BOOKS

This book is the death agony of American Poetry. As Frank O’Hara said; “. . . it may well be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off.” Gerard Malanga is carrying it out. Malanga, chic and dazzling, creates an obituary for poetry, but fuck, if the society is dead so is the art, and no matter what you do you can’t save it. A lot of people are trying to build an alternative culture; Malanga is singing the death chant of the old. Warhol has brilliantly expossed a dying culture from within by mechanically destroying the impact of an object or picture. Malanga achieves the same by assuming that the most indulgently personal and trivial material is poetic.

The more I think about it, the more sense this book makes, and I hate it. Only in movies is it easy to understand that bad work sometimes has more to say than good work, and Malanga knows movies. For instance, Niagra (1955, Marilyn Monroe & Joseph Cotton) is utterly fascinating because it so accurately reflects the madness and sickness of popular mass values of the fifties. It is seriously better than Rebel Without A Cause.

Just as the people who made Niagra didn’t and still don’t know its importance. I doubt if Gerard Malanga knows (Warhol does) the importance of his book: importance as a document on the death Of poetry, not a work of art.

The only other thing to say about the book is that in four or five poems, he forgets to be chic, and says some things deeply personal and moving with a minimum of effort. At the end of “The Big Beat” for Alan Freed, he says:

“In New York today wet snow and penetrating

bone-chilling cold, is prevailing.

These songs begin their serious existence

my youth is a history of;

But the man is gone. Only

his voice remains, preserved on tape

bursting in the heart.”

Again in the words (and the style) of Frank O’Hara he lets “the bodies fall where they may”, and they fall like human beings.

This book isn’t bad because Malanga is a bad writer, quite the contrary. It is bad because Malanga approaches poetry like the fashion or auto industry, style is manufactured to be new and exciting rather than useful or necessary. In tne end it is as superficial as you would expect.

Archie Anderson

SHARDS OF GOD: A novel of the Yippies — by Ed Sanders — Grove Press

Shards of God is outrageously dirty and outrageously good. It is written in the strangely ritualistic and formal tongue of a prophet. Ed Sanders’ God is the God of sex, drugs and’ forced sharing. It isi a credit to Sanders that he can write a dirty book when everybody thought it was impossible. At the same time, the book is unrelenting, full-force invective against AMERIKAN CULTURE, it totally waBotys in AMERIKAN violence and bullshit morals. Sanders, to our pleasure and amazement, makes the Yippies everything AMERIKA fears they are, and more, The mo st rabid Christian fascist diatribe couldn’t be better.

The perversion he devises from Jerry Rubin fucking a computer and John Sinclair fucking the ear of a God who has the form of a cow, to the Rot Vats filled with dead Women’s Lib chicks, is only matched by the perversion he practices on the English language. This book feels like a scenario for the cybernetic revolution living on a moral appendix, or as Ed Sanders says, “The vomit vomits in the vomit.”

Archie Anderson

(Women’s Lib chicks?!? — Ed.)

TARANTULA by Bob Dylan (Macmillan, 137 pp., $3.95).

Now that it’s finally been released officially, some five years late, Tarantula has to stand, as a book, as a work, on its own merits, as an hieratix or as a literature rather than as a hermetically-circulated esotertcum, in esse-wise. And, as such, if just doesn’t hold up all that well, Jim.

Tarantula’s style, in every aspect from syntax to imagery, is straight out of the period represented by Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and, just as that same syntax and im agery matrix cuts the aesthetico-emotional mustard so tpffly, so geniusly, on those twp lps, in Tarantula it presents itself in a solely linear (no music) showcase and subsequently falls flat on its overly ambitious fundament. Which is to say that there is not one passage, not one page, in this book that can even approach the power and the workness of such stuff as “Obviously 5 Believers” “Highway 61,” or the great “From a Buick 6.” And that’s because Dylan’s art of that period, when shorn of its mutant honk-filtered r&b/'spiff musick complements, was/is a sort of pretentious stab at blind imagery, I stream of consciousness and Burroughsiari syntax / verb - tense / noun -case displacement, none of which came off, as is quite visible throughout the main of the book.

I don’t really know the logistics about why the book was OK’d for publication after a period of years during which Dylan seemingly came to think of it more and more as a failure, as the showy attempts at hoi polloi poetics, little kid tough guy talk and general bitiiig off more, than et cetera which, although interspersed with flashes, of sheer tpxic psychotic expressionism, the book is. He’s a shitty painter tod.

Nick Tosches

COUNTRY MUSIC: “WHITE MAN’S BLUES” — John, Grissim; Paperback Library; pp. 299; $1.25

With/this offering, John Grissim has given the reader a knot-hole glimpse, into the world of the “White Man’s Blues”,.. i.e. Country Music. With adjective abounding, the author describes the lives of Country’s biggest names from the publishers to the record executives, to the stars themselves. He even finds time to delve into the folksjin-between. One of Grissim’s fortes, unusual description, is widespread, Witness: “ . . . wildroot pompadours holding hands with VO-5 pageboys,” or in describing Dolly Pardon: “ . . . a big Country Mania with hair piled .'high enough to start an avalance, waxed beestring lips, and mommoth po.ache.d-egg breasts packed into.a booming white crepe floor-length, rliinestone-studded formal gown.”

One of . the finest things about this book is that Grissim has thankfully foregone , the typical tracing of the roots of C&W to today’s “Nashville” or “Bakersfield’* sound. Instead, we find penetrating looks at Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Shelby Singleton plus such lesser knowns as Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, Jerry Kennedy, - and Penny DeHaven. Also, the reader is treated to an inspection of Nashville, its culture, the “rion-record industry” people, and the “hot spots” both past and present.

Nothing has avoided Grissim’s probe of the business. Sex and cheap thrills” are humorously given the once-over with Country’s groupie equivalents, “snuff queens.” Coupled with the eve r-present crutch to the country performer, booze and pills, these, areas are rolled into a very frank chapter. The inevitable highlight of the year* the Disk Jockey Convention, decends upon Nashville and proceeds to set it on its ear. As 10,000 shitkickers roll into town for a four-day free-for-all, one follows the convention through its wildest moments.

Three personalities whom the author treats with exceptional depth and obvious affection are Dave Dudley, Commander Cody, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Dave Dudley speaks of his overcoming several setbacks to maintain a solid country audience and a near fanatical hero-worship from the truckers. He tells of his success in a modest fashion and gets in some good yams about his days on the road. The amazin’ Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen are traced from their Ann Arbor days to the legendary following they now receive on the West Coast. We see them as “good ol’ boys” who just happed to wear their hair long. The Commander’s meeting with Jerry Lee Lewis is a classic and Grissim has it in its entirety. Iiy this reader’s opinion, the Lewis segment is the most comprehensive yet written about this performer. Jerry Lee is seen during the DJ Convention and we follow him to a solid 30-hour binge of boqzin’, braggin’, and carryin’ on. Grissim obviously puts Jerry Lee Lewis on the top of his personal favorites and his writing displays this.

Certainly, Country Music: White Man’s Blues gives a very real and fascinating examination of the people who involve themselves as entertainers, record industry-businessmen, or simply as listeners. If you have even the slightest interest in Country music, this book is a must.

Curt Eddy