The Realist lives!
The Realist Archive Project has begun "a complete republishing of all 146 issues of Paul Krassner's Classic and Uncompromising The Realist Magazine." Ethan Persoff at www.ep.tc/realist/ promises "four issues posted a month until the archive is complete."
Krassner's Realist was a lively collection of satire, news, hoax, provocation, and commentary. Begun in 1958, it was an oasis of irreverence in a sea of enforced conformity.
Re-reading the June 1963 issue, I'm plunged into one of the late Robert Anton Wilson's "reality tunnels" — immersed in a time when Lenny Bruce was getting busted in Chicago for disrespecting the Pope, Playboy magazine hadn't yet featured a "Negro Playmate," and New York City public school teacher James Council had just lost his teaching license for refusing to lead his students in atomic bomb "shelter drills." Re-living the era in the pages of The Realist gives immediate tangible force to James Joyce's "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
It's a harsh kind of courage you can take from those pages: If those folks lived through all of that, and kept it up with wicked humor and obstinate bravery, then I can by hell get through this crop of pissant tyrants and third-rate bastards!
Wilson himself (who later wrote for Playboy) is represented in that issue with a critique of a Hugh Hefner essay conflating capitalism with free enterprise. With the combination of broad research, clear logic, biting sarcasm, and unorthodox thinking that would win him several generations of fans, Wilson demolishes Hefner's argument, introduces the reader to the evils of government monopoly on currency, and lists a half-dozen historical alternatives that (even in a pre-Google era) could start anyone with enough curiosity and a good public library and on an intellectual roller-coaster.
Krassner found and interviewed and published and encouraged all kinds of free-thinkers and extra-terrestrials, giving light and hope to a dispersed cabal of readers. Imagine them, scattered across the landscape, or gathered in a very few city enclaves, finding The Realist and thinking, "Holy crap! I'm not the only one!"
Today, every kid in America has a blog and a face-space and a way to find his nano-cultural niche and his peersters. Back then, perfectly sane school teachers were lining you up neatly in the hallway as a way to survive nuclear armageddon, girls' bodies were cordoned off, zoned like a baseball diamond, the Red Menace lurked pretty much everywhere, and there was something called "the race issue" that many folks simply hoped would go away.
Come to think of it, the technology's changed, and there's infinitely more information (but precious little wisdom) out there, and the kids may seem more wised-up; but there's still a war (or two) on, their teachers have gone back to selling "sex=death", there's a Designated Enemy (or two) among us, and ignorant rage is back in style.
Maybe it's still the right time for The Realist. Besides firing the juices of us old wobblies, beats, and hippies, maybe this Realist Archive will find its true audience among those who are just now taking their first tentative bites out of the giant shit-sandwich of real adult life. Living history, warts and chancres and all, a profane wild counterpart to Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
They're mostly regarded as clichéd icons now — a beat-up copy of a Kerouac novel, or a book of Ginsberg poetry, or a Monk LP, or an issue of The Realist — but before our current info-flood, the clues were scarcer. And those were clues, hints that there were people out there who knew something, maybe it was hard to say what, but something about how the entire accepted narrative of the world was out-of-kilter, and that there was something else to wake up to.
It's easy to gloss it all now with the Pleasantville fantasy creamola as history, but there's nothing cliché or tired about those old issues of The Realist. They give you the jouncing bruising dangerous contradictory exhilarating beast of the time itself. Lot of times, actually. Krassner published from 1958 to 1974, and restarted again, running from 1985 to 2001. As I make it, that's about from Sputnik and The Dharma Bums through Watergate, and then from AIDS and Iran-Contra through the (s)election of a certain smirking chimp. That's a lot of history, and culture, and The Realist took as good an impression of it as any one publication could.
I missed the first half of that run, but was lucky enough to subscribe for the second. And I'm still damn proud that Krassner invited me to contribute a piece during the magazine's final year, to be published amongst that illustrious, fierce, different-drummer company. I just wish he was still publishing, since I still have, somewhere, a piece that he suggested, about the enema-coffeeshops of Cambridge and Somerville.
I'm looking forward with excitement (and, honestly, some gut-clutching dread) at taking another jump through that Time Tunnel of a magazine. Thank you Ethan Persoff and especially thank you Paul Krassner. You're one of the literary world's true Aristocrats.
