BIBLIOFILE
Beat Punks
by Victor Bockris
(De Capo, 304 pages, $16)

Since 1972, Victor Bockris has been writing about underground rockers, rebels, artists and intellectuals for publications such as Interview and High Times. He's also published nine books on these scensters and their scenes, and with his latest, Beat Punk, he tries to draw connections between Beats such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and Punks such as Patti Smith and Richard Hell. At least that's the premise put forth on the cover and in Bockris' introduction. In actuality, Bockris hasn't written a book so much as painstakingly transcribed intimate interviews with his cohorts, iconic heroes and their pilgrims.

His best interviews are with Burroughs, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood, Debbie Harry and Keith Richards. The less successful parts include a piece actually penned by Hell on Burroughs (its only reason for inclusion is to prop up Bockris' lightly explored hypothesis of the symbiotic Beat/Punk connection) and a piece about a disastrous dinner party with Mick Jagger, Burroughs and Andy Warhol, where Jagger interrupts most of the meaningful conversation between the others.

In the end it's what's revealed by the subjects themselves that makes this book worth reading. Throughout the book there are the amazing Bockris questions, such as, "Have you ever had electric shock?" To which Burroughs replies, "I don't know about these shock treatments. I know a lot of people who've had them, and I didn't see anyone who was permanently improved."

And to another question, the conscientious sybarite Richards replies: "I'm not extremely careful, but I've never turned blue in somebody else's bathroom. I consider that the height of bad manners." Tom Richards

Declare
by Tim Powers
(Morrow, 517 pages, $25)

Tim Powers is perhaps best known as the author of The Anubis Gates, a whacked-out time-travel novel set in 19th-century London that would become a cornerstone of science fiction's steampunk movement of the 1980s. Since then, Powers has built a reputation for complex, literary-minded fantasy novels featuring real-life historical figures caught up in supernatural events, such as in Last Call, The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides. This time around, Powers draws on Middle Eastern mysticism to fill in the gaps in the life of notorious British spymaster Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 after doubling for the KGB since the 1930s.

First recruited by British intelligence at the age of 7, Oxford lecturer Andrew Hale is reactivated by Her Majesty's Secret Service to finish an operation code-named Declare that went disastrously wrong 15 years earlier, possibly after being compromised by Philby. Powers sticks scrupulously to the historical record, offering imaginative interpretations of everything from the mysterious motorcycle death of T.E. Lawrence in 1935 to Philby's inexplicable fascination with Mount Ararat in Turkey.

What seems a compelling premise, however, makes for an utterly preposterous book--and not preposterous in an engaging way like The Anubis Gates. In addition to droning on for more than 500 pages (almost 200 of which are spent setting up the book's supernatural element), Declare lacks the madcap whimsy that makes Powers' earlier farfetched work so captivating. With its verbosity and twisted treatment of the Cold War, Powers' book takes itself more seriously than the reader will.
Matt Buckingham

Like Shaking Hands with God
With Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer
(Washington Square Press, 80 pages, $9.95)

A dialogue took place in a Brooklyn cafe that covered life, death, dreams and a passion for writing. Though this may sound like a daily scenario, here the colloquy was between writers Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer.

Vonnegut had his first novel published 48 years ago, while Stringer, a former StreetWise salesman in New York, became a heralded literary find after his first book, Grand Central Winter, was published in 1998.

Their moderator, Ross Klaven, pushed the discussion off the deep end from the start by asking questions that provoked both writers to speak candidly about the battle to live and write. At one point, Stringer says, "You can reveal some things in some books that you wouldn't reveal for the sake of your voice in another book." Throughout this small book, Vonnegut, one of America's literary lions, offers encouragement to Stringer and advice on continued success while constantly displaying his respect for the newcomer, whom he compares to Jack London. When Stringer reads a passage from Grand Central Winter--"And let them stumble on the wisdom every two-bit con knows instinctively, that real justice is always poetic"--Vonnegut responds, "I am still kind of flummoxed here because Lee writes better than I do."

Like their works in print, these authors' off-the-cuff words are crafted with an admirable strength and surety of expression. Although "shaking hands with God" is a description of how Stringer felt when he discovered writing, the quality of these writers' work might make you question with whom the pact was made. Joshua Cinelli