Maslin Watch: Poets In Their Dotage

Today Janet Maslin has a go at Sam Kashner's When I Was Cool, which she finds "well-named," thereby greatly relieving everyone at HarperCollins worried about whether the title worked or not, no doubt.

She opens with an irrelevant detail of home address that builds up to a rather weak pun: "Sam Kashner of Merrick, N.Y., quoted abundantly from the Ramones when he filled out his application for higher education (and seldom has that term been more accurate)."

Kashner's account of his studies at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is, apparently, "an uproarious string of character-building geriatric-Beat episodes," from which she actually quotes somewhat conservatively. But geriatric? Allen Ginsberg was all of 50 at the time, and Gregory Corso was younger than that. Out of the "aging renegades" Maslin cites as Kashner's teachers, the only one who seems particularly old in 1976 was William S. Burroughs...except, perhaps, to a newly arrived college student. A somewhat more experienced book reviewer should know better than to simply accept that perception at face value.

Mind you, one can't write about Ginsberg without making certain oblique insinuations:

"You're a sweet boy," Mr. Kashner recalls Ginsberg's telling him. "So unborn."

As for Ginsberg, he apparently turned an interested eye upon this nice young helpmate he had recruited.

Yes, yes, yes, Janet, we know Ginsberg liked 'em young. But if you're going to drop these hints, you might as well come right out and tell us whether Kashner's willing to say whether the guy hit on him or not, and what happened if he did, especially if you're going to drop hints elsewhere that Kashner "freely acknowledges trading on the kinds of unrequited crushes that made the Kerouac School go round." (A hint which merely leads to an anecdote about Anne Waldman running off with Bob Dylan for a couple days during the Rolling Thunder Revue. Also, as well as he seems to have gotten along with the guys, Kashner didn't enjoy the same rapport with Waldman, but that's not really explored in the review. In the book, who knows?)

As for Kashner's placing himself at the center of attention, "that may be self-serving, but it's understandable. And it's been a long time coming." Oh, has it now? Has the world truly been waiting for Sam Kashner to fill us all in on what Naropa was like? Mind you, I'm not saying the book won't be good, and that readers won't be pleasantly surprised when they pick it up, because that might well be the case. But the only sense in which the book's "been a long time coming" is that it wasn't written until it was written, which doesn't particularly tell us anything.

There's also some interesting use of adjectival forms of an author's name:

In his post-Naropa life Mr. Kashner went into his father's window-shade business, lived in Colonial Williamsburg, published some poetry and became a writer about some of the darker, James Ellroyesque aspects of show business history.

I love Ellroy's novels as much as any other fan, but what on earth did we call the seamy side of show business history before he came along? Also, keep in mind that his Hollywood revelations are just one facet of an appetite for scandal that embraces famous unsolved murders and the intersection of politics, finance, and organized crime.

And you know you're nearing the end of a Janet Maslin review when she starts stringing the adjectives together. This time it's in service of a "candid, poignant, hilarious second-fiddle memoir."

I have to admit, this review did actually make me curious about the book, curious enough perhaps to read it. But I have to wonder how much of that is simply because I'm already curious about the subject matter and simply didn't know a book of this sort existed until now.