In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-”*Poet's Corner-Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-”*Poet's Corner-Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

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 kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened 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.  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 thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, 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 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. 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. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s 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, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 “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 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 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 he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. 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.          

Commentary

There was a time when Allen Ginsberg's poetry 'spoke' to me and, and I am sure, to others from the "Generation of '68". His 'beat'/pacifist take on the struggle for power- inner power and heal thyself first before you take on the world - rang through many heads-until the beasts got serious at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, and in other locales before and after as well. Still Ginsberg's mid-1950's poetry shook things up for lots of people. "Howl" represents a high water mark. Hell, books have been written about the poem and its initial recitation in San Francisco in 1955. Here's why.

HOWL- ALLEN GINSBERG-1955

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Murder, Murder Most Foul-Maybe-Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy Of A Murder” (1959)-A Film Review

Murder, Murder Most Foul-Maybe-Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy Of A Murder” (1959)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sam Lowell

[Will the “finds” never end?  As I noted in an introduction to a film review of It Happened One Night, the 1930s Gable-Colbert vehicle, which the now retired, somewhat retired it appears, film critic in this space Sam Lowell (and in the American Film Gazette) had “found” when he was cleaning out his desk that perhaps he was playing me the fool. In any case I posted the review and was happy to do so. Then a couple of days ago another “desk” draft review of All The Pretty Horse appeared on my desk under his name. I posted that one as well including a mention that for the past decade or so of our relationship I have been happy to post most of his material here. Now comes another “desk” draft which he found in what must be an abyss of a drawer. I post this review as well. My question is whether Sam has “accidently” found enough reviews to keep his name in lights until he goes to the great beyond. Just asking, Sam. Peter Markin, site moderator]      

Anatomy of a Murder, starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, George C. Scott, directed by Otto Preminger, 1959

Having been in a few court rooms in my time (I won’t say in what capacity although not as a defendant) where the main motion is “hurry up and wait” it was rather refreshing to see a drama based on a real live case that despite knowing who had committed the crime, murder murder one, murder most foul, held me in its grip for most of the long film, although the non-courtroom scenes were mainly filler. That was the effect that the 1959 black and white film under review Anatomy of a Murder had on me and I am sure as well the audiences at the time.

Here’s why. So-called good old boy country lawyer Paul Biegler, played by James Stewart, had been approached by the wife, Laura played by Lee Remick, of the alleged murderer Army Officer Fred Manion played by Ben Gazzara, to defend him in a UP Michigan court on the charge of murder. After some preliminaries Biegler decided to take the case figuring that there might be a basis of temporary insanity to get the soldier off. The reason for that possibility is that Fred had reacted in a frenzy when Laura had come home to their trailer late one night claiming that she had been raped by the owner of an inn in town, Bernard Quill, where she had gone alone after Fred had fallen asleep after supper. Fred, something of a known hothead and jealous of his wife’s good looks and flirty ways reacted to that charge by going to the inn and shooting Quill and asking questions later.

The legal play in this one was a rather unusual one-temporary insanity based on an “irresistible impulse,” a defense recognized under Michigan law but not used in a long time as a defense. Of course the prosecution in the inevitable “battle of shrinks” claimed that Fred was a cold calculated murderer whatever he might have felt about his wife’s rape charges. The long film goes back and forth between the clever Biegler and the equally clever Assistant AG Dancer played by George C. Scott, brought in from Lansing to bolster the county DA’s case. Frankly, and I can give a wide leeway for cinematic dramatic license since even the proceedings of a real life murder trial are rather pedestrian, the conduct of the prosecution would seem to warrant an appealable issue of prosecutorial misconduct and if Fred had been convicted he could have justly charged that Biegler had provided  ineffective assistance of counsel. Not to worry though our Paul got the soldier off although by all measures, except legal ones, Fred was not one of nature’s noblemen-no way but that “irresistible impulse” defense worked. Worked too when Fred with Laura in tow took off when it came time to pay the lawyers. Although it is long and slow in places watch this one.                 

When The North Adamsville Corner Boys Strutted Their Literary Stuff- And Who Encouraged Them

When The North Adamsville Corner Boys Strutted Their Literary Stuff- And Who Encouraged Them 

By Phillip Larkin

Nobody uses the term “corner boy” anymore since as far as I know there are no corners for young boys, young men to hang out in their towns without being pounced on by the coppers, harassed by the corner venue owners or given the evil eye by the foxy girls who passed by but would not give any of those guys a tumble having a preference for mall rats and the like(that last probably the biggest reason but also hides a latter day truth that some of those girls back in corner boy days were not so snooty when the deal went down). Bur back in the 1960s, maybe before even the name “corner boy” read juvenile delinquent to straight society was a well-respected subculture of the post-World War II. Took its place along with West Coast hot-rodders, West Coast surfers looking for perfect waves, West Coast muck and crude bikers, Hell’s Angels but brethren, and on the East Coast the local corner boys around Tonio’s Pizza Palace in North Adamsville.

Definition, amateur definition of corner boys-sullen guys from hunger who did not fit in, could not fit in, would not fit with the golden age propaganda afloat in the post-World War II world to make a lot of dirt poor guys misshapen and world weary and wary well before their time.    

Now that definition is important in many respects because most of us, the Tonio Pizza Parlor boys, were as sullen and alienated as any, including the Harry’s Variety Store crowd who were nothing but chain-wielding biker mad men high on dope (not found out until much later) and sex maniacs (found attractive to some of those girls, so called virgins, who would not give Tonio boys a tumble). We were desperately poor or else we would have had money enough to abandon Tonio’s and head to bowling alleys, drive-in movies, drive-in eateries like the kids over the rival Atlantic section of town. (We were all Acre boys if I recall from the lowest of the low housing down by the river.) We would as we got older grab money any way we could, the midnight creep, and you can figure that one out yourselves, being the main way once we saw the “chip” of cheapjack jewelry as not worth the legal repercussions.    

Here though is where classic corner boys, Tonio’s corner boys, were off the charts of the worried sociologists and frantic criminologists. A number of us would actually survive the experience without landing in prison, a psych ward or an early grave. A number of us, not the majority but some have written here and elsewhere about everything from rock and roll to Pretty James Preston, our heroic bank robber single handed biker model who went down in a blaze of glory.   

There are two reasons, and two reasons only and it is hard to tell which is greater why we survived (and dragged most of the rest of the gang along except a couple who laid down their heads in Vietnam fight and a couple who spent a number of years in jail for mostly armed robberies having taken Pretty Boy’s route without blinking an eye. One is Pete Markin always called the Scribe after our leader Frankie Riley named him that when the Scribe wrote a few articles for the school newspaper extolling Frankie’s virtues. Pete was piece of work even if in the end he too would lay his head down too early due to the early formed hubris that stalked us all. He was our in-house intellectual always reading stuff that frankly we could have given a fuck about like the then “fag” poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg, talking up the “beats” who we equally could have given a rat’s ass about, going on and on about folk music (Jesus, to guys who lived for rock and roll and all that meant about sex and adventure not knowing until much later, college time that the girls into that music were much “easier” than our hometown Irish Bible between their knees teases).

Yeah, at some level Markin held us together, made us appreciate literature, writing, maybe culture in general. He couldn’t make it to the end like I said because between Vietnam service and that deeply held wanting habit he went off the road. The second reason which connects a little with Markin is that we all, and here I mean all those corner boys who have written here over the years, had one English teacher who made us toe the mark. Miss Rose Enos. The way that high school classes at North Adamsville after ninth grade where we were self-contained went at least for English and Math worked was that we had the same teacher all three years under some theory of continuity. (Frankly I don’t know the reason and I don’t know if this is still done educationally). Although we were not all in the same English class (I was with Markin, Sam Lowell and Frankie Riley) each of us had her for English for three years.

We could not believe our eyes when we compared class schedules one lonesome Friday night after school started. We had known since ninth grade who the “players” were in the upper grades when we got to tenth grade and knew her reputation as well which was something like the wicked witch of the West on steroids. The words was “all who enter here abandon hope” came to mind. Some guys suggested that they would try to persuade their parents to move out of the district, to go to Adamsville High and take their chances there. Others only half-seriously talked about dropping out and getting a job as a jack-hammerer rather than face three years of the witch.    

Needless to say we did not do any of that, at least of those corner boys who had her but a couple already mentioned went a different route without having her. Here is the odd thing and it not because I am nostalgic these days or because Markin would be her biggest champion (we tagged him as “teacher’s pet” even though no way in hell would Enos have such a student). She was all business, the business of teaching some unruly boys (although not in her class as we painfully learned after several after school detentions each) how to read critically, write with some kind of respect for the written language and speak with a little more eloquence than our Friday night habits would warrant. In three years she did make us appreciate what was then the Western Canon (she loved Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Ernest Hemingway among others), made us do an infinite number of book reports, including arguing out the pros and cons and read a ton of poetry (although not Howl  that would have flipped her out which is one of the reasons Markin was reading to us on those lonesome Fridays because he wanted to recite the damn thing in class). Not bad, not bad at all for a witch      

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-Poet's Corner- Jack Kerouac’s Be-Bop Poetry-“Book Of Blues”

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-Poet's Corner- Jack Kerouac’s Be-Bop Poetry-“Book Of Blues”

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 kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened 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.  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 thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, 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 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. 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. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s 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, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 “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 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 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 he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. 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.           

Book Review

Book Of Blues, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Books, New York, 1995

Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.

“As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s lesser non-prose work, the poems under review here, “Book Of Blues” that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.

And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, “On The Road”, his classic modern physical and literary ‘search’ for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. Perhaps even less well known are his poetic works, although given his spontaneous writing style method and association with many of the key poets of the 1940s and 1950s, beat or not, it is less understandable. That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of a compilation of his poetry, aptly titled, “Book Of Blues”.

Kerouac, in a couple of famous essays and in various places in some of his novels, makes a very big point that he was deeply influenced by the rhythm of jazz and by the be-bop language associated with it. Certain passages from “On The Road” and other works clearly emphasize that point. Although Kerouac was not known as a major beat poet, and will not be remembered as such, he certainly rated as a talented minor one, as these poems, especially “San Francisco Blues” indicate. It is hard to get a sense, unlike with Allen Ginsberg, of Kerouac’s ideas how these poems should “sound” from merely reading them on the page. But there is a method to the couple of hundred choruses that are included here in various forms broken into several interrelated poems. Let’s put it this way, read a couple of Kerouac’s books and then come back to this.


Bowery Blues

The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven's Angels
Wailing

Saying

We've been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.

***FromThe Archives -Out In The Be-Bop Night- In Defense Of The Blue-Pink Great American Western Night "Deviation"- A Short Note (2010)

***FromThe Archives -Out In The Be-Bop Night- In Defense Of The Blue-Pink Great American Western Night "Deviation"- A Short Note (2010)

Markin comment:  

Okay, here is the genesis of this little commentary. Rather a “tempest in a teapot”, I think, in the grand scheme of things and in the same category as White House flak, Robert Gibbs, and his inane blathering about “professional leftists” and their alleged carping on the short-comings of his boss, Barack Obama. But at least it gives me a lead for today’s commentary. Unfortunately it will come at the expense of a comrade, someone I care about and whose opinion I value, unlike Robert Gibbs (or his boss, for that matter). Here are the details.

I have recently been taken to task by this fellow member of the local anti-imperialist, anti-war ad hoc committee that I have belonged to for the past several years (and that I have written about previously in this space) who is miffed (I am being polite) at me for my constant use of the term, or variations of the term, “the great American night”, especially when dealing with the 1950s “beat” generation writers (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and the usual suspects). Now this is one of the comrades, a younger one, that I go back to the days of ancient memory Bush post-9/11 Afghan October war, bombing-them-back-them-to-the-stone-age, with, and who helped us, in all manner of ways, to get through those tough days when opposition to that war on the streets of Boston, and elsewhere in America, was an extremely dicey thing. So under normal circumstances I would be all ears when he had some comment or criticism. But here he is just “cannon fodder” for my commentary.

As readers may know this ad hoc committee is made up of various political types and is, most importantly, not bound by Leninist democratic centralist principles (nor could it be, as a patched together, if coherent, propaganda bloc composed of , well, I’ll be nice, characters ) and therefore I am not telling “tales out of school” by replying publicly here. Moreover, although Leninist organizations adhere to a single political line, publicly, and expect their members to maintain discipline on general questions those questions that fall outside of politics, like the subject of one’s attitude toward the “beats”, the use, or overuse of the term, “great American night”, or your favorite forms of music are matters of personal preference, as a rule. So I am firing away.

But there is more gnawing at me than making a public point at his expense. Go back to that young comrade’s point. We all come to leftist politics, young or old, in our own ways, and in our own good time. I have always been somewhat amazed at the variety of such experiences that, by now, almost defy categorization. We also come to out personal predilections in much the same way. Jazz, be-bop, bop-bop, techno-hop, hip-hop, poetry slam, folk jam, and so on. For a fact though he knows not, and I have drilled him on this, of ancient dreams of blue-pink great American West night dreaming old men, passed down from older men (mostly). Know or not know though, here is his answer.

********

There is no question that over the past year or so I have been deep in remembrances of the influences, great and small, of the 1950s “beats” on my own sorry teen-aged alienation and teen-aged angst (sometimes they were separate anguishes, sometimes tied together like inseparable twins, mostly the later) and the struggle to find my place in the sun, to write in bright lights my own beat plainsong. Of course, that "beat" influence was blown over me second-hand as I was just a little too young, or a little too wide-world unconscious, to be there at the creation, on those first roads west, those first fitfully car-driven, gas-fuelled, thumb hanging-out, sore-footed, free exploration west roads, in body and mind. And of that first great rush of the adrenal in trying to discover, eternally discover as it has turned out, the search for the meaning of the great blue-pink American West night. Ah, pioneer-boys, thanks.

I just got a whiff, a passing whiff of that electric-charged air, the sweet “be-bop”, bop-bop, real gone daddy, cooled-out, pipe-filled with whatever, jazz-sexed, high white note blown, howling in the wind plainsong afterglow. Moreover, somewhat tarnished, a little sullen and withdrawn, and media-used up by my time. More than one faux black chino-wearing, black beret’d, stringy-bearded, nightshade sun-glassed, pseudo-poetic-pounding, television-derived fakir crossed my path in Harvard Square in those high stakes early 1960s high school days. And a few real ones, as well. (A couple, whom I still pass occasionally, giving a quick nod to, have never given up the ghost and still haunt the old square looking for the long-gone, storied Hayes-Bickford, a place where the serious and the fakirs gathered in the late night before dawn hour to pour out their souls, via mouth or on paper. Good luck, men.). More to the point, I came too late to be able to settle comfortably into that anti-political world that the “beats” thrived in. Great political and social events were unfolding and I wanted in, feverishly wanted in, with both hands (and,maybe,feet too).

You know some of the beat leaders, the real ones, don’t you? Remembered, seemingly profusely remembered now, by every passing acquaintance with some rough-hewn writing specimen or faded photograph to present. Now merely photo-plastered, book wrote, college english department deconstruction’d , academic journal-debated, but then in full glory plaid shirt, white shirt, tee shirt, dungarees, chinos, sturdy foot-sore cosmic traveler shoes, visuals of heaven’s own angel bums, if there was a heaven and there were angels and if that locale needed bums.

Jack, million hungry word man-child sanctified, Lowell mills-etched and trapped and mother-fed, Jack Kerouac. Allen, om-om-om, bop, bop, mantra-man, mad Paterson-trapped, modern plainsong-poet-in-chief, Allen Ginsberg. William, sweet opium dream (or, maybe, not so sweet when the supply ran out), needle-driven, sardonic, ironic, chronic, Tangiers-trapped, Harvard man (finally, a useful one, oops, sorry), Williams S. Burroughs. Neal, wild word, wild gesture, out of ashcan all-America dream man, tire-kicking, oil-checking, gas-filling, zen master wheelman gluing the enterprise together, Neal Cassady. And a whirling crowd of others, including mad, street-wise, saint-gunsel, Gregory Corso. I am a little fuzzy these days on the genesis of my relationship to this crowd (although a reading of Ginsberg’s Howl was probably first in those frantic, high school, Harvard Square-hopping, poetry-pounding, guitar-strummed, existential word space, coffee, no sugar, I’ll have a refill, please, fugitive dream’d, coffeehouse-anchored days). This I know. I qualified, in triplicate, teen angst, teen alienation, teen luddite as a card-carrying member in those days.

More recently that old time angst, that old time alienation and a smidgen of that old time luddite has casted its spell on me. I have been held hostage to, been hypnotized by, been ocean-sized swept away by, been word ping-pong bounced off of and collided into by, head over heels language-loved by, word-curled around and caressed by the ancient black night into the drowsy dawn 1950s child view vision Kerouac/Ginsberg/Burroughs/Corso-led “beats” homage to the great American West night. (Beat: life beat-up, fellaheen beat-down, beat around, be-bop jazz beat, beatified church beat, howl poem beat, beat okay, anyway you can get a handle on it, beat.). The great American West “beat” breakout from the day weary, boxed-in, shoulder-to-the-wheel, eyes forward, hands to the keyboard, work-a-day-world, dream-fleshed-out night. Of leaving behind on the slow-fast, two-lane, no passing, broken-lined old Route 6, or 66, or 666, or whatever route, whatever dream route, whatever dream hitchhike gas station/diner highway beyond the Eastern shores night, of the get away from the machine, the machine making machines, the “little boxes” machine night, and also of the reckless breakout of mannered, cramped, parlor-fit language night. Whoa!

This Kerouacian wordplay on-the-road’d, dharma-bummed, big sur’d, desolation angel’d night, this Ginsberg-ite trumpet howl, cry-out to the high heavens against the death machine night, this Burroughs-ish languid, sweet opium-dreamed, laid-back night, this Neal Cassady-driven, foot-clutched, brake-pedaled, wagon-master of the to and fro of the post-World War II American West night, was not my night but close enough so that I could touch it, and have it touch me even half a century later. So blame Jack and the gang, okay and I will give you his current Lowell, Massachusetts home address upon request so that you can direct your inquiries there.

Blame Jack, as well, for the busting out beyond the factory lakes, corn-fed plains, get the hell out of Kansas flats, on up into the rockiesmountainhigh (or is it just high) and then straight, no time for dinosaur lament Ogden or tumbleweed Winnemucca, to the coast, come hell or high water. Ya, busting out and free. Kid dream great American West night, car-driven (hell, old pick-up truck-driven, English racer bicycle-driven, hitchhike thumbed, flat-bed train-ridden, sore-footed, shoe-beaten walked, if need be), two dollar tank-filled, oil-checked, tires kicked, money pocket’d, surf’s up, surf’s crashing up against the high shoulder ancient seawalls, cruising down the coast highway, the endlessly twisting jalopy-driven pin-turned coast highway, down by the shore, sand swirling, bingo, bango, bongo with your baby everything’s alright, go some place after, some great American West drive-in place. Can you blame me?

So as for that comrade, that well-respected young comrade, what would he know, really, of the great blue-pink American West night that I, and not I alone, was searching for back in those halcyon days of my youth in the early 1960s. What would he know, for example, except in story book or oral tradition from parents or, oh no, maybe, grandparents, of the old time parched, dusty, shoe-leather-beating, foot-sore, sore-shouldered, backpacked, bed-rolled, going-my-way?, watch out for the cops over there (especially in Connecticut and Arizona), hitchhike white-lined road. The thirsty, blistered, backpacked, bed-rolled, thumb-stuck-out, eternally thumb-stuck-out, waiting for some great savior kindred-laden Volkswagen home/collective/ magical mystery tour bus or the commandeered rainbow-marked, life-marked, soul-marked yellow school bus, yellow brick road school bus. Hell, even of old farmer-going-to-market, fruit and vegetable-laden Ford truck, benny-popping, eyes-wide, metal-to-the-petal, transcontinental teamster-driving goods to some westward market or kid Saturday love nest, buddy-racing cool jalopy road. Ya, what would he know of that.

Of the road out, out anywhere, anywhere west, from the stuffy confines of worn-out, hard-scrabble, uptight, ocean-at-you-back, close-quartered, neighbor on top of neighbor, keep your private business private, used-up New England granite-grey death-chanting night. Of the struggle, really, for color, to change the contour of the natural palette to other colors brighter than the New England leafy greens and browns of the trees and the blues, or better blue-greens, or even better yet of white-flecked, white foamed, blue-greens of the Eastern oceans. (Ya, I know, I know, before you even start on me about it, all about the million tree flaming yellow-red-orange autumn leaf minute and the thousand icicle-dropped, road strewn dead tree branch, white winter snow drift eternity, on land or ocean but those don’t count, at least here, and not now)

Or of the infinite oil-stained, gas-fumed, rag-wiped, overall’d, gas-jockey, Esso, Texaco, Mobil, Shell stations named, the rest lost too lost in time to name, two dollar fill-up-check-the-oil, please, the-water-as-well, inflate the tires, hit the murky, fetid, lava soap-smelled bathrooms, maybe grab a Coke, hey, no Hires Root Beer on this road. This Route 66, or Route 50 or Route you-name-the route, route west, exit east dream route, rolling red barn-dotted (needing paints to this jaded eye), rocky field-plowed (crooked plowed to boot), occasionally cow-mooed, same for horses, sheep, some scrawny chickens, and children as well, scrawny too. The leavings of the westward trek, when the westward trek meant eternal fields, golden fields, and to hell with damned rocks, and silts, and worn-out soils absent-mindedly left behind for those who would have to, have to I tell you, stay put in the cabin'd hollows and lazily watered-creeks. On the endlessly sulky blues-greens, the sullen smoky grey-black of mist-foamed rolling hills that echo the slight sound of the mountain wind tunnel, of the creakily-fiddled wind-song Appalachian night.

Or of diner stops, little narrow-aisled, pop-up-stool’d, formica counter-topped, red (mostly) imitation leather booth, smoked-filled cabooses of diners. Of now anchored, abandoned train porter-serviced, off-silver, off-green, off-red, off any faded color “greasy spoon” diners. Of daily house special meat loaf, gravy-slurp, steam-soggy carrots, and buttered mashed potato-fill up, Saturday night pot roast special, turkey club sandwich potato chips on the side, breakfast all day, coffee-fill-up, free refill, please, diners. Granddaddies to today’s more spacious back road highway locales, styled family-friendly but that still reek of meat loaf-steamed carrots- creamed mashed tater-fill. Spots then that spoke of rarely employed, hungry men, of shifty-eyed, expense account-weary traveling men, of high-benny, eyes-wide, mortgaged to the hilt, wife ran off with boyfriend, kids hardly know him, teamsters hauling American product to and fro and of other men not at ease in more eloquent, table-mannered, women-touched places. Those landscape old state and county side of the highway diners, complete with authentic surly, know-it-all-been-through-it-all, pencil-eared, steam-sweated uniform, maybe, cigarette-hanging from tired ruby red lips, heavily made-up waitress along the endless slag-heap, rusting railroad bed, sulphur-aired, grey-black smoke-belching , fiery furnace-blasting, headache metal-pounding, steel-eyed, coal dust-breathe, hog-butcher to the world, sinewy-muscled green-grey, moonless, Great Lakes night.

Or of two-bit road intersection stops, some rutted, pot-holed country road intersecting some mud-spattered, creviced backwater farm road, practically dirt roads barely removed from old time prairie pioneer day times, west-crazy pioneer times, ghost-crazy-pioneer days. Of fields, vast slightly rolling, actually very slightly rolling, endless yellow, yellow–glazed, yellow-tinged, yellow until you get sick of the sight of yellow, sick of the word yellow even, acres under cultivation to feed hungry cities, as if corn, or soy, or wheat, or manna itself could fill that empty-bellied feeling that is ablaze in the land. But we will deal with one hunger at a time. And dotted every so often with silos and barns and grain elevators for all to know the crops are in and ready to serve that physical hunger. Of half-sleep, half hungry-eye, city boy hungry eyes, unused to the dark, dangerous, sullen, unknown shadows, bed roll-unrolled, knapsack pillowed, sleep by the side of the wheat, soy, corn road ravine, and every once in a blue moon midnight car passings, snaggly blanket-covered, knap-sack head rested, cold-frozed, out in the great day corn yellow field beneath the blue black, beyond city sky black, starless Iowa night.

Or of the hard-hilled climb, and climb and climb, breathe taken away magic climb, crevice-etched, rock-interface, sore-footed magic mountain that no Thomas Mann can capture. Half-walked-half-driven, bouncing back seat, back seat of over-filled truck-driven, still rising up, no passing on the left, facing sheer-cliff’d, famous free-fall spots, still rising, rising colder, rising frozen colder, fearful of the sudden summer squalls, white out summer squalls. Shocking, I confess, beyond shocking to New England-hardened winter boy, then sudden sunshine floral bursts and jacket against the cold comes tumbling off. And I confess again, majestic, did I say majestic and beats visions of old Atlantic ocean swells at dawn crashing against harmless seawalls. Old pioneer-trekked, old pioneer-feared, old rutted wheeled, two-hearted remembrances, two-hearted but no returning back (it would be too painful to do again) remembrances as you slide out of Denver into the icy-white black rockymountainhigh night.

Of foot-swollen pleasures in some arid back canyon arroyo, etched in time told by reading its face, layer after layer, red, red-mucked, beige, beige-mucked, copper, copper-mucked, like some Georgia O'Keeffe dream painting out in the red, beige, copper black-devouring desert night. Sounds, primal sounds, of old dinosaur laments and one hundred generations of shamanic Native American pounding crying out for vengeance against the desecrations of the land. Against the cowboy badlands takeover, against the white rampages of the sacred soil. And of canyon-shadowed, flame-shadowed, wind swept, canteen stews simmering and smokey from the jet blue, orange flickering campfire. Of quiet, desert quiet, high desert quiet, of tumbleweed running dreams out in the pure sandstone-edged, grey-black Nevada night.

And then... .

the great Western shore, surf’s up, white, white wave-flecked, lapis-lazuli blue-flecked ocean, rust golden-gated, no return, no boat out, lands end, this is it coast highway, heading down or up now, heading up or down gas stationed, named and unnamed, side road diners, still caboose’d, ravine-edged sleep and beach sleeped, blue-pink American West night.

Yes, but there is more. No child vision but now of full blossom American West night, the San Francisco great American West night, of the be-bop, bop-bop, narrow-stepped, downstairs overflowed music cellar, shared in my time, the time of my time, by “beat” jazz, “hippie’d folk”, and howled poem, but at this minute jazz, high white note-blown, sexed sax-playing godman, unnamed, but like Lester Young’s own child jazz. Smoke-filled, blended meshed smokes of ganja and tobacco (and, maybe, of meshed pipe smokes of hashish and tobacco), ordered whisky-straight up, soon be-sotted, cheap, face-reddened wines, clanking coffee cups that speak of not tonight promise. High sexual intensity under wraps, tightly under wraps, swirls inside it own mad desire, black-dressed she (black dress, black sweater, black stockings, black shoes, black bag, black beret, black sunglasses, ah, sweet color scheme against white Madonna, white, secular Madonna alabaster skin. What do you want to bet black undergarments too, ah, but I am the soul of discretion, your imagination will have to do), promising shades of heat-glanced night. And later, later than night just before the darkest hour dawn, of poems poet’d, of freedom songs free-verse’d, of that sax-charged high white note following out the door, out into the street, out the eternity lights of the great golden-gated night. I say, can you blame me?

Of later roads, the north Oregon hitchhike roads, the Redwood-strewn road not a trace of black-dressed she, she now of blue serge denim pants, of brown plaid flannel long-sleeved shirt, of some golfer’s dream floppy-brimmed hat, and of sturdy, thick-heeled work boots (undergarments again left to your imagination) against the hazards of summer snow squall Crater Lake. And now of slightly sun-burned face against the ravages of the road, against the parched sun-devil road that no ointments can relieve. And beyond later to goose-down bundled, hunter-hatted, thick work glove-clad, snowshoe-shod against the tremors of the great big eternal bump of the great Alaska highway. Can she blame me? Guess.

Ya, put it that way and what does that young comrade, a dreamer of his own dreams, and rightly too, know of an old man’s fiercely-held, fiercely-defended, fiercely-dreamed beyond dreaming blue-pink dreams. Or of ancient blue-pink sorrows, sadnesses, angers, joys, longings and lovings, either.

How The West Was Won-Again-The Film Adaptation Of Cormac McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses” (2000)-A Review

How The West Was Won-Again-The Film Adaptation Of Cormac McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses” (2000)-A Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sam Lowell

[I noted in a recent comment introducing a review of It Happened One Night by now film critic emeritus Sam Lowell that he had done that review and then put it in one of his desk drawers and only in the process of cleaning out that desk did he find a draft copy of that review. Apparently the old curmudgeon is either playing me the fool or he really should be placed out to pasture as he is fond of saying these days because a draft copy of the review below was also found among the debris of that lifetime accumulation. I will only say for now that this is the last one to be posted. Of course if Sam finds anything else I will be glad to publish it as I have for the past decade or so. Peter Markin, site moderator]  

All The Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas, Penelope Cruz, directed by Billy Bob Thornton, based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy   

Unlike another tale, a coming of age tale if you like, of the modern American West, of the Texas west,  The Last Picture Show, where I read the novel by Larry McMurtry first then the film I have seen the film under review the adaptation of Cormac Mc Carthy’s All The Pretty Horses without having read the novel. But after watching the film I will make it my business to read the novel which deals with a different aspect of the West, the cowboy West when ranch life goes south on its main characters and they are left to fend for themselves. A task which in true Western fashion has them groping to stay alive, although that was a close thing.   

John Grady Cole (hey that is the way he introduced himself to one and all), played by Matt Damon, was career-less, cowboy career-less after his grandfather died and his mother decided to sell the ranch leaving this young cowboy with horses in his blood with no place to go. No place but to go looking for work south of the Rio Grande, south of the border down  Mexico way with his longtime fellow cowboy Lacey played by Henry Thomas.     

Whatever adventure, whatever expectations they had about making a living as ranch hands down in Mexico were disturbed along the way when they met a vagabond Blevens who was strange to say the least.  Along the way Blevens lost his horse and then found it again at a ranch. This brings in the factor of horse-stealing which will drive a lot of the action in the film, and which is as heinous a crime in modern day Mexico (and Texas too) as in the old days when horse thieves were strung up in an age when to take a man’s horse was to take away his livelihood, his means of travel and his manhood. Along the way because John Grady and Lacey are tarred with the same brush as Blevens they will see just what that meant. They were able to get work at a huge ranchero where John Grady got special recognition by the owner for his keen eye for horse flesh. Along the way as well they wind up because of Bleven’s actions in custody and eventually in the “you don’t want to go there” penitentiary after a corrupt Mexican cop wasted the unfortunate Blevens while John Grady and Lacey watched helplessly. They survived the prison ordeal somehow and Lacey decided to head home. John Grady decided he had some unfinished business and was staying to pursue that.       

That unfinished business was as to be expected getting his girlfriend to go back to Texas with him. This girlfriend Alejandra, played by fetching Penelope Cruz, a firebrand and well worth taking some grief for was unfortunately for John Grady the daughter of the ranchero owner and so they were fated to part, fated in part because the price of getting John Grady and Lacey out of that “you don’t want to go there” prison was that she would not see him again, certainly would not go away with him. That was that.

On his way back home across the border with his horse, Lacey’s and the late Bleven’s in tow as some sort of symbol of the experiences he had down south of the border he is stopped in Texas and essentially accused of that same horse-stealing charge. He got out of trouble once he told his story to a judge and then meandered back to Lacey’s place with those three damn horses. Yeah, the modern West is a tough dollar for a cowboy loving man just like in the Old West. See this one for the pretty horses, pretty scenery and pretty Cruz.        

The Contradictions of Malcolm X- His Life As Told To Alex Haley

The Contradictions of Malcolm X- His Life As Told To Alex Haley

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Malcolm X speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in 1964. He still speaks to some powerful truths about the black experience in America. Black is back, or it had better be.

Markin Comment:

Directly below is a review (February 1, 2008) based on Malcolm X’s autobiography as told to writer Alex Haley (originally written in 1964) "The Autobiography Of Malcolm X”, an imaginative literary treatment of his short, checkered life as a leader of the Nation of Islam, at that time a notorious (to white eyes and ears) so-called race-hating outfit led by Elijah Muhammad (with whom Malcolm had broken at the time of this autobiography). I am reposting the original review because in essentials I continue to stand by the main political (and literary) points made there. I have added a few other points below that repost as I have thought about this book more recently. 

*****

“The Contradictions Of Malcolm X

MALCOLM POSED THE QUESTION-WHICH WAY FORWARD FOR THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE? OUR ANSWER- BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH

The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, Ballantine Books, New York, 1964

Let us be clear about one thing from the start, whatever contradictions Malcolm X’s brand of black nationalism entailed, whatever shortcomings he had as an emerging political leader, whatever mistakes he made alone the way as he groped for a solution to the seemingly intractable fight for black freedom he stood, and continues to stand, head and shoulders above any black leader thrown up in America in the 20th century. Only Frederick Douglass in the 19th century compares with him in stature. No attempts by latter-day historians or politicians to assimilate Malcolm along with other leaders of the civil rights struggle in this country, notably Dr. Martin Luther King, as part of the same continuum of leadership are false and dishonest to all parties.

Malcolm X, as a minister of the Black Muslims and after his break from that organization, stood in opposition to the official liberal non-violence strategy of that leadership. His term “Uncle Toms” fully applies to their stance. And, in turn, that liberal black misleadership and its various hangers-on in the liberal establishment hated him when he spoke the truth about their role in white-controlled bourgeois Democratic Party politics. The “chickens were coming home to roost”, indeed! The Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, the Obama the “Charmas” who represent today’s version of that misleadership please step back, step way back.

That said, who was Malcolm X? Or more properly what did he represent in his time. At one level, given the rudiments of his life story which are detailed in the Autobiography of Malcolm X, he represented that part of the black experience (an experience not only limited to blacks in immigrant America) which pulled itself by the bootstraps and turned away from the lumpen milieu of gangs, crimes and prisons into what I call ‘street’ intellectuals. That experience is far removed from the experience of what today passes for the black intelligentsia, who have run away from the turmoil of the streets. In liberation struggles both ‘street’ and academic intellectuals are necessary but the ‘street’ intellectual is perhaps more critical as the transmission belt to the masses. That is how liberation fighters get a hearing and no other way. In any case I have always been partial to the ‘streets’.


But what is the message for the way forward? For Malcolm, until shortly before his death, that message was black separatism-the idea that the only way blacks could get any retribution was to go off on their own (or be left alone), in practical terms to form their own nation. To state the question that way in modern America points to the obvious limitation of such a scheme, even if blacks formed such a nation and wanted to express the right to national self-determination that goes with it. Nevertheless whatever personal changes Malcolm made in his quest for political relevance and understanding whether he was a Black Muslim minister or after he broke for that group he still sought political direction through the fight of what is called today ‘people of color’ against the mainly white oppressor, at first in America and latter after travels throughout the ‘third world’.

However sincere he was in that belief, and he was sincere, that strategy of black separatism or ‘third world’ vanguardism could never lead to the black freedom he so fervently desired. An underestimation of the power of internally unchallenged world, and in the first instance American, imperialism to corrupt liberation struggles or defeat or destroy them militarily never seemed to enter into his calculations.

Malcolm’s whole life story of struggle against the bedrock of white racism in America, as the legitimate and at the time the ONLY voice speaking for the rage of the black ghettos, nevertheless never worked out fully any other strategy that could work in America, and by extension internationally. A close reading of his work demonstrates that as he got more politically aware he saw the then unfolding ‘third world’ liberation struggles as the key to black liberation in America. That, unfortunately for him, was exactly backwards. If the ‘third world’ struggles were ever ultimately to be successful and create more just societies then American imperialism-as the main enemy of the peoples of the world-then, as now had to be brought to bay. And that, my friends, whether you agree or not, requires class struggle here.

That is where the fight for black liberation intersects the fight for socialism. And I will state until my last breathe that the key to the fight for socialism in America will be the cohesion of a central black cadre leading a multi-ethnic organization that will bring that home. And it will not be from the lips of the Kings of today that the struggle will be successful but by new more enlightened Malcolms, learning the lessons of history, who will get what they need-by any means necessary.”

February 1, 2010

In re-reading the above review I feel that although I made the right political points I did not spent nearly enough time on the some of the problems addressed by Malcolm X's autobiography. Not the least of those problems is the one of socialists creating and honing of black revolutionaries like Malcolm out of the lumpen proletarian milieu. Or Malcolm’s perceptive take on the all pervasive nature of the imprint of white racism on the American experiment, for black and white alike then and now. And intimately tied up with that hard fact of political life is the problem of recruiting (and holding on to) cadre in the black milieu for nationalist or, in our case, socialist revolutionaries.

I noted in a review of William Styron’s novel of the great slave general Nat Turner a couple of years ago (See February 2008 Archives) that the historical problem of creating a revolutionary black leadership has always been a daunting one in America whether under slavery or Jim Crow (de facto or de jure, Northern or Southern version). Turner’s own life story, based as it was on creating himself by learning to read and write and thereafter learning a salable skill as a craftsman, violated every norm and expectation of ant-bellum slave existence. Turner was one of the “talented tenth”, as it were, of his time. The question is no less tricky is viewing the highlights of Malcolm’s transformation (in prison, to boot) from a street hustler, dope addict, womanizer and purely existential character seemingly doomed to the fate of many other Northern black youth of the mid-20th century. Those of us working the “black/ freedom/ labor” milieu at the beginning of the 21st century should well note that although Malcolm was an exceptional recruit away from that lumpenproletarian milieu we still have to understand, notwithstanding the Obama life story, that the life stories of our recruits to socialism will look a lot more like young Malcolm than young Obama.

There has been much talk, too much talk of late about this so-called “post-racial” society that has sprung up during the Obamiad. For about the one thousand and first time I will recognize that the election of a black man as President of the United States in race-conscious America is significant. But what of it? I will also concede that during the past fifty years or so, since the time of the hard civil rights movement, that especially among the young racial attitudes have softened. However, I will bet many a dollar that if old Malcolm X were still on the scene he would have more than a few choice words about “racial progress”. All he would have to do is look at the ghettoes, unemployment lines and the prisons. Those views don’t lie. I remember listening to Malcolm on late night radio (“The Jerry Williams Show” a call-in talk show in Boston that Malcolm mentions in his book). I swear I disagreed with virtually everything that Malcolm said in those days, except the pervasive nature of white racism that I was painfully aware of from my own white working class neighborhood in Boston. Malcolm told some home truths then, and I am sure he would tell them now as well.

HONOR WOBBLIE "BIG BILL" HAYWOOD- CLASS-WAR MILITANT

HONOR WOBBLIE "BIG BILL" HAYWOOD- CLASS-WAR MILITANT

COMMENTARY

BELOW IS A POLITICAL OBITUARY WRITTEN BY JAMES P. CANNON, FRIEND AND COMRADE OF BILL HAYWOOD'S FROM THE INTERNATIONAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD (IWW) AND COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL DAYS FOR THE MAY 22, 1928 DAILY WORKER, NEWSPAPER OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY. AS NOTED BIG BILL WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE- THE CLASS-WAR PRISONER DEFENSE ORGANIZATION FOUNDED BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND LED BY CANNON UNTIL 1928. I ONLY NEED ADD THAT THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT HAS NOT PRODUCED SUCH LEADERS AS HAYWOOD FOR A LONG TIME. THERE ARE CERTAINLY MILITANTS OUT THERE AND NOW IS THE TIME TO EMULATE BIG BILL-THAT WOULD BE A FITTING TRIBUTE TO HIS MEMORY.

The death of Haywood was not unexpected. The declining health
of the old fighter was known to his friends for a long time. On each
visit to Moscow in recent years we noted the progressive weakening
of his physical powers and learned of the repeated attacks of the
fatal disease which finally brought him down. Our anxious inquiries
during the past month, occasioned by the newspaper reports of his
illness, only brought the response that his recovery this time could
not be expected. Nevertheless we could not abandon the hope that his
fighting spirit and his will to live would pull him through again, and
the news that death had triumphed in the unequal struggle brought
a shock of grief.

The death of Haywood is a double blow to those who were at once his comrades in the fight and his personal friends, for his character was such as to invest personal relations with an extra-ordinary dignity and importance. His great significance for the American and world labor movement was also fully appreciated, I think, both by our party and by the Communist International, in the ranks of which he ended his career, a soldier to the last.

An outstanding personality and leader of the pre-war revolutionary labor movement in America, and also a member and leader of the modern communist movement which grew up on its foundation, Bill Haywood represented a connecting link which helped to establish continuity between the old movement and the new. Growing out of the soil of America, or better, hewn out of its rocks, he first entered the labor movement as a pioneer unionist of the formative days of the Western Federation of Miners 30 years ago. From that starting point he bent his course toward the conscious class struggle and marched consistently on that path to the end of his life. He died a Communist and a soldier of the Communist International.

It is a great fortune for our party that he finished his memoirs and that they are soon to be published. They constitute a record of the class struggle and of the labor movement in America of priceless value for the present generation of labor militants. The career of Haywood is bound up with the stormy events which have marked the course of working-class development in America for 30 years and out of which the basic nucleus of the modern movement has come.

He grew up in the hardship and struggle of the mining camps ofthe West. Gifted with the careless physical courage of a giant and an eloquence of speech, Bill soon became a recognized leader of the metal miners. He developed with them through epic struggles toward a militancy of action combined with a socialistic understanding, even in that early day, which soon placed the Western Federation of Miners, which Haywood said "was born in a Bull Pen," in the vanguard of the American labor movement.

It was the merger of these industrial proletarian militants of the West with the socialist political elements represented by Debs and De Leon, which brought about the formation of the I.W.W. in 1905. The fame and outstanding prominence of Haywood as a labor leader even in that day is illustrated by the fact that he was chosen chairman of the historic First Convention of the I.W.W. in 1905.

The brief, simple speech he delivered there, as recorded in the stenographic minutes of the convention, stands out in many respects as a charter of labor of that day. His plea for the principle of the class struggle, for industrial unionism, for special emphasis on the unskilled workers, for solidarity of black and white workers, and for a revolutionary goal of the labor struggle, anticipated many established principles of the modern revolutionary labor movement.

The attempt to railroad him to the gallows on framed-up murder charges in 1906 was thwarted by the colossal protest movement of the workers who saw in this frame-up against him a tribute to his talent and power as a labor leader, and to his incorruptibility. His name became a battle cry of the socialist and labor movement and he emerged from the trial a national and international figure.

He rose magnificently to the new demands placed upon him by this position and soon became recognized far and wide as the authentic voice of the proletarian militants of America. The schemes of the reformist leaders of the Socialist Party to use his great name and popularity as a shield for them were frustrated by the bold and resolute course he pursued. Through the maze of intrigue and machinations of the reformist imposters in the Socialist Party, he shouldered his way with the doctrine of class struggle and the tactics of militant action.

The proletarian and revolutionary elements gathered around him and formed the powerful "left wing" of the party which made its bid for power in the convention of 1912. The "Reds" were defeated there, and the party took a decisive step along the pathway which led to its present position of reformist bankruptcy and open betrayal. The subsequent expulsion of Haywood from the National Executive Committee was at once a proof of the opportunist degeneration of the party and of his own revolutionary integrity.

Haywood's syndicalism was the outcome of his reaction against the reformist policies and parliamentary cretinism of the middle-class leaders of the Socialist Party—Hillquit, Berger and Company. But syndicalism, which in its final analysis, is "the twin brother of reformism", as Lenin has characterized it, was only a transient theory in Haywood's career. He passed beyond it and thus escaped that degeneration and sterility which overtook the syndicalist movement throughout the world during and after the war. The World War and the Russian Revolution did not pass by Haywood unnoticed, as they passed by many leaders of the I.W.W. who had encased themselves in a shell of dogma to shut out the realities of life.

These world-shaking events, combined with the hounding and dragooning of the I.W.W. by the United States government—the "political state" which syndicalism wanted to "ignore"—wrought a profound change in the outlook of Bill Haywood. He emerged from Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1919 in a receptive and studious mood. He was already 50 years old, but he conquered the mental rigidity which afflicts so many at that age. He began, slowly and painfully, to assimilate the new and universal lessons of the war and the Russian Revolution.

First taking his stand with that group in the I.W.W. which favored adherence to the Red International of Labor Unions, he gradually developed his thought further and finally came to the point where he proclaimed himself a communist and a disciple of Lenin. He became a member of the Communist Party of America before his departure for Russia. There he was transferred to the Russian Communist Party and, in recognition of his lifetime of revolutionary work, he was given the status of "an old party member"—the highest honor anyone can enjoy in the land of workers' triumph.

As everyone knows, Haywood in his time had been a prisoner in many jails and, like all men who have smelt iron, he was keenly sensitive to the interests of revolutionaries who suffer this crucifixion. He attached the utmost importance to the work of labor defense and was one of the founders of the I.L.D. He contributed many ideas to its formation and remained an enthusiastic supporter right up to his death. What is very probably his last message to the workers of America, written just before he was stricken the last time, is contained in a letter which is being published in the June number of the Labor Defender now on the press.

As a leader of the workers in open struggle Haywood was a fighter, the like of which is all too seldom seen. He loved the laboring masses and was remarkably free from all prejudices of craft or race or nationality. In battle with the class enemies of the workers he was a raging lion, relentless and irreconcilable. His field was the open fight, and in mass strikes his powers unfolded and multiplied themselves. Endowed with a giant's physique and an absolute disregard of personal hazards, he pulled the striking workers to him as to a magnet and imparted to them his own courage and spirit.

I remember especially his arrival at Akron during the great rubber-workers' strike of 1913, when 10,000 strikers met him at the station and marched behind him to the Hall. His speech that morning has always stood out in my mind as a model of working-class oratory. With his commanding presence and his great mellow voice he held the vast crowd in his power from the moment that he rose to speak. He had that gift, all too rare, of using only the necessary words and of compressing his thoughts into short, epigrammatic sentences. He clarified his points with homely illustrations and pungent witticisms which rocked the audience with understanding laughter. He poured out sarcasm, ridicule and denunciation upon the employers and their pretensions, and made the workers feel with him that they, the workers, were the important and necessary people. He closed, as he always did, on a note of hope and struggle, with a picture of the final victory of the workers. Every word from beginning to end, simple, clear and effective. That is Haywood, the proletarian orator, as I remember him.

There was another side to Bill Haywood which was an essential side of his character, revealed to those who knew him well as personal friends. He had a warmth of personality that drew men to him like a bonfire on a winter's day. His considerateness and indulgence toward his friends, and his generous impulsiveness in human relations, were just as much a part of Bill Haywood as his iron will and intransigence in battle.

"Bill's room", in the Lux Hotel at Moscow, was always the central gathering place for the English-speaking delegates. Bill was "good company". He liked to have people around him, and visitors came to his room in a steady stream; many went to pour out their troubles, certain of a sympathetic hearing and a word of wise advice.

The American ruling class hounded Haywood with the most vindictive hatred. They could not tolerate the idea that he, an American of old revolutionary stock, a talented organizer and eloquent speaker, should be on the side of the exploited masses, a champion of the doubly persecuted foreigners and Negroes. With a 20-year prison sentence hanging over him he was compelled to leave America in the closing years of his life and to seek refuge in workers' Russia. He died there in the Kremlin, the capitol of his and our socialist fatherland with the red flag of his class floating triumphantly overhead.

Capitalist America made him an outlaw and he died expatriated from his native land. But in the ranks of the militant workers of America, who owe so much to his example, he remains a citizen of the first rank. He represented in his rugged personality all that was best of the pre-war socialist and labor movement, and by his adhesion to communism he helped to transmit that inheritance to us. His memory will remain a blazing torch of inspiration for the workers of America in the great struggles which lie before them.

His life was a credit and an honor to our class and to our movement. Those who pick up the battle flag which has fallen from his lifeless hands will do well to emulate the bigness and vision, the courage and the devotion which were characteristics of our beloved comrade and friend, Bill Haywood.