Just finished reading Sam Kashner's "When I Was Cool", a record of the young Sam Kashner's time at the Naropa Institute . It was a good read (finished it over 2 days). Kashner was the first Writing and Poetics student at Naropa, pre-accreditation for the college, when William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, along with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman formed the core faculty. I’d heard some conflicting reactions to the book – unflattering portraits of Burroughs and Waldman, a trashy “celebrity expose” though undeniably hard to put down, this from a friend in the community.
Kashner arrives from Long Island (having just dropped out of his freshman year at a local college) with lofty illusions about his poetry heroes. He is relegated to Ginsberg’s personal assistant which involves typing (and finishing) his poems, vacuuming for Rinpoche, keeping an eye on Billy Burroughs, and helping Corso complete his manuscript of poems for publication. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of teaching going on, though Sam certainly receives an education - He is once kidnapped by Corso who’s intent is to liberate Sam from “fear”. Kashner writes of his relationships with each of the Beats, with the most time and tenderness devoted to Ginsberg and Corso. Waldman, described as a poetry rock star is inaccessible and distant from Kashner.
The book is at times painful to read. Kashner portrays himself as a shy, inexperienced Jewish kid from Long Island. At Naropa, he is exposed to sex, drugs, alcohol, and mental illness. As the first WP student, he was it – no community beyond his teachers to engage with or to get feedback from, terribly isolated. On top of this, Kashner couldn’t relate to the whole Buddhist aspect of Naropa and who could really blame him with events like the Merwin incident going down.
In the end, Kashner paints a very honest picture of his experiences at Naropa which exposes his teachers for being imperfect, crazy, and human like the rest of us. Kashner left Boulder shortly after graduating from the program and returned to New York. He writes that after Rinpoche passed way in 1987, he then began to meditate. I see this book as Kashner’s attempt at processing all of the wacked out experiences of those 2 years in Boulder – coming to terms with his prudish innocence and naivete, his desire for approval, his grasping, his fear - understanding how these qualities contributed to his suffering and making some sense of what transcends that strange experience.
I sense that the negative reaction to the book comes from the deconstruction of the myth surrounding some of the people in the book. The Beats have historically told their own stories, and what threatens about this book is that it is told from the perspective of a student who lived thru it all with them and has the courage to engage in the struggle to come to terms with that experience.
Kort and I recently speculated on what Rinpoche could have been trying to impart to his students on that Halloween night in Snow Mass, Colorado at Vajrayana retreat. The Merwin incident was without a doubt disturbing and horrific (some of the comments in Kashner’s book made me seriously ill as an Asian woman) –two innocent poets stripped bare, exposed and vulnerable before a crowd. But was the teaching about baring ourselves? Year after year, the scandal has been covered up, avoided, again and again by the community, instead of openly addressed and discussed.
