Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
All right, Mr. or Ms. First You Steal, I'll admit that
pkrassner@earthlink.net is indeed pkrassner@earthlink.net, but how were
you able to respond to my question [what's the context of 'first you
steal a bicycle?'] BEFORE I asked it, with your answer [slippage, with
the real goods]?  an electronic time warp!
  

    
Haven't heard that one.  But I get your website just fine at
http://www.paulkrassner.com/

The Homer Simpson intro and Fox's reaction is funny, or funny business
anyway.
  

    
(I just had slippage, posting a reply to #75 while you were finishing and
posting #76, messing up the context of "I haven't heard that one."  Which
was me thinking about whether there was a bike joke like that in
circulation.  The use of nicknames or "pseuds" in the name field is an old
WELL tradition, and often found word fragments, quotes or slogans are used
there.  When you are logged in, you can always click on the login name to
find the poster's read name anyway, so people play around with it.)
  

    
That's Real name.  I have a bad case of the typos today.  End WELL cultural 
trivia digression from me, anyway.
  

    
more on Jesus and Christians. (My friend calls them Xians.)

I'm paraphrasing from his last book,
but Kinky Friedman says that Jesus
was but the first in a long line 
of great Jewish troublemakers.
  

    
Email being composed re my pseud.
  

    
Wow, Paulsie.  Couldn't even get your own e-mail addy right.  You
hittin' the kush today?
  

    
Maybe you got cerebral Paulsie.
  

    
Kush?  I wish.  I do plan to try salvia, though.  [No, Gail, that's
not a typo.]
  

    
Salvia's not bad, actually.  Inexpensive, nice mellow feeling, doesn't
give me a headache like weed does.  Apparently the hallucinogenic
effects are more efficiently experienced via certain concentrated
extracts you can buy.  Can't afford any right now, though.  Anyway, Mr.
Krassner, there's a story I occasionally tell about you, but I'm
fairly sure that I've got some serious detail drift in the version I
tell, because I've long since forgotten where I first read it.  Any
chance I could get set straight on what happened?

Version I tell is that, supposedly, in 1974, you were having a novel
serialized in the Whole Earth Catalog.  Then Nixon resigned, Ford
became President, promptly pardoned Nixon, and you were quite sensibly
upset.  In celebration, you polished off your entire stash of pure THC,
and wound up in the hospital, raving paranoid, convinced that Stewart
Brand (my father, the discussion of which fact is what usually leads to
this story in the first place) had changed the ending of your novel
without telling you, and was lying when he insisted he hadn't.

So did that, in any useful sense, happen?
  

    
      By the way, Krass, I saw that book you referenced earlier on
this list, "The Tipping Point", referenced on the Common Dreams website
in an essay about how to stay sane and fight the good fight while the
millionaire hawks conquer Planet Earth.  Evidently "The Tipping Point"
has reached its' tipping point.
      You've authored or edited ten books.  I'm not the kind of guy
who normally asks how the latest Brad Pitt movie's doing at the box
office, but out of curiosity, what was your best selling book?  I don't
care about numbers, but having read every tome with your name on the
cover ever published, I'm wondering which was most popular.
       "Irony Lives!" is your fifth CD.  Between the books, CDs, live
appearances from comedy/teach-ins/TV/rallies/bris'(sp?), and editing
The Realist for forty or so years on-and-off, you're incredibly
prolific.  You are a one-human refutation of the amotivational syndrome
attributed to potheads, as well cognitive impairment (with the
exception of your inability to remember your e-mail address).  
        "Hi, my name is Paul Krassner, author, comedian and
investigative satirist. I've [repeat above resume] since the 1950s. 
for most of those years I've also smoked marijuana and the worst side
effect is midnight fridge binging.  So what do ya say, America?  It's
time to legalize.  I'm Paul...uh, Paul...mmmm, Paul...don't tell
me...Paul...KRASSNER! for NORML".
  

    
Here's my version of that story:  Actually, there are two unrelated
stories.  

Story #1: At the time Stewart  Brand and I were roommates in San
Francisco, I had been er uh experimenting with a white powder that was
supposed to be pure THC. On the night that a satirical troupe, The
Committee, was doing their final performance, I snorted the remainder
of my stash and passed out.  Stewart brought me to a hospital with the
aid of a couple of students from the nearby Zen Center.

Story #2: In 1972 I had a psychotic freakout from information overload
as I was investigating conspiracies ranging from JFK to Charles
Manson.  In 1974, partially triggered by Gerald Ford and Nelson
Rockefeller becoming the non-elected president and vice-president, I
had a slight relapse and didn't know who to trust.  In such a paranoid
state, one tries to build a rationale, and mine was that Stewart --who
was serializing Tongue Fu (my media fable/New Age satire about a man
who had a 15-inch tongue and went to a summer camp for gurus) in
Co-Evolution Quarterly, and then interspersed throughout the Whole
Earth Catalog--had changed the ending.  I had learned to confront my
fear, so I took a bus to Sausalito,  checked out the boards, and my
ending was intact.  I had called my own psyche's bluff.  
  

    
To Simmons: My bestselling book was my autobiography, Confessions of a
Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture.  It sold
30,000 copies.  It might have gone higher, but my publisher, Simon &
Schuster, released Howard Stern's Private Parts at the same time, and
you can guess which book they promoted.  I asked a bookstore clerk if
there was anything the buyers of Stern's book had in common.  "Yes,"
was the reply, "they can't read."  Ironically, that's true of me.  I
CAN read, but I'm basically illiterate.  As Norman Mailer once said,
"I'm a writer, but not a reader."  But he lied.  And I'm not really
prolific so much as the King of Re-Hash.  I'm working now on my long
awaited [by me] first novel, and have another couple in mind.  I told a
novelist friend, "It's hard to write fiction; you have to make stuff
up."  He replied, "Paul, you've been making up stuff all your life." 
"Yes," I said, "but that was journalism."
  

    
     Are your second and third currently-unwritten novels going to be
re-hashes of your first novel?
      Everyone knows that Picasso quote: "Bad artists borrow, great
artists steal".  You merely steal from yourself.
  

    

Just to make jenslobodin jealous: 

I have -- right now, on my desk -- my original copy of the May, 1967, 
issue of the Realist, with "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy 
Book" and the Wally Wood/Disney illustration. 

If you're very nice, you may touch the frayed and filthy hem of my 
garment. 

Paul, I've obviously been reading you for a *very* long time. I think I
was twelve when my brother -- later some kind of fundamentalist -- came
home from Columbia and described the REalist in negative terms that were 
sure to fire up my enthusiasm. 

I think he described you as "overly cynical." 

I have no idea what he meant. 

Hi, Michael! ("Mikey"?) 
  

    
Actually, my second novel-to-be will be about the making of a porn
movie for senior citizens, titled Gum Job; it was originally a  kind of
playlet in the first issue of Kesey's mag, Spit in the Ocean.  The
third novel-to-be is still being formulated in the cusp between my
subconscious and conscious...
  

    
Hey, Excessively...what's a jenslobovin?  Yeah, that issue brought
circulation of The Realist to 100,000, and was estimated to reach maybe
a few million with pass-on readership, libraries, word-of-mouth...the
JFK piece became a street rumor and is now an urban myth...not bad for
a piece of underground satire...but I never thought of myself as
cynical...realistic, yes...I always felt as if I was fighting the
cynicism of politics, culture and organized religion by serving as a
vehicle to laugh at 'em...
  

    

> I told a novelist friend, "It's hard to write fiction; you have to make
> stuff up."  He replied, "Paul, you've been making up stuff all your life."
> "Yes," I said, "but that was journalism."

Just wanted to hear that again.  I love it.
  

    
To Saiyuk:  Hey AK!  Call Natalie.  She's worried about you.  And yes,
your dog and I share the same nickname.  Just don't try and leash me.

Cynicism is in the eye of the beholder.  If you don't believe that
Wall Street or the Pentagon are omniscient, then according to many you
are "cynical".  I would propose that they're cynical about utopia.
  

    
A little off-topic, but I thought this might be some good Krassner fodder: 
A self-described fascist with strong credentials -- or so he claims -- 
voices his strong objections to the direction the Bush administration is 
taking the US.

<http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1548417.php>
  

    
Hi, Howard--I will check out that fodder, thanks...for now let me just
say that among the e-mails I regularly get spammed with is a
right-wing militia-type list-serve which is very much against invading
Iraq.  It would be interesting to see if some kind of  alliance could
develop between radicals at both ends of the spectrum.
  

    
Wow.  Thanks, Howard.  That reads like one of Krassner's investigative
satires.
  

    
If you off-WELL readers with questions are getting bounce
messages from your email, try mailto:inkwell-hosts@well.com
(there was a typo in <56.>)
  

    
DAMN I wish the Counterculture Hall of Fame were an actual physical 
structure one could visit.

I'd hit the gift shop first.
  

    
Declare a Victorian building in Haight Ashbury a historic site and
build it there.  Grab a dayglo paint bucket and pitch in!