hippies - book - 1969 - The Children of Change

The Children of Change
Don Fabun
Glencoe Press
1969
39 pages

Sooo.... as we already know, the 1960s were a different time, and much of what has made it different has since been absorbed by the culture industry and turned into spectacle.  Nowadays the long hair on boys, psychedelic good vibration groovitude and “bone rattling” rock music are defanged signifiers of rebellion in pop-culture productions.  Tattoos are hardly rebellious anymore, let-alone long hair, guitar-playing and new age spirituality - but I’m writing this from a historical situation where the hippie phenomenon has had 40 years to sink in.  In 1969, the hippies were an incomprehensible collage of hair, weird clothes and zoned-out facial expressions, and Don Fabun, thankfully, produced this short guide to help the uninformed understand what’s going on.

The Children of Change is a slim volume that my friend Richard (thanks, Richard) from Ottawa’s Bytown Bookshop mailed to me.  It’s author, Don Fabun, was the publications director of the public affairs department of Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation which basically meant he published a corporate magazine.  He also edited a science fiction magazine called The Rhodomagnetic Digest and wrote a few other books about creativity and communication.  This particular book appears to be a condensed and unscholarly version of The Making of A Counterculture, and I suspect that if it had a purpose or target readership, it was the sympathetic adult generation that preceded or birthed the hippies.

Fabun’s book is a small collection of short pieces that attempt to summarize the attitudes and attributes of the hippie counterculture that the author refers to repeatedly as the “the children of change.”  Fabun laces his discussions with hippie talk and thus creates the sense that he comes from the underground, despite his title as Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation Director of Publications.  He describes the importance of music (and lists several relevant albums) film, hair, and the underground press and also discusses other issues like student revolt, new age occultism, and communal living.  These discussions are buttressed by favorable quotations taken from commentators on the hippie phenomenon, like Gore Vidal.

There are two significant omissions made by Fabun, that make The Children of Change an incomplete discussion of its subject.  The first omission is any mention of drug use.  Everyone knows that hallucinogenics and marijuana were in widespread use among hippies during the 1960s.  The hallucinogenic influence can be found in many of the cultural forms discussed by Fabun, including the underground press and the music of the period, and it is difficult to make a judgment on why the author neglected to mention the hippies will to alter their consciousnesses.  The second omission was any representation of non white “children of change”.  By the time The Children of Change was published the Black Panther Party was two years old and a considerable force in the American political scene.  I suspect that the publication was intended for a white middle-class readership of some kind, and hence it reproduces the “children of change” as an all white social turn.  

The final aspect of the book I would like to discuss are its illustrations.  The book is full of colourfully psychedelic illustrations by an unnamed artist.  The cover illustration bears a partially legible signature that I, so far, haven’t been able to extract a usable search-term from.  The book also features a number of photos of sculptures, blocky representations of hippies mostly, by an artist named Pat McFarlin.  The art is probably the best part of this book and, I suspect, comes directly from the culture this book puts under examination.

beats, piracy - book - 1991 - Ghost of Chance

Ghost of Chance
William S Burroughs
Serpent’s Tail
1991
56 pages

Ghost of Chance is a short fictional work that surveys many of the ideas that Beat writer William S Burroughs was working with through the 1980s (and also through much of his career).  The core idea of Burroughs work from this era was to bring figures from outlaw history into his literary concerns of drugs, disease, language and authority.  Ghost of Chance returns to Burroughs exploration of the terrain of pirate utopias (c.f. Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes by Peter Lamborn Wilson) the he first traversed in his 1981 novel Cities of the Red Night, with legendary Captain Mission returning as a primarily character in this novella.

The only textual account of Captain Mission is from A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book by Daniel DeFoe that essentially serves as a reference guide to the golden age of pirates.  According to DeFoe, via Burroughs’ afterword, Mission was one of the first pirates to establish a short-lived libertarian community.  In Ghost of Chance, Mission appears as a leader of his community, and as a man who communes with the indigenous population (and their customs) and with the animal population as well.  He cares greatly for the lemurs of Madagascar (where his community had settled) and keeps one that he called Ghost as a pet.  

The Captain Mission narrative eventually dissolves into Burroughs ruminations on Christ and a surrealist vision of bizarre disease (referred to as ‘the hairs’ in the text, a disease where hair-like organisms consume a host-body and spread to other hosts by contact), as well as devastation and incompetent authority in the contemporary period.  In some ways this book is a short glimpse into the things that concerned Burroughs around the time of writing, including a turn towards a fondness for animals that continued until the author’s death, and an interest in the environment.  The Captain Mission character is a central site for the interrelated spheres of Western anarchism, indigenous life, and the natural environment.  Mission is an embodiment of some of Murray Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology, and members of his community are expected to show respect to plant and animal life as they show respect to their fellow pirates.  The pirate captain represents the opposite of the European colonists who overrun and destroy Madagascar and its natural environment, which sets a pattern of force meeting counter-force that carries through the short book.

This book may also be a tribute to Burroughs close friend, Bryon Gysin, who died in 1986, a few years before this volume’s publication.  Burroughs and Gysin developed a number of ideas together (the cut-up, the dreammachine) that were intended to break down our perceptions of reality and by extension its apparatus of control.  Captain Mission was an experimenter of breaking down control systems via new forms of political and social organization.  Gysin, in collaboration with Burroughs, was an experimenter of breaking down control systems via new forms of language and sensory perception.  Burroughs makes a number of references to insights Gysin had through his text.  Furthermore the book is rife with black-and-white representations of uncredited abstract paintings of the kind Gysin (a painter who was, at one time, a member of the Surrealists) produced.  

abstract calligraphic work by Bryon Gysin

Ghost of Chance is probably one of Burroughs most accessible texts.  It is not fully linear, although it is also not oriented around cut-up text fragments and choped bits of narrative like many of his other novels are.  His rewriting of the Captain Mission story recalls the work Jorge Luis Borges did rewriting fragments of Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York and other texts, although Burroughs pushes Mission into an extreme that extends well beyond the figure’s textual origins.  This short book may serve as an entry point into Burroughs heavier Cities of the Red Night that covers some of the same ground via Captain Mission.

abbie hoffman - book - 1998 - Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America

Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America
Larry Sloman
Doubleday
1998
437 pages


Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America is an oral biography of 1960s radical leader, Abbie Hoffman.  The book’s author, Larry Sloman, was an active agent of the 1960s counterculture in some capacity, and statements by himself appear in this text to reflect his own familiarity with Hoffman.  Like any oral biography, Steal This Dream is composed recorded words of hundreds of Sloman’s interview subjects.  This book is one of several biographies about Abbie Hoffman, including Marty Jezer’s Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman by Jonah Raskin, Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman by Abbie’s brother, Jack Hoffman, and finally Abbie’s autobiography, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture.  All of these biographies were written by people who knew Hoffman personally, and perhaps with the exception of Abbie’s brother, all were by individuals who were directly involved in the counterculture that Abbie helped to develop.  Steal This Dream’s is unique among the Hoffman literature in that it is an oral biography.

    Author Larry Sloman is probably best known as a collaborator of Howard Stern, with whom Sloman authored Private Parts and Miss America.  Sloman has also written a number of biographies of figures such as Bob Dylan, Anthony Keidas, and most recently, Harry Houdini.  Sloman also authored a book about the social history of marijuana titled, Refer Madness: A History of Marijuana.  He holds a masters degree in Deviance and Criminology, which appears to carry into his work as an author and journalist, as much of his work focuses on figures who play in the margins of culture and society.  While a number of Sloman’s books play on issues of nonconformism and deviance, Steal This Dream, in its lack of criticality of its subjects, appears to be a culmination of a wave of nostalgia for the radical 1960s that carried through the late 1980s and 1990s.

Sloman is frequently the invisible hand whose name appears smaller than the celebrity he collaborates with even though it is often his labour that makes it appear as though a rock star has actually sat down and written a book.  Steal This Dream is unique among his own ouevre, and among the Abbie Hoffman books, as it is an oral biography, meaning that Sloman interviewed scores of people who knew the man, and structured their resultant statements into an account of his life from this myriad of perspectives.  The printed statements, often many appear to a single page, may be supplemented by statements made by Hoffman himself from interviews he gave during the 1960s and by images of him or events related to the events being discussed.  This is the basic structure of the book, and the structure of almost any oral biography.  

The text of this book exists in two time periods.  The statements of people, speaking from the 1990s but looking back on the event that was Abbie Hoffman, and excerpted statements given by Hoffman from various points in his life.  This approach highlights an issue with the oral biography regarding the aspect of distance.  Hoffman (deceased since 1989) can only speak through his media appearances from the times being discussed by all of the other textual sources.  As is noted by many of his friends in Steal This Dream, Hoffman was a master media figure, and was always attempting to present an image of himself that balanced an appearance of mischievous playfulness as well as radical seriousness.  This representation is manifest in the quotations by Hoffman selected by Sloman, and such quotes were primarily used to fill out the details of a particular event under discussion.  Abbie's included statements are already conditioned by his approach to media appearance.  Meanwhile everyone else is looking back on events that occured 20 to 40 years ago from a situation where The Sixties have been apotheosized as a new golden age for radical political activity and alternative living (the age which inspired Theodore Roszak to coin the term ‘counterculture’).  Sloman’s subjects are speaking from a sense of their own historical relevance - and are discussing Abbie Hoffman in a nostalgic manner - often to demonstrate their own appearance and importance in that history.  Additionally they are looking back upon a completed life.  We now know that Hoffman suffered from bipolar disorder and the people who knew him may now give enlightened comments on that component of his personality.  Steal This Dream is not a source for finding how his friends and associates understood his bipolar-related behavior at the time.  

Steal This Dream covers all of the important events of Hoffman’s life, as told by his friends and enemies (including some of the law enforcement personnel he had encounters with).  His childhood, his unhappy first marriage, his Freedom Ride experience, his anti-war activism and related pranks, Chicago 68’ and the subsequent trial, his cocaine bust and flight underground, his resurfacing, his environmental activism, his career as a campus speaker and his death are discussed.  With oral biographies there is a lack of critical distance, as the people in the subject’s life tend to rosily wax nostalgic or vent their anger, often over minor details and irrelevant anecdotes, (Abbie’s brother Jack, for example, appears fixated on the radical prankster’s sexual life).  The book is most interesting when Abbie’s self-mythologizing is challenged, for example, when Bob Zellner (an SNCC activist) stated that Hoffman exaggerated his involvement in the civil rights movement.  I believe that for a figure who wrote so much about himself, such commentary is fair and welcome to a researcher, but primarily much of what is critical of Hoffman is focused on minor details rather than on deconstruction of his acts or statements.

This book’s value to a researcher may be primarily in its sources and their quotations.  The statements of many notable figures of the 1960s appear in this book, and while much of what they say is about Hoffman, many statements are also just ruminations on the events of the decade.  Additionally, insights into rivalries between groups, such as the tension between the Diggers and the Yippies, for example, can be found in Sloman’s text, and may help give depth to some of the attitudes different radical factions held towards one another at the time.  

An unfortunate dimension to the experience of reading Steal This Dream is that the connection an interview subject has to Abbie can easily be forgotten.  The text has an appendix that lists all of the interviewees and their status as of the time of publication, but a similar appendix that lists their role in the 1960s or in Hoffman’s life would have been extremely helpful in making the book searchable.  Interviewee names may disappear and then reappear later, and it is easy for the reader (i.e., me) to forget who they were if they are not a well known ex-radical.  Sloman’s subtitle for his text suggests that this book is a history of the American counterculture, from its civil rights movement beginnings through to the 1980s environmental movement.  The book would be useful as a historical text if it contained some means by which a reader may search it quickly.

Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989.  There’s a quote, given by New York City poetry maverick John Giorno towards the end of the book, where he quoted  William Burroughs as saying, “He really let us down.”  Many of the final statements of Sloman’s book were in response to Burrough’s shorthand eulogy.  Mike Rossman (I’ve lost track of his connection to Hoffman) said “If anything, Burroughs’ is a reiteration of the attitude which, introjected, helped to kill Abbie.  This demand that the man’s life should not be his own... it appears to me to be an inhuman demand.”  It may have been an inhuman demand, but Sloman’s biography describes a man who loved life as a media figure, and entered the media in order to make similar demands of others. 

philip k dick - book - 1993 - I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick

I am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick
Emmanuel Carrère
1993
Metropolitan Books
336 pages

Emmaunel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter, and director who has, apparently, achieved some reknown in his native France.   He has also written a fictionalized account of the life of American science fiction author, Philip K Dick (1928-1982).  Dick was a north California based author whose work, which often explored the relationship between illusion and reality, reflected the countercultural scene of the 1960s and 70s to which he was an adherent.  
Currently Dick is probably best known as an author whose work is frequently mined for film ideas by Hollywood.   When Carrère’s 1993 biography was originally published, only two films were based on Dick stories, Blade Runner and Total Recall, both of which altered the titles of the works they were based on.  Blade Runner - 1982, was based on the Dick novel Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? and Total Recall 1990 was based on the short story We Can Remember it for you Wholesale.  Since 1993, a number of other movies have been produced from Dick’s writing, including the 2011 film, The Adjustment Bureau.

Carrère creates the image of Philip K Dick as a working class writer who was prolific because that was the only way to make a living as his work was relegated to the poorly-paid genre-ghetto of science fiction.   Dick’s writing has received literary acclaim in North America, and academic recognition, although such accolades were posthumously bestowed upon the author. During his career Dick won the Hugo award (a major award for science fiction literature) for his 1963 novel The Man in the High Castle, but that only marginally raised his status as a writer.  Dick did find critical acclaim and acceptance within his own lifetime in Europe, and particularly in France, although the famed Polish sci-fi author Stansislaw Lem was also a proponent.  While Carrère’s biography first appeared in France in 1993, where Dick had long been recognized as a great writer, this bio did not appear in English until 2003, after Stephen Spielberg directed The Minority Report (based on a Dick story) and revived Dick’s oeuvre as a mine for film concepts.  

Carrère’s biography was an early effort in what is now a crowded field of books about Philip K Dick.  As a novelist, Carrère fictionalized aspects of Dick’s life, alluding to states of mind that are impossible to know, and conversations that were never recorded.  Carrère focuses on Dick’s relationship with women, and the processes of thought and labour, or the influencing interests on the writing of Dick’s best known works.  Dick’s Potboiler works (a slang term for genre novels written primarily to garner income) like Our Friends from Frolix 8 or The Zap-Gun were not mentioned.  Rather, Carrère focuses on the now widely known texts such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge, and a few others, and suggests indirectly that these novels were the axes around which their author’s life revolved.  Carrère constructed a narrative of Dick’s life wherein his actual situation was consistently written into his science-fiction.   When Dick was writing one of his major works then it meant the relationship he was in, his current political attitudes, the books and music that most interested him then, and other aspects of daily life were all intimately connected to Dick’s text of the moment.  

I Am Alive and You are Dead does have a lot of connective tissue between the parts that describe the events that produce each novel.  These in-between bits often focus on the state of Dick’s family life and his constantly shifting relationships with women.  Furthermore, his unraveling mental state was a frequent subject for Carrère.  Along with Thomas Pynchon, Dick is regarded as one of the great authors of paranoia, and Carrère is sure to find numerous examples of this state of mind in his personal life.  Furthermore, Dick was a writer who’s work, mostly focusing on the illusory nature of reality, fit well into the zeitgeist of 1960s northern California.  Hippies appreciated Dick’s exposure of a world behind the apparent world, while Dick appreciated the Hippie’s hallucinogenic drugs.  

Probably one of the most interesting aspects of Carrère’s biography of the troubled sci-fi writer is his telling of Dick’s conversion of his bungalow home into a hippie commune.   Dick allowed runaways and drugged-out kids to stay at his home for a time during the early 1970s.  This also was a time when the writer’s paranoia was most acute, and in Carrère’s telling, he occasionally entered paranoid, drug induced, manic phases where he looked for evidence of federal infiltration of his him.  Meanwhile, his house had become well known as a crash-pad for runaways to the local police.  

Carrère also goes into great detail about Dick’s gnostic experience, in which God came to him in the form of a pink light for short a period of time.  This experience succeeded Dick’s life with the runaways, as the first published mention of this mystic encounter by the author was in his 1977 work, A Scanner Darkly; the novel in which Dick describes those years when his home was also a drug commune.  The experience of touch with the divine was profoundly transformative for Dick, and when God’s presence withdrew from his life, he attempted suicide as a result of his failure to cope with that loss.  Following his failed attempt to take his own life, Dick began to manically make notes on the experience.  These notes contributed to Dick’s final works, his spiritually focused VALIS trilogy, wherein Dick attempted to comprehend his contact with the divine through science-fiction.

Carrère’s fictionalization of Dick’s life is interesting because it highlights questions about authenticity that pertain to all biographical writing, but with Dick it also presents his life in a manner that connects to the work of the subject.  The representation of the untrue, to supplement the true, as a theme of this biography serves to demonstrate the relevance of Dick’s lifelong project in imagining the unreal in the real (and vice-versa).  Dick’s literary ideas have vast implications for contemporary culture, as theorized by figures such as French philosopher of real and simulation, Jean Baudrillard, who made direct reference to Dick in his seminal essay collection, Simulacra and Simulation.  By admitting that his biography of Dick is part fiction, Carrère is using a biography of a writer of simulacra to highlight the seemingly realistic yet fictional nature of all biography.