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I was surprised recently in my relentless pursuit of Beat scholarship to learn of a connection between Brion Gyson, who invented and later taught William Burroughs the cut-up technique, and Alice B. Toklas, who was Gertrude Stein’s long-time companion and muse.
Even more surprisingly the connection turns out to revolve around a recipe for ‘Haschisch Brownies’ which Toklas (apparently unwittingly) included in her 1954 cookbook - a recipe that was actually given to her by Gyson…
Here is Gyson's joking description of the cakes:
“This is the food of paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradise: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morrocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by un evanouissement reveille!”
It may be a little too late for a weekend treat to bake the brownies tonight, but if you insist here is the recipe:
Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of de-stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
In pop culture these so-called 'Alice B Toklas brownies' gave rise to ample references, not least the title and main plot device of the 1968 Peter Sellers farce, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas... This clip can (possibly) also be enjoyed without having partaken of any sort of cookie shaped stimulant:
Picking up on the following remark from vol. 1 of this post, I want to focus on the role (or lack thereof) of African-Americans in the Beat movement:
Representations of the racial Other in the Beat 'canon' also are problematic. Kerouac notoriously idolized the racial Other as a Fellaheen primitive, who was more in touch with the land and with the immediacy of human needs and urges, and whose creativity was somehow primordial, and usually pre-linguistic. Thus the great jazz-men of On the Road blow tremendously, but rarely speak - in fact it is their animalistic qualities that are always singled out as their distinguishing marks. The most acute analysis of this figuration of the racial other as the sociopathic, orgasm-directed figure, prowling the subconscious of white disaffected youths, of course remains Norman Mailer's influential essay "The White Negro" which can now be read on-line at Dissent Magazine's website. I recommend that one also reads Frantz Fanon as a counterpoint to Mailer's discourse to get a perspective on what it feels like to wear a white mask over black skin...
Of all the fellow travellers with the Beat Generation group, the one African-American writer of distinction is Amiri Baraka. Most of the other black figures associated with the Beat phenomenon are relegated to supporting or minor roles as 'inspiration', or at best 'forerunners'. Such figures as the hipsters with the ability to talk 'the jive', or the be-bop musicians with their improvisatory skills - almost exclusively black - were major influences on Kerouac's aesthetic ideals, and with him put their stamp on the diction and tonality of much Beat writing. Some would argue that both hipsters and jazz-men were performers, and that the public and theatrical element of the Beat writing and life-style comes straight from there. The history of the 1940s hipster subculture is not yet something I have personally researched, but the current Wikipedia entry on the subject seems above average for the site, so it may safely be consulted...
Obviously, African-American culture has its own, much deeper roots, and Baraka has always kept a consciousness of this multifaceted heritage at the forefront of his literary and political practice. His participation in the Black Arts Movement from the late 50s onward, including setting up the Harlem based theatre company The Black Arts Repertory Theatre, is a case in point. The link above will take you to one of several resources on the history of the movement, and this is another. Baraka's several political and aesthetic mutations are detailed quite comprehensively in the Literary Kicks' web-page on Baraka. His activities with his publishing house, Totem Press, from 1958 onwards were significant to the Beats, but more so his journal Yugen, and later the newsletter The Floating Bear, which he edited together with Diane di Prima. This site reproduces a bunch of issues of the Bear. As Jed Birmingham points out: "It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn."
The Modern American Poetry site, as always, features selected excerpts from critical works on individual Baraka texts, as well as some resources situating him in literary and cultural history.
A Finnish site on Books and Writers has a capsule personal biography plus bibliographies of Baraka's work and selected criticism.
The best portal for Baraka resources, however, remains his own web site, which features a gallery of photos, a short bio, links to and covers from selected books, and - most valuably - links to a wealth of on-line Baraka texts and critical resources.
Of the many YouTube clips available I recommend the following three:
A brief soundbite on the link between performance poetry, rap, and street poetry...
Here is a longish interview from the Blackademics.org site, featuring both Amiri and his second wife Amina Baraka. Note how Amiri liked to hold his head and shake it a bit when he is asked a question that perhaps he finds a bit naive (all of them). Pay particular heed to what he thinks the price is for not being a revolutionary poet...
Finally, my favourite clip is Baraka in performance from 2007. He treats us to what he calls Lowkus, a bawdy form that shouts back in a trickster vein, but very politically so, at the sometimes pale aestheticism of the Haiku. So Lowku, which also puns on 'loco', the Spanish word for crazy, and also hints at the whole locomotion Baraka would like to get started against, say Bush, is a wholly original performance genre... Enjoy Baraka scatting and riffing (this is Bud Powell, he tells us) in between the little slogans and joking digs his lyrics consist of...
Baraka has perhaps never been so intensely scrutinised in the public eye as after the poem he wrote about the 9/11 events - a poem that cost him his post as Poet Laureate of New Jersey, and generally has been very controversial. Why don't you read it for yourselves and judge?
We shall match the Russians potato for potato, calorie for calorie. We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the picnic grounds; we shall fight in the all-night hamburger stands. We shall never surrender! And if the American nation should last a thousand years, history will say, "This was their fattest hour!"
UPDATE: I just came across this new ad for Hummer. see below HOPE: HUMMER OWNERS PREPARED FOR EMERGENCIES
I think this ad is what makes the above caption so ironic. Back in Texas, virtually every Hummer had/has one of those ubiquitous "W" bumper stickers on the back. The SUV has become a socio-political signifier. For (most) people on the political Left, Hummer represents an ideology of blatant arrogance in the face of global warming created by over consumption of petrochemicals that is enhanced by SUV’s; Hummers being literally the largest offender.
This ad could well be any contemporary right-wing political ad, combining fear with the notion of unitary action. The America of post 9-11 is alone in a dangerous and threatening world. On some levels, this ad is seen as justification for the theory of the unitary executive and unilateral military aggression. There's also a not so subtle reference to the image of the Firefighters of 9/11 rushing into the burning World Trade Center. As the narrative states, "After disaster strikes, most people run from point A to point B. Then there are a qualified few, who run from point B to point A." The final view of a tranquil blue planet Earth from space goes far beyond irony.
Another reading of this ad may be; HUMMER - Helping you survive the disasters we create…
These debates have been pretty comical over all on the American political scene. Following them can be excruciatingly painful at times as the candidates appear more and more as simulated caricatures of politicians. Part of this is obviously how the media frame the debates both communicatively and visually. All in all the candidates seem to play out their pre-scripted roles, nailing their talking points on que, or not. Occasionally a little personality squeaks through the stage managers carefully orchestrated production. Senator Joe Biden can be very funny and this from last nights Democratic debate was just too funny.
Giuliani is "probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency, Rudy Giuliani - there's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11."
It's quite interesting right now to compare both the media coverage and debate formats in the US and Denmark. I think some comparative analysis of various political and media styles between the two countries could be interesting.
I've been looking at campaign uses of websites and web 2.0 Internet platforms and am working on an Op-ed piece for publication. Last night I spent an hour or so looking at the Danish campaign websites and thinking about not only how they incorporate new media but also what their web presence and use of communication technologies tell us about their ideology. Radikale Venstre is probablly leading in online messaging and internet based social networking. I'm at a disadvantage in that my Danish is only passable. I think there could be a great article written for a Danish newspaper. Contact me if anyone is interested in working on a collaborative comparative article for either a Danish and/or English market.
Finally, and this is mostly for the graduate and Ph.d students, I've got some platforms available for getting readership exposure on some of the U.S. based political and academic blogs. This could be a good platform for working on your 'intellectual public writing' as Shelly Fisher Fishkin suggested. Some of these blogs have reached a fair level of notoriety and many are attracting academics and established journalists. As a non-published graduate student I see writing and publishing on the periphery as an avenue for writing development and low-barrier publication.
I was surprised recently in my relentless pursuit of Beat scholarship to learn of a connection between Brion Gyson, who invented and later taught William Burroughs the cut-up technique, and Alice B. Toklas, who was Gertrude Stein’s long-time companion and muse.
