On The 60th Anniversary Defend The Gains Of The Cuban Revolution- As Fidel Passes-"One Hundred Years Of Solitude"?- A Guest Review Of A Biography Of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Click On Title To Link To Guest Book Review Of The Life Of Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Commentary

Although I have reviewed a number of novels, political or otherwise, in this space over the past several years the name of the Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been mentioned here only in passing as one of the "talking heads" in documentary reviews about his long time friend, the Cuban Revolution's Fidel Castro. This recent biography of Marquez, which I have not read yet, according to the guest book review cited above delves into that relationship. In any case, for those with a bent toward biography this will have to do for now. I will review the few Marquez's novels that I have read, including the magically realistic (whee!) One Hundred Years Of Solitude, at some later time. GGM-RIP-April 2014 

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Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-On The 60th Anniversary -Writer's Corner-Jack Kerouac's Classic Searching For America Novel "On The Road"

On The 60th Anniversary -Writer's Corner-Jack Kerouac's Classic Searching For America Novel "On The Road"

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Jack Kerouac's master work "On The Road". I will be doing a separate review of this work shortly. Also see entry dated today, October 19, 2009, in this space entitled "On The Road" And On The Sidelines" reviewing a 1986 documentary about Jack Kerouac's life and some personal reflections on the effect that "On The Road" had on me as a youth.

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis) Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when they acolytes came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands). Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine),   Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Poet's Corner- William Butler Yeats' "Meditations In Time Of Civil War"

Markin comment:

The times in America are out of joint, no question. The smell of civil war, at some primal level, fills my nostrils today and hence to thoughts of William Butler Yeat's highly symbolic, if not strictly politically on point, poem.


Meditations In Time Of Civil War
poem of William Butler Yeats


I. Ancestral Houses

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
And not a fountain, were the symbol which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known;
But when the master's buried mice can play.
And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.

O what if gardens where the peacock strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,
Or else all Juno from an urn displays
Before the indifferent garden deities;
O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
And Childhood a delight for every sense,
But take our greatness with our violence?

What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
The pacing to and fro on polished floors
Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
With famous portraits of our ancestors;
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?


II. My House

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing Stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
A candle and written page.
Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on
In some like chamber, shadowing forth
How the daemonic rage
Imagined everything.
Benighted travellers
From markets and from fairs
Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms
Gathered a score of horse and spent his days
In this tumultuous spot,
Where through long wars and sudden night alarms
His dwinding score and he seemed castaways
Forgetting and forgot;
And I, that after me
My bodily heirs may find,
To exalt a lonely mind,
Befitting emblems of adversity.


III. My Table

Two heavy trestles, and a board
Where Sato's gift, a changeless sword,
By pen and paper lies,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness.
A bit of an embroidered dress
Covers its wooden sheath.
Chaucer had not drawn breath
When it was forged. In Sato's house,
Curved like new moon, moon-luminous
It lay five hundred years.
Yet if no change appears
No moon; only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art.
Our learned men have urged
That when and where 'twas forged
A marvellous accomplishment,
In painting or in pottery, went
From father unto son
And through the centuries ran
And seemed unchanging like the sword.
Soul's beauty being most adored,
Men and their business took
Me soul's unchanging look;
For the most rich inheritor,
Knowing that none could pass Heaven's door,
That loved inferior art,
Had such an aching heart
That he, although a country's talk
For silken clothes and stately walk.
Had waking wits; it seemed
Juno's peacock screamed.


IV. My Descendants

Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there's but common greenness after that.

And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless min that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.

The primum Mobile that fashioned us
Has made the very owls in circles move;
And I, that count myself most prosperous,
Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl's love,
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument and mine.


V. The Road at My Door

An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.

A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear-tree broken by the storm.

I count those feathered balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream.
To silence the envy in my thought;
And turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.


VI. The Stare's Nest by My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the state.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.


VII. I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's
Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind's eye.

'Vengeance upon the murderers,' the cry goes up,
'Vengeance for Jacques Molay.' In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,
The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,
Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,
Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide
For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray
Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried
For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
Have closed the ladies' eyes, their minds are but a pool
Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,
The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,
Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,
Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

Poet's Corner- William Butler Yeats' "Leda And The Swan"

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of a recital of William Butler Yeats' Leda and the Swan.


Leda And The Swan- William Butler Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?



A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[20]

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

***Writer's Corner- F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side Of Paradise"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Book Review

This Side Of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Simon& Schuster, New York, 1920

There was a time when if I used the name of the 20th century American writer Ernest Hemingway it also almost always meant that name of the author under review, F. Scott Fitzgerald, would follow in the next breathe (and then John Dos Passos). At that time I placed Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” and Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby” pretty closely together as exemplars of strong, non-nonsense writing styles and sparse but meaningful dialogue, along with a great narrative. “Gatsby” still certainly holds up. I find though , especially after re-reading this Fitzgerald first effort that put his name high up on the post-World War I literary scene, “This Side of Paradise”, that Hemingway has won the literary “battle” for the number one spot as the premier writer of that period. Strangely that period, “The Jazz Age” of the 1920s, is known as such in great part due to this book and is forever associated with Fitzgerald’s name.

As is to be expected from a first novel this book is very great indebted to the bits and pieces of autobiographical sketches that hold it together. And, moreover, is driven by the college exploits of the main and most developed character, Amory Blaine, at Fitzgerald’s alma mater, Princeton. The long and short of the story line is a very self-conscious attempt by Blaine , including plenty of now seemingly obscure literary references, to find out the mysteries of the meaning of life as a writer. That premise does not work so well in the college milieu that dominates the first part of the book. After all, many college students from time immemorial, from elite colleges and public universities alike, has thrashed over those questions, some successfully, some not.

What really made this book important (aside from a glimpse of “Jazz Age” manners, mores, styles and ennui) is the second part, after college and after Blaine had done military service during World War I in France (although the details of this service are only sketchily drawn). World War I acted a great divide for many of the men, and it was mainly men in those days, who suffered through it. The straight line, as the story line here details, from college to one’s proper place in the upper echelons of society got derailed, and not solely in Blaine’s case. This dislocation is mainly drawn out here as a spiritual crisis for Blaine but it also evoked class, sexual relations (almost all turning sour, for one reason or another), and life style. This is the heart of the book and the heart of Blaine’s (and Fitzgerald’s) dilemma: how to resolve the moral crisis within oneself without upsetting the social applecart that allows the wherewithal for such introspection.

What does not work here and what in the end makes this an unsatisfying work is Blaine’s rather vague and sudden attachment to some form of socialism near the end of the book. Although revolution was in the air and the great revolutionary efforts in Europe, including the seminal Bolshevik revolution in Russia, were in full blast for most of the book one would not know that things like the American government-driven Palmer Raids "red scare”, the split in the left-wing socialist movement in reaction to the American entry into the war and support of the Russian revolution, and the establishment of the American Communist Party were taking place. Blaine’s socialism is of a rather diluted sort, one suspects. Still this is a great first effort and if for no other reason that the display of Fitzgerald's' skill with language is worth reading, and re-reading.

On The 100th Anniversary Of The Bau Haus- From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"- Planning for Collective Living in the Early Soviet Union-Architecture As a Tool of Social Transformation

Markin comment on this article:

Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for leftist militants to think about these questions that are not always directly related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle today. I have made some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.

A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.

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Planning for Collective Living in the Early Soviet Union-Architecture As a Tool of Social Transformation

by Vladimir Zelinski, Women and Revolution, Spring 1976

"Despite all our emancipatory laws, woman remains now as before a domestic slave, since she is oppressed, suffocated, dulled, debased by the petty tasks of housework, which chain her to the kitchen and the nursery and cause her to dissipate her creative powers in downright barbarically unproductive, petty, unnerving, deadening, depressing labor. The true liberation of woman, true communism, will begin only where and when (under the leadership of the proletariat at the helm of the state) the mass struggle against these petty household tasks or, more correctly, their transformation en masse into large-scale socialist economy begins." —Lenin, "The Great Initiative" (1919)

The Bolshevik program for the full emancipation of women through the replacement of the oppressive family structure by alternative institutions for the socialization of domestic labor implied a radically new set of architectural priorities and tasks requiring a re¬thinking of the fundamental premises of social architecture.

In its announcement of a competition for the design of a communal dwelling in 1926 the Moscow City Soviet explained:

"It is the duty of technological innovation, the duty of the architect, to place new demands on housing and to design in so far as possible a house that will transform the so-called family hearth from a boring, confining cell that at present burdens down women in particular into a place of pleasant and carefree relaxation. A new life demands new forms.

"The worker does not desire his mother, wife or sisters tobe a nursery maid, washerwoman or cook with unlimited hours; he does not desire children to rob him and particularly their mother of the possibility of employing their free time for social labor, mental and physical pleasures "

The abolition of the private ownership of the land, which had already been accomplished, pointed the way to a successful resolution of the problems posed for home design (as well as for city planning and the service sector) in carrying out the elimination of the household oppression of women.

Under capitalism, the city planner's life is one of continual frustration as he tries, in vain, to reconcile the conflicting interests of dozens or hundreds of private property holders and land speculators who then require further appeasement in the form of tax concessions, rent subsidies, zoning variances and the like to ensure the profitability of the shoddy housing that they may (or may not) erect. The growth of cities (and their collapse) is in principle uncontrolled, and physical and aesthetic squalor the accepted norm.

One of the first acts of the new proletarian regime (14 December 1917) had been to forbid all speculation in land. In 1918 a series of laws expropriated without compensation the landed estates of the gentry as well as all city structures yielding an income above that set by the local authorities. Thus the Soviet city planner had (and in principle still has) to concern himself primarily with social values—the creation of a rationally organ¬ized, amenable urban environment on the basis of human needs.


But the country inherited by the new workers state was near total collapse. In World War I and the civil war that followed it, Russia had lost some 20 million people. The output of heavy industry was in 1920 only one seventh of what it had been in 1913; the transportation system was virtually non-functioning, while the social base with which to rebuild the country—a trained working class—had suffered extremely great losses in the civil war, since it was precisely the skilled workers who, as dedicated Bolsheviks, had volunteered for the Red Army being constructed by Trotsky. From 1917 to 1920 almost no new construction could be undertaken; the best that could be done was to redistribute to the workers the luxury apartments of the bourgeoisie in the major cities. But construction materials were in such short supply that even the existing housing could not be maintained, and foreign visitors were horrified at the deterioration of the country's entire physical plant.

It was not until 1925 that the new workers state began, albeit only partially, to overcome the circumstances of its birth, so that the architecture of the '20's divides naturally into two parts: 1920-25, a period which saw the creation of some brilliant designs but in which next to nothing was actually built; and 1925-31, when the new architects were able to commence the reconstruc¬tion of the nation's physical plant. Even so, it is estimated that no more than 10-12 communal houses were built in the entire country before Stalin's rehabilitation of the nuclear family and "Soviet motherhood" put an end to this work.

In addition to material obstacles, these revolutionary architects, proponents of a functional modern archi¬tecture, had from about 1928 onward to contend increasingly with the turn-of-the-century eclecticism promoted by the emerging bureaucracy and its sycophants in the realm of the arts. While striking modern architecture was still being erected as late as 1931 -32, this was on the basis of contracts awarded years before. The final death knell of innovative Soviet architectural design was sounded in 1932 when the bureaucracy awarded one of the surviving hacks of the old regime first prize in a competition for the symbolic structure of the country, the Palace of the Soviets Only the intervention of World War II prevented this monument to Stalin's megalomania from being visit* on the people of Moscow.

Communal Dwellings

"Are we devoting enough attention to the germs of communism that already exist in this area [of 1 liberation of women}? No and again no. Public dining halls, creches, kindergartens-these are exemplary instances of these germs, these are those simple, everyday means, free of all bombast, grandiloquence and pompous solemnity, which, however, are truly such that they can //berate woman, truly such that they can decrease and do away with her inequality v.s-a-vis man in regard to her role in social production and in public life. These means are not new, they have (like all the material prerequisites of socialism) been created by large-scale capitalism, but under capitalism they have firstly remained a rarity, secondly-and they were either hucksterish enterprises, with all bad sides of speculation, of profit-making, of deception, of falsification or else they were! a trapeze act of bourgeois charity, rightly hated and disdained by the best workers.

—Lenin, "The Great Initiative"

The communal dwellings of the '20's constituted an initial effort to translate Lenin's.demands into realty Early Soviet planners envisioned the individual  dwelling  area as a place to which residents would resort mainly for sleeping, reading "cabins" were minuscule, with only 6-9 square met floor space per person-a qualitative improvement nevertheless over the 3-4 square meters (about 6 by 7) per person that were average for apartments shared by two or more families in major Russian cities> m.the 1930's. Apart from this, the architects deliberately designed small apartments to render sharing impossible.

Like the workers clubs, the communes of the 20 were conceived as the social matrix for the new society, a culture medium out of which new social attitudes would arise by virtue of the physical and organizational shaping given to everyday life by the new architecture. It is this which, as Lenin noted, fundamentally distinguished them from seemingly similar projects in the West where there was no notion of using architecture as a means to the social transformation of man. As the Russian artist and architect El Lissitzky said: "The basic elements of our architecture belong to the social revolution and not the technological one."

And new social attitudes did arise in the new housing units, particularly among women, who benefited from them the most. While the long waiting lists for admittance to the communes reflected less a convic¬tion that they represented a higher form of social interaction than a desire for the facilities with which they were equipped—electricity, heat and running water—most women, delighted to be relieved of the brunt of household drudgery, soon concluded that private family life was intolerable. According to

People's Commissar for Social Welfare Aleksandra Kollontai:

"...where previously the women were particularly anxious to have a household of their own,...today, on the contrary, it is the husband who suggests that it would not be a bad idea to take a flat, have dinner at home and the wife always about—while the women, especially the growing numbers of women workers who are being drawn into the Republic's creative activities, will not even hear of a 'household of one's own.' 'Better to separate than to agree to a family life with a household and the petty family worries; now I am free to work for the Revolution, but then—then I would be fettered. No, separation would be preferable.' And the husbands have to make the best of it."

—Aleksandra Kollontai, Women's Labor in Economic Development

The architects of the time were characteristically uncompromising in their social goals. Typical of the clarity with which these goals were translated into structural realities is the exceptionally elegant 1929 design by Barshch and Vladimirov for a communal dwelling for 1,000 adults and 680 children. Housing was by age group, with a ten-story main building for adults and, perpendicular to it, a six-story wing for the younger children and a five-story one for those of school age.

In the main building, the first four floors were planned as a communal area containing a vestibule, dining hall, club and recreation rooms, while the remaining six stories were devoted to small, two-person sleeping rooms. Clearly the architects' desire was to create an environment in which nearly all activity except sleep would be social.

As for the children, the ground floor of the building for pre-schoolers was occupied by the entry and reception rooms, while the upper stories held 12 rooms for 30 children each. Adjacent to this building was one with a large, airy veranda. The building for school children falls into two parts: in the first two stories were the entry and workshops; in the upper three the classrooms and accessory rooms. Each dormitory was designed to hold 28 students and each of the eight classrooms 40.

In occupying only ten percent of the land on which it was to be erected and in resting on columns, thus elevated from the ground which it would occupy, this design has a lightness and airiness characteristic of much Russian revolutionary architecture.

Barshch and Vladimirov's design is a consistent realization of the ideals animating revolutionary architects regarding the replacement of the nuclear family by new ties of comradeship in a radical transformation of everyday life. In his book Sotsial-isticheskie Coroda (Socialist Cities), written in 1930, L. Sabsovich asserted:

"This socialist reconstruction of the way of life must be begun at once and be carried out for all working people, both in the cities and the countryside, in the course of the next five to eight years.... Every sort of transitional form is the expression of a completely unjustifiable opportun¬ism— There should be no rooms in which man and wife can live together The rooms will be used mainly for sleeping, individual recuperation and, in a few instances, individual occupations." In a roughly contemporary article in Sovremennaya Arkhitektura Sabsovich defined more clearly his view of the communist way of life:

"When life is organized on a socialist basis each worker may be regarded as a potential 'bachelor' or as a potential 'husband' or 'wife,' to the extent that today's bachelor may be tomorrow's husband and today's couple may tomorrow be separated. [Sabsovich envisaged "divorce" as being effected by a simple locking of the connecting door between two adjoining rooms.] At present many couples are living together unwillingly, compelled to do so, firstly, by the housing problem and also by the necessity of bringing up their children, even though the bond between them may be broken..,. When life is organized on a socialist basis, when the everyday necessities are being supplied by the state and the children are being collectively brought up, then these constraints will gradually disappear."

The architect V. Kuzmin, one of the leading proponents of collective housing, was even more categorical in his condemnation of the nuclear family: "The proletariat must at once set about the destruction of the family as an organ of oppression and exploitation. In the communal dwelling the family will, in my view, be a purely comradely, physiologically necessary and histori¬cally inevitable association between the working man and the working woman."

—V. Kuzmin, O rabochem zhilishchnom stroitel'stve (On Building Working-Class Dwell¬ings), Sovremennaya Arkhitektura No. 3,1928

Just how strongly entrenched the Bolshevik program was in the minds of party members is revealed by the fact that as late as 1930 Yuri Larin, in a speech before the Communist Academy, called for the elimination of individual kitchens in new apartment buildings, referring to the party's stated aim of feeding 50 percent of the population in communal restaurants. He also called for the construction of communal dwellings with attached nurseries, pointing out that in Moscow there were child-care facilities for only 50 children per 1,000 women—i.e., 1,000 potential workers—and noted the bad effect which the intolerable overcrowding was having on productivity.

Nonetheless it was inevitable that such extreme proposals should arouse opposition, and various attempts at compromise were made. Realizing that the economic backwardness of the country precluded, for the time at least, providing a conventional bourgeois apartment for every family and that those which were being built were in fact being allotted to groups of families, revolutionary architects attempted to find a solution that would both solve the housing problem and further communist consciousness.

It was soon realized that simple miniaturization of the traditional bourgeois apartment was no solution, since apartments with a living area of roughly 50 square meters were less costly to build than miniaturized versions or one-room apartments with the same bath and kitchen. Moreover, the rents of large private apartments would have placed them out of the reach of all but a few highly paid specialists, with the conse¬quence that they would have ended up occupied not by one family but by three or four, "thus creating not the framework for a new way of life but an intolerable existence for 60 percent of the population" (report of the Construction Committee of the R.F.S.R.—or "Stroikom"—1928).


In 1928 Stroikom set up aresearch and design section for the standardization of housing under the direction of Moses Ginzburg, chief editor of Sovremennaya Arkhitektura, the leading journal of Soviet architecture. After three months of labor, Stroikom reported that:

"Despite the extreme tightness of state funds, the provision of housing for millions of workers confronts us as one of our chief tasks.

"...the new types of housing must free as much as possible of the workers' time and energy for social and cultural activities, provide suitable means of relaxation, and facilitate the transition from individual housing to more collective forms."

Explaining the aims of the committee, Ginzburg added: "We consider that one of the important points that must be taken into account in building new apartments is the dialectics of human development. We can no longer compel the occupants of a particular building to live collectively, as we have attempted to do in the past, generally with negative results. We must provide for the possibility of a gradual, natural transition to communal utilization in a number of different areas. That is why we have tried to keep each unit isolated from the next, that is why we found it necessary to design the kitchen alcove as a standard element of minimum size that could be removed bodily from the apartment to permit the introduction of canteen catering at any given moment. We considered it absolutely necessary to incorporate certain features that would stimulate the transition to a socially superior mode of life, stimulate but not dictate...."

"Proletarian Culture"

One of the accusations regularly raised against the radical modernism of avantgarde Soviet architecture was its supposed absence of ties with the masses. These sleek designs, adherents of the emerging bureaucracy charged, had nothing in common with the new proletarian society, and were instead merely a slavish imitation of bourgeois fashions in the West.

The questions raised by such accusations are important. What should be the relationship between the artistic/literary intelligentsia and the proletariat? What sort of creative currents should the party promote? The answers provided by Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharsky and Bukharin were utterly unambigous: all were united in asserting the duty of the party to intervene against openly counterrevolutionary cur¬rents in art and literature while otherwise insisting on a hands-off policy in the cultural sphere.

Lenin's own tastes in art were rather conservative; he felt little personal sympathy for the radical modernism that came into vogue in Russia after the October Revolution, and it was probably he who approved the choice of a neo-classical entry colonnade in rudimen¬tary Doric style (by ex-bourgeois and later Stalinist hacks Shchuko and Helfreich) as an entry to the Smolny Institute, where he had met the Revolutionary Military Committee that directed the October uprising. However, this is his sole reported intervention into artistic decision-making; otherwise he assumed a position of benevolent neutrality, speaking out public¬ly only when some architectural claque attempted to arrogate to itself exclusive artistic rights to "proletari¬an" or "revolutionary" art in the young workers state. Similarly, Anatoli Luncharsky, People's Commissar of Art and Education, polemicized vigorously against artistic and literary movements which he felt stood in basic contradiction to Marxism, but promoted full freedom of cultural debate.


Trotsky's position on the role of the party in the cultural sphere was identical with Lenin's. In his "Communist Policy Toward Art" Trotsky stated that, while the party must be irreconcilably opposed to overtly counterrevolutionary art, its tasks were essen¬tially:

"to help the most progressive tendencies by a critical illumination of the road, but it does not do more than that. Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the historic processes of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and imperatively. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are, finally, domains in which it only orients itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can only lead it indirectly—"

Trotsky, indeed, explicitly rejected the notion of "proletarian art"—first of all, because of the proletari¬at's real cultural deprivation at the time of the seizure of state power:

"The proletariat is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that that society does not allow it access to culture."

—Trotsky, "What is Proletarian Culture and is it Possible?"

In addition, in the initial years of the proletarian regime (at least in backward Russia) the main tasks of the proletariat were necessarily the creation of the material conditions for general access to culture. "That is why a machine which automatically manufactures bottles is at the present time a first-rate factor in the cultural revolution," said Trotsky, "while a heroic poem is a tenth-rate factor... it is good when poets sing of the revolution and the proletariat, but a powerful turbine sings even better."

The very notion of a proletarian culture stands in contradiction to the basic tenets of Marxism:

"...there can be no question of a new culture, that is, of construction on a large historic scale during the period of dictatorship [of the proletariat]. The cultural reconstruc¬tion which will begin when the need of the iron clutch of a dictatorship unparalleled in history will have disap¬peared, will not have a class character. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there never will be any and in fact there is no reason to regret this. The proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away with class culture and to make way for human culture. We frequently seem to forget this."

—Trotsky, op. ci't.

Trotsky also ridiculed the sort of simplistic reduction-ism which then, as now, sometimes passed for Marxist criticism. Referring to Raskolnikov, a spokesman for the Na Postu group, Trotsky said:

"In works of art he ignores that which makes them works of art. This was most vividly shown in his remarkable judgment on Dante's The Divine Comedy, which in his opinion is valuable to us just because it enables us to understand the psychology of a certain class at a certain time. To put the matter that way means simply to strike out The Divine Comedy from the realm of art Dante was, of course, the product of a certain social milieu. But Dante was a genius. He raised the experience of his epoch to a tremendous artistic height....the Italian Marxist, old Antonio Labriola, wrote something like this: 'only fools could try to interpret the text of The Divine Comedy as through it were made of the cloth that Florentine merchants provided for their customers'." —Trotsky, op. ci't.

Thus Trotsky could assert that despite "the variations in feelings and states of mind in different classes...you won't deny that Shakespeare and Byron somehow speak to your soul and mine." And when the ignorantist Lebedinsky countered that, "They will soon stop speaking," Trotsky replied that the works of Shakespeare, Byron and Pushkin would still be around "when people will stop seeking in Marx's Capital for precepts for their practical activity and Capital will have become merely a historical document, together with the program of our party."

Urbanists and Deurbanists

Russian society was in the 1920's open to a degree inconceivable to citizens of the deformed and degen¬erated workers states today. Despite the ban on party factions, the old polemical traditions of Bolshevism were very much alive, so much so that the emerging bureaucracy required over a dozen years—from the death of Lenin to the Moscow trials—to definitively quash all overt political and intellectual opposition. In the meantime, bureaucratic control was asserted gradually and piecemeal throughout the country—first in the party, where the traditions of dissent ran strongest, then in the state apparatus and last in the field of culture, where the bureaucracy had first to achieve a consciousness reflecting its usurpatory role before it could begin to pursue its unequivocally regressive artistic policies.

As the Stalinist bureaucracy hardened, it gradually developed social cohesiveness and a world outlook corresponding to its balancing between imperialism and the proletarian property forms of October. For the revolutionary architects this meant that there was less and less chance of seeing their striking projects realized, as the bureaucracy increasingly favored an "impressive" academic eclecticism. Thus the terms of architectural debate were first deformed and then became increasingly unreal, as the revolutionary architects, faced with bureaucratic control over commissions, divided into urbanists and deurbanists. While the urbanists clung to the concept of the communal dwelling, to which they gave increasingly extreme and uncompromising forms, the deurbanists abandoned this synthesis in what essentially amounted to a loss of faith in the possibility of socialist reconstruc¬tion of the country's existing physical plant, with consequent abandonment of the city in favor of a pastoral existence based of course on the latest technology—rural electrification, decentralized pro¬duction and the like.


The' chief theoretician of the deurbanists, M. Okhitovich, rejected the notion of the city and put forward the reactionary/Utopian program (prior to the achievement of enormous leaps in technology and material superabundance; i.e., socialism) of a Russia dotted with individual dwellings—lightweight struc¬tures set in unspoiled natural surroundings. "No, let us be frank," he said, "communal houses, those enor¬mous, heavy, monumental, everlasting colossi, perma¬nently encumbering the landscape, will not solve the problem of socialist resettlement." Despite his avowed desire to introduce collective facilities into his housing, it is hard to see how this could have been done in circumstances of planned isolation, while the diffusion of the population would have militated against any but the lowest-level cultural facilities being accessible to the masses. In fact, Okhitovich's scheme had social rather than architectural roots: an increasing desire to withdraw from the bureaucratically run workers state into individual isolation, to substitute a sylvan idyll for commitment to the socialist ideal.

A complementary plan called for the evacuation of Moscow and the resettlement of its population along highways radiating out from the former urban center. New construction in the capital was to be banned and the abandoned areas gradually landscaped until what was left was an irreducible administrative/cultural core
plus a sort of historical museum of artificially preserved neighborhoods and monuments characteristic of the city's past.

Needless to say, the extreme positions of the deurbanizers and the violent counterproposals of the hard-pressed collectivizing urbanizers were grist for the mill of the emerging bureaucracy and its coterie of architectural hangers-on, organized in an off-shoot of Proletkult, the Vopra (All-Russian Association of Proletarian Architects). As in other fields of creative endeavor, an appeal to supposed Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy served only to becloud the real issue: the • conscious undoing of all the October Revolution had stood for.

It is important to realize that the dispute was not simply ideological, but had a material basis in the extreme backwardness and impoverishment of Russia in the 1920's. The existing stock of housing was decaying at a frightening rate, as lack of material rendered it impossible to replace broken pipes, missing tiles and window panes. Even in 1931 the average dwelling space per person was around four square meters in Moscow: indeed housing space per person had steadily declined since the Revolution, despite the new building programs, which had barely dented the vast need. These conditions of material deprivation were, as Trotsky pointed out, one of the major causes for the rise of a parasitic bureaucracy; and the role of this emergent bureaucracy as adjudicator of the strife and allocator of what little privilege the new society could offer is as apparent in architecture and public housing as elsewhere.

Stalinization

The Stalinist architectural "program" for the early '30's consisted of the following points:

1. Reduce costs! The government simply decreed (1

March 1931) a reduction in building costs for new

housing from an average of 170 to 104 rubles per square

meter.

2. Widely publicized campaigns for goals never

seriously expected to be met. In 1931 the first major all-

out drive to solve the housing problem was proclaimed

"by decision of the Council of People's Commissars

and at the personal initiative of Cde. Stalin," whereby New construction in the capital was to be banned and the abandoned areas gradually landscaped until what was left was an irreducible administrative/cultural core

700,000 new dwellings were supposed to be erected for workers in the Donets and Kuznets Basins, the Urals and Karaganda before the year's end. Of course, the country lacked the infrastructure to concentrate all its resources and trained personnel in a few regions, let alone to embark on so mammoth a construction program in the limited time allotted. For workers and functionaries on the spot, trying to cope with this bureaucratically induced chaos, the result was inevita¬bly personal cynicism and disillusionment with the socialist ideals supposedly inspiring such projects.

3. Under the slogan of "radical standardization," the Stalinists instituted a return to "traditional Russian"
modes of housing, i.e., the primitive wood log house of the peasant village, the very archetype of Russian
backwardness. German architect Wilm Stein, writing from Moscow, described the abrupt turnabout in a 1931 article for Bauweit:

"Everywhere the drums are now being beaten for the 'standard building'; the leap from the new revelation of 'socialist cities' to primitive little wood dwellings, for which plans and designs are being sent out in droves by the Office for Standardization, is being sweetened by the new advantages of the wooden house being discovered daily: 'The standard houses do not require any scarce materials such as iron and cement'; 'instead of 170 rubles per square meter in stone houses the square meter in wood houses costs only 80 rubles'; as further advantages of the standard wood house a savings in man hours for construction workers, the fact that engineers and technicians are not required, the short time of construc¬tion, the freeing of the rail system from the transport of building materials, etc., etc. are being mentioned."

Stein termed the decision to shift "from the socialist communal cities and their symphonies in steel, concrete and glass to simple peasant housing in wood" a "blow to communist theory"; this decision, he notes, "was made after a long dispute among the Communists—indeed, in the midst of this dispute—by a ukase of the Central Committee of the Party on 25 March [1931]."

4. The communal dwelling and with it the socialization of household labor were abandoned as "Utopian."
Thereby the full emancipation of women was deliberately postponed to an indefinite future (even as the
Stalinist regime began to nibble away at women's full legal equality with restrictions on abortion and divorce laws and with the glorification of "Soviet mother¬hood"). At the same time, ideological attacks were mounted on revolutionary architecture.

The pretentious, neo-classic facades erected from 1930 to 1950 were generally gigantic cover-ups— literally—of internal hollowness. Having catered to and promoted the backwardness of the working class, Stalin evidently felt compelled to buttress his authority and that of the usurpatory bureaucratic regime which he represented by resorting to the outward symbols of bourgeois power. Thus the airy lightness of early post-revolutionary architecture was replaced by a squat, oppressive style that seems a fitting tribute to the dead weight of the bureaucracy resting on the soil of "socialism in one country."

Post-War Soviet Architecture

Even apart from the havoc wreaked by World War II, Soviet housing and city design would have presented a picture bleak and dreary in the extreme. While great advances were made in housing the mass of the population and repairing the damage caused by the imperialist war, the economy remained distorted by bureaucratic usurpation of workers democracy and by generalized want. The housing that was built was either of the most drab, dull barracks type or the pretentiously tricked-out spup-sugar kitsch that appealed to the petty-bourgeoisified administrative hierarchy.

After Stalin's death, the bureaucracy as a whole realized that the current "socialist realist" style in architecture was making the Soviet Union a laugh¬ingstock throughout the world and promoting the notion of Russian backwardness, and a turn was carried out, announced by the results of the competition for the Hall of the Soviets inside the Kremlin walls—a structure that makes all the proper obeisances toward the same mid-20th-century steel and glass design which inspired New York's Lincoln Center.

It is not by chance that, despite their obvious advantages and greater rationality, communes have not been erected in the more than 50 years since the Stalinist take-over in Russia. This is simply a reflection of the fact that the oppressive nuclear family can never be eliminated under the bureaucratic regimes of the deformed and degenerated workers states.

Nevertheless, present-day architectural planning and design constitute an exemplary instance of why Trotskyists couple unconditional defense of the gains of the October Revolution with a call for a political revolution that would preserve these .gains while ousting the parasitic bureaucracy. Just what are these gains, then, in the field of architecture?

First, state ownership of the land, as the basis for rational city planning unhampered by the need to adjudicate the interests of hundreds of individual landholders (with whom under capitalism the "impar¬tial" state administrators are bound by countless ties). Second, state ownership of the means of production and the planned economy, which make it possible to allocate resources on a nation-wide scale in accord with the needs of the population. While considering cost factors (as any society must do in deciding how to allocate its surplus in productive investment), Soviet planning is not based on profitability criteria but on the satisfaction of social needs on a rational, planned basis (despite the manifest and fundamental perversion of this system by the bureaucracy).

Leninism is still social dynamite, both in and outside the deformed workers states. It, and the fragility of the bureaucracy as a parasitic caste not rooted in the proletarian property forms it ineffectively defends, account for the continued validity of Trotsky's evalua¬tion of the bureaucracy as a historically ephemeral phenomenon—as a caste, not a new class. A working-class political revolution with the establishment of democratically elected Soviets would, as in Hungary in 1956, bring about a swift dissolution of the bureaucracy, much of which—as the Hungarian example demonstrated—would probably go over to the side of the workers. While prophecies should in general be avoided, it seems safe to assert that as part of the overall activization of the hitherto atomized and passive population following the political revolution, com¬munes embodying the ideals of a proletarian state governed by workers democracy would spring up, as was the case in the 1920's, but starting from an infinitely superior material base. Here, too, the liberation of women will be part of and a consequence of the self-liberation of the working class."

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)- The Jack Kerouac- Allen Ginsberg Letters- A Guest Book Review

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- 

“Advertisements for Myself”-Introduction by Allan Jackson, a founding member of the American Left History publication back in 1974 when it was a hard copy journal and until 2017 site manager of the on-line edition.      

[He’s back. Jack Kerouac, as described in the headline, “the king of the beats” and maybe the last true beat standing. That is the basis of this introduction by me as we commemorate the 50^th anniversary of his untimely death at 47. But before we go down and dirty with the legendary writer I stand before you, the regular reader, and those who have not been around for a while to know that I was relieved of my site manage duties in 2017 in what amounted to a coup by the younger writers who resented the direction I was taking the publication in and replaced me with Greg Green who I had brought on board from American Film Gazette to run the day to day operations while I oversaw the whole operation and planned my retirement. Over the past year or so a million rumors have, had mostly now, swirled around this publication and the industry in general about what had happened and I will get to that in a minute before dealing with Jack Kerouac’s role in the whole mess.

What you need to know first, if you don’t know already is that Greg Green took me back to do the introductions to an encore presentation of a long-term history of rock and roll series that I edited and essentially created after an unnamed older writer who had not been part of the project balled it all up, got catch flat-footed talking bullshit and other assorted nonsense since he knew nada, nada nunca and, about the subject having been apparently asleep when the late Peter Markin “took us to school” that history. Since then Greg and I have had an “armed truce,” meaning I could contribute as here to introductions of some encore and some origin material as long as I didn’t go crazy, his term, for what he called so-called nostalgia stuff from the 1950s and 1960s and meaning as well that Greg will not go crazy, my term, and will refrain from his ill-advised attempt to reach a younger audience by “dumbing down” the publication with odd-ball comic book character reviews of films, graphic novels and strange musical interludes. Fair is fair.

What I need to mention, alluded to above, is those rumors that ran amok while I was on the ropes, when I had lost that decisive vote of no confidence by one sullen vote. People here, and my enemies in the industry as well, seeing a wounded Allan Jackson went for the kill, went for the jugular that the seedy always thrive on and began a raggedy-ass trail on noise you would not believe. In the interest of elementary hygiene, and to frankly clear the air, a little, since there will always be those who have evil, and worse in their hearts when “the mighty have fallen.”  Kick when somebody is down their main interest in life.

I won’t go through the horrible rumors like I was panhandling down in Washington, D.C., I was homeless in Olde Saco, Maine (how could that be when old friend and writer here Josh Breslin lives there and would have provided alms to me so at least get an approximation of the facts before spinning the wild woolly tale), I had become a male prostitute in New York City (presumably after forces here and in that city hostile to me put in the fatal “hard to work with” tag on me ruining any chances on the East Coast of getting work, getting enough dough to keep the wolves from my door, my three ex-wives and that bevy of kids, nice kids, who nevertheless were sucking me dry with alimony and college tuitions), writing press releases under the name Leonard Bloom for a Madison Avenue ad agency. On a lesser scale of disbelief I had taken a job as a ticket-taker in a multi-plex in Nashua, New Hampshire, had been a line dishwasher at the Ritz in Philadelphia when they needed day labor for parties and convention banquets, had been kicking kids out of their newspaper routes and taking that task on myself, and to finish off although I have not given a complete rundown rummaging through trash barrels looking for bottles with deposits. Christ.

Needless to say, how does one actually answer such idiocies, and why. A couple of others stick out about me and some surfer girl out in Carlsbad in California who I was pimping while getting my sack time with her and  this one hurt because it hurt a dear friend and former “hippie girl” lover of mine, Madame La Rue, back in the day that I was running a whorehouse with her in Luna Bay for rich Asian businessmen with a taste for kinky stuff. I did stop off there and Madame does run a high-end brothel in Luna Bay but I had nothing to do with it. The reason Madame was hurt was because I had lent her the money to buy the place when it was a rundown hotel and built it up from there with periodic additional funds from me so she could not understand why my act of kindness would create such degenerate noise from my enemies who were clueless about the relationship between us.

I will, must deal with two big lies which also center of my reluctant journey west (caused remember by that smear campaign which ruined by job opportunities in the East, particularly New York City. The first which is really unbelievable on its face is that I hightailed it directly to Utah, to Salt Lake City, when I busted out in NYC looking for one Mitt Romney, “Mr. Flip-Flop,” former Governor of Massachusetts, Presidential candidate against Barack Obama then planning on running for U.S. Senator from Utah (now successful ready to take office in January) to “get well.” The premise for this big lie was supposedly that since I have skewered the guy while he was governor and running for president with stuff like the Mormon fetish for white underwear and the old time polygamy of his great-grand-father who had five wives (and who showed great executive skill I think in keeping the peace in that extended family situation. The unbelievable part is that those Mormon folk, who have long memories and have pitchforks at the ready to rumble with the damned, would let a sinner like me, a non-Mormon for one thing anywhere the Romney press operation. Christ, I must be some part latter day saint since I barely got out of that damn state alive if the real truth were known after I applied for a job with the Salt Lake Sentinel not knowing the rag was totally linked to the Mormons. Pitchforks, indeed.    

The biggest lie though is the one that had me as the M.C. in complete “drag” as Elsa Maxwell at the “notorious” KitKat Club in San Francisco which has been run for about the past thirty years or so by Miss Judy Garland, at one time and maybe still is in some quarters the “drag queen” Queen of that city. This will show you how ignorant, or blinded by hate, some people are. Miss Judy Garland is none other that one of our old corner boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville, Timmy Riley. Timmy who like the rest of us on the corner used to “fag bait” and beat up anybody, any guy who seemed effeminate, at what cost to Timmy’s real feelings we will never really know although he was always the leader in the gay-bashing orgy. Finally between his own feeling and Stonewall in New York in 1969 which did a great deal to make gays, with or with the drag queen orientation, a little less timid Timmy fled the Acre (and his hateful family and friends) to go to friendlier Frisco. He was in deep personal financial trouble before I was able to arrange some loans from myself and some of his other old corner boys (a few still hate Timmy for what he has become, his true self) to buy the El Lobo Club, his first drag queen club, and when that went under, the now thriving tourist trap KitKat Club. So yes, yes, indeed, I stayed with my old friend at his place and that was that. Nothing more than I had done many times before while I ran the publication.                   

But enough of this tiresome business because I want to introduce this series dedicated to the memory of Jack Kerouac who had a lot of influence on me for a long time, mostly after he died in 1969 

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All roads about Jack Kerouac, about who was the king of the beats, about what were the “beats” lead back to the late Pete Markin who, one way or another, taught the working poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville corner boys what was up with that movement. Funny, because we young guys were a serious generation removed from that scene, really our fathers’ contemporaries and you know how far removed fathers were from kids in those days especially among the working poor trying to avoid going  “under water” and not just about mortgages but food on tables and clothing on backs, were children of rock and roll, not jazz, the beat musical medium, and later the core of the “Generation of ‘68” which took off, at least partially, with the “hippie” scene, where the dying embers of the beat scene left off. Those dying embers exactly the way to put it since most of our knowledge or interest came from the stereotypes-beards before beards were cool and before grandfather times -for guys, okay, berets, black and beaten down looks. Ditto on black for the gals, including black nylons which no Acre girl would have dreamed of wearing, not in the early 1960s anyway. Our “model” beatnik really came, as we were also children of television, from sitcom stories like Dobie Gillis with stick character Maynard G. Krebs standing in for all be-bop-dom.        

So it is easy to see where except to ostracize, meaning harass, maybe beat up if that was our wont that day, we would have passed by the “beat” scene, passed by Jack Kerouac too without the good offices, not a term we would have used then, if not for nerdish, goof, wild and woolly in the idea world Markin (always called Scribe for obvious reasons but we will keep with Markin here). He was the guy who always looked for some secret meaning to the universe, that certain breezes, winds, metaphorical breezes and winds, were going to turn things around, were going to make the world a place where Markin could thrive. Markin was the one who first read Kerouac’s breakthrough travelogue of a different sort novel On The Road.

Now Markin was the kind of guy, and sometimes we let him go on and sometimes stopped him in his tracks, who when he was on to something would bear down on us to pay attention. Christ some weekend nights he would read passages from the book like it was the Bible (which it turned out to be in a way later) when all we basically cared about is which girls were going to show up at our hang-out spot, the well-known Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and play the jukebox and we would go from there. Most of us, including me, kind of yawned at the whole thing even when Markin made a big deal that Kerouac was a working-class guy like us from up in Lowell cut right along the Merrimac River. The whole thing seemed way too exotic and moreover there was too much homosexual stuff implied which in our strict Irish-Italian Catholic neighborhood did not go down well at all -made us dismiss the whole thing and want to if I recall correctly “beat up” that Allan Ginsberg character. Even Dean Moriarty, the Neal Cassidy character, didn’t move us since although we were as larcenous and “clip” crazy as any character in that book we kind of took Dean as a tough car crazy guide like Sonny Jones from our neighborhood who was nothing but a hood in Red Riley’s bad ass motorcycle gang which hung out at Harry’s Variety Store. We avoided him and more so Red like the plague. Both wound up dead, very dead, in separate attempted armed robberies in broad daylight if you can believe that.    

Our first run through of our experiences with Kerouac and through him the beat movement was therefore kind of marginal-even as Markin touted for a while that whole scene he agreed with us that jazz-be-bop jazz always associated with the beat-ness was not our music, was grating to our rock and roll-refined and defined ears. Here is where Markin was always on to something though, always had some idea percolating in his head. There was a point where he, we as well I think, got tired of rock and roll, a time when it had run out of steam for a while and along with his crazy home life which really was bad drove him to go to Harvard Square and check out what he had heard was a lot of stuff going on. Harvard Square was, is still to the extent that any have survived like Club Passim, the home of the coffeehouse. A place that kind of went with the times first as the extension of the beat generation hang-out where poetry and jazz would be read and played. But in Markin’s time, our time there was the beginnings of a switch because when he went to the old long gone Café Nana he heard folk music and not jazz, although some poetry was still being read. I remember Markin telling me how he figured the change when I think it was the late Dave Von Ronk performed at some club and mentioned that when he started out in the mid-1950s in the heat of beat time folk singers were hired at the coffeehouses in Greenwich Village to “clear the house” for the next set of poetry performers but that now folk-singing eclipsed poetry in the clubs. Markin loved it, loved the whole scene of which he was an early devotee. Me, well, strangely considering where I wound up and what I did as a career, I always, still do, hated the music. Thought it was too whinny and boring. Enough said though.                   

Let’s fast forward to see where Kerouac really affected us in a way that when Markin was spouting forth early on we could not appreciate. As Markin sensed in his own otherworldly way a new breeze was coming down the cultural highway, a breeze push forward by the beats I will confess, by the folk music scene, by the search for roots which the previous generation, our parents’ generation, spent their adulthoods attempting to banish and become part of the great American vanilla melt, and by a struggling desire to question everything that had come before, had been part of what we had had no say in creating, weren’t even asked about. Heady stuff and Markin before he made a very bad decision to quit college in his sophomore years and “find himself,” my expression not his, spent many of his waking hours figuring out how to make his world a place where he could thrive.

That is when one night, this is when we were well out of high school, some of us corner boys had gone our separate ways and those who remained in contact with the brethren spent less time hanging out at Tonio’s, Markin once again pulled out On The Road, pulled out Jack’s exotic travelogue. The difference is we were all ears then and some of us after that night brought our own copies or went to the Thomas Murphy Public Library and took out the book. This was the spring of the historic year 1967 when the first buds of the Summer of Love which wracked San Francisco and the Bay Area to its core and once Markin started working on us, started to make us see his vision of what he would later called, culling from Tennyson if I am not mistaken a “newer world.” Pulling us all in his train, even as with Bart Webber and if I recall Si Lannon a little, he had to pull out all the stops to have them, us, join him in the Summer of Love experience. Maybe the whole thing with Jack Kerouac was a pipe dream I remember reading about him in the Literary Gazette when he was down in Florida living with his ancient mother and he was seriously critical of the “hippies,” kind of banged on his own beat roots explaining that he was talking about something almost Catholic beatitude spiritual and not personal freedom, of the road or anything else. A lot of guys and not just writing junkies looking for some way to alleviate their inner pains have repudiated their pasts but all I know is that when Jack was king of the hill, when he spoke to us those were the days all roads to Kerouac were led by Markin. Got it. Allan Jackson    

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)- The Jack Kerouac- Allen Ginsberg Letters- A Guest Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a Sunday Boston Globe book review, dated July 18, 2010, of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg:The Letters.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/07/18/writes_of_passage/

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis) Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my older brother Alex they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when they acolytes came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands). Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine),   Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

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The names of "beat" writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are no strangers to this blog. I will get around to reading and writing my own review of these letters when I get a chance. Why "when I get a chance?" Well, when you think about, at least for aficionados, Kerouac (and to a lesser extent, Ginsberg) have already "telegraphed" the high points of their literary (and "road") theories in the twelve billion words they have written on subjects like fame and fortune, and serious writing. Oh, and if you need another reason I have just finished re-reading (summertime reading, right?) Kerouac's Desolation Angels which...tells all, at least all we need to know about this band of brothers in their heyday, the mid-1950s. That review is forthcoming.