Digging around the internet or maybe even in a brick and
mortar store (!!), you come across a mimeo that you’ve never seen before. What do you do? Go to OCLC first. That is what all the book dealers do if they
come across a seemingly unusual item. Dealers
cross their fingers that it is not listed at all. If so, they can put NOT LISTED ON OCLC and
mark it up 1000%. (By the way, there
should be an official scale of mark-up relating to OCLC. No copies:
1000%. One copy: 500%.
Two copies: 250%. And so on to five copies. More than five copies you have to start
discounting your price against the hundreds of other copies available on
Abebooks.)
Take Ephemeris, edited by David Schaff, out of San Francisco. You’ve been around the block a few times so
chances are if it is new to you it is pretty rare, right? Do not flatter yourself. There are so many mimeos out of just San
Francisco that nobody can read (or own) them all. So I generally do not beat myself up when I
remember that I once thought Interim Pad was some prime real estate from the
Mimeo Revolution just because it had slipped under my radar. Turns out Interim Pad was not a true flophouse
of a mimeo (because everyone knows that in mimeo, the flophouses are worth more
than the penthouses), but just another tourist trap located in the neighborhood
of City Lights.
So what about Ephemeris?
Well, there are 20 institutions that have Ephemeris in some form or
another. Yet do not despair, because OCLC
does not always tell the whole story.
There is another way of judging if a mimeo is a true lost classic. All fans of mimeo are no doubt aware of
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the
First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968.
Compiled as a double album by Lenny Kaye in 1972 for Elektra, this LP
became a major influence for the soon to emerge punk scene. In fact in the liner notes, Kaye makes use of
the term punk rock, not for the first time, but early on nonetheless. (Like with OCLC, book dealers like to bump up
the price on book, magazine or LP that used the term punk rock before 1975.) In the 1980s, Rhino released 15 other Nuggets
related compilations. Knockoffs followed,
like Pebbles, Rubble and Back from the Grave, which dug around the garage for
any audio ephemera to set into wax. As
Wikipedia notes, “Nuggets spawned an entire cottage industry of
small record labels dedicated to unearthing and releasing obscure but worthy
garage and psychedelic rock music from the 1960s.”
Secret Location
on the Lower East Side by Clay and Philips is the Mimeo Revolution equivalent
of Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets. This is the
book that in large part spawned the cottage industry in collecting the Mimeo
Revolution for a generation of collectors who did not actually live through the
era. If Nuggets influenced punk, then
Secret Location inspired all the hipsters who are going to take over PS I for the
Book Arts Fair in September.
Yet in terms of a
lost classic what matters most is not that the magazine was featured in Secret
Location. No, a featured write up in
Secret Location is like being played on Top 40 radio. The Preliminary Checklist in the back is more
on target, and is the Secret Location equivalent of Back from the Grave. It is here in the corners and dark places of
the garage that the real mimeo rarities lurk.
And the real obscure shit does not appear in the Preliminary Checklist
at all. Ephemeris is nowhere to be found
there and neither is Interim Pad for that matter.
There will be
those of you out there that will say the absence of Ephemeris and Interim Pad
from Secret Location is merely proof of their irrelevance. If Clay and Phillips missed them, they must
not be worth reading. They must not be
important. You may have a point. But for true mimeo fanatics, for the
visionaries and the pioneers, this is precisely what makes these mags even more
interesting than a boring, old Fuck You that everybody knows about. The logic goes: If everybody has forgotten about it, it must
be truly memorable.
For these
pioneers I would suggest adding Christopher Harter’s Author Index to Little
Magazines of the Mimeograph Revolution and George Butterick’s list of
Periodicals of the Beat Generation that appeared in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography on the Beats (Vol. 16 – The Beats:
Literary Bohemians in Postwar America A-Z) as a further layer of obscurity
on top of the Preliminary Checklist in Secret Location. Butterick’s list, in particular, is fairly
deep. He lists Interim Pad, but
Ephemeris is nowhere to be found.
I will not go on
record and say that Ephemeris is a lost classic that is going to change how we
approach the Mimeo Revolution, but I will say that it provides some insight
into the magazine scene that developed in and around Spicer’s San Francisco. David Schaff and Ephemeris are not mentioned
in Ellingham’s and Killian’s Poet Be Like God, but Schaff is very much drunk on
the Spicer spirit. Ephemeris came “out
of the shadow of the late Cassiopeia,” of which the first issue featured Spicer
poem. (Cassiopeia, which ran for only
two issues and was also edited by Schaff, is yet another lost classic. Unfortunately this also means that it is
tough to find. Cassiopeia I has thus far
eluded me.) From Ephemeris II: “That old Bodega Bay salt Lew Ellingham
perservered through the typing of this sheet and weathered many a gale at GINO AND
CARLO, beloved by all and where all end up at one time or another – while they
last, copies of this issue are available for the price of a drink.” As a little-known song suggests, that spirit
was still available in 1969.
Ephemeris is very
much an apparition of the late J and Spicer’s ghost is all over it. In Ephemeris II, Schaff writes of Spicer in
terms of ghosts and hauntings. Throughout
all three issues, poems are dedicated to Spicer and written in the Spicerian
manner. Poets who played in Spicer’s
shadows, like Ellingham, Persky and Stanley, flitter about its pages as you
would expect, but so does the specter of Frank O’Hara, who you would not. O’Hara appears care of Donald Allen, who was
preparing O’Hara’s unpublished poems for posthumous publication. Ebbe Borregaard, Joanne Kyger, and Charles
Olson appear as well. So Ephemeris has
some big names in it and you might expect the mag to have turned up in Secret
Location or elsewhere.
Ephemeris II
features a map on the cover and Issue one has an astrological chart. The
magazine is truly a chart and a map of late 1960s San Francisco and the
vestiges of the Spicer Circle. For
example, Ephemeris features several advertisements for what is now a lost book
culture: Serendipity and Dave Haselwood
Books for example. And therein lies
Ephemeris’s importance: it documents an
ephemeral scene that threatens to fade away like newsprint in the California
sunshine. The third issue switches to a
newspaper format and continues down the White Rabbit hole of New Age Frisco with
pieces on Merlin, the Birth of Venus and the Apocalypse accompanied by numerous
illustrations and drawings. My copy is
inscribed by Ellingham to Harold Dull, which itself is a nice association that
tells of a history that goes back to Spicer.
The entire issue is a trip at sunrise down by the Bay with appearances
by Ellingham, Persky, Stanley, Hoyem, Bromige, Mary Norbert Korte, Richard
Duerden, Wieners and Blaser.
JB
1 comments:
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