Emily Nussbaum is amusing on the topic of Courtney Love, though she focuses more on Courtney's naughty mothering habits than on her talents as a songwriter and musician (I've always been a Hole fan and I'm looking forward to Courtney's new CD). Will Blythe does a decent job of summaring Steadman's book on Hunter, which I plan to read if I can find the time. James Campbell on the new Neal Cassady biography left me a bit cold, but maybe that's only because I've always wanted to write this biography myself (and never got started).
Despite all this coverage of our outlaw favorites, my favorite literary reading in today's New York Times was a superb piece on Irish poet Paul Muldoon by Charles McGrath in the New York Times Magazine.
Richard Powers Gets the Katie Couric Treatment
by Levi Asher on Thursday, November 2, 2006 08:40 pm1. See the slender volume in this New York Times ad?
We may have to sic the Katie Couric police on Farrar Straus Giroux, because the book in this ad is at least 200 pages thinner than the actual book, which I took a quick snapshot of here:
A scandal? Hardly. The most likely explanation is a lazy temp in the FSG art department who pasted the cover and spine on a stock photo and took an early lunch. But, shouldn't an advertised image look like the object it is representing? And could there possibly be a marketing strategy behind the not-so-subtle transformation?
The Echo Maker is a hefty 451-page book about brain injury, spoilation of nature and sibling bonds. It's a great book, but it doesn't have "blockbuster" written all over it, and the National Book Award nomination probably won't help. But it does have a bird on the cover, and maybe somebody in sales was reminiscing about a slender little 128-pager called Jonathan Livingston Seagull that once sold four gazillion copies. This has been your conspiracy theory of the day; thank you for tuning in.
2. I haven't read much by William Styron, who has passed away, though I was impressed with the film version of Sophie's Choice and I've always wanted to read Darkness Visible. Some good William Styron links can be found at The Elegant Variation.
3. The Elegant Variation also offers a fascinating personal glance at the literature of the Hungarian revolution exactly fifty years ago.
4. Edges, a novel by Leora Skolkin-Smith about a teenage girl growing up on the borders between Jewish and Arab communities in Israel and Palestine, will be the basis of an audio performance by acclaimed actress Tovah Feldshuh. She should be a good match for this intriguing material.
5. I love this video, a massive group interpretive dance of protein synthesis (via Boing Boing). Ahh, the 70's, when people did stuff like this.
We may have to sic the Katie Couric police on Farrar Straus Giroux, because the book in this ad is at least 200 pages thinner than the actual book, which I took a quick snapshot of here:
A scandal? Hardly. The most likely explanation is a lazy temp in the FSG art department who pasted the cover and spine on a stock photo and took an early lunch. But, shouldn't an advertised image look like the object it is representing? And could there possibly be a marketing strategy behind the not-so-subtle transformation?
The Echo Maker is a hefty 451-page book about brain injury, spoilation of nature and sibling bonds. It's a great book, but it doesn't have "blockbuster" written all over it, and the National Book Award nomination probably won't help. But it does have a bird on the cover, and maybe somebody in sales was reminiscing about a slender little 128-pager called Jonathan Livingston Seagull that once sold four gazillion copies. This has been your conspiracy theory of the day; thank you for tuning in.
2. I haven't read much by William Styron, who has passed away, though I was impressed with the film version of Sophie's Choice and I've always wanted to read Darkness Visible. Some good William Styron links can be found at The Elegant Variation.
3. The Elegant Variation also offers a fascinating personal glance at the literature of the Hungarian revolution exactly fifty years ago.
4. Edges, a novel by Leora Skolkin-Smith about a teenage girl growing up on the borders between Jewish and Arab communities in Israel and Palestine, will be the basis of an audio performance by acclaimed actress Tovah Feldshuh. She should be a good match for this intriguing material.
5. I love this video, a massive group interpretive dance of protein synthesis (via Boing Boing). Ahh, the 70's, when people did stuff like this.
Syd Barrett, Baby Lemonade
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 10:08 am
Syd Barrett, a playful but reclusive singer-songwriter whose works carried me through years of my life, has died in his Cambridge home at the age of 60.
BABY LEMONADE
In the sad town
cold iron hands clap
the party of clowns outside
rain falls in grey far away
please, please, baby lemonade
In the evening sun going down
when the earth streams in, in the morning
send a cage through the post
make your name like a ghost
please, please, baby lemonade
I'm screaming, I met you this way
you're nice to me like ice
in the clock they sent through a washing machine
come around, make it soon, so alone...
please, please, baby lemonade
In the sad town
cold iron hands clap
the party of clowns outside
rain falls in grey far away
please, please, baby lemonade
In the evening sun going down
when the earth streams in, in the morning
send a cage through the post
make your name like a ghost
please, please, baby lemonade
Syd Barrett was the founder of Pink Floyd and a very influential figure in contemporary music. He was a legendary "acid casualty" of the 60's Swinging London scene, and was fired from Pink Floyd for his impossible behavior (former band-mates Roger Waters and David Gilmour later helped him to produce two remarkable solo albums). He attempted a comeback in the early 1970's but the attempt was a disaster, and he retreated permanently to his mother's home in Cambridge.
Pink Floyd's album Wish You Were Here is largely about Syd Barrett, and some parts of The Wall combine his story with that of Roger Waters, who took over the band after Barrett left ("They sent us along as a surrogate band", Waters sings, ironically alluding to his feelings of guilt after replacing Barrett with Gilmour, though it's an undeniable fact that the band managed to outlive Barrett's influence and find a new identity without him).
A close look at Barrett's life story suggests that he he may have suffered from severe schizophrenia (though this was certainly aggravated by his rampant drug use). His songs combined a whimsical but cutting lyrical streak with an aggressively experimental approach to sound and recording. He used literary inspirations freely, borrowing from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and later fashioning the song Golden Hair from a James Joyce poem, Chamber Music.
For years, I dreamed I'd someday get a chance to hear a "cured" or recovered Syd Barrett perform live in concert. I'm not surprised to realize now that this will not happen. Syd, we barely got to know you.
There's more on Syd here, here and here. If you'd like to post any lyrics or thoughts about Syd Barrett, please don't hold back.
More Rites Of Spring
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 08:09 pmI really don't know where I'm heading with this "rites of spring" theme. But here are some more links.
1. Symbolist-inspired children's author Lemony Snicket has announced the impending publication of the final book in the Series of Unfortunate Events series. Apparently Daniel Handler is moving on to other things, and we'll check out whatever he does next. My kids went crazy for these books, and they have pretty good taste. I read the first installment and was extremely impressed; these books are packaged like cheap Harry Potter knockoffs, but in fact they are deeply odd shaggy-dog stories, intriguingly gothic and, more than anything else, very funny. Well done, Snicket.
2. Here's another New York event I am really looking forward to: PEN World Voices, April 25-30. Look at this list of international authors: Chinua Achebe, Esther Allen, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Staceyann Chin, E. L. Doctorow, Raymond Federman, Henry Louis Gates, Nadine Gordimer, Philip Gourevitch, David Grossman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Bob Holman, Moses Isegawa, Elias Khoury, Larry Kramer, Philip Lopate, Norman Manea, Patrick McGrath, Ritu Menon, Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Naomi Shihab Nye, Orhan Pamuk, Willie Perdomo, Salman Rushdie, George Saunders, Zadie Smith, Robert Stone, Jeanette Winterson. Who am I most looking forward to seeing? That would be Orhan Pamuk, maybe just because I will feel for 45 minutes like a character in one of his self-referential tales.
3. Via the newly designed Golden Rule Jones, spoken word recordings by the great hippie surrealist Richard Brautigan are available for free download at a new site devoted to the author.
4. Here are two enjoyable links of a classical nature. Chaucer has a blog apparently, and that's got to be what the game's been missing. Then, somebody has translated a Shakespeare passage into ActionScript. Which is very cool, except for one thing: ActionScript? That's so 2003. Oh well ... I guess Shakespeare was so 1594.
5. Three years ago this week.
1. Symbolist-inspired children's author Lemony Snicket has announced the impending publication of the final book in the Series of Unfortunate Events series. Apparently Daniel Handler is moving on to other things, and we'll check out whatever he does next. My kids went crazy for these books, and they have pretty good taste. I read the first installment and was extremely impressed; these books are packaged like cheap Harry Potter knockoffs, but in fact they are deeply odd shaggy-dog stories, intriguingly gothic and, more than anything else, very funny. Well done, Snicket.
2. Here's another New York event I am really looking forward to: PEN World Voices, April 25-30. Look at this list of international authors: Chinua Achebe, Esther Allen, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Staceyann Chin, E. L. Doctorow, Raymond Federman, Henry Louis Gates, Nadine Gordimer, Philip Gourevitch, David Grossman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Bob Holman, Moses Isegawa, Elias Khoury, Larry Kramer, Philip Lopate, Norman Manea, Patrick McGrath, Ritu Menon, Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Naomi Shihab Nye, Orhan Pamuk, Willie Perdomo, Salman Rushdie, George Saunders, Zadie Smith, Robert Stone, Jeanette Winterson. Who am I most looking forward to seeing? That would be Orhan Pamuk, maybe just because I will feel for 45 minutes like a character in one of his self-referential tales.
3. Via the newly designed Golden Rule Jones, spoken word recordings by the great hippie surrealist Richard Brautigan are available for free download at a new site devoted to the author.
4. Here are two enjoyable links of a classical nature. Chaucer has a blog apparently, and that's got to be what the game's been missing. Then, somebody has translated a Shakespeare passage into ActionScript. Which is very cool, except for one thing: ActionScript? That's so 2003. Oh well ... I guess Shakespeare was so 1594.
5. Three years ago this week.
Beat News: January 2006
by Levi Asher on Friday, January 13, 2006 04:34 pm1. I used to be totally up on Beat Generation news, but lately I have go to places like Syntax of Things to get my updates. (Anything you need to know about literary state quarters, though, I'm your go-to guy).
Here's some good stuff: 72-year-old poet and political activist Jack Hirschman has been named the new Poet Laureate of San Francisco, and Ken Kesey's son Zane has put up a wonderful photo essay on the current condition of Further, the most famous bus in literary history (sorry, William Inge). Read about all of it here.
2. Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee's Jack's Book is about to be republished by Thunder's Mouth Press. This superb oral biography of Jack Kerouac was one of the first books ever published about the author. It consists entirely of recollections by those who knew Jack, and introduced several of the tales that have since been entrenched as Beat myth. Barry Gifford is a notable novelist in his own right; he wrote the book that became the David Lynch film Wild At Heart.
3. Poet Gregory Corso died five years ago this month.
Here's some good stuff: 72-year-old poet and political activist Jack Hirschman has been named the new Poet Laureate of San Francisco, and Ken Kesey's son Zane has put up a wonderful photo essay on the current condition of Further, the most famous bus in literary history (sorry, William Inge). Read about all of it here.
2. Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee's Jack's Book is about to be republished by Thunder's Mouth Press. This superb oral biography of Jack Kerouac was one of the first books ever published about the author. It consists entirely of recollections by those who knew Jack, and introduced several of the tales that have since been entrenched as Beat myth. Barry Gifford is a notable novelist in his own right; he wrote the book that became the David Lynch film Wild At Heart.
3. Poet Gregory Corso died five years ago this month.
When Hippies Battle: the Great W. S. Merwin/Allen Ginsberg Beef of 1975
by Levi Asher on Thursday, November 17, 2005 08:33 am
When I heard that W. S. Merwin had received the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Migrations, I couldn’t help but think back to the first time I’d heard his name. We don’t often hear stories about distinguished nature poets that involve fist fights, broken bottles and nudity, but W. S. Merwin was the center of an astonishing incident at a Tibetan Buddhist seminar that descended into just such debauchery. The controversy that followed has been largely forgotten, but it occupied the poetry community for several years in the late 70's, pulling the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, Kenneth Rexroth, Ed Sanders, Ed Dorn and Tom Clark into its vortex.
It all went down at a seminary associated with the Naropa Institute, a Tibetan Buddhist outpost in Boulder, Colorado, which hosts the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. The head of the Naropa Institute in 1975 was the charismatic teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whose most famous disciple was Allen Ginsberg. Because of Trungpa's exalted reputation, there was a waiting list for his interactive lectures and training sessions, and apparently W. S. Merwin pulled some strings (he was already at that time a well-connected poet) to get an invitation for himself and his girlfriend, Dana Naone.
It seems their desire for special treatment annoyed Trungpa (who had a reputation for unpredictable and impulsive behavior). Trungpa also seemed to bristle when Merwin and Naone expressed strong opinions about the content of the Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist source materials, objecting especially to the bloody war imagery in some of the traditional Tibetan Vajrayana chants. Trungpa did not believe a trainee should talk back to a guru, even if the trainee was a celebrated poet.
The Naropa group threw a wild Halloween party, and Trungpa presented a twist: the poets, trainees and other attendants would celebrate Halloween not by putting on costumes but by being stripped of them. The guru, apparently drunk on some sort of spiritual libation that probably did not come from Tibet, walked around the party floor pointing at partygoers, and when he pointed at somebody his assistants would pounce on that person and strip off their clothing. “Chop them up,” he would say.
However, Merwin and Naone, having scoped out the scene, made the strategic decision to hide in their room. Trungpa noticed this and sent for them, but they refused to join. Trungpa then sent a larger contingent to retrieve them, this time with the message that they were ordered to join the party. Merwin and Naone, again, refused. At this point Trungpa declared to his faithful attendants that they must use whatever force was necessary to retrieve the wayward guests.
It may be difficult to picture a mob of half-naked, half-costumed hippie Buddhist poets forcing their way into another poet's private room by breaking windows and smashing down doors, but I urge you to picture this, because sources state this is exactly what happened. Apparently Merwin tried to pull a Clint Eastwood move by breaking a bottle and using the jagged remains as a weapon, and all accounts state that several of the scufflers ended up with bloody limbs (though, thankfully, there were no life-threatening injuries).
Finally, Merwin and Naone were dragged screaming and crying into the party, where Trungpa yelled at them, strangely singling out Naone, a Hawaiian, for failing to respect her Asian heritage by following his direction. At his command, the mob descended upon Merwin and Naone and removed their clothing, leaving them naked and sobbing in each other's arms in the middle of the room.
The story ends at this point, and the controversy begins. Naone had shouted for somebody to call the police during the horrific incident, but for some strange reason Merwin and Naone did not immediately leave the seminary grounds, choosing instead to stay several more days for Trungpa’s remaining lectures (which indicates that they were probably traumatized and humiliated beyond their better judgement at the time).
Slowly, other poets began to shout for justice, among them Robert Bly and Kenneth Rexroth, who called Trungpa an obscene fraud. The Naropa Institute's funding from several non-profit sources, including the USA's National Endowment for the Arts, was threatened. Allen Ginsberg had not been at the party, but as the spokesman for Naropa's poetry school, a well-known follower of Trungpa and everybody's good friend, he quickly became a central figure in the controversy.
Ginsberg was asked to repudiate Trungpa, his guru, and he would not do so. In various interviews, he repeatedly tried to find the words to defend his teacher's actions, and continued for years to try to walk the line between both sides in this difficult battle.
Trungpa's reputation never fully recovered from this debacle, though he remained active as a religious teacher and activist for Tibetan independence until his death in 1987. Dana Noane continued to write poetry, and edited a volume of modern Hawaiian poetry, Malama, in 1985.
Although the strange incident between Trungpa, Merwin and Naone was covered in Harper’s Magazine and The Paris Review and is discussed in Barry Miles' biography of Allen Ginsberg, the story has slipped from notice in recent years, despite W. S. Merwin’s rising stature as a major voice in American poetry has continued unabated.
Certainly both law and rationality side with Merwin and Naone in this battle, but it's a story that makes nobody look good. Merwin comes across as a Buddhist dilettante, pulling for special favors at a religious retreat, refusing to follow the teacher’s commands, and then failing to stand up to the teacher after the horrific treatment at the Halloween party. He made one public statement about the controversy in 1977:
My feelings about Trungpa have been mixed from the start. Admiration, throughout, for his remarkable gifts; and reservations, which developed into profound misgivings, concerning some of his uses of them. I imagine, at least, that I've learned some things from him (though maybe not all of them were the things I was 'supposed' to learn) and some through him, and I'm grateful to him for those. I wouldn't encourage anyone to become a student of his. I wish him well.
Merwin’s National Book Award honor in Manhattan came almost exactly thirty years after the Naropa bash that went out of control. According to all reports from the award ceremony, everyone’s clothes stayed on.
