Week 10: Joyce Johnson's "Minor Characters"

Throughout the quarter, we've lamented both the absence of female authors and lead characters in the various Beat Generation writings we've been reading, along with the general attitudes exhibited towards women, which have ranged from indifference and neglect to outright misogyny.  It's true that the Beat 50s and 60s were very phallocentric times, but in the decades since then many female voices have stepped forward to assert their important place in this time period — not just as wives, girlfriends and enablers, but also as writers.  Chief among these revisionist historians is Joyce Johnson, whose National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir, Minor Characters (1983) is an important document of the Beat Generation's heyday from a female perspective.

A close friend of Allen Ginsberg's in New York City, Johnson (née Glassman) was set up with Jack Kerouac on a blind date by the poet, largely because he thought that she'd take good care of him.  Only in her early twenties, she did just that for a few years, which coincided with the publication of On the Road and Kerouac's uneasy rise to international fame (or infamy).  That's what a key portion of the book is about, however it's a terrible injustice to Johnson to treat her like some mere groupie — while she had famous friends, Minor Characters is far more importantly a story of how a woman might seek (and find) the same sort of ideological, spiritual, literary and sexual freedom that Beats did.  Along the way, you'll also meet a few of her closest female friends, including Elise Cowan and Hettie Jones, who sought similar achievements, with varying levels of success.  While most of our readings for our last week will be in Minor Characters, I'll provide a few supplemental texts from these women, as well as Carolyn Cassady (Neal's long-suffering wife Evelyn from On the Road).

Here's our schedule for the week:


Tuesday, March 8:

• Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters, Foreword (xxxi) plus chapters 1-9 (1-158)
• Ann Douglas, "Strange Lives, Chosen Lives: The Beat Art of Joyce Johnson" (xiii)
• Joyce Johnson, "Beat Queens: Women in Flux" [link]

Thursday, March 10:

• Minor Characters, chapters 10-15 (159-262)
• Hettie Jones, "Babes in Boyland" [link]

Recommended additional texts (particularly if you're doing the final essay on Women and the Beats):

• Carolyn Cassady, "from Off the Road" [link]
• Hettie Jones, "from How I Became Hettie Jones" (excerpt 1) [link]
• Hettie Jones, "from How I Became Hettie Jones" (excerpt 2) [link]

And for those of you interested in more background info on Johnson, here are a few links to recent interviews:

• a 2007 interview with Johnson in The Guardian [link]
• a 2007 Vanity Fair interview with Johnson [link]

Note: for those of you who want to cite the PDFs in your final essay, both "Babes in Boyland" and "Beat Queens: Women in Flux" are taken from The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, ed. Holly George-Warren (Hyperion, 1999); the Carolyn Cassady excerpt and first Hettie Jones excerpt are from The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Anne Charters (Penguin Books, 1992) and the second Jones excerpt is from The Portable Sixties Reader, ed. Anne Charters (Penguin Books, 2002).

Final Essay Questions (due 5:00 PM, March 17th)

For your final essay, you'll respond to one of the following five prompts, which will allow you to analyze and synthesize our readings throughout the term through one of several broad frames (ideology, aesthetics, identity, gender and nationity).  Within each question, you'll be required to decide upon a number of key ideas/concepts/characters (usually three) and then explore each with appropriate complexity, bringing a wide array of textual evidence into play to support your points.  Before further discussing the nuts and bolts of your finals, here are the five prompts:

• As our readings throughout the quarter have demonstrated, the Beat Generation was as much an ideological movement as an aesthetic one.  In particular a spirit of transgression pervades the work of our authors, whether that takes the form of socially-forbidden behavior (a sexually permissive attitude, homosexuality, use of alcohol and drugs, racial integration, etc.), political and religious attitudes out of step with mainstream conservative thought (pacificism, legalization of marijuana, anti-nuclear beliefs), or outright criminality.  Explore three major types of transgressive behavior exhibited by the Beats, supporting each key concept with sufficient supporting examples.  How do the authors view their own actions — do they acknowledge their wrongdoing or downplay it, taking issue with society's mores?  Can you make any connections, either between authors or the types of transgression you address, drawing more general conclusions about the place of rule-breaking within the Beat ethos?

• As the question above acknowledges, in addition to ideological transgression, the Beat Generation was also a movement of great aesthetic innovation, proposing not only new  potential subject matter, but also new modes of expression.  From Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody" to Burroughs' cut-ups, the Beats embodied Ezra Pound's dictum, "make it new," in a variety of startling ways.  Consider three literary techniques or styles employed by the Beats throughout their writing, providing copious examples from the texts themselves.  In each case, evaluate the effectiveness of the technique, its appropriateness to the subject matter and spirit of the writing: does form follow function?  does style get in the way of the message or augment it?  What common threads do you see among the writers you discuss — are there general characteristics that you can consider emblematic of Beat literature?

• Neal Cassady is, in many ways, a vital catalyst for the Beat Generation — even though he left behind a sparse literary legacy (the unfinished autobiography, The First Third, and a series of letters), it's no stretch to say that if he never arrived in New York, befriending and captivating both Kerouac and Ginsberg, the Beats might never have achieved their full cultural potential.   You've read Cassady's tracing of his own history, and seen the ways in which he's been depicted in On the Road and throughout Ginsberg's poetry, and drawing upon these sources, I'd like you to conduct a character analysis of Neal/Dean, exploring the complexities of his identity — his strengths and weaknesses, sins and virtues —paying special attention to the differences, the contradictions, between these portrayals.  Is Cassady ultimately "a very interesting and even amusing con-man" as is alleged in On the Road, or does the turmoil of his childhood absolve him (or at the very least explain) his character flaws?  You might wish to, though by no means are required to, frame your analysis of Cassady through Aristotle's characteristics of the tragic hero, adjusting or subverting the rubric as needed.

• Throughout the quarter, we've lamented both the absence of female authors and lead characters in the various Beat Generation writings we've been reading, along with the general attitudes exhibited towards women, which have ranged from indifference and neglect to outright misogyny.  We'll address this issue in the last week of the term, with readings from Joyce Johnson and other female contemporaries of the Beats (Hettie Jones, Carolyn Cassady) who'll offer their own stories from the time period, documenting their search for ideological, spiritual, literary and sexual freedom, along with the pitfalls and benefits of living their lives outside of society's expectations for young women.  Guided by these lessons, I'd like you to go back into our earlier readings and explore three female characters you find there — some potential candidates: Marylou, Evelyn, Helen Hinkle, Terry, Mardou Fox, Naomi Ginsberg, Elise Cowan — comparing their experiences with the first-person testimonies of Johnson, Jones and Cassady.  In what ways are they liberated and how are they degraded by their male partners and society at large?  Who emerges relatively unscathed and who pays the greatest costs?

• The Beat Generation is an essentially American literary movement, and many would argue, ultimately a patriotic movement — celebrating the heart and soul of American life and exploring the true breadth and diversity of its populace along with its natural grandeur — even if its authors might not agree wholeheartedly with mainstream American culture or morality.  That having been said, it's curious that all of the authors we've read have benefited greatly from time spent outside the United States, and many of our readings have either taken place in international locales (including Mexico, Tangiers, Paris, London, Wales, South America, India and even Interzone) or were written there. Analyze the tensions between the foreign and domestic in Beat literature: how are places like Mexico City and Tangiers depicted by the Beats, and why are they so attractive to them?  What dangers exist in these places, and what freedoms can be found there that aren't readily available in America?  How does the Beats' interaction with these cultures and locales relate to their exploration of America itself and its various counter- and sub-cultures, its ethnic groups, its artistic scenes?  Is the ideal base of operations for the Beats within or outside of America, and why?

Your final essays should be a minimum of six (6) pages (and by six pages, I mean that the text of your essay itself makes it to the very bottom of the 6th page, or better yet onto a 7th), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc.  You'll e-mail your papers to me (at hennessey [dit] michael [@t] gmail [dut] com) no later than 5:00 PM on Thursday, March 17 (get your essay out of the way so you can go out and drink a lot ... of wholesome milk ... without worrying).  I will be meeting with my poetry workshop from about 1:30-3:30 that afternoon, but will have special office hours afterward (until about 5:00) so you can pop in with any last-minute worries or questions.

As I said in class on Thursday, while 6 pages seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count.  Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument from the start.  I also recommend that a) unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the topics (characters/techniques/etc.) you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and b) you write through the source texts themselves, rather than providing a general summary of an author's viewpoint then introducing a quote.  For example, which of the following is a rhetorically stronger?

• "Kerouac believes that authors should '[w]rite what [they] want bottomless from bottom of the mind,' and this is made clear in On the Road when...," or 
• "Kerouac believes that writers should be free to say whatever they want.  He says 'Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.'  He does this in On the Road, too, when he..."

You should make full use of techniques like paraphrase and summary in addition to copious quotations from your source texts (and all three of these borrowings of others' ideas should be properly cited) and should also be able to deftly excerpt and/or alter quotations so that they more effortless fit with the flow and syntax of your prose (as in the first example above, where a capital letter is made lower-case and the pronoun is changed).  We'll talk a little more about this, along with how to effective construct an argument and use evidence, in class on Tuesday.

If you're not familiar with the ins and outs of MLA format, the following two links might be of use to you:

• OWL (Online Writing Lab) at Purdue University, offers an extensive explanation of MLA style guidelines.

• The MLA Style Manual page on Wikipedia offers general guidelines as well.

Our Class Cut-Up

Was made using this cut-up engine, and using the following texts: 

• Wisconsin governor raises stakes in union fight with threat of job losses 
• Libya — The Protests (2011) 
• Crab Nebula (Excerpt from Nova Express)
• Wainwright to have Tommy John surgery

Lohse, underwent surgery no recurrence of The Blazing Photo hot sky channels before he made group of people on television to long rambling address, Vietnam war in apartment he felt striking back in to other states a professional. But controlled by The situation that causes didn't contradict the thousand years ahead intend to outthink every state should many light years job losses would all their cities flesh and junk rage patterns and laundry write a support for Walker Trying to demonstrate the unions are when the surgery — (Like three before your mind does go under in immediately perpetrates the Brass and years of flesh Opposition forces in the state's 300,000 at the funerals apathy death — buildings in Tripoli, the club's sense Minraud — Purges (AFP), which is dead in the blue star continually his right elbow. five in National capital of Tripoli part of the four-year, $15 million more than 1,000 readily be seen spread to the tape recorder — Or some disgusting end the automatic past that up wires bringing a came after Colonel have turned time he has quietly procedure. And the as a fireside — Sput — east of the been killed since booths and sex not in all was the Cardinals' rule — the city of Zentan, And what does in 1969. But sex the color on our way tank full of An intricate bureaucracy Disposals — The the knife, his in other words the hottest regions brains are brought opposition forces had armed with gasoline strong. It's not has a 7-15 debut and in so forth — sky — Through the fuel and which redirects to on a slow Walker's common-sense reforms."the host walked as many as adopt Governor Scott are seen as city, to demand their first coordinated it every fucking in a standoff nation in North time as people is inviting people and tribal alliances and didn't back surround him but said the governor.

Week 9: Gregory Corso

For our final Beat Generation author of the quarter, we switch once more from prose to poetry, specifically the poetry of Gregory Corso.  Our readings will be taken from the 1989 collection, Mindfield: New and Selected Poems, sadly the only comprehensive volume of Corso's poetry, even if it neglects his final twelve years of writing.

Corso's childhood was every bit as tough as Neal Cassady's.  Abandoned by his mother (or so he thought) not long after his birth, and then abandoned again by his father (who shuttled him in and out of foster homes throughout the first eleven years of his life.  While he was a talented student, in spite of these hardships, he soon ran afoul of the law, serving time for several thefts and break-ins throughout his teenage years, ultimately leading to his three-year incarceration in Clinton Correctional Facility from the ages of 16-19.  It was here that Corso's life began to change for the better.  

By sheer happenstance, Corso was placed in the cell that had just been vacated by the gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano, and this had several positive consequences: Luciano had donated an extensive library to the prison so that he could keep up with his reading, and to facilitate this, he also arranged to have a  special light installed so that he read into the wee hours of the morning.  Protected by the hardened criminals (who saw the teenaged prisoner as a mascot of sorts) he began a long process of self-education — reading widely through Greek and Roman classical literature as well as the English canon — and started writing poetry, which became a salvation for him.  Not long after his release, he met Allen Ginsberg at a lesbian bar called The Pony Stable and struck up a conversation, becoming fast friends.  The rest, as they say, is history!

Those of you who've come out to any of the film screenings have had the pleasure of seeing Corso in the interview setting, and like many of the other Beats, it's a bit of an understatement to say that he's a character — both cantankerous and charming, the ex-con and freeloader with a heart of gold who can quote Keats and Shelley from memory.  This tension between hyper-modern and clasical and Romantic influences makes Corso a unique voice among the Beats, and it'll be interesting to explore these dichotomies as we work through Mindfield.  Here's our reading schedule for the week:


Tuesday, March 1:

• Greenwich Village Suicide (3)
• In the Morgue (4)
• Sea Chanty (5)
• The Horse Was Milked (7)
• Requiem for ‘Bird’ Parker Musician (8)
• St. Luke’s Service for Thomas (14)
• Cambridge First Impressions (15)
• Botticelli’s ‘Spring’ (28)
• Uccello (29)
• On the Walls of a Dull Furnished Room (30)
• Italian Extravaganza (30)
• Birthplace Revisited (31)
• But I Do Not Need Kindness (32)
• Don’t Shoot the Warthog (34)
• I Am 25 (35)
• Three (36)
• Hello (37)
• The Mad Yak (38)
• This Was My Meal (39)
• For Miles (40)
• Last Night I Drove a Car (42)
• Notes After Blacking Out (47)
• Hair (51)
• Under Peyote (54)
• I Held a Shelley Manuscript (58)
• On Pont Neuf (59)
• Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway (60)
• Marriage (62): MP3
• Bomb (65) 

• Allen Ginsberg, "Foreword: on Corso’s Virtues" (xi)
• William S. Burroughs, "Introductory Notes" (xv)
• David Amram, "Introduction" (xix)

Thursday, March 3:

• Dream of a Baseball Star (71)
• Giant Turtle (73)
• A Dreamed Realization (74)
• Paranoia in Crete (75)
• Clown (76)
• The Sacré-Coeur Café (85)
• From Another Room (86)
• Power (87)
• Army (93)
• 1959 (97)
• Happening on a German Train (105)
• European Thoughts—1959 (106)
• Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem (115)
• Second Night in N.Y.C. After 3 Years (119)
• Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday (120)
• Elegiac Feelings American (125)
• Lines Written Nov. 22, 23—1963—in Discord (140)
• God is a Masturbator (156)
• Columbia U Poesy Reading—1975 (161)
• I Met This Guy Who Died (169)
• How Not to Die (177)
• Many Have Fallen (182)
• Getting to the Poem (187)
• Spirit (190)
• The Whole Mess . . . Almost (199): MP3
• Feelings on Getting Older (203)

Gregory Corso passed away in January of 2001, and thanks to the intervention of his friends, he was buried, as he wished to be, in Rome, beside the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley.  Here are a few remembrances:

• The New York Times obituary [link]
• Robert Creeley announces Corso's death on the Poetics List [link]
• The Woodstock Journal's tribute to Corso [link]

And here are a few supplemental videos:



Corso reads from "Bomb" at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Plant




Corso in Rome, 1989 (part 1)




Corso in Rome, 1989 (part 2)




Corso teaches at Naropa

Final Film Screenings of the Quarter: March 3rd and 10th

Many thanks to all of you that have come out for our film screenings so far this quarter — I hope they've been both entertaining and enlightening.  We have two final screenings scheduled for the end of the quarter and I hope you'll be able to make it to one or both.  I'll create events for each on Facebook; please RSVP if you plan on attending, and don't forget that you're welcome to bring both food and friends (I'll bring some snacks as I've done for the past few screenings).

First, we'll meet at 5:00 PM on Thursday, March 3rd in our usual room (McMicken 46) to watch Gustave Reininger's marvelous documentary, Corso: the Last Beat (2009), which gives us our most contemporary look at the Beats' legacy, starting in the aftermath of the deaths of both Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in 1997, leaving Corso alone as the final living member of the Beat Generation's original quartet.  As I've mentioned before, this film is not only a heartrendingly emotional portrait of the poet, but also an incredibly rare treat, as the film is not commercially available and it's only through the generosity of  the director/producer Reininger that we're able to watch it.  Here's the film's trailer to whet your appetite:

Then we'll reconvene at 5:00 PM on the following Thursday, March 10th to watch Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's 2010 feature film, Howl (starring James Franco, John Hamm, Mary Louise Parker, David Strathairn and Jeff Daniels), which dramatizes both the inspiration and composition of Allen Ginsberg's most famous poem, "Howl," as well as its much-publicized obscenity trial.  After ten weeks of experiencing the Beats factually through their own writings and a variety of documentaries, it will be a strange and interesting experience to get to see their lives and works turned into a work of fiction (albeit very factual fiction).  Likewise, as Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters (our reading for the final week of class) will remind us, when real life becomes history certain people are included while others are left out, and this will be a key idea to bear in mind while watching Howl.  Here's that film's trailer:

Week 8: William S. Burroughs

As we near the end of the quarter, we'll be making a brief survey of the work of William S. Burroughs, using Word Virus: the William S. Burroughs Reader as our primary text.

An early mentor to the younger proto-Beats Kerouac, Ginsberg and Lucien Carr — he not only suggested books and authors that were radically different than their readings at Columbia, but also exposed them to the drug and criminal subcultures of New York's seedy underbelly —  Burroughs had no real intentions of being a writer, but the his friends' persistent encouragement (Ginsberg's in particular) lead him to give it a try. 

Ivy League-educated, and a world traveler by his mid-1920s, Burroughs  who always seemed to find himself in trouble with authority, was drawn to philosophical questions of control and spent much of his career exploring that topic, whether through the guise of addiction, criminality, propaganda, media or deviance — all topics he knew well from first-hand experience — and in particular, his accidental shooting, in 1951, of his wife, Joan Vollmer, brought these issues into the forefront, unleashing "the Ugly Spirit" and charging him to use writing as a medium for his explorations.  He wed the sharp analytic eye of a historian or anthropologist to a wildly experimental prose style, creating some of the 20th century's most challenging and innovative texts.

You'll notice a distinct difference between relatively-straightforward  early prose  like Junky and the excerpts from Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine, as well as the handful of excerpts from Interzone, that you'll be reading this week. All of these texts were drawn from a large manuscript Burroughs produced in the aftermath of Vollmer's accidental death, called "The Word Hoard," or simply "WORD" — a vast series of "routines," (the author's term for the short vignettes that fill his work) which he would constantly revise, deconstruct and remix to produce new works. As a result, you'll likely notice a lot of repetitions and overlaps between the excerpts from Naked Lunch and the "Nova Trilogy" books, since, after all, they come from the same source.

Burroughs' primary means of reconstructing these texts was the "cut-up method," an experimental cut-and-paste practice devised by the author and Bryon Gysin in the late 1950s, which draws inspiration from, among other things, the Dadaist practice of automatic poetry, as formulated by Tristan Tzara. Here's a brief clip from a Burroughs documentary in which he describes the origins and methodologies of the cut-up technique. Take a few minutes to watch, and perhaps the work you'll be reading might make more sense:

It's also worth noting that Burroughs' writing is deeply-rooted in postmodern notions of "meta-fiction' — a practice in which form is almost as important as content. Getting a handle on what Burroughs is saying here is one thing to shoot for, but also pay attention to how he's saying it. He's taking chances with his writing, in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of the writing itself.

Those of you who're able to make it out to Thursday's film screening will get a lot of useful background information on Burroughs and his techniques, and thankfully the reader we'll be using also provides some helpful contextualization. Here's a breakdown of our Burroughs readings:


Tuesday, Feb. 22: Junky, Naked Lunch and related readings

• The Name is Burroughs (15) 
• Personal Magnetism (23)
• Twilight’s Last Gleamings (24)
• from Junky (47)
• International Zone (121)
• from Naked Lunch (149)

• plus Ann Douglas, "Punching a Hole in the Big Lie: the Achievement of William S. Burroughs" (xv) 

Thursday, Feb. 24: The Nova Trilogy to Exterminator! and beyond

• Dead on Arrival (184)
• Case of the Celluloid Kali (187)
• The Mayan Caper (193)
• Where You Belong (199)
• Uranian Willy (201)
• See the Action, B.J.? (202)
• Do You Love Me? (205)
• Operation Rewrite (208)
• The Invisible Generation (218)
• Last Words (225)
• So Pack Your Ermines (231)
• Shift Coordinate Points (232)
• Twilight’s Last Gleaming (239)
• Pay Color (240)
• Clom Friday (243)
• Who is the Third That Walks Beside You (256)
• Exterminator! (383)
• From Here to Eternity (394)
• Seeing Red (396)
• The "Priest" They Called Him (397)

Unlike Ginsberg, there aren't exact audio tracks to correspond with many of the readings, but I'm pasting a few files below to give you a taste of Burroughs' reedy, grim delivery.

• from "Twilight's Last Gleamings" (2:48): MP3

• from Naked Lunch (2:12): MP3

• from Naked Lunch (20:28): MP3 

• from Junky (7:29): MP3

And here are some supplemental readings, followed by a few videos.  

• The Paris Review: "The Art of Fiction #36: William S. Burroughs"
• Rolling Stone obituary and remembrance of Burroughs 
• New York Times obituary
• NPR Feature on Naked Lunch's 50th Anniversary
• Burroughs on the cut-up method 
• A cut-up engine, with which you can make your own texts

Much like Ginsberg, Burroughs would have close ties to the world of popular music throughout his career — he coined the term "heavy metal," and bands like Steely Dan,  the Soft Machine  and DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid all took their names from his writing.  In later years, he collaborated with a diverse array of artists, from R.E.M. to Sonic Youth to Nirvana.  Here's "The 'Priest' They Called Him," with musical accompaniment from Kurt Cobain:




Here's friend and collaborator Laurie Anderson's "Languge is a Virus," the title of which is a key tenet of Burroughs' writerly ethos:





Here's a recording of Burroughs reading "Last Words":




And here's a compendium of Burroughs' scenes in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy (embedding is disabled)

A Few More Links Related to "Wichita Vortex Sutra"

First, here's a small collection of commentaries on the poem from the Modern American Poetry site: [link]

And here's a clip of the song "Three-Five-Zero-Zero" from the musical Hair, which draws the majority of its lyrics from "Wichita Vortex Sutra":

Reminder: Quiz Thursday

As mentioned in class today, we'll have a quiz on the final day's readings from Ginsberg's Collected Poems.  While our discussion will still be open to all of the assigned readings, I've generously decided to give you a shorter list of poems that will potentially be covered on the quiz.  Here's that list:

• Don't Grow Old
• Brooklyn College Brain
• After Whitman and Reznikoff
• I'm a Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg
• Sphincter
• Personals Ad
• Numbers in U.S. File Cabinet (Death Waits to be Executed)
• After the Big Parade
• After Lalon
• Autumn Leaves
• New Democracy Wish List
• The Ballad of the Skeletons
• Death and Fame
• Things I'll Not Do (Nostalgias)

 

There will be a total of 5 points (out of 4) available, with two bonus questions, and altogether seven titles are included in the answers, so fourteen poems seems fair.

Feb. 17: Allen Ginsberg Day 4 - Farewell and Farewell Again

The autumn years of Ginsberg's life saw him go from hell-raising revolutionary to cultural institution — including his winning the National Book Award in 1973 (the same year he was admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters), and the publication, in 1984, of a handsome Collected Poems: 1947-1980 (which makes up about two-thirds of the volume we're using presently), along with a wide array of his journals, correspondence, essays and interviews.  In the late 1950s, his alma mater, Columbia University, wouldn't even buy a copy of Howl and Other Poems for its library, but a little over a decade later, Ginsberg had received some of the highest literary acclaim afford to American writers.

Of course, just because Ginsberg had been accepted by the mainstream didn't mean that his personal or political ambitions became any more quaint.  Upon being invited to join the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for example, he immediate began lobbying for his friends and peers to receive the same honor, eventually seeing William S. Burroughs join the organization as well.  He continued to criticize injustice a abuse of power wherever he saw it, in poems like "Plutonian Ode," "The Little Fish Devours the Big Fish" and "Numbers in U.S. File Cabinet (Death Waits to be Executed)," right up to the end of his life, when he greeted the election of Democrat Bill Clinton with a list of demands, "New Democracy Wish List."  

This period was also marked by a growing awareness of his own mortality.  Ginsberg had already mourned his mother, Naomi, and friends including Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, and in the mid-70s, he'd also lose his father, Louis, but in the process, write some of the finest, most moving poetry of his later years.  Ginsberg faced each new change in his life with a an unfaltering sense of self-awareness, and tracked his evolving role in society, in his relationships with friends and lovers, and natural process of aging (and eventually death) in some of the poems we'll read for Thursday.

Finally, it's interesting to note the passage of time and the cultural change that comes with it.  In Ginsberg's poetry of the 1960s, we see the Beat Generation be surpassed by a new youth counterculture (colloquially known as hippies, though as my friend Diane DeRooy once observed, the only people who called themselves hippies were suburbanites who bought their clothes at Sears).  In this week's readings, that period gives way to one of Nixon-era spiritual and political malaise, followed by the youthful rebellion of punk rock, Reagan's conservative stranglehold and a reemergence of socially-conscious youth in the 1990s.  We can see these evolutions reflected in Ginsberg's work,  can trace their roots back to ideologies he first put forward, and he happily embraced each new mode, whether that would find him on tour with Bob Dylan or sharing the stage with the Clash.  The young Ginsberg who celebrated seeing the Beatles in concert in "Portland Coliseum" would have close ties to the world of popular music until the end of his life.

Here, for example, is the line-up from a San Francisco concert in December 1996, where Ginsberg appeared along alt-rock superstars like Beck, the Chemical Brothers, the Lemonheads and Fiona Apple.  The following day, he did an interview with Hotwired (an online web journal related to Wired magazine) and saw the internet for the first time (his take on it: "Thank God I don't know how to work this!").  Around the same time, Ginsberg took part in a discussion/interview with Beck, published in the Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun with the unfortunate subtitle, "A Beat/Slacker Transgenerational Meeting of Minds."

Here's our reading list to bring our time with Ginsberg to a close:

• Don't Grow Old (659): excerpt, "Father Death Blues": MP3
• Plutonian Ode (710): MP3
• Don't Grow Old (718)
• Brooklyn College Brain (725)
• After Whitman and Reznikoff (740)
• Ode to Failure (745)
• Why I Meditate (851)
• Do the Meditation Rock (863): MP3
• The Little Fish Devours the Big Fish (865): MP3
• I'm a Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg (882)
• Prophecy (915)
• Sphincter (950)
• Personals Ad (970): MP3
• Numbers in U.S. File Cabinet (Death Waits to be Executed) (982)
• Return of Kral Majales (984)
• After the Big Parade (1010)
• After Lalon (1019): MP3
• Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke) (1029)
• Autumn Leaves (1046)
• New Democracy Wish List (1063)
• New Stanzas for Amazing Grace (1080)
• The Ballad of the Skeletons (1091)
• "You know what I'm saying?" (1096)
• Death and Fame (1129)
• Things I'll Not Do (Nostalgias) (1160)

And here are more than a few supplemental videos:



Ginsberg sings "Father Death Blues"




"Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke)"

Ginsberg's video (shown on MTV's "Buzz Bin" and at the Sundance Film Festival) for "The Ballad of the Skeletons," directed by Gus Van Sant and featuring musical accompaniment by Paul McCartney, Lenny Kaye and Philip Glass

Ginsberg (with Steven Taylor on guitar and Arthur Russell on cello) performs "Do the Meditation Rock" on Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, Nam June Paik's live satellite TV celebration of New Year's 1984 (which is astoundingly great).  That's Peter Orlovsky meditating, by the way.

Ginsberg performs "Capitol Air" with live accompaniment by the Clash





"Ghetto Defendent," also by Ginsberg and the Clash




MTV's obituary for Ginsberg


Here are two more films that can't be embedded:

• experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas' Scenes from Allen's Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit documents the scene just before and after Ginsberg's passing in 1997, including conversations with those who've gathered to send their friend off [note: this can be a challenging and emotional film to watch]
• "Face to Face with Jeremy Isaacs," an interview (1995)

And finally:

• Ginsberg's obituary in The New York Times: [link]
• "Memories of Allen," a tribute from Rolling Stone: PDF
• Mikal Gilmore's obituary for Ginsberg (also from Rolling Stone): PDF

Feb. 15: Allen Ginsberg Day 3 - Poet Becomes Activist

As the 1960s continued, and Ginsberg's fame (or notoriety) grew more widespread, and with it grew his awareness of the soapbox he'd stumbled upon.  Horrified by what he saw as a bloodthirsty culture of death and violence, and simultaneously heartened by the civil rights movement, the growing youth counterculture and queer liberation, Ginsberg's became more and more politicized.  We've already traced this thread from a poem like "America" to "Death to Van Gogh's Ear" and that lineage will continue through our readings Tuesday, which will settle on his third epic masterpiece of his early career, "Wichita Vortex Sutra," which we'll discuss in depth.

Here's a quick list of some of the major events happening in Ginsberg's life through the 1960s (covering some of the readings we did for last Thursday and today): 

• He travels the world, starting in Paris and continuing on to Tangiers, Greece and Israel before extended stays in India (as documented in his Indian Journals) and Japan.
• He has his first psychedelic experiences with both psilocybin and LSD, courtesy of Timothy Leary, which would influence the composition of visionary poems such as "Wales Visitation."
• He testifies for the defense in the Boston obscenity trial of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
• He travels to Cuba, where he causes a political ruckus and is swiftly deported to Prague, where he is crowned the "King of May" (or "Kral Majales," as in the poem which documents this event), causes a political ruckus and is deported once more.
• He meets and interacts with both Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and gives a gala reading at London's Royal Albert Hall.
• He takes part in the historic Berkeley and Vancouver Poetry Conferences (in 1965 and 63, respectively) — a sign of his growing influence in the world of poetry. (You can listen to his entire Vancouver Conference reading here)
• His friend and former lover Neal Cassady dies in 1968, and Jack Kerouac's slow decline catches up with him when he dies in 1969.
  
• He buys a top-of-the-line Uher tape recorded with money given to him by Bob Dylan, and begins composing poems by dictation during a long drive from Los Angeles to New York, many of which would appear in his volume, The Fall of America, which won the National Book Award in 1973; a key poem of this sequence, "Wichita Vortex Sutra," appears as a chapbook on its own then is published in Planet News.
• He assumes a larger role in youth culture and politics, participating in the Human Be-In and the 1967 march on the Pentagon (as well as the 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago), and mediates a peace between the hippies and Hells Angels in San Francisco.

So, it's a busy time for Ginsberg to say the least!  What we'll want to look for here is how all of these personal occurrences interact with current events in these poems — and while the war itself will be our primary focus, certainly other topics will come up.  In addition to the personal and political, Ginsberg is also further refining and developing his spiritual side, having first studied Krishnaism while in India in the early part of the decade, and also continuing his Buddhist studies.  Eventually, he'd be asked by his spiritual teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, to co-found (with poet Anne Waldman) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University (America's only accredited Buddhist university).  Much like his political views, Ginsberg would use the medium of poetry (as well as song) to spread his spiritual beliefs.

Here are our readings for Tuesday's class:  

• Wichita Vortex Sutra (402) (recordings listed below)
• Growing Old Again (431)
• Uptown (432): MP3
• City Midnight Junk Strains (465): MP3
• Wales Visitation (488): MP3
• Elegy for Neal Cassady (495): MP3 
• On Neal’s Ashes (513) 
• Going to Chicago (514)
• Grant Park: August 28, 1968 (515) 
• Memory Gardens (539)
• Flash Back (542)
• Hum Bom! (576): MP3
  
• Who (603)
• What I'd Like to Do (610)
• News Bulletin (613)  
• Mugging (633) 
• Who Runs America? (636)
• Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox (643)
• Gospel Noble Truths (649): MP3
• Junk Mail (665) 
  

As for "Wichita Vortex Sutra," we have a few options (all of which are wonderful):  First, here's a straightforward reading of the entire poem, recorded in May of 1995 at the Knitting Factory:

• Wichita Vortex Sutra I (3:14): MP3
• Wichita Vortex Sutra II (12:52): MP3
• Wichita Vortex Sutra III (5:51): MP3
• Wichita Vortex Sutra IV (5:41): MP3

Next, here's a rather breathtaking musical setting of a long portion of the poem by Philip Glass, part of his collaboration with Ginsberg, Hydrogen Jukebox (a term you'll recall from "Howl"):

And here's a very interesting recording I uncovered a few summers back, in the tape archives of the poet Robert Creeley, which sets a lengthy excerpt of the poem to musical soundscape including chanting, sound effects and a snippet of Bob Dylan's "Queen Jane Approximately," among other noises:

• Wichita Vortex Sutra (28:00): MP3

You can read my write-up of the recording (and several others released at the same time) here.

Finally, here's a rather interesting 2006 article from The Believer, in which Rolf Potts argues, on the 50th anniversary of "Howl," that we should instead be celebrating the 40th anniversary of "Wichita Vortex Sutra." In his estimation, Ginsberg's anti-war epic is every bit as important now, in the midst of the second Iraq war, as it was during the start our nation's escalating involvement in Viet Nam.

A few more videos:



Ginsberg on conservative pundit William F. Buckley's Firing Line in 1968




Ginsberg reads "Wales Visitation" in its entirety on the same program




Ginsberg was present when John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded "Give Peace a Chance" during their 1969 "Bed-In" in Toronto (and sings on the track)

Ginsberg sings "Gospel Noble Truths"




Ginsberg leads chanting on the shores of Lake Michigan during the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968

Rage Against the Machine "covers" "Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox"

Feb. 10: Allen Ginsberg Day 2: "Kaddish" and Related Poems

On June 9, 1956, not long before the publication of Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg's mother, Naomi (shown at left during her courtship with Ginsberg's father, Louis), passed away.  Her life had not been easy, marked by both mental illness (including numerous long stays in institutions and jarring therapies including electro-shock and insulin shock), further complicated in later years by a stroke.  Moreover, as a Russian immigrant to this country, and one-time fervent participant in Communist youth groups, her paranoia was stoked by the McCarthy-era witch hunts.  

Ginsberg was particularly close to his mother, having been there during her first major mental breakdown (as a teenager, he oversaw her commitment) and continuing to look after her while her then-ex-husband and older son Eugene could (or would) not.  Particularly due to his time in Rockland, and the social pressures he felt during his twenties and thirties (including his disagreement with societal norms of the 1950s), he feared that her mental illness had been passed down to him.  While he felt a sense of relief that her suffering was over, her death also felt unresolved to him, particularly since at her burial there were not enough men present for a proper minyan (Kerouac and Ginsberg's lover, Peter Orlovsky, weren't Jewish and not counted towards the ten men needed), therefore they could not pray the Kaddish, the traditional funeral prayer.

The day after the funeral, Ginsberg received a letter from his mother in the mail, sent right before her death, which responded to the copy of "Howl" he had recently sent her.  It mixed prophetic statements with motherly advice, saying, "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window — I have the key — Get married Allen don't take drugs — the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window."  His brother, Eugene, received a similar note, saying, "God's informers come to my bed, and God himself I saw in the sky. The sunshine showed too, a key on the side of the window for me to get out. The yellow of the sunshine, also showed the key on the side of the window."  Taking these statements as a starting point, along with the unsaid funeral prayer, Ginsberg sought to write an epic religious poem that would both properly mourn his mother, and also tell the complete and unvarnished story of her life, and "Kaddish," two years in the making, is the realization of those goals.


The other major bit of information that you should know behind today's readings concerns Ginsberg's first visit to Europe.  While he'd been saving up some money to travel, he was happily surprised to discover that his mother had left him a thousand dollars, and with this he was able to undertake this journey, and continue traveling through Tangiers and Greece to India and Japan.  "Kaddish" was largely written in Paris, and many of Ginsberg's other poems of this period reflect his broadened horizons.  One key sequence of events takes place in 1965, when he travels to Cuba, where he causes a political ruckus and is swiftly deported to Prague, where he is crowned the "King of May" (or "Kral Majales," as in the poem which documents this event), causes a political ruckus and is deported once more.  During this period, Ginsberg not only rises to international cultural prominence, but also sees the development of his politics, reflecting the instincts that once made him want to be a labor lawyer.


Here's our reading list for Thursday, with streaming audio links where available:

• Wrote This Last Night (174): MP3 
• Death to Van Gogh's Ear (175): MP3
• The Lion for Real (182): MP3
• To Aunt Rose (192): MP3
• American Change (194)
• Back in Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square (196)
• My Sad Self (209): MP3
  

• Kaddish (217-235, don't stop reading at the "Hymmnn" section, it keeps going)

1. Introduction to Kaddish (2:40): MP3
2. "Kaddish I" (10:11): MP3
3. "Kaddish II" (36:43): MP3
4. "Kaddish - Hymmnn" (1:37): MP3
5. "Kaddish - III" (1:46): MP3
6. "Kaddish - IV" (2:17): MP3
7. "Kaddish - V" (1:57): MP3

• Psalm IV (246)
• The End (267): MP3
• This Form of Life Needs Sex (292)   
• Nov. 23, 1963: Alone (341)
• I Am a Victim of Telephone (352): MP3
• Kral Majales (361): MP3
• Who Be Kind To (367): MP3
• Portland Coliseum (373)
• First Party at Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels (382): MP3

And here are a few supplementary links:

• Levi Asher writes on "Kaddish" on his site, LitKicks, a very early Beat resource online (this article was written in 1994, for example) [links]
• A review of the reissued Kaddish and Other Poems in Zeek [link]
• An illustrated version of "This Form of Life Needs Sex," from Salon, 1997 [link]
• Footage from the May Day 1965 parade in Prague, including Ginsberg's coronation as King of May (or Kral Majales in the native parlance) [link]

Ginsberg reads "Kral Majales" at City Lights Books, with Neal Cassady by his side (from the same session we watched in class two weeks ago)

Feb. 8: Allen Ginsberg Day 1 - "Howl" and Other Poems

As we leave Kerouac and Mexico City Blues behind, we'll be staying in the poetic mode, beginning two weeks of intense focus on the work of Allen Ginsberg.  Over the course of our four classes, we'll investigate the high points of his poetic output from the 1950s through to his death in 1997, with our first three classes tackling the three major epic works of his early career — "Howl (for Carl Solomon)," "Kaddish" and "Wichita Vortex Sutra" — while the fourth will look at the poems surrounding the death of his father, Louis, in the 1970s, and make a quick survey of Ginsberg's poetic responses to live in the 1980s and 90s.

First up is "Howl," a poem many would argue is the most influential and groundbreaking poetic work of the 20th century, not only for its aesthetic innovations, but for its revolutionary effects upon the social and cultural discourse — both in the U.S. and worldwide — from the 50s into the 60s and well beyond.  The stylistic breakthrough that "Howl" would mark for Ginsberg was a long time in the making.  You'll notice, for example, that we'll more or less skip the first 120 pages of Collected Poems, and that's because — much like the massive differences between Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City and On the Road — Ginsberg wrote a lot of poetry in the more traditional modernist mode of his father before he felt empowered to break free and write in his own expressionistic way.  Aside from NYC Beat compatriots like Kerouac and Burroughs, another key figure in his artistic development was San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, who critiqued Ginsberg's early poetry as being too formal: "It still sounds like you're wearing Columbia University Brooks Brothers ties," he observed.  Yet another unsung hero of American literary history is Ginsberg's psychiatrist, Philip Hicks.  Here's Ginsberg's retelling of a liberating exchange between the two after Hicks asked him what he wanted to do with his life:

"Doctor, I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever — never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now — and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. Then he said 'Well, why don't you?'  I asked him what the American Psychoanalytic Association would say about that, and he said . . . if that is what you really feel would please you, what in the world is stopping you from doing it?"

Ginsberg debuted "Howl" at the famous Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco on October 7, 1955 — an event Ginsberg co-organized with Gary Snyder, and which featured Rexroth as Master of Ceremonies and readings from Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia and Michael McClure.  In attendance, among many others, were Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and cofounder of City Lights Bookstore, along with its publishing imprint.  Ferlinghetti had already published a few books (including his own Pictures of the Gone World) in the "Pocket Poets" series (small pocket-sized books based on volumes he saw while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris on the G.I. Bill), and he was very excited at the thought of putting out Ginsberg's work — so much so that the morning after the reading he sent him a postcard mirroring Ralph Waldo Emerson's words to Walt Whitman a century earlier: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," and adding "When do I get the manuscript?"

Published in 1956, Howl and Other Poems was seized by officials and subject to an obscenity trial.  Ferlinghetti gives his own account of the trial in his essay, "Horn on Howl" [PDF], which I wholeheartedly recommend you read.  For more background on the book, I also recommend reading William Carlos Williams' introduction to the volume, which can be found on page 819 of Collected Poems.

The final piece of the puzzle missing so far is Carl Solomon, the person to whom "Howl" is dedicated.  Ginsberg met Solomon in Pilgrim State  Psychiatric Hospital, a mental institution he agreed to be admitted to in lieu of serving time when he was arrested for allowing thief friends to store stolen goods at his apartment.  Ginsberg's time in Rockland was a harrowing experience for a number of reasons, including his fears that he shared his mother's mental illness (something we'll discuss in greater depth when reading "Kaddish") and his witness to the defeated Solomon, once a fervent youthful Dadaist who'd surrendered to institutionalization, tired of asserting that it was the world instead that was insane.  This distinction forms a central conceit of "Howl," as you'll see.

Here's our reading list for Tuesday's class (page numbers refer to Collected Poems), and don't forget that there'll be a quiz.  When possible, I've provided links to streaming audio via PennSound:

Early Poems:

• In Society (11)
• The Bricklayer's Lunch Hour (12): MP3
• Complaint of the Skeleton to Time (25)
• Pull My Daisy (32)
• Bop Lyrics (50)

"Howl"-era Poems:

• Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo (131)
• Howl (134): (1956 in San Francisco: Intro: MP3 / Poem: MP3) (1995 in NYC: Poem: MP3 / Epilogue: MP3)
• Footnote to "Howl" (142) 
• A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley (143): MP3
• A Supermarket in California (144): MP3
• Sunflower Sutra (146): MP3
• Transcription of Organ Music (148): MP3
• Sather Gate Illumination (150)
• America (154): MP3
• Tears (159): MP3
• In the Baggage Room at Greyhound (161): MP3
• Ready to Roll (167)
• Epigraph and Dedication to "Howl" (809, 810)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Horn on Howl” [PDF]
William Carlos Williams, “Introduction to Howl” (819)

And here are a few supplemental links on "Howl" for your reading (and listening) pleasure:

• NPR: "Revisiting 'Howl' at 50" [link]
• NPR: "After 50 Years, 'Howl' Still Resonates" [link]
• Stephen Burt on "The Paradox of Howl" in Slate [link]
• "Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' in a New Controvery," The New York Times, 1988 [link]
• "Classic Beat," Greil Marcus reflects on the poem in The New York Times, 2006 [link]

Finally, let's not forget last year's film, Howl, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg.  We'll gather for our last film screening of the year to watch the movie, but for now, here's the trailer: