Id Lib: The Voguish Mad Bad Black-Humor Blues
Viereck, Peter
OQQ0QeQ0ogDQg~0000Q.o0Q0~0QiQQQ0ioggQQI00I0iDD0aQgQIjIQQ0O00OQI000Q~00~I000000eI00e000OigQDI0QQOi~0w~06Qi0QQuQ0m BD00mQ0000Q0OQ00i0QI0mQ0jD00Q006QU000 Fixed stars / Govern a life. --Sylvia Plath...
...From troublesome to global slum, We'll whoop it up for tomb, not womb--with our necro~phil-i-aaah BLUUUES...
...Yes, when Status Quo feels safe enough to HITCH To skits that let it laugh at its own TWITCH, What's big bad bold bo-he-mi-ah but BABbitt's blue-jeaned ITCH...
...Freedom, heyday...
...Now hand in paw they bid you gnaw black-humor's ultimate TOAD...
...Fling open the sado-masocho zoos...
...12 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 Leave Alcotts to small-tots--suppress it, Eve's MESsage toJo: "Let it all hang out, Little V/omen, you were ALWAYS The Story ofO...
...Forget that our brandnew porn, Eve's OW and her multiple-OH, Was said better in grand old corn...
...that's Unprogressive, but genocide--oo, Is chic...
...Leave THEM to half the race who face what WE can't face...
...has just published new editions of his Unadjusted Man and his Terror & Decorum while Putnam Capricorn paperbacks have brought out an updated edition of his Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals...
...a fiddle's death-dance blues...
...Now PLAGUE and ART, till life do them part, play a Wagner Liebestod (Pied Pipers of POP danse-macabre: pink hearse by black doves towed...
...Did reason fight rack and thumbSCREWS--to collapse in astrology's noooose...
...Lead the way...
...In the new 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the essay defining "conservatism" is by him...
...Dung and Death, Death and Dung--hear their rubble-rousing song: "Our gruesome-twosome double-doom, ballooning like a bubblegum, Reduces domes to rubbledom...
...You dream you gulp not Black Death's dream but roMANCE'S potion of youth (Nes-Kafka and instant Hieronymus Bosch: O FACILE "nightmare truth...
...Copyright Peter Viereck 1977 0Ieo0OIQ00QQQQBi~QQQi4i4OQii~ooIQQ~Bqo0O~0oQQ0igiII0Ii8OQDO0QUiI0o0Q0QOQ00QQ0I0g0Qi0QOQO0D0QQDIQQIiiQ~8Q44Q0amg~46moqUgIQOIQ~tI~Q0gw~Qi~OIIQUOQI00 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 13...
...6 It's not your swinger pilgrimages, it's not your social-blah mirages: These are mere printer's ink--it's your oiled-robot stink EARNED-art can't bear...
...O corpse-stink of rouged-up "Life" dolls, O synthetic Spontaneous ooooze...
...therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live...
...Greenwood Press of Westport, Conn...
...A miracle: GUT-string's violin--it tweaks you with X-rated moans...
...Not out but upside-down OUR formulas hang: The day "outrageous" topped "lovely" in book-jacket raves, We won--and did anything CHANGE ? It's the same HAPpily-ever-after lacquer When now Polly-Pollyanna wants a DOOMSday cracker...
...Sylvia Plath in Ario/ CALIBAN: 'Ban, 'Ban, Ca-caliban, Has a new master.--Get a new man...
...De-classing all classics as square, We loot them when out of range, We pontes maudits of Washington Square Who pretend we disCOVered" derange...
...Then comes our fit again, the Eve-voice that SHATters our blues:-"Art dotes on clown but pukes at char-la-tan...
...We're not third-world's lovers but SELF-hate's harlots When we let A1 Fatah's "socialist" starlets Blow up Belsen's waifs as"imperialist varlets" (Stop!--On merde even gagmen GAG...
...When even YOkels gotta streak through Squaresville in the BUFF And it's the FRESHmen blow their mind with psychedelic SNUFF, When baddy-bad sounds more hoHUM than goody-goody guff And "I'm a flawed GENius" wins more garDENias than Archie Bunker stuff, Then the cul we countered--it WOOOOS our countercut blues...
...And when Nuremberg's stink of blood and Woodstock's think-with-blood Croak the same noble-savage SAWNNNG, Then our secret's out: new-left was old-right all aLAWNNNG...
...All monsters are aesthetes at HEART, only bores (ugh) "politicize" aaart...
...Style still is long and lifestyle short--beWARE: Blake's--Hart Crane's--PRE-cult Sylvia's tragic magic Had (you vile modish POSturers of madness) A harder core...
...To ever more writers and students today, she symbolizes the third alternative to two mirror-image conformities: (1) a philistine culture and (2) its Dracula, its parasitic counterculture...
...When the Brown rag we beat in '45 bobs back as oh-wow DRA-A-AG, Yes, when "pure aesthete" RiefenSTAHLS pop up in movie halls, The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 11 Hoarse coffins croak MONNNster-lib blues...
...What's "J aws" but La Lovelace's j ive-style, a Dracula Mermaid's wife-style, "Deep Throat" in skinny-dip...
...Capital punishment--boo, that's taboo...
...Though red ink is our favorite SERum and onions we can arrange, Forget real blood, real tears...
...Too late you reel from vibes you feel in violated BONES...
...When Jack Armstrong's a parRIAH and Jack the Ripper a mesSIAH, We'll thumb an ism-drooling nose at FORM, Three thousand years of the fixed stars of norm, And kill Sinai and Parnassus with one stone of Ca-li-BAN, With our Ca-lib-eration BLU-UES...
...Who crowned the Brown piranhas with"thousand year" hosannas ? That artiste manqudwith the forelock, WHOSE dream made him a warlock...
...A rosy ending is rosy, whether Reader's Digest or BANG...
...O TROjan dove of our peace march, O PLAStic organic food...
...Deuteronomy Dedicated to Sylvia Plath: fourteen years after her death...
...What's countercul-TWO...
...Began with The Who, but ennnds as a painnn-fun trip: Shrill "Nashville" our fife-style, "Night Porter" our knife-style, Stale Warhol our death-style, Ken Russell our lifestyle, And "Tommy" our cuddly-cute whip...
...But such masterpieces, at first beyond reproach as imaginative correctives for banal complacency, are now themselves being banalized--mass-packaged--in novels and films of fascist-style sadism...
...Peter Viereek Id Lib: The Voguish Mad Bad Black-Humor Blues I. Come running, you gurus of WITH-it views...
...Meanwhile the third alternative to both conformities is still what Plath, conversing with the author at Mt...
...Peter Viereck of Mt...
...Lina's Red silk-Brown-blouse is Blue's blackest humor As for PhilocTEtes PAINNN-bow, twang the arc of Pynchon's Rainbow With darts his double Cupids, Dung and Death, unLOOOOSE...
...The current betrayers of these heritages are here confronted in a poem drafted in white-heat fury at today's arty cruelty and unearned "creative madness": fury at today's neo-Wagnerian think-with-blood romanticism, its glamorizing of Manson-style "revolutionaries" (Squeaky Fromme's bullets being the least of it) and of soulful Nazi brutes (success of movies like "Night Porter"), not to mention mere emetics (the tortures of Warhol's "Dracula") and mere sleeping-pills (the highbrow surrealist commercialism of novels and paintings that turn into technique what in Kafka and Bosch was hard-earned authenticity...
...When glad-HANders handle sadness and a Milquetoast toasts de Sade-ness, What's theater-of-the-cruel and humeur-noire But Pollyanna's vibrator?--'tis pity she's a BORE...
...Forget that Strindberg beFORE Was "afraid of" Virginia D en-ta-ta And that Kreutzer So-na-ta "feared FLYing" Long before our best.selling Queen KONG...
...So watch "Seven Beauties"--in bed--milk down Auschwitz For laughs, like a tumor On somebody else...
...We' re the sinking ship the rats swim TO: 1 Aesthetes in heat for jackboots --wotta crew...
...As for the prose preface and footnotes, call them a device for smuggling into poetry an odd hybrid: chant-plus-polemic...
...Holyoke two decades ago, saw as our culture's restraining Hebrew and Hellene heritages...
...P.V...
...Heads...will...rrroll (ask Weimar which) INNNN the ditch 3 _9 _9 When...rrrednecks...buy (ask Altamont why) our lumpen-ehust PITCH: Our HIGHbrow-barbarian stroke-that-liBRARian age-of-Aquarian blues...
...Ever jumbling our jargon a jump beHIND, you cats dig ever more SHOCK: 4 "Slit pig-gut's a GROOOvy hap-ning...
...When our SNOB-cult muses are his MOB-cult floozies, he' II SWITCH Fom anti-intelLECT-u-al witch-hunts that wrecked you all To ProFE S S S Sor Deathvitch' s witch...
...Come BRUISE our aging youth-cult MUSE, pass round the Id.lib booooze...
...At once the music giggles...shifts...swells SLOW, swells autumn tones...
...Many recent movie successes," warns Marcel Ophuls, "are based on a tacit alliance between anti-humanist movie producers and fascist tendencies in the audience...
...Sick-jokes in search of DOOOOMSday--wotta cruise...
...As for our poem's typography, capitalized syllables are a device for sounding more bluesy: plaintive, long-voweled, resonant...
...we're like INto its GROANNNing blues...
...Then the cul we countered says, "S OCK us with countercul rrrock...
...Yes, counterPOL died in the '60s--our countercul-TWO packs the pews...
...When your limbs tonight turn leper-white and fall as if fire SNOWED, WHOSE gut now hones (you still dig groans...
...Croon our THEME song--no, croak it: "ID BLUUUES...
...If TransylVANia's glamor-ghoul vammmp is our TRAUMa-school MANia's champ, Let all Eichmanns decamp as high-CAMMMP...
...STEPHANG: 0 brave monster...
...Caliban's lib-movement in Shakespeare's Tempest, II, 2. I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing...
...That girl-voice--whose?--makes unCOMfy our tragic-strut blues...
...Don't stop, tickle harder, oh esss...ca...late the kick...
...Veneered by the Mad Genius put-on (or else by misuse of perfectly valid lib-movements), that sadism is perhaps itself a veneer for the famous "polymorphous" infantile regressions...
...III...
...Pretend we disCOVered womb's woe...
...All werewolves bleat our Cali-banality-of-EEEvil blues...
...I KNOW you, I KNOW you, right down to the mush at your bone...
...Holyoke, the Pulitzer prize winning poet, is working on a new poetry book, Applewood, of which excerpts appear in the fall 1976 Sewanee Review, as well as a new scholarly book on his Burkean humanist conservatism...
...When shockrock-fascist FIXtures are stock MIXtures of shlock shlicksters, It clicks each time rad-CHICsters crownnn Charles MANNNson 2 Son of Man...
...Ah goo-i-er torture, bl-BLU-er flick...
...Best analysis of the alliance is Bruno Bettelheim's ethical and aesthetic indictment ofLina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties" in the New Yorker of August 2, 1976...
...Whether Polly-morph wants a perverser OR folksier cracker, The same Norm " J e s u s " (Brown OR Peale) still "Saves".5 Norm is ab, and foul is fair, Hover through the smog and filthy air, Freedom heyday, brave monster lead the way, Ad-lib us ad-libid, our IDDD-lib: Ca-libido, be THOUUU our blues...
...Blur the kinks with cosmic POSes, wear neurosis as new roses, Trash ten traffic-lights of Moses: "anything goes" is Hip...
...It woos SURreal as SCI-fi, 12-tone as HI-fi, Miro as wallpaper kitsch...
...Forget that the CRY-ing that "howls" in Hippy-King's song Was Zion's "lacrimae RERum" and Bunyan's pilgrim years...
...We're his cul-de-countercul gold-pile-obsessive infant-regressive NICHE...
...Quick, drown out that voice with the FADness Of our DEATH-culture robot-lib moral-lobotomy BLUUUUUUES...
...Though the counterculture has long ago died in politics (a field where it was often a healthy corrective in the Nixon years), it has been reborn in a few lonely literary masterpieces of black humor like Gravity's Rainbow, 1973...
Vol. 10 • April 1977 • No. 7
