Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Somewhere else I read a historian who said any work of history must by
its very nature involve all kinds of over simplifications and half
truths because what really happened in any historical event is too big
to write about.  

Since the so called hippie era is something I lived through myself and
had a very big impact on me in my formative teenage years I see any
writing about it as limited, over simplified and half true.  That is
probably just the nature of writing about any historical epoch though,
and this is one that is particularly complex and confusing.

So I will try to leave it at that and focus on the things said here
that are true, rather than what I see as half truths and over
simplifications.
  

    
>> from Robert Flink: the limiting aspects of the hippie or some other
movements may be that of reaction to perceived existing culture and,
thus, dependent on it. 

This describes the "counter" in counterculture.  The antagonisms
inherent in the separation is a form of social interdependency, I
think.  This is at the heart of the dialectic process and why the
counterculture was largely absorbed by the mainstream, and through
this synthesizing process the mainstream was, likewise, changed through
this absorption.

>> Not that reaction hasn't given us great things.

Exactly. The Hippie Narrative is largely sympathetic of the era
because I do believe that many positive, often underappreciated,
cultural developments resulted from the reactionary upheavals of the
'60s.

>> More truly detaching may be exemplified by groups such as the Amish
and other such, especially the long term durability while existing
next to regular culture.  

And this observation helps explain the difference between a subculture
and a counterculture.  Even though there have been horrible incidents
such as the recent shooting, the Amish don't have a history of
antagonistic exchanges with the mainstream.  However, they are a
subculture with a separate delineating set of values and beliefs that
do reject many aspects of "the world."   

>>Not very productive of exciting new arts etc. though.

Conflict is at the essence of literary profluence.  A countercultural
rebelliousness certainly gave the rock music of the late Sixties much
of its vibrancy, though the technologies of amplification helped, too.
  

    
102 slipped

The quote from R. Crumb in post 97 really rings true for me.  He
nailed it there.  

Also in chapter 1 of the book, the comments by Emmett Grogan of the
diggers on the hipocracy of the media created leaders and the delusions
of the hippies about the importance of their middle class backgrounds
really nail it for me.

Scott if you have some of those Grogan quotes that you can easily copy
and paste here why don't you do it.  That plus the R. Crumb quote puts
a clearer light on the time.
  

    
>>> from Steve S.  Re: Heinlein -- both David Crosby and Paul Kantner
have talked to me at length about how influential _Stranger in a
Strange Land_ was on their early ideas about communal living, open
relationships, and so on.

I'm not sure who these dudes Crosby and Kantner are, but on page 102
of The Hippie Narrative my friend Kaaren Kitchell has a wonderful
(woman's) take on the impact of Stranger and a Strange Land on hippie
culture.   


>>> In a way, hippie = beat + science fiction.  :)

What a great title for your next book, Steve.  I'll definitely want to
read this one when it comes out!!
  

    
>>> the word hovers like a gull over a ship's stern.

And, now forty years later, with that '60s ship on the horizon, I
think we can discuss that gull--read hippie, yes we can call a gull a
gull.  

I've read interviews of Tom Robbins where he hated the term whimsy to
describe his work and he hated being labeled as a hippie writer.  And
here I am canonizing the man because of the whimsical comic hippie
brilliance of his playful prose.  Never once in Another Roadside
Attraction did he use the word 'hippie' to describe his characters, but
the essence of the novel was about how Marx Marvelous, because of
Amanda, goes through a consciousness expanding experience. If this
isn't quintessentially hippie, then our human capacity for
signification through language is being whitewashed. 
  

    
>>from Tom:  I see any writing about it as limited, over simplified
and half true.

I agree with your observation about the danger of any historical
discourse, not that there can't be value there.  And, as you recognize,
The Hippie Narrative is not written in the manner of a history book
where the author is describing directly what the hippie epoch is all
about.

Rather, the book lets the key writers of the time be the lense through
which the era is revisited.  The cultural history is, therefore, an
outgrowth of the many different literary perspectives presented here.  

Instead of this being a series of chapters on Hippie Sociology,
Kinship, Politics, Spirituality, Appropriate Technology, etc., each
book examined here presents a different narrative emphasis.

You can see from all the discussion, it was a multi-year process
before I narrowed myself into a focus on the era's key works of
literature.  It wasn't until I wrote my book query to the publisher
that I adopted my professor's suggestion to structure my chapters so
that each one explores a different key work.

Writing anything, essay or short story or poem, is an unfolding
process.  When I say that the "magic" I discovered came from this
chapter by chapter approach, I mean that by the time I was done with
Tom Robbins, the gestalt of the era had formed. This was a result of
many different "verisimilitudes" creating a collage of the era.  The
approach was chronological, but also multifaceted and diversely
textured.

Also, as literary history, when I did my close readings book-by- book,
I told myself very consciously not to force-fit preconceived notions
of what I thought I would find at the expense of listening to what the
books themselves might reveal.

For example, and not to pick on Diane, in post #23, she asks: "Am I
correct in saying that you see this novel as a transition between more
traditional literary techniques and the countercultural ones to
follow?"

This was exactly what I warned myself not to fall prey to, namely,
needing to unearth a countercultural literary technique.  The 
tempation to discover a whole new genre, for example, would have been
such an easy thing to fall into.

The beauty that unfolded for me was in the recognition, that like the
best of the counterculture itself, a spectrum of literary techniques
were being experimented with, and sometimes most successfully.  At the
same time, like the authenticity of roots music, the traditional
narrative form was also executed brilliantly at times, sometimes with
an innovative use of voice, type of conflict/dysfuntion rendered, or
character execution that made those works clearly countercultural. 

Ultimately, I saw this array of hippie narratives as a collection
which honors the field of literature as an artistic discipline.  It was
the great imaginative genius of these fine authors on display rather
than an historian's distillation.  Collectively, these authors created
The Hippie Narrative.
 
  

    
>> from Tom:  Scott if you have some of those Grogan quotes that you
can easily copy and paste here why don't you do it.

From Grogan's Ringolevio:  

a crew of Diggers were discussing the need for another vehicle, when
in the front door walked Richard Brautigan, a tall, carrot-haired,
thirty-five-year old poet wearing grandpa glasses, a peacoat and a
floppy, wide-brimmed, felt hat.  He also sported a golden bristled
moustache, which drooped over his mouth like a nodding eyelash. 
Richard called his poems “Tidbits” and he wrote quite a few for the
free handbills which were mimeographed and distributed by the
Communication Company […], single sheet newspapers which were handed
out along Haight Street several times a day.

or, my favorite:

[W]hen hippies come along riffin’ about how unhip it is to make it
into middle-class society ‘n how easy it would have been for them to
make it, but they didn’t because it was insignificant, these low-money
people get confused and upset because here are these creepy longhaired
punks who grew up with meat at every meal and backyards to play in and
the kind of education which is prayed to God for, and they threw it all
away for what?

[…] So you better face the straight goods, brothers an’ sisters.  You
ain’t the new niggers or spics, ‘n you’re never gonna be.  You have too
much to fall back on […], you’re still the children of the ruling
classes, whether you like it or not.  As far as they’re concerned,
you’re just having an adventure––an adventure in poverty which, if you
aren’t careful, may prove to be more real than you’re ready to deal
with. (324-325) 



 
  

    
In late 65, I moved into an old victorian, off the USC campus, with a bunch
or other long-haired, pot-smoking, acid-dropping, long-haired
ne'er-do-wells.  We shared expenses and made most of the rent by fixing the
place up for the landlord.   We had all essentially dropped out and had
given up on the prescribed lifestyle we'd been sent to school to buy
into.   What little outside money we had coming in was based on the fact
that my old room-mates were chemistry majors and could make decent acid in
the labs.    The popular reads were Herman Hesse and Kurt Vonnegut.   We
know a few other people in the Hollywood area with similar inclinations,
but we had no idea that a movement was afoot.

Then a couple of us came up to SF to check out the music scene and found
that we there were lots of us.    It was so cool to come home with the news
that we were hippies.   We'd found our tribe.   Alas, pretty soon the news
spread and most of our neighbors saw us as the enemy.    But there was
about a year there, in 66-67, when we thought we were going to change the
world.   By the time I moved to San Francisco, in 68, everybody with any
sense at all was moving out of the Haight.
  

    
Welcome, Rik.  Thanks for this cool bit of personal history.  

"Tribe" is important when discussing this idea of 'hippie.'  I like
the way your post shows how mercurial the period was and how fast
things were changing.  

This reminds me of the urgency Norman Mailer spoke about when writing
The Armies of the Night in the wake of his March on the Pentagon in
October 1967, "as if an accelerating history of the country forbade
deliberation." 
  

    
Yup.  It felt like a tribe, and like we were all in on a secret.   But your
inside/outside dichotomy is right on.  And by 68, I knew it had been too
good to be true.
  

    

(rik), I'm impressed by your ability to put a coherent timeline to that
segment of your life. I find my memory of the order of things and the
month and year they happened to be awfully vague.

I remember dropping acid in Golden Gate Park at an enormous gathering 
and being tranfixed watching some guy in a parachute drop down out of 
sky and land on the field. I have no memory of this having been the 
first Human Be-In, and I would have sworn it was a summertime happening.
But that event occured on January 14, 1967. 

I remember dropping acid on a lovely sunny day in the [Golden Gate Park] 
Panhandle and having my mind blown by Jimi Hendrix, who gave a free 
concert on that long-ago afternoon. Was it 1966, '67, '68? The only way I 
can say with any surety that it happened in the summer of '67 is through 
poking around on the web and finding reference to that particular free 
concert. 

   ****************

Scott, you say your mom took you and your sister to see Jimi Hendrix, and
that you were "slack-jawed" at all the hippies and their revelry at the
show. This sounds like it might have been in some ways a defining moment
for you. That though the scene was pretty wild for a 14-year-old, it
was also exciting and alluring. Was it? And if so, were there other
moments from your early teens that had a similarly dramatic effect on
the path you chose to follow?
  

    
One way to mark off time in that era is to remember which Beatle album was
current.  They were releasing them every few months at the time, and we
bought 'em all immediately.   I met Jackson Browne at an open mic in Orange
county the week they released the Yesterday and Today.   The big topic of
discussion was steaming the cover off to see if you'd gotten a bowdlerized
butcher baby album.   Help had been out a few months when we moved into the
old house.
  

    
I'm pretty sure the first US concert by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
was at the Monterey Pops Festival in June of 1967 and his last American
concert was at Rainbow Ridge(?) in Hawaii a week or so after the one I
saw in Seattle during the summer of 1970.

When I was 14 in 1970, there were ample warnings about the dangers of
drugs, and I think for the insider/outsider dichotomy, I was still a
pretty straight kid, even though for my age group the Us VS Them thing
was much fuzzier.

My brother was three years older than me and when I was a pre-teen we
had Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, Revolver, Sgt. Peppers, around the house
and at 13 and 14, Iron Butterfly, Disraeli Gears, Willie and the Poor
Boys, The White Album and Jimi Hendrix Smash Hits albums added to the
collection.  We would crank up when our parents were gone. We wore
paisley in '68. I loved all that vibrant hard rock, although I admit
that at 12, I also liked my Hey, Hey We're The Monkees LP.

I had another cousin who is four years older than me who came to visit
in Seattle at our aunt's house.  I think those older cousins, who
treat you with more respect than your older siblings, have a greater
influence as role models.  My aunt had a huge yard with a personal
orchard and I remember sitting cross-legged with my cousin beside an
apple tree and listening to him playing guitar.  I was 14 and he was 18
and he was just back from hitchhiking to Washington, D.C. for one of
the biggest anti-war moratoriums.

His talk against the War had an impact (though not as much as living
in Sweden when I was 17/18).  The thing I remember most was when my
cousin warned me about the dangers of white sugar (the granular C&H,
U&I stuff).  I'd never heard of such a radical thing and was blown away
when he told me that it stayed in your system for a really long time.
This cousin, still a hippie to this day, loves The Dead, is a Tai Chi
master, and was asked to join the Violent Femmes at the time they were
founded in Milwaukee, but declined because he didn't care for their
sound and didn't think they'd make it.  

I recently went to my sister's 30th H.S. reunion (she graduated in
1975; I finished in '74) and when I saw the photos of her senior year
with her classmates at parties, I couldn't believe how longhaired
everyone was.  Everyone looked like hippies then in suburban Seattle. 
I say this because there was most certainly an insider/outsider
dichotomy that had developed, especially  by the early to mid '70s.
However, those of us in that transition period--born between 1954 to
'57--were in a muddier place in some ways.  

We were influenced by our older siblings and cousins, not as
antagonized by the War which wasn't going to draft us, usually more
cautious about the dangers of the drug excess that had taken its toll
with Jimi and Janis and Jim, and not as ostracized by the school or
other authorities for the fashionably long hair and sideburns or
miniskirts that girls wore. My suburban junior high participated in the
first Earth Day in 1970 and when the 9th graders walked down the road
to the beach, we pulled mattresses from the blackberry brambles. 
Littering was suddenly not cool.

I was my junior high ASB President and won by a landslide since I ran
unopposed.  I mention this, not because it shows how unhippie I was
then, but because I remember trying to round up volunteers to help
organize Campus Day.  The Principal had Veto power and I was a mere
figurehead, so when no one stepped forward to help, he cancelled the
event. The campus uprising was such that during our next day's ASB
meeting, the hall outside our classroom was filled with 7th, 8th and
9th graders holding a sit-in to protest the violation of their rights.
The Principal reinstated Campus Day, but it was never held again after
that year.  During the event some 9th grade boys decided to roll a VW
bug owned by one of the teachers onto the football field. They couldn't
explain the dent on top. This wasn't exactly Chicago's Democratic
Convention in '68, but it shows how countercultural attitudes and
behaviors were filtering down.  

In '72, my sister played on my high school's first girls basketball
team.  My newly hip, divorced mom stood with a new woman friend and
picketed Pay n Save Drug Store for their policy of not hiring blacks. 
She adopted the very sudden change from Mrs/Miss to consider herself
Ms.  She was definitely part of the newly liberated, though she still
had two teen boys to withstand. When she remarried a man eight years
younger than she was, I was sixteen.  

My hip stepdad--with the very responsible school job--contributed
Workingman's Dead, American Beauty, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, Firesign
Theater, After the Goldrush, and Deja Vu to our record collection.  I
would snag a pinch of the dope he had hidden in his dresser drawer.
What could he say, after all?  When I was in Sweden, I later learned
that my more devious older brother had dumped that whole stash down the
toilet.  What could our stepdad say?

I bought Wake of the Flood, Mars Hotel and Blues for Allah at the time
they each came out and, in college, I supported Cellophane Square, the
used record store.  I hated Disco.

So, I guess my hippie immersion was gradual and not in full force
until we lived with Roger & Celeste in '78.  When I first started to
actually look at myself as a hippie, I remember thinking that, in a lot
of ways, maybe I'd been part-hippie for years.  In any event, the
budding anthropologist in me was especially fascinated by this
counterculture. On both sides of my extended family of West Coast
Americans, I would say that a third of those born from 1944 to 1960
were hippies.
  

    
It's fascinating seeing it through your very perceptive and a bit late to
the party eyes.
  

    
-> In a way, hippie = beat + science fiction.  :)

Great line.

Science fiction had such a formative effect on me.  Heinlein was
pretty good but not one of the best in my opinion.  There were so many
good sci fi authors I can only mention a few here.  Arthur C. Clark and
Issac Assimov wrote a lot of wonderful stuff and seemed the most
influential.  In the process of entertaining us and blowing our
imaginations open they also taught us a lot about science.  Espicially
Assimov who in addition to writing sci fi wrote lots of science books. 
He was the guy who finally got me to understand relativity.

The very best though was Ray Bradbury.  His stories created a sense of
beauty and mystery that no one else matched.  

These were the most influential in the 50's and early 60's.  They were
shapping the imaginations of the kids that would become hippies.

No they were not great literary masters, perhaps with the exception of
Bradbury, but they were good story tellers.  Star Trek and Star Wars
represent sci fi for lots of us today, but those seem shallow compared
to the worlds created by the authors I was reading as a teen ager.
  

    
I'm listening to a blast from the past right now.   My downstairs neighbor
has MacArthur Park up loud on his stereo.   Some of the era's music was just
terrible.

I agree with Tom about what looks to me like the dumbing down of sci-fi for
more popular appeal.   Star Trek was very often just a western in space, and
Star Wars was very much a WWII movie with futuristic hardware.   I was a
freak for Larry Niven.

Dear God, he's playing that entire Richard Harris album.   Excuse me, I have
to go fire up my amps.
  

    
>>>The very best though was Ray Bradbury.  His stories created a sense
of beauty and mystery that no one else matched.

I do remember liking Farenheit 451, but the sure sign of a non-Trekkie
are the ones of us that most remember the fuzzy tribbles.


>>> MacArthur Park up loud on his stereo.   Some of the era's music
was just terrible.

Are you melting in the dark?  Remember Mrs. Miller? Didn't she have a
rendition, or was that just "Downtown."  Tiny Tim and his ukelele
turned the hippie movement pacifism on its head, since watching him
made you want to punch someone. 
  

    
-> I was a freak for Larry Niven.

Yeah I was crazy about Niven too.  Have you seen the wikipedia entry
on Ringworld?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

And also Roger Zelazny.  

They came along a little later than the authors mentioned I earlier. 
They got popular in the late 60's I think.  We would have already been
hippies so I don't think of them as forming my pre hippie imagination. 
They sure were fun to read.
  

    
The Agnostic's Prayer from Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger
Zelazny:

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what
I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may
have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if
not forgiveness but something else may be required to ensure any
possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of
your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or
withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your
receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected
intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but
which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as
it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some
way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
  

    
It's now Easter here in Atlanta.  The Easter Bunny has risen from the
dead.  Hallelujah.
  

    
Hi Tom,

Since you're on the topic of sci-fi, I wanted to point out that my
summational chapter, "Postmodernism Reconstructed," is not like a
narrative ending that plops onto the last pages of my book from outer
space without dramatic warning, clue or build-up.  Rather, I lead into
my conclusion after a careful description of this extra-terrestial
mindset.  Most notably, I discuss postmodernism, especially the
difference between constructivism/deconstructivism and its favored
spacy lifeform of juxtapositionalism in the chapters on alien "Trout
Fishing," the martian "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," and in that
cross-galactical journey "Divine Right's Trip."  
 
  

    
Star Trek was *pitched* as a Western in space. Wagon Train to the
stars.
  

    <scribbled by peoples Sun 8 Apr 07 07:59>
  

    

(damn typos...)

> I wanted to point out that my summational chapter ...
> is not like a narrative ending ...
> Rather, I lead into my conclusion ...
> Most notably, I discuss postmodernism ...

Oh, yeah, the book! Yeah, let's talk about "The Hippie Narrative" again.

Scott, you've mentioned how you didn't want your preconcieved ideas of
what you thought you might find in your close read of these books to get
in the way of what they would reveal to you.  So, looking back, what
surfaced, in terms of literary insight, that was the most interesting
surprise to you?
  

    
Happy Easter!

Hi Cynthia.  I didn't go easy on Tom Wolfe in The Electric KoolAid
Acid Test, but his opening chapter in the 1973 anthology, The New
Journalism, was very enlightening and dead on, I thought.

Not only did it put the three major works of New Journalism I examine
into a clearer perspective within the Countercultural Canon, it also
revealed a major shift in the publishing world favoring the genre of
Creative Nonfiction over Fiction.

The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, The Armies of the Night by Norman
Mailer, and Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, for
different reasons, were key works of the New Journalism.  I describe
this in detail in The Hippie Narrative.  While the novelists of the
'60s (such as Brautigan and Vonnegut) were abandoning the literary
conventions of social realism, the New Journalists, by employing those
techniques of the novel were, ironically, as Wolfe asserts,"dethroning
the novel as the number one literary genre."

Wow.  This marked shift initiated by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood,
and these three kingpins of hippie literature, highlight a major shift
in literary history that is still significant today.  

The ethical and practical downside of treating "real life" characters
as though we can get inside their minds is still a prominent concern of
Creative Nonfiction and Narrative Journalism.  The idea that
Non-fiction gets us closer to the "truth" is its great allure, but even
Wolfe articulates very well the advantages of fiction and its use of
verisimilitude to delve more deeply inside the human personality.

And, as for the ethical concerns of non-fiction, we have James Frey
and "A Million Little Pieces" to show that some of the underlying
issues stirred up by the New Journalism are still very much with us.  

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