| January 22nd, 2005 08:06 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Tales of Beatnik Glory
By Harper Barnes
Special to the Post-Dispatch
01/23/2005
"Tales of Beatnik Glory" is one of those books which leaves you cackling wildly while people within hearing range start reaching for objects to put in your mouth so you won't swallow your tongue.
- Harper Barnes
The Real Paper, 1975
It is said, probably too often, that if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. Well, I was there, and when a fat new review copy of Ed Sanders' "Tales of Beatnik Glory" landed in my lap a few weeks ago, I had only a vague memory of having read it before. After fumbling through my "library" - i.e., hundreds of books stacked in no discernible order around my once-spacious apartment - I came up with a copy of another Ed Sanders book, and the hype on the back included the quotation in italics above. I could pure damn write back in those days, although I was a little shaky on the use of "which" vs. "that."
I reviewed Sanders' book for a Boston alternative newspaper called the Real Paper, a quintessential communally owned weekly funded in part by a gift from a then-Boston politician named Barney Frank. (Everyone at that time assumed Barney was straight.)
The book I reviewed in 1975 was only about one-fourth of the new "Tales of Beatnik Glory." Sanders' hilarious and weirdly inspirational collection of autobiographical short stores about bohemian New York (and Kansas) in the last half of the 20th century has grown from about 200 pages to more than 750, from one volume to four, and includes stories written as recently as the 1990s, so most of them are new to me. As far as I can tell, Sanders has not changed at all, which is a good sign.
Poet, publisher, pacifist, raconteur and second-generation beat writer Sanders grew up in Kansas City. As a teenager in the late 1950s, he made the common existential mistake of reading "On the Road" more than once, dropped out of Mizzou and headed for New York City, where he proceeded to open a tiny bookstore - the Peace Eye - near Tompkins Square Park. The area had been part of the Lower East Side until people like Sanders and Bob Dylan arrived, moved into $40-a-month, rent-controlled flats with bathtubs in the kitchen and inadvertently turned the Eastern European slum into the East Village.
In "Tales of Beatnik Glory," which is written in the kind of exuberant yet tenderly ironic beatnik prose that Tom Wolfe imitated in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," Sanders tells witty tales of a transplanted Midwesterner named Sam Thomas who is much like Ed Sanders himself. How much is Sam like Ed? Well, in the book, the fictional Sam Thomas opens a magazine called (in its censored version) "Drugs, Social Change and Expletive Deleted." The real Ed Sanders, as I recall, actually edited a journal called "Expletive Deleted: A Magazine of the Arts."
He also infiltrated the Manson family to write his terrifyingly lurid "The Family" and was one of the founders of the ultimate anti-bourgeois rock-folk-anarchy musical group, the Fugs, a band that was in itself an expletive deleted. The stories can be edgy, or psychedelic, or even nasty - the neo-conservative literary and intellectual figures who spit on writers like Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac come in for some deserved grief in stories like "The Cube of Potato Soaring Through Vastness."
But often the predominant mood is a kind of wistful sweetness, fond nostalgic memories of a time when a group of children was known as "groovy" and benign fools from the I Am Jesus ward of Bellevue Hospital paced the streets and entertained us all.
At four times its previous length, "Tales of Beatnik Glory" remains a delight. It and Dylan's recent "Chronicles: Vol. 1" are about as close as you can come to understanding what went on in certain environs, from Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota to the New York islands, from the 1950s through the 1970s. The usual proud suspects appear - Dylan himself, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, our own William Burroughs - and the aging children of the '60s rage against the dying of the light and tell us how to stay forever young through poetry, jazz, rock 'n' roll, drugs, political protest and the levitation of massive symbols of the military-industrial complex.
Incidentally, I happen to believe that Sanders and his chanting buddies actually did get the Pentagon to levitate an inch or two in protest against the Vietnam War. But what would I know? I was there.
"Tales of Beatnik Glory"
Stories by Ed Sanders
Published by Thunder's Mouth Press, 767 pages, $21.95
Harper Barnes was the editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1970-72 and a book columnist for Boston's Real Paper and the Chicago Reader in the later 1970s.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| January 22nd, 2005 10:30 PM |
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| Water Dragon |
Thanks TTM - As always ever the informed one. I have the original publication from the '70's. I'll see if I can find the newest and latest incarnation.
Tuli, Ed, Frank Z, and Brian Jones, some of my early teen heroes! Glad to know that Ed Sanders still has style!
Regards,
W.D. |
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