I didn’t quite realize it but now Hippies is 99c. Follow Jaz and Ziggy through the risks and pleasures of the 1960s. Go ahead. Click it. Release your inner hippie.
Read it. Share it. Write reviews.
Click covers below for links.
Here it is. Worst nightmare for 1960s segregationists and 2020 woke progressives. A white southerner joining a black singer to do a song by a white British band who were mainly influenced by African-American music. The layers of cultural appropriation is dizzying. The white guys involved don’t seem to know they are supposed to self-identify as racists, and the black guys don’t seem to know they’re supposed to resent the white guys. They are all just digging the collaboration, celebrating each other’s input. May those who have taken a wrong turn to the left and those who have taken a wrong turn to the right find this spirit again someday! (Click image for link.)
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Click covers for links
I didn’t even realize it. Hippies is free again this week.
Follow Jazmine and Ziggy through their Age of Aguarius sorrows, joys, and wonders.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MTGGWZV/
Go on. Do it. Release your inner hippie.
Just be nice for the freebie and write an honest Amazon review, however brief 🙂
(Click covers for links)
Here’s another small clip from my novel, Hippies. In this one, several characters of the two-house commune are being introduced as they play around in the yard. (The two houses are the Duck and the Island.) Had you the decency to read the book, you’d know about half of these characters from the previous chapter.
Duck common residents: Ziggy, Jazmine, Ragman, Stormy, Rose Petal
Island common residents: Tex, Hoss, Gina, Pepper
x x x
Stormy paused, and Rag walked back into the elongated house, the Duck. Meanwhile, Gina and Hoss came out of the fat square house, the Island, from across the yard. Gina was a tiny, quiet thing, and Hoss a big, garrulous walrus of a man – perhaps too garrulous. Like Pepper, he did not know when to shut up, but with completely opposite results. She was all waspish wit, ready for a smack-down, and he was all love and trust and geniality, with a ready bear-hug for any stranger. Indeed, it was his affability that led him to think that a tray of pot brownies would be enjoyable for all at a faculty/student social his sophomore year. That he was expelled for such a kindness seemed a cosmic injustice, but he was good enough with the guitar to make a few bucks at cafes and on the street, and he did contract work at bigger music venues like The Warehouse, so he took it all in lumbering stride. Gina’s place in the Island was ambiguous, as the best anyone could tell was that she moved between the Island bedrooms of Hoss and Pepper, occasionally shifting to the couch if she needed her own space and no bohemian transients were in town and on it. Tex held the remaining bedroom in the Island and he mostly kept his room to himself.
“Hey, Stormy, where’s the Rag?” bellowed Hoss.
“He’s inside watching Rose Petal.” Rose Petal was Stormy’s two-year-old daughter. Together with Ragman, Ziggy, and Jazmine, this mother-daughter pair completed the permanent roster of Duck residents, at least for the time being. Of course, both the Duck and the Island had their parade of transients and hangers-on.
“Hahaha, that Rag,” roared Hoss inexplicably, shaking his head like a giant potato all covered with coarse, bushy hair.
He unclasped his guitar case, and he and Tex plucked out a few lines together. Then Tex strummed out the first chords of a song, and Hoss laid on with the notes. Hoss would sing this one, mellowing his voice to the sweet timbre of a Jewish cantor on a High Holiday.
A new day is coming, people are changing
Ain’t it beautiful, crystal blue persuasion . . .
In the pauses one could tell — Tex was good, but on guitar Hoss was master.
“My god,” Jazmine said. “Look at that crescent moon and Venus so bright. It’s like something planetary is really happening. A sign of something coming.” Everyone looked at the sky, a velvet blanket full of stars, no doubt, but with the moon and Venus most illustrious.
Stormy, spinning with her dress spread out as the song ended, chanted at the sky: “Gnomes of the earth, Nymphs of water, Sylphs of the air, and Salamanders of fire.”
“Where do you come up with this shit, Stormy,” asked Hoss cheerily, adjusting the guitar on his lap.
“Elemental spirits, baby, you can get ‘em from a book if it ain’t in your soul. Like Pepper says, don’t y’all ever read anything?”
“Hoss never got past picture books,” Tex quipped. Then he strummed another random chord while Hoss took a hit on the joint and sprawled back to look at the stars. But random as Tex’s chord was, Stormy knew what he was thinking, and as soon as he hit the strings again, she was singing along:
When the moon is in the seventh house
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
She sang it from a soulful, timeless depth, like it was no joke, and kept swaying, her carob skin gleaming a perfect blend of spiritual mystery and sensual presence.
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars.
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius . . .
Under that Venus and that moon on that early spring night of 1970, a half dozen hippies believed earnestly, joyfully, that indeed a planetary change was coming. The tragic naivete of their idealism had not yet hit.
* * *
The passage below captures a quiet moment early in the novel (circa 1969) for our hippies (click images for links).
(4.4 out of 5 stars in 19 Amazon reviews so far)
“That’s really good,” said Pepper, and she looked back up at the sky.
The others ate in silence, enjoying the crickets, the bird chatter of dusk, and the occasional sound of a VW bug torqueing around the potholes on St. Roch Street. Ragman bussed the plates and refilled the wine.
“That’s why I never did LSD after that first time with Gina and Tex,” Pepper continued, as if there were no pause. “It was cool at first but then the long agony of coming down. I remember driving across the 24-mile bridge at night and seeing monsters coming out of the water with each turn of the waves, over and over in a hellish rhythm. And then I felt all the organs inside my body splitting open. I could see them and feel them tearing. Fuck that.”
Rag was lighting two tiki torches at the ends of the table.
“What the hell were you doing driving while tripping?” he asked.
“I wasn’t driving. Tex was.”
“Oh, that makes it all better,” joked Zig. “TEX was driving while tripping.” They chuckled at the reckless absurdity of it all, knowing that at least this time all turned out safe.
“But listen,” Jazmine said, thinking now of the tan acid from Ragman’s hideaway closet lab. “You could even do this stuff, Pepper. There is no long, dark coming down part.”
Rag fired up a joint. The match momentarily lit up his face. The hazel eyes gleamed, the cheekbones more prominent as they tapered down to the point of the light brown beard. He looked for a moment like one of the plastic devil heads that come from claw machines. He inhaled hard on the joint and then passed it to Zig, who sat on the bench next to him across from Pepper and Jaz. As Rag momentarily held the pot in his lungs, Jazmine could see a note of concentration in his face.
“What are you thinking, Rag?” she asked quietly.
Rag was equally quiet as he spoke: “This shit could change everything.”
Zig took his hit and passed the joint to Jazmine. The earthy sweet smell of marijuana mixed with the citronella fuel of the tiki torches and wrapped the four faces at the table into their own world. Jazmine, with her dark eyes and ivory glow, fiery Pepper with the ice blue eyes, Zig with his rectangular face framed by long curling black locks, and Ragman: faces close together, dimly lit against the darkening sky, all feeling the wrap and pull of pot-forged kinship, but the attention was on Ragman.
“You ever heard of William Blake?” Jaz suddenly asked. “Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, the visionary poems?”
“I like the concept,” Rag said.
“I like the images,” Jaz smiled.
“I like the conversation,” Ziggy threw in roguishly.
“Well, kumbaya, motherfuckers, I’d like a hit off that joint,” said Pepper, breaking more fully the gravity of the scene. Now everything was light again. The focus on Ragman had shifted.
xxx
A variation of the “intentional fallacy” has found fertile soil in academia and the body politic.
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published their treatise on the intentional fallacy in 1946, in the heyday of formalist literary criticism. The gist of the piece was that much criticism misses the point by considering the author’s intention as the standard of a poem’s meaning. It is nothing of the sort. The fallacy, as Wimsatt and Beardsley put it, is a “confusion between the poem and its origins.” When we study a poem, we have access to the poem but not to the private meaning that may have been inside the author’s head. Indeed, it is impossible to determine the intention of a poem, and authors themselves often have trouble identifying the intention of their own poem. Moreover, there is clearly more to any work than the author could have intended. We now have the tools to analyze, e.g., gender relations of power in Shakespeare that he could not have intended. No one can deny that transactions of power between genders take place in Shakespeare’s plays, and that studying them can yield fascinating results, but all of this takes place outside the scope of Shakespeare’s intention. One could even argue that the unintended meanings in a literary work often have more to tell us than the intended ones. The bottom line is that we have to look at the work closely and judge it on its own merits, not on some unverifiable (and invariably reductive) conjecture about the poet’s intention.
Apply that to today’s political discourse, especially on matters of cultural identity. With increasing frequency, it seems, arguments are judged not by their own objective merits but by whether they were proposed by a white, black, male, gay, trans, etc., person. In order to get a fair hearing, those who would opine on cultural identity seem endlessly compelled to open with, “As a gay/black/female/white/trans/etc.,” as if credibility lay more in the speaker’s birth traits than in the quality of the argument. And indeed they may be right, insofar as demographic traits of the speaker do seem to be where the onus of credibility lies for much of today’s academic and political audience. It is a version of “intentional fallacy” we might call the “identarian fallacy,” wherein we judge a work by the author’s demographic identity rather than by its standalone merits. One’s race or gender can preclude one, as a widespread mindset holds, from making valid claims. “You cannot understand this issue because you are male/white/straight/etc.”; “you cannot speak about this issue because you are not black/female/queer/etc.” In other words, “Stay in Your Lane.”
I can understand that some demographic groups may want a leg up in the public sphere from which they were long excluded, but perhaps proscribing access to certain discussions based on race and gender is not the way to go. Perhaps we need a recapitulation of Wimsatt and Beardsley. The validity of an argument, the quality of a work of art, should be judged on the merits of the artifact itself, not on some unverifiable (and invariably reductive) conjecture about the speaker’s race or gender. Everyone should be allowed to weigh in on every discussion and the product be judged on its logical or aesthetic soundness with no regard whatsoever to the identity of speaker. If someone proves that cigarettes cause cancer, and is later discovered to be a closet smoker, does that make her research less valid? No, the merits of the argument itself are what counts, as it should be with all manner of public discourse. Let us not fall back into the fallacy of confusing the validity of an argument with the origin of an argument.
The ultimate irony is that those who exalt the identarian fallacy and the correlative “stay in your lane” policy fancy themselves as progressives, indeed as leftist radicals. Probe even to minimal depth and it is easy to see that “stay in your lane” is the most anti-liberal, arch-conservative slogan ever produced by faux-progressives. A society where everyone stays in their inherited lanes is the epitome of a conservative society.
For a truly radical vision, one that would shake off the calcified build-up of the Establishment, you need to look back to the 1960s. Back then, people were being told to stay in their lane, but the preferred phrase was “separate but equal,” and it was the banner cry of Bull Connor segregationists. Martin Luther King and then the hippies combated this ideology with their own ideology, which basically said that you should never stay in your lane and never encourage others to do so. We are all sharing all the lanes from now on. We are all in this together. Never vilify anyone on the grounds of race or gender. Any us vs. them lines in the 1960s progressive vision were based on ideology, not on race or gender. “Stay in your lane” progressives today are no better than the “separate but equal” conservatives of the 60s. Shut the devil out at the front door (Bull Connor) and he comes in at the back (identity politics).
So, too, forget today’s meme about cultural appropriation, which, far from radical, reasserts the capitalist cornerstone of private property into the zone of cultural production. The 60s ideology was culturally socialist and radically integrationist in a way that must horrify today’s conservatives and progressives alike. The 60s ideology favored every form of cultural appropriation in every direction. Full steam ahead with every kind of cross-pollination in arts and ideas. Break the back of private property on the cultural level. Everybody play with everybody else’s stuff. Put yourself in everybody else’s shoes. Cross lines as often as you can. Tear down the walls and celebrate each other across those lines, no shaming, no judgment based on race or gender, just looking toward the future hand in hand. Never trust any ideology (Left or Right) that says we need to respect walls of separation. Today’s faux progressives, on the other hand, emphasize each demographic guarding its turf from appropriation. They emphasize the walls between us and are skeptical of the bridges. Which do you think is the truly radical vision that points into the future toward a harmonious multicultural society, comfortable with diversity, free from shame, in which we all work together and celebrate our differences as well as our shared humanness?
But here come Wimsatt and Beardsley for the final round of our competition: “Stay in your lane” vs. Wimsatt and Beardsley. On the one hand, “Team Stay in Your Lane” has some righteous outrage to express at being long excluded from power and seeks redress by reinforcing lanes for each demographic and setting demographic preconditions for exercising one’s voice. On the other hand, “Team Wimsatt and Beardsley,” with an assist from the hippies, suggest that you will get a better long-term result if you forget about reinforcing the walls around your identity and tear down all the walls in a festive frenzy and usher in the Age of Aquarius. There will still be arguments in that great age, but you will have to judge them on their own merits, not on any “lane” or identity markers assigned to the speaker. This means you will have to lay off the generalizations about, indeed the fetishization of, demographic groups, and judge people as individuals. Demographic backgrounds will still exist, but cultivate this mindset and the walls will slowly crumble, leaving us to celebrate each other across demographic lines where the walls once stood.
As in a previous entry in this fine blog, which pitted the ancients against the moderns in true Augustan style, the laurel wreath goes to the ancients, Wimsatt and Beardsley, for what their “intentional fallacy” can teach us today.
xxx
Hippies is FREE this week on Amazon (Kindle). Get your copy now. Or if you have a copy, gift a copy or two to friends. Just tell them to be polite and write a brief and honest Amazon review in return for the freebie 🙂
Click the cover below to link through. (Read some excerpts below that.)
(Note: Paperback, unlike e-book, isn’t free but is 20% off at $10.89.)
Excerpts
Magic mushroom head shop and dry cleaners
Some private confusion, that is, about the politics of this blog. One minute I’m critiquing conservatives and the next I’m critiquing liberals. Guilty as charged. But not inconsistent. Not if both of those ideologies (as expressed today) are getting it wrong.
To clarify, I reviewed an old post that playfully defines my position as “Aquarian Anarchy,” which is in some ways equidistant from all points on today’s left-right axis. Although the post is from the year 2 BTE (before the Trump era), it still seems accurate. So here it is. Enjoy.
shakemyheadhollow 