Here it is.

“To find a shoe has always been my dream,” is what Armenian doctoral student, Diana Zardaryan, told a New York Times reporter about her discovery of a 5,500-year-old leather shoe during a dig in Armenia.

How many people have their own individual dreams like Zardaryan? Too few. We dream the common dreams, leftover dreams — doggy-bag dreams — of fame and wealth, not ancient shoes or their equivalent.

We need a new movement of shoe dreamers.

“He’s gone.”

“Whaddya mean? asks DeNiro.

“Well, you know what I mean. He’s gone.”

Well, I just got news like that about Krim. But in my case, it was good news.

Not long after my book came out I saw that a new history of the Beats was also coming out. The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation threatened my whole thesis. Certainly any book that is complete would have to mention Krim, at least as editor of the The Beats (1960).

So I kept checking Amazon, waiting for the moment the publisher allowed searches inside the book so I could check the index and figure out how much humble pie I would have to eat. Would there be just one or two mentions, that I could dismiss as insignificant, or  a handful that would force me to concede that the Beats were not literary Goodfellas? They didn’t whack Krim. He was just in witness protection.

But when the index came on line I learned that Krim is with Hoffa. Krim is swimming with the fishes alongside Luca Brasi.

Or as the voice on the phone told DeNiro, ”He’s gone. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.”

I didn’t go to Buffalo. A decision that has given me endless opportunities for Krimiam regrets.

Then some weeks ago Shechner contacted me. He knew Krim and was working on a review of Missing a Beat. That review is now up at Tablet Magazine, and it is a terrific remembrance of Krim.

What’s it all mean, Mr. Natural? It means that our ability to take advantage of America’s much vaunted unlimited opportunities is in fact quite limited by our characters, which direct us in certain paths to the exclusion of all others. Following that limited path is the route to unlimited opportunities.

“This volume brings together several highly individualistic documents of an era that is all too easily caricatured and dismissed, showing the surprising range of views that were possible (if not popular) within the bounds of 1950’s and 1960’s hipness, especially in matters of race and ethnicity.”

The review closes with this applause for Krim,

“Confessional writing as candid as this is both rare and refreshing.”

That’s what I say.

That would be nice. But it wouldn’t please Krim. If he was here the very possibility would fill him with enough conflicted sensations to furnish a library.

What got me going on the Seymour Krim kick that led to Missing a Beat was his omission from every Beat anthology since the 1992 Portable Beat Reader. That led me to wonder why, since the man edited The Beats in 1960 and was included in The Beat Scene the same year. (His name is on the cover, fourth from the top.)

I finally decided the Beat editors had a case, because in our time of multicultural tripwires everyone is on alert for signs of ethnicity to be sensitive about, and Krim’s work is full of Jewish content. So the Beat collections apparently decided to tiptoe around him. Let the Jewish editors handle him.

The Jewish editors didn’t. But they should.

It’s like John Lennon once said when threatened with deportation from his adopted New York home. New York is full of criminals, degenerates, and crazy people. I fit right in, said Lennon.

Well, Jewish literature is replete with anger, resentments, longings for beauty, intellectualism, sex, nostalgia, madness, and heavyweight bouts of nonstop talk. Krim fits right in.

“Krim’s verbose, misogynistic, endlessly vulgar vernacular caught some of the bop inflections of the Beat era, but the Beats never welcomed him. Certainly he cared more about the concrete than the numinous: You wouldn’t find a naked Krim penning odes to the higher consciousness on the beach at Big Sur. More urgent was the psychic tsunami of personal need, the prickly everyday demands of solipsism. Nobody else wrote about status-envy and disgruntlement with the same level of honesty. Nobody else thought it worth the risk.”

Except I’m not sure about the misogynistic part. But I’ll take that up elsewhere.

From NewWorld Review,

“If Krim does occasionally lapse into self-indulgence, he also exhibits one of the most acute and, ironically, objective social senses that I have ever encountered, particularly in relation to black/white relations in an urban environment. Black English, Anti-Jazz, and Ask for a White Cadillac are simply some of the most honest writing that I have seen on the subject of black American culture, written by a non-black.”

And in Bookforum Vivian Gornick wrote,

“On the other hand, there is the series of remarkably penetrating essays, written out of Krim’s own experience, on what it meant, in the ’50s, to be a white boy prowling Harlem for sex and music. Today, these pieces are as wise and moving as they were on the day they were written.”

His 1957 article for the Village Voice, “Anti-Jazz,” his 1959 follow-up article for the alternative journal Exodus, “Ask for a White Cadillac,” and his previously unpublished “Black English, or the Motherfucker Culture,” are unmatched in white writing about black life and almost completely unknown. Krim does not just report about what is out there in black life, but what goes on inside him in response to what he sees and understands of black life.

And in Black English he wrote one of the greatest, most successful, musical, energetic, joy-inducing sentences I’ve ever read. It follows Krim’s admission that blacks’ public use of obscenities on the streets of New York is a justifiable political act, that it rebukes white America and presents whites with the dirty facts of black existence caused by white racism.

“I accept this is true, but at the same time as a user and lover of our common language I protest as much as anyone the self-indulgence of its wallowing, the attack on my standards and privacy, the unwanted bath in street-corner biology, the unasked-for intimacy that the user’s imagery creates, the nerve, the chutzpah, presumption, contempt with which my ear is used as a free toilet bowl by some cunt-struck black cat who wants to impose his sadomasochistic fantasies on the world, thinking that by yoking them to a clenched fist he has the right to smear my head with ignorance, obsession, the meat-view of life, hammering down every nuance and creative possibility into a monotone of one-syllable appetite and force.”

Wow.

I said before that every piece of writing contains some junk, and that every reader makes his own private deal regarding how much junk he’s willing to put up with in exchange for the good stuff. I’m charitable toward Krim’s excesses because I place a very high value on sentences like that one.

If they sound as if they’re in a club, that’s deliberate; this is pure Chicago blues, raw as the liquor served in those joints and, in the slower numbers, smooth as the lines of sharp-dressed men working to seduce foxy women.

That’s classic cool white Jewish guy appreciation of a certain black scene, but nobody did it better than Krim. Here’s a taste from  his 1959 “Ask for a White Cadillac,” about the same sharp-dressed approach,

And through all this street-embattled life ran the perpetual beauty of clothes, threads, duds!—bold, high-style dresses and appointments on the girls (flashing jewelry, dyed platinum-blonde hair over a tan face, elbow-length white evening gloves handcuffed with a fake black-onyx bracelet) while the guys were as button-rolled and razor-sharp as hip clotheshorses stepping right out of a showroom.

And what’s really interesting is an equivalent 1951 observation by the great A.J. Liebling. He sized up and dug a crowd showing up at New York’s Garden to take in a Joe Louis fight.

A high percentage of them were from Harlem, and they were dressed as if for a levee, the men in shimmering gabardines and felt hats the color of freshly unwrapped chewing gum, women in spring suits and fur pieces—it was a cool night—and what seemed to me the prettiest hats of the season. They seemed to me the prettiest lot of women I had seen in a long time, too, and I reflected that if the fight had been televised, I would have missed them.

There’s a lot of vicarious living going on here. And a special Jewish appreciation for what black culture allowed and Jewish culture did not.