Found in 1992, this wax cylinder recording of the poem, “America,” is thought to be the actual voice of Walt Whitman himself. Of course, there’s been debate about it ever since—even the Walt Whitman archives list it as “possibly” his voice. Perhaps it was an actor, but evidence exists that Thomas Edison wanted to record Whitman reading his work, and this particular poem would be an obscure choice for a “forgery.” Regardless, a stirring reading, no?
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d , grown, un grown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love.
Fun fact: Someone wag posted “Song of Myself” on Rapgenius. I can’t decide if it’s actually trolling to post Walt Whitman amongst the Biggie and Tupac, but at least he’s among suitably rapier fellow wordsmiths.
Nick Cave once suggested that, with The Boatman’s Call, he “was making a big heroic melodrama out of a bog-standard rejection”—the rejection, famously, being at the pink-and-chipped fingernails of PJ Harvey. Regardless, he succeeded in squeezing some fairly special songs out of that heartbreak, and some of them—“West Country Girl,” “Far From Me” and “People Ain’t No Good”—receive especially beautiful and intimate recitations in the course this 1999 lecture on songwriting, “The Secret Life of the Love Song,” written for the Vienna Poetry Festival and delivered on September 24th of that year:
To be invited to come here and teach, to lecture, to impart what knowledge I have collected about poetry, about song writing has left me with a whole host of conflicting feelings. The strongest, most insistent of these concerns my late father who was an English Literature teacher at the high school I attended back in Australia. I have very clear memories of being about twelve years old and sitting, as you are now, in a classroom or school hall, watching my father, who would be standing, up here, where I am standing, and thinking to myself, gloomily and miserably, for, in the main, I was a gloomy and miserable child, “It doesn´t really matter what I do with my life as long as I don´t end up like my father”. At forty years old it would appear that there is virtually no action I can take that does not draw me closer to him, that does not make me more like him. At forty years old I have become my father, and here I am, teaching.
The lecture itself, which provides no less than a truncated artistic autobiography along with Cave’s creative philosophy at the time, is very much a product of that occasionally rather humorless period of his work, but it’s still compelling stuff, and wonderfully read in Cave’s deeply sonorous, almost didgeridoo-esque speaking voice.
In the years that followed the event, Norman Mailer seemed distinctly proud of having stabbed and nearly killed his second wife, Adele Morales, in 1960.
According to Mailer’s worldview of the late fifties and onward—most famously articulated in his 1959 essay “The White Negro”—the artificial had gained excessive ascendancy over the real in contemporary Western Civilization, the word over the deed, the feminine over the masculine and so on. Mailer offered the world his macho existentialism as a means of redress.
So long as Mailer advocated psychopathy, violence, and courage on the page alone, however—speaking daggers but using none—he would be tormented by the suspicion (and pursued by the insinuation) that he was the most laughable kind of hypocrite…
In the troubled weeks leading up to the stabbing the writer attended a seminar at Brown University, were he rambled on about about knives being “symbols of manhood.” He was also preparing his first attempt to become mayor of New York City, a candidacy that was to be pitched at the city’s criminalized and impoverished, along with its artists and radicals, on a platform of “existential” approaches to social problems—such as jousting tournaments (to be held in Central Park) for young offenders.
As part of this prospective campaign, Mailer was composing an open letter to Fidel Castro, in which he offered one of his more succinct formulations of his critique of US society: “in Cuba, hatred runs over into the love of blood; in America, all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.”
Just as Mailer’s eccentric but perfectly sincere lurch for political power conceivably betrayed his contempt for being a purveyor of “psychic bullets” himself (a mere “man of letters”), his second marriage to Adele Morales was similarly entwined in this same conceptual web. Morales reportedly possessed an impressively sharp tongue, and was known to score freely in the course of their drunken bust-ups: interestingly, Mailer would later define this period of their relationship as “a series of psychic stabbings,” echoing, unconsciously or not, the language employed in his letter to Castro.
The actual stabbing occurred in the course of a party meant as a campaign launch for the mayoral bid. The writer and journalist George Plimpton, Mailer’s perennial wingman and de facto campaign manager, was told to contact various representatives from New York’s “power structure” and ensure their attendance. Predictably, none of them showed, leaving just the derelicts, cutthroats and bohemians the candidate could anyway call his own.
In a legendarily tetchy atmosphere, Mailer would take it upon himself to be his own least manageable guest, starting fights and at one point dividing everyone up on opposite sides of the room according to whether he considered them “for” or “against” him. Eventually he disappeared to look for real trouble, which he evidently succeeded in discovering, returning around four in the morning with a ripped shirt and a black eye.
According to Morales’ subsequent recollection, she greeted this reappearance in the following fashion:
“Aja toro, aja! Come on, you little faggot, where’s your cojones – did your ugly whore of a mistress cut them off, you son of a bitch?”
Although there are differing reports of what Morales said, her own version certainly “pricks” the ears, courtesy of the (literally) cutting metaphor (“psychic stabbings,” again). Mailer, matching word and deed, un-prised his pen knife, approached his wife, and stabbed her in the back and upper abdomen, one of which, a thrust “near the heart” was three inches deep.
Morales was rushed downstairs to the neighboring apartment of novelist Doc Hume, where a doctor was called but no police, while she lay soaking a mattress in blood.
Initially claiming to have “fallen on some glass,” she spent the following days in hospital, during which time her husband’s antics were quintessentially kooky. After being left to “sleep it off,” Mailer disappeared into the city, bobbing up to grandiosely lecture Adele’s surgeon on the likely dimensions of her wound, and then for an appearance on The Mike Wallace Show, where he continued to meditate on what was indubitably turning into his week’s big theme. “You see,” he informed the audience, back on his beloved topic the juvenile delinquent, “the knife’s his word, his manhood.”
I would hazard a guess that the rest of Mailer’s week resembled that of the protagonist of his next novel (1965’s An American Dream), an existentialist, TV personality, and budding politician called Rojak who strangles his wife and then hits the town, fucking, fighting, boozing, and generally reaping the huge existential dividends supposedly sprung by his act of ultraviolence.
Morales, though, finally admitted the obvious to police, and Mailer was arrested and charged.
During the trial, Mailer showed especial concern that he not be sent to a mental hospital, since then future readers might feel entitled to consider him insane. “My pride,” he told the court, “is that I can explore areas of experience that other men are afraid of. I insist I am sane.” The stabbing, it seems, was primarily a literary act, a bizarre precursor to the great works of New Journalism Mailer would pen, and in the third person, later that decade—Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
Legally, incidentally, the consequences would prove mind-bogglingly mild. After being indicted by a grand jury in January 30, 1961, Mailer pleaded guilty, was put on probation, and received a suspended sentence in November—his lawyer arguing successfully that his client was working on a new book (An American Dream!) and so “could make a contribution to society.”
The presiding Judge Schweitzer also took account not only of Adele’s request for leniency—which she later attributed to what she considered her children’s best interests—but also Mailer’s impressive avowal to his probation officer that he had reduced his drinking “to a minimum”...
Below, in a clip from Norman Mailer: The American, Adele Morales tells the completely insane story of what happened that fateful night… “He was down in the street punching people. He didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know what his name was, he was so out of it. And it wasn’t just on booze, it was on drugs.”
Saul Bellow reads from his novel Henderson the Rain King (“What made me take this trip to Africa?”) before moving on to a question and answer session.
Coming after his breakthrough book The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson confounded critics, who generally gave the book middling praise—at worst being described it as a “failed experiment.” This may have influenced the decision not to award Henderson that year’s Pulitzer Prize, even though the selection committee had recommended it. Listening to the Q&A, it’s interesting to hear Bellow admit that the worst thing he faced as a writer was ‘doubt’ about not being able to finish a project. While the best was either ‘laughing or weeping yourself, and scribbling at that same time. When you’re turned on that way.’
What comes across in this short tape is Bellow’s humanism, diginity and great sense of humor. When asked if he has ever seen any of his novels on the “bargain table,” Bellow replies:
I have seen my books on the bargain table, and I have been very pleased, because the bargain table is usually where I buy books myself.
He then goes onto say how he usually skips the As and the Bs altogether on the book store shelves, as it makes him uncomfortable—‘uncomfortable because I know I can’t correct the mistakes I know are there.’
Rebels: A Journey Underground is an excellent Canadian documentary history of “the counterculture” produced for television in the late 1990s and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. It’s the work of writer/director Kevin Alexander, who did a great job with it. More people should see it. I’m happy to see that the series has been posted in full on YouTube.
The six-part series covers a wide swath of historical countercultures moving from William Blake and 1830s Parisian bohemians to mostly 20th century movements like hippie, Jazz, Beatniks, punk, and what was at the time the series was produced, the brave new world of cyberspace.
In the final episode, “Welcome to Cyberia,” I tell the story on camera of the now notorious corporate fuck-up that resulted in Disinformation receiving well over a million dollars in funding from John Malone’s TCI. This sum included $300,000 worth of marketing money—spent by yours truly in late 1996—that saw it featured on the Netscape homepage for five MONTHS. (If you’re too young to know what Netscape refers to, it was a 90s predecessor of the browser that you are using right now, so that was a very big deal. It was kind of like being on the homepage of virtually everyone who wasn’t logging on using AOL or Compuserve).
When Malone (an extreme conservative dubbed “Darth Vader” by Al Gore) saw Disinformation for the first time, his reaction, I was told by two people actually in the room, was “We paid for this anarchist bullshit? Get rid of it!”
Talking heads include Robert Anton Wilson, William Gibson, Douglas Rushkoff, Genesis P-Orridge, John Lydon, Jello Biafra, Captain Sensible, Richard Hell, Malcolm McLaren, Don Letts, Glen Matlock, Jon Savage, Caroline Coon, Paul Simonon, John Doe, Poly Styrene, Rosemary Leary, Ken Kesey, Paul Krassner, Ray Manzarek, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, RU Sirius, Mark Pesce, John Perry Barlow, Rudy Rucker and many others.
Part 1: Society’s Shadow
From Bohemia and 19th century European romanticism, this film looks back through history to uncover the beginning of “new vision” thinking in Western civilization and its links to what is now called counterculture. From 1830s Paris to New York City’s Greenwich Village at the turn of the 20th century, it follows the paths which brought Europe’s most rebellious voices to America. Includes profiles of William Blake, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gauthier, Charles Baudelaire, John Reed and Woody Guthrie.
Parts two through six of Rebels: A Journey Underground after the jump…
Roger McGough reads “Blazing Fruit or The Poet as Entertainer,” and talks to critic Michael Billington about his approach to writing poetry.
McGough came to fame in the 1960s, along with Brian Patten and the late Adrian Henri, as part of the Liverpool Poets. Their seminal volume of collected poems The Mersey Sound, brought poetry out of the academies and into the coffee-houses, bars, and working men’s clubs of swinging England. As McGough said at the time:
The kids didn’t see this poetry with a capital p, they understood it as modern entertainment, as part of the pop-movement.
Associated with The Beatles, as part of the “Liverpool Explosion,” McGough went onto form the popular music, comedy and poetry group The Scaffold, with comic John Gorman, and Paul McCartney’s brother, Mike McGear, which famously led to a number 1 hit “Lily the Pink” in 1968. McGough later teamed-up with Neil Innes for GRIMMS, and since the mid-1970s has been one of Britain’s best known and best loved poets.
A letter from Charles Bukowski to journalist Hans van den Broek in response to Bukowski’s book Tales of Ordinary Madness being removed from the Public Library in Nijmegen in 1985.
Tales of Ordinary Madness was described by the library as “very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against certain groups (including homosexuals).”
7-22-85
Dear Hans van den Broek:
Thank you for your letter telling me of the removal of one of my books from the Nijmegen library. And that it is accused of discrimination against black people, homosexuals and women. And that it is sadism because of the sadism.
The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because of these who I met were that. There are many “bads”—bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even “bad” white males. Only when you write about “bad” white males they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are “good” blacks, “good” homosexuals and “good” women?
In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of “sadism” it is because it exists, I didn’t invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds. In my writing I do not always agree with what occurs, nor do I linger in the mud for the sheer sake of it. Also, it is curious that the people who rail against my work seem to overlook the sections of it which entail joy and love and hope, and there are such sections. My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the “light” and never mentioned the other, then as an artist I would be a liar.
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.
I am not dismayed that one of my books has been hunted down and dislodged from the shelves of a local library. In a sense, I am honored that I have written something that has awakened these from their non-ponderous depths. But I am hurt, yes, when somebody else’s book is censored, for that book, usually is a great book and there are few of those, and throughout the ages that type of book has often generated into a classic, and what was once thought shocking and immoral is now required reading at many of our universities.
I am not saying that my book is one of those, but I am saying that in our time, at this moment when any moment may be the last for many of us, it’s damned galling and impossibly sad that we still have among us the small, bitter people, the witch-hunters and the declaimers against reality. Yet, these too belong with us, they are part of the whole, and if I haven’t written about them, I should, maybe have here, and that’s enough.
In 1964, The British Labour Party was elected into government with a slim majority of 4 seats. Such a small majority made governing the country difficult for canny Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Therefore, after 17 months in power, Wilson called a second election. In support of winning re-election, the Labour Party’s magazine, Tribune asked a selection of writers and artists who they would vote for in the 1966 General Election. In response, sensing Labour might not hold to their socialist ideals, poet Christopher Logue wrote the poem “I shall vote Labour.”
I shall vote Labour
I shall vote Labour because
God votes Labour.
I shall vote Labour to protect
the sacred institution of The Family.
I shall vote Labour because
I am a dog.
I shall vote Labour because
upper-class hoorays annoy me in expensive restaurants.
I shall vote Labour because
I am on a diet.
I shall vote Labour because if I don’t
somebody else will:
AND
I shall vote Labour because if one person
does it
everybody will be wanting to do it.
I shall vote Labour because if I do not vote Labour
my balls will drop off.
I shall vote Labour because
there are too few cars on the road.
I shall vote Labour because I am
a hopeless drug addict.
I shall vote Labour because
I failed to be a dollar millionaire aged three.
I shall vote Labour because Labour will build
more maximum security prisons.
I shall vote Labour because I want to shop
in an all-weather precinct stretching from Yeovil to Glasgow.
I shall vote Labour because
the Queen’s stamp collection is the best
in the world.
I shall vote Labour because
deep in my heart
I am a Conservative.
Christopher Logue was a poet, writer, journalist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor and performer. Born in Portsmouth, in 1926, Logue was an only child of middle-aged parents. After school, he served in the Black Watch regiment, from which he was given a court-martial for selling stolen pay books, and given a 16-months’ jail sentence.
‘It was so drab. There was nowhere to go. You couldn’t seem to meet any girls. If you went up to London in 1951, looking for the literary scene, what did you find? Dylan Thomas. I thought that if I came to the place where Pound flourished, I might too.’
In Paris, Logue met writer Alexander Trocchi (who saved Logue from an attempted suicide), and the pair set-up and edited the legendary literary magazine Merlin, which premiered work by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Chester Himes, as well as Logue and Trocchi. The pair also wrote pornographic novels for Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, and briefly met William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in the late 1950s.
George Whitman, propietor of Shakespeare and Co., described the pairing of Trocchi and Logue as:
‘True bohemians, Beats before Beats officially existed. Christopher was the scruffy poet, quite down and out most of the time. He definitely fancied himself as Baudelaire or somebody like that.’
In Paris, Logue toyed with Marxism, and was once famously put down by the author Richard Wright.
‘You’ve got nothing to fight for, boy—you’re looking for a fight. If you were a black, boy, you’re so cheeky you’d be dead.’
But Logue lost none of his mettle, or his socialist convictions and he continued to be a gadfly throughout his life. In the 1960s, he collaborated with Lindsay Anderson, giving poetry readings at the National Film Theater between features. He was a pacifist and a member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, taking part with Bertrand Russell on the marches to Aldermarston.
He appeared at Peter Cook’s club The Establishment and wrote songs for jazz singer Annie Ross, and had one recorded by Joan Baez. He also appeared at the Isle of Wight Rock Festival, and contributed the wonderfully bizarre “True Stories” to Private Eye magazine. He acted for Ken Russell in The Devils, wrote the screenplay for Russell’s Savage Messiah, and acted in Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky. Logue’s poetry was incredibly popular, even appearing in posters throughout the London Underground. His most famous works were Red Bird, a jazz colaboration with Tony Kinsey, and War Music, a stunning and critically praised adaption of Homer’s Illiad. He was awarded the 2005 Whitbread Poetry Prize for his collection Cold Calls.
Logue died in 2011, and Wilson won the 1966 election with a majority of 96 seats.
This is Christopher Logue reading “I shall vote Labour” in 2002, as filmed by Colin Still.
Kurt Vonnegut was a 22-year-old Private serving in the U.S. Army, when he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944. Together with his fellow POWs, Vonnegut was marched to a work camp in Dresden, named “Slaughterhouse Five.” In this letter details these events and the infamous bombing in February 1945, that was to inspire his best-selling novel.
FROM:
Pfc. K. Vonnegut, Jr.,
12102964 U. S. Army.
TO:
Kurt Vonnegut,
Williams Creek,
Indianapolis, Indiana.
Dear people:
I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than “missing in action.” Chances are that you also failed to receive any of the letters I wrote from Germany. That leaves me a lot of explaining to do—in precis:
I’ve been a prisoner of war since December 19th, 1944, when our division was cut to ribbons by Hitler’s last desperate thrust through Luxemburg and Belgium. Seven Fanatical Panzer Divisions hit us and cut us off from the rest of Hodges’ First Army. The other American Divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren’t much good against tanks: Our ammunition, food and medical supplies gave out and our casualties out-numbered those who could still fight - so we gave up. The 106th got a Presidential Citation and some British Decoration from Montgomery for it, I’m told, but I’ll be damned if it was worth it. I was one of the few who weren’t wounded. For that much thank God.
Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations—the floors were covered with fresh cow dung. There wasn’t room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year’s Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn’t….
‘A writer moves about, observing, seeing as much as he can, trying to guess how man will play the game,’ Ray Bradbury said in Story of a Writer, a documentary on his life and work from 1963.
‘Constantly measuring the way life is, against the way he feels it ought to be. He is a magnet passing through a factual world, taking from it what he needs.’
Bradbury was always generous with his advice and encouragement, always willing to explain his method of writing to those who wanted to know. Writing was like a love affair.
“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
Bradbury worked his apprenticeship as a writer in libraries, which he later described as places where:
...anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.
In the “The Importance of Being Startled,” the afterword to his final novel, Farewell Summer, Bradbury described the process by which he wrote:
The way I write my novels can best be described as imagining that I’m going into the kitchen to fry a couple of eggs and then find myself cooking up a banquet. Starting with very simple things, they then word-associate themselves with further things until I’m up and running and eager to find out the next surprise, the next hour, the next day or the next week.
Surprise is everything with me. When I go to bed at night I give myself instructions to startle myself when I wake in the morning.
As Bradbury explained in Story of a Writer, allowing the ‘subconscious time to think’ was essential.
‘The time we have alone; the time we have in walking; the time we have in riding a bicycle; are the most important times for a writer. Escaping from a typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give your subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs on the subconscious level.
‘I never consciously set out to write a certain story. The idea must originate somewhere deep within me and push itself out in its own time. Usually, it begins with associations. Electricity. The sea. Life started in the sea. Could the miracle occur again? Could life take hold in another environment? An electro-mechanical environment?’
This was the kind of thinking that made Bradbury’s book so irresistible. Anything was possible with Bradbury. He had a joyous, child-like enthusiasm for life that infused his books, with a brilliance and pleasure, that makes them so very, very special.
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
