FAMOUS LONG AGO: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service

by Ray Mungo ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 1970

Starting with a lush list of acknowledgments to Movement gurus, underground idols, friends, humans, countrymen, and other jokes (that strains the eye and sets the tone), this unruly but appealing narrative hits-and-runs through the life and high times of Raymond Mungo and the brief but brilliant heyday of Liberation News Service. The tale starts, more or less, in the summer of 1967, with Mungo and Marshall Bloom and Bala-Bala being fired from their command positions with the United States Student Press Association by an assemblage of college editors in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So they decided to start a competing news service--""not because the proliferating underground and radical college press really needed a central information-gathering agency staffed by people they could trust (that was our hype), but because we had nothing else to do."" Mungo flits off to Czechoslovakia for a Movement peace conference with a Vietcong group and then back to Washington, D.C. and the decrepit but humming LNS headquarters for months of helter-skelter reporting. But mostly it's about ""the way we lived"": ""ped-xing"" by day (""to ped-x: to manage, work out, solve unpleasant and tiresome duties"") and hallucinating by night and day (""to hallucinate: to have fun, feel free, be easy, be in tune with life, enjoy and understand""). LNS is now firmly in the usurping hands of New York Marxist politicos (despite a celebrated heist of the printing press by the original Bloom Band), and Mungo is living the postrevolutionary life on a Vermont farm-commune, writing his book to help with next month's mortgage. ""Read it stoned, read it straight, give up and never finish it, it's all the same between friends.

Pub Date: May 27, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Beacon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION