The Kraus Project

I'm no fan of Jonathan Franzen, at least not his fiction. I didn't care much for Freedom. But wait. That's the only fiction by Franzen that I've read, so it's unfair of me to say that I don't care for his fiction. All right, point taken - let's just say that, though I read the whole book, I did not like nor enjoy Freedom.

His essay "Farther Away" (it first appeared in The New Yorker and later was included in the eponymous volume, Farther Away) I found brave and engaging. That he would dare convey personal negative thoughts about David Foster Wallace in print was scandalous (to some). I found it refreshing, and interesting. Other essays in the same book are appealing as well. Franzen writes clean prose and his thinking is not trite nor his observations banal. He is a writer worth reading.

Yet he seems to be a lightening rod for animosity. Critics, offended women writers, amateur literary commentators and bloggers, all loathe him. In particular, the techies despise him and heap scorn upon him for criticizing the internet, social media, the fetishization of gadgets and technology. Oh, and heavens, he's a birdwatcher too. Scorn! Caustic flame attack! Ridicule!

His latest publication, The Kraus Project, hadn't been out a week before its contents had raised a firestorm of invective and condemnation. Shame on Franzen! He criticized Rushdie for using Twitter. He dared suggest that the internet and social media were NOT the greatest cultural advances since the printing press. He took Amazon to task for its destructive impact on independent bookstores. Heresy!

Yet lost in all the derision was any discussion (that I read, anyway) of what seems to me the most interesting thing about The Kraus Project, namely the concept of the work itself, and the form it takes. Basically, he presents two essays by the Viennese curmudgeon, writer, critic Karl Kraus (think fin de siecle Vienna) that he, Franzen, translated from the German. Okay, if you're a Karl Kraus fan (and there surely are some out there) or if you're a German lit major or a translator, you might come at this volume from your singular perspective. But if you're like me, who'd never heard of Karl Kraus, who doesn't care about the adequacy (or inadequacy) of Franzen's translation (it turns out that Kraus wrote deliberately opaque & difficult prose), then you'll come at this book from another angle. Or not pick it up at all.

I'm enthralled with it. I can barely read two pages at a time. I don't understand most of the Kraus stuff. And I'm only 40 pages into it. But you know what? It's fascinating! Why? Because the form is very different, very innovative. (Okay, sure, someone has to have done something like this before - who can possibly do anything completely "original" anymore?). Well, this work seems very new and fresh to me.

As I see it, the translations are simply a platform from which to jump off into a wide array of other topics; memoir-ish recollections, social criticism (the aforementioned condemnation of our gadget & internet-obsessed cultural moment), literary history, historical anecdotes, etc. It's collage-like and divergent, informed and curious. It meanders. It rants. It elucidates. It praises.

These days it's as if people who write about books, who review books,  people who read & discuss books, all seem hell bent on either smarmy, wise-ass put-downs, or hyper-critical analysis, all very serious and edgy and pointed. After a point, I get sick of it all and have to throw up my hands with an expectorated "WTF?!" At least when it comes to Franzen, everyone tries to one up the next person in their ability to lay waste to the man's work (or reputation, or hobbies, or choice in glasses or whatever).

Be that as it may .... I recommend this odd book. Even if you know nothing about Karl Kraus and don't care a thing about essays in translations. Actually, it might even be more interesting if you know nothing about Karl Kraus and could care less about the accuracy of the translation from German into English. It's a quirky original dalliance, the best of eccentric intellectual sketching.

Oh, and the footnotes. What I don't mention above is that the Kraus essays seem like just material that Franzen can hang his footnotes on. This is not a bad thing. This is the oddity of the work, the weirdness that makes it so intriguing. The heart of the book are the footnotes. In the footnotes, we get the memoir stuff, the human connection stuff, the divergent interesting literary aside stuff. In short, we get the stuff that transcends the stuffy huffing and puffing of Karl Kraus on, per the first essay, Heinrich Heine.

But what did Franzen think when he decided to go all in with the footnote set-up? Surely he must have been aware that people would call him out on their use and infer that he was aping David Foster Wallace. Oddly, I have not seen that particular complaint leveled at him (though I stopped reading the carping reviews after a few). For what it's worth, I love footnotes. And David Foster Wallace, for all the fame (or infamy) his extensive use of them engendered (technically-speaking, in Infinite Jest, they are endnotes, not footnotes, but they function the same), he did not invent the footnote. He used them to great effect, and Wallace's are brilliant, engaging and, I would argue, essential to the character of the works in which he employs them. But they are not solely Wallace's domain.

So I'll give Franzen credit for crafting his own book around them, it's a courageous undertaking, one that, in my opinion, earns The Kraus Project enthusiastic accolades.

Infinite Study

David Foster Wallace's unfinished, posthumous novel The Pale King has just been published. The web is awash in articles about the new book, about Wallace himself, and about the legacy of the writer who, since taking his own life in 2008, has been almost universally acclaimed as one of the most important American writers of the last two generations.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired DFW's archives, including manuscripts, notebooks, and many books from his personal library, all of which is available to scholars and enthusiasts. Coinciding with the release of The Pale King, the Ransom Center presents material associated with the writing of the book, accessed here.

One of the plethora of articles that have emerged since Wallace's death  is "Inside David Foster Wallace's Self-Help Library" by Maria Bustillos. When I came upon this piece, my first reaction was 'Gad, this whole DFW scholarship thing sure got excessive and pointless in a hurry.' And then I read the article. It's fascinating and anything but trite or pointless and offers what the best of these sorts of articles can, a unique and considered insight into the life and thinking of an artist hailed, admired, and read by many, many people, any number of whom themselves are serious working artists. The Bustillos article is first rate literary journalism.

Voznesensky

With no disrespect to Peter Orlovsky, a far more towering poet died last week, a poet loosely connected to Orlovsky and not so loosely to Allen Ginsberg. I refer to Andrei Voznesensky, a heroic figure in 20th century Soviet/Russian verse.

In repressive times, Voznesensky pushed back. A gifted orator, an iconoclast of verse, a warrior against censorship, Voznesensky shared some of the same Beat-infused spotlight that shone on Ginsberg. In the dreary Breshnevian years, the youth embraced him, chanted his name at poetry stadium readings, passed his work around in samizdat. He's surely in the pantheon of 20th century Russian poets, right there with Brodsky, Pasternak, Ahkmotova, Akhmadulina, Mandelstam. The other titan of contemporary Russian verse, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, lives on.

Orlovsky's New York Times Obituary

The New York Times published Peter Orlovsky's obituary today, June 3, 2010, Allen Ginsberg's birthday (he would have been eight-four). Um, happy birthday, Allen? Was the Times editorial people just having a little wink wink nod nod with Ginsberg, their old nemesis? The Washington Post, perhaps being less clued-in to Beat nuance and with no apparent appreciation for the insignificant coincidence, published their Orlovsky obituary two days ago.

Both pieces are respectful when in another day and age they might not have been. But of course, in citing the books Peter wrote, both omit mention of Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs (Pocket Poets,  City Lights).

Deborah Remington 1930-2010

As a practitioner of Obituary Mail Art, I habitually check the New York Times obituary section to see who has died and to determine whether there might be an obituary worthy of turning into art. In the process, I often find connections to various literary and artistic interests, in particular to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats. Such was the case when I noticed the article announcing the death of Deborah Remington, an abstract painter with whom I was unfamiliar.

Deborah Remington was one of the six co-founders (and the only woman) of the Six Gallery in San Francisco, the gallery in which Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of "Howl" in 1955 (the other artists were Wally Hedrick, John Allen Ryan, Hayward King, David Simpson, and Jack Spicer).

Obituary mail art is a sub-genre of Mail Art in general, that odd, Fluxus-like practice closely associated with Ray Johnson. I may be the only practitioner. Try googling the text string "obituary mail art" and see how many hits you get. The practice is straightforward. Read the obituaries, cut out those of people that interest you, make a photocopy of it, put the original article in an envelope, festoon and adorn the envelope with imagery, mail the envelope to yourself, then seal it in laminate. 

The images below are the front and back of Lescaret's obituary mail art of Wally Hedrick. 

Beat Memories - The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg

The National Gallery of Art hosts an exhibition of Allen Ginsberg's photographs, May - September.

"Drawing on the most common form of photography, the snapshot, he created spontaneous, uninhibited pictures of ordinary events to celebrate and preserve what he called "the sacredness of the moment."

Ginsberg's interest in photography was not casual, not a passing hobby. In many ways, the practice of photography augmented his poetry. Both art forms, as practiced by Ginsberg, merged the visual with the autobiographical. As he wrote in the Author's Preface to Collected Poems 1947-1980, "Herein author has assembled all his poetry books published to date rearranged in straight chronological order to compose an autobiography."

His photographs, many uniquely and extensively captioned by hand, augment and extend the autobiographical record. Primarily portraits, they depict a multitude of friends and acquaintances - artists, writers, scholars, boyfriends, family members - spanning the second half of the 20th century. They are not consciously 'arty' but are, like his poetry, deliberately visual and richly detailed. If Ginsberg is, as Bill Morgan asserts in The Typewriter is Holy, the Beat Generation's bonding agent, the one person whose effort, vision, and conviction is primarily responsible for scholars and readers being able to talk about a 'Beat Generation' today, then Ginsberg's photographs are unequivocally the most important visual record we have of that literary circle.

(Allen Ginsberg, Managua, Nicaragua 1986, photograph by Patrick Warner)

Is the Beat Generation A Literary Movement?

"It wasn't a sans serif age" an audience member said, commenting on the book jacket's title font. Why not use typewriter letters? The chapters are in typewriter script, Bill Morgan explained during the Q&A following his Harvard Coop talk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an author has no control over book or book jacket design. He certainly did not, he noted.

In fact, he'd actually wanted to call the book Kindred Spirits but his publisher (Free Press) had declined. They'd wanted something a little more Beat-resonant, something catchier, less sentimental. Editors or perhaps sub-editors had then plumbed Ginsberg's poems for a title-esque phrase and come up with the winner in "Footnote to Howl."

More interesting than the design of the book was Morgan's assertion that the Beat Generation is a social group rather than a literary movement. "Social group" is certainly vague but his point is that what is considered the 'Beat Generation' actually lacks a common literary style. As such, it can't be considered a "movement" in the way that for example Cubism could. Early works by Braque or Picasso are virtually indistinguishable, he suggested, implying a coherent style, the 'Cubist' style. Not so the Beats. Burroughs' work was utterly different than Kerouac's, Ginsberg's was its very own thing. So construing them and by extension their peripheral wives, friends, and girlfriends (think Edie Parker Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke) as a Literary Movement doesn't, in Morgan's view, cut it.

But they were bonded together however, their actual 'movement' being the orbiting of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was the sun around which all the planets moiled and by which the Beat Universe was sustained. Ginsberg was the single thing that everyone even remotely considered a 'member' of the 'Beat Generation' had in common.

But what about that title anyway? The Complete, Uncensored History History of the Beat Generation? He chuckled at the irony, as if a 'complete history' of something so nebulous, so prone to individual definition, could possibly be written. But it is what it is, a non-scholarly text that examines the principle figures of the Beat Generations in relation to one another and within the literary and cultural context of the times.

Holy Typewriters

Beat scholar and archivist Bill Morgan, author of the year-by-year biography of Allen Ginsberg I Celebrate Myself: The Sometimes Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, has published a new book, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.

Bill Morgan worked with Allen Ginsberg for many years as his archivist and as such has been intimately linked with Allen and all-things-Beat. I Celebrate Myself is a solid, well-researched biography (though not without occasional factual missteps), one that is a valuable tool for Ginsberg scholars writing about AG and other Beat story lines. The chronological framework allows users to quickly place Beat-related events on the time continuum of 20th century history. Morgan is not a great prose stylist - he's an archivist after all and his prose style reflects that; straightforward, matter-of-fact, a little wooden.


The title of his new work of literary history comes from the fifth line of the "Footnote to Howl" section of Howl: "The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!" An excellent selection.  AG's Howl alone could provide a thousand Beat titles given the many, many great phrases contained therein:

• the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
• eyeball kicks
• the lamb stew of the imagination
• a belt of marijuana for New York
• goldhorn shadow of the band
• cannibal dynamo
• robot apartments

But what of the subtitle? The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation. I can never help but raise my eyebrows at the assertion of completeness in any book title. Really? Complete? Nothing more to be discovered? Nothing left out? Seems unlikely.

And Uncensored? Shouldn't that go without saying? As many Beat enthusiasts know, censorship was one of the main issues that Ginsberg threw his considerable energy into confronting and rolling back. After all, Howl was censored, Naked Lunch was censored, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was censored. The issue of censorship was an enduring one for Ginsberg, right into the last years of his life when he fought the FCC ban on "indecent" language on the airwaves between set times of the day (a rule that effectively prevented Howl and other works from being broadcast, despite the fact that said works were/are considered masterpieces of 20th century literature). Who would conceive of writing a Censored history of the Beat Generation?

The last niggling problem I have with the title concerns the generic moniker Beat Generation, a label that, though instantly recognizable and widely used, remains somewhat un-defined. Who or what comprises the Beat Generation? When is someone a Beat and not a Hippie? Or a Beat and not a hipster? The term "generation" implies a time frame - what is it? 1939-1959? 1940s-1960s? What's a generation?

My issue isn't so much in Morgan's invoking the term Beat Generation, only with the premise that somehow a "complete" history of it can be laid out. I am eager to see how Morgan handles this, whether he actually endeavors to define or codify or, in the spirit of archival investigation, offer a chronological framework for this generation.

That said, Morgan deserves much praise for his ongoing scholarly efforts and the considerable amount of invaluable material he has amassed and made available for legions of Beat scholars and enthusiasts.

I'm looking forward to hearing him speak about The Typewriter is Holy at the Harvard Coop, Cambridge, MA, Tuesday evening May 11 at 7:00 pm.

48th International PEN Congress, January 1986

 The 48th International PEN Congress (January 12-18, 1986) was a contentious affair. The event brought writers from countries around the world to New York City to discuss/dissect/examine "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State." The theme itself sparked controversy among many invitees and others who complained of its ambiguity. But discord over the theme soon gave way to other imbroglios.

Norman Mailer, as President of PEN and one of the leading organizers, was at the center of just about every intellectual scuffle and participant complaint. His unilateral invitation of then Secretary of State George P. Shultz to deliver the opening remarks and inaugurate the congress drew widespread anger and vitriol. Shultz's actual speech was disrupted by jeers, shouts, whistles and other expressions of protest.

As the week of panel discussions, readings, interviews, and parties progressed, a further controversy erupted over the lack of women panelists. Again, Mailer was widely blamed for this and a contingent of feminist writers was very vocal in denouncing him and, by extension, PEN for the female disparity.

In the months following the Congress, Norman Mailer was interviewed by Richard D. Heffner on the PBS show Open Mind. The interview is wide-ranging and not specifically about the PEN Congress but Heffner does ask Mailer about it and Mailer responds to some of the controversies. He takes particular umbrage with Betty Friedan, asserting that her protest over the lack of women panelists was more about grandstanding than about any serious affront to women writers. PEN is an honorable organization, he maintains, and in his opinion Friedan should know that and not besmirch it by accusing it of deliberately excluding women panelists.

You can watch and listen to the interviews here (parts I and II):

Part I: http://www.guba.com/watch/3000097079/
Part II: http://www.guba.com/watch/3000097081/NORMAN-MAILER-THE-WRITER-II

A young Salman Rushdie participated in the event later wrote about it for the New York Times Book Review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/books/review/17RUSHDIE.html