Dieter Rot Sets In

by Alastair Johnston

wait, later this will be nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth, edited by Sarah Suzuki et al, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2013, 96 pp., 108 illustrations, paperback.

    Funny how things come in threes. Last year I wrote on Booktryst about Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish artist (concrete poet and landscape gardener). Finlay's son Eck got a laugh out of my review, calling my take, "IHF: the Dolce & Gabbana Years"! I noted that he had dismissed Dom Sylvester Houédard (ironically the first person to champion Finlay in print in Britain, in an excellent piece in Typographica 8) as "anti-culture" and "nonsense." Then I received a copy of Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter by DSH and reviewed it last week. Both of these pieces mentioned the publisher Hansjörg Mayer and both also mentioned the Icelandic concrete poet and book artist, Dieter Rot. So by some curious coincidence, Saturn cheap-day Return, or whatever you want to call it, I am back looking at the 1960s and the movements that promised so much then.

    It has been 50 years and those of us who remember the 60s are old codgers thinking nostalgically about the explosion of art, fashion and music that signaled our coming of age, and how much grimmer things got, from "Free Love" succumbing to AIDS, acid trips becoming the nightmare of drug wars with crackheads and cough-syrup slurpers pervading all corners of society, to the great liberating joy of rock-n-roll, punk & new wave, succumbing to disco then becoming the tired pablum of Justin Bieber  & Britney Spears. What went wrong? we cry. Stop babbling, gramps, say the youth, and drink your Ensure.

    Dieter Rot (or Roth as he is called here) was born in Germany in 1930. Though he operated at the same time as Op Art, Actionism and Fluxus, he went his own way and, like another German, Kurt Schwitters, he created his own one-man art movement. And he did it out of Germany, moving from Switzerland to Iceland in 1955. His biggest influence was Marcel Duchamp and he worked closely with British pop artist Richard Hamilton as well as the printer and typographer Hansjörg Mayer. There is one constant in Rot's output and that is editioned works, whether books or prints, but otherwise he changed means of expression constantly.

     The title of this monograph suggests the transience of all things, and points to the fact the Rot used cardboard, Sellotape, newsprint and other non-archival material to make his art. (Schwitters too liked bits of acidic newsprint and so many of his artworks are now uniformly brown whereas they once had sparkling red and yellow passages.) Rot's art or anti-art was ahead of its time, though obviously Duchamp and Cage are big influences. He took sheets of overprinted waste paper from a printshop floor and bound them into books. Of course there is an unconscious element in there and the random juxtaposition of fragmentary found images would be a constant in his work for the next two decades. He made masks out of black paper by cutting holes in a sheet at random then overlaying it on a printed page. He also die-cut holes in randomly assembled pieces of print matter.

   Rot's Daily Mirror Book of 1961 is a good example of his conceptual art: he cut random 2 centimetre squares out of the British tabloid Daily Mirror then perfectbound them -- the result is a "book" with pages, text, fragments of ads and imagery that is an archaeological slide of a moment. It also signals a new form: the Artist's Book. (Later he recycled this book, taking some of the pages and blowing them up to be much larger, for Quadratblatt, 1965.)

    Another artwork, less obviously a book, but no less an "artistsbook" is his Litteraturwurst, which he created in different incarnations throughout the 1960s. He took a book or newspaper and ground it up, added gelatin, lard and spices, and stuffed it into a sausage skin. You could slice your own text from it, like congealed alphabet soup (though not so vegetarian). He offered it to George Maciunas as a Fluxus publication but it was rejected. (Thus becoming another of many artworks misunderstood, even by their intended audience.) His point was, we consume literature like sausage and it too ends up as shit. He made litteraturwurst out of Marx, James Joyce, Goethe, Hegel, Günter Grass and many other authors he felt needed this treatment.

    Roth loved playing jokes on the artworld. Not like those clowns Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst who are merely naughty boys in art class saying "But Sir it is art, my mammy says so…," but in a more subversive way. He made a bunny rabbit shaped like a chocolate rabbit you might consume at easter. (Remember the Swiss love chocolate probably more than they love sausage.) It's called "Karnickelköttelkarnickel (Bunny-dropping-bunny)" -- which is amusing in itself. It was manufactured, out of rabbit droppings, in an edition of 250. Not only does chocolate resemble shit, but a lot of art is really shit, he seems to be saying. He called his collected poems The Collected Shit, forestalling any criticism, and retained all the errors in his German that his students at R.I.S.D. (who were tasked with assembling the work) introduced. He stepped in an artwork of his contemporary Joseph Beuys (a bucket of lard), but the more celebrated artist graciously allowed his action as a "collaboration." 

    A self-portrait has a Duchampian title, "P. O. TH. A. A. VFB." (written in Dymo tape on the pedestal), it stands for "Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste." His lumpy ugly sub-Giacometti self-portrait bust is made of chocolate and birdseed. His intention was that the work would be left in a garden to be consumed by the birds and vanish as the artist himself does. Of course it ended up in a museum being worried over by conservationists. From the gloom of Beckett to the exuberance of Paolozzi you can see a mirror of the times in his work.

    Rot's increasing use of food was problematic, not just for posterity, but even during its existence. Cupcakes in the shape of a motorcyclist were given out at a gallery opening … and eaten. An installation of pieces of cheese which were supposed to slide down a wall towards open suitcases became rancid and maggoty in a few days and eventually the gallerist's husband drove the art to the desert and abandoned it.

    Roth didn't like the Fluxus artists ("A good thing they are modest, he said, because they have no talent"); he doesn't seem to have liked anybody very much ("James Joyce is kitsch"), apart from his collaborators Hansjörg Mayer and Richard Hamilton, but he created some very amusing and provocative artworks, some in multiple editions, and many of which stretch our concept of what a book is or can be.
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A Beatnik from the Middle Ages

by Alastair Johnston

Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter The Life & Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard, edited by Nicole Simpson (n.p., occasional papers) 192 pp., paperback, with color illustrations $30

Though not as well known as his contemporaries Dieter Rot and Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh) is acknowledged to be one of the key figures in the concrete poetry movement of the 1960s. Starting (roughly speaking) from Apollinaire's Calligrammes, as well as Dadaist and Futurist experiments (Yes, I have heard of Ancient Greek acrostics), poets took an interest in the typographic form of their verse. Live performance also became an important component in twentieth-century poetry. For most people, poetry in the 1950s and 60s is synonymous with drug-taking Beatniks, but Houédard was a Benedictine monk who lived and worked in Prinknash Abbey, Gloucestershire, England. And while he was active in the poetry and small press publishing scene in the 1960s, his work has now vanished: most of it unique or produced in small editions ended up in private collections.

A lot of his creative output was in the form of typed pages produced late at night in his cell on his trusty portable Olivetti (like Aram Saroyan, he failed to interest the Italian typewriter company in sponsorship -- or even acceptance of how their machine had become a vital part of artmaking). dsh typed letters manifestos and sometimes would disconnect the platen to make free-floating abstract images using the typewriter keys. In this his work is similar to that of H.N. Werkman, the Dutch artist of the 1930s and 40s, whose typed 'tiksels' he would have seen in Typographica. dsh made poem objects (though often using non-archival plastic), and he published in little magazines.

a particular way of looking (1971)
courtesy of Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry

But dsh was instrumental in bringing a wider appreciation of concrete poetry (which includes sound poems in performance) to Britain. He first wrote about it in Herbert Spencer's influential bi-annual journal Typographica 8. He reached out to the Noigandres group in Brazil, Eugen Gomringer and Henri Chopin in Europe, and other British practitioners like Finlay, Bob Cobbing, and Edwin Morgan. He started Openings Press with the artist John Furnival and they involved German typographer Hansjörg Mayer in their productions also.

A spiritual as well as literary activist, dsh got out of the abbey to become engaged with the Tibetan community who were foundering once the Chinese had kicked them out of their homeland. As a child dsh had read in the paper of the "God-king" of Tibet and was fascinated, particularly since the British press did not use the quotation marks. His War service in India (with Army Intelligence in Bangalore) made him aware of how the spiritual becomes the everyday in some cultures. He was interested in Zen and read the writings of D. T. Suzuki. In 1949 he joined the monastery and was ordained as a priest ten years after. Later in life he became involved with the Oxford-based ibn Arabi society. So his was in fact an ecumenical dialogue with poetry.

In addition he spent five years as literary editor of the Jerusalem Bible (1961-6).

His most famous poem is a revision of 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho's famous "Frog" haiku, whose terse seventeen syllables read

     furu ike ya
     kawazu tobi ko mu
     mizu no oto

I am sure you know it by heart. But dsh stripped it even further to

            f  r o g
           p o n d
           p l  o p

Memorial print (litho, silkscreen & letterpress) by John Furnival, 1992

In later versions he enlarged the three Os, making them into an enso, or Zen circle, and further blurring the boundaries between poetry and painting. This reduction communicates his idea of "paintings and poems that are not 'about' life but that ARE live direct living acts."

dsh was very much an artist in the spirit of his age -- David Toop describes him (tonsured with horn-rims) as either "Sergeant Bilko in the unfolding of a scam or a beatnik from the Middle Ages, time-transported to the delirium of London's avant garde." Toop describes the sound poetry of the time (performed at "serious" venues like the Hayward Gallery or the ICA, so not merely coffee-shop ravings) as incorporating shamanic and secret speech, and he mentions the "range from Antonin Artaud to Slim Gaillard, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins to Professor Stanley Unwin."

dsh also collaborated with John Cage in the mid-60s, though how this came across in performance remains a paradox. They performed jointly in the "Chieko Shiomi Concert of Falling Events." Here are his notes for three of the seven movements in their collaborative work "c-dagesh" (the title is based on their names "cage" + "dsh"; dagesh is the Hebrew dot that accents letters to make them hard sounds at the beginning of words), a "7 note suite":

cevent

leave room for seven days: re-enter & sweep toward typewriter: type the following poem:

     c  -
            CC
         h -
            H
            H
           - observe dust resulting - some particles will have downward movements - those settling on the surface of the poems paper-environment constitute the total phonic event

seven-t

asked two tibetan policemonks to hold a teak door horizontal - on it deposited a single bead of quicksilver - for 17 hours they succeeded in keeping the bead on the wood - 17 hours later an ant i had popped into a fold of the habit of one of them caused him to scratch with his left hand - & the bead rolled off the edge

heaven-t

wrote words cacaca lemm - nenipi roto tut - cut paper into 20 pieces - dropped on lawn from tuliptree they formed word immaculatecontraception

dsh 141164 Courtesy Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of concrete & Visual Poetry

   

That dsh was greatly loved and respected by his contemporaries is clear here from their devotion in the essays and the careful reproduction of his typed letters and typewriter poems. There are type facsimiles of his major essays and a bibliography. One of the contributors, Charles Verey, is working on a full-scale biography of dsh.

The poems are a delight but the main course is the group of five essays included. dsh is curious and smart and takes the pulse of the moment (end of 1963) in "Beat and Afterbeat: a parallel condition of poetry and theology," written in familiar beat-prosody which readers of Ginsberg and Kerouac will recognize. His bibliography for this article includes four works of Anselm ("the Finn at the BBC") Hollo: Red Cats, Jazz Poems, Paul Klee, and & what else is new, a small poetry pamphlet; the Selected Poems of Corso (just published in England) alongside Edith Sitwell's latest collection; two magazines (Evergreen Review & Pa'lante) and a list of anthologies that defined the canon of 60s poetry: New American Poetry edited by Don Allen, Living Voices edited by Jon Silkin, New Departures edited by Michael Horovitz, Poetry Today edited by Elizabeth Jennings, and A. Alvarez's Penguin anthology, The New Poetry; he also includes Elias Wilentz' The Beat Scene. The first page is a total rush:

So what's happening? 1963 times running short & poetry the mad sad joy of the shadow church wefting nylon tantras inter man & man & world & Yahweh patching up the zimzum with a certified 2-way stretch of now & bursting thru our mental claptraps giftwraps & stale thought-think outlines with delirious mantic words has come a bit unstuck. And poetry here to begin with can include any even 1-line stuff from real poet shadow saints.

Then he introduces Anselm Hollo, before getting on to Vatican 2! A few pages later he tells us what's wrong:

After WW-2 we never felt naively déçu like after WW-1: partly because of the 20s partly because the 40s saw the real shrinkage (planetarisation) of the world begin partly because todays ultimate horror is the art-protest area built-in to new social fabrics (Germany England France America) that make both god & poet hygienic.

He rapses waxodical about the Beats: calling Burroughs a "writing liver." He feels for Corso, adores the hairy smelly Ginsy, but his biggest thrill is meeting another French-Catholic in Jean-Louis Kerouac. (dsh was born Pierre Houédard in Guernsey which is a British isle but geographically French.) What he detects is a heart/mind schism and he tries to explain this in art as well as theology:

…this new beat/monknik wind of popular fauve livedeparture biblical-liturgical theologies reacting against dessicated past systematisations - & this 2nd live wind of creative systematisation or cubist theology freezing for dead guests the mind-spirit impetus by conceptual bottling while hosts with satori participate in this & every insight - like reverse zen-archery & readers the hit becoming the hitters.

His task in this article is "the impossible serialisation of the surreal." He manages to separate British-English poetry from American-English, but only just, and sees the hope in pidgin "(esp Ee Tiang Hong of Malay Wale Soyinka of Nigeria & Zulfikar Ghose of Pakistan; french equivalents have had more influence on french eg alive negro poets Ed Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor - lyric firbank/lorca negritude)."

Hollo, he thinks, is too too kind to the Brits, but also "whats it like to be translated by ah? A jokey fauve sensation like going through a loss-of-outline tank - he's creative exciting as zen when loose on noncrib russian translation he ties his love into lovely knots with two loose ends. His J poets are the ones to watch…"

dsh ends this blockbuster essay/crash course in modern poetry with a flourish:

The mad gay bliss of benedictine gravitas - so other than puritanical seriosità. Some people (?Mary McCarthy) get so wild at this sort of thing: theyd rather go to what they think their image of hell ought to be just to PROVE that gods like the image theyve given up of him reflecting themselves. They cld SHAKE that god - where the new wave just breezes around unzipping him & showing the mysterys all much deeper more mysterious. The new wave & the new wind are in the same direction: life prayer poetry jazz are participation in creativeness in god - they just dont exist outside performance.

i possibly am again (1967, PVC laminate) Courtesy Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of concrete & Visual Poetry

The second essay "Between Poetry & Painting" is a Master's Thesis in telegrammatic form. dsh explores the Dadaist notion that "word and image are one," or as he puts it, Logos & Ikon on equal terms. There are no illustrations (but you can find many of them in Massin's Lettre et Image [Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970]), however a very wide range of sources is cited in his chronology including another clever typo: "1923 Werkman begins his 600 druksels: e. e. cunnings writes tulips and chimneys." Musicians, painters and architects make it to his shortlist as well as asian/arabic/hebrew sources. We also get a key glimpse inside his mind/lair when he contrasts his kinetic concrete poetry with writing about it:

kinkon/spatial is cool: hot-media (like this note about things) leave nothing unsaid: depend on fictitious feudal-author caged spirit in superior private-mind bossing the tenants of his literary space: cool is nouvelle-vague selfregulating anarchic system - communicator-receptor on equal terms sharing telstar communication ball…

wind grove mind alone
Courtesy John Rylands Library

His famous essay "Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay" expands on the last in more detail, explaining his terms such as constructivist, constrictive, nonsemantic & coexistential. "Introductionancestry Andchronology" is more of the same, this time with an emphasis on sound poetry (Finlay is a visual artist or environmental word-sculptor). These essays presents one aspect of Houédard's work; his commentaries on Meister Eckhart will have to wait for another anthology, but for those of us interested in visual arts and the poetic conjunction between language & typography this is a hefty box of chocs.
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Paul McCartney's Handwritten Lyrics To "Lovely Rita" Offered At $175,000

by Stephen J. Gertz

Paul McCartney's handwritten, working manuscript for the song Lovely Rita, from the Beatles' preeminent and triumphant album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band (1967), has come into the marketplace. The first rough draft, ten lines in ink on a sheet of lined paper from a steno pad, it is being offered by Biblioctopus of Beverly Hills for $175,000.

Within, McCartney rewrites the line,  "writing all the numbers in her little black book," to read,  "filling in a ticket with her little blue pen." In the final version as recorded the line reads, "filling in a ticket in her little white book." At the top is a note, "chorus."

Accompanying the manuscript is an unncorrected first state proof of the Sgt. Pepper album cover, varying from the released version with McCartney kneeling, the band instruments placed differently, and with two people amongst the cast of onlookers who refused to sign releases and were dropped from the final, published album cover.

Authentic Beatles manuscript material from Sgt. Pepper hold the records for rock n' roll memorabilia at auction. In 1994, a manuscript draft of Getting Better sold at Butterfield's for $249,200. In 2010, the manuscript lyrics to A Day in the Life sold at Sotheby's for $1,202,500.

At $175,000 Lovely Rita seems a lovely bargain.

This piece was last seen at Butterfield's on December 12, 1993.

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Of Related Interest:

Extraordinary John Lennon Letter To Eric Clapton: Join My New Band!.

Yoko Ono Collects Rare Books: The Booktryst Interview.
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The LSD Library Goes To Harvard

by Stephen J. Gertz

FABRICE, Delphi. L'Opium A Paris.
Paris: La Renaissance Du Livre, 1907.

The Ludlow-Santo Domingo (LSD) Library of rare books, the world's first, largest, and most distinguished collection of the literature of psychotropic drugs, has been placed at Harvard's Houghton Library on long-term loan after extended and highly sensitive negotiations with the family of the late Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Jr (1958-2009), the eldest son and scion to the fortune of Columbian business magnate Julio Mario Santo Domingo (1923-2011) and omnivorous collector of books associated with the 60s Counterculture in the U.S. and Europe.

Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll was not an area of book collecting that the family, particularly his  wife, Vera, from whom he was estranged, found edifying; it was, apparently, a source of embarrassment, and since Mr. Santo Domingo's death the family had worked hard to disburse his collection with discretion through intermediaries who insisted upon the highest degree of secrecy from potential buyers - institutions, dealers, and auction houses - and negotiations with all were, reportedly, difficult.

WILLIAMS, Fred V. The Hop-Heads of San Francisco.
San Francisco: Walter N. Brunt, 1920.

It was, then, something of a shock when Harvard formally and by name announced acquisition of the major part of the Julio Santo Domingo collection - over 25,000 books, manuscripts, works of art, audio recordings, and films - on September 28th of this year. When I inquired close to a year ago while chasing a rumor Harvard refused comment.

As did The Roll N' Roll Hall of Fame and Museum & Library and Archives which coyly responded, "no comment at this time," a non-confirming confirmation that they had acquired a chunk of the collection. And as did every auction house suspected of being involved in negotiations. (A slice of Santo Domingo's magnificent collection of fine erotica and Baudelaire was recently offered by Christie's-Paris without provenance; highly familiar with the collection, I recognized a few singular items). And last year a selection of books on '60s Counterculture from the collection was discreetly acquired by Maggs in London; journalist Susan Halas recently interviewed Carl Williams of Maggs about  Santo Domingo's Counterculture library for Americana Exchange.

FOLEY, Charles. Kowa, La Mystérieuse.
Paris: Editions Pierre Lafitte, 1920.

The cornerstone of the LSD Library - however large just one part of Santo Domingo's huge book collection - was the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library of the literature of psychotropic drugs, which Julio (we knew each other) acquired in early 2002 from its founders and curators, rare book dealers Michael Horowitz and William Dailey, along with Robert Barker and Michael Aldrich  Ph.D, who established the collection in the early 1970s in response to the dearth of historical resources and research materials on a controversial subject at the forefront of public consciousness and discussion. It was, and will now remain, the pre-eminent book collection on the matter.

VAUDÈRE. Jane de la. Folie D'Opium.
Paris: Albert Méricant, n.d. [c. 1910].
Unrecorded; the only known copy.

But before Julio bought the Ludlow, William Dailey (with my assistance as his cataloger/manager) was sending low- to high five figure shipments of drug-related books to Julio's offices in Geneva every other month or so. Julio bought just about anything you offered  related to his area of interest. I recall that, early on, Dailey sent Julio a very long list. He returned it with only a few items checked off. Bill and I were stunned - this was great, gotta-have stuff. It turned out that Julio had merely indicated the books he didn't want - only because he already had copies.

(I think that shipment was worth $88,000; if not, it was another air freight-load to him for that sum - I died a thousand deaths in the course of arranging its pick-up and shipment. After 9/11, moving large quantities of rare books on illegal drugs out of the country actually became easier. By then, the office guys at Swiss Air freight and those on the dock had become old friends of Dailey Rare Books and we were granted "known carrier" status after an airline official took a quick look-see through the shop. Our shipments no longer required time-consuming piece-by-piece inspection and too much paperwork; now, two quick phone calls and a fax).

Julio would visit L.A. once or twice a year and take Bill and me out to lunch. What did we talk about? Uh, books; Julio couldn't get enough of the subject. He was a hip bazzionaire and always appeared in crisp white shirt, pressed faded jeans, sharp blue blazer, and black tassled loafers, a casual ensemble of uncasual quality and cost to the average citizen. He was a rock n' roll jet-setter; he had personal relationships with rock n' roll's royalty and routinely vacationed with them.

Nick Carter Weekly No. 136: Une Fumerie d'Opium. An Anarchist Plot.
New York: Street & Smith, c. 1905. French edition.

Once, while at Dailey Rare Books, I picked up the phone. It was Julio, calling from Geneva, Paris, Berlin, somewhere in Europe. We chatted for a moment then I passed the call over to William.

"Hi, Bill," Julio said, "say hello to Yoko."  Yup, that Yoko. Mick Jagger was also a friend on a long list of luminaries that were his genuine pals.

When I sold my small yet precious collection of drug literature to William Dailey in 1999 it wound up in Julio's collection. When Julio invited me to Geneva to catalog the enormous number of drug paperbacks in his collection (alas, not realized) I looked forward to seeing those old friends.

Feral House, 2008.

When I was preparing my book, Dope Menace (2008), Julio generously opened his collection to me, and had his staff in Geneva - Beatrice Rodriguez, Natasha Antonini, and Flavia Aulieri -  send requested book images for inclusion into DM, which was the first and last volume to cite the Ludow-Santo-Domingo Library as a reference source. Julio was supportive and proud of the project and looked forward to its publication. He was, sadly, extremely ill at the time of the book's release and while I sent him a copy I'm not sure that he saw it before he died.

Dr. [Julius] Cantala.
The Idol: Opium, Heroin, Morphine, and Their Kingdoms.
[N.p.]: Botwen Printing, 1924.

That the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library is now at Harvard is a relief to those who spent decades assembling its core and those associated with it. We were afraid that the collection would be broken-up and cast to the winds. There is only one other significant collection of this material in the world, in private hands, yet it's a handsome dwarf compared to the LSD. Now, scholars will have access to the finest, broadest, and deepest collection of books, art, and ephemera related to psychotropic drugs on Earth.

I think I speak for all with their hearts in the collection when I thank the family of Julio Santo Domingo, particularly his widow, Vera, for keeping the LSD Library whole and placing it at Harvard, where the collection, once the bastard step-child of the book collecting world - years ago, William Dailey was denied membership in The Grolier Club because of his involvement with the Ludlow - is now recognized for its significance and takes a deserved place of  honor alongside Harvard's other distinguished special collections.

Work and Win No. 275: Fred Fearnot's Trip to Frisco, or
Trapping the Chinese Opium Smuggler.
New York: Frank Tousey, March 11, 1904.

Julio Santo Domingo, Jr.  is surely smiling, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Brian Jones, Jerry Garcia, Marc Bolan, Nico, Harry Nilsson, Jim Morrison, Elvis, etc. at his side because Julio has no doubt become best friends with all of them. And they're likely talking about this, what the Harvard Gazette called, A Collection Unlike Others.

"We got the sex and drugs," said Leslie Morris, curator of Modern Books & Manuscripts at Houghton Library, of the Santo Domingo Library.

And now, a stately procession of ignoble books of the sort that Julio loved and owned, copies of many now,  presumably, on deposit at Harvard, the most respected institution of higher learning in the world. 

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All images from Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks 1900-1975, each, save the cover image, courtesy of the Ludlow-Santo-Domingo Library.

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Novelist Richard Brautigan's Brains At Bancroft Library: A Grand Guignol Adventure!

by Stephen J. Gertz

The Bancroft Library.

The papers of 'Sixties Counterculture novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, who, in 1984, committed suicide at his desk with a gunshot to the head, rest in the The Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley.

Poet J.J. Phillips, while working in the manuscript division at the Bancroft, rough-sorted Brautigan's papers when the library acquired them. She had no idea that latex gloves and surgical mask would be appropriate to the task.

"I know you know that Brautigan blew his brains out, literally blew his mind," she wrote to poet, novelist and essayist Andrei Codrescu at Exquisite Corpse.  "What you might not be aware of is that he blew his brains out all over pages of his last manuscript... I handled them, archived them, ran my hands over his desiccated brain matter on numerous occasions, though at first I had no idea what I was touching because the Library said nothing and even denied what became all too apparent after I eliminated the other possibilities of what this strange stuff could be (I’m not unfamiliar with such things, and my eyes didn’t deceive me).

"The coroner’s report confirmed my suspicions. I see what’s on these pages as something of a completely different order than coffee stains, cigarette burns, the tomato seeds that Josephine Miles idly spat onto her mss., even drops of spittle, blood, semen, and the like.  With Brautigan, these are the actual physical remnants of brain tissue, blood splatters, and cerebral fluid of the very brain that gave birth to the ideas he had and the words he wrote, now creating its own narrative on top of those words; and of course that act insured he’d never think or write another word."

Thus inspired - or, more properly, driven - she wrote a poem about it. 

Brautigan's Brains
 
Brains blasted there
upon the page
gray matter gobbed
blood of the poet congealed
this grotesque palimpsest
last words concealed
beneath the blood
shattered neurons
glial cells unglued
glopped, splattered

A text of rage coagulated
there upon the page.

Axons impel thought to take
that fatal fiery leap
across synapse into act
fiction into fact.

Atoms smash against the skull
the neural net tattered warp and woof
the brain that strings the words extruded
globbed, fragmented, spattered
last words occluded by the final proof

The text of rage coagulated
there upon the page.

It will come as no surprise to those who knew him that the late Peter Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, CA was in the middle of all this.

"Peter sold the papers to TBL, and even he was a bit dodgy when I asked him about it." she wrote to Booktryst. "When Peter sold the typescript, he said he was going to make TBL buy one whether they wanted to or not." (Pure Peter).

He may have been dodgy then but it didn't prevent Peter Howard from later validating the story by literally putting his imprimatur on it.

"Some years ago," Phillips told me, "Peter sold a limited edition signed typescript of this poem [ten copies], printed over a photo of Brautigan’s face, with the title Apoptosis: or Brautigan’s Brains" [2002]. He later published her poem Nigga in the Woodpile (2008).

And what does the Bancroft Library think about the situation?

"I get the sense," she continued,  "that even now they don’t want people to know what’s on those mss. pages (to my knowledge, the catalog description doesn’t mention this, or didn’t when I last saw it a long time ago) because their attitude was so squirrely and obfuscatory when I began asking questions, which is why I was driven to call the coroner, then send for the coroner’s report (ghastly, a tragic death).

"TBL was (is?) bent on denying the fact of what is undeniably there.  I honestly don’t understand why they wouldn’t either encase those specific pages in mylar or remove them for safekeeping and substitute photocopies.  This for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I don’t think your average literary researcher accessing the ms. would be thrilled to learn that he or she had been unknowingly fingering somebody’s brain matter...What about possible pathogens?  What if he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease?"

Anyone wishing to go trout fishing in the Brautigan papers at the Bancroft Library may first wish to don waders and elbow-length surgical gloves. Or a Hazmat suit.
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Mille grazie to J.J. Phillips.

Brautigan's Brains reprinted with the kind permission of the author.

A tip o' the hat to Andrei Codrescu.
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Of related interest:

Novelist Richard Brautigan's Unrecorded One Day Marriage Certificate Surfaces.
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Novelist Richard Brautigan's Unrecorded One Day Marriage Certificate Surfaces

By Stephen J. Gertz

If you were an American Boomer breathing during the 'Sixites and a part of or a close observer of the Counterculture you likely read  Trout Fishing in America, the novella by Richard Brautigan published in 1967 (though written in 1961). It has sold 2,000,000 copies.

And it is just as likely that, forty-five years later, you, as I, can't remember much  about it if anything at all. Beyond its non-linear narrative - it is a series of loosely connected anecdotes, an admix of playful and gently satiric musings not without childlike charm - there is no story, however abstract, to hold on to. Brautigan demands nothing from the reader except, perhaps, suspension of critical judgment. Ultimately, his work is guilty of one of the worst sins in literature: it is utterly innocuous,  all gums no teeth. It was baby food for a segment of readers not yet weaned onto solids and reluctant to graduate to  literature that needed to be, at least, moderately chewed.

Trout Fishing in America was, as all of Brautigan's prose and poetry, very much of its time and place, possessing all the simplicity, innocence and naivety we associate with the peace and love aspect of hippie-dom with whimsical insights passing for wisdom that evaporate within ten minutes of reading them. "There is no there there," as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California. And when the Age of Aquarius died from lack of guile and a head-on collision with reality so did Brautigan's audience and career.

But for a few precious years Brautigan was it, a cult writer with a following of avid fans who consumed his every word, and he deserves  a solid place in modern American literature for capturing the Peter Pan aspect of 'Sixties counterculture.

In 1968, at the height of his popularity, he published an obscure broadside dated February 29 that soon became even more so.

The One Day Marriage Certificate is not found in John F. Barber's annotated bibliography of Brautigan (1990) nor in the Brautigan section of Gary Lepper's A Bibliographical Introduction to Seventy-Five Modern American Authors, published by the late Peter Howard's Berkeley-based Serendipity Books in 1976. How many copies were printed remains unknown. No copies are located by OCLC.  It's as if it never existed.

Yet a copy has surfaced and is currently being offered by Between The Covers.

Here, Brautigan channels Al Capp's Marryin' Sam, from the comic strip Li'l Abner, who presides over Sadie Hawkins Day, February 29th, that leap year ritual when the single girls of Dogpatch are let loose to lasso a husband.

The text, wrapped by a bevy of pre-Raphaelite/Art Nouveau beauties, reads: "This beautiful one day marriage is ours for February 29, 1968 because we feel this way toward each other and want forever to be a single day,"  followed by blank lines to be filled in. It is signed "Marryin' Sam in and for Golden Gate Park," San Francisco, and the credit at the bottom reads: "Words - Richard Brautigan. Pictures - The San Andreas Fault. Printing - Rapid Reproductions."

After the wedding you could truck on down to Winterland to see Cream perform Sunshine of Your Love on that night of February 29, 1968, the group's We're Going Wrong, presumably, not heard until the day after the One Day Marriage when the good vibes withered on the vine, the acid finally wore off, and the honeymoon was over. Sort of like the 'Sixties.

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Rocky and Bullwinkle's Rare Book Adventure

by Stephen J. Gertz

Bullwinkle: Hi-Ho culture fans! Today we journey into the fascinating world of rare books and book collecting.

Rocky: But Bullwinkle, you don't know anything about rare books.

Bullwinkle: Of course not. They're rare.

Rocky: So, how do you find them?

Bullwinkle: Watch me pull a rare book out of my hat.

Rocky: Not again...

Bullwinkle: Whoops, wrong hat.

Rocky: Or an angry first edition of Born Free.

Rocky: Why don't we go to a library to learn about rare books?

Bullwinkle: An excellent idea. Let's visit the library of a respected institution of higher learning.

Bullwinkle: Wossamotta U.

Rocky: I'm okay. But I'm worried about the cameraman.

Deep within the stacks of the Special Collections department of Frostbite Falls Library at Wossamotta U., Rocky and Bullwinkle consult with Lee Greenman, Library Director.

Rocky: Gee, Bullwinkle, Leonard da Vinci's Codex Leicester. I thought Bill Gates bought it in 1994 for $30,800,000. How did it get here?

Inside the fallout shelter beneath the rare book shop within the strip mall off the main drag of Hellhole Palms, California, the principals of Badenov Books ("If They're Badenov That's Good Enough For You") and their financial angel conspire.

Boris: Excellent news, Fearless Leader! We are now members of the ABAA.

Fearless Leader: The Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America? You fool! They're trustworthy,  ethical, and know what they're talking about.

Natasha: No, Fearless Leader, the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Albania.

  
Fearless Leader: Excellent! Finally, partnership with a fraternal trade organization of  evil Balkan no-goodniks with close ties to the very top of government by mafia. Our plan to conquer the rare book world is nearly complete! Did you get the check from Wossamotta U. for the Codex Leicester?

Boris: Yes, Fearless Leader, paid in full.

Fearless Leader: Excellent!

Boris: $3,800.

  
Fearless Leader: You idiot! How did you manage to sell a $30,800,000 book for $3,800?

Boris: Easily?

Natasha: It is my fault, Fearless Leader.

Fearless Leader: What is your excuse?

Natasha: Trade discount.

Fearless Leader: Let me understand this, Fatale. We offered the book for $30,800,000 and you sold it to Lee Greenman at Wossamotta U. Library for $3,800. That's some discount.

Natasha: He was worth it.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates, wishing to keep the whole caper on the QT, has sent a secret agent to Frostbite Falls to crack the case, with orders to be discreet.

Dudley Do-Right: Come out! Come out! Come out, little Codex, wherever you are!

Rocky: Gee, Bullwinkle, should we tell him where it is?

Bullwinkle: That will only make it more difficult for him.

Rocky: Why are you lying down on the tracks?

Bullwinkle: I'm tracking down the Codex Leicester.

Rocky: But we already know where it is.

Bullwinkle: I thought this was the obligatory scene.

 Rocky: No, that's the "wrong hat" bit.

Nearby, in a cheap room at the El Pollo Loco Lodge, Frostbite Falls' fast-food motel Mexicano con carne, Boris and Natasha plan the next step in their dastardly scheme to rule the world of rare books.

Natasha: Boris, how will we get Lee Greenman to pay the $30,796,200 difference?

Boris: What's this "we" stuff?

Natasha: You don't mean...?

Boris: Try not to enjoy it.

Later that evening....

Natasha: My, what a large-paper edition you have, Master Lee. I pray the first issue won't be its last. How much do we owe you?

The next morning, our heroes brokered a deal between Bill Gates and Greenman, who, innocent  of  all wrongdoing had turned lily-white, for the return the Codex Leicester. Gates reimbursed Frostbite Falls Library at Wossamotta U. the $3,800 it spent for the book and put a little smooge in Rocky and Bullwinkle's pockets, or wherever our boys stash change for parking meters.

And so Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose saved the rare book world.

Rocky: Golly, Bullwinkle, collecting rare books is really fun and interesting.

Bullwinkle: It sure is, Rock. I've decided to become a book collector, myself.

Rocky: What kind of books will you collect?

Bullwinkle: The works of M.F.K. Fisher.

Rocky: What's your favorite Fisher book?

Bullwinkle: The Compleat Angler.

• • •

Mr. Peabody: Thus ends another chapter of Octave Uzanne's Annales littéraires des Bibliophiles Estimés, Moose et Squirrel. What did you learn, Sherman?

 

Sherman: That outside of a dog a book is a man's best friend?

Mr. Peabody: No, that outside of a man a book is a dog's best friend.

Sherman: What about inside?

Mr. Peabody: Down, boy; don't beg the punchline. Now, go do your homework.

Sherman: Okay, Mr. Peabody. Want me to show it to you when I'm finished?

Mr. Peabody: Please. I'm famished.

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Apologies, admiration, and respect to Jay Ward and Bill Scott, creator and writer of Rocky and Bullwinkle, an American animated childrens cartoon television show (1959-1964), that presumed kids were smart enough to "get" what was clearly aimed to adults, and for many youngsters, this writer included, was a formative source that fostered a love of language and its possibilities as a playground for tongue and quill.

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For the Groucho-impaired, "Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
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