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A Discourse on Hip: Selected Writings of Milton Klonsky

Posted By: tot167
A Discourse on Hip: Selected Writings of Milton Klonsky

Ted Solotaroff, "A Discourse on Hip: Selected Writings of Milton Klonsky"
Wayne State Univ Pr | 1991 | ISBN: 0814319726 | 337 pages | PDF | 39,8 MB

Summary: Did Dostoevsky Kill Trotsky?
Rating: 4

Klonsky was, as the introduction here points out, a classic "Village Intellectual." He set out to know everything interesting there was to know–-about drugs, drink, poetry, politics, and most memorably, the great poet artist William Blake. And, further, to combine all this in unexpected ways, give it some top spin, and serve it back with style.The title for this collection is unfortunate, making it sound like some stale beatnik rap. But the title of one of the essays here, "Art & Life, A Menippean Paean to the Flea, or Did Dostoevsky Kill Trotsky?" gives a much better sense of Klonsky at full-throat. It starts with Robert Hooke, the first man to see a flea through a microscope, in April of 1663 and makes its way from there through Blake, Trotsky, Classics Illustrated Comics and '70s Don Juan mysticism, and much more, all with humor and emotional power: Blake's evening audiences for spirits and his drawing of the ravenous soul of a flea are described with skill and heart.
Klonsky has become a footnote to modern intellectual history (he is a character in a recent play about Delmore Schwartz, for example), and that's a shame. There are some filler essays here, it's true, but more than half are of such brilliance of intellectual wit (or oddity: Klonsky's girlfriend left him for Auden–-in the poet's single valiant try at a heterosexual relationship)that you will likely find them ineradicable parts of your intellectual cabinet of wonders once you have read them.

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