Bob Dylan cited Allen Ginsberg as a literary figure he admired. Ginsberg returned the compliment by praising Dylan. He said Dylan posed an artistic challenge simply by proving that great art could be done on a jukebox.
Dylan is one of the geniuses of the sixties. Not just for his unique use of the English language. That alone was remarkable. His songs a new form of poetry for people who no longer read poetry. He began as a folk singer, but by following his own intuition, his music moved ahead of the cultural current. He was both the Tambourine Man and the Pied Piper, leading us along he restored the authority of modern poetry. Then added the rhythm section. When he moved to electric music, many fans accused him of selling out. Ginsberg dismissed that complaint as one of those cornball ideas people with nothing to sell tend to worry about. He even joked that he would not mind selling out himself—if he could find someone willing to sell out to.
I always thought that remark both funny and rather clever.
Richard Kostelanetz was a fan of Ginsberg—he called him ‘the pantheon of American literature,’ someone who had lived a kind of literary rags-to-riches story. I thought Richard was rather extraordinarily. He was a prolific artist, filmmaker, critic, and writer. He produced more than a hundred books about the avant-garde of the 1960s/70s. A man both amusing and
undeniably talented, a man with a finger in many pies. A man, at times, astonishingly maladroit. And nothing could be more maladroit than his review of my memoir Technicolor Dreamin’ in her own fashion. The review was demeaning to say the least. His review of my book included a 1960s memoir by a woman whose claim to fame consisted of a parade of names the author had screwed during her year working at Playboy Club. Perhaps he was trying to kill two birds with one stone. Richard did give my book a brief summary, describing it as a more memoir about artists and events he himself knew. Even so, it was humiliating to find my memoir mentioned in the same breath as a lightweight demi-mondaine who did nothing but screw a few well-known men.
His final remark was even more of a shock. “These two books,” he wrote, “are the only books by women I have ever finished reading, ” I remember staring at that sentence, wondering whether he realized what he had written. It told far more about Richard himself than it did about either of the memoirs.
