Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
>I think my fascination with the Sixties has to do in a large part
with an interest in separating its sheer escapism from those earnest
attempts at human transcendence, especially through the ethereal power
of collectivist synergy.<

I think I understand the distinction but wonder how one would discover
it in practice. If accomplished, I wonder how the discovery would be
communicated to others. 

I also have a concern that the power of collectivist synergy may be
hard to reliably direct to positive ends given the evidence of history.
Perhaps some new insight will develop to accomplish this. 
  
  

    
>> new insight

These things you wonder about and your concerns are justified, I
think. 

And becoming too skeptical to seek new insight or to allow a state of
ennui to supplant collectivist hope may be the undercurrent of sin
facing our time. 
  

    
>And becoming too skeptical to seek new insight or to allow a state
ofennui to supplant collectivist hope may be the undercurrent of sin
facing our time.< 

Absolutely (well, as absolutely as a congenital skeptic can manage).

BTW, true believers may also stop seeking since they already have the
truth. I grant you that they have little ennui and are often
collectivist. 
  

    
>> true believers may also stop seeking since they already have the
truth. I grant you that they have little ennui and are often
collectivist.

I guess then we need to expand our list of modern sins to also include
hubris and a materialitic collectivism fueled by arrogance.  This
current administration, by its very unChristian haste to war,
exacerbates the ennui in the rest of us.  Most truly spiritual people
I've ever met––from whatever religion or centering––are also humble to
the grander mysteries of life.  [An aunt of ours––a former nun––called
Donald Rumsfeld, the antiChrist].   
  

    

> In the '60s there was a great deal of talk about treating
> hallucinogens as a sacrament, centering oneself when taking them.

And there was a great deal of experimentation where there was no talk
about the drug being a sacrament, no big deal made over "centering
oneself." We took acid, went to the Fillmore and danced all night long.
We took acid at the movies. My college drama classmate and I split an
orange barrel (early Owsley acid), got up on stage and did a rehearsed 
scene that got us a standing ovation from our classmates. The LSD opened 
up new avenues of acting!

IOW, it wasn't a religious experience, but nor was it simply 
thrill-seeking. To me and my cohort, acid was an amazing, wonderful, 
exciting experience that gave us spectacular visuals, a feeling of joy 
and calm, a stunning ability to focus, and a realization that there were 
more layers to life than we'd previously seen.

> A great many people have talked about psychedelics opening themselves 
> to believing in a higher presence.  

I can see why that kind of talk would be more compelling than talk about
how a psychedelic experience brings the user an understanding of how there's
no higher power, that it's all up to us.

I think that part of my frustration with the assertion that the hippie
investment in spirituality played such a big role in the counterculture
is that, in the hippie world I lived in, that just wasn't true. 

I think it's frustrating because ... because ... this is hard to explain.
As an atheist, I'm regularly reminded that my viewpoint is not only
not understood, it's not even recognized in many ways. 

At the Alzheimer's home where my [atheist] mom lives, the Sunday morning
activity is a church service. On the coins in my pocket are the words
"In God we trust." The religious right has made enormous inroads in the
political arena in the United States, so much so that there was *debate*
as to whether it was a constitutional violation for Alabama Chief Justice
Roy Moore to place a 2.6 ton stone with the 10 Commandments in the state's
Supreme Court rotunda. 

A debate! I mean, it's sooooooo obviously a violation of "separation of 
church and state" but culturally we've shifted so far to the right that
we are forgetting that freedom FROM religion is also an option.

The entities that are in power (at my mom's Alz home, at the US mint,
in all 3 branches of the govt) assume that everybody believes in God, some 
kind of god, anyway. That's why a non-denominational church service at
my mom's Alz home qualifies as an activity. That's why "in God we trust" is 
OK on the coins, apparently. That's why that judge felt it was reasonable
to display the 10 commandments in the rotunda. "We don't mean a Christian 
god, necessarily, it could be the god that YOU pray to." 

So my "rankled" is a reaction to lots more than what you've been saying,
Scott. Forgive me for this rant, perhaps it's the church bells clanging
away down the street this morning that woke me from a perfectly happy
state of slumber. grump grump
  

    

slippage from Scott himself!

> This current administration, by its very unChristian haste to war

that too! The duplicity of it all, it's so damn galling. 





but we're getting awfully far afield from your book, Scott. Let me try
to get back to it.

We haven't talked a whole lot about The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle.
What struck you most about this book as a "hippie narrative"?
  

    
Actually, the question I brought up here relates to the impact of
different drugs and their effect on the prose of different writers,
depending on that author's spiritual outlook.  This is a valid line of
inquiry.  

This is not the same as a discussion of how different drugs directly
affect different users.  You are, of course, well within your place to
discuss, as an atheist, how drugs such as LSD impacted you.  Actually,
you and your like-minded friends would serve as a perfect test group
for such a psychological study.  

The bigger issue here is that the US Government, afraid of the
Pandora's Box that it had opened, censored most all rational discussion
of hallucinogens.  Remember when octopus embryos were claimed to be
caused by LSD use.

Actually, I make a very similar point to yours in my chapter on Ken
Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion where one literary critic elevates
drugs used in the pursuit of art as superior to drugs used by lesser
mortals.  (This is not the question I am asking above). From The Hippie
Narrative: 


For all his keen insight into Kesey’s literary works, Tanner falls
prey to his desire to protect Kesey from being too closely associated
with the counterculture that the author’s activities helped spawn:

[Kesey’s] drug-taking, unconventional behavior, bizarre clothing, the
famous bus trip, the pranks -– these were not motivated by the same
attitudes that animated countercultural activists or hippie dropouts. 
Kesey was radicalized to some extent while at Perry Lane, enough to be
acutely aware of the sterility of the suburbanized, homogenized, and
depersonalized aspects of American society; but his base of criticism
was closer to that of Hank than that of Lee.  Consequently, he looked
toward an old-fashioned frontier tradition of self-reliant
individualism for solutions and not, as many of his young protégés,
toward a thin-blooded intellectualism, radical politics, or withdrawal
into youthcult.  His drug explorations were more a search for new
sources and forms of artistic expression than they were a political or
cultural rebellion; they were more a quest for heightened consciousness
than an escape from an unsatisfactory society. (90)

Tanner grossly overstates his case here.  Extolling heightened
consciousness, as an awakening to a new wilderness, became Kesey’s
rebellion.  Kesey was as animated and expressive about this as any
later hippie.  The hippie, in order to be hippie, shared this core
motive.  Kesey was the prototypical hippie, a seminal figurehead, an
intrepid catalyst for the countercultural epoch
.  
[...]Tanner also contends that Kesey’s search through drugs for new
sources of artistic expression contrasts with the purely escapist
pursuits of his “youthful protégés.”  This statement is patently
elitist.  Judgment placed on Kesey’s drug use is one matter, but to
suggest a loftier motive for Kesey presupposes that his activities were
superior to the individuals who later experimented with these same
drugs in the years that followed.  

Great Notion was brilliantly “elephantine,” but the issue of drug use
today, where public discourse is overwhelmingly anti-drug, has created
an elephant in the room that is usually ignored and rarely discussed
candidly.  The use of hallucinogens in the late ‘60s and beyond
involved the same sort of experimentation as Kesey engaged in, and for
a host of personal and cultural reasons––including spiritual, artistic,
consciousness-expanding, hedonistic or purely escapist. 

Considering the frequency of his drug use, Kesey, at different times,
probably used psychedelics for all these reasons.  To his credit,
Tanner did not allow a judgmental attitude toward the counterculture to
influence his literary analysis of Kesey’s work.      
  

    
Can't let it go without commenting on:

"I can see why that kind of talk would be more compelling than talk about
 how a psychedelic experience brings the user an understanding of how
 there's no higher power, that it's all up to us.

 I think that part of my frustration with the assertion that the hippie
 investment in spirituality played such a big role in the counterculture is
 that, in the hippie world I lived in, that just wasn't true."

It was just the opposite for me.  I want into my first acid experiences as
an atheist college kid looking to party.   But a couple a serious out-there
experiences opened me up the the realization of just how limited our
perception is, and how limited the whole western concept of God is.   Two
particularly massive doses, about 6 months apart, in 1967, allowed me to
experience the "ego death" I'd heard about.  And in that, I lost the
boundary between me and the rest of existence.   It was related to the
Siddartha on the bridge episode that Hesse closes the book with, and it also
made sense of the end of Casteneda's "Journey to Ixtlan" in that my old
world and my home in it are gone forever.   In essence, it forever exposed
what we call reality for the sad joke that it is.
  

    
>>> my old world and my home in it are gone forever. 

They were an illusion anyway.

>>> In essence, it forever exposed
what we call reality for the sad joke that it is.

That's what I call the "cosmic giggle". 
  

    

The punchline is spiritual and profane at the same time.
  

    
>>> We haven't talked a whole lot about The Fan Man by William
Kotzwinkle.  What struck you most about this book as a "hippie
narrative"?

Anyone who has seen The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith, will
remember the spaced out old hippie who, at one point, steals Smith's
bone density measuring device thinking that it is a time machine.
[Except that the movie should be entitled The Pursuit of Affluence, and
its treatment of this spaced out character demonstrates the kind of
simplistic lampooning of hippies that always irks me], this is pretty
close to the Horse Badorties character, though Horse is far more
three-dimensional.

The most striking aspect of the short novel is that it is rendered in
first person/ present tense.  Every movement and every minute decision
made by horse comes through the immediacy of Horse's stoned out eyes. 
He wakes up from his bed of disgusting junk, then a minute later, he
must sit down because he is worn out.  He lives in a tenement amid
piles of trash--even his roaches have roaches.

The character is unconventional,but there is a straightforward
plotline that evolves, and the book successfully transports the readers
into the madcap euphoria of this fallen-through-the-cracks character.

I was not able to find out much about William Kotzwinkle, except that
he wrote Dr. Rat, the novelized version of E.T. and a few others.

The Fan Man is an outrageous spoof of the utopian and spiritual
assumptions of the Beat/hippie scene in Greenwich Village in the late
'50s and early '60s.  Horse Badorties is a remnant relic of better
times, but even he has an odd form of spiritual redemption near the end
of the novel.   

 
  

    
On Vonnegut's passing...

In his later career it became clear that Vonnegut had surpassed even
Mark Twain in his misanthropy.  This most human of all writers had
become so soured on humanity.  There was none of the 60s idealism
evident in the counter-cultural canon that Scott has so ably & justly
celebrated in his book, & which, as Scott stated in an early post, he
sought to be an inspiration to the current generation--

the current generation that, unlike the 60s young people, have done so
little to protest a war that is, I perceive, no less heinous than
Vietnam, perhaps even worse in some ways.  There is an extreme exigency
for writers, other artists, & thinkers who can re-kindle idealism in
this country & spark the imagination, spirit, & activism of today's
youth.  

  
  

    
>>> There is an extreme exigency for writers, other artists, &
thinkers who can re-kindle idealism in this country & spark the
imagination, spirit, & activism of today's youth.  


Nicely put, Robyn.  This is related to what Robert and I were
discussing this morning on the sin of ennui/ collectivist hopefulness/
and needing new insights to sincerely accomplish such change.  
  

    
>There is an extreme exigency for writers, other artists, & thinkers
who can re-kindle idealism in this country & spark the imagination,
spirit, & activism of today's youth.<

I think a little fuel is also needed, perhaps a draft?  More
seriously, each era tends to have a unique blend of issues and forces
that come together in unique timing. Attributing a social movement too
firmly to several factors is not much better than the Great Man theory
of history and both are products of 20/20 hindsight. 

Regardless of the limitations of politicians, they are disposed to
take what is there and make something of it. What they make is not
often pretty. I keep reminding myself that Hitler was an idealist. 
  

    
I have another weird question following from the subject of this book.

What about the children of the hippies and wannabe hippies?  What artists
came from a hippie parent background?

In sports I can think of Pikaboo Street and Khalil Green (I think I just
misspelled both of them).  Do we have writers who are Gen II Hip?
  

    
(Picabo)
  

    
(thanks! and greene, not green)
  

    

Hannah Teter, the gold=medal-winning snowboarder from the last Winter
Olympics grew up with hippie parents in Vermont.

Among musical types, Courtney Love is a pretty famous example, although
whether her father, Hank Harrison, was a hippie or just a hustler
scamming the scene is subject to debate.
  

    
Cynthia's rant reminds me of a party I went to in 1966 thrown by some
of the scientists at the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute, where
sanctioned psychedelic experimentation for therapeutic treatment of
alcoholics was going on. It was almost a who's who: Dr. Humphry Osmond
(the man who coined the word "psychedelic"), Emmett Grogan, Allen
Ginsberg, and Ralph Metzner, the third of the Leary-Alpert-Metzner
group. He seemed totally pissed off, and at one point I remember him
going off: "Kids today don't understand LSD! They're taking it for
*fun*! That's not what it's for!" I remember staring at him, with a
million questions crowding my brain, starting with either "who are you
to say what it's for" or "well, what do you think it's for?" Instead my
girlfriend and I went outside into the cornfield and smoked some pot,
where we were shortly joined by an exasperated Ginsberg, who'd tried to
engage Metzner. 

>>I was not able to find out much about William Kotzwinkle, except
that he wrote Dr. Rat, the novelized version of E.T. and a few others.

Kotzwinkle, as I understand it, disappeared into Hollywood
screenwriter hell, and I see on IMDB that he's credited with writing
Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and doubtless other stuff I couldn't search
for. 
  

    

We've talked at least briefly about most of the books you examine in
"The Hippie Narrative" (some more than others, of course). I noticed
that in one of the last chapters, you look at three essays about the
hippies and weave these into an essay of your own. Can you describe
why you shifted from looking at full books to these essays, Scott?
  

    
>> from Gail: Do we have writers who are Gen II Hip?

Bode Miller, the the US Olympic skier, grew up with hippie parents in
a New Hampshire cabin w/o indoor plumbing.  He also wrote a book (with
help) called Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun.

Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture, by Chelsea Cain is a
sympathetic look at growing up in a hippie commune.

As for literary writers whose parents were hippies, with all the MFA
in Creative Writing programs sprouting up and, now that the children of
hippies are reaching their twenties and thirties, it's probably only a
matter of time.  

Tom Wolfe made a point of how surprised he was that the counterculture
didn't spawn more serious novels about itself in the late '60s.  The
Hippie Narrative, I hope, disproves the idea that there was no quality
fiction about the era written then.  Wolfe claimed that the publishers
were on the look-out for such literature, but very little surfaced. 
What they received, according to Wolfe were too many manuscripts on
"The Prince of Alienation."  

There is certainly a compelling argument that the reason there were so
few contemporaneous works about the counterculture had to do with how
difficult it was to discuss this phenomenon in its many permutations,
especially as it was erupting. 

There's a part of me that wonders if there isn't an aversion on the
part of the large publishers (and literary agents) to steer clear of
fiction about the hippie era. This could apply to the children of
hippies writing memoir, and for hippies too.   
  

    
>> from Captward:  Kotzwinkle, as I understand it, disappeared into
Hollywood screenwriter hell, and I see on IMDB that he's credited with
writing Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and doubtless other stuff I couldn't
search for.

The last I could tell when I researched this was that Kotzwinkle had
gone somewhat underground in Maine with his wife. With his track record
writing the E.T. novel, the screenwriter's hell angle makes sense,
too. All I can say is ain't it a shame––Kotzwinkle is such fine writer
to waste his talent in Nightmare land.
  

    
>>> you look at three essays about the hippies and weave these into an
essay of your own. Can you describe why you shifted from looking at
full books to these essays, Scott?

When I was in the process of writing The Hippie Narrative, I was
looking forward to picking up Joan Didion's book, Slouching Toward
Bethlehem.  Considering her reputation as a sensitive and astute
observer of American culture and as one of the New Journalists of the
'60s, I was expecting it to provide a sympathetic (or at least
partially sympathetic) portrayal of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Frankly,
I was also bothered that I hadn't found any hippie narratives written
by women, so was looking forward to including this.

What I found on that ferry coming back from San Juan Island (which is
the story frame of my own essay that discusses these other essays), was
that "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" was not a full book, but rather an
article/essay that Didion had first published in September 1967 in the
Saturday Evening Post.  

The essay helped launch her career as an author––and she is a fine
writer––but as I studied her essay, I had several problems with her
oversimplification of the story.  She made many astute observations,
but she was largely pandering to a pejorative assessment of the hippie
scene by focusing on the extremes of the crumbling street world of the
Haight.  She used this to denigrate and lament the whole phenomenon.

I had also read Denis Johnson's essay "The Hippies" from his
collection "Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond" (2001).
 I loved his rendition of going to the 1996 Rainbow Gathering in
eastern Oregon.

In addition, when I was nearing completion of my manuscript, I wrote
to Tom Robbins on the outside chance that he would be willing to write
a foreword for The Hippie Narrative. He politely declined, but in
addition to writing me that it was about time someone wrote a serious
analysis of counterculture literature, he also asked me if I had read
his essay called "The Sixties" from his collection "Wild Ducks Flying
Backwards."

Along with my own memories of the Rainbow Gathering, and of hitchiking
and of being a hippie, this started coalescing in my head when I met
the young dreadheaded hitchhiker on the ferry.  Robbins' insightful
overview, Johnson's latterday hippie experience while loaded on
'shrooms, and Didion's attempt to make sense of the chaos of
Haight-Ashbury at that explosive moment in time, allowed me to try to
show that the hippie scene, though it withered, never fully died.  

Also, the personal essay is a form of narrative, and these three
pieces were outstanding representatives of the form as hippie
narrative.  "An Essay on Slouching, Hippies, and Hitchhiking" was the
most experimental of my chapters, featuring this weave of essays,
meta-narrative, and a touch of memoir to give a cultural overview to
the hippie phenomenon.   

 
  

    
>>> Joan Didion's book, Slouching Toward
Bethlehem.

Speaking of whom, there's a great picture of her "with hippies in
Golden Gate Park in 1967" in the latest Cal alumni magazine.
  

    
And, thanks to Google, here it is:

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h=135&tbnw=91&prev=/images%3Fq%3Djoan%2Bdidion%2B1967%26gbv%3D2%26svnum%3D10%2
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