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| The publishers knew their demographic. Dig the quote, too. |
I doubt Hermann Hesse paperbacks are being much read in coffee houses or stuffed into duffel bags anymore. Do TYPOT [The Young People Of Today - Ed.] read books at all? They seem to be permanently entranced by glowing rectangles. Maybe they're reading them on their phones? What am I saying? Of course they're not fucking reading books on their phones, especially not novels by dead white dudes and especially not pipesucking entitled German-Swiss dead white dudes trying to pierce the veil of mundane existence thru rejection of contemporary mores. Fuck that shit - here's a selfie of my oat-milk latte!
Back then, though. There were four Hesse cerebral core texts [we did that one already - Ed.] that got passed around - Siddhartha, The Steppenwolf, and if you were the bookish type, Demian, and The Journey To The East. These were cult books, but it was a big cult. We didn't sit around discussing them like Oprah's book club, giving them the academic analysis, we just read the fucking things because we needed all the help we could get piercing the veil of mundane existence, which was hard work, and took dedication and a bunch of drugs.
Hesse suffered depression as a boy, gave suicide a try, got put into a mental hospital. Worked in bookshops. Kept himself to himself. Read books, wrote. Got married, travelled to the East, not finding what he was looking for there, either. Separated from schizophrenic wife. During this time he became a successful author, the cerebral core texts [give it up - Ed.] appearing between 1919 and 1932. He wrote a shitload of other stuff, including the impenetrable Glass Bead Game, glomming the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, and died in 1962, just before drug-crazed rock bands started naming themselves after his works.
This post made manifest thru the intercession of The Bishop Of Rome Motor Court, Pismo Beach.
Loadup after I immanentize the eschaton.
ReplyDeleteBubble Puppy was a very good band that deserved greater success than they had. That being said, Bubble Puppy gets my vote as the worst band name of all time. It’s not even close, although if anyone has any other nominations I would love to hear them.
ReplyDeleteGbrand
The Electric Toilet
DeleteI once saw a poster for the band Dog Shit Sandwich
DeleteBubble Puppy is worse.
DeleteGbrand
The Frothy Green Stools - an Oxford UK band. First saw the name on a poster in about 1972 and I believe they're still going.
DeleteBubble Puppy - yes, a terrible name. Ditched because of the possibility of being thought of as a bubble gum band. Great debut album!
"The Beatles" is pretty cringey. Like if Your Mom came up with a name for Your Band.
DeleteBut no mom could come up with a name as bad and cringey as Bubble Puppy. Bubble Puppy is still going to take the prize.
DeleteGbrand
When I saw the album cover of the group "Wild Butter" with a stick of butter flying through the air like superman, it made me think did these guys think it would sell? It's actually a good album.
DeleteOne of the members of the group joined Tin Huey-Contents Dislodged During Shipment, another album I actually bought back in the day.
DeleteI have that Wild Butter album. Please try to add your nick to your comments!
DeleteToad the Wet Sprocket
DeleteShould youse bums be desirous -
ReplyDeletehttps://workupload.com/file/LbaesJhdJ2R
The Steppenwolf album was much better than I remember (it's been a long time). They're from Canadia, so they should be good. Great muscular sound.
ReplyDeleteAmusingly or not - YMMV - there's a band called Syd Arthur. An early psych outfit. I assume that's a play on words.
ReplyDeleteI read those books. Good stuff. However, I still maintain a copy of Steppenwolf's 1st & 2nd albums to listen to.
ReplyDeleteFor old times sake, I swiped around on this post to find the 'hidden' link. Not really,, & thanks for the visible link. - useo
I'm going to glom the second album today - don't think I ever heard it. Glad to learn you're the bookish type!
Deletethe second album is one of my favorites. It was the second cassette I ever bought back in the 60s. For around 50 years I thought the girl said, "Hey it's not too polite" instead of "Hey it's occupied"
DeleteCooling to my theme here - are there any contemporary acts - I hesitate to use the word "bands" - collectives, maybe? - named after youth demographic cult novels? Are there even any youth demographic cult novels? Or are TYPOT a bunch of twitter-crippled illiterates? I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but I'm certainly thinking it. Prove me wrong - maybe you know a young person who reads?
ReplyDeleteRather challenging question, Farq!!! Nowadays, I don't know .. or meet ...many young people!!!! And, reading ..as in real books ... is not that popular in Thailand!! As an aside Hesse is one of my favourite writers .. along with ...??
DeleteIn over a decade in Siam I've seen someone reading a book (in public) exactly twice.
DeleteYes, Virginia, there are young people who read. A number of the biggest (I didn't say best) films of the past two decades were based on million selling Young Adult (YA) series of novels, including Twilight, The Hunger Games, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Harry Potter.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what would be considered cult novels of recent years. House Of Leaves might be one. Dystopian fiction is very popular among young adults: the aforementioned Hunger Games and The Giver (another Major Motion Picture) are examples.
The biggest surprise to me was when my younger child (who is now 21) and his friends got into what is essentially a radio show: a podcast series called "Welcome To Night Vale" which takes the format of a small town broadcast "featuring local weather, news, announcements from the Sheriff's Secret Police, mysterious lights in the night sky, dark hooded figures with unknowable powers, and cultural events."
It's like Prairie Home Companion if it were set in The Twilight Zone. The writers and the voice actors are very talented. The website tells me that the series started in 2012. My kid would stretch out on the floor in front of a Bluetooth speaker, listen to the stories, and let his imagination paint pictures of Cecil (the narrator) and the other residents of Night Vale.
As to band names, the only recent ones I can think of are Oryx & Crake (named after a Margaret Atwood novel), and The Airborne Toxic Event (named after a central event in the Dom DeLillo novel White Noise).
You can stream Night Vale episodes here:
Deletehttps://www.welcometonightvale.com/listen
Yes, of course I know TYPOT can read, but Young Adult fiction is very far from what I'm typing about. That's a marketing demographic that didn't exist when I was a "young adult". I don't see the point of it - and it seems vaguely patronising. I got straight into adult fiction as soon as I could - why not? Also, none of the books you mention, as entertaining and well-written as they may be, are anything like approaching the (counter)cult(ure) books we sought out and adopted as texts. We read not just for entertainment, but as part of the process of "piercing the veil of mundane existence" (there is no way to put it that doesn't invoke a snigger - that's okay) and experiencing something our parents could never understand. There is no equivalent contemporary mindset. The concept of sharing today means pictures of your meal, or memes, or tweets, or facebook family news or whatever. What we shared was a view of the world shattered by LSD, and we recognised those who had gone furthur without it, like Hesse, like countless others for whom the world had momentarily split, allowing a life-changing glimpse of the cosmic (snigger advisory). Trying to get this across in a blog comment is ultimately futile, but describing The Journey To The East has always been beyond words. If you could share the experience by writing about it ...
DeleteI had my brainpan lifted out by a monk in a Burmese jungle (it's in Baddha, sort of). Nothing to do with drugs. Everything to do with the process of enquiry and reflection that was aided enormously by reading a mix of books that were on nobody's curriculum, taking a little from here, a little from there - glimpses of the big picture.
So yes, kids can read, but I'm unconvinced they have any sense of what a counterculture might look like, or any context for thinking spirituality (whatever) is even a "thing", or even any real desire to understand and experience life without their phones.
If you haven't, read the four Hesses mentioned in the piece, and compare them with (if you like) Harry Potter, or The Hunger Games.
Jonder, I read both Night Vale books and enjoyed them both. That's if the question is, Do old guys read books by young authors.
DeleteFarq. I never tire of the suite of songs on side two of Steppenwolf the Second. So glad you will be discovering them. I always liked Steppenwolf. The only other one I can recommend to you as a whole album is Steppenwolf 7 which has a song that tells of John Kay escaping east Berlin. But the whole album has the sound Steppenwolf was working toward. There are a couple bootlegs out there from the Fillmore that prove they could do things live.
"There is no equivalent contemporary mindset" -- you don't know that. You choose to believe it without looking "furthur" because it reinforces your prejudices against young people. The same way your elders felt about you once upon a time. There are young folks "experiencing something (their) parents could never understand," but we will never understand it.
DeleteI didn't compare the Harry Potter books to Herman Hesse. I would compare them to Carlos Castaneda, with Don Juan as Dumbledore. New Age spirituality was a marketing demographic, aimed squarely at your generation.
The "prejudice against young people" bit, and the "choosing to believe" bit only confirm that we're not on the same page but not even in the same library - that you equate Rowling with Castaneda (!?), and argue that Hesse was part of a "new age" spirituality (!?) only confirms that you have either missed the point entirely or are so determined to make your own that your comments seem to be replies to another piece entirely. If you want to have the last word, go ahead, but please keep it impersonal, if you can - character assessments as you make here border on trolling.
DeleteSpirituality is an interesting thing, my dad as a child was forced to go to church, but he had no religious faith as far as I remember. That passed to me, and yet books could inspire me spiritually outside of formal religion. Psilocybin also did in strange and wonderful ways too.
DeleteI've just found my old copy of A Guide To British Psilocybin Mushrooms by Richard Cooper, inside are 3 pages of A4 stapled, The Polytantric Newsletter no.13.
Polytantric info below:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytantric_Circle
Interestingly, as far as "counter culture" meaning a rejection of consumer culture, materialism, and social inequality, "Boomers" still embrace the profit-maximizing market system of Capitalism to much greater extent than young adults (https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capitalism-among-young-adults.aspx). So for all their talk of rejecting "the system" and fostering a society that distributes resources more equitably and responsibly, TOPOT are much more likely to perpetuate the status-quo than TYPOT who are increasingly rejecting it at least in terms of their feelings towards underlying drivers of systemic inequalities and the consequences the previous generations have left them to try to clean up.
Deletei try really hard to shut up about generations after mine because i can't shake the feeling that we used up all fun and left everything beyond repair.
ReplyDeleteThe whole concept of "generations" in the sense that it's used by Americans (there is no "Gen Whatever" where I live) was created - like Young Adult publishing - as a marketing initiative - creating age-based demographics in order to categorise and exploit markets. The first instance of generation in this sense was the "Beat Generation", which applied to a narrow segment of society at that time, but "Boomer" started a whole process of artificial division. There was no vast number of people of a certain age that decided to act in its own interests and fuck things up for their children. Greed and selfishness are human traits, ever-present, today as much as (say) the Middle Ages. Americans love branding and brand loyalty, liking to be defined by tags such as "Gen Z" and ascribing unique qualities to that brand. The term generations has real meaning within the family - grandparents down to grandchildren. It is not useful (in fact, the opposite) when applied to society as a whole. We are all in this together, as ever, all in the same boat, There have always been young and old, all mixed up, no edges to blur, no boundaries. But culture changes, as opportunities, and what I refer to (unfortunately) as the counterculture, with its network of connections based on the LSD experience (and further explorations in the same direction) does not exist. It only existed at the time for a statistically almost negligible number of people, but it did exist, and it changed lives and created great art.
Deleteso i'm off the hook?
Deletei think we're all like wc fields on his deathbed, reading the bible "looking for loopholes".
Blaming any group of people for your troubles is not only ignorant, it's dangerous. "Boomers made a mess of the world for me to clean up"? Substitute "Boomers" for, well, you get the idea ... Also, Boomer-blamers tend to forget the environmental movement as we know it was started in the sixties, as was the rejection of society and back to the land movement, and also feminism and gay liberation and black power movements got a big boost at that time. That none of them managed to reverse the actions of a powerful minority and restore the planet to the Eden it never was shouldn't come as a great surprise and certainly isn't the fault of an entire "generation". The world has always been up for grabs, and those doing the grabbing are generally those least interested in looking after it.
DeleteI have no idea if or what TYPOT are reading, but surely some must have enquiring minds. In the 80's when I read Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, I expect an older friend recommended I read them, and I would hope parents/older brothers recommend books to TYPOT. I remember also being recommended William Burroughs, so I bought Junkie and Naked Lunch in a secondhand book shop, I was a bit shocked by Junkie - I was a naive young man. I still have Siddhartha and Steppenwolf on my bookshelf.
ReplyDeleteHawkwind had read Hesse, below a fan made video of their song Steppenwolf inspired by the book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVeJXD29DPs
Going back to my original question - are there any bands today named after books? Steppenwolf, Demian, and Bead Game were chosen as band names not just because they sounded good but because they created connections and were signals that they belonged to the counterculture. It's unfortunate I have to use the word "counterculture", because it's easily made a joke, but that network was a real thing, stretching across literature, music, fashion, language, behaviour - every aspect of our lives. I don't see that culture today. This is not prejudice or choosing to believe, it's observation.
DeleteWell, a bit more modern - how about Modest Mouse, The Boo Radleys and My Chemical Romance? Not book names (although the last one sort of is) but influenced by books.
DeleteThat should have been Junky not Junkie.
ReplyDeleteBurroughs is a good call. Hardly benign, but definitely on the list, and definitely not Young Adult fiction.I read him, like others, in my early teens.
DeleteIn my early teens I was failing at school, not reading books - excepting sci-fi illustrated books, and was a bit lost really. My cultural life began when I started work and meeting new people, and also I started reading books for pleasure. A very late starter.
DeleteAs for counterculture, when 'I got a life' three of my best friends were bikers so that could be interesting and another couple of friends were into the Free Festival scene, though I was to scared to go to The Stonehenge Festival with them, the bands playing there also played near where I live, and there was politics, veggie food and protesting the Tories.
One thing I notice about the children of my contemporarys (I don't have children) is that unlike when we left school everyone was drinking too much and some experimenting with drugs and forming bands, the young people I know seem a bit 'straight', but then I only see them when they are on their best behavior, probably. Also quite a few go to gigs with their parents(!), now I only went to one gig with my dad and that was to see Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln jazz center orchestra in the 90's.
I remember Stonehenge when you could wander over the grass and touch the stones, but for atmosphere I preferred Avebury.
DeleteI love anything like that - magaliths and dolmens. We visited Carnac a few years ago - lines and lines of hundreds of megaliths. Awe inspiring!
DeleteAvebury, has a special atmosphere, I must visit again. In the 1970's the strange kid's tv show The Children of The Stones was filmed there. see link below:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLpcr7KTi9I
Has anyone here used the term "I'd better tighten up your wig"? That's off the 2nd Steppenwolf LP.
ReplyDelete