Meditation and Poetics - 55 - (Sunyata)

March 2, 2015, 3:00 am

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[A 19th century Tibetan mandala, in the collection of the Rubin Museum of Art, New York] 

[Japanese Zen Enso Symbol]

[The Messier 80 global cluster in the constellation Scorpius, located about 35 light years from the Sun - via NASA Hubble telescope]


AG: The other aspect of the Mahayana, Mahayana style, as Reggie (Ray), I guess, may have mentioned, is the notion of  sunyata – did he get into that?.. In modern Existentialist terms that’d be“the void”, the big bad..  the big black wolf of the void, or, depending how it’s seen  In modern, twentieth-century Existential terms, it was seen somewhat as a threat – like, if you don’t have God no more, (then) all you’ve got is a void, and what’s the use of doing anything, why not commit suicide? etc, etc, etc, etc. 

So, vulgar notions (I mean vulgar in the sense that), as I was saying, there was (John) Keats’ notion of  “Negative Capability” - (the) capability to entertain many diverse opposite conceptions of the universe at one time, without freaking out, without saying, “Oh, I’ve got to commit suicide because there’s no God and it’s all a big void". "That means I’ve got to commit suicide” 
- like (the) acid head who gets high and says, “Everybody’s got to be naked. Let’s all take off our clothes and rush in front of the automobiles.""Let’s stop the traffic and tell everybody to be naked, and get run over, and who cares?” 
– Well, that’s pushing it. It’s not understanding the emptiness of that notion too.

Be that as it may, there is a notion of emptiness, or sunyata((the) proper pronunciation is shoun-yah-tah– accent on the “a”, long “a” –“Shoun-yah...”) meaning, not so much the emptiness of the phenomena, as their existence without our plastering conceptions on them – things existent in themselves, without a projection.

Student: What would be (the) difference (between the)  aspect of (William Carlos) Williams and sunyata

AG: What would be the difference between clear-seeing, (the) Hinayanaaspect of (William Carlos) Williams and sunyata ?  I think I would be somewhat the difference between Williams and (Walt) Whitman.That is to say, in later Williams, you will find that clear-seeing eye in empathy out, extenso, in space. Here, he’s still at the turn of the century, just practicing, trying to see and focus objects simplified down to single objects – like “so much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/barrow/ glazed with rain/ water/ beside the white/ chickens”– he’s trying to narrow down the focus just to see clearly . As I was saying,reading that history book, Georgia O’Keeffeand her husband Alfred Stieglitz, in beginning these experiments, discovering their own direct perceptions, thought first, as strategy, well, at least, narrow it down, focus (on) one little thing that you can see, and that others can see. When you have enough practice in that, then the Maha-vipassana,the big vipassanacomes, which is panoramic insight, in detail, in three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, in all ten directions of space and through all six senses – sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, mind - that you begin to see, say, a mandala of detail, a mandala of detail, or (a) three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sphere of details.

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately thirty-three-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding approximately thirty-seven minutes in] 

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Meditation and Poetics - 56 - (Clear Seeing)

March 3, 2015, 3:00 am

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AG: (But) to begin with, you’ve got to begin somewhere, so that’s why you begin with the breath - or (William Carlos) Williams might begin with the Red Wheelbarrow, or, in his old age (a very interesting thing, he’s got his old age poem["The World Contracted to a Recognizable Image"] about how he’s lying in bed and his mind’s fastened to a picture on the wall, like a fly clinging to a wall. As his consciousness was fading, he kept focusing just on this one picture on the hospital wall, from his hospital bed).

I would say Williams’ clear seeing would lead to the realization of  the emptiness of the things he was seeing, to the extent that they are empty of projection, the realization of a certain emptiness in things. And that would lead to the realization that things are actually both empty and full - which is the Prajnaparamitatheory -  form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is no different from emptiness, emptiness is no different from form. But you’d have to examine in detail the functioning of sight, sound, smell taste, touch and mind (the functioning of the senses) to begin to break them down to see the gaps in-between the pictures – the gaps in-between thoughts, the gaps in-between passions, the gaps in-between sight. You’d have to look so carefully that pretty soon you realize you’re looking through your eyeball, and so carefully you might see thirteen-flashes-a-second along the alpha-rhythms of the eyeball (in other words, we don’t see continuously, we see thirteen impulses a second traveling from the retina to the back of the brain). But you’d have to sit there looking very carefully through your eyeball to begin realizing that sight is discontinuous, (just as you already realized, perhaps, that thought-forms are discontinuous, that it isn't a solid universe - or, as (Robert) Creeley was sayinglast night (he’s got a favorite line, quoting (Werner Heisenberg) -  “A point in space is a place for an argument”?  [to Bobbie Louise Hawkins, in attendance] – Do you know how that goes, Bobbie?...Do you know how that goes? He’s been quoting it for years. “A point in space is..”?

Bobbie-Louise Hawkins: “A point in space is a place for an argument”

AG: “A point in space is a place for an argument”..[to Students] – Do you all know Bobbie Louise Hawkins?

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: It’s not Heisenberg, it’s (Ludwig) Wittgenstein.

[Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)]

AG: Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein – [to Students] – Do you know Bobbie Louise Hawkins here, who’ll be teaching after Robert Duncan. Did you start today?

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: I start Wednesday

AG: Wednesday – Hmm – Robert Creeley’s ex-wife (among other attributes and qualities) which is why it was funny that I…

Bobbie-Louise Hawkins:  that I'll be taking over Robert Duncan’s class!

AG: ..which was funny, because we had.. some funny pun..that I hadn't seen Robert last night and brought this little text... took over the class that Robert Duncan started.

“A point in space is a place for an argument”. In other words, if you begin to solidify, or think it’s solidified, think the space point is solidified, then, pretty soon, you’re fighting over the territory.

I don’t know if I’ve answered you satisfactorily. It’s just that the clear seeing, traditionally.. Clear seeing into detail and precision begins the insight into the dissolution of the solidity of the thing that you are looking at.  Just like… if you..

Student: Can you repeat that?

AG: Yes. Clear seeing into a dharma,into a thing, into a microphone, or a word, or a picture, seems to be the beginning of the dissolution of the solidity of that object (i.e. you begin to see that it’s made up of atoms, or that it’s discontinuous, that it’s water, that it flows like water – like Heraclitus said, “All things are water”. [Editorial note - Allen may be confusing Heraclitus and Thales here] -  Clear seeing seems to lead on to that penetration into the empty nature of phenomena.

Is everybody here familiar with the Prajnaparamita Sutra – (the) Highest Perfect Wisdom Sutra? (or, those who are, can you raise your hand? – and those who are not, can you raise your hand? – [Allen surveys the class] – Well, that’s interesting.

[Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately thirty-seven minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in]  

Meditation and Poetics - 43 (Reznikoff 13)

February 4, 2015, 7:00 am

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      [Charles Reznikoff, aged 81, in New York City, 1975 - Photograph by Abraham Ravett] 

  [St Marks Poetry Project, NYC, 1970 flyer-announcement for Charles Reznikoff reading - designed by George Schneeman] 


AG: Okay, so those were his (Charles Reznikoff's) short things. I'll finish with some of his longer matters from Volume 1 of his Collected Poems, because I think I mentioned them to you… - (66) - "If there is a scheme.." - [did I read this before here? no?] - "If there is a scheme/ perhaps this too is in the scheme/as when a subway car turns on a switch" - [that's the thing I forgot, when it "turns on a switch"] -  "the wheels screeching against the rails/and the lights go out/but are on again in a moment" - [I wonder which was better, his poem or mine  - okay..] - "the lights go out/but are on again in a moment", but it's ""If there is a scheme/ perhaps this too is in the scheme" - [That's kind of an interesting suggestion as far as the mind's concerned, if you examine mind]

I wanted to read a couple of the longer story poems. I don't think I read any of them here. We read the one about the knock? the aunt and the man? 

Student(s): Yeah

AG: So that was from an earlier set. And now (from about page 44 on) ..Yeah, well this is kind of a weird one - "The Burden" (page 51)

Student:  In Collected Poems, Volume 1?

AG: Volume 1, yeah - "(29) The shop on which he worked was on the tenth floor. After six o'clock/ he heard the neighbouring shops closing, the windows and the shutters/closed./At last there was only a light here and there/These, too, were gone. He was alone./He went to the stairs./Suppose he leaned over the railing./ What was to hold him back from plunging down the stairwell?/ Upon the railway platform, a low railing was fencing off a drop to/the street - a man could step over./When the train came to the bridge and the housetop sank and/sank, his heart began to pound and he caught his breath:/he had but to throw himself through the open window or walk to/the train platform, no one would suspect, and jerk back the little gate./He would have to ride so to and from work. His home was on the/ third floor, the shop on the tenth. He would have to pass windows and the stairwell always."

And the next one - "(30) - "In high school she liked Latin and the balances of algebra" - [have I read this here?]

Student(s): No

AG: No? - "In high school she liked Latin and the balances of algebra" - [ I like that, actually - a very elegant thing for a working-class girl - she liked "the balances of algebra" - very intelligent mind - it penetrates both ways (it's an intellectual's conception, at the same time, it's something that might come to the lower middle classes - "she liked.. the balances of algebra"] - "Her mother had died years before and her father had married again/The new wife was solicitous for her husband. "A workingman -/ has he the means for this education of a girl?"/They took her out of school and got her a job as a bookkeeper/ A student at one of the universities who she had met at high school/began to call/She herself had been reading but evenings are too short;besides/ her reading was haphazard/They talked of books that he knew and what was good in his lectures./Her stepmother and father said, "It will be years before he'll finish his/studies and make a living. When he'll be ready to marry, you'll be too/old. He's wasting your time."/It was useless talking to her, but they spoke to him and he stopped/ calling/ A salesman, professionally good-humored, introduced himself to/ her father. A good match they all said. Besides home was uncomfortable/with a nagging stepmother."

On page 54 (this is like a complete novel at this point):
"He was afraid to go through the grocery store where his father was/still talking to customers. He went through the tenement hallway/ intothe room where they ate and slept, in back of the store./His little brothers and sisters were asleep along the big bed. He took/ the book which he had bought at the pushcart, to read just a page/ or twomore by the dimmed gaslight./ His father stood over him and punched his head twice,/whispering in Yiddish, "Where have you been all day, you louse/that feeds on me? I needed you to deliver orders."/In the dawn he carried milk and rolls to the doors of customers./At seven/ he was in his chum's room. "I'll stay here with you till I get a job"/ He worked for a printer. When he was twenty-one he set up a press in/ a basement.It was harder to pay off than he thought./He fell behind in his installments. If they took the press away he would have to work for someone else all over again/Rosh Hashanah he went to his father's house. They had beenspeaking to each other again for years./Once a friend had turned a poem of his into Hebrew. It was printed ina Hebrew magazine. He showed it to his father and his father showed it/ around to the neighbors/ After dinner his father said, "Business has been good, thank God. I have saved over a thousand dollars this year. How have you/ been doing?"/ "Well", "But I hear you need money that you're trying to borrow some?""Yes". His father paused/"I hope you get it." - [that's where they ended up] 

Then the next. I don't think.. do these need any commentary? Hardly

Student: Is this autobiographical, in the third person?

AG: I don't think they are autobiographical at all. I think he's just observed these things among his friends and neighbors. He heard people talking. It's like in Mind Breaths, I have a poem that's built on these, actually. It's something that.. I just listened to my father and this is what he said - [Allen reads from the poem, "Don't Grow Old" - "Wasted arms, feeble knees,/ eighty years old, hair thin and white,/cheek bonier than I'd remembered,/  head bowed on his neck, eyes opened now and then he listened/I read my father Wordsworth's/Intimations of Immortality Ode/"Trailing clouds of glory do we come/from God who is our home"/ "That's beautiful", he said."but it's not true. When I was a boy…" - [and then he continues, it's just like (Reznikoff) - I was totally under the influence of Reznikoff at this point - and then my father continued] - "When I was a boy we had/ a house on Boyd Street, Newark/The backyard was a big empty lot full of bushes/and whole grass.I always wondered/what was behind those trees./When I grew older, I walked around the block.." - [I thought that was so funny, "When I grew older" - like, another year!  From four to five, he finally got around to walk around the block (but it seemed like that when you're a kid)] - "When I grew older, I walked around the block/and found out what was back there, it was/ a glue factory." 
In other words, it's somebody talking. He heard his grandmother (or) his aunt talking, or a businessman, talking about this business. 

This Rabbi went away and somebody signed something for his house and then someone got cheated and, twenty years later, the son, who was a lawyer, came back and told him that he'd been cheated and wanted to make it up, but he was dead already. It's a typical story. Stories like that you hear in the family all the time, whether Irish or Jewish, or Swedish, or German, or honky or black, there are these stories. It's all totally family - heimisch, or homely. And I'm sure everyone has these stories. And they're told always in the same way - like great gaps of time are covered - "There was this boy and he had a limp. Well, when he grew up, he had a candy store". And it's like epic poetry (because that's what epic poetry is composed of) - the essential details, as it would be remembered, for everybody to understand, not something high faultin' and flighty, but just the essential details of life recollected perfectly in order, but just the essential details. So, "There was this guy who has a club foot and, when he was fifty, he wanted to get married" (it starts with the child - a club foot at grammar school) 

Here's a complete fast shot (on page 55)  - "(33) Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign and go on,/glad that his own life had to do with books/Now at night when he saw the grey in his parents' hair  \and heard their\talk of that day's worries and the next:/lack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of goods,/if there were workers and goods, lack of orders again,/for the tenth time he said, "I'm going in with you: there's more money in business."/His father answered, "Since when do you care about money? You don't know what kind of life you're going into - but you've always had your own way."/ He went out selling in the morning, he read the Arrival of Buyers in The Times; he packed half a dozen samples in a box and went/ from office to office./ Others like himself, sometimes a crowd, were waiting to thrust their cards through a partition opening.." - [That's really horrifying. I've been in that situation, you know, in a big city, trying to compete with a million other people for the same job] - "Others like himself, sometimes a crowd, were waiting to thrust their cards/ through a partition opening./ When he ate, vexations were forgotten for a while. A quarter past eleven/ was time to go down the steps to Holz's lunch/ counter./He would mount one of the stools/The food, steaming, fragrant, just brought outfrom the kitchen would be dumped into the trays of the steam-table./Hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, onions and gravy, or a knackwurst? and sauerkraut; after that, a pudding with a square of butter sliding from the top and red fruit juice dripping over the saucer./ He was growing fat." - [that's the end - "He was growing fat" - It's like a novel because you can see a life of such anxiety the only relief is the eating time, so he begins piling the eating in, but that means a life of unrelieved dread, or what he's talking about, (is) actually, a brilliant piece of karmic detection work..]

So the last one I'll read today is on page 59 (a very brief one, because we're over time) - "(40) - As he read, his mother sat down beside him. "Read me a little"/"You wouldn't understand, Ma", "What do you care? Read me a little./When I was a girl I wanted to study so much, but who could?" - [The phrasing is so perfect - "When I was a girl I wanted to study so much, but who could?"…(It's so) correct that it makes you cry. You know it's true, one way or another. It's totally real. The art has approached reality in so beautiful a way, and his attention is so exact, and his intelligence is there, and so humble. He's not trying to impress anybody, he's trying to be real. So..] - ""When I was a girl I wanted to study so much, but who could?/My father used to cry when I talked to him about it,/but he cried because he couldn't  afford to educate the boys - even"/ As he read, she listened gravely, then went back to her ironing/The gaslight shone on her round, ruddy face and the white cotton sheets/ that she spread and ironed;/from the shelf the alarm-clock ticked and ticked rapidly." - [So, a moment of pure silence, pure awareness, pure silence, pure sympathy, complete empathy, sympathy, compassion, fullness, awareness, (a) complete universe. And the "clock ticked and ticked rapidly"] 

Okay, I might want to do some more of these because they're so good! - Yeah, one last, I'll do it - It's only five lines.  It applies to what I want to do next time - "(46)  When the club met in her home, embarrassed, she asked them not to begin: /her father wanted to speak to them./The members whispered to each other, "Who is her father?"/"I thank you, young men and women," he said, "for the honor of your/ visit. I suppose you would like to hear some of my poems"./ And he began to chant." 

William Burroughs' 101 (July 1985 reading at Naropa)

February 5, 2015, 3:00 am

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William S Burroughs at 101 - All of the focus on the Centennial last year, but the time has come around again.  February 5 - It's William Burroughs' birthday.

To celebrate we're running this audio - an inspiredJuly 1985 reading at Naropa(select readings from 1983's The Place of Dead Roads and 1986's The Cat Inside).

[After some announcements regarding upcoming Naropa activities from Anne Waldman,
(and additional announcements from Allen), Allen, (at approximately two-and-three-quarter minutes in), introduces William Burroughs] 

AG: William Burroughs at the present age of seventy-one, has been teaching at Naropa steadily, every summer (maybe one exception…I'm not sure, I don't think any were missed) since he was sixty years old - which is eleven years - one of our first adjunct instructors in the poetics department, and he has been faithfully helping us out in uniting the poetic community and inspiring the younger students here (as all over America and all over the world) with his intelligence and his insight, prajna wisdom, and cutting-through humor. At the moment, the bound copies of an antique manuscript from 1953 called Queer is circulating among reviewers with a 1984-85 introduction by Mr Burroughs occupying about a third of the space of the book, linking his thought of 1953 and his thought and emotion of 1985. So that will be the next book published. He's also working on a long-range novel, the end of his trilogy,Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads - the third volume, the first draft of which, I think, is almost done, is The Western Lands, part of a long-range writing project that's occupied, I guess, the last ten years. Very few writers have that much patience and devotion and energy with their work (certainly, I don't!). Not many prose writers even have that sense of long-range composition, but Mr Burroughs has pursued his subject, which is control and consciousness, examination of basic good, for the last forty years, as I remember, and is now at the height of  his powers, not only with the new manuscript, Queer, the new novel-sequel, The Western Lands, but also a very acute curious book on.. called (The) Cat Inside.  Mr Burroughs has six cats in Lawrrence, Kansas, upon all of whom he projects his imagination (and he is, like T.S.Eliot, St Louis confrere, also interested in cats as a medium between himself and the public). And so there's a big cat book, the manuscript of which Mr Burroughs has here. So he'll be reading from The Cat Inside, The Western Lands, and other notes. So we'll have all new fresh intelligence from William Seward Burroughs.

WSB: Thank you. [He begins] - "I'd like to pass along a flatly insane recent news story - "A man swimming in a canal in Florida attacked two alligators with his fists screaming obscenities. The alligators dragged him down and drowned him. And the Sheriff's office said that no attempt would be made to locate or sanction the alligators".  I guess he got what he was looking for."

How many of you have read my novel, The Place of Dead Roads? [minimal show of hands] - Good, excellent. You'll remember that Kim Carson and Mike Chase get greased in the end (not that they're likely to stay dead, in this league of operatives, dying is like trading in your old car, time  for a new chassis).  Now I just wonder how many of you figured out who killed them?  - Yes?  (it has to be someone I didn't tell, because I told quite a few people here - did I tell you? -  (Yes) - well, no, that's not fair then, no, it has to be someone that I didn't give the answer to) - huh - looks like I really wrote a whodunnit - so but obviously, the whodunnit, the obvious suspects are not the ones. It wasn't Bickford's agents at all - and the clue's to be found on page 126 - "Kim was aware of the danger from Joe the Dead but thought he could handle it" -  Famous last thoughts!  Joe says "Here I am the best technician in or out of hell and he brings me back from hell to make sling shots and scout knives and zip guns. Yeah, leave the details to Joe. He left one too many. Joe laughs, a dry rustling sound like a snake shedding its skin. I lifted that out of a spy novel, good enough to steal.


Joe the Dead belongs to a select breed of outlaws know as the NO's, natural outlaws dedicated to breaking the so-called laws of the universe foisted upon us by physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and biologists, and  above all, a monumental fraud of cause and effect, to be replaced by the more pregnant concept of synchronicity   - why, it almost fits right into a song, it must be the matter - synchronicity.  Ordinary outlaws break man-made laws. Laws against theft and murder, of course, are broken every second. You only break a natural law once. To the ordinary criminal breaking a law is a means to an end -  obtaining money, removing an obstruction. To a NO, breaking a natural law is an end, the end to that law. Ordinary outlaws specialize in accordance with inclination and aptitude, or they did. Many of them are on the endangered species list with the gliding lemurs, the rusty-spotted cat and the monkey-eating eagle (well, the monkey-eating eagle will not be missed by the monkeys).   

Consider the Murphy Man. How many of you know what a Murphy Man is? Not one. Your Murphy Man steers the mark to a non-existent whore, having located an apartment building without a doorman and with the front door open. It's mostly a black art. Only a black man has the Murphy Man boy's cool insinuating familiar and the Murphy Man face - sincere, unflappable, untrustworthy. He spots a mark from out of town away from wife and kids for a night on the town. "Looking for some action, friend?" - "Well, uh, yes..." - The Murphy Man makes a phone call: it's all set up. He leads the mark to this apartment."Go up one flight, first door on your left, 1 A.  Prime-grade, friend, and she's ready and waiting" and he gives him a big toothy smile. I wonder if there are any Murphy Men left? 

And then there was the practitioners of theHype or the Bill, that was a short-change routine. You start with twenty dollars. You get the change on the counter and then, "Aw, wait a minute, I don't want to take all your change, give me ten" (and counts it back minus the ten). It's hard to get a conviction because nobody can explain exactly what happened. I've had it explained to me many many times and I still don't see how it works. But the basic principle can be found in a sketch by Edgar Allan Poe on nineteenth-century hustlers, who were known as Diddlers - Now a diddler walks into a tobacco store and asks for a plug of tobacco, and when the plug is on the counter he changes his mind, "Give me a cigar instead". He takes the cigar and starts to walk out. "Oh, wait a minute, you didn't pay me for the cigar", "Of course not. I traded it against the tobacco plug", "Well I don't recall you paid me for that either", "Pay you for it!  Why, there it is! None of your tricks on traveling men". There was a neat little double-bind there somewhere.

Unobtrusive, insistent, practitioners of the Bill were almost always addicts. I wonder if there are any hype men left?  

Remember Yellow Kid, while in the Big Store?  he would set up a whole prop brokerage office. The old-time bank robbers and the burglars who knew what they were looking for and the pickpockets trained from early childhood (the best came from Columbia they tell me). Where are they now, the Murphy Men? and the hype artists?, the Big Store? - Gone, all gone. Ou sont neige d'antan.   

Oh yes (well here) - noteworthy is the hideously sordid yachting scandal still practiced -  Now, they're going to buy a boat together and sail to the South Seas. This swindle requires mark and swindler live in the same trailer, get drunk together every night and lay the same whore. Yellow Kid Weil would've been scandalized. "Never drink with a savage" was one of his rules. Well, ordinary outlaws specialize and so do the NOs. Joe the Dead specializes in evolutionary biology. He dedicates his dearly-bought knowledge of pain and death to cracking two biologic laws:  Law 1 - Hybrids are permitted only between closely-related species and then grudgingly. The Biological Police bluntly warn: "To break down the lines that Mother Nature in her right wisdom" (I can smell it from here) "has established between species is  to invite biological and social chaos".  Joe says "What do you think I'm doing here?  Let it come down"
Rule 2 - An evolutionary step that requires biological mutation is irretrievable and irreversible. Newts start life in the water with gills. At the determined time, the newt sheds his gills and crawls up onto the ordained land,  now equipped with air-breathing lungs. The newt then returns to the water where he lives out his days. It might be convenient to reclaim his gills and breathe underwater again? "No glot clom Fliday", says the Cosmic Uncle. It's the law.

So for starters, Joe pulls a baby mule out of the cosmic manger. There is Mary - Mother Mule, and John [Joseph] - the father - and the impossible child with a glowing pulsing halo.
(Incidentally, the fact that John [Joseph] was a part-time veterinarian might, shall we say, illuminate without denying, the Virgin Birth. After all, a sterile syringe is not a corrupt and impure member, so she can still qualify as the Virgin Mary).



A Kansas vet, known as Joe Lazarus, after he was pronounced dead at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, having been kicked in the head by a mule, was the instrument of altered destiny. Like Saint Paul, knocked off his ass on his ass on his way to Damascus, Joe Laz, following his miraculous recovery, knew what he had to do. He set out to produce a fertile mule. He exposed sperm from his horses and donkeys toorgone and radiation in the magnetized pyramid. It didn't hack it. So Laz went further, he rigged a magnetized manger and bombarded the copulating animals with Deadly Orgone Radiation - D.O.R - and he sewed himself into a goat skin and whipped his beasts to wild Pan music - any woman hit by the whip of the Goat God will conceive in nine months - and finally he created a fertile mule. Skeptics pronounced Joe Laz's mule the most colossal hoax since the Virgin birth. 
"I had it up my sleeve," Joe deadpanned. 

A quiet, enigmatic, former herpetologist resident in Florida challenges Rule 2. His name is Joe Sanford. Bitten by a king cobra, he recovered and devoted himself to a study of newts and salamanders. Sanford claims to have re-instituted gills into air-breathing newts by injections of a lamb-placenta concentrate, the same preparation used in fact by Doctor Kniehaus in Switzerland to turn back the clock for his wealthy patients, to name a few (this is true now) Somerset Maugham,Noel Coward, Pope Pius XII,President Eisehower (I remember Eisenhower waving a tiny American flag from his hospital bed with a big stupid grin on his face and wondering if he would ever die). Winston Churchill couldn't qualify because he couldn't or wouldn't lay off the sauce for six weeks, which was a pre-requisite for the Kniehaus treatment (no exceptions). You will note that rule 2 carries the implicit assumption that time is irreversible. Sanford made a hole in time and Joe sloshes through the hybrids. "All is in the not done, the diffidence that faltered... Let others quaver out:  "I dare do all that become a man, who dares do more is none". Not so, says Joe. /He who dares at all, must dare all./ When mules foal,/ Anything goes,/ When mules glow/ Anything  foals./ Hybrids Unlimited.../ HU HU HU." 

It is not necessary to prove, simply to state. This is a biologic revolution fought with new species and new ways of thinking and feeling, a war where the bullet may take milleniums to hit. Like the old joke about the.. someone makes a swipe with a razor, you know, and.. "Well, missed me that time" - " (but) just try and shake your head three hundred years from now" 

This is a...Dead Souls..this is a.. (yeah, from Gogol, of course), a film-idea loosely suggested by a sci-fi book called Lost Souls. "Dead Souls' postulates that a soul is an electro-magnetic field (possibly several of them, in a complicated grid) designed to occupy and activate a certain organism. While infinitely less vulnerable than the artifact it occupies, the soul can be dispersed and destroyed by a nuclear blast. This is, in fact, the sensitive function of the atom bomb -  a Soul-Killer. "Stacked up, you understand, like cordwood and non-recyclable by the old Hellfire, like fucking plastics". We have to stay ahead of ourselves and the Ivans lest some joker endanger national security by braying out, "You have souls, you can survive your physical death!".  Ruins of Hiroshima on screen. Pull back to show Technician at a switchboard. Behind him three middle-aged men in dark suits with a cold dead look of heavy power. The Technician twiddles his knob."All clear". "Are you sure?" - The Technician shrugs. " The instruments say so." Oppy, he says, Thank God it wasn't a dud" - "Oh, uh, hurry with those print-outs, Joe", "Yes, sir". He looked after him sourly, "Thank Joe it wasn't a dud. God doesn't know what buttons to push." However, some tough old souls, horribly maimed and very disgruntled, do survive Hiroshima and come back to endanger national security. So the scientists are put to work to devise a Super-Soul-Killer. No job too dirty for a fucking scientist (not even the worst of all crimes - Soul-Murder). They start with animals and there are some laboratory accidents. "Run for your lives, gentlemen!  A purple-assed baboon has survived  '23 Skiddoo!""It's the most savage animal on  earth" - The incandescent baboon soul rips through a steel door like wet paper. (and) We had to vaporize the installation, lost expensive equipment and personnel.
Irreplaceables, some of them. Real soul-food chefs cordon bleu, you might say.

There's an interesting detail from the book. The Soul-Killer gives off a smell of burning plastic and rotten oranges. Anything so bizarrely arbitrary is good enough to steal. 
I'll been reading some trash sic-fi unspeakable horror book and suddenly I yelp out"GETS, GETS, GETS" (good enough to steal). Like that agent shedding his… with a laugh like a dry rustling sound, like a snake shedding its skin, that's "GETS". Well, trial and error, we now have Soul-Killers that won't quit, state of the park, sure the big fart. We know how it's all going to end. The first sound and the last sound.
Meanwhile, all personnel on Planet Earth confined to quarters, permanent party, you might say. Convince them they got no souls, it's more humane that way. Scientists always said there is no such thing as a soul and we're here now in a position to prove it. Total Death. Soul Death. It's what the Egyptians called the Second and Final Death. This awesome power to destroy souls forever is now vested in far-sighted and responsible men in the State Department and the CIA. 

The President with his toadies and familiars is now five hundred feet down in solid rock with enough find foods, wine, liqueurs, hash, coke,and heroin to last for a hundred years and the longevity drugs to enjoy (held off the market in the interests of national security).
The President appears on national tv with his well-cut suit hanging loose on his skinny frame to pipe out an adolescent treble, alternately pompous and cracking: "We categorically deny that there are any [crack] so-called "Fountain-of-Youth" drugs procedures or treatments [crack] that are being held back from the American people [crack]". He flashes as boyish smile and runs a comb through his unruly abundant hair. "And I categorically dismiss as without foundation rumors that I myself and the First Lady, my fag son, my colleagues in the Cabinet, are sustaining themselves on state-of-the-art vampiric technology,drawing off from the American pimples [crack giggle] so-called "energy units"! . His hair stands up and crackles, and he gives the American people a finger "I got mine, fuck you!  It's every crumb for himself.

Well, I hesitated to read this piece because..not wishing to identify myself with the subject but, I nominate for the most flatly disgusting passages in recent fiction - a typical interview between the young Intelligence operative and The Chief:
"When Peter walked into the office, The Chief smiled. Agents have been known to get frostbite from The Chief's smile. "Having trouble with the Jew boy?" "He's a bit stand-off-ish", said Peter noncommittally. "Sure he is. We'll treat a kike like a high-class Jew and a high-class Jew like a kike  - and he will come right back moaning for more.  Come on, right out with it, "You want to know a nice gentile Country Club? Well, we like nice Jews with atom bombs and Jew jokes". Ah, Peter could see the Chief as some cold-eyed old exterminator  deciding on the bait to poison a warehouse full of rats... a little molasses, a little tinned salmon, plenty of arsenic. Peter knew he was in the presence of greatness. He squirmed with the schmaltz and then broke out fulsomely,  "I'm just beginning to realize what a cold-hearted bastard you are!" The Chief was pleased. He couldn't help squirming a little but his voice was cool. "Well, that's one way of looking at it. I call it "Staying on top of an op"". "The casualties could run into the millions", "The billions, Peter, the billions", The Chief spread his hands and smiled."Outsiders, none of our people will be touched.
Operation Bunker." - "How long?""Long enough for things to cool down. Then we emerge like the Phoenix, (without of course the inconvenience of being burned) . "Just drop him a few hints. Room in the bunker for the right kind of Jew. You know what I mean.... white Jews. None of that Galacian trash. Now they tell me Portuguese Jews are the best kind like Portuguese oysters." Peter squirmed deliciously, this was true greatness. You can't fake the real thing. "You are a cold-hearted bastard! ", he ejaculated. White-out and back. "He's coming around, Chief, just like you said he would." Suddenly, out of a clear sky (he) says "it's the kikes in our race that give us a bad name"" Any trouble with the cracker, boy?" "Not a peep I gave him the old white schmaltz, right down the line, like you told me: "What are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes. Why don't you come over here where you belong and act like a white man, huh? - Always a place in the Bunker for the right kind of darky, you know". "He swallowed that did he? I thought he would. Believe me. He's in the American Dream, like all niggers…well, as one menstruating cunt said to another, "I guess it's in the rag, Mary"". The chief smiled slow and dirty."

It is Colonel Bradfield's job to investigate the practical potentials of ESP, sorcery, witchcraft, the lot He doesn't give a shit for natural laws, what is and isn't possible. All he cares about are results. "Bring me the ones who work""What you bring this old beast in here for?" A withered old man dressed only in a loin cloth, stiff with yellow piss-stains, stinking like a  snake cave in spring sits down in a leather armchair. Fumigating the chair will be inadequate the Colonel decides. "He's a natural Chief, he can throw an operative curse"." I don't doubt it, he can kill by proximity. "He's got a good track record, Chief", "Sure, Sure". And eighty years in the making. So how did he get that way? To be a magician you got to be inhuman in some way. Easiest thing is to eat your own shit and eat it steady. You eat it in and shit it out and eat it in again, it gets eviler and dirtier, a stink nobody can smell and live. But who am I to be critical? Trouble is it just isn't practical""But Chief, no trays,nowhere to put trays for us" "The Hell there isn't. You think the Ivens aren't into this shit, up to the ass?  You can..they can.. make up the evidence. We all do it and no one can trace it. Big deal! eighty shit-eating years!. to turn out one old human centipede (who) can throw a curse if you hold him steady on target. I can train an agent in hours with untraceable poisons and toxins, electronic devices to produce arhythmic heartbeats.""He died in his sleep dreaming about a beautiful deadly woman and all he wanted to do was die in her arms". See what I mean? We don't need it". "But, Chief, we can't just throw away a thing like this?""Indeed, where can we throw it? It's radioactive, get it out of here, for starters, and take the chair out with it. Thank you."      

I've been reading a lot of these doctor books lately (and) my Doctor Benway really shines forth as a model of responsibility and competence by comparison!  Perhaps the most distasteful book of this genre is called A Pride of Healers. It needs to be remembered there's a  pathology of who decides if a patient's got cancer or don't got it. The doctors open her up and anything suspicious they send a hunk down to pathology and then they stand around, twiddle their scalpals and wait for the green light - its malignant boys, let's go . So in this pride of prowling healers the runty, ugly, half-impotent pathologist finds a big surgeon humping his old lady. So he carefully frames the adulterous surgeon for a prostate cancer, falsifying the results and everybody knows there is only one answer to that. The surgeon is castrated and his nuts sent down to Pathology. Holding the nuts of his enemy in his hand gets him aroused and he surprises his wife by a real pimp fuck. She's got another surprise from him - as she comes, he shoves the severed nuts down her throat. As the Germans say, unappetitlich, unappetizing.

Well most of them aren't as lurid as that, just ordinary, no-good, greedy, callous, bigoted humans, with a grossly inflated self-image.  
Here is my sense from final diagnosis:  Attractive, red-haired, empty as an empty waiting-room. Well, how can anyone believe in God or ESP or anything like that, in the face of these vast medical complexes, monuments to progress and science and rationality and healing?

This wretched specemin has fallen for a nineteen-year-old nurse. He fucked her in a broom-closet that reeked of Mr Clean. He has proposed. She has accepted. Then she comes down with a bone cancer. They have to take off her left legs. Her left leg, stat, scalpels off,  it hasn't spread. Does he still want her? She tells him to take five days and think it over. He does. With bleak clarity he sees the years to come. Oh yes, he can see where his own intterests are involved. He is striding towards surgery. "It takes guts to practice surgery he says (it sure does, what would we do without them?) Striding toward surgery, tho' the patient is clearly terminal (he would operate on a mummy) and she's scrambling along on her prosthetic.  "Will you shake the lead out?""I'm doing the best I can, darling", "Why don't you go back to your crutches, he thinks, irritably. Aloud he says, "Why don't you jet-propel on your stinking farts?" - Admittedly his words were somewhat unkind. But cancer does stink. . Of course it's not her fault that she's in this loathsome condition, or is it?  His mother always said: "Son, in this life, everybody gets exactly what they want and exactly what they deserve". People who think they are getting what they deserve tend to believe it.

Another flash - 'Incongrously, Mike thinks of an old joke. The eternally travelling salesman protaganist of the eternal dirty joke. Salesman spots an attractive woman in the club car.As fate would have it, she is in the lower berth just opposite his upper birth. And he is eye-balling her. She pops out a glass eye. She takes off her wig. She spits out her false teeth. She unhooks her wooden legs, looks up at him pertly and says,  "Anything you want?""You know what I want. Take it off and throw it up here." He starts laughing. She demands why and finally he tells her. She hits him with her prosthetic, requiring five stitches. "Look, darling, I've been thinking it over, and.." She throws an ashtray at him."

The Medical Riots of 1999. It is estimated that ten thousand doctors, medical bureaucrats, directors of pharmaceutical companies, were massacred in the week of the Long Scalpels. The killings were not by any means random. The rioters had lists:  "There's the bastard that let me pass a kidney stone in the emergency room." It stacked up and up. Unnecessary operations, patients dying in the emergency room. "We cannot accept medical admissions from emergency". Ambulance calls disregarded. "I can't send an ambulance unless I know what's wrong with her", "She's having a HEART-ATTACK!" "I can't send an ambulance unless I know what's wrong with her". SHE'S HAVING A CORONARY!" "I can't send an ambulance...". Potentially beneficial and harmless products kept off the market... lethal products kept on the market. A recent example is the.. are the.. so-called non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs for arthritis. Don't ever let any doctor talk you into using them. I took one pill (and) I've never been as sick in my life. In England, eight people died of liver failure caused by this shit and still they won't withdraw it - just change the trade-name.
I saw a tv show where the company representative, the lies just oozing and slithering out of him, tried to tell a woman her hepatitis must have come from some other cause. "I know it was that medicine", and I know a nurse who got hepatitis from this stuff. 
Well, it was a Burn Unit walk-out that set off the riots. I have this from nurses who have worked in burn units - absolutely no morphine or  other pain-killers are ordered for the patients, otherwise there could be a danger of addiction for patients who may be in treatment for months. Even the dying are denied morphine if they have the misfortune to die in the Burn Unit. "But, doctor", my nurse-informant protests, "the patient will be dead in twelve hours". "Don't you think I know that? This is the Burn Unit and we are under Burn Unit rules. These hands are securely tied  by two-hundred-thousand-a-year. Every day Burn Unit patients have the raw cavaties scrubbed out with a stiff brush to clear away dead skin and flesh. The patients scream with agony and very few nurses can take it. Well, a team of amateur astronauts who call themselves the Spacers landed in the Burn Unit when their home-made space rocket exploded. After the first scrub-out, they issued an ultimatum - "Morphine every four hours as long as we need it or we walk out". "What is this nonsense, there will be no more morphine and you are not going anywhere"."Meet my brother the lawyer, doctor". "Do you propose to hold these people against their will?""It's for their own good. If they leave the hospital they will be dead in a few days from infections". They set up a private clinic in a loft . Clashes with police raiders searching for narcotics, three patients shot to death, the walk-out spread like atoppling forest-fire - "MORPHINE OR WALK!""MOW! MOW! MOW!" The doctors paw the ground uneasily, like cattle smelling danger. In seventeenth-century London everybody got fed up to the mouth with the lawyers and the cry went up "Kill all the bloody lawyers!"  Whereupon even the most elderly or infirm scrambled off with the agility of rats or evil spirits. Hampered by inflated self-image the healers did not acquit themselves as well. "What are we waiting for, a hospital bed?"" Kill all the fucking croakers!". Security steps nimbly aside andthe crowds rush in.. "Got a hotshot cutting doc here. You think he needs an operation?" - "Hell, yes, a Gut-ectomy" Paging Doctor  Doctor Streusschnitt  (that's Sloppy-cut). Enter Doctor Streuschnitt, accompanied by his scapel-bearers carrying two-foot knives and saws. "You is filled up with unnecessitated parts, two kidneys?, Sure upon is a Jew. Heraus mit!.  The inner parts should not be so close in together, crowded - they need lebensraum - der Vaterland!"

[At approximately forty-three minutes in, Burroughs shifts gears] - Well,  I will turn now to the cat book - The title is The Cat Inside -  "May 4th 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion Gysin who is going to do the illustrations . In the front room, where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten" (it's a little calico cat, she had five kittens) - "I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy, I look inside and there are four kittens…"Take care of my babies. Take them with you wherever you go"" - "I'm selecting cat food at the pet shop in Dillon's (supermarket) and I meet an old woman. Seems her cats won't eat any cat food with fish in it. Well, I tell her, mine are just the opposite. They prefer their fishy foods like Salmon Dinner and Seafood Supper. "Well", she says, "they certainly are company". And what can she do for her company when there is no Dillon's and no pet shop? What can I do? I simply could not stand to see my cats hungry."

"Well, of course, there are many wild cats, some of them that could be tamed, cats that weigh only three pounds. However, they'll be fewer and fewer exotic beautiful animals. The rain forests of Borneo and South America are going...to make way for what?. At Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the Atom Bomb and couldn't wait to drop it on the evil East, the Yellow Peril, the boys are sitting on logs and rocks eating some sort of food. There is a stream at the end of a slope. The counselor was a Southerner with a politician look about him. Like many Southerners, he was a natural orator, just naturally full of bullshit. He told us stories by the camp-fire, culled from the racist garbage of the insidious Sax Rohmer" (you remember Sax Rohmer, who created The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu? Hearst Yellow Peril? - and Fu Manchu went on and on likeTarzan, you thought he was dead and then he'd pop up again. He also wrote books about evil Egyptians, The Green Eyes of Bast, (and) the unspeakable Bazarada,  "who was told that he looked more like a beautiful evil woman than a man, up to his crotch in unspeakable rites and depraved practices and secrets so foul no decent man may learn them and live. Basic postulate - East is cruel, depraved, devious and immoral, anti-Christ, anti-American, and, in a word, evil. West is humane, decent, wholesome, straightforward, moral, sincere, and god-fearing - in a word, good. Good for what exactly?) -  "Suddenly a badger erupts among the boys - don't know why he did it just playful, friendly and inexperienced, like the Indians who brought fruit down to the Spanish and got their hands cut off. So the counselor rushes for his saddlebag and gets out his1912 Colt 45 auto and starts blasting at the badger, missing him with every shot from six feet. Finally, he pus his gun three inches from the badger's side and shoots. This time the badger rolls down a slope into the stream. I can see the stricken animal, the sad, shrinking face, rolling down the slope, bleeding, dying. "You see an animal and you kill it, don't you. It might have bitten one of the boys""



"This book [The Cat Inside] is about inter-species contact, not interspecies communication. There is a basic difference between communication and contact. Communication is designed to avoid contact, maintain a distance across which communication can take place. Contact involves identification with the creature you contact,  and this can be very painful. Communication can be forced. Contact cannot. You cannot force anyone to feel. This cat book recounts my own experiences with inter-species contact. You know when it happens. It can't be faked. And, in this case, of course, contacting the badger is very painful indeed - he just wanted to romp and play and got shot with a 45 -  Identify with that. Feel that. Contact that.

I  don't know how many of you saw the tv short on Bigfoot - "Tracks and sightings in the Norhtwest mountain areas. Interviews with local inhabitants. Here is a three-hundred-pound female slob:  "What in your opinion should be done about these creatures if they exist ?" A dark shadow crosses her ugly face and her eyes shine with conviction "Kill them! They might hurt somebody"" -  "A specemin of homo-sapiens green, with a longer-range rifle with telescopic sights, close-cropped beard, trying to look like an adventurer and looking like a marginal freelance journalist who writes for survival. He is quite sure Big Feet are out there in those hills and proposes to kill a specemin. If I lived in the area I would be more worried about this jerk with his rifle than about Bigfoot. But I suspect Bigfoot to be a fake like the Barnum & Bailey Unicorn. Well, a camera team just happens on Bigfoot with their cameras all set up and ready to go - Lights! Action! Camera! - There he is about a hundred yards away, walking with a strange slow gait, taking six feet in a stride, like a moonwalk. Scientific stride experts say this is not a human stride. Well, certainly not at twenty-four-frames-per-second. I suspect it to be a man in a gorilla suit projected in slow-motion." 

'When I was four year old I saw a vision in Forest Park, St Louis. My brother was ahead of me with an air rifle, I was lagging behind and I saw a little green reindeer about the size of a cat. Clear and precise in the late afternoon sunlight as if seen through a telescope." - Well, can those images,those visions, be photographed? Certainly, anything that can be seen can be photographed. And anything that can be photographed can be faked. "The magical medium is being bulldozed away. No more green reindeer in Forest Park, angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere. The medium in which Unicorns, Bigfoot, Green Deer exist, always thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breathe in them, as the forests fall to make way for motels and Hiltons, the whole magical universe is dying."

"Well, life such as it is, goes on. Dillon's is  still open. I am the cat who walks alone. To me all super-markets are alike."

This is the end - "We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place. Walk alone for us" -  Thank you  [Burroughs acknowledges enthusiastic applause - and offers an encore] - 

Well, "Political Program"– "Every man a god. And how can this be accomplished? Well, to put it country-simple, by doing your job and doing it well - because there are many gods – a god of whores and thieves and pushers, a god of cheaters and plagues who rides on a whispering south wind, god of the long chance the horse that comes from last to win, the punch-drunk fighter who comes off the floor to win by a knockout, a god of anti-heros and outrage, the ships captain who put on women’s clothes and rushed into the first life-boat,the pilot who bailed out of a burning plane leaving his passengers to crash, a god of  future space-travellers who are ready to leave the whole human context behind and take a step into the unknown. Every man a god, that is, if he can qualify. You can’t be a god of anything unless you can do it."

[The reading ends at approximately fifty-four-and-a-half minutes in. Anne Waldman announces that audio tapes of the reading are available (at five dollars (sic)!) and more announcements are made ("a lot of very interesting poetry activity" at Naropa, not forgetting an upcoming visit by Eido Roshi, Zen master]

[At approximately fifty-six-and-a-half minutes in, the tape continues with Burroughs reading several further sections from The Cat Inside] 

 “An English cat-hater of the upper classes (he became a Lord in the course time so I hear), well this limey sunovabitch  confided to me that he had trained a dog to break a cat's back with one shake. And I remember he caught sight of a cat at a party and snarled out through the long yellow horse teeth that crowded out of his mouth, "Nasty stinking little beast!" Well I didn't know anything about cats at the time. Now I would get up from my chair and say,"Pawdon me, old thing, if I toddle along, but there's a nasty stinking big beast here.

" I will take this occasion to denounce the vile English practice of riding to hounds. So the sodden huntsman can watch a beautiful delicate fox torn to pieces by their stinking dogs. Heartened by this loutish spectacle, they repair to the manor house to get drunker than they already are. No better than their filthy, fawning, shit-eating, carrion-rolling, baby-killing beasts."

" Warning to all young couples who are expecting a blessed event - get rid of that family dog! - "What! Our Fluffy harm a child? Why, that's ridiculous" Long may your child live to think so, little mother... fondly dandling their child and drooling baby-talk when Fluffy, in a jealous rage, rushes on the baby, bites through its skull and kills it." - (that's an actual case, and there are many, I read one quite recent one - "Jealousy Caused Dog to Kill My Child",  a small dog too, it was a Scottish terrier.) - "Dogs are the only animals other than Man with a knowledge of right and wrong. So Fluffy knows what to expect when he is dragged whimpering from under the bed where he cowers. He realizes the full extent of his trespass. No other animal would make the connection . Dogs are the only self-righteous animal."

And another horrible practice - walking to hogs - Hear Clem and Cash, down in the Everglades of Florida get their jollies killing wild hogs with knives "Jump on the hog's back and cut its throat" But they couldn't indulge their loutish pastime without a pack of thirty yipping, yelping hounds to distract and immobilize the pigs. When your hounds stand and bay at pigs, you got to get there fast because a hog's tusk can open up a dog like a surgeon's scapal. And sometimes you arrive too late. It brings tears to the eye to see a courageous dog half gutted-out, coming back for more. To whose eyes does this bring tears, you bestial redneck. Pigs out there minding their own business, living on roots and berries, and out-charges Clem and Cashand their horrible hounds.

I have eulogized the fennec fox, a creature so delicate and timorous in the wild state that he dies of fright if touched by human hands . The red fox, the silver fox, the bat-eared fox of Africa...all beautiful animals. Wolves and coyotes in the wild condition are quite acceptable. What went so hideously wrong with the domstic dog? Man molded the domestic dog in his own worst image...self-righteous as a lynch-mob, servile and vicious, complete with the vilestcoprophagic perversions... and what other animal tries to fuck your leg?" 

"I am not a dog-hater. I do hate what man has made of his best friend. The snarl of a panther is certainly more dangerous than the snarl of a dog, but it isn't ugly, because a cat's rage is his own, beautiful, all its hair standing up and crackling with blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering .(But a) Dog's snarl is ugly, a redneck lynch-mob Paki-basher snarl, the snarl of somebody who's got a "Kill A Queer For Christ" sticker on his heap, a self-righteous occupied snarl. When you see that snarl, you are looking at something that has no face of its own. A dog's rage is not his. It's dictated by his trainer. And the lynch-mob is dictated by their horrible conditioning.

Cats were held in veneration by the ancient Egyptians. To harm a cat was a capital crime.

Here's a newspaper article - a man in Warwick, Rhode Island was fined $200 for killing a stray cat in his microwave (a case that screams for Egyptian justice).

Dogs, of course, started as sentinels, and that's still their chief function in farm and village to give notice of approach , as hunters and guards, and that is why they hate cats. "Look at the services we provide and all cats do is loll around and purr.. it takes a cat half an hour to kill a mouse. All cats do is purr and alienate the Masters' affection from my honest shit-eating face." The cat does not offer for its services, the cat offers itself .Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy those for nothing. Like all pure creatures cats are practical.."   

Meditation and Poetics - 57 (Some Mahayana Ground)

March 4, 2015, 3:00 am

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[Prajnaparamitra Sutra (Heart Sutra) via Shunryu Suzuki] 

AG: Okay, the Bodhisattva Vows and the PrajnaparamitaSutra or statement are the basis for ZenBuddhism, which is Mahayana, and Tibetan Buddhism, which is Mahayana. (The Prajnaparamita Sutra) probably should be understood both as a piece of poetic literature, which it is, and also a general philosophy, and also a basis to understand this area of poetic mind. It’s the Prajnaparamita or Highest Perfect Wisdom, no less – highest perfect wisdom. Does anybody else have the chutzpah? Yeah, it’s actually an insight akin to much poetic insight that you’ll run into in the Romantic and modern poets.

It runs approximately as follows. It’s generally chanted monosyllabically in Zen temples in the morning (or before meditation) in a style something like [Allen begins to chant the sutra] – “Kan-Ji Zai Bo Satsu Gyo Jin Han Nya Ha Ra Mit Ta Ji Sho Ken Go Un Kai Ku Do Isai Ku Yaku Sha Ri Shi Shiki Fu I Shiki Shiki Soku Ze Ku Ku Soku Ze Shiki Ju So Gyo Shiki Yaku..”– I forgot. Something like that. But you get that monosyllabic chanting, (in) both Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and, originally, somewhat like that (in) Sanskrit, or Pali. 

The English translation by Suzuki Roshi of the San Francisco Soto Zen Center is sort of telegraph-ese monosyllabic and is pretty coherent, and there is an excellent translationdone byFrancesca FremantleandChogyam Trungpa (Rinpoche), which is chanted in the Dorje Dzong upstairs meditation room every day. Suzuki Roshi’s version is something like – “Avalokitesvara bodhisattva” (“bodhisattva”, (as) you know, is someone who has taken the vows of the bodhisattva, the four vows, “Avalokitesvara is that aspect of wakened mind which is down-glancing compassion, the aspect of empathetic compassion, glancing downward from some watchful height. “Down-glancing space-warrior, down-glancing space-enterer” or “Avalokitesvara bodhisattva” practiced highest perfect wisdom meditation..” (which is what we were for ten minutes, just paying attention to breath or empty mind) “..practiced highest perfect wisdom meditation when he perceived the five heaps of appearances all empty”..”(it) relieved every suffering, (the) five skandhas,five heaps of appearance

(It’s another matter we’ll go into if you ever want – just say, “the heaps of appearance all empty”). When he perceived the heaps of appearances empty, it relieved every suffering. Sariputra ((a) student, who was enquiring),  (realized) Form is no different than emptiness, Emptiness is no different than form. Form is the emptiness. Emptiness is the form. “Sensation, feeling, form, feeling…” – let’s see now, “form, feelings, reactions” – well, see, there are several different translations, so I’m trying to make an approximation now. So, “Form, feeling reaction, solidification of feeling reaction, habit reaction, and continuation of consciousness are all like this – empty, Sariputra, this is the original nature of everything – not born, not annihilated, not tainted, not pure, does not increase, does not decrease. Therefore, in emptiness, no form, no feeling, no sensation habit, no fixation (of) thought, no continuity of consciousness. Sariputra, this is the original character of everything – no form, no feeling, no sensation, no consciousness. No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of touch. no eye, no world of eyes until we come along these categories of no world of consciousness. No ignorance also, no combat against ignorance. No suffering, no cause of suffering. No nirvana. No path, no wisdom. Also attainment, because no attainment. Every Buddha depends upon highest perfect wisdom, because mind is no obstacle. Because of no obstacle, fear doesn’t exist. Therefore attain complete perfect enlightenment”. 

In other words, by total disillusionment from grasping to attainment, and solidification and fixation, therefore attain enlightenment. Therefore, he, down-glancing, compassionate enterer into space, proclaims highest  perfect wisdom mantra and proclaimed mantra says – “Gone gone”, or “gone”, or “gone out” – “all gone out wake space so AH!” – or “Gate gate” – (“Gah-tay, gah-um"– same Indo-European language root – “gone”) – “Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha!” – “bodhi s0-ha” – gone, gone, para-gone – parapsychology (over-gone, or gone) – “parasamgate”- summa para, summa gate, gone over the top, or top gone, or something,  “bodhi” (wakened space – actually, wakened mind, or mind wakened into wakened space) – “so-ha” (or “so Ah!”, “svaha” – (salutation) – which is very similar to..what we’re (going to) get into (next) – which is (Walt) Whitman.  Enough theory. But I just wanted to establish some Mahayana ground to get into.

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-nine-and-a-quarter minutes in] 


[Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders deliver the Prajnaparamita Sutra at the funeral service for Carl Solomon]

Théâtre de Poche - (AG on Stage Nudity)

March 5, 2015, 3:00 am

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Roger Domani founded the politically engaged Théâtre de Poche in Brussels (Belgium) in 1951. Allen was on hand in 1976 for the  25-year celebration. The Théâtre de Poche had famously produced a stage adaptation of his Kaddish in 1967 

                                          [Stage Nudity - The Living Theatre - Paradise Now, 1967]

Allen is seen (and heard) here chanting - "AH" - and making the following declaration: 

What seems strange and shocking perhaps in 1945 or (19)55 seems usable, workable now as, for instance, a few years ago, twenty years ago, we all had the dream of people naked on stage, or perhaps orgasm on stage. We haven’t seen orgasm here but we have seen people naked on stage acting love, and that was something that was unthinkable, perhaps, for the general public, or even for an artistic public, twenty years ago, so there’s been..it’s perhaps taken several generations to do that but that’s one idea that finally comes out and emerges in public and becomes accepted and delightful to the public

                                                      [Daniel Ratcliffe in Equus, 2007] 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 211

March 6, 2015, 3:00 am

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Legendary film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre, Dune etc), recalls his meeting with Allen Ginsberg (he speaks in Spanish with Italian translation) - An English translation of Jodorowsky's comments follows here:  

AJ: "I see Allen Ginsberg arriving [in Paris] in winter with a small t-shirt, ripped jeans, wearing espadrilles and with mad hair and no luggage - nothing! - He was staring, like this  [Jodorowsky imitates Allen looking around, searching] - "Hey, I know you..you're Allen Ginsberg" - "Yes" - "What are you up to?" - [Allen] - "The thing is Fidel Castro invited me to Cuba. Well, I thought he liked poetry, and I did this interview on the Official radio, and I mentioned that I'd  dreamt that I was making love with Che Guevara, so…they put me on a plane immediately and they kicked me out!…So here I am..I'm here.". I realized he must be cold and hungry so I asked him, "What can I do for you?". "Help me find an Angel", he replied. I understood, so I took him to La Reine Blanche, a homosexual cafe, ok?. The cafe was empty and I asked someone where the customers were. (Ginsberg didn't speak (adequate) French at the time). "They are one block away from here at Le Fiacre Bar (the Carriage Bar)", he answered. I mentioned this to Ginsberg, and, still without eating or being cold, he dragged me to this bar. There were three floors at this place, packed with people..like nowadays, men of all ages and all types, touching each other..hugging each other, the staircases were so full. He wanted to go to the top floor..to heaven..to heaven..to the top floor! - I helped him make his way through the crowd (men touched me everywhere) and we got to the top floor, there..next to the window was a blind guy with polarized sunglasses..blind. Ginsberg said, "The Angel!" - He approached him [Jodorowsky to his Italian translator - "I don't want to seduce you, ok?] and whispered into his ear..poems..poems into his ears. The blind guy fell into his arms and I left them, never saw Allen after that. So I left the bar, I got out of there (they almost ripped my pants, but I got out!). So, twenty years went by and I found him again, in a train, in San Francisco, in a tram. He was sitting playing a tiny piano (harmonium?) and chanting Hindu mantra from the top of his lungs. He did it for several stops..blocks..and nobody seemed to be bothered by it."Why?", I asked the guy who sold tickets. "Everyone knows him", he said, "Everyday..at the same time, he goes around chanting mantra to purify the city". I was so moved. This guy went from looking for love to becoming a therapist..singing to a city to purify it! - So I got close to him and asked him. "Do you recognize me? It's me, the one that got you "The Angel" - "Ahhh", he said, "I'm going to ask you something,.. at this very moment, what is the most beautiful thing in the world?". I did not know what to answer..Now I can answer that question but couldn't at that time. Allen took a round mirror and placed it in front of my face and said, "The most beautiful thing in the world is that you are sitting at this very moment in a tram..talking to yourself". What a beauty, right?"     

et en français - see his introduction here to Gilles Farcet's Allen Ginsberg - Poète et bodhisattva Beat (Allen Ginsberg - Poet and Beat Bodhisattva) 

More Jodorowsky and Ginsberg - Ginsberg's text, his LSD poem ("Lysergic Acid"), was utilized in Jodrowsky-Arrabel-Torpor (Panic Movement)(Mouvement panique)'s groundbreaking 1965 "Happening" - Melodrama Sacramental  

(Documentation of that can be seen here - Allen's reading (on the soundtrack) begins approximately five minutes in)

and Allen's curious devotion/surprising offer to Raquel, Jodorowsky's sister. Read more about that (in an earlier posting) here 

Breaking news - a troubling freedom-of-speech/censorship story in the US -
A (so-far unnamed) South Windsor, Connecticut high-school teacher [update - David Olio] has been "placed on administrative leave" for directing students to read what school officials are calling a "highly inappropriate poem". The poem in question? - Allen's notorious sexually-explicit "Please Master".  Hear Allen reading it, in a rare recording - here. 

For some intelligent discussion of this brouhaha see the Comments section after the account in Raw Story, Charlie Bondhus at The Good Men Project, doubtless plenty other places..  

Dangerous Minds, one of our very favorite sites, published this week a "Dangerous Minds Exclusive" - A Previously Unpublished Interview with Allen (Michael Rectenwald, an ex-Naropa student's 1994 conversation - "as they meander from politics to the drug war to Buddhism to William S Burroughs" - and more).  

A few of the highlights:

Allen: "The basic program is candor or honesty or frankness. So if it comes to sexual revolution or gay speech or gay liberation, you just be candid with what your experiences are, what your feelings are, so there are (is) a lot of clear or gay poetry, some of it quite frank".

[on drugs] - "I've always been interested in drugs. Mainly for artistic purposes, rather than for being hung-up. And so there are a number of poems either written on psychedelics or written on a little grass, and then there's a lot of political aspects to the whole drug thing because the drug thing is primarily (a) political problem rather than a medical problem. It should be a medical problem but they made it criminal and political…"

"Then there is the more important question of sexual politics. Sort of, the macho repression of the feminine in women. The unbalance in the military and civilian life in that way. And then there is the question of the ecological disaster that hyper-technology has visited on the planet, especially the military hyper-technology. The use of fossil fuels and the use of plastics, the use of chemicals as a source of energy.." 

"..Clean energy and renewal for us might be more, at this point, more reliable. Same thing as with the heavily government subsidized nuclear industry which is a huge mistake since they don't know how to get rid of the nuclear waste…"

"..so the poetry just what comes to my head. Some of it paranoia and political, some of it Eros, some of it family material, some of it realization of death, some of  it on the subject of meditation and practice, some of it on the subject of human tenderness, some of it on Buddhist and Eastern thought.."

"I think that "Father Death Blues"song is, what do you call it? -  the reference point, or the North Star for that element of quiet wisdom, tenderness and feeling. It seems to be universally accepted at poetry readings as the one poem that intersects everyone at every age (it's) very emotionally packed.."

[asked about Charles Bukowski] - "..Bukowski I didn't know very well…But I gave a reading with him, a number of years ago. About ten I think, with Gary Snyder and (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti. It was in Santa Cruz to raise money for Americans that were busted in Mexico and who were being held for ransom in Mexican jails, the corrupt system….So we did a benefit in Santa Cruz and someone made a bomb threat in the middle of the reading while I was on stage. And I was singing the blues so I started improvising that it was time to leave the hall because of the bomb threat, and since we didn't want to wind up dead we might as well get up and get out into the open air….So, it was in a sort of blues form, and Bukowski read, he had just read. And for every poem he drank a shot, so after he had read eight poems he was really out of it. Then we had a big party afterwards and he was so drunk that his pants started falling down while he was on the dance floor. But he came over to me and said, "Ginsberg, you're a good man". He was such a grumpy old man."
Michael Rectenwald: "Very grumpy and wasn't very kind to many of the Beat writers.
AG: He was to me, in person at any rate. I think earlier, before he got cured, his brothers would say, i.e. before he got much richer than me or any of the Beat writers, because he was very famous in Italy and Germany, and they made movies of his work. Before that, he was wondering why we were so popular and why he was not. And therefore he was a little bit grumpy about it. But he did meetNeal Cassady and admired him and wrote a very nice story about him."   

Jack Kerouac's birthday next week.  
Lowell Celebrates Kerouacthis weekend. 
One highlight of the event - the official dedication of the Kerouac Corner at the Pollard Memorial Library - "Come see the spot where Jack sat and read books by great classical and contemporary authors. Short talks by Bill Walsh, Roger Burnelle, David Amram and Lowell Mayor Rodney Elliott in the corner area on the first floor, followed by birthday cake on the ground-floor meeting-room" 

[from Kerouac's notebooks]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's birthday also coming up soon (he'll be 96!)
 - Last Saturday, Legends of the Bay Area - Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a major Ferlinghetti art exhibit, opened at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. It will be up through April 5th. 
Read more (and see more - Adam Grossberg's recent documentary video on Ferlinghetti) here

Some recent web essays - Matt Phillips writes on "Punk Rock in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" over at The Artifice. (We'd draw your attention to our 2011 (reposted 2014) series "Allen Ginsberg Was A Punk Rocker" -  here,here - and here)

& musings on Beats-ploitation - (We mused upon this several months ago). 
Jason Stonekingcontinues the deliberation over on Empty Mirror.
Howl merchandising - "The Howl Hat",  (courtesy of City Lights) -  "..when I wear the hat what is that I am advertising? is it Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti or their personal values? Or is it the content of the poem? or…"
- "I take the hat off, I put the hat on.."

Jack Kerouac - The Northport Tapes

March 7, 2015, 3:00 am

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Audio of Jack Kerouac is priceless and so we're very happy to feature this weekend (courtesy of Counter Culture Chronicles and the remarkable Ubu Web) - "The Northport Tapes". 

As Ubu Web notes:
"Counter Culture Chronicles has released on cassette a rare recording of Jack Kerouac at home in Northport, (Long Island), where he lived from 1958 to 1964. We hear Kerouac reading from his work while getting drunk and occasionally singing along with Frank Sinatra records that are being played in the background. Kerouac is clearly having a good time and takes the listener on a lucid deconstructionist trip, in which American popular culture is turned upside down and inside out. The recording covers the full ninety minutes the material. Have a seat and get filled to the brim with Kerouac's intoxicated mind. You won't get up again." 

Side A of "The Northport Tapes" can be heard here

& Side B can be heard here  

Jack's Last Call - Say Goodbye to Kerouacwritten by Patrick Fenton and directed by Sue Zizza, with music by David Amram, a dramatization based on these tapes may be listened to here. 

George  Wallace's account of Jack Kerouac in Northport, in Polaritymagazine, can be read here  - and his video - a tour of Kerouac's Northport -  can be viewed here
(Fenton's tour of Kerouac's Queens, incidentally can be accessed here) 

Here's further background (from Christopher Twarowski  & Spencer Rumsey) in the local paper - Jack Kerouac - The Long Island Years

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Meditation and Poetics - 58 - (Whitman 1)

March 9, 2015, 3:00 am

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AG:  So to Walt Whitman  - “When I Read The Book” – so this is some statement of his opening.. (I’m reading from Whitman now, from the Modern Library (edition) of Leaves of Grass, page (twenty) eight – “When I read the book, the biography famous/ And is this, then, (said I), what the author calls a man’s life?/ And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?/ (As if any man really knew aught of my life;/ Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life;/Only a few hints – a few diffused, faint clues and indirections,/I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.) 

Well, now, I’m choosing this as a little progression from (William Carlos) Williams’ clear seeing detail. He’s working with ordinary mind, also, Whitman. He’s willing to accept he doesn’t know anything about his own life – that emptiness. That’s his version of sunyata – in relation to his own ego, his own nature, his own solidification, and yet, at the same time, what can you work with but the few hints, few solid thoughts, few direct perceptions. So he’s starting, beginning where I am, with the unborn, so to speak, with the unborn mystery of my own life (unborn, in the sense that you can’t trace its roots, not that it isn’t there, just that you don’t know where it began – like the universe).

“Only a few hints – a few diffused, faint clues..” – So it’s like Williams saying, “I’m settling for the raw material. No, I’m not interested in the finished product . It’s only in “isolate flecks” that something is given off” – some little flashes of perception, some few moments of direct clarity - (being) willing to work with those moments, without bullshit. Then, the moments of non-aggressive, non-bullshit, non-assertive, direct, clear seeing. So that’s, in a sense, Whitman’s ambition

And then, somewhat like the imperturbable nature of mind observing its own projections but never entangled in them,, if you have the advantage of meditative practice – these (are) among Whitman’s salutations to the reader and introductions to the reader toward his state of mind – “Me Imperturbe” – (I-M-P-E-R-T-U-R-B-E, or “Me Imperturb” - but I imagine it’s some Europeanism – “Me Imperturbe” (Mee Impurturbee)  - “Me Imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature/ Master of all, or mistress of all – aplomb in the midst of irrational things,/ Imbued as they – passive , receptive, silent as they/ Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought/ Me toward the Mexican Sea or in the Mannahatta, or the Tennessee, or far north or inland,/ A river man, or a man of the woods,or of any farm-life in These States, or of the coast, or the lakes, or Kanada”  - [K-A-N-A-D-A] – “Me,  wherever life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies !/ O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.” – Well, he’s pointing to a quality of imperturbable mind, or imperturbable self-nature, which, by now, in this course, or some course, I hope we have begun to develop as part of our own mind, part of our own open nature. So that’s somewhat, you might say, the Mahayana core of the fellow.

And then for a bodhisattva statement, the famous one – “Poets To Come” – “Poets to come!, orators, singers, musicians to come!/ Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am for/But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known/ Arouse! Arouse – for you must justify me – you must answer./ I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,/ I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back into the darkness/ I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you/ and then averts his face,/ Leaving it to you to prove and define it/ Expecting the main things from you.”

So that’s precisely what we’re about right at this moment – (in the position) of approving and defining” his hints, scientifically, and with a full experience of a hundred years of apocalyptic history, examining the nature of his tolerance, mellowness, open mind, negative capability, empathy and spaciousness, - where it comes from, how we can attain it, how is it characteristic of all poetry? and how it's a characteristic of  human mind - using, in this case, the definitions of meditation. 

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately fifty-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately fifty-five-and-three-quarter minutes in] 

Meditation and Poetics - 59 (Whitman 2)

March 10, 2015, 3:00 am

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[Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850)]

AG: So (to) get right into “Song of Myself”, and I’ll do as much of it as we can (in an hour) So he [Walt Whitman] begins -  as we had in (William Carlos) Williams  [in “Danse Russe’] - “Who shall say I’m not the happy genius of my household”, (which was really an extension of  a kind of Whitmanic empathy) . So on that common ground, Whitman begins, “I...” -  (this is page twenty-three of the Modern Library version, or whatever page you have of whatever Whitman you got) - ”Song of Myself” – “I celebrate... -  I celebrate - what? Well, he doesn’t know what to celebrate. It’s all too slippery, so the only thing he can rely on is his own nature (which is somewhat like the theory of Objectivism that I was talking about – that those elements of our own consciousness that we observe objectively are like the furniture around the room, are some solid objects which can be celebrated or dealt with in poetry), and he’s sufficiently..  See, there’s always that little ambiguity in Whitman - Is this self a solidification of ego? - or is this self some kind of porous balloon-like empty cloudy thing that, actually, is (something) he’s wittily aware of as a sort of general idea or a notion ?  - Or is it some universal self that everybody partakes in (is he pointing out to some big LSD great mind?) or, what is he pointing out to? what is the self? So he’s going to determine, he’s going to examine it, and its going to turn out to be..,what? - I don’t know, we’ll find out. It’s a “song of my self [sic]” (which is a little tricky area to step on, into - you know - it freaked out everybody at the time) because..except, for the beginning of the tradition of (William) Wordsworth  (who, amazingly, began to write an epic just about his own mind, the progress of his own mind, instead of epic universal history or Iliad battles or Odyssean travels  or Heaven-Hell-Paradise).. Wordsworth, strangely enough, modernized poetry to begin to deal with here and now, the person and the self, in his long epic poems, “The Prelude” and “The Excursion” (I was thinking the other day, I don’t think I said that here - that really was an enormous breakthrough that Wordsworth did, because before him there was no other great poet that wrote vast epic poems about what the poet actually knew, (which was only his own self and his own world). A poet could write about book-learning and he could write about mythological experience, but rarely did a poet ever write about his own experience directly, without attempting to nobilitate it, to elevate it to mythological (status) or disguise it.  Generally… pardon me?

Student:  (What about Wordsworth's other poems?)

AG: Well there are the great.. well, all of his longer shorter poems like “..Intimations of Immortality” and “..Tintern Abbey” are about his own experience, but he also wrote long poems – “The Excursion” and “The Prelude” – long autobiographical poems, actually, sub-titled, I think, “On the Growth of the Poet’s Mind”, [editorial note - "Growth of A Poet's Mind - An Autobiography"] actually ...So that it was actually Wordsworth who made things real, in the sense of made things personal, real in the sense of direct dealing with what the poet could really know of his own life outside of..    tape ends in media res here

[Audio for the above may be heard here, starting at approximately fifty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at the end of the tape)

Meditation and Poetics - 60 (Whitman - 3)

March 11, 2015, 3:00 am

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[Walt Whitman ( 1819-1892)]

AG:  So how many here have been listening to (Chogyam) Trungpa’s lectures? How many go? He’s just entered into the Mahayana discourse (and his last lecture was on the paramitas, or excellencies of mind, that were by-products of sitting meditation. The excellencies were generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, concentration and intellect, and I’ll be rummaging through (Walt) Whitman to find examples of generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, concentration and intellect). 

Somebody at the lecture last night asked how do these schematic Mahayana Buddhist virtues differ from anybody’s Whitmanic ordinary mind generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, concentration and wisdom? What’s the difference? His answer was that the Buddhist development was based on egolessness rather than the ambition to buy off the universe by being generous, or feel good by being generous, or by getting credits for being generous (which is a nice distinction, actually. It probably applies).

What I would like to do when we’re going through Whitman is, there is this problem of ego or egolessness in Whitman, which is interesting. I started bringing it up in the end. He extended his sympathy to the farthest corner of the universe. He found himself empathizing with all sentient beings and insentient beings. To what extent was this buying off death, rather than allowing it? To what extent was he trying to create a god of himself, or of man, or of beautiful young men? – an ideal nature that would survive old age, sickness and death, and transport his spirit beyond what might be acceptable natural boundaries – which is ordinary dying. To what extent was this a battle against death? To what extent is his extension of sympathy a plastering or projection of himself onto the entire universe so that he could feel that, if he were dying, at least the universe wasn’t dying and his word, his tone, and his spirit, would survive. And to what extent was that a defect in his wildness?  To what extent did he let go of himself? To what extent was his projection of himself on the entire universe a letting go of himself and to what extent was it a reinforcement of his own truth? Actually, I think it’s mixed. But it’s interesting to read Whitman from that point of view – either as the supreme universal egotist, or as the supreme giver-up and spacious mind.

We’re on Part V of “Song of Myself”. So he begins it with an assertion of his soul – “I believe in you my soul” – (which he’ll define later, I hope ) – “I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase you/And you must not be abased to the other./ Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,/ Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best/ Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice” – 

Well, there’s some evidence there of a loosening. He says actually a loosening and a loafing, so there’s a kind of meditative attitude in that sense. The whole thing is beginning (in) the first section with “loafing”, which, in a sense, was his form of meditation. In the first part, “I loaf and invite my soul” (but he’s loafing to invite his soul, there’s still something that’s going to come from it) .So, “Loafe with me on the grass” – he repeats.

Then, the most tremendous moment in Whitman, in terms of person, in terms of Whitman’s personal family  - “I mind how we once lay such a transparent summer morning,/ How you settled your head athwart my hips and gntly turn’d over upon me,/ And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,/And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet./  Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the arguments of the earth,/ And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,/ And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,/ And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women, my sisters and lovers,/And that a kelson of the creation is love,/And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,/And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,/ And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stone, elder, mullein, and poke-weed.”

Well, it begins with a grand generalization, and ends up in poke-weed. That, I always thought, was sort of the heart of Whitman. It certainly got directly the physical homosexual heart, certainly. Apparently an epiphanous moment when somebody completely accepted him and made love to him, which I think he was probably unused to – on an open field – actually parted his shirt, kissed his heart, and held him from beard to toe – a kind of affirmation of his body and his desire (which to him probably seemed like a cosmic and universal experience), which set his complete body tingling and opened him up for the first time to a fittingness in his own desire, or a realization that his own desire was answerable (which is an experience, I guess, we’ve all had at one time or another, of achieving love that we had despaired of, or of finally getting what we desired). It’s the most epiphanous moment in Whitman, in terms of intense emotional grandeur.

What I liked about it always was that it wound up with the “elder, mullein and poke-weed”, that the cosmic or universal consciousness that was catalyzed by his love experience was manifested in his minute observation of the detail of ““elder, mullein and poke-weed”. He didn’t go off into a cadenza about the clouds, he goes off into a cadenza about the worm fence and heaped stones. So that the experience does have the characteristic of existing in a lot of dimensions besides emotional fullness. There is also direct optical perception, or perception, samatha or vipassana perception, minute detail, insight into what’s around him.    

[Audio for the above is available here, beginning at approximately thirty-seconds in
and concluding at approximately eight-and-three-quarter minutes in]   

Jack Kerouac's Birthday

March 12, 2015, 3:00 am

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               [Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) - Jack Kerouac in Orlando, Florida, 1958 - Photograph via L.A.Times]

March 12 - It's Jack Kerouac's birthday today. 93 years since his birth in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. We celebrate with some Kerouac news, and some further reading,



Editor Todd Tietchen is interviewed on the Empty Mirror site here on his newLibrary of America edition of three Kerouac novels (Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, and Big Sur) and declares: "I am editing another Kerouac volume for them, O Rich and Unbelievable Life!: UnCollected Prose Writings of Jack Kerouac, scheduled for publication in September, 2016. Some highlights of that volume (will) include I Wish I Were You, Memory Babe, the August-November 1951 VA hospital journal, and English translations of  La Nuit est Ma Femme and Sur Le Chemin (translated byJean-Christophe Cloutierof UPenn, who also discovered the manuscript of the lost Claude McKay novel)." 

Interviewer, Paul Maher Jr.'s - The Archive - Sketches on Kerouac - Assorted Ramblings Derived from the Papers of Jack Kerouac is a wonderful trove of (like he says) Kerouac-related matters.

His bibliographic note on the Kerouac Collected Poems is here
His article on the neglected "Strange Cemetery in Jamaica", and on Visions of Cody, along with other articles, are available here.

Kerouac links - here are the links from Jack Kerouac.com at the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center For The Public Humanities 
& How could we forget the Kerouac flame at The Beat Museum
not forgetting too the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics...
& The Kerouac Project of Orlando, Florida. Here's another image of Kerouac in Orlando.  Happy Birthday, in memoriam, Jack!  

    

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 212

March 13, 2015, 3:00 am

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Recently surfaced, Allen Ginsberg and the Clash - Ghetto Defendant - an extended version which originally appeared on the bootleg "Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg"

[Allen Ginsberg with Mick Jones, and withJoe Strummer, of  The Clash at Electric Lady Studios in New York, December 1981 at the recording sessions for Combat Rock - Photographs by Bob Gruen]

This coming Monday at the Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver (in conjunction with the on-going Ginsberg photos show), Nude Ghosts, a lecture by Jonathan D Katz

Yet another of Michael Limnios' extraordinary Beat-related interviews - this time Ginsberg biographer, Michael Schumacher:

Michael Limnios (Blues & Greece): What does "Beat" mean to you?
Michael Schumacher:John Clellon Holmes, the novelist and essayist and close friend of Jack Kerouac, probably gave me the best definition of "beat" I've ever heard. "Beat", he told me "is when you've sunk so low that you're willing to wager all your resources on a single number." This was what Kerouac meant when he first talked about a "Beat Generation" in a conversation he had with Holmes in 1948. Kerouac refined the definition to include "beatific" - angelic in a way. Herbert Huncke, the Times Square hustler Kerouac and Company met and befriended, meant "beat" to mean thoroughly tired and wasted. To answer your question, I suppose, "beat," to me means all of the above. 

For more of Michael's revealing interview, see here. 

[Allen Ginsberg and Michael Schumacher (via Michael Schumacher Archives/All Rights Reserved)]



Back in 2012 we featured this classic Corso-subverts-a-Ginsberg reading
- David Kirby re-visits and comments on it - here
- and Andrew Epstein comments on David Kirby's comments - here 

Great news! - our good friend Colin Still and his exemplary, not to say essential, video/production company, Optic Nerve(named in hommage to the great William Blake, incidentally) has a new web-site.  For more information on his continuing on-going energies - see here. 

Here's an example of a classic Optic Nerve video:

Carl Solomon and Jack Micheline

March 14, 2015, 3:00 am

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Carl Solomon and Jack Micheline this weekend on the Allen Ginsberg blog.  

The occasion is the 1982 Jack Kerouac Conference at Naropa
These two Beat luminaries were among many notable figures gathered in attendance.

Their reading is available (with introduction by Al Aronowitz and supplementary introductions by Allen) -  here 


[Al Aronowitz (1928-20050]

Allen Ginsberg:  (approximately eighteen minutes in) - "We have the distinguished introducer, Al Aronowitz here, who introduced me to Bob Dylan and introduced Bob Dylan to The Beatles and also introduced The Beatles to grass (this is Al Aronowitz) - as well as introducing the American public to The Beat Generation, through his series of brilliant journalistic writings in the New York Post,  and so I had originally intended to introduce Al Aronowitz to introduce Jack Micheline but I can introduce them both!"

Al Aronowitz (at the start of the tape) introducing Carl Solomon:

"Way back when when I first met Allen Ginsberg to do a series for the New York Post about the Beat Generation…(this is supposed to be in back of the speakers, we’re going to have feedback problems, I’m afraid,  here,,, no? ok )...  When I first read "Howl" there was this dedication to Carl Solomon. Carl wasn’t around at that time. I didn’t get to meet him. The dedication always… I’ve just got to tell you how I felt about it because you can  think way back to when you were kids, I can’t, about my son’s age, or younger, a friend of yours freaks out and has to go into the looney-bin. I mean, you know, think about it – I mean think about what close friends Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon were. I mean, you think about it, when you read the dedication in "Howl".

And so Carl is a seminal figure. I didn’t get to meet him until years later but he’s one of the men who inspired the Beat Generation and here he is to read some poetry."

Carl Solomon: "Well, what I’m going to read is not all poetry, because I wrote a variety of things.. The two books [Mishaps Perhaps and More Mishaps Perhaps] consist of articles and poetry and wise-cracks and god knows what. There’s “A Letter to Governor Rockefeller”, there are a number of things (in it), and it’s a quite mixed-up thing. Anyway, I... the texts were written in three places all together – in Greenwich Village, in the Bronx, and in a ward of the New York Psychiatric Institute, and to give an indication of how they were regarded by the publisher, I’ll read from the backs of both books first 
 – “Through the lost exit with that intuitive Bronx Dadaist and prose-poet to whom Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is addressed. In this book of his life, pilgrim truth speaks through straight faces" - [I don't know how that's how I see myself, but that's how they saw me anyway] - "Monsieur Solomon (Monsieur  Solomon) continues his epical battle of wits - all satanic forces of pure reason allayed against satantic legions of tiny thoughts emerging from his civilized unconscious A.D. post-Marxist mid-Sixties. Eternal banalities of wisdom language confront twentieth-century banalities of domesticated and foreign policy. Is it humorous? Is it serious? It's a substance as interesting as his Bronx, a style rare in American, as it were the evolution of French  pensées  to consider the daily news" -
This is dated June 16 1967 and signed Allen Ginsberg - Now I'll read from the books - I'm just opening it at random and reading from it, since I've lost the train of thought that was involved in the writing of it]
  

Carl Solomon reads from his two City Lights books, beginning, at approximately three-and-a-half minutes in, with "The Cat Soviet" and "My Henry Wallace Period" ["When I wrote these things I was just writing on anything I could think of, because I wasn't sure just what I should write about. My experience had been so complex and so confusing…"] - and continuing -  "As a boy, I was left completely cold by all forms of music, other than patriotic airs, and couldn't stand jazz, until I began reading the Partisan Reviewin the late (19)40's…"..."It was this interest that put me in contact with the Ginsberg-Kerouac crowd of the early (19)50's" -  "Memories of a Hammock" ("I did most of my summertime reading in (19)41 or (19)42 in a hammock…"…"away from the in-crowd and the out-crowd, and crowds in general..") - "Problems" ("Two of the most important problems facing us today are those of mental stealth and excremental health..")  - "Bon Mot" ("If you lose contact with the zeitgeist, never fear..") "On the One Hand and On The Other" ("A man's philosphy dies with him, brother…"…"Why not die babbling of starfish?") 

Approximately seven minutes in, he declares;  "Ok, I'll read something from the first book, which was.. this stuff was much earlier, and I think a bit cruder. Here's a play called "The Bughouse". It's a one-page play. Try to make something of this. I was very mixed up and confused when I wrote it, and it came out just that way" - [Carl reads his play and then continues] - "This is.. Well I used to.. we used to pick on one another all the time, and I suppose we still do, so here's a little picking on Allen Ginsberg. It's called "A Note on the Real Allen Ginsberg" - [He reads "A Note on the Real Allen Ginsberg" -  ("I feel this clown before your eyes is really a double..") - and follows it (at approximately ten-and-a-quarter minutes in) with "For Jack Kerouac" ("Some years ago, I yearned for pancakes in a place where there wasn't even toilet-paper…".."I would like to take a moment to praise this man for honesty and sharp powers of observation")]

"Well, here's an interesting piece of advice to young people. It's called "Life Is A Nightmare" ("If you don't believe that life is a nightmare, start living and see for yourself…")
"L'Etranger" (this little short thing is called ("L'Etranger") - "Stop your attempt to re-route me towards "reality", I live only because I am afraid of the infinite"… "..THE ONLY IMPORTANT THING IS YOUR HEATH"), 
"Behind the Times" ("Nobody Tells Me The Truth Anymore" is the sub-title of it") - "Well, I felt very sorry for myself then" 

"Now let's see.. when you want me to stop let me know.. - "Viva La Difference"("It must have been difficult for Chinamen and Japanese in Spain during the Civil War…"), "Utrecht"("Utrecht was a town where nobody wore neckties.."),  
"Quiz" (Do you recall Poe's poem about mental illness..")

Oh I've got something here…. I'll read you the one for Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts(it's not the "Mad Motherfucker" edition of Fuck You, but I think I later appeared in that - I'm not sure!) … I'm looking for the piece about the meeting with (Antonin) Artaud… [Solomon looks for the piece, but is not able to find it] 
Oh well, I just haven't found that, but here is something which, I think, ranks with it. This is a manifesto. This is the only part of the two books that were written in the wards of the Psychiatric Institute - with Allen's co-operation. He and I actually put this manifesto together. He helped me with it, and it was his idea, but I carried through on most of it. ("At about this time, I wrote a sort of manfesto called "Manifest" which is a most pertinent artifact.  Corsica is an island, situated off the coast of Sardinia..".."Thank you for your kind attention, signed a vehement adult")
[applause]
Al Aronowitz:  Thank you very much, Carl Solomon. I first met Carl Solomon in Washington Square Park with his mother. He had just got out. But he was limping pretty hard but he still smiled, and he's still smiling now. So let's give him a hand 
[thunderous applause]

The second half of the programme begins approximately seventeen-and-three-quarter minutes in 

          [Jack Micheline reading at the 1982 Jack Kerouac Conference at Naropa - Photograph by Mark Christal]

Jack Micheline: I really don't need an introduction (unless Allen Ginsberg wants to introduce me)

AG: Was it not arranged for Al Aronowitz to introduce also?.. he didn't want to?..ok - 
Jack Michelene is the acme American ("Beat" is one of his monikers, but minstrel - jazz, blues, shout-ing street poet). When one thinks of a Beat poet as a street poet, Jack Micheline is one of the classic.. practitioners, probably with, say, covering East and West Coast. He gave readings with Jack Kerouac in the late 'Fifties in Greenwich Village (and the famous reading's I think, where Kerouac is pictured with his arms out, in a cross-style,(on a ladder, actually), with Howard Hart and Philip Lamantia - and, in those same days, were Jack Micheline (and Hugh Romney, incidentally, who was around then, now called Wavy Gravy, who was here the other night). Kerouac liked  Jack's sound because of the wild, swinging vocal breath, that comes from American talk and American rhythms and blues rhythms and thought that Jack was one of the greatest of the white blues poets, dug his swing, and also dug his melting-pot psyche - Jewish-Italian-New York. Jack has also developed subsequently through years of activity as a late 'Fifties Greenwich Village MacDougal Street poet, where.. [to Jack Michelene] - did you meet..run intoBob Dylan in those days too?.. They hung around..let's see..Ray Bremser, I guess, would be part of the company of that time, Howard Hart
Jack Micheline: Howard Hart, Steve Tropp,Taylor Mead, a whole bunch.. 
AG: Steve Tropp, Taylor Mead.. yeah, all begun there. (Well, (Charles) Bukowski from a different year, a different time, a different geographical location. I was trying to figure who were the personnel hanging around…)
Jack Micheline: Well, it really doesn't matter, Allen. They just want to hear some poems.
AG: Well, ok, but you asked me to introduce you. So Jack (Kerouac) wrote a short preface to River of  Red Wine, Jack Micheline's first book and Micheline now lives in San Francisco and is a big painter - Jack Micheline.  

Jack Micheline reads (starting at approximately twenty-one-and-a-quarter minutes in) -  
"Well if I told you the story (of) how I got published, you guys would not believe it, but I'm not going to go into history, you guys want to hear some sounds, you people want to dance, you people want to feel good" - He leads off with "Old Howard Hart" ("It's good to see your eyes, that fine grey coming out from behind the rocks again.."…"the twinkle in his eyes, Howard Hart")

"I'm going to read one poem from River of Red Wine and when I had that book published, no-one knew me, see, by the name of Jack Micheline. What I did was I honored myself by naming myself "Jack" after Jack London and "Micheline" after my mother, (which was her maiden name). I had thought I could create my own destiny, which was a wrong.. not a wrong thing to do but, a very difficult thing, to come out with a new name when everyone knew me with another name, and I had some weird experiences. It doesn't matter what my other name was, it mattered that I had to be able to accept, if I wanted to make my own destiny, accept the consequences of my past, that's all." - At approximately twenty-six-and- a-half minutes in, Jack Micheline begins reading "Hommage to Mickey"("You were two years old, you fell out of the baby-carriage.."..."And you both cried together all night, you and your mother all night long"),  followed by (first with an introduction) - "Night City" ("I was connected in the (19)50's, in the mid 'Fifties till about 1960, there was a tremendous relationship that never happened in America before - jazz musicians, poets, painters, were mingling together in a very warm atmosphere, where they were able to interchange their knowledge w ith each other, and a great renaissance took place from that period. Well, they were really able to.. somehow.. it was great, you know, to go to Zoot Simsand to jam with Zoot Sims and that crazy guy Rene, and Bobby Jaspar on flute, andBlossom Dearie coming in, and we're all high on peyote that lasts eight hours andeverybody's having a good time (shit!, that was a great time, man, nobody was getting paid, man, we all had a ball) 0k, lets not fuck around and lets get down to it- "Night City" - What I'm about, I'm going to get down to what I'm about")  - [Micheline begins reading approximately twenty-nine minutes in] -   ("Above the sounds, dark cities lie in shadows…"black tar in the night") - "And what I think I'm about? - I'm about self-liberation. The whole reason why I create is to open myself up so that I can communicate with what I feel which is true with me and the universe, which is a huge wide place, and whenJack Kerouacput his hands out, he knew he was going to die, he knew he was like Christ, walking-dead and beat-up (and fucked-up by the p-r - what they do in America to famous men who are not equipped to handle the madness of such a crucifixion).  He touched people because he was driven by some force that was unbelievably as big as the whole universe" - ("Write clear the sound..".."Write for all so they will know your sound")" 
The reading continues at approximately thirty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in with "Hot Chicken Soup" ("Bernie..   "…"no-one enjoyed a meal better than Bernie") - 

"I want you to know that when I started out, I was like Carl Solomon, a fucked-up guy from the Bronx (no, I mean it, I came from an American family. My mother was a telephone-operator, my father was a letter-carrier. My father took me to the Polo Grounds to watch "Harry the Horse" Danning, who was a great catcher for the New York Giants. I chased girls in Harlem. I did like everyone else did in America but I never wanted to be a poet because they told me that poets were sissies. But what happens.. the weird trip about life, I end up a poet! - That doesn't mean I'm a sissy, that means, a poet is everything."

At approximately thirty-three-and-three-quarter minutes in, Jack Micheline reads "Conversations on A Degenerate Street" - ("Miss Babushka looked like a middle-aged housewife.."…"long live the degenerates").
He considers reading one recent poem and then decides against it:  "I'll read (next)  something I wrote in New York. It was recently, maybe last year when I was there for a short time..nah, I'll save that for later because it's heavy.I want to keep it loose and light and I don't want to make it too heavy, you know, because, you know, you have enough heavy shit in the world, you know, our lives are full of.. very few sweet sounds in the world and everybody don't.. we have to tap in. That's too sad. I'm throwing this one away! - I'm just feeling good."

"Okay, this is a tough one and I'll read this - "Just Two Eyes Like Poems" ("I have no friends. It is two in the morning.."…"the lemming of Saskatchewan" (sic)…"...name? who cares, he had no name, /just two eyes, like poems, dead on arrival")

Yeah, I know, (Paul) Krassner has been bugging me, man (to) read a race-track poem, you know, a story - "Tigers in the Sky" - I'll read "Tigers in the Sky" ( I haven't read that since Santa Cruz, a long time ago) - ("The night before there was a  high noon.. " ("By the way, I'd been going to the track, since the Bronx, where I was born")  

Jack Micheline concludes his reading (at approximately forty-nine-and-a-quarter minutes in with three short pieces -  "Imaginary Conversation with Jack Kerouac' - ("Waki-waki-doo, he said/"What you say, man?, he replied..")
and, "one more prose piece".. "about a time..it was a great time in America in the 'Fifties, because we used to travel quite a bit and read in many cities. I read a lot in New Orleans, St Louis, Houston, LA, San Francisco, and whatever town we could do our number in. And this is about some of the people I met on my travels - "Kenny and Ben" ("It was like it happened only yesterday…"...Magic is how sweet it is.") 
& - "alright, I'll sing, okay, I'll finish it off with "Rock Song" it's getting a little late, and I want to sing it "Rock Song'because that's always been my favorite song  ("O, the dead stalk the corridors of airports…")

Meditation and Poetics - 61 (Whitman - 4)

March 16, 2015, 4:00 am

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  [Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle circa 1869 - Photograph by M.P.Rice, Washington DC - via Ohio Wesleyan University, Bayley Collection]

Student: Allen?

AG:  Yeah

Student: Why does he [Walt Whitman]…in the line it goes, “women my sisters and lovers”… ["And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers"]

AG: I think he’s just covering himself. He covers himself throughout the book (Leaves of Grass)

He has a natural affinity towards women, actually. He had women friends and boasted that he’s had children too, that he had a jolly, boldly, sensual life in New Orleans when he was a young man. I think (Algernon Charles) Swinburne wrote him and said, “Are you gay?)  (or queer? or are you homoerotic?” - I forget the word), after reading Leaves of Grass. And he wrote back a long indignant letter, saying that Swinburne had totally misinterpreted his emotions as expressed, that it had nothing to do with material contact, that it was just all comradeship, and that he’d had a vigorous sensual life with women, and had children, illegitimate children.

But my own reading of it is that, of course, he’s enraptured with the idea of extensive sympathy, and, by its very nature, if it would cover a criminal with a bead of sweat on his mustache, it would also have to cover women, it would have to cover mules (in other words, it couldn't all be young boys, it couldn’t all be young workers glimpsed across a crowded bar, it would have to come.. because he was boasting of universal sympathy, so he has to make it good by applying it to the feminine).

There is a certain hypocrisy in it, I think. As I grow older I think there’s a certain hypocrisy in his attitude, in the sense that, given his time and place, he was still in the closet. There are a lot of declarations and realizations in his writing that he wants to write about men, and he resolved henceforth to write no poems but those of manly affections in some of the earlier poems, but to have a constant empathetic system, a consistent system of inviting his soul to cover the whole universe, he’s got to cover women, it’s logical.. Otherwise he reveals his hypocrisy (if any). So that there’s a constant effort to balance the male and the female in description. And, since he has to attend to it, he begins getting good at it, and, probably out of that ideological desire , (he) probably did, after a while, develop sympathy for women. Because it was just empty if you want to have a giant soul and be the spokesman of the giant universal one soul, which he is doing, saying that his sympathy penetrates everywhere, like William Carlos Williams’ nose, then he really does have to give a display of sympathy.

I don’t know how women read Whitman [to (female) Student] - What does it look like to you? 

Student: Are you saying that you think he’s (being hypocritical) in that statement?

AG: Well, when I use the word “hypocrisy”, I’m using it in a very gentle way - it’s alright, it’s not a crime. It’s just (that) he’s got a psychological dilemma that he’s got to cover. He’s aware of it, as we’re aware of it. He’s trying to fill it in – to fill in the gaps of his erotic sympathies. I think his descriptions of men are more vigorous and erotic than his descriptions of women. I think his descriptions of love of women are more generalized. He’s filling in the form, so to speak. When you get to the Calamus section, there are long rhapsodies over the body, and then he includes women’s bodies, alternates descriptions of men’s and women’s bodies. The descriptions of women’s bodies do look somewhat dinosauric – his words, his terminology is somewhat dinosauric  compared to his immediate and accurate homoerotic insight. You couldn’t say that he had real erotic insight into women (I would say (there's) a philosophic insight, covering the erotic).

But I wonder how it seems to women when they read Whitman. [to (female) Student] What was your impression of his empathy toward women?

Student:   I wouldn't worry about it too much but I haven’t been able to read very much of it yet

AG: Yeah. It’s an interesting thing to check out when you’re reading. I always wonder.. Yeah?

Student: I always thought (when he'd) mention women he would appreciate them

AG: I think intellectually, absolutely, philosophically, absolutely.

Student: It’s nice that he's thinking of (them).

AG: Yeah, I think he’s making the gesture!  I think he knows better  - not "better", I mean, he knows)  - but this section - is this a girl or a boy that  “I mind how once we lay a transparent summer morning./How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me/And parted the shirt..”  - and probably gave him a blow-job?

Doesn’t really matter. Ultimately, the emotion, the height or dearness of the emotion – the penetrancy and dearness of the emotion (is) equal either way. He was the first one to actually be able to display that dearness and completeness, naked and…almost nakedly (it’s slightly clothed). You’ve got to give him credit for that, I mean, an enormous breakthrough into Gay Lib (or, it’s not even Gay Lib, it’s an enormous breakthrough into the personal, into Human Lib, into Emotional Lib, into what other people were afraid to write about – either of men or women, actually). So it’s just an interesting point. Because I’m homosexual and I read Whitman and see where the lines flow and am faced with similar problems of wanting to be universal and at the same time having erotic preferences. So I notice how he goes about his business, his poetry business. It’s an interesting point. I don’t know if it’s much discussed, aside from insulting him. And there are writers, there are critics, that will insult him for being shallower in his emotions towards women than men. I think he made a very good balance, a good try. (He was) basically a good fellow. 

(Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately eight-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately fifteen minutes in] 

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Meditation and Poetics (Whitman - 5)

March 17, 2015, 3:00 am

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AG: But still, you see, he (Walt Whitman)’s saying.. this has nothing to do with men or women, (it's) beyond that. See? It’s a question of “Is he proclaiming a universal soul, (with himself as Person), and universal soul that will cover all empathy and every direction, so to speak, egolessly, where the adhesiveness is a natural emanation of any human being, latent in any human being? He’s representing “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I shall assume you shall assume”. ["I celebrate myself/And what I assumes you shall assume.."] -  So he’s saying, “This is universal”. Basically, “my feelings are universal”, he’s saying. So there’s this problem - is it that he has feelings and that’s universal? - or these specific feelings? - is one distinction. Feeling is universal, certainly, but there’s also a subtle thing he’s trying to do, (which) is (to) convince other men to love other men, too. He’s trying to open up that area of sympathy, or adhesiveness, between men, (which was necessary in his, and our, time, too). But his proper motive, his own secret motive probably, was to have a response. To open up an area, or a space, where men could respond to him – even if not in his own lifetime.  
So that, finally, you get the very great covert erotic suggestion -  “Who touches this book touches a man” (which is read by every high school boy in the nation, throughout the world)

Peter Orlovsky: Also, it was right after the Civil War. 

AG: Yeah

Peter Orlovsky: And what (when) did he write?  fifteen years later (than the) Civil War?, where the feeling of the uselessness of the Civil War - the dead bodies.. the young men bodies dying...

AG: Yeah, you’ll find that later – his appreciation and sympathy for the young wounded, and his mothering and nursing of the young wounded, which is presented as universal sympathy, and yet, there’s this... also a wash of erotic compassion.

Gregory Corso: It’s spooky, Allen, I know it man. He’s got these dying soldiers and starts sucking their dick! They didn’t do nothing! ..

AG: Kissing them.

Gregory Corso: Even when you’re dying, you’ve got a dick!

AG: ..Or worse. Or worse, at their last dying moment, bending down, and, you know, at the last moment they’re kissing this bearded face! He boasts.. How many…

So, it’s a funny thing, and yet, on the other hand, you might say that, if you looked into anybody’s heart, sure, that’s the way we are. We are all seeking our own erotic level, and so he’s just displaying his erotic level. There’s a certain disguise here but what’s universal is not the display of the erotic level, but the erotic level that is displayed, in other words, the erotic universality, the erotic sympathy  (erotic sympathy, which is universal in one form or another). And everybody’s different, actually. You couldn’t classify him as homosexual as opposed to hetrerosexual, because actually there is no such black-and-white distinction, there’s, like, a vast spectrum, in which everybody’s freaky in his own way, (I mean, everybody has his own particular fetishes or eidolons, erotic eidolons) and there are no two alike and you couldn’t really divide it just into heterosexual and homosexual.

Gregory Corso: “When I fuck a chick in the ass, I like to eat meatballs”! -  There’s nothing like that.

AG [momentarily taken aback, and responding to Gregory's outburst]: There’s a unique display - which is no more unique than Whitman’s (actually) - or anybody else’s here. 
And so, if we actually did a check-out on everybody’s private fantasies, the really private fantasies of everybody, they would be all as, if you want to call this eccentric, everybody would be as eccentric, or non-average, as Whitman. In other words, everybody would be unique, everybody would have their own sized shoe. So he’s actually speaking for the individual, with his own size cock, or shoe, or cunt, or heart...

(Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifteen minutes in  and concluding at approximately twenty minutes in] 

Meditation and Poetics (Whitman - 6)

March 18, 2015, 3:00 am

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[Walt Whitman (1819-1892)  c.187o - Photograph by Frank Pearsall- via The Library of Congress]

Actually his (Walt Whitman’s) contribution was, well, you could call it generosity. The first virtue, the first paramita – generosity – there. Absolutely totally generous with the display of his feelings. A bodhisattva, in that sense, that he completely opened up his heart and his own mind for inspection – “What I shall assume, you shall assume” 

He was the first person in American history to open himself up to make public what is private, to make public what was so completely private, to a point where, I think, the book was in his desk as a customs inspector and his boss saw it, and he got kicked out of his job, because the book was so shocking in those days, particularly this passage - [“I mind how we once lay such a transparent summer morning,/ How you settled your head athwart my hips and gntly turn’d over upon me,/ And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,/And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet./  Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the arguments of the earth,/ And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,/ And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,/ And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women, my sisters and lovers,/And that a kelson of the creation is love,/And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,/And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,/ And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stone, elder, mullein, and poke-weed.”] - Does everybody know that passage previously, that epiphanous thing? Is there anybody that had read it before? that had read it before? Is there anybody that had not read this? Well, it’s a great moment in American letters. I think this is the great self-revelation in Whitman. It’s certainly an epiphany. Yes? 

Student: (So) that would be the impetus for his illumination. See, from there, it (all) began, …but, (at) first…)

AG: Is that what it all boils down to, do you mean?

Student: Isn't that what triggered his illumination?

AG: I think so. I think it was the recognition. See, here he was, this secret lover, aching, until he was forty, in Brooklyn, working as a newsman, writing a kind of prurient novel (he wrote novels and they were temperance novels, moralistic temperance novels, for money, I think, potboilers - [Editorial note - Whitman's temperance novel, Franklin Evans - or The Inebriate, was published in 1842)] - Then, somehow, maybe this happened to him and he recognized his own feelings once and for all, and recognized the ultimate nature of them – that that was his ordinary mind, so to speak, or that was his absolute nature and he was willing to be that, finally, to step into his own skin. It wasn’t, however, until someone had given him permission, I think. His lover gave him permission by responding (which is a word that (Robert) Duncan uses often, that word “permission” – that we have our inklings, which we take to be crazy, until someone from the outside recognizes that impulse, and says,”Yeah, I feel that way too”, or you feel that way and somebody else likes it too, and opens up a space where it’s safe to express it. Here somebody had completely responded to his idealized desire, and actually made love to him, because he’s the passive acher, aching, laying out on the grass, and somebody actually made love to him. I imagine in a way that  he had never expected would happen in his life, and that must have completely blown his mind, as they say, or blown his heart (if not his genitals!), and, finding one response out (there) in the outer universe, in the outside world, (he) must have felt then, finally, (that) there was an attunement possible.  

So he says, “Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace…”  - [a relief from the anxiety of being totally alone] – “the peace and knowledge that pass all the arguments of the earth,/And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,/ And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,/ And that all the men ever born are also my brothers...” – [brothers-under-the-skin, brothers in emotion, he means – that every man born has emotions like himself, if not in the same direction and object, every man has the same vulnerability, tenderness, impossible desire].

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at twenty minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-four-and-a-half minutes in] 

Meditation and Poetics (Whitman - 7)

March 19, 2015, 3:00 am

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                                  [Walt Whitman and Bill Duckett, 1886 - Photograph - Lorenzo F Fisler] 

Gregory Corso: Al, excuse me, how did the Russians take that book (Leaves of Grass). They don’t mention his homosexuality, you know, but they..

AG: No, nor in America was that mentioned. 

Gregory Corso:  (.. did read and admire him..)

AG: Actually, see, until this year [1978], there never was any real documentation of Whitman's erotic life. There is a document published in Gay Sunshine Interviews (in Gay Sunshine magazine),which is an account by Gavin Arthur of San Francisco, the late Gavin Arthur, who had slept with Edward Carpenter.. (who was a post-Victorian, Theosophist, free-love, early Gay Lib, philosopher, (and) former tutor to the Royal Family's children in England, who had visited Whitman). So Gavin Arthur slept with Carpenter and Carpenter had slept with Whitman

Gregory Corso: He made it with the guy who slept with Whitman..

AG: Under the coverlet. Edward Carpenter explained that Whitman had blown Carpenter when Carpenter was a young man. So that was, I think, the first documentation  (which is kind of interesting, that Whitman had been able to - not hide, but - not assert his gross physical situation - if it were to be considered gross - as it was in those days). I always thought that because he couldn't assert his gross physical situation, the emotions then had to be generalized, disguised even, but generalized into comradeship, adhesiveness, empathy, sympathy, universal compassion, then he had to include women, (and) then he had to include everybody, if he was going to cover himself as a theorist…

(But) on the other hand, he's trickier than that. It isn't just a psychological ploy.And when I use terms like "cover", "closet", "psychological ploy",  I don't mean to be insulting. I'm just using common, somewhat vulgar, vocabulary for suggesting the directions that Whitman took to resolve a very complicated social problem and artistic problem and psychological problem and balance things out with a good deal of intelligence. Yeah?

Student: So, in a sense, he was writing for a gay (audience)

AG: Yeah. 

Student: (But secretly...)

AG: I don't know if he had any secret poems. He was trying to extend what was public, as far as possible. He was trying to extend the private into the public, to celebrate himself, or "self", or "Person" (with a capital "P", is his word). He intended to be a bodhisattva poet, that is, a national poet. He intended it [Leaves of Grass] to be an American bible, a bible of American emotions, a bible of the possibilities of emotion in America, or a bible of latent emotions which should be brought out forth (into the) public. He says that over and over again - that he wants to create "comrades", "camerados", or large-bodied healthy men and women. So he's trying to create, he's writing his prophecy, he's writing up his fantasy of what he wants America to be like, what he wants Person to be like, what he wants lovers to be like, what he wants the relations between men to be like, and he even bases a whole politics on that. 

[Audio for the above can be found here, beginning at approximately twenty-four-and-a-half minutes in, and concluding at approximately twenty-eight-and-a-half minutes in]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 213

March 20, 2015, 3:00 am

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Elaine de Kooning's portraits show, opening last week at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC,  includes this striking one of Allen. He was always ambivalent about it, since it showed him glasses off, eyes closed. We, however, like it. 

More consideration (a week or so later) of the recent pedagogy and poetry - teaching "Please Master" controversy - Here's Anne Cohen in the blog for the Jewish Daily Forward - "Why Shouldn't High School Kids Read Allen Ginsberg?"  
and here's "Hermenutic" on Daily Kos - "Allen Ginsberg and The Prudes of Connecticut". 
(always, interesting, in these cases, are the "Comments" section - and, incidentally, readers, how about using our "Comments" section?)

Michael Horovitz and Barry Miles' BBC Radio 4 appraisal (from December 2013), "Great Lives" (which we mentioned here) has been posted on You Tube and, in case you missed it the first time, is well worth listening to.

And on Vimeo - a new, or at least rarely seen, William Burroughs documentary (thank you Dangerous Minds for alerting us to it) - Chris Snipes'Out Town - Episode 7 - William Burroughs & Lawrence (focusing on his Lawrence, Kansas residency). Glimpses of Allen and of Marianne Faithfull,Timothy Leary, and others at the River City Reunion.James Grauerholzand other residents tell stories, Patti Smith sings to his coffin. The film may be watched in its entirety - here. 

Also noted by us in the past (but given a timely reprisal by the recipients, the Paris Review), Allen's 1966 letter regarding drugs (specifically LSD) - "..No monster vibrations, no snake universe hallucinations.." . An Italian translation of the letter has just been made by Pietro Ingallina, (to be read alongside the English original), and is available here

Just announced - for Los Angeles next month - a "60th Anniversary celebration" of "Howl"put together by the indefatigable Hal Willner (as a benefit for the David Lynch Foundation). The event takes place on April 7 at theAce Hotel and features a surprising array of performers - musicians, actors, and comedians (among them, Lucinda Williams,Courtney Love, Tim Robbins, Amy Poehler…

  































and also the breaking news - sad news - the death, at 85, in Stockholm, this past Wednesday, of  legendary music scholar, Sam Charters. We featured his Jack Kerouac talk as a three-part series back in August of last year. HisNew York Times obituary (by Larry Rohter) can be accessed here   

"I always had the feeling that there were so few of us and the work so vast..."
"For me, the writing about black music was my way of fighting racism…"
(Sam Charters to Matthew Ismail, in Blues Discovery (2011) 

Joyce Johnson, Jan Kerouac, Ray Bremser, Corso & Orlovsky at the Kerouac Conference

March 21, 2015, 3:00 am

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                        [Jan Kerouac in 1989 - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg] 

Last weekend, we featured Carl Solomon and Jack Micheline from the legendary 1982 Jack Kerouac Conference at Naropa, this weekend, another reading from that occasion, a reading dominated, perhaps, by the ever-feisty Gregory Corso, but featuring strong readings byPeter Orlovsky and Ray Bremser, and, most significantly, by two of the important women of the Beat Generation - Joyce Johnson and Jan Kerouac (Jack's daughter)

listen to this five-part group-reading -  here

The audio begins with a series of public announcements (typically, Corso is heard, indiscreetly, both on and off mic.)

Female Announcer: We've got a hot night. After the reading the Nature Theater of San Francisco presents "The End of The Fallen Poe" at 1111 Pearl Street at 11 o'clock tonight, withKush, - that will be from 11 to 11.35, and at 11.35 there'll be a showing of more Kesey films with Ken Kesey, more Frank films with Robert Frank, bus footage, 1111 Pearl Street, same place - they're going to charge you a dollar, at Naropa, 1111 Pearl Street, on the mall, they're going to charge you a dollar..doesn't matter what the name of the events, it's Frank films and Kesey films, 11.35 - Alright, here's what we need, we need someone who knows the projector room at Naropa Institute to go set up a screen and projector. If there's anybody here that can do that, meet me in the back of the auditorium as soon as I can get out of here. Okay. Jack Micheline reading tomorrow, (sic) 1 to 2 o'clock at Chem.140 with Carl Solomon. The money goes to the poets.
Gregory Corso: That's weird to hear - "The money goes to the poets?"
Announcer: (to Gregory Corso) Yeah. Do you want to do an extra reading? 
GC: If the money goes to the poets, you'd better believe it! - Jack Micheline worked that one out, that's him, man, that smart fucker.
Announcer: He worked it out well, Gregory.
GC: Excuse me?
Announcer: He worked it out well..  No smoking!
GC: No, we're going to smoke.
Announcer: You guys, no you can smoke.. 
GC: So, they're going to smoke, but just play it cool. [to Ide Hintze] - How are you doing, Ida? You expect me to pay you back that money you gave me?..I'll talk to you about it later.
Announcer: Benefit concert for Nicaragua now.. We'll do the benefit concert. There have been floods and disasters recently in Nicaragua, 70,ooo homeless, crops ruined, etc. It's a $5 benefit in the UMC ballroom - all the beer you can drink, three bands - it'll go on after this, so if you want to go over there afterwards, you've got your choice of going here or to Naropa.. repeat it again.. Cassette tapes are on sale for the Conference events at room 216 during the Conference. A list of tapes is available on the yellow paper at the door. We encourage you to order your tapes early so that they'll be ready when you leave the Conference. Don't forget to pick up your arrest tape
Noon Sunday at the Boulder Center For the Visual Arts at Arapahoe and 13th, there will be an auction of art works. Examples - photos by Robert Frank, paintings by (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Jack Michelene, sculpture by William Burroughs, and much much more. It'll be a great auction. Here comes Allen
AG: Rare works by Robert LaVigne are on sale at the UMC in the Communications Room next to the Bowery Bookstore
Announcer: (What time?) Noon. Sunday. (Is there a minimum price on the items before they (go up)? - Yes 
Okay, Bob Fine, who created the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane light shows in the 'Sixties will be performing a multi-media show with Gary Peacock,Julian Priester and Jerry Granelli, in the Boulder Theatre, August 5th at 8.30 … how much is it? - six dollars - okay.
Don't forget, we've got a picnic on Sunday and we've all got to figure out how to get there. We'll talk about it later.     

[Joyce Johnson]

I want to introduce Joyce Johnson, an old friend of Jack Kerouac's, author of a novel called Bad Connections, and Come Join The Dance - two novels. She'll read from her new book, Minor Characters, a memoir of the (19)50's - Joyce Johnson 

JJ: I'm going to read from a book about the first time I met Jack. The date was 1957. ("Hello. I'm Jack, Allen tells me you're very nice, Would you like to come to Howard Johnson's.."…."I could feel in my own warmth absolute proof of my existence")  [Joyce Johnson concludes reading at approximately sixteen-and-a-half minutes in]  
GC (to JJ): I'd just like to add to part of that history. I aways thought that I was your (boy)friend first before Kerouac.
JJ: Yes
GC: Well then how the hell did Ginsberg get into the act of introducing you to Jack. You know, he's always there introducing people to other people, you know..  but I was your (boy) friend, I was the one who introduced you to Jack, not..
JJ: No, that's not true, Gregory. It was Allen.
GC: Well, then where do I come in? I was your boyfriend, right?
Audience-Member: Why would you want to introduce..?
GC: Why would I want to introduce? Because I had once before took a girl from him, and 
so I thought, in relating, here Jack you? want to meet a girl 
JJ: "Here -  I'm your daughter!
GC: What does that mean? That's not putting down women. It's not selling off women. I'm making an introduction - and he liked her, right? [turning to JJ - isn't that what you say?] - he liked her. So I did a good shot. Who's hissing me?  Probably some dumb broad, you know, that just sticks on a..  Yeah, see what I mean? - you can't even call them a "broad" (in New York, a "broad" means an endearing term for a woman!) - Right, to get the history straight, then, [turning to Allen Ginsberg] - how did you meet her? (see, you don't even remember!)
AG : Well Columbia was Helen Elliott    
JJ: And Elise Cowen 
GC: Elise Cowen
AG: John Hollander
GC: How did I meet her?
Ray Bremser: Allen introduced you to her!
GC:  And that's the game! Alright, that's all clear, that's all.. thank you.But you shouldn't hiss me on words like "broad". See what I mean, look at that. Women don't understand, still, man (if you call them "baby", they like it). 

                                                               [Ray Bremser]

At approximately eighteen-and-a-half minutes in, the second reader begins - Ray Bremser.

RB: I'm supposed to be next? Okay. It took me a long time to decide to read something old, which my older friends probably won't like because they heard it so much. But this is a Kerouac-inspired conference here, and I would like to read this poem because it's one of the most obvious poems that.. obvious that Jack had influenced my composition and that the music of (Dizzy) Gillespie and (Charlie) Parker and (John) Coltrane was coming in the poem. It's an old one. It's called "Blues For Bonnie" ( take one - January 1960) - [Ray Bremser reads/performs "Blues For Bonnie" (concluding at approximately thirty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in)] -  "these blues broke out in a gallery "…"The dark is enough to those who would see". 

                                                               [Jan Kerouac]

The next reader up (beginning approximately thirty-three-and-a-half minutes in) is Jan Kerouac

Jan Kerouac: You can hear me?
GC: You can hear me, right?
RB: Anywhere!..

Jan Kerouac begins with two sections from her recently-compiled memoirs -  First - "The date was set and at the appointed hour, I hurried to the new address to see how things were going…"…""If you do go out, Jack, please lock up, I have to get back to work", "don't worry about it", he said, "my manuscript's in there"" - followed by "..this one other thing about when my mother had just met Jack's mother..Gabrielle Kerouac, who is French-Canadian, who was French-Canadian..they were having dinner at her house and.. (oh dear, don't tell me I lost it, ok, (no) there it is).. their conversation was about all sorts of things, and they happen to mention Allen Ginsberg's name, and it failed to escape her notice" -"You know Ginsberg?, she asked me, almost accusingly. Yes, I admitted.."
… "..."Anybody whose grandparents weren't born in the USA, he imparted reluctantly...ou Canada, she prompted - or Canada, he obliged"

At approximately thirty-nine minutes in, Jan Kerouac turns next to some poems - "Well now I have some poems here, that I wrote, let's see.. "On the dust-laden black desk.. "…"..a light scrawl like Key Largo would tear off this jargon" 
and here's another one - "Broken crocodile tears…"…"...wearing a strange yellow sweatshirt with different childhood memories" 
I'll read a few (one) more - aha! - "The monthly delirium has set in…"….".. you stalk the wild insignias, whilst I horde pyjama lint"

"I have some dreams here". [ she continues] - "This is going to be the second Kerouac Book of Dreams -"I went to England with no money and was starving…"….'that was where the combination of melon and prosciutto originated."
and this is another dream - "May 22nd and I don't know what year, Hollywood. Very cosmic feeling dream…" - "...In this dream I could actually sense the movement of earth and planets in ratio to each other and understood completely what true time is."

She reads next "something about New York City, growing up in New York City - "Baby Driver", - yeah, "Baby Driver" (taken from a Paul Simon song - it wasn't my idea) - ok - "Manhattan, so secure in such an improbable way…"…."like a tuft of mould, tucked in the groove of a boulder." 

"Is my time up?" [Jan Kerouac concludes]  "In that case, I'll read about the first time I ever met Jack, my father that is (I like to call him "Jack" because I like that name) - I was nine years old -  "The day was nearing when I was to meet my father for the first time.."...  "…every once in a while, I'd take out the souvenir of his visit, the cork from the bottle of sherry, and stare at it, wishing it would hurry up and be January."

JK: You going to have enough time?
GC: Yeah, fine, fine. I think the ten minutes thing has caused it to be too tight, but "Beat poets", we go over the time-limit..Okay..

[Gregory Corso]

Gregory Corso is next 

GC: This poem was recently written. It's for Jack Kerouac, spontaneous, without change (I usually make changes). It's also got in it, for the hissers, an awful lot about women, ergo, don't let them distract you from the poem (those hissers will do it on this one, but the rest of you, just let it pass, man, you go to the poem, alright?) - This one is called "Having Fun With Myself at the Expense of Others" - It's called "Things in Life I Know (that) Most Others Don't Know" - [At approximately fifty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in, Gregory Corso begins reading - "Some know the blue whale to be the largest creature ever to have lived on Planet Earth…" - (and), (at approximately fifty-six-and-a-quarter minutes in - "this is for the hissers") - "Women - I know why women are the way they are. Ninety-nine percent of men don't know and fifty percent of women don't know…"  

Peter Orlovsky is next
GC (to Peter Orlovsky: You go. We've got another trip around, right?

                                                                     [Peter Orlovsky]

Peter Orlovsky (beginning off mic) begins by reading four poems - "America, Give A Shit!", "My Mother's Memory Poem", "Good Fuck With Denise", and "And The Tea Will Seem Golden" - followed by the following observation - "I was traveling with Allen Ginsberg on a poetry tour in California in the wintertime and coming to a lot of.. reading a lot about the horrors of the American military enterprise in Guatemala, in the Akwesasne News, and there'd be a lot of horror stories in there, and one horror story that was interesting was that with American helicoptors there they can shoot two thousand rounds a minute, and they go on these raids at..six in the morning, and they can kill, they can wipe out, a whole Indian village - and I somehow got it into my head that I was married..that I wanted to marry an Indian girl in Guatemala. So I thought (Alexander) Haig was killing my wife, my future wife. So I felt very hateful towards him and wanted to kill him on the spot. So, at a poetry reading in California, in L.A, I said. if I had a gun, I'd kill Haig, and I said that if Haig… the reason that this kid who shot (Ronald) Reagan (Brinkwater? Hinkley? - (John Hinckley))..the reason Hinckley shot Reagan (was) because he thought (that) Reagan was  going to drop the atom bomb in Europe, and that would have an atom bomb in America, the United States ((a) chain-reaction of atom bombs) and that's why he shot Reagan. And if fifty million people had a gun, they'd shoot Haig right this second  ((or) that second in January). And so, Allen said, "Someone's going to… If someone shoots you…?" - And so I said "Goodbye, Allen". And so I re-thought it out, and realized it wasn't a very Buddhist attitude to go around shooting people, or having a gun, (or) stuff like that.  I write this -  "Aney Haig who thinks of/ starting a Vietnam type War/ in El Salvador/will be cooked in the Heart Attack/Supe Pot tomorrow/morning at 6.A.M//So says My Mont Blank Pen".

PO (to GC): Another poem that you haven't read?
GC: Yeah, I think I can do it…. but...  [tape ends here]