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DOUG LANG
Freaks


click to enlarge

New English Library, London, 1973
(price: 30p; 128 pages)

dedication: an extravaganza for Lady Andrea Gonzo, Dr Emanuel Gonzo & Ana Maria Lovely


The blurb on the back:

THE TIME: two months of chaos and crisis in the summer of 1972.
THE PLACE: a communal house in London
THE PEOPLE: five men and two women.
THE PROBLEMS: drug abuse, sexual antics and political activism.

FREAKS is the story of the emotional interactions and sexual permutations of seven people as they live through a crucial period in all their lives. It describes the pressures they experience; their successes and failures in the game of survival; and their attempts to escape from situations created for them and by themselves, usually with painfully unpleasant results.
Here is a novel that vividly describes the hang-ups of today's drop-outs.


It's tosh, of course, complete tosh, a British attempt at Beat writing. As though it weren't bad enough that the Beats continue to exert a death-like grip on American youth literature, we have to indulge the self-indulgence they bequeathed us as well.

It's perhaps significant that the narrator is a Welsh poet - Celtic fringe, you see? So what does he have to say to us?

Meaning, to me in poetry, is not a grid through which seeps the poem to sit there like a jelly from a mould. Meaning is fluid, depending on form, on which the poem moves.

Oh, shut up.


ARTISTIC MERIT: 1/5
ENTERTAINMENT VALUE:
1/5
HIPNESS QUOTIENT:
3/5


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