Page 47 - The Myth and the Moment

Afternoon

“Oh, nobody ever heard of them. They didn’t want to be known;
figured publicity would be the kiss of death to a group of anarchist
writers. No, the idea was for each of the members to go out and
strike a blow for freedom independently; then, once a year, meet
together and swap stories. One guy had a plan to smuggle books into
libraries: forge the rubber stamp, put Dewey Decimal System
numbers on them, even type up card catalogue entries. He couldn’t
fake the computer cards each book is supposed to carry, but that
would be the library’s problem. And which books would he introduce
in this fashion? Anything banned by the courts, of course.”
“Did he succeed?”
“No. The books were stolen, never checked out, by the patrons.
He may as well have left them sitting on the sidewalk in Westwood.
Another poet had a grudge against small poetry magazines, most of
which were edited and published by other poets unable to get
published elsewhere. He felt those author-editors were totally unfit to
judge others’ work, since they inevitably set up their own otherwise
unpublishable works as the standard. His plan, therefore, was to
collect back issues of these journals, say two or three years old. Then
he would copy a poem or two by author-editor A., and send it to
author-editor B.—pseudonymously, of course. Then he would turn
around and do the same thing with B.’s work: send it to A. After the
rejection slips came back—you guessed it: he sent them on to the real
authors and sat back waiting for the sparks to fly. Editorially, if not
otherwise.”
“Har-har-har! That sounds more like a practical joke than a
political act.”
“Well, the Dead Poets had a strong affinity to Dadaism, a non-
movement if ever there was one. I won’t get Wittgensteinian on you,
but there has to be a gray area between politics and art, and that is
where the anarchist is most comfortable. Not a blend of the two
kinds of act or statement, but an ambiguous realm where absurdities
commingle and horrors can be laughed at without turning them into
comedy. Anyway, the Dead Poets Alliance lasted about two
meetings.”
“Wait a minute, Nate. What did you do in this war?”
“Me? I had my own cockeyed vision of truth at that point. I was
outraged by the appropriation of linguistic change by big business

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