Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [12]
I asked him where he found the time to pursue his own studies as heavily as he seemed to and still grade papers, keep up with the news, read magazines, and all that.
“Oh, papers don’t bother me—haven’t you noticed how few written assignments I’ve given in this class? It's not necessary if you read the words in the textbook and take notes on my lectures and our class discussions. I find plenty of time to study literature—in fact, it's all I do. I keep up with the news in a marginal way—I just don’t care about it enough to do more than that. And magazines and all that sort of thing … do you read magazines?”
Yes, I said, all the time.
That seemed to put him out a little bit. He said that magazines were a waste of my time if I wanted to be a writer, that I should be studying literature “even if you just read through the Great Books of the Western World as you’d read any trivial book… because you know that no matter how many classes in literature you take, it won’t mean a damn thing. You’ve got to educate yourself or you’ll end up just like all these other know-nothings with degrees.”
I thought longingly of my weekly comic book, Life, of my always irresistible Time and Newsweek which I hated and read with some mad compulsion almost weekly, of my twice-a-month Beat and my monthly Hit Parader, both rock ‘n’ roll rags and both absolutely essential, I thought of the weekly hippie papers which were my life's blood at the time, the East Village Other, the LA Free Press, and the San Francisco Oracle, and finally I saw my supreme favorite among all the periodicals I lived by, The National Close-Up, the most gutbucket proletarian yellow sheet I’ve ever read, the belovedly recalled cover of the first issue of it that I ever bought, one night when I was stoned on Romilar and wine and Benzedrine, that ugly red tabloid banner split-second exploding like a blinding flashbulb before my mind's eye:
INSANE VIRGIN MURDERS TO “HAVE SEX WITH GOD”
“Nothing personal,” she sez
and below that:
MARIJUANA IN THE PENTAGON!
But of course he was right—you can’t fuck around with a lot of jive and madness and expect to get a first-rate education. I asked him if his social contacts didn’t suffer by his marriage to literature.
“Of course they do, in fact they’ve practically become nil. But, I don’t know, I don’t really miss them.”
I’d see him in his office occasionally, days I happened by, bent over his desk, furiously twisting back and forth, pen in hand, paperback on his right and gilt-flecked old tome his left, notebook in the center, the atmosphere therein vibrating like that in the Elysian orgone box dreamed of by smokers of de Quincey and Burroughs. I never saw him in the halls but he was rushing between his two stations, bent forward by the propulsion of his peculiar distracted intensity, and should we meet he never failed to chide me for the omnipresent tabloids, comic books, “undergrounds,” and rock mags under my arms, which never failed to give me a twinge of guilt. It had not yet occurred to me on a conscious level that in reading slick journalism, hippie pulp, and obscenely amusing articles like “Insane Virgin Murders to Have Sex with God” I was preparing just as surely for a literary life quite different from that of the days when a young writer first practiced writing short stories in the style of Hemingway, then Faulkner, then Fitzgerald, etc. etc. etc., in the meantime reading the classics for background. I was just beginning to realize that I was coming up in the dawning days of a new era when literature would turn to toilet paper, daily news would become surrealistic, and artists of all stripes everywhere would feel blissfully free to cut themselves