"Uncle Andy's Cats": James Warhola illustrates his uncle's creative chaos

Animals have been an integral part in the lives of many artists and writers. Creative individuals with career reputations for being reclusive, difficult or aloof have had their favorite pets. Late in life even the seemingly incorrigible William Burroughs himself played host to a succession of felines, and in 1954, unlikely as it seems, Andy Warhol already had a Manhattan apartment overrun with cats.

That year, he created a picture book of cats to give as Christmas gifts featuring calligraphy by his mother Julia. All but one of the Warhol cats (the real ones, 25 of them) answered to the name Sam, except for one named Hester, a gift from Gloria Swanson. Warhol hand-painted each of the lithographs in the edition of 150 copies of the book, and tinted Hester a beautiful pale wash of color. The book's name came from a suggestion by Warhol's friend Charles Lisanby. Julia wrote out the cover title with a missing letter "d": 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. Warhol was charmed by the accidental nature of the imperfection and left his mother's original spelling intact.

It was never disclosed whether Warhol also meant to include only 17 cats in each book -- perhaps he felt that given the nature of cats, they would multiply in number to 25 soon enough. Which, apparently, is indeed what happened. James Warhola, the artist's nephew, completes the picture with Uncle Andy's Cats (Putnam, 2009).

It's the wide-eyed, illustrated children's story of how Hester and all the cats named Sam created a houseful of pets in the unlikeliest of settings. Warhol's new uptown apartment, in 1962, is already bursting with the advertising displays, Brillo boxes, and raw material of the new art he was creating. A carousel horse stands in the living room, and Siamese cats courtesy of Sam and Hester are everywhere.

For James it's a carnival-mirror image of his own father's work as a Pittsburgh junkman, and the seven-year-old is understandably delighted. He and his six siblings have the run of the townhouse's three floors, play in rooms crammed with bric-a-brac, wake Uncle Andy in the morning curled up with a bed full of cats.

The carnival atmosphere, of course, is not for everyone. In the previous story of Uncle Andy's: A Faabbbulous Visit With Andy Warhol (Putnam, 2003), James's mother wonders when Andy is going to clean up the mess. James and his father, though, are amused at Andy's ability to turn what looks like junk into something else altogether: art.

The cats, surely one or two who were presented as gifts as well, made an impression on Warhol's young nephew. His family's trips from Pittsburgh to New York provide James with an early and very unique glimpse of an artist at work. The visits are also an ad hoc education on the value of creative chaos.

The two books illustrate a cheerful family dynamic, presenting an aspect of Andy's private life that seldom gets explored, and as a children's book it's natural that the impromptu family visits never collide with Andy's more arcane and famous personal pursuits.

But the visits inspire James to develop as an artist, briefly working for Andy himself, then as an illustrator of science fiction (to Andy's chagrin) and also a staff artist for Mad magazine as one of its "Usual Gang of Idiots."

Both books are meant to be fun introductions to the original King of Pop. Warhola's intention in creating the books for children, he states in an illustrated interview, is to demonstrate "there are better things in life than watching TV." In addition to his career as an illustrator Warhola is a consultant of the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in the family's ancestral town in Slovakia, a permanent exhibit filled with art created by Andy, Paul, and James.

"I Make Hitler Laugh," a poem by meeah

"I Make Hitler Laugh"
by meeah

We were hiking through the Tyrol with the Fuhrer.
At a scenic overlook, the famous naturalist,
long deceased,
was pointing out the resemblance
of various famous people
to other famous people in a book
full of photographs of famous people: Sartre to Cary Grant,
Glenn Gould to someone or other,
that sort of thing. 

What was his point?
That all famous people are basically identical?
The scenery, by the way,
was breathtaking.
Shrouded in a lavender mist, etc. 

So, inevitably, the famous dead naturalist
comes to a picture of Hitler—it’s one of the last,
Berlin in ruins, the Fuhrer,
his peaked cap pulled low,
bundled up against the cold,
is reviewing the “troops,”
a motley collection of men and pre-teen boys
rounded up for one last
hopeless defense of Nazism.
That was a bad day for Hitler,
the sort every dictator dreads,
but he was out there putting the best face on things.
You had to hand him that.

“Now in this photograph…”
and the naturalist, undaunted,
flips through the pages
to suggest another of his unlikely look-a-likes.

“Good grief,” I cry, with a not entirely mock exasperation.
“You’d think at least being the Fuhrer
would be enough in itself.
That you wouldn’t need to search out
these kinds of tortured comparisons
between him and anyone else!”

At this, Hitler himself bursts out laughing.
It was a hardy, sincere laugh,
filled with warmth and the spirit of fellowship.
It made me feel good to make him laugh like that,
god only knows why. 

The long-dead naturalist,
caught unawares for a moment,
begins to chuckle, too.
Soon we’re all sharing a hearty laugh
in the crisp mountain air. 

Yes, it’s a fine day in the Tyrol.
The thawing landscape sparkles.

"I Make Hitler Laugh," by the poet meeah, originally appeared online in the February Action Poetry section of Levi Asher's Literary Kicks. The poet's blog is the oddbox. (Photo by Beate Bergstrom, Michael Meschke's staging of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, 1964.) 

"This Strange, Old World,"Katherine Anne Porter: "utopias are steadily on the decline"

The writing of Katherine Anne Porter has slipped out of literary fashion these days -- her sharply-drawn observations and difficult, flawed characters aren't the easy stuff of today's contemporary fiction. Her one major novel, Ship of Fools, was published more than 45 years ago and was the best-selling novel of 1962. Her short stories are seldom anthologized, but they are gems of beauty and precision. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter won her a Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1966.

She was a guest at the writer's colony Yaddo in upstate New York often in the 1940s, and completed Ship of Fools there. Ms. Porter -- who once declared "my life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it" -- was a prolific letter writer throughout her life, and the brief, sharp book reviews written from the '20's through the ''50s's, collected here by Darlene Harbour Unrue, are written in a familiar, just-between-us style of a personal letter between writer and reader. The result is a witty and unique literary salon-of-one.

This collection of published reviews shows Miss Porter, not surprisingly, was just as conscientious and thoughtful about the craft of her fellow authors as she was of her own writing. Although many of the books Miss Porter reviews in This Strange, Old World (University of Georgia Press, 2008) were not considered major works at the time, their issues were of obvious interest to her as a writer: history, travel, culture (especially of Mexico), independent women discovering their growing social and economic equality. She finds contemporary parallels of this burgeoning freedom in surprising literary places:

"... Mary Wollstoncraft must have found her world a singularly dreadful one: she was a woman cursed with deep emotions, a quick argumentative mind, a frustrated religious conscience, and a rigid set of moral scruples. She had picked up the pedantic social theories which heralded the nineteenth century, and J.J. Rousseau's sentimental humanistic libertarianism now bore fruit in some horrid schemes to right all social wrong. Her radical feminism seemed monstrous to her times. Her delicate high beauty did not save her from a life of hardships incident to the disaster of having been born with an inquiring mind. She was thirty-five before she had a lover, and then a basely inferior one. She bore her child out of wedlock and was deserted.

... She stuck to her principles and her pride (and lived to be) the wife of William Godwin, a pedant and charlatan, and the mother of Mary Shelley. Her Vindication of the Rights of Women remains a monument to her boldness, her anger, and her frustration. Her luck was the worst of them all."

It's a rare treat to read criticism that enhances and illuminates its subjects with such grace and style. There are nice touches of wit, too, without being cruel, even with authors that may undoubtedly deserve it. "Utopias are steadily on the decline," Miss Porter comments on one author's conclusion that the solution to the rise of feminist ideas is a return to "good, old-fashioned, romantic, hearty masculinity."

She finds an equal target in Catherine the Great of Russia: "Female despots in the making do not suffer from a mother fixation," she writes in a witty review emphasizing Catherine's political -- and marriage -- ambitions.

These brief reviews, written mainly on deadline, still echo the finely crafted style of Miss Porter's short stories. They also require the reader to read between the lines; much is implied. But they manage to be entertaining and worthwhile, years later, and anyone interested in Katherine Anne Porter should not miss reading them.

Dante's "Divine Comedy" gets a graphic novel & video game: good news for swaggering hero-poets

Bowler hats, tommy guns, and spats: illustrator Seymour Chwast's updated Dante's Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation looks like a 1930s Hollywood detective movie, telegraphing Dante's ultimately hopeful message in cinematic black-and-white. If Chwast's version of theDivine Comedy begs no comparison to the art of illustrator Gustave Doré, well, it's a safe bet the 19th century engraver never imagined Dante as a Dashiell Hammett character, either.

Chwast's first graphic novel is full of innovative and clever images, although high-school Miss Grundys may wail at the simplified story. "Captain" Charon's lake is now a neon-lit chasm he zooms across in a speedboat and floozies of Florence lounge in cocktail dresses. The damned wear Yale varsity sweaters. Dante still searches for the truth with the poet Virgil, now as his guide in a tuxedo and bowler.

Some things, however, stay true to the original: for most readers, as well as the artists that have illustrated the Comedy over centuries, the torments of Hell are still more thrilling to depict than the transcendence of Heaven -- and for Chwast make for much wittier visuals.

Not to be trumped by mere words and pictures on a page, Electronic Arts has developed a videogame of Dante's Inferno that ratchets up the action to make Dante a fallen crusader swaggering his way through hell, battling Satan himself for the love of Beatrice.

"He fundamentally mapped hell with this poem," says Jonathan Knight, the game's executive producer. "He's created a visual topography, and there's a tremendous amount of structure, geography, weather — and monsters."

A graphic novel and a videogame based on the work of a 14th-century visionary seem a victory of sorts for the image of fearless and swashbuckling hero-poets, if not for truth in literature. It's unlikely there'll be corresponding releases for Purgatory or Heaven -- spiritual redemption is less exciting for gamers, presumably. Who knows -- that still leaves the battle for Heaven in Milton's "Paradise Lost" for some enterprising game company to try.

"Smoking Typewriters:" the 60's underground press, granddaddy to alternative media

"We're turning into a generation whose thing is to be an Audience, whose life-style is the mass get-together for good vibes." (The Berkeley Tribe, December 12-19, 1969)

That quote seems a surprisingly contemporary view of our media-driven culture, in its way, even as it describes the audience who showed up for the Rolling Stones wreck of a free concert at Altamont in 1969 expecting a good time. In its pages the Tribe newspaper reported the sudden end of the 1960s, as first witnessed in the underground press. In contrast the major Bay-area daily paper, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, first reported on a successful and happy festival with no deaths and no problems at Altamont. It was a kind of "wistful thinking," brought on by the expectations of another Woodstock. Where were those Examiner reporters grooving?

More than forty years later everyone is still part of a tribal audience, of course. We are all connected in cyberspace, but rather than joining in a group with shared expectations and ideas we are the internet audience of individuals bent over our keyboards. The difference is that we are now accustomed to news and information expressly tailored to our own expectations and ideas, with advertising based on data-mining of our own internet searches, and the insular "news services" of all political and cultural stripes.

The history of the underground press in the 1960s and 1970s presented in Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, is more than a memory-trip of counter-culture rags, political rants, and Indian ragas. John McMillian's study makes plain that the New Left politics of the underground press could only move further left of the Kennedy and Johnson Democratic administrations of the 1960s. The rest of the country was not as sure what was going on in college campuses, and later in the streets, as the decade ended in equal parts tragedy and war.

The only direction, for many on the New Left, was to move beyond even the goals of the politicians and union leaders of in the 1930s and 1940s. Hubert Humphrey's long career fighting for liberal causes was overshadowed by his vice presidency under Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy had been assassinated in June; and the Democratic Party found itself split, again, when first-time 18-year-old voters were attracted to Senator Gene McCarthy's promise of a "peace plank" in the Democratic platform to end the Vietnam War. This idealism, created and nurtured primarily on college campuses, was bound to seem extreme in a year of assassination and riots, and it eventually met an extreme backlash in the form of Nixon's "silent majority" and the rise of Dixiecrats represented by George Wallace, who won five states in 1968.

It was plain, however, that the anti-establishment position of the underground press was initially helped along and then maintained by increasingly cheap technology available to anyone with an opinion: "our founder, the mimeograph machine," read a posted sign in the office of one paper.

With the luxury of a long view, Smoking Typewriters takes pains to draw lines between the cultural and the political. In the hothouse reality of the times, however, the lines were swiftly blurred between the polemic and the people. By the late 1960s there were an estimated 400 underground magazines in the country; in many, it would have been difficult to separate the ads for record companies from the anti-establishment editorials they helped finance.

Soon the politics became wrapped in the idea of a "counterculture" that spread into the marketplace, and though Paul Krassner's Realist magazine was funny, smart and pointed in its politics, it was Jann Wenner'sRolling Stone, with lengthy musician interviews, full-color photography, and hip, literate record reviews that was found beside most readers' LP collections and plastic baggies.

The Great Speckled Bird (1969)

As the counterculture emerged aboveground in commercial ways, it was the distribution and availability of the more radical underground press, as much as the content in its pages, that was at issue. In Atlanta, The Great Speckled Bird was subject to a succession of obscenity and harassment trials, and its offices were eventually firebombed after an expose of the Mayor's office in 1972. Challenges to first amendment rights became a frequent battleground in what could and could not be printed and sold. Here was a familiar war ranged around freedom of the press, and some familiar voices spoke up for the underground papers. 

Even then, however, there were differences of opinion in an era when the very words "drug culture" meant different things to different people. Allen Ginsberg took note of these subtle shadings when he chided PEN American Center director Thomas Fleming's defense of free speech in one 1970 case, for characterizing the underground press as "inflammatory": 

I would have taken exception were it my place, to (the) adjective "inflammatory" applied wholesale to the New Left literature outside the context of equally-inflammatory ideology displayed in, say, Reader's Digest with its historically inflammatory cold war fury or odd language about "dope fiends;" or NY Daily News which in editorials has proposed atombombing China counting 200 million persons at their own estimate as reasonable; or for that matter the New York Times whose business-as-usual reportage in this era of planetary ecological crisis occasionally inflames my own heart to fantasies of arson. ... Merely to say that I find "aboveground" language as often inflammatory as I find "New Left" underground thetoric, (as would) W.C. Fields.

Smoking Typewriters is a good reminder that America, though challenged to do so, was able to encompass both the "radical" and "political" in its concept of a free press. Yet there are surprising echoes in the history of recent political campaigns as partisans on both the left and the right learn to use the internet to "frame the debate" with persuasive words and images, and with even more powerful personalities.The 2008 election will always be historic, McMillian writes, not just because it made Barack Obama president, but "as a watershed election in which the Beltway media was frequently outmaneuvered or humbled by the liberal blogosphere." From far-left manifestos to far-right screeds, the internet's viral nature makes political opinion ever more a free-for-all, and with increasing far-reaching effects: the potential of the internet, and social media as they develop, will far outstrip the wildest expectations of any nation's underground press.

Alasdair Gray: an excerpt from "Dante's Sublime Comedy"

(illustration from Dante's Inferno Journal)

HELL: Chapter 7



"Daddy Mephisto! Daddy Buguboo!"
      gargled the demon. Like a bulging sack
      his bloated body almost filled the gap                             3

torn in the cliff our track descended through.
      "Never fear him," murmured my gentle guide.
      Pointing at Plutus swollen face, he said                          6

"Shut up, you wolfish clown! Chew your own gut!
      Our journey into Hell is willed on high
      where archangelic swords cut rebels down!"                  9

As billowing sails of scudding ship
      crumple of tangles if the mast collapse,
      so crumpled Plutus. We descended past,                       12

arriving at the fourth shore round the bin
      all evil sinks to, where I stared amazed
      by the insanity that raged therein.                                 15 

Justice of God! I cannot understand
      why men condemn themselves to endless pain
      by madly chasing earthy loss and gain.                          18

....
How short a comedy it is, my son,
      this play of wealth that's only blessed by luck,
      since all the gold that glows beneath the moon            45

can't buy a single soul one moments rest."
      Said I," Please tell me more about this luck
      who seems to hold the worlds wealth in her fist."        48

Said he to me," O creatures of the dark –
      you human brood until reason's spark,
      allow my sentences to do you good.                             51 

The mind who formed the universe tool care
      that every one could have an equal share
      of sunlight, moonlight, starlight and sweet air.            54 

On earth such widespread goodness cannot be.
      Most goods become a private property
      even within a small community.                                  57

Inside a city or a nation state 
      great force or cumming can accumulate
      properties, letting some cliques dominate                   60

until the angel with so many names –
      luck, chance, fate, fortune, mutability –
      makes new cliques prosper, other cliques decay,        63 

whether by vice or virtue, who can say?
      But those who trust, not virtue, but to luck
      have gone astray, aye, very far astray.                         66

A day and night have passed since we set out.
      We must not linger longer on our way
      but go to look at deeper misery."                                69
         
...


Walking between the Styx and that foul sight
      my master said," Outrageous violence
      condemns these souls to mindless, endless spite.       87 

Now turn your eyes and look the other way
      to the black slime bubbling like boiling broth
      caused by the sights of damned souls underneath.     90

I'll tell you what they'd like to say but can't.
      On earth we were so full of our own woe
      we saw no good in any gift of God.                            93

Not space, time, air, sunlight or love itself
      should woo us from our miserable state.
      Eternal sullenness is now our fate.                            96

Aye, could they speak such words would be their chant.
      Bubbles are all that will be seen of them."
      Conversing, we eventually came                               99

to a base of a big tower that had no name.                     100


"Dante's Sublime Comedy," a continuing translation by Alasdair Gray of Scotland, appears on his blog. With appreciation to wood s lot.

"Days of Rome" (Gerard Malanga)

"Days of Rome" 

(Gerard Malanga)

Days of nothingness 
Days of clear skies the temperature descending 
Days of no telephone calls or all the wrong ones 
Days of complete boredom and nothing 
is happening 
Days of 1967 coming to a close in the frigid condition of chest 
cold and cough 
drops 
Days of afternoons in the life of a young girl 
not being on time 
Days of daydreams exploding 
Days of utter frustration 
Days of my film being cursed and myself 
with the curse never lifting 
Days of closed windows to keep the cold 
out the livingroom warm 
Days of avoiding lunch for a phone-call 
with change of plans for the day 
Days of posting letters 
Days of no mail today 
Days of fatigue and amphetamine highs 
Days of Charles Edward Ives 
Days of the 4:00 pm doldrums 
Days of wonder drugs to challenge the common cold 
Days of utter frustration 
Days of forgetting

"Days of Rome" by Gerard Malanga, previously unpublished, appears in the 2001 collection No Respect: New & Selected Poems 1964-2000. Malanga's career encompasses his work with Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia presentations that accompanied their performances, as well as a continuing and distinguished career in photography. He began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. To interviewer Richard Marshall in 2003, Malanga commented “I've always thought of poetry as an introverted process whereas photography has always been an extroverted process. But they both involve the eye to a certain extent -- both the inner eye and the outer eye.” An interview with the poet, "The Poetry is Something," appears in the Summer 2004 online issue of RainTaxi. (Photo of Malanga with his cat Archie from RainTaxi by Asako.)