COMING UNBUTTONED by James Broughton (City...

COMING UNBUTTONED by James Broughton (City Lights Books: $11.95; 155 pp., illustrated, paperback original). In this merry memoir, the poet and film maker insists that his destiny was proclaimed to him at the age of 3 by the god Hermes. Even readers who reject this divine invocation will enjoy the often outrageous descriptions of the avant-garde/beat scene in California over the decades: Anais Nin, Alan Watts, W. H. Auden, Stan Brakhage and Pauline Kael drifted in and out of Broughton’s skewed orbit. Although he seems more interested in revealing who slept with whom than in discussing his poetry or films, Broughton’s prose has an elfin charm that is difficult to resist.