Southern Bookman

Ed Sanders Remembers the Fugs

I'm finding it all too easy to buy books for the Nook. The cost is less per book than in a bookstore, but clicking that little tab quickly adds up. 

My latest ebook purchase is "Fug You," the memoirs of Ed Sanders, one of America's overlooked cultural heroes. How ironic that I would follow Ed's career into the ebook era, when I first encountered his work on vinyl 33-rpm records when he was the leader of The Fugs and a solo artist who produced one of the great albums, the "Ed Sanders Truckstop." I have also read many of Sanders' books, including "Tales of Beatnik Glory," poems and "The Family," the best book written about the Charles Manson trial. Even when he was publishing iconoclastic works such as his "Fuck You, a magazine of the arts," Sanders stood outside of the bohemian counterculture.

Like another satirical genius of the '60s, Frank Zappa, Sanders has a conservative side that allows him to look critically at the excesses of the philosophies that took root in the '60s. As with Zappa, Sanders' songs take a broad aim, examining middle class conventional society as well as the hippie, left wing culture that brewed its own deadening conformity in rebelling against "the bourgeoise."

Like Sanders, Zappa first produced classics as the leader of a band. Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Sanders' Fugs produced brilliant satire that showed a firm grasp of a range of musical styles, not only in melody but with lyrics. Then both of them produced ground-breaking work as single artists. While Sanders also wrote poems and books, Zappa moved into different realms as a producer on Bizarre and Straight records, with such imporant works as a album of Lenny Bruce's Berkeley concert and Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica." 

While Zappa's music grew more sophisticated and self-conscious with its models on jazz and classical music, Sanders found a similar model in country western and swing. Both found rich troves in early rock and rhythym and blues. Like all great parodies, Sanders "Truckstop" not only makes fun of country motifs, but shows great love and respect for them. As with Zappa making great rock and jazz while parodying them, Sanders makes great country and swing music.

Sanders with his blue collar characters such as "Johnny Pissoff" showed an early understanding of and sympathy for working class anger that most '60s writers lacked. Zappa understood a different class, a more suburban, California-mall-oriented group, while Sanders captured the feelings and cultural touchstones of truckers and plumbers and carpenters, haunted by Jesus, sex and booze. Sanders' humor is more free-swinging and guttural than Zappa's. The Fugs, who also included the late Tuli Kupferberg, were part of the New York village scene that also produced Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, while Zappa came from the Southern California freeway-oriented musical mix. While turning to country, Sanders and the Fugs kept the Lower East Side influence; while Zappa remained rooted in Laurel Canyon.

Sanders' self styled "investigative poetry" is too programmed and topical, but I'll always remember reading his "Poems for New Orleans," on the abuses in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His poems put these in a more memorable and compelling form than the countless magazine articles and books about the storm's aftermath. As with all of his work, he shows a jazzy, free-form sensibility along with a deep knowledge of New Orleans' history and culture. I bought that book in Cambridge Square, then spent a nice morning in Harvard Yard reading it. Sanders' poems, like his other works, are viscerally entertaining.

The Fugs' name, like that of his new memoir, comes from the euphemism that Norman Mailer used in his celebrated first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," for the old four-letter Anglo-Saxon f-word . This nod to literary culture is another hallmark that set Sanders apart; he has a strong knowledge of American poetry and fiction, with Fugs songs making references to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle (HD). He references Homer and the Iliad in "Truckstop."  Unlike some anarchists and bohemian figures, he had a strong reverence for books and writing, a desire to preserve and celebrate the literary culture. That's why his book on Manson displays such deep understanding; Sanders knows and is part of the nihilistic cultural waves that produced Manson, but possesses the disgust and foreboding of a cultural conservative.

At 72, Ed Sanders continues to provoke and entertain. Reading him, I am saddened that Zappa didn't live to see the social media era. But I'm thankful to have Sanders still among us. 

American literature is blessed with writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth who continue producing vital work into old age. Sanders, for all of his idiosyncrasies, can stand among them.

 

Encountering the Nook

Now I've entered the e-book world, having received a Barnes & Noble "Nook" for Christmas. I've used the Nook for reading the celebrated "Pulpwood," the collection of magazine writing by John Jeremiah Sullivan. After reading orgiastic reviews by the New Yorker's James Wood and others, I wasn't that blown away by Mr. Sullivan, whose work struck me as remote, and emotionally un-engaged. Too much about him, not enough about his subjects, although he did introduce me to an old blues song I'd never heard of, 'Last Kind Words Blues."

I also used the Nook, which always reminds me of the old nasty word for female genitalia, to purchase Patti Smith's memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. I also downloaded quite a few classics, either free or for $1, such as Alexander Pope's translation of "The Odyssey," James Joyce's "Ulysses," etc. In some ways, I find the Nook easier reading than a book, easier to rapidly skim through, so I thought I could at last finish Joyce's work and others. In searches of what's available on the Nook, I've found some puzzling and distressing omissions. One day, I suppose, I'll try movies, TV shows and movies on "The Nook."

Speaking of magazine writers, I've read two pieces, Wood's and one by David Brooks, that calls all magazine pieces "essays." The term can refer to pieces used to be known as "articles," i.e. factual works based on reporting. I thought the term essay referred to personal, reflective pieces, although an author can write an essay on subjects outside of the self, such as books, paintings, cities, places. Yet, I was curious that the term essay has been expanded. Is this a cover for the blending of fact and invention? Would celebrated pieces such as Norman Mailer's look at Vietnam Moratorium Day, or Tom Wolfe's look at the Merry Pranksters, be called essays, not reporting? 

On a trip to New York, I discovered a recently released collection by a vintage New Yorker writer, Wolcott Gibbs. He was a triple-threat man, doing articles, short stories, theater reviews, "Talk of the Town" pieces. His most famous piece, I suppose, was the paradoy of old Time-ese, "Backward Ran the Sentences Until Reeled the Mind." Reading Wood's piece on Sullivan, which claimed for Sullivan territory covered long ago by New Journalists like Mailer, Wolfe and Gay Talese, I felt a similar dizziness.

 

Farewell, Christopher Hitchens

At Christopher Hitchens' death, I recall in some amazement how much of his work I've read. Before completing his memoirs, "Hitch-22," I regularly read his columns in Vanity Fair and the online magazine Slate, as well as collections of his essays. I first started reading him years ago in "the Nation," when he was an unalloyed member of the left. I've also read some of his other books, such as his appreciation of Orwell.

Reading his book reviews for the Atlantic in his recently released volume of collected essays, I return to my earlier opinion that he was at his best writing about literature, although he perhaps was better known as a political and social polemicist. Although he never wrote fiction or poetry, or at least published any, he possessed as a critic a perception of imaginative writers' purposes and how well they accomplished them.

At times in his political writing, I felt he was a fraud, a charlaton with opinions a bit too glibly stated. He was always, though, an engaging writer who challenged thought, an examinatioin of my own opinions and conceptions. I liked his swaggering, wise-guy personality. His takedowns of Mother Teresa, Kissinger and Bill Clinton remain in my memory, bolstering my skepticism and natural propensity to shun idols.

His final writings gave excruciating details about the progress of the cancer that killed him. A final piece in the current Vanity Fair vividly renders the pain and humiliation of a terminal patient. It reads like great fiction, making me wish that he had written novels and short stories.

He dies at 62, the same age my father died of cancer nearly 30 years ago. Hard to imagine the world of thought and language without Hitchens' distinctive voice.

Andre Dubus III Finds Beauty in Wretched Childhood

Andre Dubus' III's "Townie" gives a devastating condemnation of the '60s and its breaking of social norms. Like so many other personal memoirs in recent years, "Townie" examines excruciating details of a bleak childhood. While not reaching the best of the genre, such as books by Mary Karr and Joe Queenan, Dubus finds strange, poignant beauty in his story of violence, parental neglect, and the '60s "let it all hang out" philosophy.

I checked out the book at the library, and its pages are stained with substances whose origins I was reluctant to think about too closely. The dark stains are a good match for the book, which tells how Dubus' father, the noted writer Andre Dubus II, left his family for younger women and how Dubus II's mother was unable to cope with the resulting poverty and her responsbilities as a mother.

Dubus II was a saintly, heroic figure to me when I read his essays about how he coped with devastating injuries received an a horrible accident on a Boston interstate, but "Townie" paints him as an irresponsible father, philanderer, alcoholic and bloodthirsty lover of violence. Like William Styron, whose daughter, Alexandra blasted her father in a recent memoir, Dubus II is pilloried by a child who also became a writer. 

"Townie" gives repeated scenes of bar fighting, apparently the only growth industry in the economically deprived Massachusetts town where he grew up. Dubus III tells how he starts out as a frequent victim of bullies, then builds himself up through weightlifting and boxing lessons to turn into a brutal fighting predator himself. As with other memoirs, the sense of place is strong, with the economically ruined town and the polluted Merrimack River somehow given a perverse pastoral uniqueness.

The book ends with reconciliation, as Dubus finds peace as a writer and cares for his father, whose legs were crushed by a car that ran over him when he'd stopped to give aid to a couple whose vehicle had broken down on the interstate. 

Dubus IIi follows the well-worn personal memoir template, but does it with vivid language. He would have benefited from better editing; he shows an irritating fondness for run-on sentences, and his narrative control slackens at times. While not quite a classic of the genre, "Townie" is a worthy look at how family love and endurance overcomes human weakness.

Faulkner's "The Hamlet" stands among his master works

August, a month so associated with William Faulkner, meanders along with waves of heat broken by rain and stormy winds. I'll mark this late summer, when global warming grows deeper, with the reading of Faulkner's "The Hamlet."

I'd known of Faulkner's Snopes family saga and read a good part of it, such as the fine short story "Barn Burning," which a lovely Louisiana lady explained to me at the Faulkner conference at Ole Miss. But I'd never read the novel trilogy, "The Hamlet," "The Town" and "The Mansion." Someplace I'd read a quote by  Gabriel García Márquez that "The Hamlet" is among the greatest Latin American novels, and that lit my desire to read the book, the first part of the trilogy.

As with other Faulkner books I've discovered over the years after my college reading of the standard "great novels" of "The Sound and the Fury," "Light in August" and "As I Lay Dying," I was thankful to have read it. My life would have been significantly lessened without this great book. "The Hamlet" joins "Absalom, Absalom" and "The Wild Palms" as Faulkner books I've read for the first time relatively late in life. 

"The Hamlet," published in 1940, is one of Faulkner's great works. In it, Faulkner displays a wonderful rough-edged humor, as rich and knowledgeable about frontier life as Clemens. The book can stand with "Huckleberry Finn" as a comic masterpiece. As with Clemens, "The Hamlet" shows the mastery of a variety of different dialects. It also shows an astonishing range of literary forms in one book: the tall tale, the joke, magical realism, the Victorian novel, 20th centry "stream of consciousness," the Western, the mystery, the potboiler, the Southern gothic.

After savoring the novel', I was taken even higher by the writing in the last section, "The Peasants." The novel details the life of "Frenchmen's Bend," the rough settlement near Faulkner's central location of Jefferson. The novel often shows the farmers and workers of Frenchmen's Bend sitting and talking on the front porch of the country store, the center of Flem Snopes' rise to power and the steady accumulation of other members of the clan. The dialogue in "The Peasants" shows a perfect ear for Southern speech and the rural rhythms of life in Mississippi after the Civil War. The funny, amaazing stories that unfold show an ineffable narrative gift. 

The qualities of the book continue. The variety of their characters, and the sure touch of their names, matches Dickens. In fact, although Faulkner is often celebrated, or derided, for his modernist narrative disjunctions of chronological time and point of view, I found the book at its best when he uses the standard narrative techniques of 19th century masters like Dostoyevsky and. Turgenev.

Among the many wonderful characters in the book, a couple stand out. V.K. Ratliff, the "sewing machine agent," is the book's moral center. He is prone to wheeling and dealing and the pursuit of money, at times with nearly shady acts, yet he also shows compassion toward others, humor and the responsibility of preserving the tribal heritage of the place. Ratliff, with his knowledge of every inch of the territory from his travels on his buckboard selling sewing machines, and his desire to be the chief storyteller, has a consciousness similar to Faulkner's. One weakness of the book is that at the end, he is deceived by Flem Snopes in the funny, amazing denoument of the novel. Although Faulkner tries to address this problem, I am not convinced that Ratliff would fall for Snopes' strategem; he is just too smart, too canny, too wise. This problem is not serious enough to ruin the book, but it is one of the few places where Faulkner missteps.

Another character whom received extra affection from Faulkner is the young boy with the amusing name "Wall Street Panic" Snopes. Again, the boy's wild energy, curiosity and ability to survive hair-raising adventures reminded me of Clemens' Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I had the feeling that Wall Snopes is Faulkner's image of himself as a boy, running around Oxford Mississippi and environs.

Now, on to the other parts of the Snopes trilogy, "The Town," published in 1957, and "The Mansion," 1959. The last two books were published late in Faulkner's life, and I fear they will show a lessening of powers. Even if I find "The Town" and "The Mansion" don't reach the heights of "The Hamlet," I trust they will stand above most books.

Faulkner's imagination was taken by the Snopses throughout his career; he first conceived of the stories in the 1920s. He loves all of the families and characters he created, but he has a special, rough affection for the Snopeses. I look forward to completing the journey.

A light on John Berryman's spiritual side

The Catholic intellectual journal Commonweal miraculously reappeared at the Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, along with the Times Literary Supplement. I hadn't seen either publication on the newsstands for years, and their reappearance sparked my flickering hopes that print culture was in rapid decline. Alas, the TLS quickly disappeared, and when I inquired, the clerk, with the gravity of an undertaker or a doctor with bad news, said "we are no longer carry it." Not enough buyers, he said. However, Commonweal remained.

The other day, I at last picked up a copy, to read an article on the new translation of the Catholic liturgy, which will be imposed upon us in November. The old English liturgy has been the once recited at Mass since the 1960s, when the Latin Mass passed away in the days of Vatican II. I'd read an article in The New York Times about the new translation, which sounded awkward, convoluted, tone deaf, unmusical, etc., if allegedly accurate.

Unforunately, I found the Commonweal piece on the new liturgy as dull and wooden as the new translation itself is supposed to be. Luckily, though, I found a moving article on John Berryman and his late "Eleven Addresses to the Lord."

The article recounted Berryman's struggles with alcoholism and despair and how a conversion experience in a a rehab center had led to the "Addresses." Tragically, the conversion didn't take, not did the alcoholism cure, and Berryman killed himself by leaping off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill's piece places Berryman as one those spiritual seekers who swerve between great doubt and great faith. His "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," found in his 1970 "Love & Fame," one of the first poetry books I bought as an adult, reflect that conflict. Cahill doesn't even mention Berryman's best-known work, "The Dream Songs," with which he is saddled. It's one of the masterpieces of his generation, but its popularity has taken away attention to Berryman's other work. It's refreshing that she concentrates on his religious poetry.

Many of the poets of Berryman's generation were known for their personality extremes. While Berryman wasn't medically diagnosed as manic depressive like his sometimes admirer Robert Lowell, Berryman showed all of the erratic behavior and mood swings of his peers. 

Berryman's longing for religious grace and spiritual healing was among his most admirable features, along with his handling of the vernacular as a poet and his depth as a scholar and critic. Thanks to Cahill for examining this side of him. The piece made me wish for a "Collected Poems" of Berryman, as has been done for Lowell. Editions of "Dream Songs" abound, but I would love to have all of Berryman's work collected in one place.

 

Ken Kesey's "Magic Trip"

In one of those serendipitous discoveries, I found that Comcast's On-Demand is showing a documentary on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic trip across the United States in a painted bus called "Further." Although the hour was late and sleep called, I had to immediately watch "Magic Trip," the History Channel-funded film.

The film, pieced together from movies taken by Kesey and crew on the trip (the initial motive for the journey was to make a film), was exhilarating and hilarious, although the antics of the proto-hippies now seem ill-conceived, jejune and wasteful.

How wonderful and relevatory to see characters in "living color" I'd only read about previously. Kesey with his physical power and charisma, bursts from the screen. Neal Cassidy, the hero of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," also shows his legendary physical dynamism and electric non-stop raps. Although he was constantly on speed, driving through the night and talking even when no one is listening except for the microphone, Cassidy despite his love of nutty,unexpected adventures comes off as an adult, knowing how to change tires and get out of frequent scrapes with the highway patrol. Cameo appearances are made by an amusingly proper Larry McMurtry,  perplexed when his old Stanford chum Kesey and the Pranksters show up at his home in a rarified Houston neighborhood, a sadly diminished Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A young and beardless Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead play a significant role in the film's look at the famed Kesey acid tests, the subject of a book by Tom Wolfe (not even mentioned).

The less famous members of the crew come off as silly, confused, bewildered, infantile and mentally derangedl. I felt something like pity for them, along with the sick fascination of watching impaired people acting out their delusions. One or two of them show intelligence in commenting upon the experience. Others are just children trapped in Kesey's artistic and social experiment.

Frequent LSD trips mark the cross-country journey. Kesey is an early LSD apostle, although the film shows Timothy Leary and Ram Dass shunning the group when it shows up at Kesey's LSD experimental station in New York. Kesey first took acid as part of a government-funded experiment at Stanford. The experiment is shown is excruciating detail, with Kesey recording his observations in a tape recorder, then in an interview with a nurse who may be a Nurse Ratched prototype. Kesey's psychedelic visions sound pretty much like any other acid trip, showing how mundane and unordinary the so-called "revelations" really were.

Like other "happenings" and political street theater projects of the time, the trip of Further doesn't hold up aethetically. Most of the crews' antics while on acid don't appear very imaginative and innovative. Yet, the film, with its comments from Kesey and Cassidy and its constant attempt to show the context of the times, still possesses great charm and energy. As with Andy Warhol's similar aesthetic experiments with a crew of acolytes, Kesey's experiment looks like a grand failure. At the end, he turned against the counter-culture folks who kept showing up at his Oregon farm, and the widespread use of acid, although he kept maintaining the value of its use for select visionaries such as himself.

Kesey says to an unnamed interviewer who sounds like "Fresh Air's" Terry Gross that he kept writing to the end. Yet, at least in posthumous works that have been published so far, he never reached the heights of his earlier works, the classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and "Sometimes a Great Notion." Kesey wasted much creative energy in the Magic Trip. While the film is amusing, I wish we would have had instead later, artistically mature, books from Kesey.

By the way, I was glad to hear Kesey say he didn't like the movie made from "Cuckoo's Nest," although he liked the Broadway play (Kirk Douglas played Randall McMurphy.) Kesey thought the movie, starring Jack Nicholson, focused too much on the conflict between McMurphy and the Big Nurse. On reviewing the movie several years ago, I hated the misogynistic portrayal of Ratched, although Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for her performance.

....Note: Terry Daughtery, interviewed by Southern Bookman after his fine biography on Donald Bartheleme, will have a biography out this month on "Catch 22" writer Joseph Heller. A riveting excerpt is in this month's Vanity Fair. 

Remembering Ernest Hemingway

The media mania for anniversaries is taking hold with the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's suicide. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, blew out his brains with a shotgun while his wife, Mary, slept. In the last week, I've read two pieces on Hemingway, the latest in Saturday's New York Times by Hemingway pal and biographer A.E. Hotchner. The gist of Hotchner's piece was that Hemingway wasn't delusional in thinking that FBI agents were tapping his phone and following him; Hotchner found through a Freedom of Information Act receipt of documents that J. Edgar Hoover's spooks really were following the author. As the saying goes, attributed to San Francisco music writer Ralph J. Gleason, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not really out to get you.

Hemingway's Paris years after World War I continue their romantic pull, as in Woody Allen's movie "Midnight in Paris." Last year, I read the "unedited" version of Heminway's "A Moveable Feast," which restored parts reportedly removed by Mary. The book's image of the young, idealistic Hemingway is an admirable contrast to the outsized self-parody he became.

Hotchner in his New York Times piece quotes Hemingway speaking, his voice sounding like one of those bad Hemingway contests. By the end, paranoid and depressed and having lost the ability to concentrate on his writing, Hemingway decided to end it all.

No matter how unlikable I find the late Hemingway, I'll always admire much in his work. Many of his short stories continue to live for me among works I'll continue to reread. His novels I consider lesser works, but I plan to one day reread "The Sun Also Rises," which I loved in college. 

Hemingway's death 50 years ago marks the end of a time in American culture when novelists were still venerated and the masculine ideal was far different. It was the height of American power, when the Cold War was raging, when deep and powerful cultural currents were evoking major changes. Yet, a rereading of Heminway's early short stories, like other classic works, reveal the unchangeability of the human heart.

Shakespeare Troupe Moving to Fort Greene

The New York Times had an interesting story Saturday morning about the Theater for a New Audience Shakespearian theater moving from Manhattan to Fort Greene in Brooklyn, where the city is funding a new $47.5 million theater for the company. The move drew criticism from black residents and artists, who say the move catering to, as the Times said, works of a "Dead White Male" playwright. Said Laurie A. Cumbo of the Musem of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, "We have a role and respnsibility to act as a community so that these institutions that we're building first and foremost benefits the people who live" here. Then we can think about the hipsters, the yuppies, the Manhattanites and that sort of thing."

I can see the need for the city to fund works of emerging black playwrights, along with works from other groups. Artistic merit, not ethnicity, should be the standard. However, while Shakespeare the man might be white and dead, his plays have remained alive for more than 400 years, and speak to all of us. The belief that Shakespeare doesn't relate to black audiences shortchanges them. The article says the Theater for a New Audience does three plays a year; surely other companies and artistic genres can use the theater some of the time. It would be a good gesture for the theater to open itself to contemporary plays, including those of black writers and performers.

The building of the theater recalled to me that Shakespeare's own company built the Globe Theater in London. What does it say about our time that in the Elizabethan era, a theatrical troupe could afford its own stage, not depending on the queen to fund it. Of course, today the theater must compete with much more entertainment offerings. The wealth of "The King's Men" can only be duplicated in mega performances on Broadway, which also continues to struggle along with symphonies, museums, publishers,etc. 

 

 

Adam Hochschild's "To End All Wars"

I love reading books about World War I more than any other war, with the exception of the American Civil War. The two wars have much in common: trench warfare, modern weapons making frontal attacks horribly murderous, vestiges of honor and chivalry co-existing with the advent of technology, the "total war" strategy of punishing civilians.

World War I is not as interesting as the Civil War in military history. Unlike with the Civil War, World War I battles were grinding affairs of little strategy, mainly soldiers running from their trenches, getting slaughtered, and retreating. In short, stalemate, not great risky charges and swings of fortune as at Gettysburg or Chancellorsville. What fascinates me about World War I are personal stories of men who endured the trenches, their heroism and sense of honor in such a tawdry reality. The great poets and writers such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves make World War I rich in literature. 

My latest World War I book is Adam Hocheschild's "To End All Wars." He goes over much ground as familiar as the same bit of Belgian soil fought over on the Western front, but he goes into much I've never read about, mostly characters on the British home front. Like Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War," Hochschild focuses on Britain and the devastating costs of World War I on British society. He builds a similar case, that Britain paid too high a cost in the war, and that if Germany had won World War I, World War II and the Nazi regime would not have risen. Such counterfactual reasoning is dubious, but Hochschild's book is a fascinating look at Britain, especially the attention he gives to the antiwar movement and a gallery of once famous figures now obscure. 

Hochschild possesses the gift of writing dramatic narrative. As with all of the best books about World War I, the sense of tragedy, of a rich European culture destroying itself, is strong. I don't agree that a German victory in World War I might have been more beneficial to the world, but his book is an essential addition to the history of the era.