Books: Bang Bong Bing

Those unwashed minstrels of the West, the beatniks of San Francisco’s North Beach and Los Angeles’ Venice West, make much of their loud vows of poverty. To be poor, yak the shirtless ones as they sit scratching in store-front espresso halls, is to be holy, man, holy. But last week, the mendicants of marijuana and mad verse were in the somewhat embarrassing position of monks whose liqueur sells too well. Tourists were snapping up their stuff like Chinese back-scratchers, and the beatniks were starting to rake in the dough.

On North Beach’s Columbus Avenue, a dozen customers once constituted an oxygen problem at the City Lights bookstore, run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 40, as a combination Beat Haven and publishing house. Now the crush is so great that the bookstore has been expanded, and Ferlinghetti’s only slightly offbeat A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions) has sold a surprising 15,000 copies. The really far-out beatniks do even better. Allen Ginsberg’s effete epic, Howl, published by Ferlinghetti, is up to 40,000 copies in print, and Fantasy Records is preparing a disk of Ginsberg reading Ginsberg, including some passages too naughty to print. Jack Kerouac’s soapless saga, The Subterraneans, is doing so well (over 40,000 sold, not counting paperbound reprints) that M-G-M advance agents are prowling San Francisco’s Beatland for material for a film. Latest beatnik hit, published last month: a murky outpouring called Second April (“O man, thee is onion-constructed in hot gabardine”), by a scraggly bard named Bob Kaufman—2,500 copies already in print. Why the popularity? The beat blather certainly is not literature. But it can be amusing, and at its best, more fun to recite in the bathtub than anything since Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo. Sample from Bomb (4,000 copies in print), by Gregory Corso, 28, a curly-haired youngster whose earlier Gasoline (95¢) has gone into three printings, 6,000 copies:

Impish Death Satyr Bomb Bombdeath

Turtles exploding over Istanbul

The jaguar’s flying foot

soon to sink in arctic snow

Penguins plunged against the Sphinx . . .

O athletic Death Sportive Bomb

… O the happy stands

Ethereal root and cheer and boo . . .

Leap Bomb bound Bomb frolic zig and zag

The stars a swarm of bees in thy binging bag . . .

BOMB 0 havoc antiphony molten cleft BOOM . . .

Carrion stars charnel planets carcass elements . . ,

A thunderless God A dead God

O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb . . .

O Bomb I love you

I want to kiss your clank eat your boom

You are a paean an acme of scream . . .

O resound thy tanky knees

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

BOOM ye skies arid BOOM ye suns

BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM

nights ye BOOM ye days ye BOOM

BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rams

go BANG ye lakes ye oceans BING

Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM

Ubangi BANG orangoutang

BING BANG BONG BOOM bee bear baboon

ye BANG ye BONG ye BING

the tail the fin the wing .