Rabid Readers, Rabbit Feeders and Gentle Souls All,
Still, again, we find ourselves apologizing for our absence. Since we last wrote, we had a strange interlude with Ferd, which we did manage to get on a cassette tape and will to you shortly.
More exciting, upon celebrating the anniversary of the birth of our hero, the great Lenny Bruce, we discovered that a friend of ours is a mutual friend of Lenny’s only child, daughter Kitty Bruce. We were offered an introduction and Kitty is granting us an interview which will appear in the tenth issue of Beatdom, the religion issue. Lenny took a lot of swipes at religion and we are very fortunate that Kitty is so gracious to share her time with Beatdom. She will be in good company, of course.
Also, in Beatdom news, we made contact with Richie Ramone, fastest of the three Ramones drummers and writer of several Ramones hits, including Somebody Put Something In My Drink, a set standard at any later Ramones show. He has also agreed to talk with Beatdom about the Beat aspects of life on the road with the Ramones, among other things. It is interesting to note that the Ramones were the fastest-playing group in the original first wave of Punk. That makes Richie the fastest of the fast, and you can read him tell about it in Beatdom issue eleven.
So, it goes without saying that we have been busy (even though we just said it) and part of the bustle had to do with the release of the third book from the publishing house of the modern Beat, Beatdom Books. Our third release is the ‘hot off the presses’ yet long-awaited tale of a modern Beat suffering through an ‘on the road’ adventure, as given to us by Beatdom’s Fearless Leader and Editor-In-Chief, our partner, Mr. David S. Wills.
We are seeing more and more about Korea in the news these days, so as world-citizens, we offer this review of Mr. Wills’ tome:
What is so Beat about Korea?
In his first novel, David S. Wills, creator of the literary journal Beatdom, takes us on a long, strange trip as he finds cultural astonishment in the depavity which surrounds him.
His Korea, as presented in The Dog Farm (Beatdom Books, October 2011), offers the tattered tableau of a treacherous terrain where no mammals exist - except for on plates, to be consumed. Even the closest thing to a stray dog, behaviourally, are the vile and drunken denizens of Daegu.
Spitting, cursing, staring, insulting his protagonist, Alexander, the whole of humanity in South Korea behaves badly, lashing out at our hero with fists, umbrellas and verbal assaults. Even worse, he introduces us to the vile smell of the kimchi, a gastricly gaseous foodstuff which pollutes the air of the country with the portentious stench that flavors sections of the novel. Kimchi, not only a food but a symbol of Korean superiority, holds the power to not only turn the stomach but causes a condition known as the kimchi rage…a violent mood-swinging behaviour, the ugly end of which usually targets Westerners, more commonly known as foreigners.
Young Alexander arrives in this over-heated hell from his bleak hometown in Scotland, where he wiled away days drunk, stoned and on the dole. Korea, in his drunkenness, represented opportunity. White skin made him a faux-American, the first scratch at the surface of the racism prevailing in the strange, new land. While making him desirable as a teacher, since Korea is, of course ‘Number One!’, and the children of wealthy Koreans only get the best education possible, in their eyes – which is virtually no education, whatsoever, but as long as the teacher is ‘American’, all is well!
Anybody with white skin can be American and earn a small fortune, with no formal education in teaching.
Skin-tone may help with cashflow but in the drunken, dirty, dark streets of Daegu, it also incites violence and mockery, shame and shit-flinging. The racism works both ways. Alexander notes that he had no racism in his soul until being subjected to these anomalies.
We venture out of Daegu a few times, to the beach, the mountains, a glorious Buddhist temple, on an ill-fated escape to Japan and back.
Along the way, we meet other characters, both the expats who form Alexander’s social circle, and the countrymen and women who dictate the rules of his existence at the dubious citadel of education, Charleston Academy. We meet the administrators, who are ugly, sleazy, greasy and dress cheesy. It is a nation of cheesy dressers. The master of the con is the oily Mr. Park, or ‘Parky’ as the expats know him. He implores Alexander to be good, not to drink like the others, not to sound Scottish and to make himself home in a squalid cell of an ‘apartment’…to stay there and not consort with those other ‘bad’ teachers who drink after work and see through the shell game of the academy.
To return to our question, why is this Beat?
It doesn’t get much more Beat than this. We have travel, sex, music, drugs, love, hate, exotic locales, odd new glimpses at human behaviour, danger, escape, corrupt society and crooked police hounding the hip. It’s the same old Beat but in a new country in a new decade. Alexander unwittingly morphs into the essence of Beat in this cruel petri dish of a country, where germs and humans cohabitate in unnatural transparency.
Like those before him, he takes to the road as means of salvation and finds what one always finds on the road…more hard road to travel.
If you have ever traveled to another country as an American during or after the second Bush presidency, you may have felt some of the prejudice and animosity described by Wills, but to a much-lesser degree. If you have ever considered travel to South Korea, outside of a safely-guided tour, you may want to read The Dog Farm first and perhaps consider visiting Japan, instead. If you have read all the Beat novels and are looking for something new, that is not a rip-off of Kerouac or Burroughs, but is a fresh, (relatively) new voice in the land of Beatdom, then this is the book for you.
