Straight Up | Jan Herman

When I asked Cody Mahler to write something for me about the friend we both lost, he wrote back: "I have to sit down with Carl and discuss what he would like me to say." They must've had a great conversation, because this is what he wrote:

Everybody knows that he is dead except me
Why don't I know it yet?
Maybe because we were downstairs when he went to bed
We were downstairs and he went to bed because he had a sore throat
He had a sore throat and he didn't want to spread any germs
He didn't want to infect anybody
He particularly didn't want to infect Signe
Who had offered to bring him up some soup that night
When we had called him on the phone expecting to meet him
Downstairs
At the gallery
Where we were planning to join him in the festivities
No, he said he was tired
I told him a couple of funny stories on the phone
which I can't remember now
He was not too tired to laugh
He could laugh no matter how much it hurt
And there was nothing more he was waiting for
Than a chance to get a good laugh
A good innocent laugh
Or a even bitter caustic laugh at hypocrites
Who he shrugged off with fine chosen words
As fine as the cakes and cheeses and ciders and wines
He brought us
And such fine things we had for dinners that we invited him to
Or dining out in the "ghetto" as we called it
Slumming was the word we used
in his neck of the woods
I called him Mister Mooch
Which by definition is a man that mooches off people
Takes their comforts and their food
It was an intimate joke between us
He was never a mooch
He was our friend
And nothing can take that away
Signe just said I forgot something
We asked Carl once
What his favorite meal in the world was
And he told us spaghetti and meatballs
So one night
I made them
Just like my mother did
And he was about as happy
As anybody I have ever seen!

-- Cody Mahler

Matthias Penzel's obituary about Carl Weissner, more an appreciation than an obit, appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung this past Sunday. He has kindly translated it from the German for me, and I post it here with his permission.

Penzel, a Berlin-based author of several books, including TraumHaft (a rock 'n' roll novel) and Rebell im Cola-Hinterland (a biography of Jorg Fauser, written with Ambros Waibel), says he met Carl when he was starting out as a journalist: "He rolled many balls in my direction, contacts, ideas, door-openers, the whole works."

This version of Penzel's obiturary restores cuts made in the published German text and adds a few enhancements. As he explains: "Nelson Algren once said, 'No book was ever worth the writing that wasn't done with the attitude that this ain't what you rung for, Jack -- but it's what you're damned well getting.' Same goes for this -- ok?"

One of the few stories he wrote in German ("Last Exit to Mannheim")* kicks off with the first-person narrator sitting at the foot of the Bay Bridge, San Francisco, on the stairway of his apartment house fire-escape, clocking with ancient field glasses the neighbor across the street ("used to play with Charlie Parker at the Five Spot") as he watches TV ("an old Hollywood ditty with Robert Mitchum who was once again wearing a pair of underpants way too huge for him"). Just hearing the title of one of Carl Weissner's books, published years ago, makes contemporary cutting-edge writers like Mark Z. Danielewski sit up and listen -- the title in question was The Braille Film (most interesting to a guy whose House of Leaves emulates the syntax of movies and features the scribbled notes of a blind man who happens to be the only person to have watched a certain movie). This may capture it: the story of the life and impact of works by Carl Weissner.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
When you phoned him, you would be greeted -- for years -- by nothing but the shrill pheep of an incorrectly set fax-answer-phone-machine. When he insisted on driving you home because of atrocious rain at six in the morning -- his glasses finger-thick -- doing 18 mph on the highway, in the right lane at least -- and then when you awoke from nightmares, when letters were returned unopened, because the mailman -- working a Mannheim neighborhood of Turkish gambling parlors -- didn't see the name-tags on the door bells, which would have led him to a letter box inside Carl's apartment block across from a Women's Bookstore, then you would sometimes ask yourself: Was ist hier bloß los?

Carl Weissner translated books. While he tried pretty hard to remain in the background and unreachable, he is known to people in the weirdest hangouts -- in Calcutta just as much as in Luxemburg, at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, among Bukowski readers worldwide anyway. If you mentioned to him that underground poets from East Germany or ad writers or celebrity reporters in Hollywood would scream in awe, "You know Carl Weissner!?!," he would only shrug and react with a smile. Impenetrable. How does someone grow up as a child during the war, amidst the rubble, and learn to be gentle? Someone who looks and listens, who goes way beyond fine manners. A good boy at the piano who discovers jazz, then with a grant goes off to Manhattan and '68 San Francisco. And then becomes, in still grey and triste Germany, the expert for hipster slang.

His translations are actually exactly that: transfers from a different world, interpretations into a language, a country, in which -- as he put it -- "many understand 'Schriftstellertum' like an employee, right in the midst of a streamlined career -- never to wrong-foot or make a mistake, but rather to function straight and reliably."

Funeral is Feb. 10, in Mannheim. [Photo: Signe Mahler]
After the war, performing with and for GIs in Karlsruhe, he would play in jazz bands, gobble up special editions of the Times Literary Supplement, and wanting more from life, start to write. Letters. Up to twenty a day. To legends of the counter-culture, John Sinclair, Burroughs, Ginsberg, the dramatist Mohit Chattopadhyay in Calcutta, beatniks in Greece, Mexico; at the same time to Wolf Vostell; and as he could not afford all his own reading material, he cobbled together a magazine, in which he would print this New Internationale. Like a pretty cool agent, or rather a dealer, he would translate J.G. Ballard, the Beats, Warhol, Dylan, Leonard Cohen -- but also Will Eisner, Denton Welch, Diane Arbus, Muhammad al-Murabit -- into a German that had not existed before. The man who stayed in the background thereby kicked open a door to a library, existing invisibly and parallel to what every well-educated literary student had been completely unaware of, a door to a world of books, to grooves and a language that pulsated with life.

This he did with an active vocabulary that made some of his translations -- another silent smile here -- look even better than the originals. And because he was a pro at his craft -- never too self-assured, always with open ears, wide-awake vision, and with AFN radio playing in the background. He translated books -- and did well, not grand -- many of which got reprinted, repeatedly. Ten hours a day in the early days. The gain, in terms of merit not earnings, was that Weissner helped knock the mildew of past decades out of the German lingo. Zappa, whom he also translated, has by now had streets named after him; Dylan is touted as a contender for the Nobel Prize -- yeah, sure (so what). Weissner remained unobtrusive. Ten years ago, he quit what he called his "day job." Kept listening, looked around, and wrote. In Thailand, Paris, in Marseilles tracing Rimbaud, then back into the shadow of the Empire State Building. Finally, at the age of 70, he found a home for his own novels -- Milena-Verlag, in Vienna -- which he had nearly given up hoping for. Also his latest book, only months old, seems to be taking a whole new generation of readers on a trip.

1940-2012. He died on Jan. 24, in Mannheim, Germany.
There is nothing I cherished more than my friendship with Carl. He was my dearest, oldest friend. We didn't just go back to the '60s together, when we exchanged torrents of letters and collaborated on literary projects; we remained the warmest of friends through all the years since. I am devastated by his death. It came as a shock, and not only to me. To his son Mike, too, and to all the friends who were as devoted to Carl as I was. When I heard he had died, I cried like a child. You'd think I deserved the purple heart for breast-beating. Shit. What a spectacle. I tell myself, "Don't be sad. He would prefer a good laugh." Besides, going out the way Carl did fits the man. No fuss. No muss. No bother. Complete surprise. The angels, if there are any, simply carried him off. Looking over our recent email exchanges helped calm me down. He was in wonderful humor.

(See updates below.)
I had asked about his Rimbaud-in-Marseille novel, which he'd put on the back burner while finishing Manhattan Muffdiver and The Adventures of Trashman. He replied: "i should get into that marseille story, but I think I'll have to suffer, in situ, endless bad weather bad food bad drinks in crummy waterfront bars first. in other words, earn it." I told him about a recent trip to a shaggy little Caribbean village, which had "exceeded my expectations," and I wondered whether he was "earning it." He messaged back: "in their xmas edition, STERN gave my book five stars" -- the reference was to Trashman -- "as a result of which I get a chance to say my piece on austrian TV next week. so, I am not earning it, I'm living off yesterday's laurels." As to the Caribbean village, he said, "maybe one day we'll have a 2 week get-together there, bottle of rum and a mulligatawny soup, ploog can hop over from ft lauderdale, we'll have our own table, with a brass sign that says: The Survivors."

Phone just rang ... my daughter Olivia (who also loved Carl dearly and to whom he dedicated Muffdiver as one of the "Hermans") is about to give birth, so I must stop here. I have much more to say, but that will have to wait for now. In the meantime, please have a look at realitystudio.org's In Memory of Carl Weissner, which is largely about Carl and William Burroughs.

Human Rights Watch reports:

Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees. Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a budding police state.

-- Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch

I suppose that's not the same thing as the Sunni genocide or the death squad massacres hidden in plain sight or the loud whispers, which we blogged about in 2005 and 2006. But it's a reminder.

Speaking of Lower East Side legends, Ed Sanders has written a new memoir, FUG YOU {An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, The Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side}. Just out from Da Capo Press, with a dust jacket based on an historic Life magazine cover, it's a picaresque chronicle of the 1960s filled with scrupulously documented recollections of Sanders's adventures and misadventures in poetry, politics, and rock 'n' roll.

FUG YOU reads like a nonfiction outtake from Thomas Pynchon's V. The tales Sanders tells, bizarre but true, are buttressed by illustrations and citations from a mammoth archive he compiled through the years. They include everything from mimeo magazines and antiwar flyers to FBI memos and news clippings; from poems scribbled on napkins to set lists and lead sheets; from Peace March photos and concert posters to literary relics such as the "well-scooped cold cream jar" that Allen Ginsberg used as a "cock lubricant."

A sample vignette:

I was working weekends -- Friday, Saturday, Sunday -- on the 5:00 PM to 2:00 AM shift at the cigar store where I had toiled off and on, and learned a lot about the underground world of Times Square, since 1960. It was freaky. One evening a guy who worked at the 2-for-25¢ hamburger place next door came in for cigarettes. I asked him why he was barefoot. He replied, "I have a date with a Toe Queen, and my date likes dirty feet."

All that evening I wrote a series of poems depicting the life and times of "Tillie the Toe Queen" on white, elongated slats of thin cardboard from cigarette cartons. By the next weekend I had published The Toe-Queen Poems.

When I read them at Le Metro, the response, in applause and overwhelming laughter, was the first I had received for anything I'd ever read in public, and I think it was an impetus to form a satiric proto-folk-rock group called The Fugs a few months later. One of the first Fugs songs, never, unfortunately, put on an album, was a ditty called "Toe Queen Love."

Although FUG YOU has no sewer-dwelling alligators hunted by a posse of misfits with shotguns, it has plenty of details that are equally preposterous and Pynchonesque. For instance, an anti-yodelling edict at the Chicago 7 trial. The presiding judge won't let Sanders demonstrate from the witness stand how well he yodels. "I was disappointed," Sanders writes, "for verily I was and am the only Beat who can yodel. However, I resisted the dramatic impulse to weep and show trembling agitation in front of the judge at this restriction on my yodeliferous genius. Why? Six-month jail term and maybe a $1,000 fine for insulting the dignity of the court. I had to get to L.A. and start investigating the Manson family." (Which he did.)

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

I can't let the year end without taking note of a new coloring book -- yes, a coloring book -- titled Legends of the Lower East Side. It's a collaboration of the artists Troy Harris, Orlando Bonilla and the unstoppable documentarian Clayton Patterson. The book features their confederates in nonconformity, artistry, community activism, and "colorfulness." If the International Herbert Marcuse Society were to give a Great Refusal prize to honor colorful outsiders, Patterson should get it. Since there is no such prize, a coloring book will have to do.

I've written about Patterson before, the first time in connection with 326 Years of Hip, a group show of outsider artists Mary Beach, Taylor Mead, Boris Lurie, and Herbert Huncke, which Patterson produced and curated in 2005. I wrote about him again in connection with Lurie and the No!art movement. But that only scratched the surface of someone I think of as the opposite of what Marcuse called one-dimensional man.

Patterson -- rightly dubbed a "docucontrarian" -- has lived a multidimensional life of exemplary defiance and commitment. His record of arrests for antagonizing authority is by itself enough to put him in a category far above extraordinary. If you asked Patterson what he's proudest of, however, he would probably point to the massive archive he has created with his partner Elsa Rensaa, who is also featured in the Legends coloring book.

Their archive documents the people, culture, and history of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and captures the neighborhood's dramatic changes over the past three decades with hundreds of thousands of photographs, approximately 2,500 hours of video, and a unique collection of ephemera. Many of Patterson's projects are a direct outgrowth of the huge amount of material he has gathered as a historical legacy, including a handful of books -- Inside Out (1994), Wildstyle (2003), Captured (2005), Resistance (2007), Arabic Tattoos (2007), and the Front Door Book (2009) -- all of them dedicated in one way or other to free expression.

Here's an interview from 2010 with the man himself:

You can say a lot of things about Christopher Hitchens's role as a cheerleader for the war in Iraq, most of all that it stank to high heaven. Of course it's pure coincidence that he died on the same day that marked the official end of the war. But it's a fitting irony that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's lie to the departing troops -- "You will leave with great pride, lasting pride" -- applies to Hitchens's departure as well. All the fine principles that Hitchens stood for were tarnished by his relentless drumbeat for an unforgivable war. When they took down the American flag in Baghdad for the last time, the band played "Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder." I doubt that the lyrics will be recited at Hitchens's funeral, but they would be a fitting sendoff for him, too.

Postscript: Dec. 20 -- I see that Alexander Cockborn wrote a welcome antidote to the Hitcharoma that has gripped the press.

Was an online editor for the New York Times being cute? Have a look at the photo of a woman sticking her head in the toilet. It sat like an illustration from The Onion next to the headline "Putin Says Clinton Incited Protests Over Russian Vote." Here it is on the digital front page of yesterday's NYT global edition.

At a glance the photo would appear to illustrate the report of Putin's claim that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had personally spurred protesters to action after Russia's recent parliamentary elections. "She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal," the Times article quoted Putin as saying. Clinton denies the allegation, of course. She would never stick her head in the toilet, would she? What kind of signal is that? Better she should stick her finger down her throat. In fact, the photo illustrates a feature story for the Home & Garden section, Scrub the Halls, about neat freaks tidying up at home for holiday visitors. But I'm still wondering what the editor had in mind.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)