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I can just make out ‘beatnik,’ jammed in the back
of what I still call the ‘ice box,’ its delinquent expiration sticker
out of sight behind the Jell-O salad and the moldy fondue
--Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight is fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
--Leonard Cohen
Now nothing remains for building or burning
The losing of lovers was all I was learning
A time to escape and a time for returning had come to me
--Phil Ochs
You were born too soon
I was born too late
But every time I look at that ugly lake
It reminds me of you
--Violent Femmes
beat’s moot, a tomb
beats mood, doom
even a beat snood
holds jello brains together
beat’s through, a trough
zookeeper’s snorkle into
beat’s elapsed, collapsed
its time’s run out the exit door
into backward streets of kitsch
& socialist realist hero statues
& retroactive sales of books & other stuff
beat’s dead, ‘nuff said
it’s rotting in the tool shed with Dada
--David Meltzer, in Beat Thing
In the year 2004, we view the Beat Movement through the lens of history. It’s changed somewhat. A word that initially referred to a small school of poets that merged poetry and prose (and like most schools, this one started as a miniscule clique) grew to refer to the entire pre-hippie counterculture, not only a broad group of artistic movements but a Generation, a vast collection of theories, rebellions, lifestyles, and ideas that all presented the speaker’s opinion that I do not have to accept your ideas as my own; I do not have to live like you, act like you, be like you, think like you, want the same things you want or hold the same ideals you hold. The Beat Movement, as defined today, has little to do with rhythm, but has become a generic anthem for freedom. Other than historians of the 20th Century and actual poets, people my age generally consider On the Road a historical document, one that remains unread with The Communist Manifesto and other failed political experiments.
The freedom offered by both the literal and modern definitions of “Beat" was uniquely American. Beats were raised on American idealism and cursed with the intelligence to see that Americans didn’t give a fetid coyote shit about their much-discussed ideals. Kerouac most famously discussed the inherent value of our land and diverse peoples, but it was always a part of the Beat Movement; a discussion of Beat is impossible without an understanding of Jazz, and the cover image of Beat Thing is an appropriate photograph of Meltzer reading in front of a somewhat irate-looking jazz band in ’58. Calls for artistic and social freedom happen everywhere, but the specific flavor of the Beat Movement had to happen in the minds of people who kept the Atlantic on the right side of their brains and the Pacific on the left. Beat geared up as McCarthy did, spent its days taking pot shots at J. Edgar’s fat ass, and diffused under Reaganomics as counterculture and free love became amusing, but highly marketable, aspects of our idealistic past. Stick that copy of Junky in between the Manson t-shirt and the jolly nigger bank; it’s all Americana now. And after November 2004, now that the final nail is driven into the coffin of American ideals of freedom, now that we begin the final leg of our slow and inexorable march into Fascism, the Beat Movement is history, man, gone the way of digging it and groovy times, gone the way of the commies, the hippies, the anarchists, the objectivists, the individuals. A library of hilarious anecdotes and trivial criticisms, written increasingly by people like me who were not yet an itch in daddy’s pants, bury the Beat Movement in a flood of words as murderous as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. beat’s dead, ‘nuff said.
Except, of course, for the inconvenient fact that David Meltzer and many other Beats are still alive.
Since my intention was to review Beat Thing (insofar as you can call this mess a review), I was careful not to read anything about it beforehand, and was rather surprised by what I actually got. Those who are seeking to increase their growing knowledge of chucklesome Beat trivia will find little in Beat Thing. This book is not written to be a help to Beat historians, except that Beat historians generally get off on Beat poetry, and this book is one wall-to-wall, enormous, hyper-epic Beat poem. Meltzer’s feel for the beat behind Beat has always been unique, and Beat Thing is raw and refined and quintessential Meltzer. You can easily hear his voice narrate the entire book for you; and if you’ve never heard a Meltzer recording and are too lame to buy one, shit, just make a voice up, the Meltzer in your head has an amazing ability to read a zillion-word poem without a break. The cadence, throughout the work, is clear and powerful, as easy to hear when he dips into prose as when he uses tiny, tortured staccato lines. In sharp defiance of Beat kitsch, this is very visceral, pelvic writing, born of the guttural strands of Jazz music that are descended from when Africans used to use repetitive noises in their Satanic rites. Or something like that; you’ll have to forgive me, Americans aren’t big on world history.
The point is that Beat Thing is poetry, Beat poetry, a brilliantly-executed epic example of an art form that looks suspiciously dead. The death of an art form, however, is never absolute, always tongue-in-cheek, and certainly doesn’t mean that the art form can’t inflict ecstasy and injury.
The book begins with a chapter called The Beat Thing Looms Up, 44 pages of orderly images chaotically arranged, defying chronology and moving only to the interior logic of memory. At first glance, the casual reader who is unfamiliar with the details of the Beat Movement might find this section confusing. This chapter is filled with names of people you don’t know, in places you’ve never heard of, sashaying and vomiting and gossiping and fucking all over the page, generally doing things that probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time, and their motives certainly aren’t explained. They are captured in image, fleeting or extended, and if you think you’re reading the book to learn about them, you’ll get nowhere. Meltzer never tells you the history behind these names, and the less you know about their history, the more you can enjoy the work. From page 21:
Start a new world a new day buy a two-bit bag of biscotti at Green Street Italian bakery, then get free coffee from poet counterman Bob Stock at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop:
Chris Maclaine in sporty tweed cap speeds into audio range w/ hipster murmurs to the Bellsons already there; the Vignes (Dion & Lorelei) frazzle in their sizzle against the wall, something’s going down; Mike Nathan, Bobby Fischer of painting, ambles in, twichy laugh, hair scythe cleaves face; Hube the Cube’s reads the morning Chronicle in yet another new orbit of comic chemic roulette, cigarettesmoke turns his beard into redwood; hungover Tom Albright croaks significance to Irene Taverner, Bird’s U.K. penpal; Paddy O’Sullivan gums croissant, silk cape frayed, tricorner hat smashed, its plume bent; Patricia Marx blue eyes you don’t lie to, she said “I want to kiss you to see how it feels," an experiment, eros empirically shopping…
The idea is not to know what’s going on; the idea is to let Meltzer take you for a ride, through a time and place that never made sense and need not now. He writes with constant irony, with the knowledge that he is reducing to words moments that were too big to live in books in the first place. The text is peppered with some of the creepiest photos of Beat icons I’ve ever seen, and many Beat icons took pretty creepy pictures to begin with. Under a terrifying photo of Allen Ginsberg and Wallace Berman, Meltzer ends the chapter with his final word on the impossibility of writing a proper history of the Beat Movement:
who’s beat now & then
who keeps score
who’re the gatekeeper guys & gals who bar office doors
you need a password a look a book an agent &
good connections
