Paul Williams' Home Page
How to get this book
TIME
BETWEEN
by Paul Williams & family
Published in 1972 and, for the first time
in paperback, in 2000, as an exact facsimile of the typewriter-paper pages of
the original manuscript, so you can see and feel the energy of the writing and
the moment. "The theme of the book is transition, the sense of being caught
between the old world and the new--I wrote it in a burst of energy between Dec.
27, 1969 and Feb. 19, 1970. The book starts by describing the goings-on around
me (mostly sex and LSD, enthusiasm and conflict) in the commune I was then living
in in Mendocino, northern California. It continues through a disjointed cross-country
rap on Stranger in a Strange Land [ital], Charlie Manson, Mick Jagger, breaking
free of the old world, love between men, moving to Canada--and settles into
a visit and series of adventures in another commune, Total Loss Farm in Vermont.
The book ends with the author's awareness of and suggested cure for his own
schizophrenia (combined with final comments on the messiah myth, another recurring
theme). Many different typewriters were used and some pages were written out
in longhand." The immediate forerunner of, and trial run for, DAS ENERGI.
TIME BETWEEN review by Wally Conger from the Los Angeles Free Press, March 1973:
"Let me tell you: this book is everything good writing should be."At 17, Paul Williams founded Crawdaddy! magazine in 1966, and with it rock journalism. By 1969, he had relinquished the editorial reins to others and was living communally in Mendocino, northern California.
"Time Between comes from somewhere between December 1969 and March 1970. It is written freely. It is communal writing, now that I think of it, and Christ, who's ever heard of communal writing before this?
"I'm so excited by this book, this brilliant volume, that it's hard to write. Williams has broken all the rules. He's kicked down the creative barriers (to hell with the literary establishment) and done what we all should be doing: exploring new frontiers.
"Time Between is lovely. It's a large-paged, black cloth-bound book, a reproduction of the original manuscript, typos and all. The book is typed with several different typewriters, handwritten at times; sometimes there are pages of solid print-other times there's plenty of eye- pleasing white space.
"Paragraphs are indented or not whenever the author feels such things are necessary. Sometimes there are no paragraphs, just straight writing, line after line. It's full of type-overs, errors, marking pen corrections. The manuscript is over three years old, but it still screams with immediacy.
"What's the book about? Living. The beauty of loving. Complications. Pleasures. Fighting the system. Struggling with future shock, schizophrenia. Big stuff and little stuff.
"Paul talks about Charles Manson, Richard Nixon, the Rolling Stones and the tragic concert at Altamont-and then he talks about smelling flowers and writing and eating and sleeping with his friends. Time Between is full of Paul's ideas, poorly pieced together and marvelously worded and written both childishly and with genius flair. He scribbles, he types, he throws his thoughts to paper without editing. The book is a constant flow, it's a river, and the reader just floats along with it, follows it without question, wondering where Paul Williams will take him next. This book is meant as an antidote to despair. I want you to know it is possible to break through. I want to affirm our strength, our potential-and I want to affim all our perceptions of just how bad the situation is, without harping on that, because if we pretend things aren't as bad, as difficult, as they are, we'll never be able to see how good they are, how good they can be."Wow. That was Paul.
"And other people are here. People you've never heard of who also write in the volume, people who don't normally write at all. But they're beautiful. They're human. They're as creative as any writer you've before encountered. They're life.
"I've been reading the book for the past week, and I've finished the beginning and the end. Now I'm working on the middle. That's one of the great things about TB-you don't have to sit down and read straight through. You can skip about, take just a bit here and there. You can skim or get deeply into it all. It goes well with music, too-any muzak. I've been reading it and listening to the original Byrds (their new album), and it's very fine.
"Time Between is an incredible, unique experience. It's full of ideas, poems, big and little essays, letters to and from Paul. It's a damned good collection of thought, and it's all damned good writing, unedited as it (and maybe that's why it's so damned good).
"But good as it is, Paul Williams was forced to publish the book himself. No publisher would touch it. No publisher, influenced by the dollar, would take the chance of losing a litle bread by pushing this book. It's too different, too unusual, and it'll scare a lot of people. It's too real, it's flesh, life itself, and books shouldn't be all that real, right?"
---Wally Conger, LOS ANGELES FREE PRESS, Mar. 30, 1973
Copyright © 2000 by Paul Williams.