I sure hope so, because Choice likes Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim. Calls it “an excellent resource for anyone interested in journalism or in cultural or American studies.”

Plus,

“The volume includes brilliant essays on Norman Mailer, ‘white slumming’ in Harlem, and the so-called New York intellectuals—it includes something to stimulate or offend everyone (in keeping with Krim’s intent).”

Exactly right.

And we talk about Krim from a Jewish angle, naturally.

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.