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Tales of Beatnik Glory/2 Volumes in 1
Ed Sanders's mock-heroic (and heroic) odyssey follows poet, filmmaker, and activist Sam Thomas, editor of Dope, Fucking, and Social Change, and a variegated cast of castoffs, dropouts, peaceniks, freakniks, and mendicant filthniks, from Kansas through the beatnik and hippie countercultures of New York City's Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. From the Freedom Rides and confrontations with the Alabama Klan to the "hate-dappled" Summer of Love, Tales of Beatnik Glory is the epic of America in the sixties, in a language of droll invention and stoned mythopoesis, from a man who once dared to exorcise the Pentagon.
- GenresNew York
543 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1990
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78 people want to read
About the author
Ed Sanders
138 books80 followersEd Sanders is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and publisher. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations.
Sanders was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He dropped out of Missouri University in 1958 and hitchhiked to New York City’s Greenwich Village. He wrote his first major poem, "Poem from Jail," on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting against nuclear proliferation in 1961.
In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore (147 Avenue A in what was then the Lower East Side), which became a gathering place for bohemians and radicals.
Sanders graduated from New York University in 1964, with a degree in Classics. In 1965, he founded The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. The band broke up in 1969 and reformed in 1984.
In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the Tate-LaBianca murders. He obtained access to the Manson Family by posing as a "Satanic guru-maniac and dope-trapped psychopath."
As of 2006, Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York where he publishes the Woodstock Journal with his wife of over 36 years, the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders. He also invents musical instruments including the Talking Tie, the microtonal Microlyre and the Lisa Lyre, a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
Sanders was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He dropped out of Missouri University in 1958 and hitchhiked to New York City’s Greenwich Village. He wrote his first major poem, "Poem from Jail," on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting against nuclear proliferation in 1961.
In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore (147 Avenue A in what was then the Lower East Side), which became a gathering place for bohemians and radicals.
Sanders graduated from New York University in 1964, with a degree in Classics. In 1965, he founded The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. The band broke up in 1969 and reformed in 1984.
In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the Tate-LaBianca murders. He obtained access to the Manson Family by posing as a "Satanic guru-maniac and dope-trapped psychopath."
As of 2006, Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York where he publishes the Woodstock Journal with his wife of over 36 years, the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders. He also invents musical instruments including the Talking Tie, the microtonal Microlyre and the Lisa Lyre, a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 4, 2020
A tour de force of hip lingo, neologisms, and freak-jabber, the tales are stand alone portraits of Beatniks. At once zany and monumental, this is our Odyssey—an encapsulation of a cultural phenomenon that changed America and the world.
Delightful, disturbing, and supercharged. Sanders hit it out of the park with this one. The laurel bushes snap their fingers in awe. Thrill-bedazzled ecstasy!
Delightful, disturbing, and supercharged. Sanders hit it out of the park with this one. The laurel bushes snap their fingers in awe. Thrill-bedazzled ecstasy!
January 27, 2021
Wonderful! Tales of Beatnik Glory portrays and anatomizes the elements that defined the late Beat movement of the Lower East Side. A staggering amount of historical and sociological content is rendered in a semi-fictional, quasi-Kerouac, free-flow style, with intensity, heart, and deprecating humor.
I became aware of Ed Sanders in 1968, when I first heard his band, The Fugs, which I thought clever but not as good as Peter Green’s new group, Fleetwood Mac, both of whom were on a Reprise Records sampler lp (along with Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa, et al). [While I never sought out a Fugs album, I chortled at the sample song, “Iliad”, which was sung from the perspective of an illiterate redneck whose chief joy was to drive drunk around the town square and beat up on queers. Thoroughly jejune and even mean-spirited, the song evinced to my 14-year-old sensibilities a parodistic slyness that spoke truth to my nascent anti-establishment posturing.] My next encounter was in the mid-80s, when I stumbled on vol 1 of Tales of Beatnik Glory, which I thoroughly enjoyed. [One memory of that book was a reference to ingesting morning glory seeds, how they were an easy source of a moderate psychedelic buzz. I recall at the time thinking I should buy a packet of morning glory seeds, and I researched it enough to find that commercial seed packets are generally treated with pesticides.] Other than that specific bit of memory, I had the more general memory that it was a fun read, generally light-hearted and humorous, where the characters were not dissimilar to Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
My current reading of the book, which has expanded to volumes I and II, was also enjoyable (even as it offered more evidence that my mind is crap for details, ie, there were only and a handful of actual “ah-hah” recollections of my previous, 1985-ish reading). Sanders’ collection of 32 interconnected stories is a colorful, vibrant, compassionate, hep, and hopped-up account of the Lower East Side (ie, Greenwich Village) and its Beat denizens, some of them fictional composites, some with pseudonyms (Ed Sanders is himself transformed into Sam Thomas), and some on the periphery of the narration bearing their real names (eg, Tuli Kupferberg, WH Auden, Alan Ginsburg). Sanders doesn’t expend a lot of time talking about what the Beat movement is about; instead, his stories bring to life a gallery of characters whose various backgrounds, presuppositions, and behaviors create a fully-rendered, composite portrait of the movement. There is hedonism, ambitious artistry, liberal politicking, romantic squalor, sexual abandon, anti-establishment heckling (even amongst the Beat community when someone is perceived to have sold out), and a general quest to fully exploit ALL the freedoms offered by the US Constitution. The very first story, which sentiments of cross-generational affection/concern are echoed in a later story, is a paean to the mother-in-law, Sam Thomas’ young wife’s mother who breaks from her husband’s antipathies about no-account, shiftless bums and pays the young Beatnik couple visits and delivers them CARE packages. In a story that limns the political legacy of the Lower East Side, Sanders portrays an octogenarian who by accident stumbles on a protest planning committee. In the course of things, she explains that she’d been involved in political protests since the 1900s when she initially fought to unionize garment workers. This woman, Farbrente Rose, eventually sheds her dowdy Long Island identity, moves back to the Village, and suddenly comes to life again, protesting alongside these young Beats the presence of nuclear submarines in the harbor.
The stories chronicle the late 50s and early to mid-60s, and in the second volume of Tales, there are accounts of events transpiring in the South, around the civil rights marches, including the Birmingham bombing in 1963. In one such account, Sam Thomas ends up in jail in Alabama, and it is the frantic activity of his Beat pals, including Farbrente Rose, entailing a night-long trip from NYC, that helps spring him. Some of these tales don’t add up to much, other than as sketches rendered with the Beat appreciation of Buddhist calm and presence, in koan-fashion expressed in a restless, tell-it-like-it-is language. Sanders makes the writing look easy, because it reads so well and so aptly conveys the essence of the passions that fueled his Beatnik comperes. A sample of Sanders’ lucid, comic, and fervid prose, an instance of Johnny Filthy Feet hustling handouts in Washington Square: “He did other things to bedazzle the tourists that crowded the Village in the beatific era. Growling and slobbering, he often fell at the feet of a passel of map-clutchers. There was one weekend in August of ’60 when he fell to his knees, head tumbling forward, and began to lick a Dreamsicle stick upon the ground in its wet, crumpled Dreamsicle wrapper. Tongue-trails wet the perimetric tar. He groaned, he slithered, a crowd developed. He was arrested. The police dispersed the crowd. The squares put their Brownie Hawkeyes into their purses.”
I became aware of Ed Sanders in 1968, when I first heard his band, The Fugs, which I thought clever but not as good as Peter Green’s new group, Fleetwood Mac, both of whom were on a Reprise Records sampler lp (along with Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa, et al). [While I never sought out a Fugs album, I chortled at the sample song, “Iliad”, which was sung from the perspective of an illiterate redneck whose chief joy was to drive drunk around the town square and beat up on queers. Thoroughly jejune and even mean-spirited, the song evinced to my 14-year-old sensibilities a parodistic slyness that spoke truth to my nascent anti-establishment posturing.] My next encounter was in the mid-80s, when I stumbled on vol 1 of Tales of Beatnik Glory, which I thoroughly enjoyed. [One memory of that book was a reference to ingesting morning glory seeds, how they were an easy source of a moderate psychedelic buzz. I recall at the time thinking I should buy a packet of morning glory seeds, and I researched it enough to find that commercial seed packets are generally treated with pesticides.] Other than that specific bit of memory, I had the more general memory that it was a fun read, generally light-hearted and humorous, where the characters were not dissimilar to Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
My current reading of the book, which has expanded to volumes I and II, was also enjoyable (even as it offered more evidence that my mind is crap for details, ie, there were only and a handful of actual “ah-hah” recollections of my previous, 1985-ish reading). Sanders’ collection of 32 interconnected stories is a colorful, vibrant, compassionate, hep, and hopped-up account of the Lower East Side (ie, Greenwich Village) and its Beat denizens, some of them fictional composites, some with pseudonyms (Ed Sanders is himself transformed into Sam Thomas), and some on the periphery of the narration bearing their real names (eg, Tuli Kupferberg, WH Auden, Alan Ginsburg). Sanders doesn’t expend a lot of time talking about what the Beat movement is about; instead, his stories bring to life a gallery of characters whose various backgrounds, presuppositions, and behaviors create a fully-rendered, composite portrait of the movement. There is hedonism, ambitious artistry, liberal politicking, romantic squalor, sexual abandon, anti-establishment heckling (even amongst the Beat community when someone is perceived to have sold out), and a general quest to fully exploit ALL the freedoms offered by the US Constitution. The very first story, which sentiments of cross-generational affection/concern are echoed in a later story, is a paean to the mother-in-law, Sam Thomas’ young wife’s mother who breaks from her husband’s antipathies about no-account, shiftless bums and pays the young Beatnik couple visits and delivers them CARE packages. In a story that limns the political legacy of the Lower East Side, Sanders portrays an octogenarian who by accident stumbles on a protest planning committee. In the course of things, she explains that she’d been involved in political protests since the 1900s when she initially fought to unionize garment workers. This woman, Farbrente Rose, eventually sheds her dowdy Long Island identity, moves back to the Village, and suddenly comes to life again, protesting alongside these young Beats the presence of nuclear submarines in the harbor.
The stories chronicle the late 50s and early to mid-60s, and in the second volume of Tales, there are accounts of events transpiring in the South, around the civil rights marches, including the Birmingham bombing in 1963. In one such account, Sam Thomas ends up in jail in Alabama, and it is the frantic activity of his Beat pals, including Farbrente Rose, entailing a night-long trip from NYC, that helps spring him. Some of these tales don’t add up to much, other than as sketches rendered with the Beat appreciation of Buddhist calm and presence, in koan-fashion expressed in a restless, tell-it-like-it-is language. Sanders makes the writing look easy, because it reads so well and so aptly conveys the essence of the passions that fueled his Beatnik comperes. A sample of Sanders’ lucid, comic, and fervid prose, an instance of Johnny Filthy Feet hustling handouts in Washington Square: “He did other things to bedazzle the tourists that crowded the Village in the beatific era. Growling and slobbering, he often fell at the feet of a passel of map-clutchers. There was one weekend in August of ’60 when he fell to his knees, head tumbling forward, and began to lick a Dreamsicle stick upon the ground in its wet, crumpled Dreamsicle wrapper. Tongue-trails wet the perimetric tar. He groaned, he slithered, a crowd developed. He was arrested. The police dispersed the crowd. The squares put their Brownie Hawkeyes into their purses.”
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August 3, 2021Poignant and hilarious--highly recommended.
January 23, 2011
I enjoyed reading this many years ago. The many flavours of early/mid 1960s Greenwich Village and the nascent 'counter-culture' are recounted in a very appealing style.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews