by Sanders, Ed
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
I was following, as best I could, the ups and downs of the MFDP, which led a heroic effort that year to become the actual delegates from Mississippi at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. It wasn’t easy to discern, in the leaflets and articles I was reading, what was really going on.
SNCC had organized the party at a meeting in Jackson on April 26. The MFDP ran candidates in the June 2 Democratic primary for senator and for three House seats: Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, John Houston, and the Reverend John Cameron.
They lost but then filed petitions to be on the November ballot as Independents. The Board of Elections laughed them away. Then the party decided to conduct a mock election process to challenge the Mississippi delegation at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
They freedom-registered 80,000 voters; held mock precinct, county, and district caucuses; and, on August 6, held a state convention that sent to Atlantic City an MFDP delegation headed by Fannie Lou Hamer to try to unseat the racist Mississippi delegation. They were counting on LBJ.
LBJ wanted to sabotage the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge of the all-white Mississippi delegation. There was to be a vote of the convention credentials committee. Martin King stood fully in support of the MFDP, while LBJ’s forces assisted the all-whites in a move that smells to this day like rotting tofu.
Meanwhile, the FBI was wiretapping King’s room at the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City and feeding the transcripts on the nonce for Tonkin-hubris’d Johnson to read, helping him to shove his will as the Freedom Party was defeated.
It has been pointed out that many of the white Mississippians whose delegate seats Johnson preserved would support Goldwater in the fall. Also to be considered: Lyndon Johnson’s thirst to micromanage an engulfing war, thinking he was FDR in the Map Room in 1943 studying the position of World War II troops and battlefronts on wall-sized maps.
It was the meanness of Guns in Dallas. The meanness of four children bombed in Birmingham. The meanness of right-wing nuts. A Mean Streak that smeared itself across the skies.
Getting Invited to Literary Soirées
I began to get invited to literary parties, such as those thrown by Ted Wilentz in his apartment above the 8th Street Bookshop. I met writers such as Norman Mailer, Gunter Grass, Norman Podhoretz, and Gil Sorrentino at these literary soirées. An example is a note from Gil, who sent poems that I published in F.Y.: “Dear Ed, OK. Here are three poems from The Perfect Fiction, the works that we talked about @ the Wilentz’s the other night. I hope you like them—if you don’t, don’t bother to return them please. My best to you—Gil.”
Note from Gil Sorrentino.
Parties at the Dakota
I also started getting invited to Panna Grady’s parties at the Dakota, a landmark New York City building, constructed circa 1881–1884 and located at 1 West Seventy-second Street just off Central Park. Its brick and sandstone walls are adorned with balconies, corner pavilions, and terra-cotta panels and moldings. It has a steeply pitched slate and copper roof featuring ornate railings, stepped dormers, finials, and pediments.
Panna was a wealthy supporter of writers, and at a gathering in the late summer/early fall of 1964 for novelist Gunter Grass I was chatting with her and suggested she expand her considerable help from novelists to poets. I mentioned Charles Olson as a great American genius worthy of her support. My suggestion bore fruit a year and a half later.
That was the party where I met Norman Mailer. Holding his hands up, jutting from his body in a kind of sparring position, he addressed me as if he were boxing. “You’re the guy that puts out Fuck You. I have a poem you can publish.” He sent it a few days later, a poem titled “Executioner’s Song,” and I published it in the “God” issue.
The God Issue
All through August and some of September I produced the God issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, volume 5, number 7, with a beautiful cover by Robert LaVigne.
I gathered some brilliant works by Charles Olson, John Wieners, Allen G., Robert Duncan, William Burroughs, Robert Kelly, Carl Solomon, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Judith Malina, Paul Blackburn, Al Fowler, Philip Lamantia, Norman Mailer, and others. I was proud of the issue.
The back-page image featured glyphs of my current passions: freedom to use magic mushrooms, hookahs, the Egyptian scarab, pot, the Lawrencian Boat of Death, the peace sign, spurting dongs, hypodermic needles, and Peace Eye and its Wayward Tongue. A little too much of the needles, of course, but it was a parcel of what was actually going on in the Lower East Side in the underground.
The God issue.
“God” issue Table of Contents.
One feature of the issue was a “position paper” that made proposals regarding the crackdown by various New York City bureaucracies on underground movies, poetry readings in coffeehouses, and public performances. The Department of Licenses, in particular, had raised its cudgels to censor the avant-garde.
“God” issue back-page image.
I was beginning to hone and polish my philosophy of the scholar-activist, utilizing my emphatic Fuck You Press writing style. I wanted my position paper to be heeded. I interviewed Ginsberg and placed portions of the interview in the position paper.
It began:Shriek! Shriek! The Goon Squads are loose! We are motherfucking tired of the brickout of books, movies, theatre groups, dope freaks, Times Square gobble scenes, poetry readings, night club acts, etc. in New York. The Department of Licenses, the freaks in the various prosecutors’ offices, the nazis, the fascists, et al., have joined psychoses for a Goon Stomp. Poets have been bricked out of their readings—Lenny Bruce puked from MacDougal street—Theatres raided—Actors freaked—Grove Press zapped by creeps! Coffee houses harassed—film makers censored—dreamy eyed loiterers & hustlers seized & humiliated—& even the Times Square dance hall scenes have been stomped! Their motives, particularly those of the prosecutors and the lawyers of the Dept of Licenses, seem to be a) self-aggrandizement, focusing the yes of the press on themselves in order to groove up politically, b) the whenever-I-hear-the-word-culture-I-want-to-reach-for-my-gun syndrome, & c) the low budget, low payoff scene. We don’t give a frozen rat dick how brilliant Police Commissioner Murphy is or how effective the Supreme Court is, or even how liberal Mayor Wagner is, when all over N.Y. we are getting slimed off the set! If a city or state official lacks a very liberal sensitivity toward sex, cocksucking, dope & welfare, then the fuckhate should be zapped off the set. It’s hard not to be bitter against these . . . “vice crusaders farhting through silk” waving their penny whistle censor’s flags. The lowliest shoe shine hustler creep mishugana on times square is worth more to a society than all the Calvinist lawyers in Department of Licenses, all state film censors, all the gelded or armored-over fugitives from the vanishing asshole of the void!
I was very revved up.
“Resistance to the Goon Squads,” I complained,
has been sporadic & sometimes effective, but more often the poets & artists have adopted the Cockroach Retreat. . . . However, Allen Ginsberg, with his golden gift tongue of Thoth, in high level behind-the-scenes conferences, by infinite phone calls, manipulations, freaks, fucks & gropes, has managed to cool the scene for poetry readings in restaurants & coffee houses & has rallied support in the city council and (Democratic) Reform movement toward rewriting New York’s oppressive coffee house law. His Lenny Bruce petition, signed by everyone from Lower East Side dope moguls to the Richard Burtons, is a fantastic collage of a new commitment to artistic freedom.
The language in the position paper was a bit overblown, but there WAS a climate of oppression from around 1964, in the administration of Mayor Robert Wagner, up into the early years of Mayor John Lindsay, who took office in 1966. It was the liberal and culturally attuned John Lindsay, in my opinion, who played a big role in the ebbing of the censorship and oppression in the Great City. But not in 1964, when the campaign against culture wa
s in full ax.
I went on in the position paper of ’64 to present some advice from Ginsberg on “Guerrilla Lovefare” tactics. Most of all Allen Ginsberg warned against emanating hostility. (“If you charge the Soft-Machine directly, the Machine will be directly charged by your hate,” Burroughs had written.)
When asked about tactics in street demonstrations where the Goon Squads have blown their cool, Ginsberg replied:If you don’t emanate hostility, the chances of being noted by Goon Squads is lowered considerably but not entirely.
Carry movie cameras & tape machines to protect yourself from official undeserved Goon Squad violence. If you’re occupied taking pictures of the cop hitting you it’s self-evident court proof that the cop should be bounced from his job.
I still think Gentle Mass Movements on Times Square could end the Vietnam War. (Violence gives them an excuse to ban demonstrations.)
Every time I go out on a march, the adrenaline runs through my body making me afraid. I can handle it if all I’ve got to face is the hostility of the cops, but the hostility rising out of the middle of the mob I’m in completely confuses me so that I just want to run away.
True words then, true words now.
Then I asked him about a “Ginsbergian Blueprint for Resistance.”
He replied, “Register & vote”:Come on to your representatives like a self-righteous citizen, it seems to pack weight. If you’re abused, write a clear self-righteous citizen’s letter to the newspapers, send a copy to the local authorities & to the mayor. Either get a personal lawyer or get connections with some specific legal aid body or get the number of a lawyer & cover your activities in advance by knowing the laws & their legal implications. If you smoke pot, suck cock, shoot junk, march in the street, or talk dirty, know what the legal ground rules are, & protect yourself in advance.
All the energy that goes into injustice collecting, vague cultural complaints, putdown sneery conversations, & bad poetry could, without psychic loss, be switched over to lucid concrete self-protective or mutual-protective action. 5 minutes spent looking at the technicalities of the Stop & Frisk law are as charming as an hour’s romantic griping about it in paranoiac bathrooms.
I was beginning to learn organizing principles that would help me for the rest of my existence on Gaia.
My friend novelist Doc Humes recommended what I called the “25 x 25” plan.
“You start,” I wrote,with a list of 25 city officials, 25 people each calling a few a day on an issue—makes the appearance of a phone flood of 625 irate citizens! If it’s the FBI that’s bugging you, set up an FBI newsletter & tell all, or a Dept of Licenses newsletter, etc.—document your story. Get ALL the facts. Get a press list & hand out press releases. Join hands with sympathetic reporters & news outlets—figure out exact program! Onward ATTACKED BY CREEPS! On the offensive. . . . We defy all censors, fuzz, goon squads! We’re going to eat at their foundations, weaken them, lessen them, most of all we’re going to stir their armored-over repressed psyches with the hot breath of our love.
My position paper ended with my usual call for freedom to ball in the street “or anywhere under the Rays of Ra” and for legalization of pot, plus I took a stand on magic mushrooms: “And what’s all this . . . about ‘clinical investigations and calibrated study’ of the hallucinogens! Turn the flip-mixtures loose! Why should a bunch of psychologists hog all the highs? FREEDOM FOR HALLUCINOGENS!!”
The paper also called, sensibly enough, for a “ten year timetable for fucking & sucking in the movies.” And then this futuristic exhortation: “When THE FEELIES arrive we MUST have the social conditions set up for audience film-fucking.”
I closed with a shout toward the Repressionists:
The finale of the position paper.
It was the only time in the history of Western civilization that the actual Egyptian hieroglyph for asshole was used in an editorial essay.
Applying to Grad School a Bit Too Late
That summer of ’64 I applied to grad school, but my application, I was informed, was received too late for the fall academic year. I liked the faculty at NYU, including Bluma Trell. And I also dug the erudite Professor Frank Peters. Plus I’d taken a graduate level course in Mycenaean (Linear B) under Professor J. Alexander Kerns. In addition, the classics department had allowed me access to its papyrus laboratory, which had a number of excellent books on gnostic amulets, Greco-Egyptian issues, and the like.
My screwup in registering for grad school too late made a huge change in my life’s course. If I’d applied a few weeks earlier, I could have safely been on a voyage to becoming a classics professor.
Nevertheless, even though I was not a matriculated student, I took part in a production of Euripides’ Trojan Women, put on by the NYU Classics Club and directed by Professor Bluma Trell. I was Menelaus, husband of Helen, the launcher of many ships. Also in the cast was Carly Simon, soon to be a recording star.
A Cigar to Phil Whalen
Meanwhile, I came home from work at the cigar store after my shift was over just in time to call the taxi service we had listed on the wall by the phone. Miriam was just about to give birth to Deirdre, at Bronx Lebanon Hospital. It was early in the morning on September 4, 1964.
A few days later I sent a pink-wrapped cigar to poet Phil Whalen in San Francisco! Whalen had gone to Reed College with Gary Snyder and Lew Welch and now was a key person on the San Francisco literary scene. His poems in Don Allen’s epoch-making anthology, The New American Poetry, astounded my generation. One thing I miss from those years is a friendship by mail with Phil, who replied to my letter with the cigar celebrating Deirdre’s birth.
Phil enclosed various literary relics for my catalog, including some drawings and a poster for a poetry reading by Whalen, Snyder, and Welch. Phil also wanted me to run an announcement in Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts for a patron to send him an electric organ and the Schirmer complete Bach organ works, which I did.
“Please specify,” Whalen further wrote, “that the organ have 2 manuals and a 32-note pedal keyboard. Manufacturers preferred are Conn, Baldwin, or Allen. Gulbransen is no good, an unreliable transistor system not yet perfected—and they run a non-union shop. Wurlitzer is unacceptable; their machine is shoddily built and don’t tune right.”
Charles Olson’s Introduction to My Book
To my lasting gratitude Charles Olson wrote an introduction to my book Peace Eye.
Ed Sanders’ language
Advances
in a direction of production
which probably isn’t even guessed
at; and which symbols & allegories
are more evidences of than the more
usual, and recent, and principally existent
since the use of a new metric by Sappho &
Alcaeus only. Prior production—from 550 BC
back—conceivably more interesting now
as aid and abetment to help recognition of
forms & inventions “weak” only because
the size of the substance needed
for them is like, say, the
earth. That is, it takes the earth
to make a feather fall.
Charles Olson—
Wednesday, October 7th, 1964
The Folklore Center
Israel Young, who ran the Folklore Center, a cultural center frequented by many folksingers and musicians, became a friend. I used his mimeograph to print an issue of Fuck You. I knew him as a great supporter of the avant-garde, and of course there was his connection to fast-rising Bob Dylan. Izzy had been in the group picketing Columbia Records when it censored Dylan’s “Talking John Birch Society Blues” in 1963.
The Folklore Center was at 110 MacDougal Street, on the block between West Third and Bleecker that contained the Gaslight, the Kettle of Fish, the San Remo Bar (dear to the Beats and the Partisan Review crowd), Rienzi’s coffee shop, the Fat Black Pussy Cat, Minetta’s Tavern, the Player’s Theater, the Night Owl, and Manny Roth’s Café Wha (where J
imi Hendrix would be discovered).
Johnson’s Victory
In general, there was Great Exhilaration that Lyndon Johnson won the race for the presidency. We had no idea of the torture that the flawed LBJ was to inflict on the soul of a great nation.
Meanwhile, Kerouac Folding the Flag on Park Avenue
Much of the ’60s had to do with what to do about the American flag.
Ken Kesey had purchased a six-acre farm near La Honda, California, from the money he’d made from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was the time that Kesey and his pals, called the Merry Pranksters, began holding Acid Tests. The Pranksters arrived in New York City in the wildly painted bus named Further, driven by none other than Neal Cassady. It meant something that On the Road’s Dean Moriarty—Neal Cassady—was Further’s driver.
Allen Ginsberg quickly went to see Neal. Then Neal and Allen drove in the psychedelic bus to pick up Jack Kerouac at his house in Northport, Long Island, and the bus, sporting the banner “A Vote for Goldwater Is a Vote for Fun,” brought him back to meet Kesey at a Park Avenue apartment. The Pranksters had put an American flag on the back of the living room couch in Jack’s honor. However, Kerouac, spotting the flag in the hectic apartment full of Merry Pranksters, some making home movies, was disconcerted, and he carefully folded the American flag and set it aside.