Looking for Ginsberg in Hungary

There's a row of used book shops on Karoly Ut in Budapest, venerable shops with handsome collections of Hungarian volumes of many kinds and subject matter. In particular, I went looking for Allen Ginsberg and found two copies of A Leples Bitang (The Shrouded Stranger).

Ginsberg was popular and appreciated in Hungary, his intrinsic message of individual freedom resonated with Hungarian youth, writers, and artists who lived under Communist dictatorship. With poetry celebrating democratic sensibilities and championing free expression, Allen Ginsberg was well-represented in Hungarian publications, aided by the enthusiastic translations of Eorsi Istvan.

The volumes, in hardback, cost 800 and 1000 forint respectively (approximately $4-5 each).

Dennis McNally: Jack Kerouac and the American Bohemian Tradition

Dennis McNally gave a talk "Jack Kerouac and the American Bohemian Tradition" to a capacity gathering in the theater of the Lowell Visitor Center on Market St. This was the 25th anniversary of the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festivities.

Notes Sitting Listening

as an historian, McNally tries to "put phenomena in context"

~ artists as "antennas of of the human race"

~ in the 1950s "Communism" was just a code word for the modern world in general; in the 1950s there was "an overwhelming pressure to conform."

THE ALTERNATE VOICE - everyone that didn't fit into mainstream conceptions of normal American life.

Bohemianism

• anti-materialism
• religious skepticism
• individual value over the corporation/state
• sexual freedom & sensuality
• American Bohemian Tradition consistently demonstrates an attachment to African-American cultural breakthroughs (jazz in particular)

Bohemian life  = a "life protest" to counter the "soulless, flat corporate world."

(In the Q&A after the talk someone asked if there is a Bohemian culture today and McNally hesitated, shook his head, and basically said "it's hard to be a Bohemian in today's world.")

First mention of Buddhism in America? Thoreau in 1844 in the Transcendentalist magazine "The Dial," the translation of a Buddhist text at the request of Emerson. Kerouac very much into Thoreau.

Kerouac's great gift? His "naive defenselessness." Meaning, the beautiful wonder with which he saw the world. He investigated the soul and the idea of endless eternity, "the void," instead of distracting himself with the usual politics business stock market book review Literary Canon orthodoxy. He was already living in eternity while the culture around him grew sillier and more irrelevant.

Jack Kerouac's Grave, Edson Cemetery, Lowell, Ma
October 2, 2010 

Colossus of Maroussi

New Directions is re-issuing Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi, one of his lesser known books, yet one of his finest. Richard Rayner of the Los Angeles Times writes a good piece on it. He plucks some terrific quotes from the book that illustrate well the enthusiasm and vigor that Miller brought to this work. Rayner also succinctly brings into focus the lineage that Miller established:

"The incantatory style, with its rolling sub-clauses, mixed Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence in a way that was fresh at the time; it seems familiar now because it predicts Kerouac, Ginsberg and Snyder. Like the Beats who would follow him, Miller looked out for the possibilities of human holiness. Like them, he embraced risk and never minded going over the top."

Well worth checking out.

David Foster Wallace, Book Reviews, and the Need to Believe in One's Work

The review by Wyatt Mason of David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace in the July 5, 2010 (vol LVII, num. 12) issue of the New York Review of Books is interesting on many levels. What struck me, however, is Mason's discussion of some of the earlier reviews of Wallaces's books, reviews that disparaged Wallaces work as "not edited," "excessive," "self-indulgent," "gibberish," "nonsense," etc.

Though Mason generously accounts for how some of those reviewers might have come by their opinions (deadlines that required hurried reading, for example), what stands out, in light of how we're beginning to understand Wallace today, is how un-generous and shortsighted those reviews were. Could it have been otherwise? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps only in time do we come to fully appreciate, or re-evaluate, a writer's work. Perhaps something truly new, truly innovative, must inevitably endure ridicule and misunderstanding before the prevailing culture catches up with its genius. The Beats, Kerouac in particular, come to mind.

Of course, the object lesson here for aspiring writers, writers willing to chart new territory, to experiment with form, to break with tradition, is to believe in oneself and to disregard the tenor and substance of negative reviews. It's a daunting task to be sure, one that, in Kerouac's case, could not be achieved. It seems clear that, despite Wallace's suicide, his belief in his work never wavered. Though in interviews Wallace admitted to  doubts he had about his fiction, the work itself belies those admissions. The force of certainty pervades his novels, stories, and essays and while every writer is to be afforded his or her apprehension about their work, ultimately the work stands on its own.

In the case of the reviews that Mason cites, what comes through clearly are the peevish, harried, pedestrian minds of the reviewers. Genius comes to light slowly while banality is always plain to see.

Orlovsky's New York Times Obituary

The New York Times published Peter Orlovsky's obituary today, June 3, 2010, Allen Ginsberg's birthday (he would have been eight-four). Um, happy birthday, Allen? Was the Times editorial people just having a little wink wink nod nod with Ginsberg, their old nemesis? The Washington Post, perhaps being less clued-in to Beat nuance and with no apparent appreciation for the insignificant coincidence, published their Orlovsky obituary two days ago.

Both pieces are respectful when in another day and age they might not have been. But of course, in citing the books Peter wrote, both omit mention of Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs (Pocket Poets,  City Lights).

Peter Orlovsky

Allen Ginsberg's longtime companion, Peter Orlovsky, died in Vermont on Saturday, May 30, 2010. Ginsberg's muse, friend of Jack Kerouac (who portrayed him in several of his novels), eccentric poet organic farmer Buddhist, Orlovsky was one of the last of the Beat Generation's 'core' members, those friends who knew and inspired each other in the 1950s and who were there for the explosion of Howl and On the Road - William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and, peripherally (because each has declined to accept the mantle 'member of the Beat Generation' but who nonetheless were close friends and significant characters in the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance), Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

I met Peter Orlovsky just once. Oddly, I was with my parents and we were visiting Allen Ginsberg's apartment on East 12th St in the Lower East Side (Allen was actually out of town). Peter lived in the adjoining apartment and he was coming out of his as we topped the stairs. I introduced myself and my parents and he was very polite and offered a sunny smile and a friendly handshake to Mom and Dad and myself. This encounter contrasts sharply with how Peter was at other moments during those mid '80s years. In those difficult days he was troubled by alcohol and crack addiction and was at times wildly erratic, violent, and wholly unpredictable.

Peter's struggles with his addictions and with bouts of mental illness weighed heavily on Allen who wavered between being tolerant, denying there was a problem, and enforcing tough love (like cutting him off financially,  or calling the police when Orlovksy threatened violence). In the end, when Allen died and his estate sold at auction, the proceeds of the sale went to Orlovsky. I attended that auction and wrote a poem afterwards. In it, I described Peter as "...shambling cannonball-bellied wild-haired unkempt Peter Orlovsky," and noted that...

"The last 'fair warning' announcement echoed from the auctioneer’s gavel, the last hammer blow struck, Orlovsky has stumbled away, pockets stuffed once again by Allen’s unfaltering generosity ... "

Deborah Remington 1930-2010

As a practitioner of Obituary Mail Art, I habitually check the New York Times obituary section to see who has died and to determine whether there might be an obituary worthy of turning into art. In the process, I often find connections to various literary and artistic interests, in particular to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats. Such was the case when I noticed the article announcing the death of Deborah Remington, an abstract painter with whom I was unfamiliar.

Deborah Remington was one of the six co-founders (and the only woman) of the Six Gallery in San Francisco, the gallery in which Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of "Howl" in 1955 (the other artists were Wally Hedrick, John Allen Ryan, Hayward King, David Simpson, and Jack Spicer).

Obituary mail art is a sub-genre of Mail Art in general, that odd, Fluxus-like practice closely associated with Ray Johnson. I may be the only practitioner. Try googling the text string "obituary mail art" and see how many hits you get. The practice is straightforward. Read the obituaries, cut out those of people that interest you, make a photocopy of it, put the original article in an envelope, festoon and adorn the envelope with imagery, mail the envelope to yourself, then seal it in laminate. 

The images below are the front and back of Lescaret's obituary mail art of Wally Hedrick. 

Beat Memories - The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg

The National Gallery of Art hosts an exhibition of Allen Ginsberg's photographs, May - September.

"Drawing on the most common form of photography, the snapshot, he created spontaneous, uninhibited pictures of ordinary events to celebrate and preserve what he called "the sacredness of the moment."

Ginsberg's interest in photography was not casual, not a passing hobby. In many ways, the practice of photography augmented his poetry. Both art forms, as practiced by Ginsberg, merged the visual with the autobiographical. As he wrote in the Author's Preface to Collected Poems 1947-1980, "Herein author has assembled all his poetry books published to date rearranged in straight chronological order to compose an autobiography."

His photographs, many uniquely and extensively captioned by hand, augment and extend the autobiographical record. Primarily portraits, they depict a multitude of friends and acquaintances - artists, writers, scholars, boyfriends, family members - spanning the second half of the 20th century. They are not consciously 'arty' but are, like his poetry, deliberately visual and richly detailed. If Ginsberg is, as Bill Morgan asserts in The Typewriter is Holy, the Beat Generation's bonding agent, the one person whose effort, vision, and conviction is primarily responsible for scholars and readers being able to talk about a 'Beat Generation' today, then Ginsberg's photographs are unequivocally the most important visual record we have of that literary circle.

(Allen Ginsberg, Managua, Nicaragua 1986, photograph by Patrick Warner)

Is the Beat Generation A Literary Movement?

"It wasn't a sans serif age" an audience member said, commenting on the book jacket's title font. Why not use typewriter letters? The chapters are in typewriter script, Bill Morgan explained during the Q&A following his Harvard Coop talk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an author has no control over book or book jacket design. He certainly did not, he noted.

In fact, he'd actually wanted to call the book Kindred Spirits but his publisher (Free Press) had declined. They'd wanted something a little more Beat-resonant, something catchier, less sentimental. Editors or perhaps sub-editors had then plumbed Ginsberg's poems for a title-esque phrase and come up with the winner in "Footnote to Howl."

More interesting than the design of the book was Morgan's assertion that the Beat Generation is a social group rather than a literary movement. "Social group" is certainly vague but his point is that what is considered the 'Beat Generation' actually lacks a common literary style. As such, it can't be considered a "movement" in the way that for example Cubism could. Early works by Braque or Picasso are virtually indistinguishable, he suggested, implying a coherent style, the 'Cubist' style. Not so the Beats. Burroughs' work was utterly different than Kerouac's, Ginsberg's was its very own thing. So construing them and by extension their peripheral wives, friends, and girlfriends (think Edie Parker Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke) as a Literary Movement doesn't, in Morgan's view, cut it.

But they were bonded together however, their actual 'movement' being the orbiting of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was the sun around which all the planets moiled and by which the Beat Universe was sustained. Ginsberg was the single thing that everyone even remotely considered a 'member' of the 'Beat Generation' had in common.

But what about that title anyway? The Complete, Uncensored History History of the Beat Generation? He chuckled at the irony, as if a 'complete history' of something so nebulous, so prone to individual definition, could possibly be written. But it is what it is, a non-scholarly text that examines the principle figures of the Beat Generations in relation to one another and within the literary and cultural context of the times.

Holy Typewriters

Beat scholar and archivist Bill Morgan, author of the year-by-year biography of Allen Ginsberg I Celebrate Myself: The Sometimes Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, has published a new book, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.

Bill Morgan worked with Allen Ginsberg for many years as his archivist and as such has been intimately linked with Allen and all-things-Beat. I Celebrate Myself is a solid, well-researched biography (though not without occasional factual missteps), one that is a valuable tool for Ginsberg scholars writing about AG and other Beat story lines. The chronological framework allows users to quickly place Beat-related events on the time continuum of 20th century history. Morgan is not a great prose stylist - he's an archivist after all and his prose style reflects that; straightforward, matter-of-fact, a little wooden.


The title of his new work of literary history comes from the fifth line of the "Footnote to Howl" section of Howl: "The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!" An excellent selection.  AG's Howl alone could provide a thousand Beat titles given the many, many great phrases contained therein:

• the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
• eyeball kicks
• the lamb stew of the imagination
• a belt of marijuana for New York
• goldhorn shadow of the band
• cannibal dynamo
• robot apartments

But what of the subtitle? The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation. I can never help but raise my eyebrows at the assertion of completeness in any book title. Really? Complete? Nothing more to be discovered? Nothing left out? Seems unlikely.

And Uncensored? Shouldn't that go without saying? As many Beat enthusiasts know, censorship was one of the main issues that Ginsberg threw his considerable energy into confronting and rolling back. After all, Howl was censored, Naked Lunch was censored, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was censored. The issue of censorship was an enduring one for Ginsberg, right into the last years of his life when he fought the FCC ban on "indecent" language on the airwaves between set times of the day (a rule that effectively prevented Howl and other works from being broadcast, despite the fact that said works were/are considered masterpieces of 20th century literature). Who would conceive of writing a Censored history of the Beat Generation?

The last niggling problem I have with the title concerns the generic moniker Beat Generation, a label that, though instantly recognizable and widely used, remains somewhat un-defined. Who or what comprises the Beat Generation? When is someone a Beat and not a Hippie? Or a Beat and not a hipster? The term "generation" implies a time frame - what is it? 1939-1959? 1940s-1960s? What's a generation?

My issue isn't so much in Morgan's invoking the term Beat Generation, only with the premise that somehow a "complete" history of it can be laid out. I am eager to see how Morgan handles this, whether he actually endeavors to define or codify or, in the spirit of archival investigation, offer a chronological framework for this generation.

That said, Morgan deserves much praise for his ongoing scholarly efforts and the considerable amount of invaluable material he has amassed and made available for legions of Beat scholars and enthusiasts.

I'm looking forward to hearing him speak about The Typewriter is Holy at the Harvard Coop, Cambridge, MA, Tuesday evening May 11 at 7:00 pm.