Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
(slippage from Scott himself!)
  

    
Trout Fishing In America was an experimental form of narrative. It had
no set protagonist, no conflict to resolve, no sustained plot, but
rather a series of narrative vignettes that imaginatively recast the
pastoral idea of trout fishing in America within an alternative set of
contexts.

Brautigan's vision of Trout Fishing in America often had nothing to do
with actually Trout Fishing, or when it did, the whimsical, surreal
descriptions of this endeavor turned realistic impressions of this
American pasttime on its head.

In this way, the book is often very funny.  Each little chapter
awakens the reader to a fresh way of viewing the world. These were all
mini narratives, but, as I said, with no overriding storyline employing
dramatic profluence and resolution.

Instead, Brautigan creates a series of little stories that all deal
with one motif--trout fishing in America.  These motifs accrete.  There
is no traditional narrative climax, but the book has one vignette near
the end, that I argue, is the climactic one.  Here, Brautigan creates
a scene where his narrator stops into a local junkyard and inquires
about purchasing a trout stream. The vendor tells him how much the
stream will cost per linear foot and says that the birds are extra and,
since they are used, they come without a warranty.  

With this scene, the whole idea of Trout Fishing in America is one
where, not only is our modern vision of the pastoral made to seem more
surreal, but the pastoral actually comes to inhabit our modern way of
life.

Postmodern literary critics favor the petit recit (the little
narrative) over the grand narrative (with its eurocentric and masculine
biases). I take issue with this perspective in my closing chapter,
"Postmodernism Reconstructed."   

Brautigan's novella is a seminal work of postmodern narrative based on
juxtapositional irony as its core form. In this, I believe, it is
exceptionally well rendered.  However, as indicated in an earlier post,
Brautigan's close association with the hippie epoch has not given him
the critical respect he deserves as a successful innovator within the
narrative form. 
  

    
I'd forgotten how much I loved the trout stream at the junkyard vignette.

It's a quilt. It's post-pastoral but pastoral.  Thanks for the juicy
description!
  

    
It's definitely a quilted approach to narrative.  I've seen it fail
miserably quite often, but Brautigan succeeded brilliantly, me thinks,
with this junkyard crescendo.
  

    
I've really just begun to dip into the book (which finally arrived!),
so I don't know if this is really dealt with there, but I'd be
interested in pursuing the whole notion of "Americanism" that we
drifted into, but specifically in terms of the novels that you deal
with, Scott.

First off, I think that I'd reject "out of hand" the binary of
"Pro-American" and "Anti-American" stances in favor of a broader notion
of competing visions of what Americanism means.  Certainly, when I was
in high school and thinking about facing the draft, my friends and I
thought of our anti-war beliefs as strongly pro-American.

Even the title of Trout Fishing In America points to a particular
vision of Americanism (nicely put in <178> as the place where "the
pastoral actually comes to inhabit our modern way of life.."

I wonder if you could comment on some of the other "American" aspects
of these writers -- how they conceptualize American, whether they see
themselves as pro- or anti- or something else?

Oh, and I ask this in part in the spirit of Jerry Garcia's comment in
some interview that the Grateful Dead were "As American as a lynch
mob."
  

    
Garcia also once said in a published interview I read somewhere
(perhaps in one of <tnf>'s "Conversations" books) something along the
lines of "our scene [meaning the Grateful Dead and its attendant
"family"] couldn't have happened in any other country." I think that's
true, and in that sense Garcia was making if not a patriotic comment
than at least an endorsement of the freedoms allowed by America's
constitution and our version of western liberal culture. 
  

    
I think the love, alienation and wry humor that was implied in 
the bumpersticker "U.S. Out of North America" captures some of that 
non-binary complexity.   
  

    
Yes! I always loved that bumper sticker!
  

    
Howdy, Mr. MacFarlane, and welcome (or could that be "Well-come?")!

I've read a few of the books on the list so far, and I have two
questions.  One is "When did you start noticing the '60s
feeling/spirit/ethos/etc. starting to fade away?" (which is also the
subject of a thread in the Boomers conference) and the second, "What
books written in the last 20-30 years best capture what the '60s
counterculture was about (and/or why it ultimately did not last on the
scale that it once did)?"

Question #1 was largely inspired by my readings of two books:  John
Stickney's 1971 classic _Streets, Actions, Alternatives, Raps_ which
was a collection of talks he had with various people involved with
various countercultural scenes (some political, some religious, some
not) in mid-to-late 1970, many of whom gave the verdict that things
were petering out even then. and Peter Coyote's 1998 memoir _Sleeping
Where I Fall_.

Thank you, and PEACE (boy we need that more than ever!):)
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
>> from Gary:  the whole notion of "Americanism" that we
drifted into, but specifically in terms of the novels that you deal
with, Scott.

First off, I think that I'd reject "out of hand" the binary of
"Pro-American" and "Anti-American" stances in favor of a broader
notion of competing visions of what Americanism means.


I'm really pleased you challenged this as a binary, not to discount
Keith Abbott's account that he and his Haight cohorts thought of
themselves as "pro-American," but because of the way
"anti-Americanism" has been framed in such a limited way by flag-waving
jingoists so as to limit American freedom of expression and behavior. 
This authoritarian narrow-mindedness grows more disturbing as the
years pass. 

I don't talk about the books in The Hippie Narrative as either pro
or anti-American, but through their grand diversity, a portrait of
dissident America at that time emerges.  In this way, I think these
books can assist us in revisiting what it means to be a free American
and how it is that America has changed culturally since the '60s and
'70s. 

Garcia's quip about The Dead being as American as a lynch mob, is
hilarious!! 
  

    
>The social cauldron boiled over, with the hippie phenomenon as one,
not insignificant, part of this.  The social change that ensued from
this period is a fascinating area of study, still largely unfocused
and oversimplified.<

Scott, how do you avoid the problem of reading patterns into past
events like the hippie movement? 

A big sports event is a simpler example where the commentators claim,
in hindsight, to have seen deterministic elements when chance plays
such an obviously major role as in a "hail mary" pass in the final
seconds. 

I realize how eager people are to have things explained by a trail of
cause and effect.  
  

    
>>> from Gary:  I wonder if you could comment on some of the other
"American" aspects of these writers -- how they conceptualize American,
whether they see themselves as pro- or anti- or something else?


I talked earlier about how the rich perspectives from these diverse
writers coalesce into a Gestalt, a portrait of America in the 60s and
70s that none, individually, could render.  

Kesey, the Northwest rugged individualist goes to the City (Palo Alto)
to learn how to write the Great American Novel. He gets blown away by
psychedelics, but succeeds in writing two of the finest Great American
Novels of his generation.

Pynchon is honing his craft with the Crying of Lot 49 showing clear
signs of more brilliance to come as well as an intellectual slant
toward the modern/postmodern condition in the West that few have
equaled.

Brautigan's America is profoundly imaginative, metaphorically twisted,
but so accessible that, without a hint of didactics or the polemical,
he changes how his readers see the ordinary world around them.

Hesse was Swiss, so his view of America had serious holes in it.
(sorry).

Heinlein had some probing questions about the role of religion and sex
in American society at the end of the 50's.  His fellow California
sci-fi writer had started a religion called Scientology.  Science
Fiction allowed Heinlein to probe some of these questions that would
have been censored if presented through a more straightforward
narrative.

Tom Wolfe is fixated on heirarchy and status in America.  He had a
Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale.  He saw in Kesey and the
Pranksters the makings of a new religion.  He captured, with rich
prose, the origins of the dynamic that created Psychedelia. His work is
literary sociology.

Norman Mailer is a brilliant political and cultural observer with a
leftist bent and a take-no-prisoners style.  In The Armies of the
Night, he ruthlessly examines his own foibles in the context of
marching on the Pentagon.  Mailer wants the best for his nation, but
over time his blunt political slant came into disfavor. Armies,
however, is a profound portrait of his America at a defining moment of
the young nation's history.

Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five is a boldly pacifist American who
implores with great irony when it comes to questions about Western man.
 What has the West come to with its war machine and insular
modernization?  His is called black humor, but he posits a hopefulness
for man to transcend his own propensities for horrible behavior toward
his fellow man.

Gurney Norman's America is shaped foremost by the traditionist roots
of Appalachia.  When, like Kesey the Northwesterner, he ran headlong
into pre-Psychedelic California, he came out the other side and found a
way to reconcile the two seemingly irreconcilable Americas.  He
inadvertently showed that the hippies were less the leftists of
Mailer's imagining, but mostly radical traditionalists who honored, not
their parent's generation, but their grandparent's traditions.

Hunter S. Thompson, like Norman, was also born in Kentucky in the
mid-30s.  A don't-tread-on-me individualist, Thompson had a jaded view
of his America, and used his prose to highlight the hypocrisies and
absurdities of the establishment, especially its authority structure. 
If he hadn't found wilder drugs, and if he had come of age during
prohibition, HST would have made a great underground champion of the
moonshiners and bootleggers, writing a besotted masterpiece called Fear
& Loathing in the Cumberlands.

William Kotzwinkle has the New Yorker's vision, a caricaturist's
brilliance for portraying the Lower EastSide side of the Beat/hippie
underbelly.  He spoofs hip pretensions, Zen illusions, and a junk man's
delusions in this odd casting of America.

Tom Robbins' America is a fusion of a Southern childhood/Northwestern
adulthood manifesting itself through the comic-hip grotesque.  Like
with Flannery O'Connor's grotesque portrayal of the South, both of
these authors use this comedic veneer to probe much deeper questions,
such as the spiritual nature of mankind.

It's all America and it's far from a binary portrait which these works
combine to paint.  
  

    
>>> the Grateful Dead and its attendant "family" couldn't have
happened in any other country." I think that's true, and in that sense
Garcia was making if not a patriotic comment than at least an
endorsement of the freedoms allowed by America's constitution and our
version of western liberal culture.

I think this is a great observation and quote, Steve.  ["I'm Uncle
Sam/ That's who I am/ Been hidin' out in a rock n roll band..."]
  

    

Very sad news.  Kurt Vonnegut has died at age 84.  I was at some point 
going to quibble that he was not of the hippie generation, but that 
hardly matters at a juncture like this.  He's sure a part of a lot 
of our brainsand hearts.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html?
  

    

Aw, shit.
  

    
May Vonnegut rest in peace.
  

    
>> from Mario, The Oiler Fan:  "When did you start noticing the '60s
feeling/spirit/ethos/etc. starting to fade away?" (which is also the
subject of a thread in the Boomers conference) 

As one of the other posters aptly noted, since I was born in 1955 and
was 11 years old during "The Summer of Love," I came to the dance a bit
late.  My greatest immersion into the counterculture came in my
twenties when I was seeking out what I later realized were the waning
vestiges of the hippie epoch.  These vestiges were very real and had
matured since the '60s, but the hippie spirit of collectivist idealism
was not what it was.  

I think it is well documented, and Divine Right's Trip is predicated
on this, that a countercultural innocence was lost after the horror of
Altamont in Dec. 1969.  I've talked to hippies who say that in 1971-2
there was a palpable anger brewing over the Vietnam War. People were
very pissed.  

And, in a way, the back-to-the-land diffusion of large numbers of
hippies had an indirect effect of diluting the social concentration of
hippies away from the urban centers. With this, much of the hippie
scene moved way from the media eye and was not recruiting new hippies
in large numbers.

The main change, I think, came after 1972 when the Selective Service
draft was suspended and the War in Vietnam ceased to be a galvanizing
point of antagonism against which a diversity of people could react. 
This had the highest impact on the most politicized hippies when the
New Left all but dissipated overnight. (The militant Black Panther
Party also dissolved then.) 

For the more dionysian and mystical hippies there were many "pockets
of peace" that persisted.  There were communes that survived. The
Rainbow tribe and its Fourth of July gatherings became important. I put
the Deadhead movement into this latter Dionysian/mystical category. 
The hippie phenomenon lost a central focal point in American social
debate by 1973, but there are sub-movements of The Movement that
continue today, if one cares to delve into the cracks of our culture.

The coopting and commoditization of the hippie phenomenon is too
involved to address here, but there are still significant vestiges of
this movement vectoring through American society.  For example, in June
I will be presenting aspects of The Hippie Narrative at an academic
Symposium called "The Greening of the Disciplines." 



>>> and the second, "What books written in the last 20-30 years best
capture what the '60s counterculture was about?

There are many solid biographies about the '60s such as Peter
Coyote's.  However, I also found Emmett Grogan's Ringolevio, also about
The Diggers but written in the early '70s to have a bluntly revealing
quality that I loved.  Emmett let the reader know who he despised and
liked and what was really going on in a way that Wolfe/ Didion/ Mailer,
as outsiders, couldn't portray.

I had high expectations for Dennis McNally's Long Strange Trip, but,
while it is amazingly comprehensive in its detailing of the Grateful
Dead story, it read like a historical barrage of
people/places/dates/details that were not contextualized in terms of
their socio-cultural significance.  

I've read books by authors that renounce their youthful radicalism or
that try too hard to rationalize it.  Charles Reich in The Greening of
America thought he had it all figured out in 1971.  Rereading it today
shows how far off the mark he was. 

Frankly, I've found aspects of the books written in the early '70s,
such as Ringolevio or Raymond Mungo's "Famous Long Ago" to be more
revealing of the era's nuance than books that are more retrospective.
These were great as memoirs but not as helpful for the grand picture.  
Maybe the difficulty in perspective is summed up in the great quote I
use in The Hippie Narrative:

"New York Times movie critic Karen Durbin stated in a 2001 movie
review that “the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960’s and
‘70s were as traumatic and transforming in their own way as the Civil
War had been a century before.  But it’s as if we don’t want to think
about that time, much less risk revisiting its great and terrible
vitality” (Durbin, NY Times, 8/19/01)."

In other words, we're still trying to get our collective arms and
minds around this amorphous ethos that still haunts the American
psyche.  I chose to revisit the era through its authors with the hope
that a fresh perspective would emerge.   


>> and/or why it ultimately did not last on the
scale that it once did)?"

People will say that the drugs did in the hippie.  The War on Drugs
certainly incarcerated a great many users/dealers and drug abuse was
the Achille's Heal of individual hippies.  The more anarchistic aspects
of the hippie bacchanalia were simply not tolerated.  

I think that when those earnest hippies tried to adapt alternative
lifestyles, this set in motion the absorping and coopting cultural
mechanisms that would bring the most meritorious and saleable aspects
of hippie culture into the mainstream.

Foremost, however, for most young people receptive to the hippie ethos
was the raw need to survive, to find work, to support themselves
and/or their young families.  This was the single biggest compromising
factor in the foreshortening of the hippie epoch, in my estimation.
  

    
I just read your post about Vonnegut, Mario. Too many of these authors
I write about are dead.  At least this fine author lived a full life. 
God bless!!
  

    
Epigraph as Epitaph

For Kurt Vonnegut, there is a deep affinity with American life.  His
rise to popularity during the sixties was an event itself, taking its
place alongside other milestones of popular history during those
tumultuous times.  Cultural historians already perceive those events as
important episodes in the evolution of American culture.  But
Vonnegut’s importance is something more than as the spokesman of a
counterculture.  It is more like the authentic idiom of a whole
culture, with its contradictions, dissonances, and dreams as parts of
the full orchestration.  There has never been another writer quite like
Vonnegut, just as there has never been another decade quite like the
sixties. (xii)
        ––From Vonnegut in America, Jerome Klinkowitz/ Donald Lawler
  

    
>> from Robert:  Scott, how do you avoid the problem of reading
patterns into past events like the hippie movement? 

>> I realize how eager people are to have things explained by a trail
of cause and effect.

My writing of The Hippie Narrative––as a result of getting an MFA in
Creative Writing––led me back to my social science undergraduate roots
in Cultural Anthropology.  I  don't see "reading patterns into past
events" as a problem if there is evidence that those patterns existed. 
Rather, oversimplifying complex sociological phenomenon and reducing
things to a formulaic cause and effect is a problem.

Remember Diane's post talking about Venice, CA. in 1971 when it seemed
that the hippies had just emerged from the Ocean?  For me, that had
great poetic appeal as an imagistic take on this scene.  I loved it's
impressionistic take as a snapshot of the time, but I didn't take it
literally.

For example, how much of the impression that those individuals were
giving was "caused" by them wishing to assume new personnas, wishing to
transcend the baggage of the past? How much of it was encouraged by a
new hippie culture that allowed people to take new names, slip into an
underground culture? How much of this was precipitated by their
psychedelic drug use that impelled them to want to disconnect from past
baggage and try to live solely in the here-and-now of their 1971
existence? These are all questions of cause and effect that in no way
refute Diane's eloquent observation which holds a different sense of
'the truth.'  However, causes and effects do emerge when one steps back
to make larger cultural observations.  This doesn't reduce these
people in Venus in 1971 to some vacuum of chance to explain the
impression they were giving, but offers a larger plausible context.  
  

    
By the way, a nice personal recollection of playing chess with Vonnegut 
by <aleonard> is up at Salon today, and while I checked it out, I 
noticed the disturbing main cover story is about Casteneda's lovers 
and their apparent suicide pact.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/04/12/castaneda/

Strange to have two of these authors come back into the news in 
such different ways on the same day.
  

    
Vonnegut's passing has hit hard. The still living authors that I
discuss in The Hippie Narrative are Pynchon, Wolfe, Mailer, Norman,
Kotzwinkle (I think), Didion, Robbins, and Denis Johnson.  

Gone are Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey, Farina, Brautigan,
Hesse, Heinlein, HST, and now Vonnegut.

Gone except in the immortality of their powerful words, that is.
  

    
"People will say that drugs did in the hippie."

On first reading of the aboue quote from your post Scott (thank you by
the way), one might conclude that all drugs were the problem, in a way
that the right-wing politicians and commentators would.  However, I
think the drug problem was predominantly with hard drugs.  For
instance, the Haight was largely destroyed by speed in 1967
(ironically, during the Summer of Love--and by the way, I believe the
TRUE Summer of Love was the previous one, before the mass-media
blitzkrieg and resultant overpopulation) and heroin in the years after.
 In the early 1970s, Quaaludes were quite popular (from the literature
of the time I've read, it seemed there were a lot of acidheads who
just wanted to forget--especially after the nightmares of the Haight's
disintegration, Altamont, Manson, and the political/social divisiveness
of the time--like Thompson pointed out, mind expansion went out with
LBJ and downers came in with Nixon), and starting in the second half of
the 1970s, cocaine came into all sectors of America like a January
midwestern blizzard.  

I've read Martin Torgoff's excellent book, _Can't Find My Way Home_,
which was about the social/economic/political/cultural history of drugs
in post-WWII America, and he pointed out how widespread cocaine use
was from the mid-'70s to roughly about the early '80s.  Sure, there was
the Reagan drug war, but also a lot of people were having problems
with cocaine and other drugs by this period, and it seemed to be the
time when many baby-boomers started to end their drug use, or greatly
curtail it regardless of what Ron and Nancy were shouting out from
their rooftops (while the CIA was flooding America's streets with 
cocaine themselves in order to finance the Contras in Nicaragua and the
right-wing government in El Salvador--this makes me wonder if the War
On Drugs was not at least partly ana ttempt to deflect attention from
this very ugly little secret, as well as serving as part of a vendetta
against the movements of the 1960s).

Of course, there were also those who habitually smoked too much
marijuana and allowed it to become too big in their lives (which can
easily be done with anything, drugs or not) as well as those who were
the acid-burnouts (like Sam Spence and Syd Barrett).

Any thoughts on the rambling words above?
  

    
(P.S.  Sorry, in my opening sentence I meant "above."  In Paragraph #2
I intended to say "an attempt.")