Book Review

Soul on Ice

by Eldridge Cleaver

     While doing prison time on a marijuana possession charge in the mid 1960s, Eldridge Cleaver wrote a series of letters and essays. By 1970, he had become a recognizable figure in the urban guerilla movement known as the Black Panthers and so these writings were collected and published as Soul on Ice. Readers with knowledge of Cleaver’s biography may be surprised at how nuanced some of his writing is. Then again, they might not be. A lot of readers in our age have little sense of nuance and often allow their knowledge of the author’s moral shortcomings to overshadow the meaning of these essays as they stand. Even worse, some readers use Cleaver’s essays as a stepping stone to express their own self-righteous moral outrage, using it as a vehicle for grandstanding and virtue signalling without taking into consideration anything that Soul on Ice actually says.

This collection is organized into four sections. The first deals primarily with Eldridge Cleaver’s life in Folsom Prison with, regrettably, no references to Johnny Cash. It opens with an introductory essay, “On Becoming”, in which he effectively sets the tone for all the writing that comes after. He states the purpose of his writing is for self-reflection, using his prison sentence to come to terms with the mistakes he made in his youth, all the while offering commentary on the white power structure that contributed to his disgruntlement with American society. You might say that this essay is friendly in tone, maybe even humble. Cleaver draws you in by sounding like a gentle person who got misguided in life.

Then this passage comes almost out of nowhere: “I became a rapist...Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was trampling upon the white man’s law, his system of values, and that I was defiling his women...I was getting revenge.” These thoughts, spread over two paragraphs hit the reader like a stink bomb of nuclear proportions. In fact, it hits so hard that it permanently clouds the judgment of some readers, so much so that they can not read, with any degree of accuracy, most of what comes later in this book. In fact, their judgment is sometimes so clouded, sometimes deliberately for the sake of puffing up their own sense of superiority, that they completely ignore the next paragraph which marks both a transition point in the essay and a transition point in Cleaver’s thinking. Says the author, “I took a long look at myself...and admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray – astray not so much from the white man’s law as from being human, civilized...” The author, at this point, takes responsibility for his own wrongdoings and vows to turn himself around. He admits that he owes this not only to himself but to society as a whole. Readers who are clear-headed and humanistic enough to grasp the meaning of this confession will still often admit that these hard-hitting paragraphs hang like a dark cloud over everything that Cleaver says subsequently throughout the course of Soul on Ice.

In one sense, Cleaver’s confession is a stroke of literary genius. Rarely do passages in essays like this arouse so much curiosity and strong emotion, enough so that the reader feels a strong compulsion to continue reading. Such a bold admission to possibly the worst crime a man can commit demands that it be followed up with bold analysis and even bolder insights. From this point on, the bar for success is set high; it is propped up according to whether Cleaver can deliver the goods by the last line of the last essay.

Other essays in this first section deal more specifically with life in prison. One piece, “The Christ and His Teaching”, stands out above the others, not only in this section, but also in the whole book. Cleaver writes about Lovdjieff, a prison teacher who is wildly popular with the inmates and a cause for suspicion with the prison authorities. The fact that Lovdjieff is white seems surprising at first, considering the author’s antagonism to the white power structure, but it soon becomes incidental and a matter of less importance as the essay progresses. Cleaver feels a deep bond with Lovdjieff, not just because of the teacher’s passion for knowledge but more specifically for his ability to get the author to see his life situation from multiple perspectives. At the crux of the matter is the life of Thomas Merton, a theologian who renounced material wealth to live in a monastery, dedicating his life to God. To Cleaver, this monastic life and vow of poverty looks insane; to him it looks like life in a ghetto only the imprisonment and poverty in a monk’s cell are voluntary. Cleaver thinks Lovdjieff’s lessons make Merton look like a fool but what is more important is that this forces Cleaver to look at his own prison life in a different light, it forces him to reframe his situation and consider the possibilty that he is wrong in his thinking.

“The Christ and His Teachings” is more than an almost stylistically perfect essay in the way it introduces themes, points, counterpoints, and gives the reader just enough information to lead them to the main point without overstating the case. It stands out among Cleaver’s other writings because it so directly points to the heart of his thinking. It demonstrates that not only can a person change by stepping outside themselves and re-thinking the way they are, but entire societies can do the same. The purpose of the teacher, and of effective leadership, is to catalyze this process, set it in motion, liquidate fossilized ideas, and the more sincere the teacher is, the more effective their results will be with their pupils.

The carry-over of this theme of transformation being instigated by a teacher can be easily seen in the essays on Malcolm X. As is well-known, after Malcolm X went on the hajj in Mecca, he left the Nation of Islam, converted to Orthodox Sunni Islam, and renounced racism while publicly acknowledging that he would work with white people to end injustice against non-whites. While this was a controversial move that fractured the loyalties of African-American activists at the time, Cleaver writes in full support of Malcolm X’s decision, holding him up as an example for the direction society can go in the process of integration.

The chapters dealing with life in prison are the best in this collection. They are personal and self-probing, creating a clear picture of where Eldridge Cleaver stands at this point in his life. He does an effective job of rallying the reader to his side. The caveat is that, being a prisoner and one that acknowledges his guilt in the crimes he committed, he appears to be deliberately portraying himself in the most sympathetic light he possibly can. Cleaver does come across as sincere, and he probably is, but he might leave you wondering how deeply into his own moral convictions he actually went.

Aside from the section of letters Cleaver exchanges with his attorney, the rest of Soul on Ice attempts to be less personal, addressing broader and more theoretical social issues concerning white supremacy and the oppressive power structure of government and big business. Many of his ideas are naive, being broad abstractions and over-generalizations. With his shift from focus on the individual to the structures of institutionalized racism, a lot gets lost. The idea of individuals as participants in a society much larger than themselves does not get effectively connected to the broader abstract theories he proposes. There is no data to support his theories, but to be fair, Cleaver was not a social scientist and he does effectively communicate a world view, even if it is a rudimentary one at best. Some of his ideas are certainly plausible, but his arguments lack supporting evidence. On the other hand, some of his ideas, particularly in regards to gender, are questionable.

“The Primevel Mitosis” is by far the oddest and most off-putting essay in this collection. It is formulaically logical while its contents are mostly absurd. Drawing on tightly-wound Hegelian logic, the politics of the Sexual Revolution, and the Nation of Islam’s myth of Yacub, the scientist who unleashed evil on the world by creating white people in a laboratory, Cleaver argues that white men are all brain and no body, black men are all body and no brain, white women are some vaguely defined essence of pure femininity, and black women, along with homosexuals, are a hopelessly confused mish-mash of gender roles. The bizarre reasoning behind this does not need to be analyzed in depth to be dismissed. But what is most troublesome is not how misogynistic, homophobic, and shockingly racist against African-American women it is, but rather how it justifies raping white women as a tactic of political activism. At the start of this book, Cleaver denounces that idea and action as a mistake of his youth but he reasserts it here by saying that it is necessary for black men to have sex with white women for racial progress to be made. While he is advocating consensual interracial sex over rape, and there is certainly nothing wrong with interracial sex unless you are a bigot, the idea that white women can be utilized as tools for the sake of harming and disempowering white men should be regarded with suspicion. Towards the end of this book we can see how Cleaver has shifted from rape to consensual sex without actually altering the flawed philosophy that underlied his motivations to commit that crime in the first place. On top of that, while interracial relationships certainly can go a long way in eliminating racism, interracial sex is not a panacea that will magically eliminate inequality on a large scale. Cleaver is advocating a fetish, not a plan of political action.

On a brighter note, in “Convalescence”, as well as comments in other essays, Cleaver addresses the issue of white people “appropriating” African-American culture. He mentions the likes of Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles; all of these are currently whipping-boys for the anti-appropriation crowd these days, but like Lovdjieff, Eldridge Cleaver would insist that these people look at their beliefs from another angle. Cleaver DEFENDS these white people for borrowing Black people’s culture. In his era, white people were not hearing pleas from African-Americans for racial equality but they were hearing their music. It would also make sense that white people would accept other white people who encourage integration simply because they are of the same peer group. What those writers and musicians did, according to Cleaver, was making it possible for white people to see that Black people have a legitimate point of view; they have something that can benefit all races and bring people together. Jack Kerouac and The Beatles, without being explicitly political, sent the message that it is acceptable for Black people to be themselves and that it is acceptable for white people to appreciate that. While Cleaver acknowledges that their borrowing of cultural elements and styles from Black people is superficial and even corny, he makes jokes about how silly white people look when they dance to Black music, he also demonstrates how they were opening a doorway, allowing white people of all races to interact in the same physical space. These cultural icons are like Lovdjieff and Malcolm X, catalyzing change and making people reorient the frameworks they use to perceive the world.

Getting back to his opening essay and the statement about rape that hangs like a dark cloud over everything else in Soul on Ice, we have to consider whether Eldridge Cleaver lived up to the task he set himself with that statement. Aside from it being a painful confession for him to make, did he succeed in effectively using his writing to re-evaluate his life, taking responsibility, and making changes for the better? In the end, I can meet him half way and say he got off to a good start but leaves a lot to be desired. His self-reflection comes across most effectively in the chapters on prison life and the essays drop in qualoty as they go on. He shifts away to writing about larger social issues that effect him personally but take the spotlight farther away from himself than it should be. While he expresses the need to end segregation and usher in a new era of social equality, even proposing a means of doing so through interaction in social spaces surrounding popular culture, he never sufficiently addresses the question of why he, the individual man named Eldridge Cleaver, saw rape as a legitimate form of expression. He never answers the question he poses to himself. He may have done this in his private life, thinking it was too personal to publish, and he does start off with an apology and a promise to be a better person, but on a literary level, he owes it to the reader to address the issue in some detail since he brought it up in the first place. By the end, it looks like his analysis of white injustice is a way of avoiding responsibility for the crime of rape that he committed. This obviously not the impression he wanted to make.

While not all of the essays in Soul on Ice are great, there are a few high points that make it a vital work of literature. His own life is another matter. After getting kicked out of the Black Panthers for wanting to escalate violent revolution while they were more concerned with free breakfast programs for children and helping African-American people get jobs, he went from one cultish group to another, becoming a Moonie, a Mormon, and finally a republican. He even tried to start his own sect called The Church of the Sacred Sperm; sounding too much like something out of a John Waters movie, it predictably went nowhere. He also invented the penis pants. If you don’t know about them, look them up online. This is the life of a man who felt lost in the world, struggling and failing to find a place to belong. His homophobia, his emphasis on hypermasculinity, and his obsession with his own penis are easy to laugh at, but there is something horribly sad about all that. He was overcompensating for feelings of weakness and vulnerability. While he blames white society for his rage and eccentricities, and in some senses this is justifiable, he had deeper personal issues that never got addressed. I’ve met a lot of troubled people in my life and I see certain patterns; I find myself wondering if Cleaver was sexually abused as a child. When Allen Ginsberg said, “I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness”, he could very well have been talking about Eldridge Cleaver. He was a tragic figure and the biggest tragedy is that he never got the help he needed.

Soul on Ice has definite strengths and weaknesses. The strengths outweigh the weaknesses, especially in Eldridge Cleaver’s ability to express his anger, his hopes, and his confusion with a precise and rigid clarity. You can see his demons and angels fighting a brutal war even when he is not directly writing about himself. Like the heroes and idols he portrays in this book, he gets you to re-evaluate the way you think. Even if you don’t appreciate what he has to say, this book is a valuable historical document for students of African-American history, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, and the countercultures of the 1960s.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. Ramparts Books/Dell Publishing Co. Inc., New York: 1970.

 

Book Review

Diane Arbus: A Biography

by Patricia Bosworth

     You could make the case that the transgressive photographer Diane Arbus sufficiently represented the zeitgeist of the times she lived in. Patricia Bosworth’s Diane Arbus: A Biography, although being unauthorized, has become the standard book for documenting her productive but troubled life. Bosworth does not explicitly claim that Arbus was an avatar representing the values of her times but it is easy to see how this could be true and understanding the values of the 1950’s and 1960s will go a long way in helping you understand the significance of her photos.

According to Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus was a precocious child, seemingly almost tailor-made to be an artist. She was an avid reader, felt emotions strongly, and was strangely sensitive to physical sensations, feeling life in every material item she touched. She experienced the world around her at at a much deeper level than everyone around her which, darkly, sometimes led to periods of melancholia and depression. She came from a family of secular Jews with ancestral roots in Ukraine. Her father owned a chain of expensive fur coat stores with their flagship location being on 5^th Avenue in Manhattan. Diane Arbus grew up in a sheltered environment with her family protecting her from the negativity of the Great Depression and World War II in their New York City apartment.

In the 1950s, Diane married Allan Arbus, the first boy she fell in love with during high school. Despite their almost inseparable attachment, she simultaneously had romantic notions for Allan’s close friend Alex Eliot, who she eventually had an affair with. The husband and wife team rose to prominence in the art world as fashion photographers, working freelance for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life. They churned out magazine spreads at a dizzying pace like a highly productive factory while maintaining high standards of quality. Their work was monotonous but stable and dependable; still an unease and creeping feeling of dissatisfaction was underlying their lives. If Diane Arbus could be said to exemplify the cultural attitude of the 1950s it would be in this dullness and restraint of emotions. Everything in her life was fine and that was entirely the problem.

Up to this point, Bosworth’s biography suffers from one major flaw. There is very little said about Diane Arbus herself. The author goes into a lot of detail about the people in Arbus’s life but doesn’t say enough about her. There is a lot of information about her family and friends while Arbus just fades into the background. Her absence weighs heavy on the narrative while Bosworth goes into yet another sidetrack discussion about her brother, her friends, or other members of the professional photography community of that time. The author might have been trying to camouflage Diane Arbus in the people surrounding her to make a point of how inconspicuous she could be, but if that was done intentionally, it was taken too far, so far that it interferes with the flow and meaning of the text.

During the ‘60s, Arbus’s life began to change and this is where this biography becomes more interesting. As a fashion photographer, she got used to seeing different sides of her models. Many of them were poor, suffering from depression, or having problems with drugs and alcohol. Some of them were homeless or victims of domestic violence. But when the Arbuses photographed them, they took on a whole other appearance. These displays they put on for for the camera were superficial and fake. She took interest in who these models were in reality. She decided to use her photographer’s talents to explore this other side of life. Diane Arbus began taking pictures of carnival sideshow freaks, homosexuals, eccentrics, the mentally ill, nudists and all other manner of people who existed at the margins of society. She became fascinated with the seedy street-life of 42^nd Street. She photographically documented the world of outsiders in America. She didn’t just take their pictures, though. In most cases she spent hours talking to them, getting to know them, sometimes visiting them in their homes, sometimes having sex with them. By getting to know them first, she felt like she could break through to the real people they were. When most people are confronted with a camera, they act as if they want to project to the world how they want to be seen but Diane Arbus wanted to show the world how they really were. By photographing these outsiders, Arbus tried to see something of herself in them, to identify with them and to force the viewer to do the same by confronting us with their images. Her style of portraiture was aggressive, rough, sometimes even intimidating.

For Diane Arbus, this photography was a means of transgressing her own boundaries. She was breaking taboos with her art and likewise in her own life the initial feeling of liberation led more and more to extremes. She became continuously more promiscuous, attending orgies, and going as far as having casual sex with complete strangers in public places. As the 1960s progressed, becoming more and more liberated and free spirited, her life became more disorganized, her marriage ended, and her photography become more popular. But as gallery managers and art dealers hailed her as a visionary and genius, she sunk deeper into poverty and mental illness. Just as the hippie generation ended with the Manson Family murders and the deadly chaos at Altamont, Diane Arbus sank into a hopeless state of depression and committed suicide. It was as if she personally embodied, step by step, year by year, the whole process of lifestyle experimentation, social change, and the undoing of repressions that characterized the counter cultral movement of that pivotal decade. Going so far off the rails and into wildly uncharted territory, unfortunately, led to the simultaneous downfall of both Diane Arbus and the hippies’ strive for utopia at exactly the same time.

In terms of the narrative, Bosworth does a much better job of telling the story in the chapters dealing with the 1960s. Maybe that is because that decade was the most productive and most interesting period of Diane Arbus’s life, but also the author does a better job of keeping unnecessarily extraneous information from intruding. There is still some sidetracking, she provides a lot of biographical information about Weegee even though Arbus did not actually know him, but this sidetracking is less prevalent and the narrative moves along more smoothly as a result.

Diane Arbus: A Biography certainly has its flaws. The writing is sometimes choppy and Patricia Bosworth provides quotes from a wide array of people who don’t seem to be particularly important or insightful for the purposes of this book. These shortcomings are not big enough to ruin it. Patricia Bosworth did a sufficient amount of research to make it work in the end and she succeeds in putting Arbus’s life and oeuvre into context in terms of art history, photography, theory, criticism, and the socio-cultural climate. A definite picture of Diane Arbus stands firm at the end. She was a woman who moved faster than everybody else, so fast that her contemporaries could not keep up with where she was going until it was too late. She reflected and influenced the times she lived in and it is only with hindsight that people are able to see what that means.

Bosworth, Patricia. Diane Arbus: A Biography. W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London: 2005. 

 

Bernie Sanders Interview Punks At the Mall

 

Bernie Sanders, mayor of Burlington, interviews punks at a local mall

(1988)

Book Review

Mannix, Dan. Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower. Ballantine Books, New York: 1964. Dan Mannix’s Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower has got to be one the greatest books chronicling carnival sideshow life. The narrator, named Slim in this account, starts as a young college student whose interest in the occult leads him to visit a traveling carnival. When watching a performance, a fire eater accidentally sets himself on fire. Slim volunteers to learn the trade and replace the injured man. What follows is the story of the carnival and the lives of its performers.

Slim is possessed of an insatiable curiosity for those he travels with. He recounts the details of their life stories and reasons for choosing to live as transients. The sideshow is run by Krinko, an Indian fakir also known as The Human Pincushion. He sticks pins through his flesh, eats glass, and climbs a ladder made of swords. There is also a fat lady, a tattooed man, a cowboy performer from New York City and his fourteen year old girlfriend, and the Ostrich, a Viennese man who can swallow just about anything and regurgitate it. This is lowbrow entertainment at its best.

Slim’s mentor is an old trickster with a long beard named the Impossible Possible who runs a gambling booth that is set up to suck as much money out of the marks as possible. The Impossible Possible has worked in all aspects of carny life and has lots of stories to tell. He is a bit of a psychologist too, explaining to Slim that being a conman means feeling a bit of sympathy for the people he rips off. He also complains about people who try to cheat on the carnival games, explaining with a straight face that he dislikes dishonest people while his whole livelihood revolves around tricking everybody to make money. But this is an insight into carny ethics. There is a definite line between the carnies and their marks and that line delineates loyalty to their own tribe. Everybody on the other side is fair game and the carnies take sides with each other whenever there is a conflict with the outsiders, no matter what the dispute is about.

Slim himself is an unusual character. He is taller than everybody and tries to learn all the stunts that they perform. He starts as a fire eater then moves on to sword swallowing and swallowing neon lightstoo. Other tricks that he attempts are less successful, especially the mentalist mind-reading performances which are too easy for the audience to see through. But his quest to master all aspects of carny life are what give this book is structure. By learning all the tricks of the trade we learn how each stunt is done. While some are fraudulent, others are actually not deceptive and incredibly dangerous as well.

What really give this book its charm is not just the way in which Slim’s education unfolds; as he encounters all the different transients he has each one tell their own story and philosophy on life. All of them love being traveling performers because it gives them a chance to live the way they want to. They are proud of their outsider status and share a supportive community for the misfits of American society. America has always been a country of mass conformity but along the way it has also produced some of the most fascinating counter-cultures in the history of humanity. This book is yet another testament to how liberating it can be to live outside the margins of the dull, gray mainstream full of lifeless people sluggishly shuffling along because they can’t think of anything better to do with themselves.

Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower is a first-rate account of a vanishing aspect of American culture. With its vivid portrayal of the traveling life, it is sometimes light and sometimes dark. It is sometimes sordid, sleazy and even violent but it is never sensational or sentimental. Dan Mannix simply wrote, with honesty, about what he encountered while working with the carnival. There probably is no other book about the carny lifestyle that is this complete.

Mannix, Dan. Memoirs Of a Sword Swallower. Ballantine Books, New York: 1964.

 

Jello Biafra Takes on Trump, ‘Nazi Punks’ Then and Now, and His Former Band, Dead Kennedys

What’s so unfunny about disruption, hate and misunderstanding? Ask Anti-Trump activist and punk-rock avatar Jello Biafra, who says, "I always thought, Hey, what if horror lyrics were about real monsters?"

Read the full article on Variety

 

The Story of Skinhead

The Story of Skinhead

BBC documentary with Don Letts

(2017)

 

The Troublemaker

On a Wednesday afternoon in February 2007, I shared a booth with a man named 26 inside the Travelers Club International Restaurant & Tuba Museum in Okemos, Michigan. We’d picked a spot far enough from the door to give us some respite from the winter blast, and dozens of African masks and beautiful battered tubas lined the walls above us. Police reports have listed 26 as 5' 7" with a “thin” build. In person, it was a little hard to tell how thin he was. He wore a blue crocheted sweater, fraying and loose, and an oversize baseball cap with the logo of the Weather Channel covered his scraggly hair, which was wild and wiry but not yet gray. He wore large rings on almost every finger and projected an amiable fragility

Read the full article on Vice

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Revised Boy Scout Manual:

An Electronic Revolution

by William S. Burroughs

     In the early 1970s, William S. Burroughs was mostly writing articles for underground newspapers and pornographic magazines like Mayfair. The hippie scene was winding down and urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Angry Brigade, and the Red Army Faction were springing up all over the place. Burroughs had just voluntarily left the Church of Scientology because of their authoritarian and potentially fascist overtones and was trying to maintain his status as a writer and counter-cultural icon. He began work on a manifesto to explain his unorthodox world viewto the younger generation. He never completed the project but parts of it were sold as spoken word pieces on cassettes and other fragments were published in scattered places. These pieces were put together as The Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution and recently published in paperback. The finished product serves as a good, but incomplete, overview of his ideas.

     The opening sections of this short work lay out strategies for overthrowing the established order and explain a variety of weapons, both conventional and unconventional, that can be used in the pursuit of building a free society. These passages are seasoned with little bits of Burroughs’ acerbic humor and eventually make a transition into fantasy vignettes that read like the fiction Burroughs is famous for. A smooth transition is made from realistic-sounding essay writing to the gallows humor of his dark scenarios. Readers who are less experienced with Burroughs’ writing style may get disoriented and wonder whether they should even take this prose seriously. The answer is both yes and no or at least the intent of his writing is serious while the realized result is fiction. But that is how Burroughs always operated. He melted the boundaries of reality like hot candle wax dripping into a pool of molten lava. He didn’t merely think outside the box; he did everything he could to destroy whatever box it is you are in when you think.

     There are key ideas to this revolution. One is that ten percent of the human race has to be killed but it has to be the ten percent that is responsible for controlling and oppressing everybody else. His idea that ten percent of the population controls ninety percent of society prefigures, by forty years, the contention of the failed Occupy Wall Street movement that one percent of the population controls ninety percent of the wealth. Political activists of our day should take note because they are not as unique or original as they think they are. To add to this idea, Burroughs points out that genocides and mass murders have historically been acts of violence perpetrated by the powerful elite against the masses of common people. Another component of this revolution is M.O.B. which means “mind own business”. When governments and police do not allow people to live freely then they are not doing as such; M.O.B. is to be the cornerstone law of a newly liberated humanity. The result of the revolution will be communal societies, some of which will be located on the beaches of Ecuador or in the dense jungles of the Amazon River basin. It is not surprising that Burroughs’ preoccupation with power, domination, and control made an impression on the mind of a young Michel Foucault who cited him as an influence on his philosophy of biopolitics.

     The rest of the book suggests ideas for experiments using film and audio. By the 1970s, Burroughs wished to expand on his practice of cut-ups to apply it to other, more current forms of media. A lot of the tape splicing he describes are now common practices in editing sound, music, and video. Some people have claimed his hypotheses are silly, ridiculous, and impossible but they may be misunderstanding the concept of experimentation. That particular word means to try something new and see what happens. The outcome may or may not be predictable but you really can not know until it is tried. Most experiments fail. Sometimes the intend outcome is not realized but serendipity occurs and a new method of doing things is accidentally discovered. In the end these tape recorder experiments had a profound influence on music and other arts. Burroughs used tape loops and sampling long before hip hop artists did and his philosophical ideas had a directed impact on industrial and punk music in the 1970s.

     Another aspect of revolution Burroughs explores is the presence of language. He briefly explains how language can be used as a mechanism of control. He also writes about the encoding of meaning in words by the speaker and the decoding of its meaning by the listener; he makes suggestions for experiments with language scramblers to determine if a listener can unscramble distorted messages subconsciously. This is a crude take on semiotics but it explains some passages from his novels that read like disorientating gibberish; some of his texts were scrambled using cut-ups and montage and it is up to you to decide if you can derive some meaning from it. Burroughs also suggest eliminating the words “the”, “either/or”, and “is” from the English language. He describes the way “is” causes distortions in our perceptions of reality. This sounds like an idea lifted from Martin Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics but actually it is inspired by the General Semantics theory developed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski in the 190s. In any case, these ideas anticipate the philosophies of poststructuralism and deconstruction by at least a few years.

     A lot of people have criticized William S. Burroughs for believing in things that are simply not true. They also overlook the fact that he was primarily a writer of fiction and fiction, by definition, is not true. But good fiction makes statements about truth. The Revised Boy Scout Manual should be read as a fictional document, maybe even as comedy or satire, but keep in mind what it actually says about the world we live in. It is some of Burroughs’ most clear and direct writing and does a good job of explaining his theories in a way that can clarify some of the confusing and opaque passages of his difficult prose. 

Burroughs, William S. Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution. The Ohio State University Press, Columbus: 2018. 

 

Book Review

Book Review

The First Third & Other Writings

by Neal Cassady

     Neal Cassady was possibly one of the most famous non-fictional literary figures ever. Written about most famously by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he also played important roles in the writings of John Clellon Holmes, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, and Sonny Barger. So when the rising stars of the Beat Generation literary movement insisted he try to write a novel, Neal Cassady gave in and tried. The results were not spectacular but for fans of the great American counter-cultures of the 20^th century, his book The First Third & Other Writings will probably be worth at least one good read.

     The First Third is Neal Cassady’s attempt at writing an autobiographical novel. In the Prologue, he gives accounts of his family history, both from his father’s and mother’s sides. The story of his father’s life and ancestry are detailed, possibly inaccurate, and sometimes you might wonder why Cassady thought to say as much as he did. A similar comment could be made about his mother’s life story and family tree with the addition that it is hard to tell what he meant to say until the mention of his mother’s birth. These passages have their moments but it often reads like Neal Cassady was more concerned with getting the stories on paper than he was in making them interesting. The writing is adequately good and clear in some spots but in other places it is more like lists of information than actual literature.

     The main passages of The First Third are all about Cassady’s childhood. Some parts of it are vivid and even exciting. The story takes place during the Great Depression. His father, also named Neal, was a barber and an alcoholic. They spend a lot of time in the streets of Denver and sleeping in skid row hotels while his father gets too drunk to function in any meaningful way. Cassady writes about his wanderings through the city and his exploratory adventures in junkyards and other industrial wastelands. He also goes on a hitchhiking trip across the country with his father. Later in the autobiography, he goes to live with his mother; his older step-brothers are bullies and little Neal watches as they beat the hell out of his father for being drunk. Neal Cassady also begins sexual experimentation with other kids in his neighborhood at a precocious age; a child psychologist would probably attribute this to parental neglect, something that appears to have been a big factor in the childhood of the author. But Neal Cassady never writes as though he feels sorry for himself; this is not victim literature and he often writes as if his obviously painful life were fun and a never-ending adventure.

     Some of the most clearly written passages are also the most grotesque. In one instance, six year old Neal enters a hotel room where a drunken bum with no legs is masturbating. This, in itself, does not surprise him but what he does find shocking is that a man in his 40s is able to get a hard-on. The kid had a lot to learn. Another time, his sadistic older brothers torture a cat to death by stomping on its head until its brains pop out. They throw the dead cat down an alley and Neal goes to look at it. He finds, by coincidence, that the corpse landed on a book that had been stolen from him a long time ago. His descriptions of playing doctor with little girls aren’t exactly pretty either.

     There are some badly written passages too, in fact, there are lots of them. Cassady often tried to write marathon sentences, going on for as long as he could without using a period. There are many parts that degenerate into nonsense and babbling. There are also several passages where he introduces a character or a plot line then goes off on tangents that lead to further tangents without him ever returning to the original point. Or if he does return to where he started, it doesn’t make sense because the sidetrack went on for so long you forget what it was it was originally meant to be about. Supposedly Neal Cassady wrote this with the intention of writing like his favorite author, Marcel Proust. But writing under such an influence with a mind moving at warp-speed did not do Cassady justice. His writing is too self-conscious to ever really take off and fly for prolonged periods of time. A lot of the times the narrative is like climbing a hill while dragging a bag full of bricks behind you.

     But when Neal Cassady wrote at his best, there is something genuine and stylistically American so that it winds up being tragic that he did not try harder to pursue a literary career. There is something reminiscent of great American authors like Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, and John Steinbeck in the way he writes about his family and the American experience.

     The sections of story fragments and letters at the end of this volume are some of the better narratives. The story about Cherry Mary is hilarious. There is a lot of stuff about stealing cars and some crude sex talk that sounds like male locker room conversations. One chapter is the beginning of a story about a great race car driver that is obviously modeled on Neal Cassady himself. The race car driver always wins in competitions because his mind works 500 times faster than everybody else’s. These passages are more true to the character and personality of Neal Cassady himself. When he doesn’t try too hard to be a great writer, his inhibitions come down, his self-consciousness disappears, and he writes the way he thinks. This still isn’t great literature but it is more interesting and true to life than what Cassady wrote in The First Third.

     This book is not going to have wide appeal. The writing is not great and it will not speak to most readers. It definitely is an item of interest for those who are in love with the Neal Cassady mythology. Despite the rough pacing and confusing descriptions, this still comes across clearly as his own genuine voice rather than a version of the man as portrayed by other great writers. There is just enough good writing here to make you wish he had tried harder as an author. Neal Cassady was probably too manic, too energetic, too scatter-brained to really sit down for long periods in order to concentrate on writing in earnest. Then again, we are fortunate that he lived the way he did because the whirlwind of his life stirred up so much interesting culture and controversy in his wake. We are fortunate that he chose the life of a wild role model rather than a writer, even if he was a bad role model.

Cassady, Neal. The First Third & Other Writings. City Lights, San Francisco: 1992.

The Last Beat

A murder in Riverside Park changed the lives of a group of Columbia undergrads. Did it change literature as well?

Read the full article on Columbia Magazine here

Book Review

Book Review

The Dharma Bums

by Jack Kerouac

     When reading The Dharma Bums forget about Jack Kerouac’s biography. Forget his other books. Forget what you know about the Beat Generation. Forget what you know about Buddhism. Most importantly, forget what you know about critical theory, deconstruction, feminism, political correctness or whatever other pseudo-intellectual muck you might have clouding up your brain. Clean out your mind and encounter this novel as it is. Just read it and go with it. It has to be experienced on its own terms.

     The Dharma Bums is primarily Jack Kerouac’s exploration of Buddhism. Ray Smith is the main character and the four strands of the book include accounts of his friendship with Japhy Ryder, his encounters with nature, his travels across the country, and some wild Beat Generation parties. The characterization of Japhy Ryder is both visual and psychological. Their extensive conversations about Buddhism, their mountain climbing, and their wine drinking sessions that lead to silly bouts of spontaneous poetry-making bring this individual to life. Through conversation, Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder intertwine their minds and personalities while remaining distinct in a way that makes both of them easy to understand. It seems as if Kerouac dropped the manic in-the-moment hedonism of Neal Cassady and replaced it with the imminent transcendence and lofty contemplation of the guru Gary Snyder, the real life poet who Japhy Ryder represents.

     When Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder take an experienced mountaineer up to the peak of Matterhorn, we get some of Kerouac’s best prose stylization. The natural atmospherics of the mountain range are sharply described and vivid; you can feel the height of the pine trees, the shade of the forest canopy, and the refreshment of cold stream-water as they pour it over their sweating heads and let it flow down their thirsty throats. You can feel Ray Smith’s straining muscles and the resistance of gravity as he hikes and climbs. His hunger makes your stomach rumble. All this is described in a free flowing prose that is rhythmic, airy, light, and spontaneous. It literally sounds like music when read out loud and in fact the musical flow and beat is so strong you could, at times, even imagine dancing to it.

Another great section about nature is when Smith visits his family in North Carolina and spends copious amounts of time meditating in the woods while surrounded by dogs. He describes the grove as a temple and meditates under a pine tree the way the Buddha Siddharta Gautama found enlightenment under the Bo Tree. In his inward journey he contemplates the true nature of existence. His thoughts are abstract but not impossible to understand. In terms of Buddhism, this is probably not very original but he articulates them well and in the end his sense of peace and well-being are sincere without sounding like flakey, new age pretentiousness. His return to the world outside his head is not glorious, though; his family treats him like an idiot because he deviates from the well-trodden path of mainstream America full of dull people who do little more than work and watch tv, the mid-century equivalents of the nobodies today who do little more than lay on a couch, playing with their cell phones.

     Then back in California there are the parties. The friends of Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder stay up all night with bonfires, jugs of wine, guitar playing, people dancing naked, and couples sneaking off to make love in the woods. This Dionysian revelry predates the California hippy scene by almost ten years and Japhy Ryder makes an accurate prediction about a future youth movement where people celebrate life and return to nature rather than falling for the never-ending drudgery of work and boredom that was so popular in the 1950s. Even his prediction of a rucksack revolution where pilgrims roam the Earth in search of knowledge and experience foresees the world-traveler backpacking movement that has been going on since the 1990s. But Ray Smith, ever the loner, feels uncomfortable at these parties and spends a lot of time cooking for the guests, sitting silently by the fire, and wandering off along to look at the stars.

     In between all this are the passages about traveling around America. Ray Smith rides buses, hitchhikes, and jumps on freight trains like a bum to get from coast to coast. He meets a cross-section of truck drivers, hobos, and various other people while expressing fascination and admiration for almost all of them.

     Ray Smith is such a great guy. He loves the world and he loves life. He seeks for genuine truth and believes deeply in kindness and goodwill towards all human beings. He wants to bless everybody with generosity and enlightenment. His kindheartedness brings out the best in everyone he meets and his fascination for other people is both naive and charming. Underlying all this goodness, though, is a sadness, a dark shadow, because of all the suffering and unhappiness of the human race. While Kerouac does not explicitly bring out this subtle gloom, it can be felt in so many lines of The Dharma Bums.

     This novel may be the closest Jack Kerouac ever came to perfection. The sections are well organized and distinct from each other while flowing smoothly from one passage to another. His sentences are a little more controlled than usual and his thoughts, even when rambling, are clear, clean, and accessible. While The Dharma Bums has a gentle and contemplative tone, it is also energetic and vivacious. In our age when America is steeped in hopelessness, anger, injustice, and hate this is a great pieces of literature to turn to for renewal. In our day, it does not seem dated and in fact, the thoughts and actions of Ray Smith seem more relevant than ever. 

Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. Signet Books, New York: 1959.

Sex, Satanism, Manson, Murder, and LSD: Kenneth Anger tells his tale

He told where the bodies were buried in the third issue of Kinokaze Magazine circa 1993. Or so it seemed, as no subject appeared to be off-limits. Drugs, murder, and movies. But then again, Anger rarely if ever veers from the script as he is a man who has carefully controlled his myth and reputation for decades.

Read the full article on Flashbak here

Book Review

Go 

by John Clellon Holmes

     In its time, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was called “the novel that defined a generation.” While it certainly was the most commercially successful of the Beat Generation novels, Go by John Clellon Holmes more properly deserves that designation.

     It may not be fair to compare the works of Kerouac to the small output of John Clellon Holmes but it is difficult not to. If the Beat Generation had not taken off as a cultural and literary phenomenon, then Holmes might very well have been forgotten. Go is now considered to be the first Beat Generation novel but it is significant for more than just being the first horse out of the gate. Kerouac’s purpose was to spontaneously express the lifestyle of the author as he and his friends spun wildly out of control. Holmes set out with a different task in mind though. Go is more of an attempt to introduce, portray, explain, analyze, and judge the Beat Generation as it grew into a scene in New York City.

     The main character of this story is Paul Hobbes, a writer working on his first novel. He decides to befriend Gene Pasternak and David Stofsky, representations of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg respectively, because he sees them as manifestations of a newly arising cultural impulse, the cutting edge of a new way of being American. Hobbes, actually a stand in for John Clellon Holmes himself, struggles to fit in with their lack of self-control. He also struggles in his marriage to Kathryn who has an affair with Pasternak, an affair that is given Hobbes’ blessing even though he appears to be hurt by it. At one point in the novel, Hobbes realizes he has to choose between being a part of the meaningless masses of society who seemingly do nothing but work and sleep like a horde of gelded horses or ally himself with the Beats. He chooses to go with the Beats but he sadly remains at the margins of their group and never clears out the clutter and confusion in his mind.

     Aside from Kathryn, Pasternak is the character with the closest relation to Hobbes though the two never seem to actually connect at a deep level. Pasternak is a sad man who drinks heavily, loves jazz, smokes a lot of grass, and has an easy time seducing women, especially if they are married. Stofsky is a poet, given to reading William Blake and having mystical visions; he sets off to help all his friends find the right path in life but instead he just annoys people and they often tell him to go away. Hart Kennedy is Holmes’ depiction of Neal Cassady; he hits the New York scene like a cyclone, always manic and permanently in the here-and-now without any sense of responsibility. After arriving from a roadtrip that started in Denver, the other Beats follow him around as he takes them from bar to bar, from party to party, establishing himself as the king of the group. During a fight with his eighteen year old wife, Diane, Kennedy is portrayed as being less than an ideal husband. Holmes almost makes him look like a monster rather than the portrayal as some holy prophet of individual freedom as he got from subsequent authors.

     Together with an extensive bunch of second-tier characters and subplots weaving in and out of the action, we get an idea of what it meant to be “Beat.” As Hobbes explains it, beat is meant as in beat up, beat down, beat tired, or beaten as opposed to winning. Therefore Go is quite a downer of a novel. On the surface, the characters pursue a life of never ending ecstasy but this is really a means of escaping from their inability to relate to other people or even to themselves. The post-World War II generation of youth feels restless and confused, full of anomie and unable to relate to the world. Go is a dark and brooding novel, full of frustration and urban angst, the language is nervous and melancholy while the scenes of social tension, arguments between lovers, drunken nights in shadowy apartments and muted conversations in shady dive bars depict a clique of young people who always seem to be on the brink of despair, if not plunging over the edge into self-annihilation. Holmes depicts the Beats as caught in a space between writers, artists and intellectuals on the one hand and thieves, criminals, and junkies on the other hand. The concepts of crazy and cool are central to the narrative, crazy being the state of manic euphoria, spontaneous expression, and living loose and out of control while cool means being aloof, cold, unemotional, deflated, exhausted after the psychological extremes of crazy have reached their peak

     Go provides u with an in-depth look at the New York City scene and it deserves to be read for that reason, The characters are well-drawn and portrayed with depth and an ambiguous sympathy. Holmes saw the good and the bad in every character. He also gave voice to a lot of the females in a way that no other Beat Generation writer ever did with the exception of a couple women authors associated with the movement (Diane DiPrima and Carolyn Cassidy deserve mention here). Go still has some serious flaws though. The pacing is irregular, moving in fits and starts, sometimes going so slowly it becomes hard to follow. The dialogue also tends to be melodramatic and reads like a counter-cultural soap opera at times, so much so that it is can be hard for the reader to avoid rolling their eyes.

     Overall though, Go puts the Beat Generation in a particular time and place. It situates the movement in a historical context and a specific social milieu. It says a lot about who the Beats were, what they were reacting to and why they lived the way they did. It should be the first Beat Generation novel anybody reads if they care to see what that whole thing was about. Sadly it remains obscure to this day. 

Holmes, John Clellon. Go. Plume Books/New American Library, New York and Scarborough, Ontario: 1980. 

Communiques from the Weatherman Underground

Hello. This is Bernardine Dohn.

I'm Going to read A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR

Read the full article on Dissident Reality here

On the Passage Of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time:

The Situationist International  1956-1972

short documentary film by Branka Bogdanov (1989)

Eight Tons of Punk

Facing rising San Francisco rent prices, the world's largest collection of punk records and the anit-establishment music magazine that safeguards it must find a new home

Read the full article on The Outline here

PAGING V. VALE: STILL RE/SEARCHING FOR THE TRUTH

Countercultural anthropologist and founding member of Blue Cheer, V. Vale has documented the 1970s San Francisco punk scene and explored the subcultures of industrial music, body modification, and more with his Search and Destroy zine and RE/Search book series. He is still exploring new ways of expression and shocking Jesse Helms’ ghost on a daily basis forty years later. Amanda Sheppard spoke with V. Vale for PKM.

Read the full article on Please Kill Me here