Beatnik Beat Off

MEMOIRS OF A BEATNIK

by Diane di Prima

Olympia Press

Traveller's Companion Series

ORF

by David Meltzer

Essex House

And now, class, the time has come to ask the literary question: What ever became of all those beatniks? Well, some of them are making money writing porn. Which only stands to reason, since one look at the Olympia press publication roster tells you where many young writers of “far out” proclivities, the ones who would have been beats if they’d grown up a few years earlier, are heading. Ronald Travel’s Street of Stairs comes complete with “for years its fame has been steadily and subterraneanly growing” hype and kudos from Bill Burroughs, and what redblooded degenerate wordslinger would not be proud to claim as his own such titles as Love On a Trampoline, Of Sheep and Girls, The Whip Angels, The Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe, Jailbirds in the Backseat, Bondage Trash . . . ?

That’s right, folks, one of the main reasons there ain’t hardly no literature no more that’s worth a turd is that all the talent’s off writing DB’s. These guys and gals are so loose they don’t even give a shit whether they get recognition for their own names, so they call themselves things like Akbar Del Piombo, Jett Sage and Tor Kung. So pick up on some of this porn! And don’t be an anal retentive, shell out those two bucks or so for 127 page 3” by 7” paperback with a drab green cover that sez “The Traveller’s Companion Series” on it. I’m not just talking about “fuck books,” those dipshit little 50c paperbacks with pictures of doctors raping nurses on the cover and titles like Swap Swingers and authors almost as farinabrained as the clucks what read ’em, I’m talking about incredibly talented writers who spend their time sitting around dosing themselves and thinking up the sickest things they possibly can and then writing them in such a way as to make Aleister Crowley drool!

It started a long time ago, with some of those wierd frogs like Genet and Celine, and Americans like Kenneth Patchen and Henry Miller. In fact, maybe Miller was the real source point, but there’s no question that the big watershed was Burroughs. Naked Lunch turned a whole generation of writers into hooligans, because however much Mary McCarthy and John Ciardi prattled on about Burroughs’ “moralism,” we knew what the real significance of his breakthrough was: KICKS! The literature that kicks ass, that turns decent citizens into raving idiots and wellspoken youth into slavering maniacs. For awhile there was some patina of Literature still attached to this whole movement, the way publishers like Grove touted books like Steven Schneck’s The Night clerk, which was nothing more nor less than a postBurroughsian hoo-hah, as if it were “serious” like John Updike or some other fartnozzle. Bah!

Now at last, though, all pretenses have been surrendered, and porn and pestilential prosody bloom like ragweed across the land! And, since the beatniks had a head start on this whole literary mayhem riff anyhoo, it only stands to reason that some of ’em should be hacking away and cleaning up. Like Diane di Prima: this chick has been around for years, made the Beat poetry minor leagues, and knows the Bomb Culture bohemian scene from asshole to Adam’s Apple.

Diane came to the Village as a young girl in the early Fifties, so obviously if anybody could write the definitive inside history of the social and sexual mores of the Beats it’s her. Memoirs of a Beatnik ain’t that book, however; it’s just a highclass porn novel set more or less autobiographically in the Village during the Beat era. One chapter describes an orgy with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but that’s the only name dropping in a book which could use a lot more of it. Diane starts hanging out in Bohemia, see, and meets and shacks up with and casually fucks an impressive array of people of various sexes, living in different avant-environments like roach-ridden flats, the back rooms of bookstores, etc.

There’s a great section which finds her staying at the country home of a schoolmate who also happens to be her Lesbian lover, and what does she do but end up being balled by the girl’s hairy, grunting, beerbellied father who sneaks up behind her while she’s drying her nude'bod on a rock in the sun after swimming. She resists the old geezer at first, then thinks, what the fuck, he’s a harmless old fart, so she lets herself get into it and even comes! A scene to warm the codes of any baldheaded jerkoff! But then, she always comes no matter what the circumstances or who she’s balling; it’s a convention of fuck books that nobody ever has a bad come or none at all in the course of coitus, but somehow Diane makes all hers convincing, which I guess is a testament to something. There’s one chapter where she falls in love with a junkie, and so great is the power of her love that she sucks him off after he’s hit up a spoon of smack and actually succeeds in bringing him to some kind of orgasm through all that heroin. Heroine’s more like it! The book begins with her losing her virginity and ends when she learns the cosmic fact that she’s going to have a baby. And incidentally, an anti-birth control tract is thrown in there somewhere — she actually maintains that for the first five years of her extremely active sex life she never used any kind of birth control at all, and never got pregnant. This she ascribes to “some kind of youthful charisma.” Diane always was sort of a hack at beatdom.

David Meltzer was another story entirely. A good poet given to haiku about Havatampa cigars, he kept on top of things in the Sixties by leading a Sain Francisco folk-acid-rock band called The Serpent Power, who had one album released on Vanguard. Obviously no man to let opportunity knock once and pass on, he has turned recently to writing some pretty scabrous porn novels for an L.A. publisher that prices their editions like Olympia even if they ain’t got the true Traveller’s Companion Class. These books are archetypal postBurroughsian amphetamine spews of glossalalial raunch, with the added fillip of some real rank sci-fi moves. Everybody that thinks Bruce Jay Friedman and Donald Barthelme and all those other Black Humor bores are such hot shit oughta read this stuff. Most “serious” Black Humor fiction is terrible and pretentious. This is terrible too, but Meltzer, like S. Clay Wilson, has the integrity of his degenerate mindlessness. There’s no moral, no deft stylistic gimmicks, just page after page of neon leers and hallucinatory ravings. The hero of the book is a lewd-lipped popstar who shoots amphetamine, wriggles through groupie-gropes, haggles with his Grossman-like manager, and even finds time for some good old-fashioned resentment of Mom and Dad. Sort of like a beatnik Performance, and best read in a near-comatose state. Meltzer has also written a whole sci-fi porn trilogy called The Agency, which you might wanta spring for if you’re a real addict.

In fairness to some of the other authors in this field, it must be stated that many of the books in the Traveller’s Companion Series are both more outrageous than Memoirs of a Beatnik and more coherent than Orf Crazy Wild by Jett Sage, for instance, is a batteringram of a novel about juvenile delinquent gangs which alternates fucksuck passages with orgies of sadomasochistic slash-and-gash at such a dizzying pace as to make Clockwork Orange look like Bless the Beasts and Children. The Homosexual Handbook by Angelo d’Arcangelo has some inside info on what William F. Buckley does when he’s not licking his lips at his guests on Firing Line — all lies, but they get away with ’em and that’s what it’s all about. Unitl She Screams is a great, funny book by Mason Hoffenberg, co-author of Candy, about this offensive stereotype Mexican who smokes dope and takes siestas all day in which he dreams of harem dancing girls, until he accidentally kills his wife while fucking their fat blonde milkmaid, after which he become^ embroiled with a lecherous old teacher from a Catholic school for blind preteen girls who spends all his time reciting the multiplication tables while masturbating at them . . .

Or, as Harry Golden’s mother once said: “Enjoy! Enjoy!”’

Lester Bangs

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Avon (paper)

It’s getting hard to write big these days, because everything is getting so big that even the big things seem small. If Homer ain’t around writing the Odyssey again, well, there’s a reason.

That’s why it was such an event for me to read this book. Imagine, if you can, a book that reads as easy as Brautigan; that’s as cosmic as Jodorowsky (and precious few others) thought El Topo was, and in the same uniquely Latin American way; that’s funny, sad, and which fills you with the same liquid feeling as a half-remembered dream does; and which you can read over and over again, discovering new bits of wit and wisdom each time. If you can imagine that book, it’s One Hundred Years. Of Solitude.

Published in Argentina in 1967, it was a runaway best-seller throughout Latin America, but when it appeared in this country in 1970 very few people paid much attention to it. Now it’s out in paperback at a buck and a half, a price most people can afford, which is good because as well as being big and cosmic it’s a book that has all the earmarks of a popular favorite, one that will be bought and enjoyed by people for years to come.

What’s it about? Well, I’ve only read it once, so I can’t go into any deep discussions about it, but mainly it concerns a family called Buendia, who are one of the founding families of a magic, haunted jungle town called Macondo. The Buendias are followed through six generations, during which time Macondo rises out of the jungle and rots back into it. The changes in Macondo and the changes in the Buendia family are practically interchangeable, and their fates are parallel, if not the same. We start out with the patriarch and the matriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula, coming to a place by a river, where, with other young adventurers who had left their homes, they found Macondo, setting the city up along Utopian lines. In time, they have three children, two boys and a girl. One of them, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, leads the country into revolution and becomes a national hero whose image goes through several revampings before the booK is 'over. Little by little, life in the town gets easier, culture blooms in the jungle, and, to everybody’s relief, nobody dies. Not that everything is bright, mind you — there is an insomnia plague with Ursula inadvertently brings on by baking it into candy animals, and Jose Arcadio Buendia gets hung up in some mystical alchemy which causes his mind to disintegrate slowly, if benignly.

But, like all paradises, Macondo is doomed. A visitor to the Buendia dinnertable discovers that delicious bananas such as are found nowhere else grow in Macondo, and an American banana company loses no time building a railroad into the city, setting up banana plantations on the other side of the tracks, and generally wreaking havoc. The gypsies who had formerly brought magic to Macondo give it up in disgust. Prostitution and drunkenness become a way of life for the plantation workers, who are hideously exploited by the Company, and the magic that the town posesses becomes a bit more insidious. People begin dying. The Buendias who are coming up during this period are more creatures of darkness than their ancestors.

It rains for years and years. After the rain, the town is crippled because the banana company has deserted it and the rain has destroyed crops, livestock, buildings, and people’s mental balance. Red ants make their appearance everywhere, and, as the Buendia mansion crumbles, the family’s last survivors rot with the town.

That’s more or less the story, on a grand scale, but the thing that makes the book (and the story and, of course, the town) are the people, and Garcia Marquez succeeds at the nearly impossible task of creating hundreds of characters to populate his book, but making each of them so vivid that the reader seldom mistakes one for the other, even though many of them have the same names. A geneology chart is provided for the Buendias at the beginning of the book, which helps some, but it is mainly Garcia Marquez’ skill at characterization that keeps the book afloat.

There’s not a single facet of human experience missing, either, and, while you may not agree with Garcia Marquez on some points (although you’d be surprised — he’s been a very vocal supporter of Castro), you will surely be astounded at the scope of his vision. And, like any great dabbler in cosmic thoughts, things that he cannot explain are rationalized by magic, but most of the things that happen in the course of daily events are so filled with magic anyway that rationalizations are hardly necessary. For instance, when Ursula stands in the backyard, where her great granddaughter is lying in a sort of trance, and watches the girl float slowly upward until she is out of sight, it seems like the most natural thing in the world. As does the priest’s explanation of how drinking chocolate helps him levitate. Or the fact that Jose Arcadio Buendia dies one day, even though it doesn’t seem* to affect his daily routine too much.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a fairy 'tale, an allegory, a surefire revivifier for tired spirits. It’s the story of the whole human race — only the facts have been changed. It’s a big book and a good one, and I guess the main thing I have to say about it at this point is that it’s there if you need it, and who doesn’t?

Ed Ward

YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE-DOWN

by Ishmael Reed

THE LOOP GAROO KID DONE REACHED VIDEO JUNCTION AND GOT HIS UNKNOWABLE TOGETHER, SPECTACULAR ENTRANCE, CHARMS, RIDING MY SYMBOL, FANCY BLACK BOOTS, SILVER SPURS, BLACK BUCKSKINS WITH PINK FRINGES, BLACK MAGICIAN TO END THEM ALL PSYCHING UP A BALLOONED SPEECH OF GRAFFITI THAT WOULD ESTRANGE POPEYE - AFTER ’EM BOYS, Drag hollered.

And off they went. Into a Wild West that didn’t exist all at the same time, but might as well have. Off to get aholt of the Loop Garoo Kid, black Hoo-Doo cowboy, wizard with a whip, and hero of one of the craziest, funniest westerns ever written, a book where folks talk real funny, jamming things, together that might never have existed in the same time — Lewis and Clark and credit cards and Colt 45’s and President Jefferson and helicopters and a newlyinvented device called the guillotine — but you never notice cuz you’re too busy either laughing or reading to find out what’ll happen next. Will Drag Gibson sub-lease Florida? Will the Loop Garoo Kid ever get his revenge on Drag’s badass cowboys for shooting up the other members of the circus troupe he was travelling with? Is revenge what he’s after, even? And what about the Pope?

Ishmael Reed is definitely one of the brightest stars on the horizon these days, and he has been for a few years now. This is his second book finally released in an edition everybody can afford. It is one of the very best new novels around, easily readable, and one that I guarantee will give you the rare opportunity of yukking out loud once every five pages, if not oftener. If you saw and were as disappointed as I was in Zachariah, but still yearn for a psychedelic western, this is the book. If you’re up on your voodoo and want to read some fine action scenes, here it is. A fast-moving satire, a religious commentary, a trenchant political statement, and a western movie you can stick in your back pocket: Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is all of those things. Pass it by at your own peril.

Ed Ward

STARMIND

Dave Van Arnam

Ballantine Books

Transplants of various organs are now an accepted part of medical techniques. In this 1969 speculative novel, the concept of transplants and their possible consequences are carried three steps beyond.

Parts of two normal brains — one of them female-are transplanted into the muscular body of a retarded teenager, Benjamin Tyler. What the hospital staff calls Tylerbody is soon known to itself as Jailyn and Joe — and Benjy.

How this person with three personalities makes the adjustment to himself and a new life, and how he escapes from the bureaucratic hospital complex to the simple hospitality of the country folk, is an exciting saga in itself.

Tylerbody’s final discovery of mental unity, through the use of a drug called soma, and his escape from Earth on a strange mission make for a compelling conclusion. Technology, sex, medicine, humor, and even Tolkien, are all ingredients of this masterful novel. Dave Van Arnam has written something fine.

Mike Brake