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In Memoriam: Barney Rosset, Grove Press Publisher

Barney Rosset, one of the most important publishers in American history, passed away Tuesday. Rosset bought Grove Press in 1951 for $3,000 and managed it for 35 years, steering the publishing house through some of the nation's key literary publications and legal trials, including Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch.

 

A short list of only some of the authors who had key works published by Grove Press: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Malcolm X, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and  Kenzaburo Oe.

The Los Angeles Times writes, "In 1959, [Rosset] published Lady Chatterley's Lover, which had been banned by the postmaster general for promoting 'indecent and lascivious thoughts,' but in 1960 a federal appeals court found that its frank descriptions of sexual intercourse did not violate anti-pornography laws. In 1961, Rosset published Tropic of Cancer, which was blocked by more than 60 court cases in 21 states. In a landmark 1964 ruling, however, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it had 'redeeming social value' and was thus not obscene."

Rosset had first read Tropic of Cancer (which was initially published in Paris, but not in the U.S.) 21 years earlier as a freshman in college. He is quoted in Wall Street Journal: 'The district attorney said, 'Do you realize that members of the grand jury have children who are buying that book at newsstands right near their school?'' Rosset recalled. "And I looked at him and said, 'If that's true and they buy it and read it all the way through, you as parents are to be commended.'"

"I Am 25" by Gregory Corso

With a love a madness for Shelley
Chatterton Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
has gone from ear to ear:
I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:--I did those then
but that was then
that was then--
O I would quiet old men
say to them:--I am your friend
what you once were, thru me
you'll be again--
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
and steal their poems.

Like a dry piece of dust

Like a dry piece of dust on a rock on a plate
The gate fell impulsively the clarion with its beak
Opened up its mouth to speak these words pressed down on a candle
Filling the amber hand that spilled the cards dealt in a matchbox
The truth sucks and sometimes the grass grows in a fiberglass chamber
The gun went off slowly when I unfolded the antique picture chest
The puzzles that came out resembled timber cabins the flint
Too shattered to dismantle this is how the ladder came about
A sentimental monument to the tide of the price of the piece
Of earthenware carefully hand-painted with a paw the neighborhood committee voted
To insert when the pies were cooking now they're done
It's fun to touch the crust divided into cues you protest
Not enough the sucker punch that came inside the clock
Was almost on time maybe a few minutes late my mistake
To think of a pink bottle on the brink of a questionable claim to insanity
The adjusters on watch gave a thought to spears and tokens and hammerheads
Make sure the fish are fed before you go out tonight
Don't you want it to feel alright before the moon is out of tune
Stay stuffed inside your glass cages I'll stick with my moving wagon
On the wall was painted an epic slogan tumblers in motion
Look at the bearded lady rejected for a wonderful erection elections
Come too cheap standing cheek to cheek the three-footed ensemble
Took off their fourth page the book ended with a ceremony
Pronounced by a fire hose only heaven knows what she was saying
It's a pain to sort this out can we get back to the hotel clouds
I've heard that room service comes in many funny numbers humbler
Than a raging bull never play the fool when you have a tool
That hasn't been unleashed yet it came time to pay to pay the check
All the stamps in my pocket were printed out fifty years ago
Who knew then that a talented wolf with horns beneath its teeth
Would drop a real live stallion inside the doormat of the last
Toothpick you little prick the last transaction come back unauthorized
Voices soon surrounded the mounting calls for insomnia it was settled by a delegation
Without knowing the equation the riddle took on a hum
Don't be conning me, man, I'm not yesterday's tomorrow
Though I would be happy to borrow that pen there are some things I've been thinking
Imprint is standard issue cartoon and hard to follow
Without swallowing my tongue I found a piece of lung unplug
The faucet that was supposed to be planted on a billboard
Raining from the ceiling give off a peaceful easy feeling
Of tornadoes or maybe ingrown toenails hard to know anybody
When they haven't made their self-introductions self-destruction
Is overstated especially between the hours of two and three
The test results came back clean no one had seen the doctor
With a fob watch turn his back on a plastic nail this flotilla
Would look better on ice with chocolate cake and martinis to the max
Smokestacks rise above the waterfront the peddler goes out for a friendly jaunt
Jousting is a paragon of a bygone age this hat
It doesn't match this beast is pleasant but hardly novel
Chairs lined up like ducks it's important to know when to fuck your neighbor
Neon lights glow on sticks iron walls depict something resembling hysteria
It's a bit too soon to say it's a bit too early just wait a minute
The Greyhound was turning around the finish lane fuck the pain
No fuck the wall do you understand what I'm saying at all?
Two fools stood outside a mad hatter's mad clatter stumbling toward the door
This one is sleeping this one breathing it's hard to know what kind of chance they're taking
Romancing alone is the platform to better things come lets sing
The song of secret spaces the indentation of a well-known schism
Never mind division let us head on to subtraction it is time to get moving
The hounds outside the door are waiting, it's best to choose your movements carefully
Don't you see the bottom of the glass is half-rhinoceros
A thick feeling building inside every nostril cotton balls
Collected high up into the ceiling this is impressive
For a pigeon wing everybody throws a coin onto the table
Touch typing with two fingers sawed off by two tulips
The leftover portion of a fireworks display has been put on standby inside a train station
Tickets went on sale the day after for half-price shaped like turtle eggs.

"a poem is a city" by Charles Bukowski

a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war,
a poem is a city asking a clock why,
a poem is a city burning,
a poem is a city under guns
its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
a poem is a city where God rides naked
through the streets like Lady Godiva,
where dogs bark at night, and chase away
the flag; a poem is a city of poets,
most of them quite similar
and envious and bitter …
a poem is this city now,
50 miles from nowhere,
9:09 in the morning,
the taste of liquor and cigarettes,
no police, no lovers, walking the streets,
this poem, this city, closing its doors,
barricaded, almost empty,
mournful without tears, aging without pity,
the hardrock mountains,
the ocean like a lavender flame,
a moon destitute of greatness,
a small music from broken windows …

a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,
a poem is the world …

and now I stick this under glass
for the mad editor’s scrutiny,
and night is elsewhere
and faint gray ladies stand in line,
dog follows dog to estuary,
the trumpets bring on gallows
as small men rant at things
they cannot do.

Shooting the Moon

The Mid-Autumn Festival... it came and went. And I was busy and did not have time to jot down a entry detailing my date with the moon. This will be a bit of a personal post. Political manifestos and sensual photos will return at a later date.

On Friday, Oct. 2,  L. and I took off on a mission to the Shangri-La hotel in order to obtain a box of mooncakes she had been given from a friend. We were going to take the subway but the cars were so overcrowded that we ended up getting off after only two stops and walking a ways. She stopped to make a deposit at a "Cash Recycling Machine" (in China, it is common to use separate ATMs for deposits and withdrawals). While she was in the bank, I perused a collection of counterfeit books that a vendor was selling on a cart outside. A couple caught my eye, both by Will Durant. I ended up choosing The Story of Philosophy over The History of Philosophy.

My personal dates of philosophical inquiry can be divided approximately into three phases: high school, college and graduate school. With the graduation from my M.A. now more than eight years past, I was overdue for a refresher course on the great books, and Durant's summaries seemed like a good segue. The vendor offered the book for 30RMB (about $4.25) and I didn't attempt to bargain it down further. The printing was of good quality, but had a strong smell of fresh wood, like it had just been ripped out of a 2x4.

We walked into a large Sichuan chain restaurant and I lapped up the book's contents greedily. One passage stood out: "Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt--particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought. There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself."

The first chapter provided a rather cursory summary of Plato, kind of like seeing the Arctic Circle from an airplane. You may have glimpsed it, but you've hardly explored it. But it was good to get a taste.

One thing I have to bring up. Some of the phraseology in Durant's summary quite frankly scared me- particularly those passages where he seems overly tolerant of Plato's disdain for democracy, rattling off words like "what could have been more ridiculous than this mob-led, passion-ridden democracy, this government by a debating society," attributing the disarray in Athens to its rotating rule at the hands of "simple farmers and tradesman." They may have made a mess of things, but I've also read about more than a few so-called philosophers who managed political affairs ineptly, and nowhere have I seen this perfect education that would (in of itself) prepare a person for leadership. Real experience, broad communication, travel, simple integrity and compassion, even occasional heartbreak seem too inextricably intertwined. The idea of these abstract thinkers with no personal interest in the state they're overseeing scares the shit out of me. For me, the model of a great leader is Abraham Lincoln. I don't think any Lincolns are likely to come out of a segregated, dogmatic education of three or four decades...

The restaurant where I was scanning these passages was Xing Xiang Hui, a large place cast in a modernist diner-type decor, rich in black and gray colors. The menu was not merely a menu, it was also part magazine, part shopping catalog, part shall we say experience. Entitled "Lifestyle Plus," it contained(for example) a page dedicated to the art of Andy Warhol- with products for sale that bore little resemblance to his pop art,  which included a pair of black and red boots that looked like galoshes and a shirt with a cartoon reptile on it.

Looking over the food section, L. immediately eyed the chicken claws. She passed the menu to me and I passed over a page with a plate full of duck heads before settling on a dish of duck necks. "Why do you want duck necks?" L. asked incredulously. "Why do you want chicken claws?" I asked defensively. In the end, we left out the duck heads, but instead ordered a dish of pork and green peppers, some chicken wings, and "disanxian" ("Three Flavors of the Earth," meaning potatoes, eggplant and peppers"). Our four dishes, along with some watermelon juice, came to 97RMB. The food was reasonable but far from spectactular, missing the chilis and peppercorn zing that is customary in Sichuan cuisine.

Leaving the restaurant, it was time to continue our odyssey to exchange the coupon for the mooncakes. We hopped in a cab and took it over to the Kerry Centre. A sign stood in the lobby directing mooncake seekers to the third floor. Exchanging her coupon, L. got a long box that looked like it should hold a pool cue but instead held six small mooncakes, about the size of White Castle burgers. They came in yolk, green tea, black sesame, sugar-free pumpkin, sugar free white lotus and date-and-walnut flavors. They had a consistency close to a scone. I rather liked them, but L. insisted they were "freaky mooncakes."

We had some time to kill before heading to the Shanghai Dance Festival, so we headed down to the Starbucks on the first floor (yes, I know, I hate Starbucks and I also drink coffee there a lot... such are the complexities of life). The Moon Festival is a convenient time for businesses to ignore all laws of economics. Thus, little cakes that ordinarily sell for around 50 cents each now are sold in six-pack boxes costing $30, $50 or even more. The cakes at Starbucks, which I'm told taste good, were on sale in boxes piled high to the ceiling at a cost of 218RMB ($32) per set. Haagen-Dazs is another unlikely mooncake entrepeneur. I settled for a medium coffee and perused a copy of Shanghai Daily. A feature article inside the newspaper lamented how the Mid-Autumn Festival had been reduced to another family dinner by the television event, one associated mainly with mooncakes and thought less fun by young people than Valentine's Day or Christmas. It talked of times in the distant past, when people would gather outside in the night and watch the moon and drink wine and recite poetry.

For the following evening, L. and I went to a visit a friend from her hometown in the south of China. Along the way, we stopped at City Shop and L. picked up curry to make shrimp and I picked up a bottle of Chilean wine. Her friend lived in one of the dwindling old neighborhoods in central Shanghai, a kind of ramshackle boarding house-type dwelling that nevertheless had a homeliness that is lacking in the apartments that have now become the norm. Her friend had recently had surgery, and the woman's mother had arrived to oversee affairs, preparing (with a bit of L.'s assistance) a 10-dish dinner, featuring such local specialties as boiled frog and periwinkles. Of me, the mother had two questions: "Do you eat intestines?" And "Why don't you shave your beard?" I explained to her that I once bought an electric razor at Carrefour and it promptly jammed inside my beard, leading me to return it. Since then, I have just let the beard go its own way.

[An aside: just try returning an item to Carrefour or Wal-Mart in Nanjing, China. I had a coffeemaker from Wal-Mart that broke after two weeks. When I returned it, they insisted that they wouldn't take it back, but instead would arrange for a repairman to fix it. A week or two later, they said I could pick the machine up. I biked for an hour to Wal-Mart to go get it. When I took the machine home, it wouldn't even turn on. So much for the repair. I took it back to Wal-Mart once again and rather angrily insisted that this time they give me my money back. As for Carrefour, I got a glimpse at how their return desk worked when I returned the electric razor- not much better. First off, the people working at the return desk were not authorized to take returns. So they had to call a manager out, which took about a 15 minute wait. When the manager came, she turned the razor on and insisted that it worked because it made a hum. Yes, the machine turns on, I explained, but it doesn't cut hair. To demonstrate, I poked beard trim side of the razor into my beard, where it promptly gagged. Horrified, the manager agreed that it did not seem to be working. Next, she took it apart, holding it up against the light, apparently checking to make sure it did not have any hairs that would indicate I had secretly been using it for the last few days. Finally, I got my money back from a cash register that barely had a 100 kuai in it--apparently, paying money back on returns is not a common practice at discount conglomerates in China.]

Getting back to the meal. Liam, a friend of L.'s, was there, and he asked if I had seen the National Day parade. I said I had and he asked if it was like parades in America. I said there were some aspects in it that were similar, but that in America heavy weaponry is usually not put on display for a ceremonial parade... Our hostess' mother asked if we needed more dishes and everyone hurried to say there was enough on the table (the 10 initial dishes were later followed by desserts of fruit and mooncakes)... The TV played in the background. Brazil was announced as the winning Olympic bidder. What surprised me about that was how shocked the American press had treated the announcement that Rio was selected over Chicago, Tokyo and other destinations. C'mon. South America has never hosted an Olympics. This is a world event. And Rio will obviously hold a great party if they can keep crime under control. I thought the Olympic Committee made the right decision (though I was also a bit saddened to see Barack Obama's Chicago effort passed up). Next came news of the David Letterman affair- I had never previously known him to be a personality in China, but apparently now he was. This was followed by coverage of some pop concerts related to the National Day celebrations. I wondered what that must be like... your some 20-year-old pop star on stage shaking your hips, and you look out to the front row of the audience to see, not some teenage girls, but a row of crusty middle-aged military dudes in olive green uniforms. If the singer felt absurd there on stage, he didn't let on.

Somewhere in the meal, some of the guests found out that Liam had once been the singer of a now rising Chinese rock group. They asked him if he regretted passing up his chance to become famous. He said he was more interested in finding a girlfriend and writing poems. He added that he writes poems in a Beat style, mentioning Allen Ginsberg and The Dharma Bums. Leaving the dinner, I was off to a photo shoot. We invited Liam to go with us, but he said he was going to a poetry jam and would have to join us another time.