Chronicles of Disorder
#3 (c/o Thomas Christian, PO Box 721, Schenectady, NY 12301) $2.95
by William Ham
It looks much like any other hastily-assembled chapbook, full of haphazardly-layed-out text, dark Xeroxed photos, and such, but there’s love in these pages. Every few months, Thomas Christian collects prose, poetry, found items, and art relating to a particular theme and slaps it all together between the covers of Chronicles of Disorder. The Beats, of course, are the last great literary movement, probably the last time in our history that a group of writers and poets will ever have a lasting effect on American culture. The end of literature? Perhaps – certainly their influence is measured in terms of lifestyle as much as prose style, and their existence has surely inspired more hitchhiking and drug abuse than good writing in their spiritual offspring, but their dark rebel flame still burns brightly on the page for those who care to look, and Christian has pulled together an impressive collection of Beat descendants for our perusal. The usual blank-verse prose-poem tributes to Neal and/or Jack are here, of course, and if you’ve ever taken twenty NoDoz and played the one Charlie Parker record in your father’s collection over and over again while scribbling stream-of-consciousness nonsense in your Red Chief notebook, and face it, we all have, you’ll dig it all on some level, but the most revelatory stuff is a little less romantic than that. I’m thrilled, for example, that equal time was given to Herbert Huncke, one of the lesser-known of the big Beats’ junkie muses, and I’m a sucker for Burroughsian cut-ups. But the best stuff here are the vintage Patti Smith poems, a tribute to her by Thurston Moore, and the sad but truthful “Jack Kerouac and the Forty-Niner Drive-In” by Joseph Verrilli, in which he tries to emulate Ti Jean’s cross-country wanderings twenty years after the fact and fails miserably. That alone is essential reading for anyone who mistakes On the Road for a Michelin travel guide or a blueprint for living, but the whole of this is a lovely tribute and I look forward to future installments.
