# A Wild Act

And [David] Susskind sits there on his show reading one of [Phil] Spector's songs out loud, no music, just reading the words, from the Top Sixty or whatever it is, “Fine Fine Boy,” to show how banal rock and roll is. The song just keeps repeating “He’s a fine fine boy.” So Spector starts drumming on the big coffee table there with the flat of his hands in time to Susskind’s voice and says, “What you’re missing is the beat.”

Blam blam.Tom Wolfe, “The New Culture-Makers,” The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965: 66.

Yes. What you’re missing, David, what you cannot possibly get, is :::: The Beat.

The urge, the impulse, the thing that drives creation relentlessly onward, that push. The Beat is always raw and intense in a Poe hoax, pulsing at or close to the surface. Something’s going on. Those teenagers today, the goths in black lace and mascara, and the steampunks? They feel the same beat. They Get It. But they don’t know what or why.

AUGUSTINE JOSEPH HICKEY DUGANNE (1823-1884), Writer, and FELIX OCTAVIUS CARR DARLEY (1822-1888), Illustrator

"Edgar Allan Poe"

Holden's Dollar Magazine, January 3, 1849

With tomahawk upraised for deadly blow,

Behold our literary Mohawk, Poe!

Sworn tyrant he o'er all who sin in verse —

His own the standard, damns he all that's worse;

And surely not for this shall he be blamed —

For worse than his deserves that it be damned!

They didn’t Get It then, either. The poet Augustine J. H. Duganne, at age 26, thinks he is taking on a wounded lion.