Cosmic Scholar

The Life and Times of Harry Smith

De: John Szwed

Narrado por: Paul Woodson

He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, sat at the piano with Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, and argued film with Susan Sontag. He was always broke, always intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, "the only person I met in my life that transcended everything."

In Cosmic Scholar, John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century's most overlooked cultural figures. From his time recording the customs of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Florida to living in Greenwich Village in its heyday, Smith was consumed by an unceasing desire to create a unified theory of culture. He was an insatiable creator and collector, responsible for the influential Anthology of American Folk Music and several pioneering experimental films, but was also an insufferable and destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society. He was "so devious," said Ginsberg, and "so saintly."

Exhaustively researched and energetically told, Cosmic Scholar is a feat of biographical restoration and the long overdue deification of an American icon.

©2023 John Szwed (P)2023 Tantor

great book

Harry Smith seems to have met and they influenced everyone from the 1930s to 1991. (Except Bob Dylan who he refused to get out of bed and meet)

A Weirdo Worth Your Time

My interest in this book begins with a fundamental interest in the fringe, and ends with a general interest in homemade, conceptual animated film. The former is essential to the layman's appreciation for this work, as one must surrender to a reading experience concerning a figure who is out-of-reach in more ways than one. Unless one is themselves a scholar or anthropology enthusiast, it might be reasonable to expect coming away from the book feeling as though only a fraction of it was penetrable, or useable in assembling a conceivable portrait of the man. So from where I see it, a reader must possess an unshakable interest in those living beyond the bounds of modern society, moving within it on their own terms, possessed in an endless stagger toward an all-encompassing, yet intangible truth. In doing so, Harry Smith sifts through the sands of time, and in reading Cosmic Scholar, I sift through the meanderings of a genius in search of his cosmic indications of the future, of the past, of the Now. This is all quite hopeless of course, though the pursuit is meaningful, and the varying shape of this pursuit in fringe characters high and low is endlessly interesting. And on this, Szwed delivers, offering indications of the striking shape of Harry Smith's cosmic pursuit. I am left with an undeniable impression of Harry Smith, ephemeral as it may be, and for this impression I am thankful.

The narrator came across as rather stilted at first, took some time to get used to. An odd pairing of narrator and text giving the anti-establishment nature of Harry, I'd expect a narration more grounded in the elocution of the streets, rather than that of high society.