Fwd: SLPAD 10 - Beats

[Michael Bailey]

I’m taking today off.

Please enjoy this contribution from longtime P-lister Matthew Cissell, who
has a degree in the field.

I did check with him, and he did intend to send it to the list!





---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 7:56 AM
Subject: Re: SLPAD 10 - Beats
To: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>



Hello fellow Pynheads,

Long time no post from me, hope you're all well. I've been watching and
thought I might chime in on this one.

Some years back (2016) as I was approaching the end of my dissertation
research, some folks put up old Cornell photos and this led me to a new
lead. The name Gerda Meyerhof, whose parents had a type of literary salon
that the Crew visited, appeared; I followed. This brought me into contact
with former Cornell Pynch colleague Robert "Tod" Perry. He and Gerda were
both quite kind and helpful in providing first hand accounts of the period
just before TP went West to Seattle. I used that information for a
presentation at IWP 2017 La Rochelle (please take a minute to remember
Gilles) as well as my dissertation.

My approach is very driven by the work of Pierre Bourdieu so I look at the
field and the positions and players -Who's doing what, where and how do
others respond. One of my questions for Mr. Perry was about any
relationship or awareness (anxiety of influence) of the Beats. He wrote:

          " I remember some years later "the whole sick crew" (surely at
this time Kirk, me, Dick, Tom and I don't know who else) at a party sitting
on the floor not 5 yards away from Allen Ginsberg and his sick crew and not
a word went back and forth from the two groups. Ginsberg's group was
getting lots of PR, but we thought, or at least I thought, we were writing
something possibly great, and these guys were breaking glass but not making
more than noise."

    That hits hard. It says so much. So, awareness yes, but acquaintance,
no. Still, 5 yards is pretty close. (I can easily imagine Allen with his
coterie and admirers, some of whom might still have been hovering around
him as he chanted OM inChicago in '68, not unlike Joyce on a Parisian
terrace with sycophants and the rest.) But they have occupied very
different positions in the literary field and employ divergent strategies;
The Whole Sick Crew didn't want to be 2nd gen Beats, despite whatever
admiration TP admits to in SL.

At this point I might pan out to the wider discussion that has been ongoing
regarding class. Yes it is a term that TP uses in SL, but it is far too
Marxist. We might do better to turn the discourse in a Weberian direction
and talk of position and standing (Weber was a huge influence for Bourdieu
as well).
  Throughout the 20th C., the Left's dreams kept getting smashed. "Hey
look! Revolution! That's it, let's go" Of course, when people started to
find out about the gulags ("Gulash I know, but what's a gulag") some had
sense to give up their party cards, but others just looked further East,
get a RED BOOK and work for the real Revolution! Maybe by then the young
apolitical writer was starting to get the same nose that led Orwell to side
with CNT in Spain (and we know how big an influence Orwell was for TP).
Anarchy becomes his ideological reference, albeit with TP's own twists.

I spent a long time (too long) with insufficiently diagnosed Romanticism
that had been exacerbated by a deep infatuation with all things Beat. ( My
advice to parents, go easy on the Beethoven, etc; if necessary, use copious
amounts of Isaiah Berlin to dispel the spirits that are all too happy to
drive us to the darker corners of our minds and souls, which then may
create truly hellish places on Earth. Romanticism is one hell of a drug.)
It would seem that TP escaped going too far down that path, and that
allowed him to forge his own tools and break open new terrain. No one could
ever seriously say that Pynchon was "typing, not writing" -  critics be
damned - in his own way he raised the literary fiction bar as much as Joyce
did in his day. He had Von Neumann and more under his belt, he was well
supplied. And from that emerged the Project.

Ok, that's my 2 cents. Next time maybe we can talk about how Bleeding Edge
is a very jewish novel and why.

Take care everybody and get ready for the Rites of Spring and other
festival dates and anniversaries.
mc




On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 7:19 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> “…only a glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement.”
>
> Not having, like, attended a Slim Gaillard show or hopped a freight train
> with Jack Kerouac, ridden with Neal Cassady, or conversed intimately with
> Allen Ginsberg, I guess he means.
>
> Serendipitous finding of the first issue of “Evergreen Review,” golden
> hours in jazz clubs, sunglasses at night, much discourse about intermittent
> weed connections, and song circles on Navy ship decks* determine a bold
> tangent line to the phenomenon, though, don’t they?
>
>
>
> * (some service people are still musically inclined & putting up songs on
> YouTube last time I checked - this is more formal but
> https://youtu.be/X9k7jRxVR7c, and there are more informal ones such as
> Numa
> Numa
> https://youtu.be/puVmKfCwb4M or Sun King’s “Hey Ya”
> https://youtu.be/QEkYqL9n7vo )
>
>
> When he returned to college, he found points of similarity between the
> degreed academics concerned about “Evergeen Review” (even just its cover)
> and the officers in the Navy who were puzzled & inquisitive about Elvis.
>
> The tenor of that comparison reminded me that even established institutions
> came out of popular groundswells in the first place & naturally respond to
> societal currents. Because of embedded characteristics, they might not be
> first responders or early adopters, but they are interested parties.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>