Subject: Re: Holden Caulfield & Allen Ginsberg
From: Mark Kuhar (mkuhar@mail.ohio.net)
Date: Sat Apr 12 1997 - 10:59:31 GMT
George Will can can go screw himself. This smug, arrogant,
holier-than-thou, right-wing, candy-ass thinks he has moral carte blanche
to cast his biased value judgements over anything that does not march in
goosestep with his frightened, conformist, elitest, lilywhite, political
agenda. He makes me want to puke. I'm glad he's out there spouting this
kind of horseshit, because he serves as a clear example of the kind of
thinking no one should emulate in their own lives. He wouldn't know
originality, truth, honesty, or a clear and unique voice if it punched him
square in the center of his unenlightened face. --mark
>BARD OF 'COFFEEHOUSE RADICALISM'
>
>by George Will (voice of RIGHT or RIGHT FIGHTS BACK)
>WASHINGTON POST
>4/09/97
>
>WASHINGTON - Allen Ginsberg, symptomatic symbol of the "beat generation"
>and other intellectual fads, died last Saturday at age 70. He once
>wrote, "I'm so lucky to be nutty." Actually, his pose of paranoia was
>not luck, it was a sound career move.
> It became big box office with his famous declamation of his poem
>"Howl" in San Francisco in 1955. That was the year "Rock Around the
>Clock," in the soundtrack to the movie "The Blackboard Jungle," helped
>launch what was to become the third element in the trinity of Sixties
>ecstasies - sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Ginsberg made the first two
>his projects. He composed "Howl" with the help of a cocktail of peyote,
>amphetamines and Dexedrine.
> Thirty years later his reward for a career of execrating American
>values and works was a six-figure contract for a volume of his collected
>poetry. It is a distinctive American genius, this ability to transmute
>attempted subversion into a marketable commodity.
> The adjective "beat" was appropriated by Jack Kerouac from a
>drug-addicted Times Square thief and male prostitute, who meant by it
>the condition of being exhausted by existence. "That man's existence
>must have been wearying.) Kerouac attached the adjective to the noun
>"generation," emulating Gertrude Stein's identification of the "lost
>generation" of the 1920s. Soon LIFE magazine, happy to find some
>titillating unhappiness in a decade defined by President Dwight D.
>Eisenhower's smile, was writing about the beats as "The Only Revolution
>Around." That's entertainment.
> Back then, poetry commanded crowds. In his book WHEN THE GOING WAS
>GOOD: AMERICAN LIFE IN THE 1950s, Jeffrey Hart, now a professor of
>English at Dartmouth College, wrote:
> "Robert Frost strode onto the stage at Carnegie Hall to a standing
>ovation from an overflow house. ... One night in 1957, T.S. Eliot was
>reading his poems to an overflow audience in (Columbia University's)
>McMillin Theater. Even faculty members had difficulty getting tickets,
>and people were crowded into the windows and doors, and listening
>outside to Eliot over loudspeakers. ... Dylan Thomas stood at the podium
>... his third American tour in two years."
> When Ginsberg came to Columbia, "there was a vast throng that had
>been unable to get in. They pounded on the doors and milled around.
>Ticket-holders entered between lines of police."
> Today no poet could cause such excitement on any campus, or any other
>American venue, so complete has been the supplanting of words, written
>spoken, by music and movies as preferred modes of communication. One of
>Ginsberg's young acolytes, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., put the
>dissenting impulse to music as Bob Dylan.
> Some beats wrote the way some jazz musicians made music, in the head
>of chemically assisted improvisation. Truman Capote's famous dismissal
>of Kerouac's work - "That isn't writing at all, it's typing" - had a
>point. Granted, Kerouac revised ON THE ROAD for six years before it was
>published in 1957. However, fueled by Benzedrine, he wrote the first
>draft of that novel in 1951 in less than three weeks, as one long
>single-spaced paragraph - 120 feet long on 12-foot strips of tracing
>paper taped together. Here is its beginning:
> "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just
>gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except
>that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my
>feeling that everything was dead."
> Does that tone of voice seem familiar? Here is the beginning of a
>novel published in 1951, the year of Kerouac's typing frenzy:
> "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably
>want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like,
>and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all
>that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into
>it, if you want to know the truth."
> Yes, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. Holden Caulfield, adolescent scold,
>strong in disapproving "phonies," was a precursor of the beats with
>their passion for "authenticity," which to Ginsberg meant howling echoes
>of whatever constituted coffeehouse radicalism of the moment. ""Slaves
>of Plastic! ... Striped tie addicts! ... Whiskey freaks bombed out on
>530 billion cigarettes a year...Steak swallowers zonked on Television!")
>With a talent that rarely rose to mediocrity, but with a flair for
>vulgar exhibitionism, Ginsberg shrewdly advertised his persona as a
>symptom of a dysfunctional society. He died full of honors, including a
>front page (and a full page inside) obituary in THE NEW YORK TIMES, a
>symptom to the end.
>
>
>
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