SHAKE IT FOR THE WORLD, SMARTASS

Seymour Krim was born under the sign of Taurus, the bull. As everyone knows. Taurians need constant proof of their existence: they have, like Krim, a ""fanatical ego-hunger,"" and, addicted to symbols, they tend to think of themselves as fertilizing agents. Krim writes a grinding, garish, preachy, raunchy, flapdoodle sort of prose (Taurians have difficulty reasoning, being of the earth, earthy), full of outrageously quotable hits and misses, wild insights and shouting matches with the Late Star Final. An indispensable example of the New Journalism, Krim's collection of reviews, puffs, blasts, and private letters is a polygraph of his moods and nerve cells during the Sixties. His encounter with the works, thoughts, and personalities of Mailer, Kerouac, James Jones, Paul Goodman, Baldwin, Cleaver, and others, naturally has less to do with these figures than with the psychic syncopation of Seymour Krim. Even the immense bluster of Norman Mailer, with whom Krim is always quarreling and exalting (N.M. is the only god, and. S.K. is his prophet), seems a bit dim when brought within range of the rhetorical machine of the author of Shake It For The World, Smartass. One remembers Krim's much earlier volume, Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, with a good deal more interest, probably because the effervescent subjectivity was fresher, and the mystagogy less apparent. Balzac was a Taurian, too: he wrote on a ""torrential stream of coffee."" Krim uses newsprint -- topical, yes, but no doubt less suited for immortality.