20:4/21:1 Spring-Summer 1969

BRUCE KAPLAN

Document: Convention Coverage

The Spring-Summer 1969 issue of Chicago Review was devoted to “Fantastic Art and Literature”: it included translations of drama by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Tristan Tzara, fiction by Kenji Miyazawa, and poetry by Georg Trakl. But as the editors noted, during the preparation of the issue the “fantastic of actual events, commonly known as reality” intervened as the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the confrontation between the Chicago police and young protesters in Lincoln Park provoked a fantastic spectacle that summer. Editor Iven Lourie remembers how this transcript of interviews from Lincoln Park came together:

I recruited my friend and Folklore Society associate, Bruce Kaplan, to take his Uher tape recorder out in the park during the “riots” and see what he could get. Being Bruce, as soon as he waved his mike at the crowd, he attracted off-beat and unusual interviewees. Bruce got on tape a young civil disobedience veteran explaining all her self-defense and riot protection gear; stories of encounters with the police and hysteria in the city streets; a woman walking her dog who complained about the litter in the park; a man who immediately identified himself as the author of all this activity, a god-like being whose will was being served by the demonstrations; a hippie who described taking a lot of LSD and becoming convinced he was a vampire, sleeping in a coffin and emerging only at night and so on. I did a few of these interviews, but most were Bruce’s. He was a folklorist, student of Mircea Eliade and several prominent scholars in South Asian Studies, and uniquely qualified in field recording. We hired an anthropologist friend of Bruce’s to transcribe the tapes, then edited them for crispness and a cinematic rhythm, and presto! —we had a text that ended up in another Big Table anthology of prose experiments. Bruce never quite finished his Ph.D., instead founded Flying Fish Records, where he did a great deal of memorable recording. He died suddenly in 1992, a loss to the music business and to all his friends and family.

The transcript runs over fifty pages; we’ve included some excerpts from it here.

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