Commentaries - July 2021

The Andrews Sisters perform Sid Robin’s zany novelty song, let’s call it zoot-suit Dada for the “bleeps” enlisting in the US Army to fight the Nazis. Not quite Spike Jones’s “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” but even so, Robin pays tribute to the the unheroic “schlemiels” that’re gonna win the war. The jeep weeps for the jerks/wacks/quacks/creeps who are on their way to fight and die. “Six Jerks in a Jeep” combines slang and scat with rhyming abandon. It’s Nude Formalism as comic propaganda. 

At the risk of tarpooing the jouissance, the self-deprecation here is transvaluation. You have to be a jerk to go to war, knowing it’s not only hell but futile; knowing it’s the schmoes who end up on the front line while the privileged stay safe far from the action And yet, three cheers for them (them is us). 

The song was included in the 1942 WWII Army recruitment film, Private Buckaroo. Robin, a private, originally wrote it for a GI review. It didn’t make it onto an Andrews Sister Decca album and so remains one of their lesser known songs. But it’s pure lyric gold.

The transcription is mine: {stanzas bracketed} are in full recording [also YouTube] but not in movie clip. If you have any corrections, let me know. 

Six Jerks In A Jeep

Judd Tully interviewed N. H. (Norman) Pritchard on Sept. 11, 1978. The ninety-minute conversation is informative and engrossing, offering more information about Pritchard than has been previously available. Pritchard was a poet in the CETA / Cultural Council Foundation Artists Project in New York and Tully, a CETA writer, interviewed him as part of the program. PennSound is happy to make this recording, made as part of the Artists Project, available, thanks to Tully and to Molly Garfinkel of CityLore. Records of Pritchard's CETA assigments are here. For upated information on Pritchard's manuscripts, see David Grundy's report.

Hank Lazer’s shape-writing walks a very narrow bridge, which is — as the Hasidic mystic, Reb Nahman of Breslov teaches — the world itself, hung across a shattering vessel, swung in awesome cosmic doubt. 

Poet, editor, and activist George-Thérèse Dickenson died June 15, 2021 in New York. The cause was a brain hemorrhage, according to her brother, John Dickenson.

With Will Bennett, Dickenson edited the magazine Assassin in the late 1970s.
She published two books:
Striations, from Good Gay Poets (Boston, 1976)
Transducing, from Segue (New York, 1986)

George-Thérèse Dickenson was born October 23, 1951, in Napa, CA, daugher of Howard George Dickinson, a lawyer, and Joanne DePuy (maiden name Cardiff), a wine and travel entrepreneur from Altadena, CA. Dickenson was a graduate of Wellesley College. After a brief stint at UC-Berkeley, she moved to Vermont and then Boston in the early 1970s, where she became involved with the anarchist circle around Murray Bookchin. She also connected with a group of poets. In the late 1970s, she  moved to lower Manhattan, where, over the next decade, Dickenson was closely involved with Larry Estridge and Peter Seaton. During that time, she taught poetry in the prisons through Janine Pommy Vega’s Incisions Arts Project. Her poems were included in a related anthology, Candles Burn in Memory Town: Poems from Both Sides of the Wall, edited by Vega (Segue/Incisions, 1988). While in New York, she struggled with substance abuse. During Dickenson's last decades,  she was living in a mountaintop cabin in a nudist colony in Stockton, NJ. She is survived by her mother and her brothers John and Chuck (pictures above) and her longtime partner Bobby Astarita.