“Hieronymous Bosch”
Walter S. Gibson
Praeger Publishers
Copyright 1973
The paintings of 15th century Dutch artist
Hieronymous Bosch can be numbered, along with the
Tibetan Book of the Dead and Egyptian ankhs, among
the cultural artifacts revived by the counter-culture
during the 1960s. The surreal landscapes of such works
as his “Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych,
populated by suggestive nudes and ferocious demons
that seemed to spring forth complete to the last detail
from the collective libido, stimulated many a
chemically-aided imagination to new heights back
then.
Now, approaching the middle of the somewhat
more sober 1970s, it may be valuable to retrieve these
artifacts occasionally from the miasma of history into
which they are already fast returning, pull up an easy
chair, sit back, and try to figure out just what really is
going on with the things that used to provide such
cosmic hits. In the case of Bosch, Walter Gibson’s
Hieronymous Bosch is a good aid in the effort to peel
off the old day-glo to lay bare the original, remarkably
brilliant colors underneath.
Gibson’s book has a number of plusses going for it.
One is that his prose never deteriorates to the level of
the musty footnotes that often pass for art historical
writing, and occasionally rises considerably above it,
making the information available in a manner that can
please the lay reader as well as the scholar. Another is
the price: the book’s paperback edition, published by
Praeger, goes for a modest $4.95, not bad for an art
book.
The author’s thesis is that, far from being drug
inaucea nauucinauons oi an esoteric ireeminxer wno
was ahead of his time, Bosch’s paintings are the ex
pression of the cultural imagination of his milieu,
Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages. It was a
place and time, Gibson shows, in which most people
were unsure of the effect of the decay of traditional
values and institutions in progress around them. They
might have seen it as the approach of a new day, but
they were more prepared to interpret it as the coming
of the end, the Last Judgment complete with hellfire
and persecuting demons for the majority of the
population.
Bosch’s genius, according to this theory, lay in
giving vivid realization to what was going through
everybody’s mind. His images were intended as moral
allegories, and in paintings like “Death of the Miser”
and the “Haywain” and “Garden of Earthly Delights”
triptychs the artist used them to try to convince the
world’s sinners to quit their evil ways. Other works,
often concerned with the lives of saints, were meant to
induce additional piety in the righteous by way of
example. As usual, the images of sin and retribution,
which Bosch was a master at portraying, have proven
more interesting in the long run than those of
salvation.
Hieronymous Bosch provides ample visual
illustrations to support the author’s thesis: there are
numerous black and white reproductions and even
some middling-quality color plates of major works and
details. Unfortunately, he doesn’t give a clue as to the
reason for Bosch’s recent revival, leaving that to the
reader.
Given Gibson’s thesis, however, it might be useful
to observe, as historian Barbara Tuchman has,
parallels between the Zeitgeist that produced so many
forecasts and vivid descriptions of doom during the
late Middle Ages, and the spirit of our own time. This
analogy may go at least part way in explaining why the
painter’s work has become so popular.
And that last thought, after the book’s been laid
down, makes the old easy chair a little less com
fortable than it used to be.
Stephen Bangs
“The Fireside Watergate”
Nicholas von Hoffman and Garry Trudeau
Sheed and Ward
Copyright 1973
With the continuing barrage of information about
the Watergate scandals, you may feel like skipping this
review. I know that as I sat down to read von Hoffman
and Trudeau’s book I felt like skipping it. Never
theless, the book was amusing enough to hold my at
tention through its 110 pages.
But the sad fact remains that as each new
revelation reaches our ears, as the realization that the
government is essentially an unenlightened despotism
sinks in, and as a sense of bewildered and numbed
futility overtakes us, attempts at comic interpretation
of the events around us inevitably fall flatter than they
by all rights should. The incredible, breathtaking
sweep of statements such as Ron Ziegler’s
“inoperativism” leaves the mind stunned—how can a
society carry on with its business when the people are
being lied to by the regime and the regime admits it?
Comedy which tries to draw its laughs through
reduction ad absurdum inevitably fails, overwhelmed
by events which are themselves so absurd as to draw
the hysterical laughs accorded to natural
catastrophers.
For example, one of the funniest running gags in
the book is the hiring of an obscene demonstrator by
Nixon to shock the tourists outside the White House into
a reactionary sympathy. The President is very con
cerned about the exact wording on the sign. Well, then
we discover that in real life, one of Nixon’s German
shepherds wrote “great” or “good,” or both perhaps)
on a memo suggesting that an anti-Nixon demon
stration might be violent. It’s like trying to satirically
forecast television sitcoms :the most implausible show
that one is able to dream up invariably appears the
following fall. Only in politics, not only does one’s mind
rot, but one’s very existence begins to fray.
But von Hoffman writes pretty well; this book is
certainly more successful than Phillip Roth’s Our
Gang, the pre-Watergate vaudvillian roasting of
Tricky Dick. Trudeau buffs will of course be pleased by
the plentiful cartoons. However, this aspect of the book
is not all new; in fact most of this material and
decidedly most of the really funny material, is taken
from “Doonesbury,” and the drawings evidently done
especially for this volume are not nearly as droll.
To guard against unintended emphasis of
negativism, I will add that there are some very funny
parts—images of the boy-wonder trickster Donald
Segretti slinking across the nation in a cab, the agony
of the campaign donors, James McCord stuck with a
phone de-scrambler. Fairly funny is von Hoffman’s use
of names (check out what a goldmine Egil Drogh is),
but, on reflection, humor developed from the ridicule
of names is a few steps from a sort of adolescent
racism. What finally carries the book is its texture,
rich in the multitude of layers of cleverness.
So, as $4.95 seems like an awfully high price, I
suggest borrowing a copy from a friend or waiting till it
comes out in paperback. Of course there exists the
danger of becoming even more fed up with
W+ + +rg+4-e while waiting for a copy, but that’s
simply a risk the reader will have to take. If Nixon can
risk America, the least the reader can do is risk
boredom.
David Novick
“The People’s Lawyers”
Marlise James
Holt, Rinehart and Winston
New York, Chicago, San Francisco
Copyright 1973
“What the legal profession has always been about is
money, influence, power and status.” As evidence,
Marlise James points out the lopsided nature of legal
representation in America. Some 210,000 lawyers serve
the upper 25 percent of the nation (measured in terms of
income) while a mere 4,000 serve the 16 lk percent of the
population whose incomes place them below the poverty
level. James’ book concerns the aspirations and ac
tivities of a good number of those four thousand.
The influx of young lawyers into radical law practice
slowed considerably with the beginning of this decade.
While their entrance into practice swelled the ranks of
alternative lawyers, it also added to its diversity.
Summarizing the views of those she describes, James
notes that “they range from liberal to revolutionary,
from ethnic nationalist to total integrationist, from male
chauvinist to woman’s liberationist.” What unites the
“Second Nation” lawyers, then, is a refusal to do
business-as-usual and an attempt to bring to poor, Black,
Chicano, Asian, Native American and Movement groups
and individuals the kind of legal representation that used
to be the unique province of the rich and the corporate.
To a generation reared on the Perry Mason-Owen
Marshall barrister image, this book dispels many
illusions. The cloak of the American system of justice,
Holy Objectivity, is universally discredited in this Who’s
Who of Movement Law. The names of Kunstler, Nader,
Garry and the A.C.L.U. are familiar; those of Cockrel!
Acosta, King and SLAM are less so, but the flow of ideas
concerning attorney lifestyle, the chances of winning
impartial ejudication and the relation of lawyers to those
struggling for social change, is constant. In this age of
intermittent repression, Nixonic recession and popular
depression, many Movement lawyers echo the words of
a member of a Gainesville law collective, “We have a lot
of dreams...but now we are just trying to stay alive.”
written in a talking history style borrowed with
unfortunate ineptitude from Oscar Lewis (Children of
Sanchez) and Studs Terkel (Hard Times), The People’s
Lawyers wallows in utter gracelessness. If the book had
been turned in as an eighth grade composition, it would
have been returned bloody with corrections. Simply
because James is reporting about proletarian law
practice, there is no reason why her writing should be so
impoverished. The tome’s value is further constricted by
its topicality, which will outdate the material very
rapidly, and by the fact that those without a thorough
understanding of recent radical political happenings will
find great difficulty in placing the practice of radical law
in perspective. Still, if you can withstand the medium,
the message is worth encountering.
Ken Doctor
“White Bird Flies to Phoenix: Confessions of a Free
Clinic Burn-out”
Ethan Nebelkopf
Illustrated by Peter Craycroft
Jack Rabbit Press
Copyright 1973
If you can get through the jive-ass talk of Ethan
1,'ebelkopf’s White Bird Flies to Phoenix and un
derstand it, then you’ve opened up the secret channels to
“reality” and stepped in front of Alice’s Looking Glass.
A paperback book about the White Bird Socio-Medical
Aid Station, it mirrors the rise of the free clinic in
Eugene, from its obscure birth three years ago to one of
the largest social service agencies in Lane County.
The story, if you can kick away the refuse of
dialogue, is about “a free clinic burn-out.” The so-called
“burn-out” image surrounds the life and times of the
author in Eugene. However, the book is a collective
effort with illustrations by Peter Craycroft and printed
by the Jack Rabbit Press, with the goal of producing
works of artistic and social significance.
The printing, colorful pages and cartoons signal a
true version of a counter culture product, but the
writing, “hot off the typewriter” style, reeks of
humanitarianism profoundly based in the author’s own
story. “Confessions of” consists of 10 sections of con
fessional material interwoven with short essay type
stories to accompany the general format.
Confessions une sets me stage ior our teuow
freak author to handle his own reasons and background
leading to his bird-like drop into Eugene. “The vibes,”
he says of Eugene, “reminded me of the blossoming of
flower power in Berkeley in the summer of 66...”
However poetic, it’s questionable as to whether Eugene
ever did blossom before the coming of Nebelkopf.
It is hard to grasp the jargon of such sections as the
“Friday Nite Bummer Squad,” but perhaps that was the
author’s intent. Yet, with much sorting of the secret
language of the Bummer Squad, you finally get the
message and step into the world of the White Bird Clinic,
what it does and how it does it. Nevertheless, “Con
fessions Two” straightens out the whole mess of “Friday
Nite” and inadvertantly lets a bit more history about
White Bird escape the clutches of the author.
“Why I like Bananas,” the mood James Taylor, and
especially “California and the Lemming Instinct” give
an enlightening look at society through the eyes of the
alienated youth who grew up to become disillusioned
adults under the bonds of social bias and hopes for social
change.
Perhaps my favorite section includes the formation
of the “West Eugene Bozo Association.” Nebelkopf
explains the mystery of human faults and does it with
much compassion by saying, “A bozo is a human being
who f— up because he is a human being.” Of all reasons
for White Bird Clinic, this is the most useful. We are all
bozos and at sometime we all make a mess of our lives
and if White Bird can help out, thank god it’s there. But
Nebelkopf says it better, stating, “We love Bozos” —
“We are you are us.”
In a final look at White Bird Flies to Phoenix:
Confessions of a Free Clinic Burn-Out, I must question
the author’s decision as to whether we should take him
seriously in his writing. Regardless of this, White Bird
Flies is simple, yet complex in its social concepts. It is
real, yet sadly unrealistic in its ideals. But most of all, it
endears us to such characters as Stone Queen, the Bozo
Collective, Pear Queen, Crazy Frank, and Miz Lizzi as it
endears us to humanity itself.
Who is White Bird for? The book, whose proceeds go
to the Clinic, is for everyone in the Eugene area or out of
it, because everyone has a right to medical, social and
psychological help whether he or she can afford it or not.
It’s a right that lives in White Bird, and White Bird must
fly, or she will die.
Deb Perumean
“The Knee of Listening”
The Method of the Siddhas
Franklin Jones
Down Horse Press
Copyright 1972, 1973
“He has simply realized that he himself as he is, like
a star, like a dolphin, like an iris, is a perfect and
authentic manifestation of the eternal energy of the
universe, and thus is no longer disposed to be in conflict
with himself. Dangerous wisdom — and yet fire, elec
tricity, and technical knowledge are also dangerous. But
if you genuinely know this, it is nothing to be proud of or
humble about. It is just what is so...
“To say what Franklin Jones is trying to say is like
drawing an asympotic curve — a curve which is always
getting nearer and nearer to a straight line, but only
touches at infinity. Perhaps it could be said that this
curve is approaching it a little faster than some others,
knowing,however, that there is no hurry. Beyond words,
in the silencing of thought, we are already there.’’
Alan Watts
April. 1973