Michael Davidow's Blog: The Henry Bell Project - Posts Tagged "the-beats"
Beat It
Responsible for a washing detergent that made clothes tingle; a brand of minty toothpaste that promised its users a glamorous grin; some shady business in London that may or may not have implicated the Rockefeller bank, depending on which rumors you believed; and the character of Kenny Kangaroo, escaped from a cartoon zoo to bounce through crowds of kids, stealing chocolate bars from their pockets and jamming them into his own.
There’s a dead giveaway that you are visiting the world of fiction when you hit that rundown of Henry Bell’s accomplishments; and it’s hiding like the purloined letter, right smack in the middle of things. It’s that toothpaste scam: the “glamorous grin.” Because every student of the 1950’s knows that no such toothpaste was ever sold. No such toothpaste was ever sold because the ad-man responsible for choosing that slogan decided against it. Decided against it because studies showed that the word “brilliant” made people think of things that were shiny and bright, like diamonds; whereas the word “glamorous” made them think of things that were rich and ostentatious, like fur coats. And “nobody want to have furry teeth,” reasoned that ad-man. Who also found the plodding obviousness of the work that went into that decision to be so off-putting that he quit the trade altogether. His name was Allen Ginsberg.
Now GATE CITY has no actual beatniks in it; no more than SPLIT THIRTY had any hippies. Which is because if you were to throw a rock at any crowd of random people in either 1972 or 1960 you would be far more likely to hit a score of regular-seeming souls trying to deal with the problems of their lives in ways that you and I can still easily sympathize with, than you would people who fully embody their generation’s cartoon archtype (the past is not another country; the past is more like two towns over, down the interstate highway). There’s the artist Tom Engelbrecht, of course (who goes so far as to quote Ginsberg’s A Supermarket in California when speaking to Bell in Santa Susana: “wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes…”) (to which Bell replies, unerringly, “what’s that?”) and there’s Tom’s assistant Elaine as well (who at least looks the part, wearing the same sweatshirt and dirty sneaks as Maynard G. Krebs himself); but neither are true beats. Meaning, per Kerouac at any rate, that neither is truly beaten. Both of them are still in there pitching; both of them are still willing to put in the time and the effort; put simply: both of them still have hope.
Which, come to think of it, was part and parcel of life in this country, ca. 1960. Ah so. And we know how that one ended.
No, there are no real beatniks in my new novel, except, perhaps, for the author himself. But even he probably flatters himself, to admit that he keeps writing even when he knows he can’t succeed at it. He keeps thinking that someday, people might read his goddamned novels. And really, man. What’s more square than that?
There’s a dead giveaway that you are visiting the world of fiction when you hit that rundown of Henry Bell’s accomplishments; and it’s hiding like the purloined letter, right smack in the middle of things. It’s that toothpaste scam: the “glamorous grin.” Because every student of the 1950’s knows that no such toothpaste was ever sold. No such toothpaste was ever sold because the ad-man responsible for choosing that slogan decided against it. Decided against it because studies showed that the word “brilliant” made people think of things that were shiny and bright, like diamonds; whereas the word “glamorous” made them think of things that were rich and ostentatious, like fur coats. And “nobody want to have furry teeth,” reasoned that ad-man. Who also found the plodding obviousness of the work that went into that decision to be so off-putting that he quit the trade altogether. His name was Allen Ginsberg.
Now GATE CITY has no actual beatniks in it; no more than SPLIT THIRTY had any hippies. Which is because if you were to throw a rock at any crowd of random people in either 1972 or 1960 you would be far more likely to hit a score of regular-seeming souls trying to deal with the problems of their lives in ways that you and I can still easily sympathize with, than you would people who fully embody their generation’s cartoon archtype (the past is not another country; the past is more like two towns over, down the interstate highway). There’s the artist Tom Engelbrecht, of course (who goes so far as to quote Ginsberg’s A Supermarket in California when speaking to Bell in Santa Susana: “wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes…”) (to which Bell replies, unerringly, “what’s that?”) and there’s Tom’s assistant Elaine as well (who at least looks the part, wearing the same sweatshirt and dirty sneaks as Maynard G. Krebs himself); but neither are true beats. Meaning, per Kerouac at any rate, that neither is truly beaten. Both of them are still in there pitching; both of them are still willing to put in the time and the effort; put simply: both of them still have hope.
Which, come to think of it, was part and parcel of life in this country, ca. 1960. Ah so. And we know how that one ended.
No, there are no real beatniks in my new novel, except, perhaps, for the author himself. But even he probably flatters himself, to admit that he keeps writing even when he knows he can’t succeed at it. He keeps thinking that someday, people might read his goddamned novels. And really, man. What’s more square than that?
