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Dream Time: Chapters From the Sixties
The sensibility of the sixties--the drug culture, mysticism, rock music, and revolutionary tactics employed in the name of peace and equality--is captured in this insightful blend of autobiography, prose montage, and cultural criticism
- GenresMemoir
194 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 27, 2015
I'll start with the caveat and then move on to an explanation of why this earns a place on my "favorites" shelf, which I limit to books that combine writing excellence, depth and personal impact. Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Leslie Silko, Ulysses...the true A list.
But there is a caveat. O'Brien's Sixties are white and privileged: he writes (consciously) from the perspective of middle-to-upper-middle class youth, with a masculine tilt. There are no black characters, no Vietnam vets, and women are present in angular relationship to the center of the stories.
Most of the time, those elements would seriously compromise my sense of a book's quality, and there's a small voice in the back of my head whispering that I shouldn't be giving Dream Time quite as strong a recommendation as I am. And there's a possibility that O'Brien's real audience consists of people who share some/most of his "identity" characteristics. But I don't think so and I'll move on to explaining why.
Like Rich's poetry and Baldwin's prose, Dream Time knows precisely where it's coming from and is deeply aware of the complications we use the superficialities of "identity" to veil and evade. It's a jazz book, one dedicated to testing phrasings, exploring the ways internal states of being freeze, thaw, melt, are exploded by the changes in the external world, re-form, dissolve again, grasp on to phrasings as life rafts that have already begun to sink by the time we've located them. On a sentence by sentence basis, the book is stunning. O'Brien frequently writes a paragraph, half-paragraph, sometimes only a phrase, from a perspective firmly committed to a "truth" which the next phrase or paragraph refracts into a new configuration. As I read I found myself repeatedly wondering how he took us from point A--maybe a commitment to revolution as envisioned by Che or the lure of James Bond fashion or a shared moment of sexual ecstasy--to point B, from which the first moment appears to have been pure delusion or willed innocence. Been a while since I've fallen so firmly under the sway of an unfamiliar writing style. O'Brien's written eloquently about jazz, so I suspect he understands the style in precisely those terms, but it doesn't really matter. The impact is immediate, visceral and its implications are absolutely opposed to abstraction and generalization.
And that's precisely what, at their best, the Sixties were about: constant questioning and evolution. But also profound disillusionment. The structure of the book follows, inevitably I'm afraid, a tragic arc, or maybe a tragicomic arc. But that's not quite right because it requires accepting the late beat, affluent nuclear nightmare of the early 60s as a desirable state of being, a mistake O'Brien's far too sharp to make. Each chapter takes on a different state of (mostly white, male-centered, economically shielded) being, takes apart its contradictions, insecurities,while recognizing the spiritual and political visions that can't be dismissed with a glib ironic " critique."
Not sure how clearly Dream Time will communicate with those who don't follow the allusions--"you had to be there, man"? There's a bit less music than in my memory of the time, a bit more film, a lot more NYC "high culture" (I should probably add region to the list of "limitations"--the Sixties meant something way different in the Rocky Mountain Time Zone than they did in the Ivy League sphere. But at the end, none of that mattered much to me. I had a specific location that conditioned my sense of the sixties; so did everyone else who lived through the time. What I'm sure of is that O'Brien has provided one of the clearest pictures I've seen of how the Sixties felt.
When you're done, read Baldwin's Another Country, Rich's Leaflets, Leroi Jones' Dead Lecturer, Denise Levertov, Gwendolyn Brooks...listen to Dylan and Aretha and Coltrane and Nina Simone.....But keep Dream Time in the mix.
But there is a caveat. O'Brien's Sixties are white and privileged: he writes (consciously) from the perspective of middle-to-upper-middle class youth, with a masculine tilt. There are no black characters, no Vietnam vets, and women are present in angular relationship to the center of the stories.
Most of the time, those elements would seriously compromise my sense of a book's quality, and there's a small voice in the back of my head whispering that I shouldn't be giving Dream Time quite as strong a recommendation as I am. And there's a possibility that O'Brien's real audience consists of people who share some/most of his "identity" characteristics. But I don't think so and I'll move on to explaining why.
Like Rich's poetry and Baldwin's prose, Dream Time knows precisely where it's coming from and is deeply aware of the complications we use the superficialities of "identity" to veil and evade. It's a jazz book, one dedicated to testing phrasings, exploring the ways internal states of being freeze, thaw, melt, are exploded by the changes in the external world, re-form, dissolve again, grasp on to phrasings as life rafts that have already begun to sink by the time we've located them. On a sentence by sentence basis, the book is stunning. O'Brien frequently writes a paragraph, half-paragraph, sometimes only a phrase, from a perspective firmly committed to a "truth" which the next phrase or paragraph refracts into a new configuration. As I read I found myself repeatedly wondering how he took us from point A--maybe a commitment to revolution as envisioned by Che or the lure of James Bond fashion or a shared moment of sexual ecstasy--to point B, from which the first moment appears to have been pure delusion or willed innocence. Been a while since I've fallen so firmly under the sway of an unfamiliar writing style. O'Brien's written eloquently about jazz, so I suspect he understands the style in precisely those terms, but it doesn't really matter. The impact is immediate, visceral and its implications are absolutely opposed to abstraction and generalization.
And that's precisely what, at their best, the Sixties were about: constant questioning and evolution. But also profound disillusionment. The structure of the book follows, inevitably I'm afraid, a tragic arc, or maybe a tragicomic arc. But that's not quite right because it requires accepting the late beat, affluent nuclear nightmare of the early 60s as a desirable state of being, a mistake O'Brien's far too sharp to make. Each chapter takes on a different state of (mostly white, male-centered, economically shielded) being, takes apart its contradictions, insecurities,while recognizing the spiritual and political visions that can't be dismissed with a glib ironic " critique."
Not sure how clearly Dream Time will communicate with those who don't follow the allusions--"you had to be there, man"? There's a bit less music than in my memory of the time, a bit more film, a lot more NYC "high culture" (I should probably add region to the list of "limitations"--the Sixties meant something way different in the Rocky Mountain Time Zone than they did in the Ivy League sphere. But at the end, none of that mattered much to me. I had a specific location that conditioned my sense of the sixties; so did everyone else who lived through the time. What I'm sure of is that O'Brien has provided one of the clearest pictures I've seen of how the Sixties felt.
When you're done, read Baldwin's Another Country, Rich's Leaflets, Leroi Jones' Dead Lecturer, Denise Levertov, Gwendolyn Brooks...listen to Dylan and Aretha and Coltrane and Nina Simone.....But keep Dream Time in the mix.
August 27, 2010
Really, an amazing book. Following a linear pathline that is the manifestation of a life to a time period, the biography of the 60's rebirth and death. This birth into consciousness, fed by the media culture perfumed by the 1950's, lead into the Consciousness-rebellion of the 1960's. This book is the closest thing to an acid trip i've ever read, more than Her by Ferlinghetti.
The media are broadcasting the sound of a wound and calling it reality. Consider the Beach Boys. All the while they were singing polyphonic hymns of dazzling purity and spiritual concentration, they had suffered from the wild delusion that they were singing about little deuce coupes and no-go showboats. They, at least, were redeemed through the transforming revelations undergone by their guiding genius Brian Wilson: 'My experience of God came from acid; it's the most important thing that's ever happened to me.
What i like and didn't like about this book is it's stream of consciousness. It's like a rant, but comprised of the ethos surrounding the history of this decade. He makes up these composite characters of the counter-culture esteem of the time, Johnny and Bad Girl. They approach sexual freedom with a James Dean-like cigarette hanging from the lip and a fierce ambivalence towards their own naked bodies:
What a dawn it was; and yet it could never quite be the fresh start of which they dreamed. The Western sexual tradition kept getting in their way. They would have liked to write it an open letter: Why did you do this to us? You have blighted the fun house that would have been our bodies. Even Blake and Shelley said so hundreds of years ago. We try to take off our clothes but are unable to take off the idea of them. We encounter thickets of thwartings: "My baby's got me locked up in chains, but they ain't the kind that you can see." Why isn't my girlfriend happy? How can we smash what ten thousand years of language have done to our bodies? How could desire become a burden? I insist on knowing how this was permitted to happen.
This book really tries to map that time, to put into expression, as prose. He knocks it all down to the exploitation of Leary's phrase, "Drop out, turn off, tune in;" to "Tune in, turn off, drop out." Because it sounded better. the more lyrical tuning of that phrase actually represents the lack of wherewithal which the most important device withing that generation withheld, that is, the collectiveness rather than the rebellion. The rebellion was just a means, to break down and build up again. Everyone got too stoned to realize they were all part of something. So, like Hunter Thompson's obsession, this book exists as moratorium towards a time of deadened spiritual awakening.
An absolute reversal of definitions is approaching, as the Age of Fishes prepares to lay down its cache of knowledge at the feet of the Water-Bearer. There have always been a few people on the planet with some idea of what was in store, but now with each generation their numbers will increase radically. The sci-fi picture "Village of the Damned" was perhaps a prophecy of this advent of the Children of Light, albeit with the paranoid slant we might expect from a product of the moribund Piscean culture. How terrified they must be at the spirit tongues announcing the end of rationalism!
...
We look at the woods and think unavoidably of a single universal mind gone utterly into form. The sound of the stream continuously running neutralizes the insidious flow of human thoughts. Here is our point of origin. Once you hook into that rhythm there's no need to think again. The movements of stars, migratory patterns, planting cycles, the chirping of insects in their seasons will collaborate to guide you. Nature talks, you listen. Your nerve ends readjust. The staccato of the city language fades. There is no longer any way to be "indoors," no way to be cut off from the soil and the rotting leaves and the bugs. If you don't belong here you don't belong anywhere
Truly the intention of this book is to capture the real potential of that time, of kids re-emerging into something so huge as the actual Revolution; but it was too stoned.
In an imaginary room in the nineteenth century, poets smoke from long hookahs and ascend in rapt silence toward the ecstasy that will engender "Kubla Kahn" or "The Illuminations". Now a century away, Johnny and his friends were trying to find a way back into that room. There are other things to love in life--girls, movies, sunny days at the beach--but they are outward things. We want the inside track, the secret world available for only five bucks from a guitarist who hangs out at Reggio's.
The media are broadcasting the sound of a wound and calling it reality. Consider the Beach Boys. All the while they were singing polyphonic hymns of dazzling purity and spiritual concentration, they had suffered from the wild delusion that they were singing about little deuce coupes and no-go showboats. They, at least, were redeemed through the transforming revelations undergone by their guiding genius Brian Wilson: 'My experience of God came from acid; it's the most important thing that's ever happened to me.
What i like and didn't like about this book is it's stream of consciousness. It's like a rant, but comprised of the ethos surrounding the history of this decade. He makes up these composite characters of the counter-culture esteem of the time, Johnny and Bad Girl. They approach sexual freedom with a James Dean-like cigarette hanging from the lip and a fierce ambivalence towards their own naked bodies:
What a dawn it was; and yet it could never quite be the fresh start of which they dreamed. The Western sexual tradition kept getting in their way. They would have liked to write it an open letter: Why did you do this to us? You have blighted the fun house that would have been our bodies. Even Blake and Shelley said so hundreds of years ago. We try to take off our clothes but are unable to take off the idea of them. We encounter thickets of thwartings: "My baby's got me locked up in chains, but they ain't the kind that you can see." Why isn't my girlfriend happy? How can we smash what ten thousand years of language have done to our bodies? How could desire become a burden? I insist on knowing how this was permitted to happen.
This book really tries to map that time, to put into expression, as prose. He knocks it all down to the exploitation of Leary's phrase, "Drop out, turn off, tune in;" to "Tune in, turn off, drop out." Because it sounded better. the more lyrical tuning of that phrase actually represents the lack of wherewithal which the most important device withing that generation withheld, that is, the collectiveness rather than the rebellion. The rebellion was just a means, to break down and build up again. Everyone got too stoned to realize they were all part of something. So, like Hunter Thompson's obsession, this book exists as moratorium towards a time of deadened spiritual awakening.
An absolute reversal of definitions is approaching, as the Age of Fishes prepares to lay down its cache of knowledge at the feet of the Water-Bearer. There have always been a few people on the planet with some idea of what was in store, but now with each generation their numbers will increase radically. The sci-fi picture "Village of the Damned" was perhaps a prophecy of this advent of the Children of Light, albeit with the paranoid slant we might expect from a product of the moribund Piscean culture. How terrified they must be at the spirit tongues announcing the end of rationalism!
...
We look at the woods and think unavoidably of a single universal mind gone utterly into form. The sound of the stream continuously running neutralizes the insidious flow of human thoughts. Here is our point of origin. Once you hook into that rhythm there's no need to think again. The movements of stars, migratory patterns, planting cycles, the chirping of insects in their seasons will collaborate to guide you. Nature talks, you listen. Your nerve ends readjust. The staccato of the city language fades. There is no longer any way to be "indoors," no way to be cut off from the soil and the rotting leaves and the bugs. If you don't belong here you don't belong anywhere
Truly the intention of this book is to capture the real potential of that time, of kids re-emerging into something so huge as the actual Revolution; but it was too stoned.
In an imaginary room in the nineteenth century, poets smoke from long hookahs and ascend in rapt silence toward the ecstasy that will engender "Kubla Kahn" or "The Illuminations". Now a century away, Johnny and his friends were trying to find a way back into that room. There are other things to love in life--girls, movies, sunny days at the beach--but they are outward things. We want the inside track, the secret world available for only five bucks from a guitarist who hangs out at Reggio's.
October 14, 2014
Really an extraordinary book that appears at first to be a series of discrete essays about the 60s but is much more of a memoir though not in the traditional sense. Amazing writing that somehow captures the period in an effortless and really imaginative way.
October 31, 2016
And again in 2002.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews