BOOKS

How To Succeed in Publishing Without Really Writing

DAS ENERGI By Paul Williams (Elektra)

AS THEY WERE By Tuli Kupferberg & Sylvia Topp (Links)

Two ways to be published without actually sitting down and typing out a manuscript. A good idea, if you can make it work for you; as a friend once said, “I have spent the greater part of my life reading words which should not have been written.” He hasn’t written anything since, either. In fact, he moved to somewhere they don’t even speak much English. Which is another good idea, if you can make it work for you.

On the other hand, all of these 60s counter-faces gotta keep making a living somehow, especially now that there’s no more freebie.

The difference between Tuli Kupferberg and Paul Williams is simple, clearcut — a child could make the distinction. Kupferberg is a mad genius. Williams is a pimply creep who was a dipshit rock critic then got brainwashed by the 39 year old perfect asshole, Melvin Lyman of Boston, and lived to cringe his spineless way onto the pages of Das Energi.

Williams’ creepoid tome is a collection of acid-lobotomy scrivening, pathetic prose fantasies around the broadest, pseudo-cosmic concepts he could think of to justify the advance. To choose an appropriate example, “Shame.” “If you are doing what feels right to you... ,that is the best you can do.” Tell that to Charles Manson, not me, scunge. Elektra Records should feel mortal fear, not just shame, for publishing this piece of undiluted horseshit.

On the other hand, there is Kupferberg’s book. (I hate to slight Sylvia Topp, but the book gives no information about who she might be. In fairness, there’s no information about Tuli, either. I already knew about him.) It is a charming collection of photographs of famous persons “as they were” in their childhood.

Included are Bella Abzug (she wore hats, even then), Charles Atlas (a 96 pound weakling), Bob Dylan (faded, naturally), Che Guevara (he looks a little like Paul McCartney), Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (he looks white, so does his family), Pete Seeger (looks like the picture of George S. Patton, if you can believe that), 'Benjamin Spock (in a potty chair; perhaps undergoing toilet training?), and Mae West, on a bearskin rug. It is a typical Tuli tome, too. It even ends with “How sweet I roam’d from field to field,” the Blake poem (he wrote it at 14) which keeps recurring in so much of Kupferberg’s work — with the Fugs, his Birth Press publications and (if I remember correctly) on his ESP album. Kupferberg, incidentally, is prepared to do another album, and someone should snap it up. Some of his ideas are a little dated, sometimes, but anyone who can come up with a photographic book this interesting obviously has plenty of tricks left.

Dave Marsh