Somebody must have turned back the clock. The iconic image of Allen Ginsberg, recalling his "Pentagon Exorcism" days circa 1967 (stars-and-striped stovepipe hat, black-framed eyeglasses, full beard and riveting, innocent eyes), stares at me from corner newstands all over Manhattan. His face is on the cover of Time Out/New York, which dubs him "the spiritual muse" of the Howl! Festival, a weeklong celebration of the arts that just ended in the East Village.

The Fugs are back, making a splash with "The Fugs final cd, (part 1)," their first release in 17 years. (Download link to the songs.) They're wrapping up their "Last Reunion" tour with a free "Literary Concert" at the New York State Writers Institute in Albany on Sept. 16. (Download link to "The Fugs First Album.")

Meantime, Fugs leader Ed Sanders has an essay in Time Out (not online, unfortunately) recalling his Peace Eye bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, an era when Life magazine put him on its cover because of his literary notoriety. In the early 1960s, he edited a mimeographed poetry journal called FUCK YOU / A Magazine of the Arts and wrote lyric poems that scandalized the literary world.

Here's the way Ed began "The Hairy Table," a story published in 1968 in a San Francisco little magazine I once edited, decades before the vernacular became acceptable in magazines like The New Yorker:

Her delicate tongue of flame slid into the crinkles of my ass, jabbing here like a sparrer, there sucking like a cuttlefish. ... I filled her snatch full of air and gently drew it out in funt-spurts, tasting the salmon moisture of the wheezes.

(The story drew the wrath of a Midwest congressman, who foamed about it on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in one of the earliest battles against the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Paul Krassner, who staked his own claim to literary notoriety in the '60s, is about to launch a weekly column, "Zen Bastard," in the alternative weekly New York Press. Just this morning there's a review of a new book going over old ground by Henry the K in The New York Times (free registration required). And now Blue Wind Press has re-issued Ted Berrigan's "So Going Around Cities," a collection of poems from 1958 to 1979.

Some day future anthropologists will thank Berrigan for his poetry. A leading figure (the father figure, really) of the second-generation New York School Poets — what I think of as the Kitchen Sink School — Berrigan threw everything into his poems from the hair on his face to the amphetamines he took, from the ice cream he ate to the bedsheets he slept on, from the streets he walked to the all-night raps he talked, from the boredom he felt to the sex that excited him. He pretty much left nothing out.