BUSY DYING

---

At Columbia University in April 1968, Hilton Obenzinger was one of many students who dramatically occupied the presidentâs office. For six days they protested the universityâs secret research to support the Vietnam War and its plans to build a gym in Morningside Park despite the opposition of Harlem. The occupation and subsequent strike was a generational moment repeated in universities around the country and throughout the world. Busy Dying is an autobiographical novel, a portrait of the authorâs Polish Jewish family, a coming of age in poetry, music, politics, and friends in New York City and Columbia, including a dangerous exodus through the Yukon to end up teaching on an Indian reservation in Northern California. All of this is comically and sometimes tragically relived as the author is inspired by a series of encounters and coincidences, including the revelations of students he teaches at Stanford today and the surprising discovery of the story behind Hilton Obenzinger, a 1980s Long Island high school humor magazine.

---

No one tells the story of the Columbia University variation of Apocalypse 1968–its prelude and its up-to-date fallout (e.g., This Is Your Life)–better than Poet-and-Communard-in-Residence of that and other histories, Hilton Obenzinger. When Politics meant something other than Brute Force, Obenzinger was there, observing and making it happen, like one breath in, another out. In deft, benign, deep and often hilarious prose, he has kept the faith.

– Bill Berkson

---

Hilton Obenzinger is an American original. His lost histories are acts of legerdemain and cunning–mixing truth and imagination in ways rarely seen before.

– Paul Auster

---

In almost all this wonderful memoir, Hilton Obenzinger has been true to his life and the drawing is strong and life-size. If he forgets that I was beaten up, he remembers quite well what a brat I was. His skepticism is one thing; the pathos can be very convincing. It's a book about the Holocaust survivors and the price they paid to change their deepest names. A poet, as in the marvellous “NY on Fire,” Obenzinger does something better than research, he tries with dayglo and phosphorescent humor to make that time breathe again. It had to be called a novel, though like baggy novels, almost anything can be put into this book and not, as his teacher Koch once said, smell it up. Like a city at its center, and human pluck and revolt along all other edges.

Obenzinger's l968 is a book that is polarized between an anarchic joy–Rudd giving himself up next door to the author's father--and the development of an integrity. Obenzinger divides the book into something delightful as short paragraphs in Machado or in Kawabata. The Yukon is exotic enough, much of the truth of the book is watching him become a writer, with his father's few poems, a poet who hates false poetry, a true poet who hates pedants and carries his whole being lightly.

– David Shapiro

---

You can order

Busy Dying

directly from CHAX
www.chax.org

and at

Small Press Distributions
www.spdbooks.org
1341 7th Street
Berkeley, CA 94710-1403
510.524.1668

Available also at Amazon.com, and from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere.

 

back to top