Out Is In

Out Is In Regina Weinreich The Outlaw Bible of American Literature Edited by Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenberg, and Barney Rosset Thunder's Mouth Press http://www.thundersmouthpress.com 662· pages; paper, $27.50 The R. Crumb Handbook R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski MQ Publications http://www.mqpublications.com 442 pages; cloth, $25.00 Round up the usual suspects! William S. Burroughs , Hunter S. Thompson, Terry Southern, Henry Miller, Kathy Acker, Patti Smith, Norman Mailer, and more—outlaws all represented by excerpts of their writing in a holy shrine of non-canonical work. Mix in snippets of Dee Dee Ramone, Lenny Bruce, Ralph Steadman, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and you get a picture of what this compendium of marginalized yet revered artists ennobles. The Outlaw Bible of American Literature is not the Norton Anthology of in-your-face literature, although its sheer heft forces comparison. This inspired work evokes nostalgia for the passions of a time when politics and art were equivalent, when an up yours philosophy was a cry for a better, truer America. Take this bit from Kathy Acker, from her novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986): "I think Prince should be president of the United States because all our presidents since World War II have been stupid anyway and are becoming stupider up to the point of lobotomy. . . ." Of course she was thinking ofReagan when she began this prophetic paragraph. Or take the piece by Annie Sprinkle on how the movie Deep Throat initiated her career as prostitute, stripper, porn star, and conceptual artist . Hers is a journey through the criminal legal system that leads to some deep thoughts about an America rife with hypocrisies. Or take Cookie Mueller's behind the scenes account of life on the set of John Waters's outrageously satirical Pink Flamingos, with its unforgettable shit-eating finale: "What's the worst thing that can happen to me when I eat the dogshit?" Divine asked us.... There was no question that Divine would eat the dogshit. He was a professional. It was in the script, so he was going to do it. . . . This was show biz. Divine didn't balk and he wasn't the only one. Mink Stole was going to do a big scene that called for her red hair to catch on fire. All this coincides with the language of rebellion at large in the culture, epitomized in Patti Smith's L'Anarchie Flier with its headline, "You Can't Say 'Fuck' in Radio Free America." Witness the judicious use of that unmentionable four-letter word in super rock critic Lester Bangs's deadpan from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988): "'What do you feel like doing right now?' I replied, automatically, same tone of voice as one might say, ? could go for a tuna sandwich on rye,' I said: ? wanna fuck.' A second of silence. Then: 'Okay,' she said, just as casually. 'Come on over.'" Bangs explores the wild, primitive, organic nature of this come on: "I wanted to fuck this woman in the mud of a ditch while a firestorm of white-hot PLO and Israeli bullets whizzed over our heads." It's enough to remind you that in America there are some people who simply do not want to be fucked that way. Similarly, in a legendary 1947 letter about screwing a virgin hejust met on a Greyhound bus in frustration over a missed opportunity with another girl ("all my pent up emotion finding release in this young virgin"), Neal Cassady gushes in a torrent of words, a style which would become a model for Kerouac's iconic writing. As the fictional Dean Moriarty, the Holy Goof, whose proclamation "Sex is Holy" appears throughout On the Road (1955), he makes a vital connection: his trinity of sex, soul, death provides the spiritual underpinning for this volume's outlaw sensibility. Ah, the beauty of these spontaneous, original voices, now worthy of becoming essential reading in college courses across the land! But here is someone curiously left out: that ultimate outsider Robert Crumb, the originator of Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Devil Girl (and this despite the fact that The Outlaw Bible includes work by one...