Gerald Howard in Tin House: Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion"

What did your favorite writer do for his or her living before writing the indispensable book that changed your life? Do you care?

There was a period in the mid-twentieth century when a writer's ability to depict time and place with eye-witness accuracy was based his own on real-life (i.e., school, work, neighborhood) experience. Gerald Howard, in an essay currently featured online at the quarterly print magazine Tin House, elaborates this idea of the writer-as-reporter through the decades, often reflected in the author biographies as they were featured on the published book. As he writes, "The message being conveyed was that the guy (and they were, of course, guys) who had written the book in your hand had really been around the block and seen the rougher side of life, so you could look forward to vivid reading that delivered the authentic experiential goods."

This worked great for war stories, road novels, thinly-disguised fiction: Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Steinbeck. Howard goes deeper, invoking Dreiser, Dahlberg, James T. Ferrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy as emblems of the search for working-class authenticity, "a star search for the writer of impeccable working-class credentials." Then an interesting turn occurred after World War II: new American prosperity and wealth created an extended period where differences of class seemed to disappear, only surfacing again in the chafing discontent of the Beats in the 1950s. (Kerouac the football-scholarship Columbia drop-out had the rough-and-tumble of blue-collar experience to draw on to enhance the barely-disguised realism of On the Road.)

The current state of much fiction is different, reflecting a change not only in the nature of book publishing but in the expectations of the reading audience. A writer's experience now counts primarily as background material, pages of intricate detail on which to hang a cinematic trial, a murder, or an historical event. The amount of research and information that can be found online or through simple research creates contemporary novels of enormous detail, but little depth. The real stories of working-class Americans, and the authors who write them, seem to have vanished except largely as examples of a misunderstood "K-mart realism," as Howard calls it.

In his lengthy essay Howard celebrates authors -- Raymond Carver, in particular -- whose work maintains authentic working-class roots, and there are others (Bobbie Ann Mason in Kentucky, Richard Russo in New York State, and Dorothy Allison are just three of many he mentions) whose novels are "set in affectionately but precisely observed bars, diners, and workplaces that are their native habitat." And then, surprisingly, comes this well-deserved tribute to a writer whose novels seem to have disappeared behind his public persona of 60s hipster-trickster but are still marvels of time and place:

Take, for instance, Ken Kesey’s almost overwhelmingly powerful 1964 novel Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey is best remembered today as the psychedelic superhero and culture warrior of the sixties and the author of the anti-authoritarian cult classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But Kesey was also as authentically working class as his fellow Pacific Northwesterner Carver, a son of dairy farmers who ended his gaudy days working that same family farm. Sometimes a Great Notion is an epic saga of a family of loggers whose slogan, in thought, word, and deed, is “never give an inch,” and whose sheer cussedness brings them into conflict with the entire community.

Politically incorrect (the Stampers battle against the union to continue delivering lumber to the local mill) and formally innovative in the manner of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! the novel is imbued with the sort of mythic American intransigence celebrated in such events as the Alamo and the Battle of the Bulge. ... The book’s famous master image — of patriarch Henry Stamper’s severed arm mounted on his home in such a way as to give the finger — to the rising river, to the striking workers, to anyone who cares to look — may seem overdetermined to certain literary tastes. But Kesey earns his image through his undeniable vitality and authority and the reader can’t help but smile.

It would be great to read a novel these days whose characters were full of "sheer cussedness." It's been a while since a novel like Sometimes a Great Notion raised a middle finger to expectations, either to its readers or the demands of the marketplace .

(photo of Gerald Howard from Tin Drum)

Interview's psych-out with Alexander and Ann Shulgin

Ah, Interview magazine: Amid the glam and glossy of its pages, where flesh is always a great fashion accessory, the September issue includes a real twist: a chat with Dr. Alexander Shulgin and his wife Ann about their forty-year search for the chemical pathways to inner beauty.

The effect is somewhat like finding a hidden copy of High Times magazine inside this week's issue of People at the check-out counter: "Hey, isn't that Blake Lively on the cover? What's she doing in handcuffs?"

Michael Martin's conversation with Sasha and Ann Shulgin is in conjunction with Etienne Sauret's new documentary, Dirty Pictures, which profiles the couple whose four decades of experiments with psychedelics and other compounds has put them at odds with the law and made them, understandably, heroes of the pharma underground. The title is a reference to the script of chemical compounds written on the label of each new drug.

Now 85, Shulgin looks the part of the psychedelic genie who in his own lab has created 200 psychoactive drugs -- many based on the formula for MDMA, or ecstasy -- and who just as willingly cooperates with the demands of the DEA as each new compound, eventually, makes its way to the Feds' list of scheduled drugs. They are careful to state that, as the DEA places each new discovery on its list of regulated drugs, the Shulgins "throw my samples into the fireplace." That regulation process may take four years or more.

Shulgin says at that point "I let others make it if they want to, or make it commercially if they want to ... I want nothing more to do with it. ... I don't tend to go back to things that are known. I look for new things." He mentions 2C-B as a compound he considers as important as MDMA. "It became commercially available in Germany. It was called Nexus. And a South American tribe used it as a sacramental medicine. Then it became Schedule 1, and that's it."

"We don't have any scheduled drugs in the lab or house," Ann says. "We are always aware that the DEA is very interested and very hostile, and so we have no intention of doing anything that would tempt them to invade us again."

Ann and Alexander Shulgin (2010)

Excerpted from the Interview article: In 1991, the Shulgins published the book PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, which describes their relationship and work—a bit too explicitly for some, who saw it as a drug cookbook. Coincidentally or not, three years later, the DEA raided their home and lab but found nothing illegal. Still, Shulgin was asked to surrender his DEA Schedule 1 license and was fined $25,000. A sequel, TiHKAL, followed in 1997, and now the pair are finishing up a giant index of psychoactive drugs. ...

MARTIN: Sasha, it’s your birthday today. How are you going to celebrate?

SASHA: Live ’til 86. ...

MARTIN: In the film, you seem to have a large social circle. Who are those people who are always hanging out at the house?

SASHA: [laughs] You handle that one, Ann.

ANN: There are a lot of people in the world who are interested in the action of these materials. And I don’t know how many people have come up to Sasha, or to both of us, and said, “You’ve changed my life.” Many have found perhaps they were in a state of severe depression, and they’ve taken MDMA.

SASHA: We haven’t changed their lives—they’ve changed their own lives.

ANN: And MDMA helped them gain access to parts of themselves that they hadn’t been able to open up before. It’s a very important experience for a lot of people. We have friends who don’t use psychoactive materials but who are still interested in how the brain works and psychology and spiritual training. It’s a very large and very intelligent bunch of people. We have two big parties each year where people bring food and drink and get to know each other. It makes a very good party.

SASHA: We have two rules: One is that you can’t come before noon. The other rule is you can stay as long as you want. ...

MARTIN: Sasha, a 2005 New York Times Magazine profile of you was titled “Dr. Ecstasy.” In the film, it’s said that you resent that label. Why?

SASHA: Well, first of all, I don’t know what “Dr. Ecstasy” means. Define ecstasy. What does it mean?

ANN: On the street as a drug, it means anything the chemist wants to put in it.

SASHA: Therefore it has no meaning.

ANN: The term ecstasy is a street name. The drug is illegal, and there is no quality control. There is no way to tell if there is any MDMA in it. One research group found that at a particular rave, one third of what was being sold as ecstasy had some MDMA in it. The rest did not, which is one of the dangers of making things illegal. There’s no protection. The authorities feel there should be no protection, but their views are somewhat different than ours. ...

(Interview magazine photos by Jeff Minton and Scott Houston)

The Stop Smiling interview, Paul Auster (2009): "In America, writers have no power"

The bad news first: Chicago-based Stop Smiling ceased publishing its quarterly magazine last year after 38 issues. In its print form Stop Smiling was an always-interesting cultural mix that covered the familiar and the new, in a sleek and modern graphic style. Its annual 20-interviews issue featured conversations with writers, artists, musicians, and actors in thoughtful dialogues, interviews that achieved the increasingly-difficult trick of being both entertaining and intelligent.

There is a silver lining: Stop Smiling has since become a book publishing venture in cooperation with Melville House (NY), and now has a growing list of titles reflecting the wide range of topics covered in the magazine: How to Wreck a Nice Beach is Dave Tompkins' high-voltage, high-wire history of the vocoder; just released is Listen to the Echoes, ten years of interviews with Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller.

Writer and film-maker José Teodoro interviewed Paul Auster for Stop Smiling in 2009. Auster's 2008 Man In the Dark was a novel of political extremes inspired by the Presidential election of 2000; in it, Auster imagined a second southern secession and civil war. As the 2010 political election cycle becomes more heated and divisive, the points Auster raises in the interview (excerpted below) seem increasingly relevant -- the dichotomy between political perception and reality, and a current wave of anti-intellectual feeling in America that leaves writers increasingly marginalized.

With recent wins by the Tea Party that are rocking the G.O.P. boat (and leaving Democrats uncertain whether the Tea Party represents a real threat or a tempest in a teacup) Auster's secessionist story seems less and less a fiction, more forecast of a coming political season.

JT: How conscious were you of readers sniffing around for political subtexts while writing this book?

PA: I think there is a strong political component to this book. And I think it was generated by the 2000 election, which for me was one of the great scandals of American history. We watched Al Gore get elected president and then we watched it get taken away from him through legal and political maneuvering in an outrageous Supreme Court decision, which was in some sense a legal coup. And I’ve lived these past seven and a half years with this eerie sense that we’re not in the real world anymore, but a parallel one. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Bush wasn’t supposed to be president, there wasn’t supposed to be a war in Iraq — there might not have even been a 9/11 if Gore had been elected. So I think this sense of disconnect is what inspired the story within the story, the one that Brill invents for himself.

JT: Don DeLillo once said that it is the writer’s job to be against the establishment, to take a stand against the government.

PA: I agree with Don. If you remember the epigraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson that appears in my novel Leviathan: “Every actual state is corrupt.” I believe this. Some states are worse than others, but the fact that there’s always room for improvement should keep us on our toes. We have to be alert to the hypocrisies and contradictions and corruptions in our society. Everyone should. But I think a writer has the duty to do that.

JT: Do you feel that writers and poets still have an influence on public discourse?

PA: In America, writers have no power at all. It’s a moment in which we are in abeyance, perhaps forgotten forever as the great tide of history sweeps us away. We have a culture of such deep anti-intellectualism that the majority of people mistrust intellectuals.

The ridiculous arguments that have been proposed during the presidential campaign about Obama being an elitist because he’s articulate and has read books and even written books, and went to good colleges and universities, is absurd and frightening. George Bush went to Yale, after all. He comes from a family of immense privilege and wealth. Why does he get to be the good ol’ boy? And poor Obama, who grew up broke, struggling, with a broken family, is labeled an elitist. The world is upside down when you get to this point. ...

"Label 228": The USPS medium is the message

It was only a matter of time before Andre the Giant really did have a posse.

The black-and-white image of wrestler Andre the Giant on stickers affixed to stop-signs and telephone poles was an "experiment in phenomenology" begun in 1988 by design student Shepard Fairey, who in 2008 designed the now-famous Obama "Hope" image. Twenty years later, Fairey's original experiment has become an art form that appears virtually everywhere an artist can stick a label.

Artists that once sought gallery wall space find new media for expression, and new places to display their work; today, pop culture is the medium itself, and artists find tools in the everyday material of the marketplace. Spray can, markers, pen and ink -- these seem new and logical tools as art swings wildly from gallery to print to digital, pixel to page, and back again.

Others bypass this process all together and simply go from pole to post, creating stickable art that affixes to any surface. Label 228 (Soft Skull Press) began as camden noir's call for artists to submit their art on USPS Priority Mail stickers -- those ubiquitous rectangles with their inviting white space. Six months later, 500 items had arrived from around the world.

From the Soft Skull website: "These labels are free, portable, and quick and easy to exhibit, offering artists the chance to spend more time creating their work than if they were to paint and write directly on walls, vehicles, and public objects.”

One man's stickable art, of course, is another's graffiti; it's a toss-up if these labels by Mecro, Zoso, Kegr, Robots Will Kill! and others are permanent treasures. The disposable nature of a label suggests they're not meant to be -- the viewer's appreciation here depends on the images' inclusion in book format, away from the ephemeral encounter at street level. If the irony of this is lost on the artist, to the viewer looking through Label 228 its an irony that assumes its own art form.

Fantagraphics acquires lost William S. Burroughs graphic novel

Everyone's favorite cranky Uncle Bill, William S. Burroughs, continues to battle the forces of Control thirteen years after his death. The author who gave name to heavy metal, provided inspiration to underground writers everywhere, and pissed off an entire generation of academic critics, will see his forty-year old "bedtime story" Ah Pook Is Here re-published in a deluxe edition by Fantagraphics Books in 2011.

From the Fantagraphics site: "This lost masterpiece, Ah Pook Is Here, created in collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeill in the 1970s, will be published in the summer of 2011 as a spectacularly packaged two-volume, hinged set, along with Observed While Falling, McNeill’s memoir documenting his collaboration with one of America’s most iconic authors.

Ah Pook Is Here is a consideration of time with respect to the differing perceptions of the ancient Maya and that of the current Western mindset. It was Burroughs’ contention that both of these views result in systems of control in which the elite perpetuate its agendas at the expense of the people. They make time for themselves and through increasing measures of Control attempt to prolong the process indefinitely."

panels from Burroughs' Ah Pook Is Here, by Malcolm McNeil (Fantagraphics, 2011)

And on the topics of time, magic and music, Burroughs was certainly willing to "take a broad, general view of things," as he once advised his readers to consider. An online post at Arthur magazine (from 2007) reprints his 1975 conversation with Jimmy Page regarding the cosmic force of music, drugs, and belief. While the general conversation between the singer and the shaman comes close to one of those woozy, Playboy-After-Dark sessions with the tape-machine capturing the purple haze of 1970s rock'n'roll Babylon, it sure beats the hell out of hearing Lady GaGa talking with Cher at this year's Video Music Awards.

WSB: Did you ever hear about something called infra-sound?

JP: Uh, carry on.

WSB: Well, infra-sound is sound below the level of hearing. And it was developed by someone named Professor Gavreau in France as a military weapon. He had an infra-sound installation that he could turn on and kill everything within five miles. It can also knock down walls and break windows. But it kills by setting up vibrations within the body. Well, what I was wondering was, whether rhythmical music at sort of the borderline of infra-sound could be used to produce rhythms in the audience–because, of course, any music with volume will set up these vibrations. That is part of the way the effect is achieved.

JP: Hmm.

WSB: It’s apparently…it’s not complicated to build these infra-sound things.

JP: I’ve heard of this, actually but not in such a detailed explanation. I’ve heard that certain frequencies can make you physically ill.

WSB: Yes. Well, this can be fatal. That’s not what you’re looking for. But it could be used just to set up vibrations….

JP: Ah hah…A death ray machine! Of course, when radio first came out they were picketing all the radio stations, weren’t they, saying “We don’t want these poisonous rays” [laughter]….Yes, well…certain notes can break glasses. I mean, opera singers can break glasses with sound, this is true?

WSB: That was one of Caruso’s tricks.

JP: But it is true?

WSB: Of course.

JP: I’ve never seen it done.

WB: I’ve never seen it done, but I know that you can do it.

JP: I want laser NOTES, that’s what I’m after! Cut right through.

WSB: Apparently you can make one of these things out of parts you can buy in a junk yard. It’s not a complicated machine to make. And actually the patent…it’s patented in France, and according to French law, you can obtain a copy of the patent. For a very small fee.

JP: Well, you see the thing is, it’s hard to know just exactly what is going on, from the stage to the audience…You can only…I mean I’ve never seen the group play, obviously. Because I’m part of it….I can only see it on celluloid, or hear it. But I know what I see. And this thing about rhythms within the audience. I would say yes. Yes, definitely. And it is…Music which involves riffs, anyway, will have a trance-like effect, and it’s really like a mantra….And we’ve been attacked for that.

WSB: What a mantra does is set up certain vibrations within the body, and this, obviously does the same thing. Of course, it goes….it comes out too far. But I was wondering if on the borderline of infra-sound that possibly some interesting things could be done.

"Discovering the language of photography:" the Gernsheim collection

Official image of the "first photograph" -- Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras (ca. 1826)

The University of Texas at Austin is offering a rare opportunity to see an image considered to be "the world's first photograph." Taken in 1826, the shadowy, indistinct image is almost invisible to the eye, but it is the centerpiece of a grand collection of 35,000 photographs, nearly 200 of which are currently on display at the Harry Ransom Center on the Austin campus through January.

The image, taken from an upstairs window over nearby rooftops and trees, is more correctly called a heliograph -- a picture traced by exposure to the sun on a metal plate coated with a substance called bitumen of Judea -- and made with a camera obscura by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.

Niépce's simple, hazy landscape is the result of a chemical reaction, not a mechanical one, yet it began a revolution that encompasses most of today's visual media. The exhibit at the University's Harry Ransom Center is on display through January 2; called "Discovering the Language of Photography," this marks the first time the heliograph has been displayed since it was discovered in 1952 -- and then rediscovered years later by the collectors Helmut and Alison Gernsheim in their collection of 35,000 photographs, which had been purchased by the University.

The exhibit displays the enormous range of British and American photography over the past 175 years, many images which the Gernsheims had collected since the 1940s. David L. Coleman, the exhibit's curator, calls the collection arguably the finest in private hands -- works acquired by the Gernsheims in an era when photography was considered less than a high art. The University purchased the collection in 1963.

In addition to the exhibit, the University of Texas Press is publishing a companion volume with 125 plates selected by Coleman. From the book's preface: "The collection’s clearest strength remains its holdings in nineteenth-century British photography, including hundreds of images by such masters as David Hill and Robert Adamson, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and Henry Peach Robinson. The Gernsheims carried their passion for the medium into the twentieth century by also collecting significant works by modern photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Man Ray, Paul Strand, Albert Renger-Patsch, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson."

Winifred Casson, Accident (ca. 1935)

Along with photographs from the collection, the exhibition includes equipment, albums, correspondence and other manuscript materials that illustrate a visual history of photography from the earliest-known photograph to images of the mid-20th century.

The exhibit fulfills one of the Gernsheims' primary objectives in archiving photography: "without any enthusiasm depositories for huge photographic collections simply [existed] because there was no other place," they are quoted in the preface. "This has only led to dead departments. Photographs must be exhibited, researched on, written and lectured about, and made easily available to the public, other wise [sic] their whole purpose is lost."

"The Work of Joe Webb" (2009), by Reuben Cox

Mention "photography in the south" and a certain imagery of decay leaps to mind: steel-gray clouds in a black-and-white sky, weather-beaten clapboard, the forgotten faces of Appalachia -- as if the ghosts of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were still documenting the slow turning of the human soul south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Or perhaps it's here that William Faulkner's "the past isn't really dead" is more truth than aphorism; maybe the inexorable and ultimate reconstruction that progress brings hasn't yet removed all traces of the past that linger in the south, and which Reuben Cox is drawn to capture.

The North Carolina artist whose website offers a welcome and a request ("welcome to my mosque ... please wipe your muddy mind before entering") is a photographer, luthier, portraitist; his photo subjects range from the ephemera of the soul to whorls of river water to the graffiti-plastered walls of the now-closed CBGB's, documenting the passage of the temporal in sharply-rendered images of both beauty and clarity.

image from Record Shack collection, Reuben Cox

His human subjects challenge the camera's eye, rather than divert their attention from it. Their assurance in the captured moment is a personal statement, even in the seemingly offhand way Paul McCartney plays an upright piano and the potter Georgia Blizzard sits in window light loosely holding a carved Buddha in her lap.

image from The Work of Joe Webb, Reuben Cox (2009)

His book of photographs The Work of Joe Webb: Appalachian Master of Rustic Architecture (Jargon Books, 2009; distributed by the University of Georgia Press) is work that celebrates the craftsmanship of the Highlands, North Carolina woodworker and builder who created nearly thirty log cabins in the 1920s and 1930s. Cox's contemporary photographs -- taken with a large-format field camera -- reveal the houses in current states of repair, disuse, or unrecognizable renovation: a review in Blueprint calls the images "hallucinatory ... balustrades of thick, twisted twigs minimizing thickets; staircases constructed with random patterns of interlocking laurel or rhododendron branches."

Though Cox's photographs of log cabins are beautiful documents of a physical past rapidly disappearing, his website offers other work showing Cox's interest in the metaphysics of belief. Everybody Wants to go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a series of evocative C-print photographs -- smoke evaporating into air, explosions caught in the moment of combustion, as if the human spirit had suddenly ignited and caught fire -- in settings of fall woods, in the dark of night, or against blue skies and skeletal trees.

image from "Everyone Wants to go to Heaven, But No One Wants to Die," Reuben Cox

Cox created these fleeting moments of flash and fire by experimenting with available light, gunpowder and shutter speed, and the results are unrepeatable instants captured reflexively on film. The ghostly and beautiful images can be unsettling reminders that life is momentary, that the nature of spiritual belief is a matter of individual faith and doubt, and that human nature is changeable as smoke even as the artist tries to capture man's nature against the impermanence of time.

The Jargon Society remains a valuable asset to the continuing memory of its founder (the "visionary coach and, at times, crank") Jonathan Williams, and now in the capable hands of Thomas Craven. Its stated goal is still "dedication to the care and preservation of the singular, the personal, the local, the individual. ... What other press would devote equal effort to White Trash Cooking and the collected poems of Lorine Neidecker at the same time?"' Williams's boundless energy in promoting the vast and largely unheralded wealth of American creativity was expressed in an interview with Leverett T. ("Sneaky Fast") Smith and posted at the Jargon Society website: in it, Williams declares “'There is no end to desire.' But, perhaps, there is an end to energy? I will try to go to the well as long as I think there is a drop of water in it."