Big Hippie Book
The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. Edited Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenburg and Barney Rosset. Collection copyright 2004. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, "Please Kill Me"
Iggy Pop: Once I heard the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, and even Chuck Berry playing his own tune, I couldn't go back and listen to the British Invasion, you know, a band like the Kinks. I'm sorry, the Kinks are great, but when you're a young guy and you're trying to find out where your balls are, you go, "Those guys sound like pussies!"
[. . .] I went to Chicago with nineteen cents.
{. . .] I went out to Sam's neighborhood. I really was the only white guy there. [. . .]
So I hooked up with Sam Lay. He was playing with Jimmy cotton and I'd go see them play and learned what I could. And very occasionally, I would get to sit in [. . .]
It was a thrill, you know? It was a thrill to be really close to some of those guys--they all had an attitude, like jive motherfuckers, you know? What I noticed about these black guys was that their music was like honey off their fingers. Real childlike and charming in its simplicity. It was just a very natural mode of expression and life-style. [. . .]
I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it, which is what most white blues bands did.
[. . .]
164 - [. . .] then it hit me.
I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues. I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs...
So that's what I did. I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase--either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs. So "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is probably my mishearing of "Baby Please Don't Go."
Meridel Le Sueur, "Ripening"
Minneapolis, 1934
181 - I HAVE NEVER BEEN in a strike before. It is like looking at something that is happening for the first time and there are no thoughts and no words yet accrued to it. If you come from the middle class, words are likely to mean more than an event. You are likely to think about a thing, and the happening will be the size of a pin point and the words around the happening very large, distorting it queerly. It's a case of "Remembrance of Things Past." When you are in the event, you are likely to have a distinctly individualistic attitude, to be only partly there, and to care more for the happening afterwards than when it is happening. That is why it is hard for a person like myself and others to be in a strike.
Besides, in American life, you hear things happening in a far and muffled way, One thing is said and another happens. Our merchant society has been built upon a huge hypocrisy, a cut-throat competition which sets one man against another and at the same time an ideology mouthing such words as "Humanity," "Truth," the "Golden Rule," and such. Now in a crisis the word falls away and the skeleton of that actions shows in terrific movement.
Emma Goldman, "Living My Life"
211 - ["] Cardinal Manning long ago proclaimed that 'necessity knows no law' and that 'the starving man has a right to a share of his neighbor's bread.' Cardinal Manning was an ecclesiastic steeped in the traditions of the Church, which was always been on the side of the rich against the poor. But he had some humanity, and he knew that hunger is a compelling force. You, too, will have to hearn that you have a right to share your neighbor's bread. Your neighbors--they have not only stolen your bread, but they are sapping your blood. they will go on robbing you, your children, and your children's children, unless you wake up, unless you become daring enough to demand your rights. Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich, demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!"
Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"
258- The news spread around intellectual-hip circles in the San Francisco-Berkeley area like a legend. In these circles, anyway, it once and for all put Kesey and the Pranksters up above the category of just another weirdo intellectual group. They had broken through the worst hangup that intellectuals know--the real-life hangup. Intellectuals were always hung up with the feeling that they weren't coming to grips with real life. Real life belonged to all those funky spades and prize fighters and bullfighters and dock workers and grape pickers and wetbacks. Nostalgie de la boue. Well, the hell's Angels were real life. It didn't get any realer than that, and Kesey had pulled it off.
Paul Beatty, "The White Boy Shuffle"
298 - In the middle of the throng stood a commemorative sculpture. A slightly abstract cast-iron flick of birds in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., who received his doctorate in theology from Boston University. "Do you see that sculpture?" I asked, [. . .] I was speaking to the Negroes, but the white folks were listening in, their ears pressed to my breast, listening to my heart. "Who knows what it says on the plaque at the base of the sculpture?" [. . .]
"[. . .] I saw what the plaque said. It says, 'If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live. Martin Luther King, Jr.' How many of you motherfuckers are ready to die for black rule in Sout Africa--and I mean black rule, not black superintendence?"
Yells and whistles shot through the air.
"You lying motherfuckers, I talked to Harriet Velakazi, the ANC lieutenant you heard speak earlier, and she's willing to die for South Africa. She don't give a fuck about King's sexist language, she ready to kill her daddy and
299 - if need be kill her mama for South Africa. Now don't get me wrong, I want them [. . .] to get theirs, but I am not willing to die for South Africa, and you ain't either."
[. . .] "So I asked mysself, what am I willing to die for? The day when white people treat me with respect and see my life as equally valuable to theirs? no, I ain't willing to die for that, because if they don't know that by now, then they ain't never going to know it. Matter of fact, I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die. I'm just ready to die."
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, "Please Kill Me"
Iggy Pop: Once I heard the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, and even Chuck Berry playing his own tune, I couldn't go back and listen to the British Invasion, you know, a band like the Kinks. I'm sorry, the Kinks are great, but when you're a young guy and you're trying to find out where your balls are, you go, "Those guys sound like pussies!"
[. . .] I went to Chicago with nineteen cents.
{. . .] I went out to Sam's neighborhood. I really was the only white guy there. [. . .]
So I hooked up with Sam Lay. He was playing with Jimmy cotton and I'd go see them play and learned what I could. And very occasionally, I would get to sit in [. . .]
It was a thrill, you know? It was a thrill to be really close to some of those guys--they all had an attitude, like jive motherfuckers, you know? What I noticed about these black guys was that their music was like honey off their fingers. Real childlike and charming in its simplicity. It was just a very natural mode of expression and life-style. [. . .]
I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it, which is what most white blues bands did.
[. . .]
164 - [. . .] then it hit me.
I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues. I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs...
So that's what I did. I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase--either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs. So "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is probably my mishearing of "Baby Please Don't Go."
Meridel Le Sueur, "Ripening"
Minneapolis, 1934
181 - I HAVE NEVER BEEN in a strike before. It is like looking at something that is happening for the first time and there are no thoughts and no words yet accrued to it. If you come from the middle class, words are likely to mean more than an event. You are likely to think about a thing, and the happening will be the size of a pin point and the words around the happening very large, distorting it queerly. It's a case of "Remembrance of Things Past." When you are in the event, you are likely to have a distinctly individualistic attitude, to be only partly there, and to care more for the happening afterwards than when it is happening. That is why it is hard for a person like myself and others to be in a strike.
Besides, in American life, you hear things happening in a far and muffled way, One thing is said and another happens. Our merchant society has been built upon a huge hypocrisy, a cut-throat competition which sets one man against another and at the same time an ideology mouthing such words as "Humanity," "Truth," the "Golden Rule," and such. Now in a crisis the word falls away and the skeleton of that actions shows in terrific movement.
Emma Goldman, "Living My Life"
211 - ["] Cardinal Manning long ago proclaimed that 'necessity knows no law' and that 'the starving man has a right to a share of his neighbor's bread.' Cardinal Manning was an ecclesiastic steeped in the traditions of the Church, which was always been on the side of the rich against the poor. But he had some humanity, and he knew that hunger is a compelling force. You, too, will have to hearn that you have a right to share your neighbor's bread. Your neighbors--they have not only stolen your bread, but they are sapping your blood. they will go on robbing you, your children, and your children's children, unless you wake up, unless you become daring enough to demand your rights. Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich, demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!"
Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"
258- The news spread around intellectual-hip circles in the San Francisco-Berkeley area like a legend. In these circles, anyway, it once and for all put Kesey and the Pranksters up above the category of just another weirdo intellectual group. They had broken through the worst hangup that intellectuals know--the real-life hangup. Intellectuals were always hung up with the feeling that they weren't coming to grips with real life. Real life belonged to all those funky spades and prize fighters and bullfighters and dock workers and grape pickers and wetbacks. Nostalgie de la boue. Well, the hell's Angels were real life. It didn't get any realer than that, and Kesey had pulled it off.
Paul Beatty, "The White Boy Shuffle"
298 - In the middle of the throng stood a commemorative sculpture. A slightly abstract cast-iron flick of birds in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., who received his doctorate in theology from Boston University. "Do you see that sculpture?" I asked, [. . .] I was speaking to the Negroes, but the white folks were listening in, their ears pressed to my breast, listening to my heart. "Who knows what it says on the plaque at the base of the sculpture?" [. . .]
"[. . .] I saw what the plaque said. It says, 'If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live. Martin Luther King, Jr.' How many of you motherfuckers are ready to die for black rule in Sout Africa--and I mean black rule, not black superintendence?"
Yells and whistles shot through the air.
"You lying motherfuckers, I talked to Harriet Velakazi, the ANC lieutenant you heard speak earlier, and she's willing to die for South Africa. She don't give a fuck about King's sexist language, she ready to kill her daddy and
299 - if need be kill her mama for South Africa. Now don't get me wrong, I want them [. . .] to get theirs, but I am not willing to die for South Africa, and you ain't either."
[. . .] "So I asked mysself, what am I willing to die for? The day when white people treat me with respect and see my life as equally valuable to theirs? no, I ain't willing to die for that, because if they don't know that by now, then they ain't never going to know it. Matter of fact, I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die. I'm just ready to die."
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