Beat Generation
Not the Jack Kerouac Estate Battle Again ...
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 04:16 pm
Somewhere out there, Jack Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia is yelling "I told you so".
A news announcement just came out of nowhere: a judge in Pinellas County, Florida has ruled that the much-debated will that bequeathed Jack Kerouac's entire estate to his wife Stella Sampas after the great novelist's death in 1969 was a fake. The will in question is not Kerouac's will but that of his mother, who died in 1973. While this ruling is unlikely to be the last word -- I'm sure the Sampas family will appeal -- it is a very surprising new turn in a battle that raged for years, broke many friendships, and outlived its main would-be beneficiary, Jack's daughter Jan Kerouac, who died in 1996. (Paul Blake, Kerouac's nephew in Florida, might be the beneficiary of this new ruling.)
There's a lot of baggage here, and I experienced much of it first-hand as a member of the online BEAT-L community in the mid-1990s. Jan Kerouac's cause against the Sampas family of Lowell, Massachusetts became an all-consuming obsession for Gerald Nicosia, author of the most acclaimed Kerouac biography, Memory Babe. Nicosia's strident tirades against the Sampas family eventually caused the entire BEAT-L community to disband, as documented in a 1999 Salon article by Austin Bunn that quotes me and a few other participants who became so sick of the increasingly ugly controversy that for a while we couldn't even enjoy reading Kerouac anymore (the Salon article is broken on the Salon website, but is archived here).
The furor eventually died down, and I gradually came to assume that the Sampas's control of the Kerouac estate was a fait accompli. As I said often during the height of the unpleasantness, I didn't really care very much who owned the Keroauc estate, but I wanted everybody to shut up because it was disturbing my reading. I have a feeling it may get to that point again real soon.
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 Roth Remix
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 01:39 am
1. After interviewing Philip Roth, James Marcus turned a culturally significant Roth utterance into an audio dance track (via Moby Lives).
2. Sarah Weinman unearths another writer in the Singer family, Hinde Esther Singer.
3. Kenyon Review: "What happens when a poet’s own name is invoked in a poem of her own making?"
4. Adira Amram of the wonderful musical Amram family has released her first record. Looking forward to hearing this!
5. McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan now has an Espresso Book Machine. As we pointed out before, Espressos are cool.
6. One interesting thing about this Persepolis fan-fic about the Iran elections, originating in Shanghai, is how well it captures Marjane Satrapi's style.
7. It's an old formula, this "post some ridiculous emails you've received about your blog" blog post. And yet, it's still fun.
8. Michael Jackson read books. Good for him.
9. I'm glad that Bill Ayers has the courage to publish a book, a graphic memoir. Maybe it'll come out on the same day as Dick Cheney's.
10. Once upon a time, Literary Kicks was a website devoted to the Beat Generation. I know some of my early readers wish I had stuck with and perfected that formula, and if I had, maybe Peter Hale's The Allen Ginsberg Project is what this site would have been like. Hale, who works closely with the Allen Ginsberg estate, has been putting high quality stuff up -- rare Kerouac videos, beautiful images, surprising texts, with a wide range of coverage and a friendly touch -- week after week. If you're into modern-era experimental/alternative literature, you might want to follow this site.
Comix For Bloomsday
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 12:17 amBeat Generation, British, Classics, Comedy, Comix, Fiction, Language, Love, Modernism, Music, News, Reading, Technology
1. For your Bloomsday enjoyment: comic strip artist Robert Berry is visualizing James Joyce's Ulysses. This project appears to be off to a great start.
2. More Bloomsday action: Dovegreyreader on a new book called Ulysses and Us by Declan Kibberd.
3. Farewell to poet Harold Norse.
4. It must be a good sign that somewhere inside the giant paradox that is the nation of Iran, they are loving the inventive and hilarious early writings of Woody Allen.
5. I did not know that novelist Roxana Robinson was a member of the Beecher family. But what's this about Lord Warburton being the man Isabel Archer should have married? I was rooting for Ralph Touchett.
6. The word technology is derived from the same root as textile.
7. We need a poetry reality show right here in the USA.
8. A digital Gutenberg would be nice to look at.
9. What could it possibly have been like to be married to Harold Pinter? Fortunately claims Antonia Fraser, it was not a Pinteresque experience.
10. "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?" (Or, I'd like to add, one man).
11. Eric Rosenfeld appreciates Thomas Pynchon's use of description.
12. Kafka Tribute in New York
13. Michelle Obama reads Zadie Smith, a better choice (in my opinion) than her husband's Joseph O'Neill. (Barack is also cited as reading What is the What?, a good choice though not exactly fiction).
14. The Who's Quadrophenia GS Scooter has been sold at an auction. (Though it's from the movie, not the record album photo shoot).
15. Via Bookninja, what the book you're reading really says about you.
Literary Brawler: John O'Hara
by Levi Asher on Thursday, June 11, 2009 01:18 am
The author of the remarkable essay I posted here yesterday about the state of literary criticism in 1962 was John O'Hara, and it appeared as the introduction to his short story collection The Cape Cod Lighter, published by Random House in 1962.
John O'Hara was an extremely popular and widely loved novelist through much of the 20th century, though his popularity with readers and his irascibly anti-fashionable attitude caused him to suffer much critical bashing during his later decades. Martha Conway once wrote of the "New York Johns" -- O'Hara, Cheever and Updike, all of them smug, sexist, suburban and irritatingly male. Of the three, John Updike was probably the most brilliant, but O'Hara had the wickedest sense of humor (and tragedy).
His 1934 novel Appointment In Samarra (the title blacked out in yesterday's posting) is a great entry point if you'd like to discover O'Hara, though his later short stories (like "Pat Collins", which is in The Cape Cod Lighter) prove how well his talent endured. In his early years, O'Hara wrote the New Yorker character sketches that became the show Pal Joey.
I obtained my John O'Hara book collection from my Grandma Jeanette when she died, which gives you an idea when he was last in style.
These lines in the essay above:
The exciting word is getting around that not only the novel, but all fiction, must go. Not go-go-go, just go.
... are directed at postmodern critics from Time and Newsweek, but contain a friendly side-swipe at Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation writers, who were all the rage in 1962.
Now, as somebody asked yesterday: who were Monk Lovechild and Tootsie Washburn?
Broken Lines
by Levi Asher on Friday, June 5, 2009 01:10 pm
1. So downtown Brooklyn will not be getting a Frank Gehry building after all (thanks for nothing, Jonathan Lethem). However, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff gives a thumbs-up to a new postmodernist spectacle by Thom Mayne, very much in the Gehry vein, near Cooper Union and St. Marks Place. Call me a fool -- I just love a building with broken lines. This is what big cities always looked like to me in my dreams.
2. Evan Schnittman aptly invokes Magritte in thinking about Google as a book publisher.
3. Benigni in Hell.
4. I'm so glad a John O'Hara renaissance is finally happening.
5. Literary (mostly kid-literary) cakes.
6. A nice implicit Burroughs reference in this piece on early computer advertising art.
7. And Wow He Died As Wow He Lived. Jason Boog on Kenneth Fearing.
8. On The Great Tradition by F. R. Leavis.
9. Literary Losers selected by Mark Sarvas.
10. Chris Felver's film on Ferlinghetti.
11. From a superb new blog representing Allen Ginsberg's legacy: Buddhists Find Beatnik Spy! And scroll on, much good stuff here.
12. Shattered childhood much?
Joey Gallo and the Jukebox Gangsters of Red Hook, Brooklyn
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, June 2, 2009 03:00 pm
In 1971 a charismatic and brainy gangster named Joey Gallo returned home to New York City after ten years in jail, intending to resume the war for control over the Profaci mafia family that had sent him to jail in the first place. Joey Gallo and his brothers Larry and Kid Blast did not seem to have great instincts as gangsters, and never rose high in the serious business of organized crime. But Joey was a natural-born celebrity, with an uncanny knack for calling attention to himself. Over a decade earlier, he got a proud showing in Robert Kennedy's book about crimefighting, The Enemy Within, and even seemed to get the better of the future Attorney General and Presidential candidate in Kennedy's own book.
The New York newspapers couldn't get enough of the fun-loving Gallo mobsters, who mostly shot and got shot by other mobsters, and in the early 1970s Jimmy Breslin wrote a book about them, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, which got turned into a Mafia movie just before a much better movie called The Godfather was released. It's been completely forgotten today, but the movie version of Breslin's book starred a then-unknown Robert DeNiro as a member of the inept gang.
And Joey Gallo is back again as the subject of a lively biography by Tom Folsom, The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld. This book connects Joey Gallo's wandering intellect to its sources, from the gangster movies that inspired him to the Beatnik scene that enthralled him during his early years running a jukebox and vending machine service from Red Hook, Brooklyn during the late 1950s.
Gallo had particularly great taste in existential philosophy, counting Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Reich and Albert Camus among his favorites. Folsom's book breezes through Gallo's fast life and doesn't try to deconstruct what these writers might have meant to the striving gangster. It reads like a collage, skipping merrily from past to present, connecting lots of dots, from the famous Albert Anastasia barbershop shooting in the 1950s to the prison race riots of the 1960s (Gallo was an early believer in racial harmony) to the cozy Greenwich Village theater scene of the 1970s, where Gallo mingled with the likes of Jerry Orbach, Gay Talese and Neil Simon before he was shot to death in Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy one late evening after enjoying a Don Rickles nightclub performance that would be the last show he'd ever see.
Another friend of Joey Gallo's from the Greenwich Village theater scene was Jacques Levy, director of Oh! Calcutta, who would soon work with Bob Dylan on a great 1975 album called Desire that would include a song called "Joey". It's because of this wonderful song -- one of the best and longest tracks on an album full of mysterious lyrics, jangling acoustic guitars and gypsy violins, that I myself became interested in the legend of Joey Gallo. I can't deny that I'm partial to this book because of my affection for the Bob Dylan song. The book illuminates many of the lyrics for me, from the beginning:
Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn in the year of who knows when
Opened up his eyes to the tune of an accordian
to the end, when:
he staggered out into the streets of Little Italy
This song has taken on a life and legend of its own. It reappeared in a live version on the later album Dylan and the Dead in which Jerry Garcia improvises a beautiful short fill to illustrate the moment of Joey's death. The Dylan song may be bigger than its subject, and this is a perfect example of the artistic serendipity this minor Mafia figure always seemed to create.
That serendipity is the true subject of Tom Folsom's book, which ends with a vision of the new IKEA that looms over present-day Red Hook, the once desolate neighborhood where the brothers ran. It's a nice final touch. My only question, upon finishing The Mad Ones, is whether or not Martin Scorsese will turn it into a movie. I don't see why he wouldn't.
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.
The Volcano Pilgrim
by Levi Asher on Monday, May 11, 2009 07:18 pmBeat Generation, Classics, Film, Jazz Age, Language, Music, News, Poetry, Politics, Russian, Technology, Transcendentalism
1. Japanese search parties have found the remains of poet and volcano enthusiast Craig Arnold, who had been running a blog called The Volcano Pilgrim. Jacket Copy's piece on Craig's death is the best of many I've read.
Nobody needs to wonder why a poet would love volcanoes; the metaphorical appeal is obvious. The word "volcano" is itself literary, evoking the Roman god Vulcan (the Greek god Hephaestus). Then there's Malcolm Lowry, and Susan Sontag, and let's not forget that the San Francisco beatniks hung out in a North Beach bar called Vesuvio.
Some might disagree with me, but I don't think it's exactly tragic when a poet who passionately loves volcanoes dies exploring a volcano. It's tragic if a poet who loves volcanoes dies of cancer, or catches a stray bullet during a liquor store robbery, or kills himself in a moment of desperate depression. For a poet to die in courageous pursuit of his greatest dream and fascination does not seem tragic in the same way.
(The homemade volcano photo above was found here).
2. Las Vegas Sun maps the Seven Deadly Sins to the states and counties of USA.
3. Keith Gessen gets himself into trouble reporting on an election in Russia.
4. "While the publishing industry chases the new, the young, the instantly commercial, readers are often looking for something else -- for a kind of enduring quality." Agreed. Reissed jazz-age classics from Bloomsbury.
5. Wyatt Mason invokes Emerson.
6. Bill Gates's father is writing a book called Showing Up For Life.
7. 25 Microchips that shook the world.
8. To embarrass is to block, to em-bar.
9. How George Orwell was feeling (hint: not good) while he wrote 1984.
10. Literature and classic rock (I used to try to maintain a list something like this, but haven't kept it up to date).
11. Why does everything Bret Easton Ellis writes get turned into a movie?
12. Anne Waldman on why chapbooks matter.
13. Carly Kocurek, a smart young writer from Texas who used to contribute to LitKicks as "violet9ish", is one of the authors represented in Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket by Elizabeth Englehardt.
14. I get interviewed by Mike Palecek at New American Dream. I like it that Mike asks questions like "Are UFO's real?" instead of the usual stuff about e-books and blogs.
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.
