Several years before the Fugs formed, Tuli Kupferberg was running around Greenwich Village as a poet and pamphleteer. His most successful effort was a 1961 book published by “Birth Press” called 1001 Ways to Live Without Working, a scurrilous F-U to establishment culture that showed an uncanny ability to anticipate what young people would be thinking about five years later.

On the front cover, to announce the book’s intentions, was a striking image of a man’s face with the words “A STANDARD OF LAZINESS” written across his forehead. The back cover featured “Visualized Prayer for the American God #6,” a typographical poem by the Cleveland poet d.a. levy, which is a swastika made out of dollar signs.

True to its name, 1001 Ways to Live Without Working really is a list of a thousand items, and as such, draws material from as many rhetorical registers as it can. The book is a mixture of a long numbered list and photos of odd archival material, many of them classified ads or pertinent news reports, to add spice. Scant thought was given to layout, which lends the book a refreshing carefree style.

Here are the first 10 entries:
 

Die
Someone else die
Find a million dollar in a toilet bowl you the only one dares to fish it out
Beg & quit after $1.00 a day
Steal
Go into business
Marry a rich homosexual
Marry a rich sexuall
Marry a rich asexual
Marry rich

 
What the book reminds me of more than anything is a kind of spindly foretaste of John Hodgman’s 2005 book Areas of My Expertise, the difference being, of course, that whereas Hodgman’s book is a kind of hipster’s celebration of trivia and esoterica, Kupferberg’s work is something akin to a political weapon.

In 1967 Grove Press, sensing the currents in the air, reprinted the book, the same year that Kupferberg published the follow-up 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft.

Here are a few pages from the book.
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Tuli Kupferberg, Slum God Of The Lower East Side