Short Take |
Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin’ Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes
By
Published: Dec 15, 2015
The headline is from Lord Buckley, but it could just as easily come from the mouth of Chandler Brossard (1922-1993), who was the hippest American writer you’ve never heard of. I’ve read him, but that’s because I knew him. We met at LOOK Magazine — if you were born after it shuttered, LOOK was like LIFE, just with better photographers and a social conscience — when Chandler was 45, with an office and a byline, and I was an 18-year-old summer intern. He had heavy eyelids and an expression of cosmic weariness; he was the most cynical human being I’d ever seen, which, of course, I found fascinating. Chandler’s basic position was that he was a novelist, and a great one, and that this journalism gig was like playing piano in a whorehouse. Naturally, I inhaled his books. I was knocked out. We became friends.
“Who Walk in Darkness” is a street-level account of the Greenwich Village scene in the early 1950s. It was considered the first Beat novel, Kerouac before there was Kerouac, but that’s to date it, and in no way is this book dated. [To buy the Kindle edition of “To Walk in Darkness” from Amazon, click here.] “The Bold Saboteurs” is the story of a teen punk who has the soul of a poet. It’s a book you’d expect Albert Camus to write if he spent a season working in the crew of a young criminal. I’m delighted that Open Road Media, the publisher of my novel, is the e-book publisher of Chandler’s fiction and that “The Bold Saboteurs” is featured in its selection called For the Book Nerd Who’s Read It All. [To buy the Kindle edition of “The Bold Saboteurs” from Amazon, click here.]
