Michael McClure (1) (1932–2020)

I was initially drawn to The Adept by its psychedelic book cover. Even after a friend pointed out that each "e" in the title on the dust jacket looked like a Pac-Man — albeit striped Pac-Mans — I didn't care. I didn't care even though I was strictly a Galaga kid when Pac-Man was all the rage. I had to have it, that cover called to me; I was transfixed by its meditative, out of body experience, in its cover art and design. Thankfully, Lorne Bair Rare Books, self-described "specialists in show more the history, art and literature of American social movements" (Woodstock's generation, for instance) was there for me when I was jonesing hard for it and needed this amazing fix fast.

The Adept was Michael McClure's second novel, published by Delacorte Press forty-five years ago, and so far, it has been his last. After safariing deep underneath its alluring surface cover, I polished the novel off last night.

Sure wish McClure had written another novel (or would write one more soon). Pure pleasure finding myself unself-consciously submerged by the reading, swirling deep into the vortex of Michael McClure's immense imagination — a subversive, unpredictable, and visionary realm at once spiritual and corporeal. Michael McClure has long been an Artist well attuned to whatever it is out there that stalks and breathes beyond our senses, and in The Adept he takes us there.

The Adept is "anti-narrated," you could say, anti-narrated by an expert antihero; by a metafictional-minded ("Listen, my Dear Reader, my Fine Punk Asshole, my Lovely Hypocrite, and you shall hear what it is to be a full-grown adult male animal with hair down to the ass and a fine set of muscles"), cocaine addled mystic, this drug dealing New Yorker, Nicholas, with his kooky predilection for impromptu longueurs galore on things like leonine symbolism one second or Botticelli's illustrations for The Inferno the next. The novel compels its "Dear Reader ... Lovely Hypocrites" along with Nicholas' digressive commentary (is it maybe Michael McClure's astute social commentary disguised?) because, yes, it blends like this linguistic smoothie out of erudite esoterica and streetwise jive. The Adept is serious funny brains. McClure's colloquial commingling of down and dirty earthiness and high art prefigured David Foster Wallace's own super-smarts-meets-low-arts sensibility of style.

Nicholas' worldview counters the counterculture of his time. In 1971, when we meet him — we "Fine Punk Assholes" — whatever happy hippie idealism he may have once had has long escaped this enigmatic cynic for good—

"I despise the radical and social Left which would poison me and put me in a prison of Society—leaving me no pleasures but those of happy work, and marriage, and perhaps finally automation so that there would be nothing for me to do but watch state-owned television and pursue crafts and cultural events until the utopia breaks up in sheer boredom of existence."

I said I was enamored by the The Adept's cover at the outset. I'll say now I was mind blown by the book, and leave it at that, except for this beautiful bit of prose—

"A rose is not only beautiful when new but it is also beautiful when wilted. The Japanese know this. There is more thought in a wilted rose than in a new rose. The new rose, lucent flower meat, gleams and gives off light like a psychedelic drug being whirled in a centrifuge in a dark room. No, not like that. The new rose is new flesh. It stares back at you. It is shocked to be removed from the garden, but newborn to be unitary, disparate, and free. show less

What?

What?

This couldn’t be anything but a product of the ‘60s—no other decade could possibly claim it, in the same way that no other decade could have claimed Hair, and in that sense The Beard is comparable to Hair, minus all the contrived horseshit—surprising considering the author Michael McClure is the only poet who I ever felt went out of his way to piss me off by trying too hard—and that, I suspect, is why it’s been left behind with most everything else from the sixties. show more

It’s not really good, but there’s just…something there that draws you to it, the repetitive nature of it, and the fact that all the ideas McClure is trying to get across would fit in two short sentences, so it’s not exactly a complicated play. Actress Jean Harlow and outlaw Billy the Kid are sitting together, wearing beards of paper scraps, passing the time in eternity and saying the same things over and over and over, slowly leading up to a very sexy ending that aggravated so many popo and Hollywood figures back in 1965 San Fran. About the only celebrity not closely connected to the Beats or the San Francisco Renaissance or the Black Mountain poets that did like it was Rip Torn, who took it upon himself to direct a number of early performances, which, coupled with his own performance in the Beastmaster, puts him in the running for the title of ballsiest actor.

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"Before you can pry any secrets from me, you must first find the real me! Which one will you pursue?"
“FUCK YOU!” show less

A drug-induced masturbatory fantasy of the ego. Pure crap.

Poor condition