Tuli’s Archives
Gothamist has a pretty incredible story about some newly discovered Bob Dylan lyrics, to a song-never-recorded about Robert Moses. It’s easy to assume that the lyrics sheet is a hoax. But, because, it was discovered in the Tuli Kupferberg files, I’m inclined to regard it as legit.
Tuli was a true American character. He was a member of the musical avant garde jug-band the Fugs, an early progenitor of the Village underground, a leftist and a proto-zinester. I first learned of him when, accompanied by a (paid!) intern, I poured through David McReynolds’ archives to find suitable material for the Socialist Party’s 100th anniversary conference journal.
McReynolds was a long time leader of the SP, a pacifist and student of Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste, a two-time candidate for President (I managed his second campaign in 2000; his first, in 1980, is purportedly the first time that an openly gay man ran for the office) and a long-time bohemian and Village resident. Before David complains about this post, I use the past tense because I am describing an event from 2001, not because he is dead. He is very much still alive (and blogging!).
David’s archives included many incredible photographic negatives of Socialist Party and War Resisters League events from the prior 40 years, including some of the last “new” pictures of Martin Luther King – from a WRL (or possibly Fellowship of Reconciliation?) – awards dinner in the early 1960’s.
It also included a shot from that same dinner night that I has developed into a 11″ x 14″ print that has adorned the walls of every home I have since called my own, of A.J. Must and Norman Thomas locked in an intense yet casual conversation at that same awards dinner, (I think) with the glass reflection of MLK’s back behind them.
So, what convinces me of the authenticity of these new Dylan lyrics because they were found in Tuli’s archives? Well, many of Tuli’s archives wound up in McReynolds’ archives – most notably a zine called “FUCK GOD!” When we came across that one, McReynolds chuckled and said, “That was pretty controversial back in its day. I don’t know how Tuli got away with that one!”
A few minutes later, I came across Tuli’s sequel to that particular opus, a mimeographed volume entitled, “FUCK GOD IN THE ASS!,” its cover adorned by a crude line drawing of a be-robed man with long grey hair, from behind, spreading his butt cheeks. “Yeah,” I said, “I think this would still be pretty controversial today.”
So, do I think it’s possible that young Bob Dylan threw a lyrics sheet of a song taking the piss out of “master builder” Robert Moses Tuli Kupferberg’s way? Yeah, you betcha.
The Sandpiper Serves as Lookout Against the Ferals.
I’m taking a mental health day; smoking a cigar on the fire escape. I bought my Padron at the Humidor, a neighborhood spot where the old men can smoke their stogies on the leather couches inside. They’re watching coverage of the Greek elections like it’s a soccer game. I’m not sure which side they’re on.
I take the opportunity to refill our bird feeders. Bay Ridge doesn’t have a lot of bio-diversity. We get lots of finches and the occasional mourning dove. Lately there’s been a couple of sand pipers to enliven the scene. They’re beautiful. Their tail feathers are slightly robotic in motion. I hear a bird whistling like an alarm. Is she pissed that I won’t vacate the fire escape so she and her comrades can enjoy the new snacks we’ve laid out for them? I notice it’s one of the sand pipers alerting all the other birds to the presence of one of the neighborhood ferals. She flies along the top of the fence that surrounds the Catholic Church’s parking lot and perches occasionally to renew the alarm as the neighborhood stray saunters along the bottom of it.
The kids from the Catholic junior high school stream into the parking lot with their parents, resplendent in their green “graduation” gowns. It’s “moving up” day. The girls are model-tall and stumbling in their high heels. The boys have the misfortune of looking a little too much like Glen Bishop from Mad Men. A couple of goobers toss their four-cornered caps into the air, in a re-enactment of whatever just took place in that 50-year-old auditorium. It’s hard to imagine being that excited about something ending and a new thing beginning. And yet we’ve all been there.
“yo,” my wife e-mails. “i forgot my phone. email in the next few minutes if you need anything. there’s a laptop on this pedicure chair.”
“this is the future.”
I take another drag from the cigar and look at the spray paint marks on the grating of the fire escape, where she preps her canvasses and think, “Maybe this is.”
Review: James P. Cannon and Origins of the American Revolutionary Left
Quitting the Socialist Party freed me to commit the twin heresies of reading V.I. Lenin and Michael Harrington. My political perspective hasn’t changed very much, but my perspective has become more nuanced. This leaves me very familiar with American social democratic theory and with the twists and turns of the old Socialist Party, as well as its last major off-shoots, and, thanks to Si Gerson’s library, with the external work and internal factionalism of the Communist Party, at least up until 1960. But the history of the American Trotskyite movement has remained a willful gap in my knowledge, mostly because I tend to find modern-day Trotskyites so interminable.
Bryan D. Palmer’s “James P. Cannon and the American Revolutionary Left” begins to fill in some of that gap. Cannon is best known (to the extent that he’s known at all) as a father of American Trotskyism and founder of the Socialist Workers Party. Palmer’s volume focuses on the period when he was a founder of the Workers (Communist) Party. Along with such odd bedfellows as William Z. Foster and Jay Lovestone, Cannon helped foster a native expression of Marxist-Leninist agitation in America, while navigating intense and ever-changing factional intrigue in the party and the International. As such, it is an adjunct to Theodore Draper’s stalwart “The Roots of American Communism” and a cousin to Edward P. Johanningsmeier’s and James Barrett’s recent biographies of Foster.
I consider Foster my favorite tragic hero; the first truly modern trade union organizer and a brilliantly pragmatic navigator of union structure who cast his lot with the Communists after Lenin endorsed his union work in “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” In Palmer’s pages, in the first flush of the Third International, when revolution was proved to be possible, the attraction of foreign revolutionary leadership for Cannon and Foster is understandable. It is quite possible that most people on the Left would still be spinning their wheels trying to create new, perfect labor unions if that generation of activists were not directed from Moscow to get dirty inside the bureaucratic AFL unions and organize some new members and strike actions. Equally ironically, the lily-white left might never have evolved past the chauvinism that led good men like Eugene Debs to say dumb things like, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races,” to take seriously the civil rights of African-Americans without the pressure from Moscow.
But as the Communist International degenerated into a cult of personality around Stalin, national issues in Russia came to dictate what was seen to be in the best interests of the American activists, and led to constant faction-fighting that hobbled much of the party’s potential in the 1920’s. Foster eventually came out on top, losing most of what was best about him and becoming an unrepentant Stalinist. Cannon left at his earliest opportunity and cast his lot with Trotsky.
Much of the book is taken up in documenting temporary alliances like Cannon-Foster, Foster-Bittelman and Lovestone-Ruthenberg. It’s somewhat tedious and distracting from the main action, which may well have been Palmer’s point. (His attention to detail is laudable). The book is at its most exciting in describing Cannon’s International Labor Defense work in support of class-war prisoners like Sacco and Vanzetti, and in describing the intrigue of smuggling Trotsky’s criticism of the 1928 CI proceedings into America and surreptitiously forming the new Socialist Workers Party. That’s where Palmer’s book leaves off. It is clear that there is another volume still to come, documenting the effort to build a new sectarian political party and the lesser-noted work of Trotskyites in the labor struggles of the 1930’s, and that that book is where Palmer’s heart truly lies. I look forward to it, and to continuing my cautious research into American Trotskyism.
Introducing…
I flew back from New Orleans yesterday feeling a little under the weather. Ordinarily, it’s the sort of thing I would power through. But the prospect of also having to push my way through the teeming masses of Super Bowl celebrants (good game, that) just to get in the front door of my office left me with a very definite case of Blue Flu.
On my day off, I helped a very talented local artist set up her personal website. May I introduce to you my wife, Kate Ostler.
Oh, yeah. By the way, this happened while I was neglecting my own website.