By that time di Prima was no stranger to either the publishing of sexually explicit texts or its attendant backlash. Memoirs was initially published in 1969, a full decade and a half past the events it describes. Published by Olympia Press, a French publishing house that trafficked in both avant-garde literature and raw erotica for an eager public across Europe and the United States, di Prima’s Memoirs blurred the lines between fiction and life, art and pornography, and history and fantasy. This passage, which prefaces the Beat poet Diane di Prima’s erotic novel, Memoirs of a Beatnik, displays the writer’s tongue-in-cheek style as well as the tensions of countercultural life in the second half of the 1960s. John Wieners is mad and in make-up in Buffalo, Fred Herko walked out a window, Gary Snyder is a Zen priest. And some of us managed in preserve our integrity by accepting government grants, or writing pornographic novels.
Well sweetie, some of us sold out and became hippies. “What do you suppose happened to all the beatniks?” mused a blonde freshman as she drove me back to San Francisco after my reading in Berkeley last year.
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