“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” Thus spoke Allen Ginsberg, in “A Supermarket in California,” announcing the atomic present of 1955 to the ages. Here, in the still point of a turbulent world—a supermarket in Berkeley, no less, on sacred ground now occupied by a Trader Joe’s—Ginsberg bridges Whitman’s boisterous cobblestone streets of 19th century Brooklyn and García Lorca’s surreal, civil war-haunted Spanish earth with images of postwar America’s naif splendor, a lust-filled world of packed shelves and latent queer desire.
Beyond the confines of the “neon fruit supermarket,” Dispatches invites you to join us in “The Postwar, 1945-1991.” Our explorations are far from comprehensive or authoritative, not only because the limitations of the magazine format preclude it, but because “authoritative” isn’t really our bag. Hungry for images and packed with questions, something eclectic and spontaneous, disparate and impressionistic emerged rather organically, something illuminated by the past and yet looking toward the future. “Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?”
For our correspondent Philippe Aronson, the beard belongs to Ira Cohen and it points, exuberantly, in the direction of master literary stylist Leonard Michaels and archetypal beatnik Irving Rosenthal—two Postwar American writers whose stories and lives caught the crazed pitch of the ‘60s and ‘70s—and beyond. We find the Beats again in our Person-to-Person with novelist Sarah Schulman, whose early works in the ‘80s re-imagined the possibilities of Lesbian fiction and whose collaborative AIDS activism not only bore witness to the crisis in New York, but continues to offer tools for organizing today. Also featured in Person-to-Person is artist Alfredo Jaar, who began making art in response to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in 1974. His activism, informed as much by the words of Antonio Gramsci and Pier Paolo Passolini as it is by the Coke bottles of Cildo Meireles, shows the Postwar artist as participant in the subject of his work: For Jaar, this subject is often war—most recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Postwar spans the years from the end of World War II in 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but as Jaar notes, the word “postwar,” when taken literally, glosses over the conflicts during and after the period. We return to one such conflict, the Vietnam War, in “Looking For Black Lang,” a haunting new poem by Yusef Komunyakaa that swelters in the heat of an American firebase where a man comes face to face with Truth and the “unsayable,” which may be the same thing. In his intimate dispatch from London, Andrew Moss takes us back to his adolescence in the late ‘50s when Sputnik was in the air and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was just beginning. Jeff Hewitt’s reappraisal of Philip K. Dick, which sends Richard J. Hofstader’s seminal 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” into hyperdrive, reminds us that an uncomfortable amount of the social, technological, and political mayhem we face today was prefigured in Dick’s inimitable books, many of the most important written in the paranoia-laden pall of the Nixon years.
Look forward to another incisive symposium, featuring provocative takes by Jed Perl, Sylva Fischerová, and Kevin Baker, among others. We are also pleased to publish our first special insert “Aesthetics and Politics in the Postwar Era,” a collection of essays edited through a valued collaboration with the Centre for Aesthetics and Politics at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco.
As Allen Ginsberg wrote later, the Postwar was “the beginning of the ‘American Century,’ the beginning of hyper-militarization, of the Atomic Era and the Age of Advertising, of Orwellian double-think public language.” In our humble attempts to better grasp today and the challenges facing tomorrow, we found ourselves drawn to that eternal period of explosive hopes and unrealized expectations, when it seemed unprecedented growth and opportunity for some would thwart doom and oppression for all. But if the past isn’t even past, then Dispatches presents to you its urgent latest, as of the time and place as ever.
