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A Jack Kerouac Weekend - 2

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                                     [Jack Kerouac's original hand-drawn cover for On The Road]



[Jack Kerouac photographed by Allen Ginsberg - caption reads: "Jack Kerouac wandering along East 7th street after visiting Burroughs at our pad, passing statue of Congressman Samuel "Sunset" Cox, "The Letter-Carrier's Friend" in Tompkins Square toward corner of Avenue A, Lower East Side; he's making a Dostoyevsky mad-face or Russian basso be-bop Om, first walking around the neighborhood, then involved with The Subterraneanspencils & notebook in wool shirt-pockets, Fall 1953, Manhattan."

Allen Ginsberg: I might as well supplement what Gregory said about the mussed hair and the crucifix with Kerouac’s own account of it . Some of you may know it, some not:

 (JK): “That nutty picture of me on the cover of On The Road was the result of I’d just gotten down from a high mountain where I’d been for two months completely alone, and usually I was in the habit of combing my hair of course, because you have to get rides on the highway and all that and you usually want girls to look at you as though you were a man and not a wild beast. But my friend, Gregory Corso, opened his shirt and took out a silver crucifix that was hanging from a chain and said “Wear this, and wear it outside your shirt - and don’t comb your hair”, So I spent several days around San Francisco, going around with him and others like that, to parties, arties, parks, jam-sessions, bars, poetry-readings, churches, walking-talking poetry in the streets, walking-talking God in the streets, and at one point a strange gang of hoodlums got mad and said, “What right does he have to wear that?”, and my own gang of musicians and poets told them to "cool it", and finally, on the third day, Mademoiselle magazine wanted to take pictures of us all. So I posed just like that, wild hair, crucifix and all, with Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen, and the only publication which later did not erase the crucifix from my breast, from that plaid sleeveless cotton shirt-front, was The New York Times, therefore the New York Times is as Beat as I am and I’m glad I’ve got a friend”

AG: Letters from Kerouac in 1954, when he was first beginning to absorb Buddhist texts and Buddhist ideas and ideas of meditation and transform them into his own personal vehicle. So some.. December 1954 writing from New York (I had written to him from Mexico about a dream that I’d had of seeing a hero on a cross, with very gorgeous Catholic-looking ceremonial drapes all around). He said, “wealth of drapesand dark lapped colors andRembrandt splendor can’t make up wealth of detail, les meubles, they can’t make up for the simple line of clarity as elicited by a near-naked Indian whose crown of glory far exceeds.. messianic hung-up maniacsof Rama  [he’s talking about Christ there] -"..far exceeds.. messianic hung-up maniacsof Rama, and whose main ambition is always political and terrestrial, otherwise they’d be no reason for multitudes of pharisees to give them political crucifixtion. Jesus got in everybody's hair, face it!. Edgar Cayce is nothing but a Jesus Christ hillbilly who pretended to be ignorant of medicine, pretended to go into trances, was just apparently extremely intuitional and classic physician who however had a mystic streak and wanted to propheyize and so cooked up this bed trance medicine."

So that’s an early take.  I can.. I accused Lucien (Carr) of being proud of suffering (which, incidentally, is what Neal (Cassady) is), because the only thing.. the only reason why I couldn’t make any impression on his intelligence with the doctors of the East was because he, being a life proud American like (William) Burroughs and Lucien, wouldn't accept the  number one truth of Buddha – the first of the Four Great Truths – all life is sorrowful. Thinking that misery is grand ruptures their rapture, life is suffering, this you've got to understand. If you think it is anything but suffering you've lost completely the significance of even the need for emancipation. And of course for your beginning studies in Buddhism you must listen to me carefully and implicitly, as though I was (Albert) Einsteinteaching you relativity, or (T.S.) Eliot teaching the formulas of objective correlation on a blackboard in Princeton. 



And so, then he prescribes a reading-list – from the Lamkavatara Sutra, to begin with. (This is for any of you who are interested in his entry into Buddhism or your own parallel inquisitiveness into that field) – the Buddhacarita, orLife of BuddhabyAsvaghosa (the patriarch, which is a book used popularly around Boulder, intcientally), Paul Caru’sGospel of Buddha (which is a more nineteenth-century shot), Buddhism in Translation  by Henry Clarke Warren  also in the Harvard Classics (and that was a text, those were texts used by T.S. Eliot previously), The Buddhist Bibleby Dwight Goddard (which was his main source – and he  says of that –“This is by far he best book because it contains the Surangama Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra scripture, not to mention the eleven-page Diamond Sutra, which is the last word. and Asvaghosa's  Awakening of Faith andthe Tao.The Buddhist Bible uses sources from the Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Burmese, and modern, and from The Buddhist Bible he got Songs of Milarepa and a lot of talk about Marpa’s wife, Damema(Dakmema), (whose name constantly recurs in Mexico City Blues – Damema, mother of Buddhas, who he identified with his own mother.) 
(The list continues withthe Digha Nikaya, (the dialogues of Buddha), and the Visuddhimagga by Buddhagosa, Paths of Purity..The Visuddhimagga is what?..  the exposition of..
OT: The Visuddhimagga . that’s theAbhidhamma
AG: Abhidhamma
OT: Purification, right.That’s the..
AG: So that would be like a precision…precise instructions in how to eat , how to sit
OT: What happens in your mind when you sit
AG: Oh-ok
OT: All the little scientific detail(s)
AG: OK. So that’s the systematic scientific analysis of the psychology of consciousness while sitting – AndSacred Books and Early Literature of the East – “Now Allen, as Neal (or (Lucien) Carr) can tell you, last February I typed up a hundred-page account of Buddhism for you, gleaned from my notes, and you'll see proof of that in several allusions and appeals to (you). And I have that here, if you really want to see it, I'll send it importantly stamped. It's the only copy,we must take special care with it, right?  Some of the Dharma I called it and it was intended for you to read in the jungle. Some of it is now, I see, useless because mistaken or written on grass or other faults, but it may really give you a send off into the above tomes, which is my wish. Listen, you must begin with the Life of Buddha by Ashvaghosa, then if you can read the Surangama Sutra next, this is how I found the path, but the paths of the many are many to the one path”

And -  “I don’t have to write. I may write to teach. I suppose I gotta teach. but likeJoe McCarthy I'm getting awfully sick of being reprimanded for losing my hold on life's attaching apparatuses. It's like I commited some crime. Nirvana means, snapping a relationship, so naturally noone will like me any mo'. Close your eyes, cross your legs under you,practice slow in-breathing and out-breathing, think "I am breathing in, I am breathing out", then you think, "there is the breathing-in, there is the breathing-out", and soon essential mind will begin to shine in you and you will beginto experience your first 
samadhi"

So that was his instructions to me and I immediately wrote him back and said, "Okay, you be my guru”. So he wrote me back a long letter saying, ”Well, I don’t know enough about it, I can’t be your guru. However, if you’ll listen to me, and do this and that, and read the Diamond Sutra..” But, my first reaction, actually (something I’ve mentioned before but it’s really interesting, because it might.. I think it’s something that relates..that (Ken) Kesey would understand - (and most of you would understand) - there is a resentment that I felt, instantly, at being told that existence is suffering, that life.. that theFirst Noble Truth that Kerouac talks about..  because as a high-school kid from New Jersey I was looking forward to a career, and getting on in life, and having a successful, happy,whatever, (as)  either a career, or a marriage, or a house, or an American future, and then Kerouac was coming in and saying, “Existence is suffering”, and he did it with a slight edge of aggression there, which actually turned me off for the first couple  of years, thinking that I was going to submit to some horrible doctrine from the East which would turn the Universe into an inhuman dog-eat-dog affair, not realizing that it was actually.. it’s sort of a neutral descriptive statement. The.. I found it easier to understand in terms that I’ve heard around here in Boulder, “Existence contains Suffering”, because that’s… obviously, or the statement, “being born in a body”, there’s a slight in.. – it’s not insecurity, it’s like..discomfort, having a body and having to sit in a body and the discomfort obviously of the body falling apart.

Well that was Jack’s first take on Buddhism. I hadn’t realized that apparently he had some idea of sitting, probably from reading. The difficulty was that there was no Zen master, meditation teacher, that we knew of , until Suzuki Roshi came in 1958 to San Francisco. I don’t think Jack met Suzuki Roshi. (In) the period of 1954-1955-(19)56, when we were all hanging around together with Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder (which totally turned him on to the texts – the Lamkavatara Sutrand Surangama Sutra that he was reading, with them). I don’t think Gary ever showed me how to sit, and Gary, I found out recently, he didn’t know either, except from books (because he hadn’t actually a sitting or meditation teacher – so Gary might have learned it from statues, actually, he said – statues and books – the postures. And so there was no transmission of exact, precise information on how to sit. And so Kerouac’s sitting, as it’s described in The Scripture of Golden Eternity is more like a force-feed fed fast instant squeezed tight-assedkundalinishot  (holding your breath!) – at least at that point by the year he wrote The Scripture of Golden Eternity, at Snyder’s recommendation that he explain what he knew
Okay

Now [at approximately thirty-eight-and-a-hald ninutes in]  John Clellon Holmes (speaks)

                                               [John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac]

John Clellon Holmes:I’m here on this panel, I suppose, to read.. First, is, I was asked somemonths ago, after looking over the topics that would be taken up in this conference, if I had any suggestions, and I said I thought there should be a panel on Catholicism and Buddhism as they related to Jack Kerouac. I later discovered that I was to be a member of that panel, which is interesting because I am neither a Catholic nor a Buddhist. Knowing Jack as I did, and corresponding with him regularly over the twenty-two years that we were friends, it was inevitable that I would be a witness to his spiritual travels, which were continuous and endless. He was that way when I met him, he was that way when he died. He saw spirit in everything. He, at various times in my relationship with him, he explained it in terms related to, or borrowed from, various religions, primarily the oldest sort of Christianity, and later, what I took to be, and I has not been proved opposite since then, a profound and penetrating understanding of the Buddhist view of life, and of reality. As a man without a faith, then, but, I observed this because I could not feel that anything that this man was interested in was insignificant. I was an atheist when I met him. I studied religion primarily because I wanted to understand what he was talking about Catholicism was instinctive to him when I met him. He talked in terms.. When he talked of spiritual matters, he talked usually in terms borrowed from one aspect of Christian theology or another. This changed, in my experience with him. I noticed it changing in letters. But when he came back from the mountain, and just a year before, almost a year before On The Road finally got published, he and Allen and Peter were on their way, hopefully, they thought to Europe, or North Africa, which was where they did end up, and Jack seemed to me different than he had been before. He was still the same man but he seemed to have achieved a kind of peace,that was at first puzzling to me but eventually made me extremely happy for him, something had happened to him on the mountain where he was compelled to be by himself,and in that setting, which was awesome and magnificent, he looked, as I think he always looked, for God’s foot-print, God’s plan. And I felt that he had seen beyond that to.. that the plan that he had looked for, the purpose that had looked for, had been only partial. In my experience with him, his Buddhism was sincere and it was not faddish. It was not faddish, it wasn’t faddish to be a Buddhist then (I’m not saying it is now but it’s more… more people know about it than certainly knew about it then). I also felt that it had provided him for that period in his life (I didn’t know the uproar to come) with serenity that I had never seen in him before. I don’t think that he ever… The question has come up many times as to whether he re-converted to Catholicism, or what have you. I don’t think it’s important, particularly. Jack often fell backon instinctive knowledge, or knowledge that he had achieved very early. On that trip that he did make to.. a few months after I saw him for a week up there, he wrote me a funny letter when he got to Tangier. He was traveling on a tramp steamer (I believe I'm correct about that)and they got into a terrible storm (now Jack had been to sea, this should not have been unusual for him, but I gather this was a really bad storm, it went on for three or four days) and the way he described it, and he was being somewhat facetious, was “All my Buddhism evaporated in a green crap of fear”, and he….This, of course, was a sign of Jack’s essential honesty about himself, because, when I saw him again, later, he was Buddhist, again. I don’t think.. (Well), the point to be made, I feel, from my experience, as a religious man myself without a creed, is that Jack saw in religion an artistic expression, in a sense, of man’s spiritual strive both to know the truth and to be reconciled with reality. Suffering? – He did not invite suffering  upon himself, he did not take suffering upon himself consciously, in my opinion, but he realized that suffering was innate to life, (it was) instinct to life, that one couldn’t get through life without being hurt, disappointed, rejected, baffled, and sometimes in despair. 
I think that he believed that the last despair (if you can call it that, and this is where the Catholicism still remained), that the last despair was a mortal sin, that to give in to despair was to violate your nature and to use it cheaply, He did not try to avoid despair but he did not invite it. And I think through despair, that drawing through despair, coming out on the other side, and thereby all the suffering that goes along with that, he… that that was the only way to achieve peace. And I think that Jack, in his calmest moments, in the moments when he was alone, it was peace of spirit that he wanted to find inside himself so that he could speak with more authority in his writings to all of us. I think he profoundly believed that he had to experience what everyone experiences  and go through it and come out the other side.However, I must add, I think, probably, towards the very end of his life, he was relying on the rituals and attitudes of his boyhood religion. But I think if he was here listening to us, he would say, “All this doesn’t matter, as long as we keep open to faith it may come”. He remained open to belief and to hope for the world, and for all of you, to the end of his life. You know what this must have cost him because you have all felt it a little at least yourselves. (That) if we despair of the world, if we grow bleak and cynical and angry, then, that is where no hope lies. We can make the future and we can save ourselves (no matter how we do it or where we end up), and that that endeavor is the highest thing that human beings can achieve. He lived in that belief, he wrote in that belief, and only when he became so tired did he long for sleep – and find it.


[Finally (at approximately forty-eight minutes) in is Osel Tendzin]
AG: The next mind to analyze the poetics of the situation is the inheritor of the Kagyu lineage whispered transmission crazy wisdom school descended from the yogi poet Milarepa, the dharma heir, or Regent, Osel Tendzin


                                                                     [Osel Tendzin (1943-1990]

OT: Thank you Allen, thank you very much. I’m beginning to sweat. I feel extremely honored to be here and also embarrassed at the same time. I’d not read anything of Jack Kerouac’s until this afternoon. In fact, it was last Thursday, I think, that Allen persuaded me to be here (and I said to him, “Allen, I don’t know anything about these things”, and he said, “Well, you’re a professionalBuddhist and you should be here”. So, thinking of myself as a “professional Buddhist”, I thought, “Well, what shall I say?” – All these people have some insights into Kerouac, the person and his writings and what not. But as I read the selection of articles that Allen sent me and listened to Mr Kerouac on tape, I thought, “Well, it seems that Mr Kerouac and I have a few things in common” (which I suppose is the only way to communicate with people, if you recognize what you have mutually, in common). I thought, at first - he seems to be an incredibly inquisitive man, and second - he seems to be totally confused, and third – he discovered the personal truth of the Buddha (which was precisely what happened to myself). 
The first Buddhist text that I ever opened was given to me by a friend in 1964, and at that time I was taking a lot of LSD and was thinking that the world should be enjoyed as much as possible. We should eat as much as possible, make love as much as possible, and forget about the rest. And there was a huge text (I think it was one of those old scholarly texts by some Eglishman) and I just opened a page and turned to the Four Noble Truths, and the first one was that all existence is marked by suffering (which is different from what you said before (Allen), existence doesn’t contain suffering, and existence isn’t suffering, it’s marked bysuffering. In other words, if you could describe existence, you would say, “It hurts”. And I saw that and I said , “That’s right”. I went to some friends of mine and I said, “Look at this, this is true”, and they said,”Forget it”. That was in 1964. “That’s ridiculous”, you know, “don’t bother with that and lets get back to what we’re doing. So I forgot it at the time. And in 1970, I met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and remembered something. We are all gathered here in the name of Jack Kerouac, and it seems that what he embodied as a human being is quite profound, that inquisitiveness was, as John Clellon Holmes was saying, open-mindedness, and also that confusion, flipping back and forth, that confusion is not bad particularly, it’s kind of really meaty, really juicy, because it talk ls about love not being fixed, not being set, saying “this is the way, this is the only way”. And from reading Mr Kerouac’s works, he seemed to have that kind of vision, when he talks about Buddhism or Catholicism or whatever, and says, “It doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you experience some sense of awakening. In that sense, we all share that, and, lastly, we all share the experience of life as..fleeting. So, Mr Kerouac was very powerful, it seems, to bring all of you here – and here’s another thing – the fact that he wrote and he read his writings, that is something you should think about. I suppose a lot of you are aspiring to write, as Mr Kerouac did. 
A lot of times you’ll read (in fact, I think Kerouac himself said, “the words don’t mean anything” – Well, in reality, I suppose that’s true – but, on the other hand, you’re here, we’rehere, because he wrote something, he said something, and, in fact, throughout our history as human beings, somebody came along, now and then, and said something. In Tibetan tradition, we call it.. especially Kagyu tradition  - the Great Masters used to sing spontaneous songs (which you could call poems, but they sang them – just like in the European tradition in psalmsand what-not ). And those songs were meant to talk about the very moment, the present moment. So, because of that writing, and because of your attention to it, we’ve gathered together here. So words are not simply words, after all. Words do mean something. But, there’s another point, in order for the word to communicate, it has to be based on real experience.Now when I say “real experience” I don’t mean to say that there’s a “fake experience”  (in other words, if you burn your hand with a hot cup of tea, that’s a fake experience or a real experience, but, “real experience” to me is something that communicates to beings like ourselves, without filter, without anything in between. And in many ways Mr Kerouac did that (I wouldn’t say he completelydid that, but he did that in many ways. So, if you’re aspiring to write and communicate to others through your writing, you should think about that. What you think about is up to you, but at least think about it – that the word is a vehicle – it is a vehicle for awakening, for oneself and for other people, so it is a definite means to enlighten ourselves also about others. So, aside from that, I suppose I have only one other thing to say, that I have a very definite feeling of Mr Kerouac that he had a very kind and tender heart, and in that he seems to embody the human condition of all of us (no matter how much we  rant and rave about this and that, and make our speeches, and have our conferences, write our notes, and eventually go home and sleep, wake up the next day, wonder what happened, there’s a tenderness and a vulnerable quality in each of us  which cannot be ignored, and for that, 
I think Mr Kerouac deserves this Conference because he displayed it, openly. I’m not particularly advocating some kind of.. what do you call it?..   

AG: Hard-on sleep? Sentimentality?

OT: No, more the literature…exhibitionism, exhibitionism, particularly, (that’s not important), but to be honest, and recognize your own tender heart. It’s supposed to be a good remembrance of Jack Kerouac. Well, thank you all for being here.

 [This concludes the formal part of the panel, but the panel will continue]

AG: Don’t go away, Gregory
GC: It’s not over?
AG: Shall we have some conversation between ourselves?..and then with the audience? – Is there anybody who, staying on stage, wants to respond to anything or has any other statements?

GC: Ah, the cross thing…    

to be continued...

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes and continuing till appoximately fifty-seven minutes in]


[Some versions of some of these transcriptions can be found in Coffee House Press' s  volume, Beats and Naropa - An Anthology, edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, 2009] 



Allen Ginsberg - Montreal 1969 (Q & A - 1)

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                                                 [Allen Ginsberg in Havana, Cuba, 1965]

Following his October 31 1969 reading in Montreal,Allen answers a number of questions from the audience

Q: What happened in Havana?

AG: What happened in Havana? To me?   I got kicked out of Havana or arrested in the morning, one morning,  for having complained, loudly, to friends and newspaper reporters and local bureaucrats and literary people that the government was kicking all the fairies out of the theater-school, and was arresting and bugging young poets of the El Puente group (the Bridge group)  for being too beatnik boys, and looked down and police arrested people who had Castro-type beards and long hair in Havana because that was considered degenerate.

Q: What year was that?

AG: That was 1965. I didn’t make any particular point out of that because they were very sort of (out of their minds) of  their own bodies.
The question was what happened in Havana?  So I got deported to Prague, Czechoslovakia – that is I got.. about five in the morning– I was there for a literary conference with a lot of fellow- poets and a bunch of mean uniformed detectives came to my room at about eight in the morning, knocked, opened it up and told me to pack., (and wouldn't let me) get in touch with Nicanor Parra, who was my friend, who was there, or any of the other poets, and then they and drove me out to an airfield. So I said, “What have I done here? Wait a minute, hold on”, and the Oficial de Immigracion said, “You've broken the laws of Cuba”.  Well, I said, ”What laws have I broken?” – And he said, “You’ll have to ask yourself that!"
 – I didn’t even get laid (while I was there)! – or, only once! 

Q: What's going on inChicago with….


[Jean Genet, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, on the front-line at Chicago, in 1968]
AG: What is going on now [1969] in Chicago?  - A long trial (which will cost them about 200,000 dollars – Doctor Spock’s trial cost $150,000, the Chicago trialwill probably be $200,000 . That’s, as far as I can tell, the main problem. You know, the government of the United States (has) tactics at the moment is bleeding everybody financially by setting up cases which, sooner or later, generally, are won by the victims of  government attack. So costs amount to prove the innocence. As in the case, of, say, LeRoi Jones, [Amiri Baraka], (who’s lawyers' costs are ten, fifteen, twenty thousand - more probably).As in the case of Timothy Leary, (whose Supreme Court Appeal cost – which he won -  cost something like thirty, forty, or fifty, thousand), and in the case of Doctor Spock, (one-hundred-and fifty thousand). And, according to (Leonard) Weinglass, (Jerry) Rubin’s lawyer, two hundred thousand for that. 

I haven’t been out there. I’ll be going out there (to speak) as a material witness, because there were two points that I'm supposed to testify, regarding. One is I’ve had a lot of letters from Abbie Hoffman, after an Easter police riot in Grand Central Station, preceding Chicago Convention Day. And the conversations I’d had with Rubin and Hoffman were powerful insights into (the fact) that you could make a kind of Festival of Life-Bethel (Woodstock)scene there, but nobody had unconsciously, or consciously, the power to pull it together  - that was something that the people would have to do themselves. But the conversations and letters I’ve had with Abbie Hoffman were, like, all different peaceful proposals to safeguard the scene in Chicago so that there wouldn’t be violence. 
So I have to testify to that - i.e. the conspiracy and preparation having been peaceful. 

And also I have to testify to a single moment when Dave Dellinger, the head of the Mobilization Committee, is accused of having tried to foment a riot, having conspired all to form a riot, on the precise moment when he calls meup, in front of the line of marchers, on Wednesday of the Convention week, that were holding a march without (the) police permit and who wanted to assemble on the streets. (While he was negotiating with the police, he asked me to pick up the microphone and chant Buddha chants. So it was for this precise moment that he was being accused of formenting a riot). So I have to go there and chant in court for twenty minutes and demonstrate exactly, what was going on, actually, in the front row of the march, as I had stepped out (a front row which includedWilliamBurroughs,Terry Southern, and Jean Genet  [all together] - at Dellinger’s request, we all assembled on the front of the line).  So the point I am making is that this precise moment is legally the moment when he's accused of formenting a riot for..  So actually it’s a quite good prognosis, as far as evidence, but it will still cost several hundred thousand dollars.  
 Yeah

[Audio for the above can be heard here, (third segment) beginning approximately fifty-seven-and-a-half minutes in and concluding approximately sixty-two-and-a-half minutes in] 

Allen Ginsberg - Montreal 1969 (Q & A - 2)

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                                                           [Allen Ginsberg in 1969]

Q: (One of the most disturbing themes I think I see studying your poetry deals with tragedy…)
AG: One of the most persistent themes that deals with..?.. that's appearing..?, studying my poetry.. - yes?..
Q:…that deals with.. the amount of pain and agony that life represents - (and) the 
liberation that death brings..
AG:  (Oh, so, curiously enough, the pain that life represents, and…?)
Q: The liberation…

AG: The liberation of death.. That's specifically in (Jack) Kerouac s sonnet-like poem ["211th Chorus'] -  “Poor! - I wish I was free/ of that slaving meat wheel/ and safe in heaven dead",  yes..


                                 [Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) - (Kerouac had just died a week previous to this interview]  

Q: (Of course),  but, at any rate. Do you find that life offers you, much more. like, a disproportionately greater amount of pain, more than pleasure.? - And if so, what prevents you from commiting suicide?

AG: The only reason is I'm scared of committing suicide!   Do I find that the life has a disproportionate amount of pain more than pleasure, and if so, what’s preventing me from committing suicide? - It’s like the Ol’ Man River – “I’m tired of living and scared of dying”. Also I’m afraid I’ll commit suicide and jump into the arms of some kind of giant octopus God who’ll say, “Aha, you thought you’d got away, eh?” – The usual acid-head fantasy.  I’ve found, at the moment, melancholy, (a bit), but not real pain. I’m not lonely, really. The thing that really bugs me is physical pain (as for anyone). (If) I’m not able to get around that.. I wouldn’t want to be in a state of continuous physical pain. I think that is the one thing that would drive me out. Kerouac had that, I think, towards the end, almost continuously. He had drunk so much that his actual liver was… he had cirrhosis of the liver, and he literally, like, in the phrase, “rot-gut”, he drank so that his stomach hemorrhaged. He drank a hole in his stomach, so that must have been extremely painful.
So I’m very heavily influenced by his love, or his tenderness, or his image of me and his image of himself, and of the universe, his particular Buddhism. You know the Buddhist doctrine is dukkha dukkha , you know, trouble, trouble, samsara, illusion, maya, the world that we’re in is primarily a restless place by its very nature, because of the change of..
[tape ends here and then resumes]
                                                                          ["Dukkha, Dukkha"]


… (It was) inexplicable that when I got out of Columbia, I still couldn’t read the financial page, I literally couldn’t read the financial page, I’d never been trained. I didn’t know how banks operated. I had to go to Ezra Pound in getting some conception of, like.. like actual basic theory of economics – the functioning of banks – banks are the con game, which is a hallucinatory con-game, which is something that still hasn’t penetrated (except some of the Birch-ites know it, oddly)



















Q: But they don’t want to tell anybody about it

AG: Well, they don’t know how, you see.

Q: I’m not sure if they want to anyway

AG: So then in English?...they hadn’t.. The English novel in the twentieth- century, which was heavy on Edith Wharton and (said) nothing of Henry Millerand both of them were roughly of the same time - or Willa Cather say, who was of the same age-group as Miller was  taught as a classic, Willa Cather – and Miller was obliterated completely, mainly because, though, a few of the teachers , professors, had read Miller in Paris, or had . had a secret copy of Miller, at one time, in their possession, they literally were scared of the illegality of proposing Miller as reading to class




















Q: Do you..were you… I don’t know. Were you ever involved in the political McCarthyism of the 'Fifties  or was anything…

AG: Well, not entirely. I joined.. You see, I was at school in the 'Forties
Q: Yeah

AG: – 1944-48

Q: Were you teaching during the 'Fifties?

AG: No

Q: Just writing

AG: No, well, when I got out of school I couldn’t get a job. In school, I joined the Young Communist-type, early Young Socialists League . Everybody was scared of doing that at this time. Signing anything was..was.. Not that people were scared of it politically, like (with) (Joe) McCarthy , it was more that it was considered bad form and kind of vulgar to join a group like that, political.. (you) don’t want to challenge the entire system (because that was considered quixotic and immature at Columbia).At the same time, (Percy Bysshe) Shelley was considered a punk poet and (Walt) Whitman was considered a creep and an eccentric rather than in the main line of American letters. And William Carlos Williams was considered a  provincial jerk. And more rigid prosody was considered (the) high class.  Like Yvor Winters or John Crowe Ransom, were considered super and ok.  Classic ideas – singing, Zen Buddhism, tantra, any magic(al) tradition, were considered creepy and outside of the pail of formal propriety. So the 'Fifties…let’s see, (19)49 I was in the bug house, (19)50 I was in.. washing dishes in Bickford's, (1951), I was working for National Opinion Research Center (which did surveys into opinion-making. You know, like what people think about Korea or something, for University of Chicago). And then, from there, I went into advertising, applying that to do market research, pick people’s brains. So for about two years I went into that and learn the technology of (the) brainwashing for Ipana toothpaste, to find out how it was done, and how you mould public opinion (how at first you sample public opinion, and then make a feedback advertising campaign - like “Does Ipana "make your teeth sparkle"? or does it "make you glamorous"? - and then they spent a lot of money to find out that people associated glamor with furs and associated sparkling with pearls - so they spent another million dollars on advertising campaigns, you know, to kind of make you see teeth sparkling. So….




















 And then, (so) I told the people that I was working for that the work I was doing could be done by an IBM machine. So they assigned me to make a transfer, and I did, and I got myself… did myself out of a job, and went on unemployment, started writing (about (19)53.  And that was the last time I worked..

[Allen is introduced to a guest -  then continues]  - Hi  …let’s see McCarthy was around (19)51-2-3….and was like a heavy symbolic thing around. The trouble is the reactions to McCarthy were all very square. I mean everybody got scared when they saw somebody being a fancy-pants intellectual..nobody had the humor to get up and take out his prick in the Congressional Hearing, like Jerry RubinandAbbie Hoffman do. I mean nobody had the... Everybody accepted the terms of the argument, you know, and was intimidated by being called “UnAmerican” or “Communist”.













I mean, people were afraid of being called "Communist". People were afraid of words, actually!  Actually, McCarthy, you know, was like a faggot type, in a way. I mean there was a lot of rumor about it in fairy circles at the time. But everybody was afraid to talk about it like that, you know. What it was, basically, was Time magazine, or actually I think what it was was the CIA had so completely taken over all the intellectuals and paid everybody and the student groups in the mid 'Fifties -  that everything was official short-hair culture, secretly financed by the CIA, (because the CIA had subsidized the Congress For Cultural Freedom  and was running that and their magazines and that was where most of the independent intellectuals were supposed to be – and they were also running the student groups, running the NSA, in America. So there was an official culture that was, like..
And that’s still.. In other words, the virulence that is with us now with the SDS is a bi-product of the suppression of all anarchistic humanistic populist tradition by the CIA in the 'Fifties, when there should have been an expansion of heart and an expansion of consciousness in the Academy and among the students then. That was all bought off, diverted, and re-channeled by CIA manipulation, so that when it finally came out, in the 'Sixties, it came out in a much much more violent (way).  

[Audio for the above can be heard here, (third segment), beginning at approximately sixty-two-and-a-half minutes in, concluding at the end of the third segment, and then continuing on the fourth segment, concluding at approximately seven-and-a-quarter minutes in on the fourth segment ] 

Allen Ginsberg, Montreal, 1969 - Q & A - 3 (The Appointment)

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Setting up An Appointment - A moment of quotidian practicality - A non-event on the Ginsberg blog today (we don't even have tape of the subsequent interview!) 

(from 1969)

Interviewer: Mr Ginsberg, I’m from CBC - Hi! 
AG: Hi 
Interviewer:  We would like to interview you tonight which wouldn’t take very long. Would you be willing?
AG: Ah, well, what time?
Interviewer:  7.30 to 8.30
AG: I guess, ok, it’s just that I wanted to do some socializing and go downtown... 
Where are you? Where’s your office?
Interviewer: ….The studio's in Verdun, actually.
AG: Where’s that? Far away? 
Interviewer:Fifteen minutes by cab
AG: Well, if you can provide a cab, so that I can get back to where I want to be. 
Interviewer: Sure. Great. Could you be there at 7.30, then?
AG: What time would I have to leave my hotel?
Interviewer: Quarter after seven
AG: And where can I phone to get a cab if I’m not at my hotel?
Interviewer: You can get one right outsidethis hotel
AG: What if I’m not there?
Interviewer: Oh, 5000 Wellington..
AG: Pardon me?
Interviewer: 5000 Wellington.
Student:  You could be there at the hotel and...
AG: No, I may not be at the hotel. I don't know where I'll be. I guess I'll be at the hotel.. 
Student: We can give you the address and there are cabs
AG: Five?  
Interviewer: Five thousand. On the corner of...
Student:You have a car or something?
Interviewer; No I don't have a car.
AG: I go to CBC ?
Interviewer Yeah.
AG: 5000 Wellington..
Interviewer; It's at the corner of Wellington and Fifth Street
AG: That's where CBC is?
Interviewer: No,  that's where the studio is. Verdun studio.
AG: And that's what? Verdun you said?
Interviewer: It's Verdun..
AG: Okay, and I should be there..
Interviewer; At 7.30?
AG: And how far is that from downtown hotel here? - how many minutes?
Interviewer: Fifteen minutes
AG: So if I could take a cab around seven, I'd be sure to be there in plenty of time.
Interviewer: Yeah
AG Okay
Interviewer: And I'll meet you there.
AG: What's your name?
Interviewer:  Barbara..
AG: And do you have a phone?
Interviewer; Yeah, I'll give you my number at the office, it's 868-3211
AG: Okay
Interviewer: Extension 1724
AG; 1727
interviewer: 1724
AG; 1724 okay
Interviewer; Monday…Tuesday
AG: Okay Barbara




addenda (a little bit later): 


Student: Line one..hold on please..Allen, there’s a call for you about the radio show that you’re supposed to do….

“Mr Allen Ginsberg is up here with us , sponsored by the McGill Hillel Jewish  Society and the McGill Debating Union to give us, a to give McGill University a poetry reading tomorrow evening at 8pm at the Union Ballroom. There’ll be a question-and-answer period after the poetry reading as well tomorrow. Mr Ginsberg is here for a press conference. Fire away any questions you may have at him,. he’ll be happy to entertain them. So if you can please have your questions

to be continued..


[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seven-and-a-quarter minutes in (in the fourth segment), and continuing until approximately nine-and-a-half minutes in -plus from approximately thirteen-and-a-quarter minutes in to approximately thirteen-and-three-quarters in]

Allen Ginsberg, Montreal, 1969 - (Q & A - 4)

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Q : (Is it true what they say about all these guys (who criticize)in the 'Fifties  (like in
J.D)  SalingerCatcher In The Rye - Holden CaulfieldWere they all "Holden Caulfields", all the(se) idealists?)




AG: Well, sir,  everybody was kind of stupefied, you know - about sex, for instance, I mean, nowadays [1968], Holden Caulfield would have a little sexual adventure. Nowadays, young kids get much more information. Everything’s much more open, you know. Nobody is…. The imagery is there, as it is in a primitive community, or there is in a farm community, where kids see cows copulate. So what is it, in the suburban city communities of the 'Fifties, like, everybody really was totally insulated. It’s like that was the acme of middle-class isolation, and then the over-population, and over-industrialization, and the ecological crisis of the 'Sixties began breaking all that down and mixing up the information again. In other words, like, white middle class got to the acme of being in a cocoon of comforts and electronic security and isolation. And then, the heavy-metal thing got to be so heavy that the whole crust of the earth began cracking open, and consciousness began to be shuddering, and sexual information and dope information and war information, and massacre information, and black information, foreign information, economic information, began crashing in on everybody’s head till it was finally planetary information and cosmic information. Moon shots. Science-fiction, I mean. The 'Fifties were the last of, like, suburban..suburban urban, insularity, and, all of a sudden, the next thing, everybody’s plunged into science-fiction space-age, living on a planet floating around in the universe.

Student:  The Leave It  To Beaver Age! 

AG: Huh?

  
Student; Leave It To Beaver

AG: What’s Leave It To Beaver?

Student: It’s a tv program.



                                                                  [ "Leave It To Beaver"]


AG: Yes,  well intellectually, Well that’s a big transition, see, from (1940 to 1950). 
In 1950 there was no cosmic consciousness. (In the) 1960s, all the young kids are suddenly reading the I Ching and the Kabbalah and the Zohar and Tibetan Book Of the Dead and the American Indian peyote rituals, and dropping acid, and going off to the moon, and studying high electronics, and going out on to high mountain desert areas (there’s like a whole new planet-consciousness that’s come through). That’s different, isn’t it? That’s all new. It’s like.. when I remember the 'Fifties, it was all householdand (sitting), you know, like, in the humane.. the community, to do the social work, and everything was going to be enclosed within Long Island, you know, Levittown, or something. All of a sudden, Levittown is cracked open by..by… by its appearance on the planet!  (It’s revolving in a solar system which is at the periphery of  the  galaxy, you know, it’s three-quarter the ways out from the center of the galaxy - Even the ten-year-old kids know about the galaxy now. When I was a young kid, I didn’t think about..  I didn’t realize I was in the middle of a galaxy)





Q: Do you ever watch the Saturday-morning cartoon shows?  You should see. You have to be a physics major to understand those..

AG: It’s probably, like, a shift as great as when I was in high school and grammar school we read about the great cultural conscious shift that took place between Galileo and Copernicus, you know, when, from..when they thought the world wasn’t round, you know, and when they thought  the world was round, and when they thought that the earth... [Allen - offered a cigarette no, I’ve stopped smoking] – that the earth was the center of the solar system, and then they realized that the sun was the center, and there was like a big..you know, people’s heads changed all of a sudden. Now it changes again.


[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately nine-and-a-half minutes in (on the fourth segment) and continuing until  approximately thirteen-and-a-quarter minutes in]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up -260

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March 18, 1956. Sixty years since the legendary Town Hall Theater Berkeley reading. Tonight in that very space (now a neighborhood cafe called "Sconehenge" (sic)), Tom Ferrell and George Killingsworth have assembled a gathering to suitably honor the reading of Allen's great epoch-making poem (G.P.Skratz will be m-c)
.
As Allen himself remarked on the occasion:
"The audience (that night) was a little off-center because of the celebrity of one earlier Six Gallery reading, many in the audience had been there. Some thought it was a hoot party, which it was, but they didn't get the non-wine sublimity or aesthetic seriousness. They wanted to encourage but were a little too familiar, too "knowing", not yet aware of the power of Parts II and III. So the beginning of the reading is quite muted. I'm not stable on my feet and I'm worried I'm going to be interrupted if they laugh too much at the curiosity of the lines, because the phrasing is humorous, meant to be appreciated, maybe with response, but not such as would interrupt the flow of the poem. However, the reading goes on, it mounts in intensity and clarity, people begin settling in and realizing what's happening, it's musical as well as intellectual, it should be listened to. By the end of Part I it approaches a tearfulness or emotional power, and when the proclamation launches into Moloch and I'm with you in Rockland"…"



Publication of Wait Till I'm Dead - UnCollected Poems has, of course, sparked, interest in all Allen's unpublished work. As Bill Morgan writes in his "Note on the Selection of Texts":
 "All of Ginsberg's most successful poems were attempts to capture his spontaneous thoughts and insights, what he called "ordinary mind". Composed in that way, in the act of "catching himself thinking", it remained for me only to select the very best examples of his mind at work"
This was achieved through careful reading and rereading of texts, whittling the mass down to those poems that best achieved that goal. If the mind was shapely, the art created by that mind would also be shapely was his creed. It also gave the editor the oppportunity to reexamine every uncollected poem and select only the best from the entire span of his life 

Chris Funkhouser, in "A Personal Appendices", notes one poem, "Nothing Personal", the poem above ("Ginsberg's handwritten contribution to a mimeo magazine from the 1970's that I found on a visit to Bolinas Public Library") that didn't make the cut.
"Homer", we're reliably informed, was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's dog:

"Nothing personal,/  Homer's bark  rough limit of hard sound/ Hiss Crash wave comes lipping/ sand wish/Eyes fixed at Horizon, a bird floats moving/Air surface awash with sun silvery/wave glitter/Spine balanced light on immobile sand seat,/Stomach filled deep its own, exhaled its own,/breath slower than sigh,/Rocks sat Grave on ocean bottom/ What'd he see on that cliffside/ half decade ago, Faces?/I mourn my old loves, today's love light as/white mists/ Old loves the most sweet thoughts! old forms/disappeared in earth as numberless waves by/ the hour -/Old names echoing in head, telephones ringing thru/ White House/mind dreams newspaper corpse photos. Then the/Presence Alone, waves bowing to body, Crashing/ foamy to brown sand crotch."

Funkhouser goes on to also provide annotated typescript from transcription of two of Allen's 1988 dreams (which appeared in limited edition in his magazine We - 12 (1989).
To see the whole note (including unequivocal praise for Wait Till I'm Dead) - see here 

Praising the life and poetry of Joanne Kyger - by Dawn Michelle Baude in The Huffington Post

Praising the remarkable achievement of City Lights Bookstore in The Guardian

Tonight (this afternoon, actually) at Harvard (Cambridge,Mass.), Dr Rita Banarjee lectures on "Encountering Allen Ginsberg - The South Asian Avant-Garde Response to the Beats"

Next Wednesday (Wednesday March 23rd) at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Bill Morgan on The Beats Abroad (For our recent note on The Beats Abroad see here)

Tomorrow in Luton, England - "Beat Day" at "Lutonia" - Jeff Towns, "the Dylan Thomas guy', introduces Iain Sinclair (talking about American Smoke and introducing his 1967 film, Ah Sunflower!), David Shulman(sharing his film, Guerilla TV, and showing rare footage of Allen narrating the introduction), Colin Still (showing his film, No More To Say & Nothing To Weep For), "Howl", (a live performance with Ceri Murphyas Ginsberg reading the poem, accompanied by graphic illustrative projections), and more

Starting Sunday in Milan --
















Giulio Bellotto is the organizer


- and in Thessaloniki, Greece,



The Performing Arts Research Lab AlmaKalma (under the artistic direction of Yannis Mitros) are the organizers there. 

More Kerouac

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                       [Three paperback covers for Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel - The Dharma Bums]




AG: Don’t go away, Gregory
GC: It’s not over?
AG: Shall we have some conversation between ourselves?.. and then with the audience?
– Is there anybody who, staying on stage, wants to respond to anything or has any other statements?

Gregory Corso : Ah,the cross thing… Later on in life, of course, I looked on the cross as a heavy-weight. Somebody died on it so I really didn’t like it. I didn’t like the cross. If  he’d have gone on the electric chair then we’d be wearing electric chair necklaces on their neck, something like that. (I) would’ve passed it on there. So I was a little embarrassed to think that I did hand him something that I  disagree with, that I actually find deplorable, you know, stretched out on a cross ( - my feelings about that, anyway).

John Clellon Holmes: If I can add something to that. Just in answer to you, Gregory. I don’t think Jack was offended by any religious symbols. He saw them for what they.. I call them symbols, or rituals.. I think he saw them for what they are, they are a kind of discipline, they are a way of fastening our attention on something, they are a way of entering into the tenets of a given faith. Jack never stopped at objects. I don’t think you do either..

GC: No, I stopped. I stopped that, the cross.

JCH: That’s why I think that to try to decide which faith of.. not only of these two [Catholicism and Buddhism] but of the many faiths in the world he ultimately subscribed to is a hopeless pursuit and really not very important. Jack was extremely curious, indeed, insatiable, in his interest in the spiritual life of  the human race and what things it had created to embody that urge. I think he took from anywhere things that he felt were of use. I think he saw the similarities in religions which all too often are lost in times of warring doctrines (in which..in one of which we live).The essential thing is – any man that searches and cares is going to find (as he did, in various stages of his life in various embodiments). So, I would hope that, eventually, the view of Kerouac that will prevail will be that the search, and the struggle if you will, and the willingness to be open to belief when it comes to us, when we are gifted with it, is the important thing. And to keep our hearts pure and to avoid violence towards other beings , and live in hope and faith  that we will come out. Good-heartedness and Right-mindedness, if you will, are what he embodied. If he lapsed from that at times, it is because he was human and because he could not subscribe forever, or all the time, to anybody’s doctrine. In a sense, his.. his works embody the involvement of his own doctrine which is indebted to the faith of his youth, the discoveries of his manhood, and is not invalidated by the despair and loneliness which ultimately claimed him.

GC:  (but..)  I’m wearing a cross now, but it’s a little more interesting, a girlfriend of mine gave to me, that has the dust of St Francis in it. Now, it’s a relic, it’s from his own body. (You might say) “Well, that’s a kick to wear “.you know, it’s got the dust in it.

JCH; (I don’t know)

GC: You can’t see from here  but..here it is.. It’s a little like (an) Irish cross and it’s got some white dust from his body, from his grave, fromtheterre e tombein Assisi. So…I’m not downing you (about it)





















AG: St Francis that is?

Gerald Nicosia: John, I’d like to add something to what you said, because I recently heard a tape of the Buckley tv show that Jack was on and Buckley had asked Jack (this is 1968), “Was the Beat movement pure?”, and Jack said, “Yes, it waspure – my heart”

AG: Shall we open it up to you out there and does anybody have any questions?

GC: It’s not.. Maybe Italians do that, man, they just pour powder and say it’s St Francis’ dust, but….it…

AG: Anne Waldman..

JCH: Gregory, If you treat it like St Francis, it is St Francis.

AG: Are there any..? Are there microphones up front?  Are there not microphones up front? Okay – Anne (Waldman)? Yes? - Loud  

Anne Waldman: There's a very funny passage and charming passage inDharma Bums...

GC: (Why don't you)  get closer to the microphone. Sit here for a sec...

[Anne gets closer to the microphone]
AW:  You were talking about Japhy Ryder,  (Gary) (Snyder), and.. [Anne begins reading at length from Kerouac's The Dharma Bums]

"Alvah couldn't sleep and came out and lay flat on his back in the grass looking up into the sky, and said, "Big steamy clouds going by in the dark up there, it makes me realize we live on an  actual planet” -"Oh, I don't know what you mean by all that!", he said, pettishly. He was always being bugged by my little lectures on Samadhiecstasy, which is the state you reach when you stop everything and you stop your mind and you actually with your eyes closed see a kind of eternal multiswarm of electrical Power of some kind ululating in place of just pitiful images and forms of objects which are, after all, imaginary. And if you don't believe me come back in a billion years and deny it. For what is Time? - "Don't you think it's much more interesting just to be like Japhy and have girls and studies and good times and really be doing something, than all this silly sitting under trees?" - "Nope, I said, and I meant it, and I knew Japhy would agree with me. "All Japhy's doing is amusing himself in the void." - "I don't think so" - "I bet he is. I' going mountainclimbing with him next week and find out and tell you" - "Well (sigh), as for me I'm just going to go on being Alvah Goldbook [Allen Ginsberg] and to hell with all this Buddhist bullshit" - "You'll be sorry some day. Why don't you ever understand what I'm trying to tell you: it's not with your six senses that you're fooled into believing not only that you have six senses, but that you contact an actual outside world with them. If it wasn't for your eyes, you wouldn't see me. If it wasn't for your ears, you wouldn't hear that airplane. If it wasn't for your nose, you wouldn't smell the midnight mint. If it wasn't for your tongue taster, you wouldn't taste the difference between A and B. If it wasn't for your body, you wouldn't feel Princess. There is no me, no airplane, no mind, no Princess, no nothing, you for krissakes do you want to go on being fooled every damn minute of your life?" - "Yes, that's all I want, I  thank God that something has come out of  nothing" - "Well, I got news for you it's the other way round, nothing has come out of something, and that something is Dharmakaya, the body of the True Meaning, and that nothing is this, and all this twaddle and talk. I'm going to bed" - "Well sometimes I see a flash of illumination in what you're trying to say but believe me I get more of a satori out of Princess than out of words" - "It's a satori of your foolish flesh, you lecher." - "I know my redeemer liveth" - "What redeemer and what liveth?" - "Oh lets cut this out and just live!" - "Balls, when I thought like you, Alvah, I was just as miserable and graspy as you are now. All you want to do is run out there and get laid and get beat up and get screwed up and gt old and sick and banged around bysamsara, you fucking eternal meat of comeback you you'll deserve it too I'll say" -  "That's not nice. Everybody's tearful and trying to live with what they've got. Your Buddhism has made you mean, Ray and makes you even afraid to take your clothes off or a simple healthy orgy." - "Well, I did finally, didn't I?" -  "But you were coming on so hincty about  - Oh let's forget it" - Alvah went to bed and I sat and closed my eyes and thought, "This thinking has stopped" but because I had to think it no thinking had stopped, but there did come over me a wave of gladness to know that all this peturbation was just a dream already ended and I didn't have to worry because I wasn't "I" and I prayed that God, or Tathagata, would gie me enough sense and strength to be able to tell people what I knew (as I can't even do properly now) so they'd know what I know and not despair so much. The old tree brooded over me silently, a living thing. I heard a mouse snoring in the garden weeds. The rooftops of Berkeley looked like living meat sheltering grieving phantoms from the eternality of the heavens which they feared to face. By the time I went to bed I wasn't taken in by no Princess or no desire for no Princess and  nobody’s disapproval and I felt glad and slept well" 

















GC (Did you want to stay (come) up here (on the panel) ? 

AW: No - I (just) thought you could maybe comment on that, if you could...

AG: I don’t remember the conversation anymore! – except I do remember resenting that he was telling me that I couldn’t have a good time anymore and that existence was suffering – or marked by it  



to be continued tomorrow

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-seven minutes in and concluding approximately sixty-four-and-a-half minutes in]

More Kerouac - 2

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                                                           [Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)]

Q: (Gregory (Corso), (in several of his) remarks referred to (the first) conversations he’s had with Jack Kerouac...
Gregory Corso: Yeah
Q: (And I was wondering…) 
GC: I think it was more of a feeling he had towards things, that I was raised Catholic and that he was raised Catholic, it had a kind of bond to it. 
Peter (Orlovsky)? - Peter was raised Catholic?
AG: No 
GC: No, that’s it. So in the ball-game there was (William) Burroughs, who was an Anglo, there was the Jew-Boy, and, what was Peter? - Russian Orthodox? - or what?
AG: He wasn’t.. He’s a goy, so he’s not Jewish.
GC: Alright, whatever, but, nonetheless, he and I  {Gregory and Jack] were (together)
AG: Russian Orthodox, 
GC: Orthodox, Russian Orthodox.
AG: His grandfather..
GC: Ah, whatever.  Nonetheless, he [Jack] was interested in Catholicism, and I was raised by Christian brothers and in orphanages by nuns, so there was that connect. The conversations we had about it? -  je ne sais pas, I don’t recall none that we had.
AG: I (do).
GC: You do? okay..
AG: Yeah, you know what they used to say? The whole conversation was “You’re a Catholic” – “Yeah, I’m a Catholic, and you’re a Catholic..”..
GC: The two Catholics…
AG: …And he’s a Jew! – “Catholic poet, Catholic poet, yeah, Catholic poet - Jewish poet (Jewish poet)!”. That was about all! 



Q: (How true to Buddhist experience do you think Kerouac's books are (I'm thinking of
Some of the Dharma)?

AG: I once asked Gary Snyder that, because he would sort of be right in the middle in....he was studying, doing koan study Daitoku-ji monastery in Japan, and I asked Gary what  he thought about Kerouac’s mind... his mind, say with koan. And Gary said that he thought that Kerouac had a very very insightful mind, and probably could, intuitively, get to resolve some of the koans in a shorter time than most students (just simply because his mind was spontaneous and loose and not bound down by conceptual rigidities) .. but, have I answered your question? – how true to Buddhism is his exposition of dharma?  Close, I would say. He’s hitting…

Osel Tendzin: Sketchy 

AG: Sketchy, in that one book (Some of the Dharma) - but then he has a whole bunch of books..

OT: Still sketchy

AG: I would say un-sketchy, to the extent that he embodied Buddhist ideas in dramas and dramas of disillusionment, like the account of his older brother’s death (Visions of Gerard), where insights and flashes that would have doctrinal names in Buddhist dharma are given flesh and exhibited naked and raw in the narrative.

OT: Sketchy doesn’t mean bad, particularly.  (I mean sketchy, in terms of penetrating the doctrine itself, I think (he) is sketchy)  


AG: How would you… That’s interesting, because…Actually,that’s what I invited you mostly, here, to hear. What’s your judgment on...let’s see now..(his) intellectual grasp of the whole scheme of the dharma (what you say is sketchy…

OT: Kerouac?  - Sketchy, I think. I think he basically got the ideas, you know

AG: Uh-huh

OT: …right off the top, because he was a very sensitive and intelligent person, and, as I said before, tender, open, so he got the ideas right off the bat. As far as penetrating into the essence, I think it would have taken him a while (if he had a good teacher) ..

AG: Yeah

OT:…which didn’t exist at the time 

AG: Yes. One thing I thought, he clung to suffering. See? - Not merely recognizing Existence containing Suffering but then he got hooked on it and hung up on that one point.

OT: Well, there was an interesting thing you sent me which was from "Last Words"?
AG: "The Last Word" – yeah
OT:..and he listed the Four Noble Truths. Do you know the piece?
AG: Um.. Yes I do. It was.. I’m not sure if.. I do have it..
OT: (And) he says here ..
AG: this is an article in Escapade, being an exposition of dharma  (to OT): Am I talking about the same one?)
OT: No, this is it, this is it 
AG: 1960 or so, he took on a contract with Escapade 

OT: (reading) “Yet these thoughts stand up to the Four Noble Truths as propounded by Buddha and which I memorized under the street lamp in the cold wind of night – (1) All Life is Sorrowful” – (which is probably the translation that he could get at the time) – (2) “The Cause of Suffering is Ignorant Desire” – (which is another translation he could get at the time) – “The Suppression of Suffering can be achieved” (which is a really bad translation!) – and  “The way is the Noble Eightfold Path” (which is fine) – which you might as well say is just as explicit in Bach’s Goldberg Variations, not knowing it could just as well be - (1) All Life is Joy – (2) The Cause of Joy is Enlightened Desire - (3) The Expansion of Joy can be achieved - (4) The way is the Noble Eightfold Path”.  So, maybe he had some other ideas, as well as clinging to that, but..

AG: At that point, he wouldn’t…

OT: Is this at the end of his life?

AG: No, this is a kind of balance, I would say. Do you know, Gerald, what year?

Gerald Nicosia:  That would be about..very early, maybe (19)54   
AG: No, no, "The Last Word" is a..
GN: It was published much later, but it was written years before it was published.
AG: Do you think that’s partly from Some of the Dharma?  I thought it was written for Escapade as a summary in 1960, (or) whenever those articles were.
GN:  No, a lot of those Escapade articles were written years before, and that was one
AG: Okay 

OT: But it seems to me…

AG: The transformation from suffering to joy is interesting.. It's kind of Vajrayana-style, isn't it?

OT; It’s interesting, it’s interesting, because “All life is suffering” doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re trapped (that’s the whole notion of Original Sin, which doesn’t really exist in Buddhism) and “The cause of suffering is ignorant desire” is close – the cause of suffering is ignorance (and desire comes out of that).”The suppression of suffering can be achieved” is completely off (the normal translation is “cessation of suffering”, which is also off). The whole notion of suffering is that it is.. Suffering, basically, is a kind of mirror-image of your own projection. So you suffer because you look at something and say, “What’s that? – It’s other than me!”. So it’s possible that suffering can be defused (or unwound, which is a much better idea) and the Noble Eightfold Path is that – Be good, do good, don’t say bad things about other people, be nice to people, don’t hurt yourself, don’t hurt other people”

AG: What I was diggin’ here was “The Cause of Joy is Enlightened Desire" and "The Expansion of Joy can be achieved”

OT: Well, "Enlightened Desire" is an interesting point, too. "Enlightened Desire" means everybody here has a desire for something. It’s like that cross Gregory’s talking about. That cross doesn’t necessarily have to mean that somebody's stretched out on it bleeding. The cross itself may say to somebody, “Wake up!” – So that could be Enlightened Desire, just to see a symbol, of some kind, could wake up something in you, or if you read a line in Kerouac’s work..




Gregory Corso: Yeah, but it does have a lousy history, that cross, though (I mean, good god, it’s something else!)

AG: Gregory, do you want to…

OT: Not that one.
GC: Oh  not that one.
OT: Not that one
GC: Not this one!...

Q: (I don't know who to direct this to... It's just that I'd like to try to (question the) challenge to Jack Kerouac's Catholicism).. Do you see any comparison,  (any) compatability, between Catholicism (and) Buddhism, in the idea that, in Catholicism, there's an acceptance of suffering (and a chance for good in the after-life, you know)…...whereas, in Buddhism, we must improve the suffering, as it says in The Eight Noble Paths… Also, how enlightened… (how)… do you see any compatability or contradiction(s)?) 

GC: Well the two Catholics can answer that, right?, you, Riccardo (sic) , and me -  Denial, flagellation, they wouold have, I mean, monasteries, vows of silence, and what-not – yeah…That’s as close as I can come to I where they would deny themselves the pleasures of life and what-not – the asceticism.

OT: There’s a little difference between the Catholic idea of why you would deny yourself that pleasurable experience and the Buddhist idea. There’s actually quite a bit of difference there. I think that speaks to this gentleman’s question.You deny it now because this particular thing we’re doing is really...  and the next one is much better.

GC: That’s weird, because, the next one, if you’re going to wait for the next one, you’ll never know really. Everything is happening now

OT: Well you do know, if, if, according to the Catholic tradition, you can tune your mind to Christ

GC: Yeah

OT: Body and mind, not just mind, body and mind. Then, when you die, you’re born in a particular heaven, and life goes on..

GC: That’s a funny one to believe, though, because dead you’re really up shit’s creek, I mean you can’t do nothing. When you’re alive, you do it.

OT: How do you know, Gregory. Come on..

GC: Well, I’m alive 

OT: How do you know?

GC:  I don’t know nothing about death. Allen called me up the other night to explain death? - "No, thank you"

JCH: It seems  to me, as a sympathetic and interested observer of all this, that doctrines (separate)  different doctrines can never be compatible, but the essence, for which doctrines are an expression is often, essentially, the same. And Jack was… Jack..  in the passion..in his first passion of Buddhism, he did not reject Catholicism, despite what you read. He didn’t concern himself with it. I never heard him say anything about it. He didn’t say that now I have..  in accepting this, I must reject that. He was… He found his beliefs via experience and not out of books (which is the very best way to find them, after all) - I think the books made it seem he was living hedonistically, which Jack did not, Jack had a deep moral sense, for which his Catholicism, I think, is primarily responsible, because those things are formed very early in life.

GC Yeah

OT:  (I think the books were experience too)  Well weren’t the books in there too? He read something there.

John Clellon Holmes: Oh yes. I mean for a.. for a doctrine about which so few Westerners know anything, there is almost no way to approach it except through books.

OT: I don’t know when he was reading all this - the Lamkavatara Sutra, and all this stuff ,but it must be quite early for Americans.

AG: Yes. In the book [a history of Buddhism in America], How The Swans Came To The Lake, he’s given credit for being one of the sort of precursors of the larger wave of actual Buddhist practice that took place in late 60s and early 70s.

JCH: I think he was. I’d agree with that, but we are talking about what he himself believed (or the nature of his belief, not what he believed), I don’t think he was preoccupied with tenets of any faith. If they had psychological or spiritual relevance to him, he accepted them and talked about them in his books (and) in his letters. I mean, Visions of Gerard is as intensely Catholic as Dharma Bums is intensely Buddhist

OT: That’s interesting…

JCH: They were both written by the same man and  he found no incompatability between them, but, they are no doctrinal books, they are not illustration of a doctrine. They are a depiction of human beings struggling with themselves and with their longings, and, ultimately, with death – how to confront death, how to understand it, how to cease fearing it. This is a profoundly religious point of view, but to try to say..  to try to claim Jack for any given faith or any.. to try to sum up where Jack ended up, I think we’re looking for a kind of certainty he would …he would not have appreciated. He was never certain. He never stopped growing. He  was enlarged by everything that he encountered in terms of this, and we should attempt to be no smaller than that.

Q:  (I’d like to ask about another figure, touching on all these matters - the spiritual transmission of  Walt Whitman"Song of the Open Road", Specimen Days""Song of Prudence",  Song of Myself  - writing on matters of love and death of comrades, taking care of the sick….)

AG: Well, the Whitmanic open road is very similar to Mahayana Buddhism  and sutra, at least Budddhists think so. So there’s some correaltion there, that is – respect for self ((Whitman's) “I celebrate myself”), affection for self, without being hung-up, and thus transfer that affection to other people, sensibility (or, basically, a tender heart, open tender heart, open road. Same doctrine.

Q: (But isn't there an actual direct connection to be made between Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac  Specemin Days and (all of) Jack's…?)

AG: Ok,  Yes. That’s another speech.

I  had one thing I wanted to remember. The first time I ever heard the.. what do you call those things?, when you take…? -  refuge!  - the refuge vows, Kerouac was crooning to..crooning them to me in the voice of  Frank Sinatra! – 1955 – and the way he sang it was [Allen imitates "Buddham saranam gacchami,  Sangha saranam gacchami, Dharma, saranam gacchami"  (kind of mixed up, but, anyway, he was crooning the first time I ever heard it – and he kept saying , with the voice of Sinatra, this is the American way of singing it. You know, it sounded great. I still remember it to this day, and you know I’ve heard it a thousand times since but that was the most striking I ever heard it – and it had, like, Sinatra-esque love-suffering in the middle of it...

It’s six o’clock. Some people have got to go to dinner at the 6.15 dinner. Anybody want to wrap it up?

GC: Yeah. Have a good life!     



[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately sixty-one-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at the end of the tape]


[The microphone is left on for a couple of minutes after the panel ends (until the tape runs out) - so this tapeends with  ambient sound - room conversation - Allen overheard speaking of busy-ness, Ken Kesey, and signing books]

Allen Ginsberg, Montreal 1989 - (Q & A - 5)

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                                              [Yoko Ono and John Lennon  in London,1969]


Continuing with the 1969 Montreal Q & A

Q: Just to begin, how do you think [1969] the war in Vietnam will end?

AG: I don’t know. I guess, presumably, the people in the United States will get more and more violent about their frustrations and pretty soon the government will get more and more upset, and I suppose they’ll probably withdraw everything, withdraw all the troops. 
I don’t know, I’m not an IBM machine..

Q: Do you dig the violent idea of it, the fact that the violence seems to be inevitable?

AG: No, no, I mean, I think it’s just that the government has been so violent all along that it’s provoked it, now in the United States too.

Q: Is there another way?

AG: Well, if the government would get out, sure. There’s ninety billion dollars that’s going to the Pentagon. If they gave the ninety billion dollars to the Department of the Interior and told them to straighten out the ecology of the United States and clear off all the smog – and give out free pot, and set up psychedelic-research centers, and do some rural reconstruction, and give everybody a lot of money to go out and live in the country in communes, then, sure, everything would calm down. Give all the blacks (sic) all the money they want to go back to Birmingham [Alabama] and enjoy themselves, instead of having to hang around New York City in the slums and fight the welfare system. There’s enough money. (In other words), most of the money spent in the last… since I can remember has all been spent on the destruction of the environment, on a violent destruction of the environment, like tearing up of the..tearing up the Jersey Meadows and destroying huge areas of bird sanctuaries, and cutting down giant (democratic) pine populations. 

Q: And buying up Canada?

AG: Buying up Canada? – So.. I don’t quite understand what you mean by how do I think the war will end?

Q: Well, it was just a general question..about..basically about, what do you feel about the trends in American society today, as a result of the war…

AG: Well, they say.. they say now, I don’t know if it’s true, but, about three weeks ago,
fifty-eight percent of the United  States population thought that the war always had been a mistake. In other words, not merely that they wanted to get out but they also thought it always had been a mistake (according to big polls). So that means, if they were getting that perspective, that’s fifty-eight percent of the people think that they personally had been hallucinated all along, or “brainwashed” (which was (George) Romney’s (sic) phrase), which is a large.. that’s a big step for people to go, to realize that they were wrong. So that means if they were wrong, that means they’ll have to realize that the people that run the country don’t know what they’re doing really, are, you know, completely out of their skulls, and have been all along.

Q: Well, how much do you find that  your political commitment influences your poetry?

AG: I don’t have very much political commitment actually. In the sense that, what I’m saying now is, like, like the result of reading between the lines of the New York Times, say, or reading the underground press, or having actually, having been in Vietnam, actually, having visited Vietnam some time back. But I don’t, like, feel committed to, like New Left revolution, in terms of the hysteria and violence involved, any more than I feel committed to…I don’t know, the Democratic or Republican Party with all their hysteria and violence.

Q: What do you find patriotic about, then?

AG: Nothing particularly, anymore! – I’d like to die easy, frankly.  I’d like to get out of, get out of, this particular scene, it’s getting..

Q: The college scene?

AG: No, I meant the meat scene, the phenomenal apparitions, maya, life.

Q: Like being here?

AG: Well being anywhere!  (too painful)

Q: Excuse me, when you say you’d like to die…

AG: I’d like to die peacefully, you know

Q: Are you speaking metaphorically?

AG: No, no, it would be really sort of a pleasure to get out of the body.

Q: Well, it’s always available!

AG:  Yes, but it’s painful, that’s the scary part . So I won't have the fear, you know

Q: Your thought of echoing  (John) Keats' wanting to die in  "Ode to a Nightingale"  - Is that what you mean?

Q: Oh yeah

AG:  He looked.. He looked as if he were some sort of funny bodhisattva rabbi who’s made-believe he came here to announce the fact that the universe didn’t exist and then he died to prove it – Or, like, (returned it), like an eternity meat-doll and was lying in his coffin. And I suddenly felt that he never had been here, actually. that nobody.. that everybody was sort of like a walking dumb-show..

Q: In so far as what you say, Mr Ginsberg influences a large number of young people, when you say that you would like to die, are you, in fact, counseling other people to pursue what one might consider a rather negative attitude towards life?

AG: No, because, you see, first of all, you've got to understand that it’s to the extent that I have any function at all is simply to.. to speak as clearly as possible and frankly, you know, what’s on my mind (and that’s about all a poet can do – say what he’s actually thinking, as distinct from what he thinks he should think, or what other people think he should think, or what he should think if he was being responsible when he was thinking.) In other words… Are you following what I’m saying?

Q: Er..well..

AG: In other words, I have the responsibility not to disguise my.. thoughts

Q: Did you counsel others to avoid the draft?

AG: Sure. Yeah - Don’t kill. However, what I was saying, I didn’t.. wouldn’t count as negative. I think that would be your interpretation of it.

Q: Yes, that’s what I wanted to know..

AG: (And so) I wouldn't interpret it so negatively – to say that one is detatching oneself from earthly ambitions and greeds (It was counted a virtue in the old days - Remember?)

Q: Yes, you did mention death and you said that you weren’t speaking metaphorically

AG: [greeting someone who returns greeting – Hare Krishna!]  - Pardon me?

Q: You did mention death and you said that you weren’t speaking metaphorically.

AG: Well, I don’t think in the old days it was…  that death was counted a negative virtue – I mean, death was always thought of as a very awesome and important experience. It wasn’t necessarily to be considered evil, was it?

Q: It’s very rarely in the, say, European tradition that it's been greeted with loud and many fanfares

AG: Oh? – haven't you ever been to an Irish funeral? -  An Irish funeral is a loud, merry drunken delight, in fact.

Q: The tributes, say, (in) mourning, the key-notes….

AG: Yeah.. but I mean, there is an old European tradition of awareness of death, as you know. A Great Being, possibly God himself, arriving. In other words… There’s also an American tradition – in  (Walt) Whitman – “Come lovely death,/ undulate around the world, serenely arriving...” (serenely arriving!)". [Editorial note - the precise quote is "Come lovely and soothing death…" - (from "When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom'd")] - You’re making a lot more to it than I would have wanted to.

Q: Do you think Jack Kerouac was an important figures?

AG: Yeah  - for me – for my consciousness, Yes .

Q: How was he important for you?

AG: Well, he taught me to write! – He taught me to watch my own mind when I was writing and to transcribe my mind, to listen to the babble in my head and to take that seriously, as prosody, taught me to hear myself and watch my own thoughts (sort of like a yoga, poetry-yoga), he also introduced me to Gnostic awareness, Gnostic awareness, to Buddhism, and thereby, like, introduced me back to my own Hebrew tradition, to some extent, Hasidism and Kabbalah, which I’ve only scratched the surface of. The main thing… I think the main thing is that he taught me, that I think I learned from him, was that life, quite literally.. that the phenomenal life that we’re looking at, is, literally, maya, illusion. 

That’s what I meant when I was talking about dying. The realization that what we were confronted with was what the Indians call “maya’ – or illusion
So (it’s what you guys) read in Ecclesiastes, basically – “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” – Vanity, I guess. ["Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity"] - His last book was called “Vanity of Kerouac” (“Vanity of Duluoz”) – it was an Ecclesiastes lamentation of his own grasping

Q: Excuse me

AG:  I guess that I’m afraid that you’re going to interpret what I’m saying as negative. I didn’t mean the negative that you meant

Q: No no, no. don’t be frightened..

AG: I mean, I don’t want to..

Q: There’s one thing that rather struck me…

AG: I thought there was someone else who wanted to talk

Q2 –Yes, I don’t understand, you say you don't feel any  political commitment per se. So what did you see your role in Chicagoas? What purpose were you serving by going there? 

AG: Well, originally…

Q2: (You gave a press-conference, and..)

AG; Yeah,originally (Ed) Sanders… well, Sanders wanted to go and I like Ed Sanders! – So if he will do something, then I’d go along with it, partly that. The other was… Originally the idea was Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins, (Ed) Sanders, The Fugs, Country Joe and The Fish , Abbie Hoffman, (Dave) Dellinger, (William) Burroughs, even Charles Olson, to some extent –all had talked about it – ((Timothy) Leary, particularly). All were thinking in terms of holding a "Festival of Life" in Chicago, something like what had emerged at Bethel, at White Lake, [Woodstock], where the entire city would be swamped by a million naked young kids with rock n’ roll bands, and, with, like, an actual articulation or manifestation of the new planetary consciousness that young kids feel, or of the gnostic consciousness, or the cosmic consciousness, as distinct from the limited earth-man-city consciousness that the secret police were enforcing in Chicago. So that was the original conception, and I..  sort of as a party, as a ball, as a.. not exactly political.. that's political, but it’s another kind of, like, space-age science-fiction cosmic psycho-politics, which is a little different from political commitment as I interpreted it when it was asked me, just a minute ago.

Q: But couldn’t you see that hasn't come off..

AG: So..  It did come off in Bethel, finally, it came off in White Lake, finally. I went..  Your question is why did I go? - it's because I announced that I would go, originally, thinking we might be able to evoke something like that, and I figured that since I said I would come, if  there was someone who came on my account, I’d better be there to be chanting, to, like, maintain the particular thing, vibration, that I proposed originally, and at the original press conference where I announced I was going , the thing I announced that I would do would be to chant the Hare Krishna mantra. So I felt I had to go to Chicago to chant the Hare Krishna mantra

Q: WasAbbie Hoffman with you at that press conference?

AG: Yes, encouraging me to chant the Hare Krishna mantra. Do you know that mantra?

Q: Pardon?

AG: Do you know that Hare Krishna mantra 

Q: We’ve been hearing it a lot at McGill lately!

AG: Well, it’s good medicine

Q: (Krishna devotees)

AG: Yeah Some of them from (ISKON)  theInternational Society For Krishna Consciousness (are) here. Yeah?

Q: Are you going to be chanting while you’re here?

AG: Yeah, I’ll be chanting while I'm here. Though it’s weird see, like, this is the Hillel, this is a Hebrew (thing), I should really know how to chant rabbi songs too, which are  just as effective as the Hare Krishna things – but I don’t.  I know the Hare Krishna better, oddly enough 

Q: Where are you with the Jewish thing?  Where are you at ..)?

AG: Oddly enough, all of these years, I sort of avoided it. 

Q: Well, so can you keep on avoiding it?

AG: No, last night, for the first time actually, I heard a record of Rabbi Carlebach, which sounded as good as Hare Krishna (I mean, it really sounded great). I’d like to learn Carlebach’s singing actually
Q: Well, I mean, You being presented as.. specifically, in New York, where there’s tension between black and Jews….that is.. well, I mean, this is a political thing, but it’s more a sociological thing, where are you at there, exactly…?

AG: I don’t know. Confused like everybody else.

Q:  Confused?

AG: Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) won’t talk to me now (1968). On the other hand, I just finished making a phonograph record of (William) Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience with Elvin Jones and Don Cherry. So in the area where I feel confident, which is art, I find that there is no difficulties (because Cherry and Jones are (both) great black musicians). In the area of adoration and worship, I don’t think there’s any problem. So I would say that would be the political area to begin with. Adoration and worship and then work out from that,

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirteen-and-three-quarter minutes in (on the fourth segment) and continuing until approximately twenty-eight minutes in] 

Allen Ginsberg, Montreal 1969 Q & A - 6) (Drugs)

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[Allen Ginsberg, 1966 poster from San Francisco advertising the famous Ken Kesey Acid Tests]


Q: What is your present [1989] thinking about drugs?

AG: Well, it looks like marijuana will slowly be legalized in the United States (since grandmother Margaret Mead came out for it the other day! ). So I saw an AP dispatch yesterday that said that Governor Kirk of Florida called her “a dirty old lady”

Q:  (He)..said she should be locked up with all the other degenerates!

AG: Yeah 

Q: But what was it about the stronger stuff?

AG: And then crime in New York and the larger cities will be cut in over half if the police would obey the law and allow junkies to go to doctors to get their medicine. That would cut out the Mafia (and) cut out the selling of drugs by the police which is rampart in New York City, So the only people who are profiting from the present dope situation in New York, or the hard-drug situation, are the police and the Mafia. So that could be easily solved if you..if we would, in the United States, adopt the English system, and, actually, legally, we already have that, because there was a  Supreme Court decision in 1925 that said that junkies really legally could go to doctors for maintenance doses, it’s just that the police have blocked that at every turn. And for speed (amphetamines), I would just quit the manufacture and sell speed to all persons including the Pentagon (which is operating mainly on speed (as far as I can see).   And for acid, I would (just) follow the recommendations of the National Student Association and institute intra-disciplinary psychedelic studies as an optional or elective course in freshman year at college.
.
Q: Freshman year in college?
  
AG: Yeah, or maybe late high-school.. Well, whenever the classical vision-quest time comes for a social group. In other words, American Indians go after their vision-quest about the same time as Jewish boys get bar-mitzvahed. You know, that’s thirteen, when manhood or puberty comes, the vision-quest in almost all non-Western societies is an ancient ritual. 
So, I guess you could institutionalize or ritualize, ritualize the use of psychedelics as part of. like, a normal vision-quest for younger people, elective, you know one of many. Maybe put the Boy Scouts in charge of that effort?
  
Q: Which of your poems have come to you while you were tripping?

AG: Not many. Part II of “Howl” is written on peyote. A few other poems are inscribed - “LSD", ”Mescaline”, “Nitrous Oxide”,”Aether” – those are the titles – and then there’s one long one (from) about two years ago called “Wales Visitation, which is a long Wordsworthian nature poem written on acid in Wales.

Q: Do you think you have to be tripping to enjoy your poetry to the fullest  – like tomorrow, when you'll be reading it.

AG:No, I don’t think it makes very much difference one way or the other. No. No, most of my poetry I don’t write on drugs, just that a few good things I have written. (In other words). Some poems I wrote on the typewriter and some scribbled, some I wrote on drugs and some I didn’t. I think the..the myth put forward by the police that no creative work can be done under drugs is folly.

Q: Of course.

AG: The myth that anybody who takes drugs’ll..will produce, produce something interesting is equal folly. It’s a great argument over nothing. A lot of people are being put in jail over folly.   Yeah?

Q: How important  is your poetry to your...

AG: Pardon me?

Q: How important is your poetry to you. Is it the most important thing?

AG: I guess, yeah, It’s the thing that I feel most sentimental about. I feel most.. (more than sex now - it’s horrible!) 
- [Allen turns to previous questioner] -  Actually, I didn’t really mean to be so.. I keep feeling that I was rejecting your question in a funny way and that..because of my own nervousness, and I don’t know if I answered it properly before (about death or whatever attachment the political was), I’ve forgot...

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-eight minutes in (fourth segment) and concludes approximately thirty-three minutes in]  

Allen Ginsberg Montreal 1989 Q & A - 7) (Kerouac)

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[A flyer from the 2009 production in New York of  Larry Myers play -"Jack Kerouac: Catholic" - "He (Jack) was proud of being a Canuck Catholic" (Allen Ginsberg)] 


Q: May I (now) ask you another question?

AG Yeah

Q: Jack Kerouac abandoned his Catholicism, which was the Church in which he had been brought up. You mentioned that, and at the same time, you coupled it with a statement that seemed to suggest that you are returning to a Kabbalistic or Hassidic tradition. How do you reconcile a return to a traditional Jewish root with an enthusiastic interest in Hare Krishna…It is… Do you think that a rabbinical tradition can, in some way, be reconciled with a Hindu or Hare Krishna tradition?

AG: Yeah, Okay. Well, first of all, about Kerouac. Actually, he didn’t really reject the Catholic tradition. In fact, I was a pall-bearer in St-Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell last week and he got a full High Mass burial with a rosary between his paws. He had gone into, like, Buddhist studies, very heavily, and I don’t think he ever did reconcile the difference between an Atheist Buddhist void universe, nirvana of the Buddhists, and the Personal Saviour-Lamb-Sacred Heart sweetness-and-softness of the Christ that he had in mind. And he wound up drinking himself to death, actually, I think with that conflict there.

Q: Well, of course, there were two Kerouacs…(Jack and Ti Jean)

AG: Yeah – but .. And he did both actually. It’s amazing. Like, he died both (ways)

Q:  Jean... 

AG: Jean-Louise Lebris de Kerouac was his name actually, and he was proud of being, like, a Canuck Catholic. And that was, like a heavy part of his personality. As well as a learned Buddhist at other moments. So it’s like….

Q: Do you think you can solve the (dilemma)?…

to be continued

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

Ferlinghetti's Birthday

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                           [Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Godot," 2008, Oil paints on canvas, 11 x 14 in. Photo by Ron Jones]

Two Moscow memories from the recently-published Writing Across The Landscape



"On the walls of the Writers Union Cafe, I saw Allen's three-fish symbol, drawn by him here in summer 1965  & I drew woman nude with inscription, "The door to the invisible is visible"


"Zoja Voznesensky concluded, after a discussion of Ginsberg (who had visited Moscow, summer of '65) that Ginsberg was concerned with the interior world while I was concerned with the outside world and therefore my poetry was "more comprehensive" (or something like that - this was through an interpreter). I asked why, then, was his poetry so much more universal than mine. She replied that because the interior was more important than the exterior………. Later I reflected that if she knew Allen better, she might realize that it was Allen who is in fact the extrovert, I the introvert…."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns, believe it or not, ninety-seven today.  
Happy Birthday, Lawrence! - 
Check in on all-things-Ferlinghetti on Lawrence'sCity Lightspage - here 
(and his Facebook Fan Page - here)

Ferlinghetti interviewed by Jonah Raskin for the local San Francisco newspapers (in June of last year)

Recent interviews - (and Beat-international interviews) - Following up our recent notice of an Italian one, the ever-sprightly Lawrence Ferlinghetti interviewed in Spanish - here 


Here's Lawrence's elegy  (from 1977) on Allen: 



And don't forget, of course, this book:



Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 261

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Recent Ginsberg volumes - The Essential Ginsberg (from HarperCollins) and Wait Till I'm Dead - UnCollected Poems (from Grove Press) - here's Library Journal's cogent and informative appraisals of the books: 

"The work and not just the poetry of Ginsberg (1926-97), one of 20th-century America's most important and notorious literary figures has finally been given the career-arching overview it deserves. Schumacher (Dharma Lion) has compiled the poet's greatest hits into this volume, including the regularly-anthologized, "Howl", "Kaddish", "A Supermarket In California", "America", and "Kral Majales". What distinguishes this book from other posthumous Ginsberg collections is that it also presents small samples of his songwriting, essays, interviews, letters, journal excerpts, and understated photography. Ginsberg's position at the center of the Beat movement is made clear through Schumacher's selections which highlight his key relationships with Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs, Neal Cassady, among others. Similarly his involvement in the burgeoning American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s is at the heart of many of these selections. By making this volume similar to the ones in Viking's "Portable Library" series, Harper Perennial has all but ensured the book's place in university classrooms for years to come. VERDICT: An essential starting-point for any reader encountering the artist's still-controversial work for the very first time."

- and, Wait Till I'm Dead

"Much more than a footnote to 2006’s massive Collected Poems, 1947–1997, this carefully chosen gathering of Ginsberg’s fugitive pieces, some unpublished and others long buried in obscure magazines, spans his college days in the 1940s through 1996, the year before his death at age 70. For five decades Ginsberg adhered to a personal ars poetica (“I must write down/ every recurring thought —/ stop every beating second”), which for better or for worse influenced generations of poets beyond the Beats. An example of this spontaneous aesthetic at its liveliest is the heretofore uncollected “NY to San Fran, a 27-page Whitmanic reverie of hallucinogenic scope the poet set down in a notebook during a 1965 crosscountry flight. But Ginsberg could pivot when appropriate, as in the formal unpublished elegy to his father, the poet Louis Ginsberg, composed in 1976. 

VERDICT: Together with the editor’s informative notes, this volume not only complements its larger predecessor but similarly offers an impressionistic microhistory of the 20th-century American counterculture, its restless consciousness and broad emotional register filtered through the unbridled visions of one of its most outspoken icons. Ginsberg fans and scholars alike will appreciate the wealth of new material included."

A review of last week's Berkeley "Howl "60th celebrations -  here



[Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" , 1956 Berkeley Town Hall - Photograph by Walter Lehrman - © Walter Lehrman and the Walter Lehrman Beat Generation Photo Collection at the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University, Logan, Utah] 

Some recent news that we've missed:  

Mohammed Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami, the Qatari poet who we reported on this time last year, has finally been pardoned and released (after being imprisoned, shockingly, for almost five years, for, as Carles Torner, international executive director of PEN, has noted, "simply reciting a poem in private". Al-Ajami was arrested in Doha in 2011 on charges of "inciting the overthrow of the ruling regime" and "insulting the Emir" relating to the content of two of his poems. The charges were brought after recordings of him reciting his poems at private gatherings were published on line.


[Mohammed Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami]

  The Washington Post reports on a rare Walt Whitman letter, written for a dying (Civil War) soldier, found in the National Archives


[Letter, written by Walt Whitman, on behalf of an illiterate dying soldier (Private Robert N Jabo)  to his wife] 

(which reminds us, recalling this aspect of Whitman, of Charley Shively's moving anthology of just such letters, Drum Beats - Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers, now regretfully out-of-print, from Gay Sunshine Press   

 


 Images of Allen and Peter (and a whole lot of Dutch, English, and American poets (& a few Russians too) - from vintage Amsterdam '79 (courtesy Harry Hoogstraten) - (scroll down here


[Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky - Photograph by Harry Hoogstraten © 1979-2016 Harry Hoogstraten]

Wednesday night (this coming Wednesday, March 30th, coming up) at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences - "The Poetry of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg for Baritone and String Quartet" - How proud Allen was of his membership of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences!  -  David Kravitz and the Arneis Quartet are the performers featured

&amp (hot damn!) ; 



A Gregory Corso Weekend

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                           [Gregory Corso, Boulder, Colarado, July 1994 - Photograph by Seth Brigham]



[Gregory Corso - Self Portrait (undated)]

A Gregory Corso weekend.. It's Gregory's birthday. He would have been eighty-six today. 

We've featured Gregory many many times on the Allen Ginsberg, starting way back in 2010 with this birthday announcement. 
Gregory Corso Happy Birthday of Death(sic) can be found here
Corso 2013 Birthday celebration - here
Corso 2014 Birthday celebration - here
Corso 2015 Birthday celebration - here
Not Forgetting Gregory Corso - here

Two vintage  Naropa readings - one (with William Burroughs)  - from 1975, and one (solo), from 1981 (a reading from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit - that reading continues here

Original Beats, Francois Bernardi's film of Gregory and Herbert Huncke can be seen here  (additional footage from that movie - here

Here's more footage of Gregory



Here's Gregory reading The Bill of Rights on an East Village rooftop!
 

Die on Me is the extraordinary set of recordings put out in 2002 on Paris Records. A complimentary record, Lieders (with Marianne Faithfull) was also put out by Paris Records

Listen to to "Ah Roma!" (with Francis Kuipers)
(More Gregory-in-Rome here and here

Gregory heckling Allen? - It wouldn't be a proper Gregory memory if there weren't record of Gregory misbehaving. There's his famous 1973 interruption of Allen's uptown Y reading 

That same year, he wasn' t any less restrained at the Salem State Kerouac conference.

Gregory's more measured words on Kerouac (from 1986's What Happened to Jack Kerouac?here:



Allen and Gregory bickering over Shakespeare - here,
confessing he's in error - here 
and sparring with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, way back in 1975,  in a hilarious series of posts (eight of them in all) starting here - ("He wants to be like me - famous! - and Allen. He wants to get into the poetry racket, that's what he wants to do") 

That year (1975), indeed for many years, Gregory gave classes at Naropa. The Allen Ginsberg Project has featured several extensive transcriptions. The 1975 classes (serialized in seven parts) begin here (after "Two Shots From Gregory Corso"). This is followed by a four-part serializaton, (posted February 2012),  "More Corso At Naropa

Gregory interviewer and interviewee - 1961 -  the Journal For The Protection of All Beings interview - Gregory and Allen interview William Burroughs
From 1959, Gregory and Allen and Peter Orlovsky are interviewed by Studs Terkel
(plus a later radio interview with Allen and Gregory) 


Speaking of interviews, there's now this essential volume:


Gregory, the "great list poet". Allen evokes some of Gregory's longer works here
(and offers a shorter note - here)

in 1978 (in a four-part sequence) he joins Allen with a line-by-line reading (almost) of Whitman's revealing and foolishly neglected poem, "Respondez!

and there's more….

Happy Birthday, Gregory Nunzio Corso!

more tomorrow!


   [Gregory Corso,  September, 1959, in Athens, Greece, at the Acropolis - (for more from that particular occasion - see here

A Gregory Corso Weekend - 2

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[Gregory Corso, Lowell, Massachusetts - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg © The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

[One of Gregory Corso's triangles - a favorite game he played, drawing unexpected xonnections between kindred spirits - Courtesy the collection of Raymond Foye. - Raymond Foye writes: "He could spend a whole day on a game of this sort, in cafes & bars, testing out ideas, quizzing people, having fun. As the day wore on and there were more & more drinks, things would start to get edgy and challenging. It would eventually end with him screaming insults at everybody and tearing up all the diagrams".]


                                     ["The spirit is a charitable thief" - drawing by Gregory Corso, 1974]

Our Gregory Corso birthday celebrations continue with this miscellany of items…..


                  [Gregory Corso - original drawing c. 1970's (from the Patti Oldenburg (Mucha) Archive - & see here]


[Gregory Corso - original 1963 Diary/Journal]


 ["To be done with darkness…" - Another page from Gregory Corso's 1963 Diary/Journal]

   
["Bomb" - original ms,, 1958 - "This is the first assembly of mine [sic] poem Bomb. The process of trying to attain the mushroom shape, which was impossible to do at the typewriter - Also this poem is early draft in that final draft is very different in line changes, subject matter, etc " (Gregory Corso)  - via  University of Miami Library]

                                ["A bluebird alights upon a yellow chair - Spring is here']


Allen Ginsberg, Montreal, 1989 Q & A - 8) (Judaism and Krishna)

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AG; Now, about the second part, [sic - "How do you reconcile a return to a traditional Jewish root with an enthusiastic interest in Hare Krishna? Do you think that a rabbinical tradition can, in some way, be reconciled with a Hindu or Hare Krishna tradition?] -  (it) was a… I didn’t mean to..  

Like, I was saying,.. last night, I heard  - (and I’m sitting here in Hillel House,  so I don’t mean to make it quite that corny - "Well, folks, I want to announce I am now returning to the Hebrew tradition” – that’s not what I meant– that's not what I meant). No, that’s not what I meant. 

No it was, actually, oddly, I did hear Carlebach, Schlomo Carlebach, who’s a very great cantor and Hassid, modern hip Hassid, last night, and, like, I found that attractive, because I’ve had a lot of experience singing now, and I suddenly recognize a really great heroic spiritualized voice that sounds like it’s on a high note, it sounds like it’s coming out the top of his skull. 

The.. well, actually, what I’ve been into (I was explaining it to some students upstairs), my deepest experience, experience of any nature, was a mystical, or illuminative,  experience, or religious experience, or a hallucination, whatever you want to call it, that I got once while reading poetry – (William) Blakespecifically, And in going back into that, and doing a study of that, that has led me back to Thomas Taylor, the Neo-Platonist and Taylor’s essays on the Bacchic and Eleusinian mysteries. It’s led me into Dr Hans Jonas’ books on the Gnostic religions. It’s led me to the Mandaean Gnostic System.It’s led me to Manichaeism, and Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme, also to the Kabbalah and the Zohar, as it also relates.. you know, the same thing..what I would say is common in all of them is that the Buddhist void or nirvana or the Buddhist doctrine of the empty single void is very similar, oddly, to the…what I understand.. to the Mandean Gnostic conception of the Abyss of Light which gave birth to a shudder of self-consciousness which gave birth to Sophia” , Wisdom, or The Word. And she gave birth, I believe to Ialdabaoth and Ialdabaoth  had a thought and that thought was Io, and now.. Io’s first thought was Elohim and Elohim’s first thought was Jehovah and Jehovah thought us up and we’ve been stuck in Jehovah’s mind-garden ever since. According to the Mandean Gnostic system . 

So, according to that same system. Sophia regretting the fact that her hallucination had created all these myriad aeons, guarded over by archons, and guarded over by people who guarded this (harmony) this mind-creation, sent an avion, or messenger, or Caller-of-The-Great-Call, into the garden of Jehovah to tip Adam and Eve off that they were prisoners of Jehovah’s ego. And that messenger was the Serpent, according to that particular, that specific, Gnostic system. 

 The terminology of that system is not very different ..(of the aeons and the Caller) is not  very different from the Buddhist terminology of the many worlds in the ten directions in and out, and thebodhisattva. And the abyss, the original Abyss of Light, or the blissful empty nirvana of the Buddhists, the dharmakaya of the Buddhists, to be precise, is relatively.. well, is an image very similar to the Gnostic "Abyss of Light", and that’s very similar to what I see in the opening of the Zohar is a description of the original uncommunicable void from which  a point of light emerged.

Q: In other words..

AG: In other words, obviously, we’re dealing with one consciousness, in a strange universe, and, obviously all of these hieratic or esoteric or Gnostic or hermetic studies, all lead in to the same point of consciousness 

AG: Yeah, and what one finds in the Jewish tradition, the Chabadnik,  the Chabad, the rabbi songs – Chochma binna deat – Wisdom – what’s Chochma binna deat?Wisdom.. Does anybody know?

Q: Study and Knowledge..Understanding..

AG: Yeah, the rabbi songs are hypnotically repeated chants, sung atSimchat Torah (at least in Williamsburgwhere I heard it, which have a very similar physiological and mental ecstatic effect as the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra. In fact, my chanting of the Hare Krishna, or of Buddhist mantra , is, probably, is more cantorial than Oriental – than Indian or Japanese, so I’m told.

Q: You wouldn’t say then that you were hovering between Lubavitch and Buddha or the Lubavich-strain and Buddha or Buddhistic strain…

AG: Well, what I would say is it’s… "Buddha sits in Mary’s belly","Shango holds Shiva’s prick"[Allen quotes from his own poemHoly Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss"] - (Shango, the African divinity who’s  symbolized by a phallus, as is Shiva symbolized by a phallus. And.. I don’t know.. I don’t have my books with me. 
Does anybody have a book called Planet News here? Can I have a copy? I’ve got a specific statement to make

Q: We're adopted in all this. What can I say? 
  
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in, and concluding at approximately forty-one minutes in] 

Allen Ginsberg, Montreal 1989 Q & A - 9) ("Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss")

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                                                   [Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (Lord Chaitanya) (1486 - 1534)]

AG: Okay, the formulation I finally arrived at was... 

[Allen reads from Planet News] -Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss" -

"Is this the God of Gods the one I heard about/in memorized language Universities murmur?/Dollar bills can buy it! the great substance/exchanges itself freely through all the world's/ poetry money, past and future currencies/issued and redeemed by the identical bank,/electric monopoly after monopoly owl-eyed/on every one of 90 million dollar bills vibrating/To the pyramid-top in the United States of Heaven - /Aye aye Sir Owl Oh can you see in the dark you/observe Minerva nerveless in Nirvana because/Zeus rides reindeer thru Bethlehem's blue sky..It's Buddha sits in Mary's belly waving Kuan/Yin's white hand at the Yang-tze that Mao sees,/tingue of Kali licking Krishna's soft blue lips..Chango holds Shiva's prick,Ouroboros eats th' cobalt bomb,/Parvati on YOD's perfumed knee cries Aum/ & Santa Barbara rejoices in he alleyways of Brindaban/La Illaha El (lill) Allah Who - Allah Akbar! /Goliath struck down by kidneystone, Golgotha grown old,/All these wonders are crowded in the Mind's Eye/Superman& Batman race forward, Zarathustra onCoyote's ass. Laotzu disappearing at the gate, God mocks God,/Job sits bewildered  that Ramakrishna is Satan/and Bodhidharma forgot to bring Nothing."
(No, Bodhidharma brought the doctrine of the Void across, so "Bodhidharma forgot to bring Nothing"[
 - So, in other words, that’s what I would see the whole relation as..  

Ramakrishna was the one who came up with a formula like that when asked, like, "What’s his scene? - He said, “I worship all Gods” – and attempted to practice the different sadhanas – And that obviously is a necessity, you know, at this point in planet history, because you can’t have one planet with about sixty different ethnic groups quarreling over which image of God is the correct one for an entire planet. So you’d obviously have to finally realize that, actually, as Swami Bhaktivedanta says, that Christ is Krishnaand Krishna-Christ are identical - which means that the Jews have got to give up their God to get the Big God, and the Christians have got to give up their God to get the Big God, and Krishna-ites have got to give up Krishna in order to get Krishna, and the Mohammadens are going to have to give up Allah in order to get Sophia, to get back to the Abyss of Light, actually.

Q: What about Lord Chaitanya?

AG: Lord Chaitanya?  Well, I guess he’ll have to join the dance! – But I don’t think you can make any exclusive claim to any single name or form, finally. Because, otherwise, you’d have to accept the Christian’s exclusive claim (because they say they have an exclusive claim to an exclusive name and form). I don’t know what Swani Bhaktivedanta would say about that. I think he’d disagree, because he thinks that Krishna is the Supreme Person and includes all other supreme persons. Well, that’s alright. If it includes all other supreme persons, then any supreme person you name, like Christ, you’re naming Krishna, so, there’s no harm done.  Yeah?

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

Carl Solomon's Birthday

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[Flyer for 1964 Carl Solomon reading at Le Metro Cafe, New York - designed & produced by Ed Sanders - from the Ed Sanders Archives]

Carl Solomon's birthday today. He would have been eighty-eight.


               [Carl Solomon, 1991 - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg © The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]


For previous Solomon salutes (Solomon shout-outs), see herehere and here.

His reading (in 1982) with Jack Micheline at Naropa at the Jack Kerouac Conference has been transcribed and can be heard and seen on the Allen Ginsberg Project here

Allen, from his new book of posthumous poems: (the book, actually concludes with two Carl Solomon poems, "Last Conversation with Carl or In Memoriam", and the following, "Dream of Carl Solomon"):

I meet Carl Solomon
"What's it like in the afterworld?"

"It's just like in the mental hospital
You get along if you follow the rules."

"What are the rules?"

"The first rule is: Remember you're dead
The second rule is: Act like you're dead."

Allen and Ed Sanders recite the Prajnaparamita Sutra at his funeral service: 



Allen Ginsberg, Montreal, 1969 Q & A- 10) (Kerouac)

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                                                                                      [Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)]


Q: Do you feel that the death of Jack Kerouac has taken away his image for people, young people, in the (United) States now, to….

AG: Nobody depended on himHe was just a great drunken lout, fortunately! He did it purposely, he desecrated any image possible! – and he went on television drunk, on (William) Buckley (‘s) t.v.show) and burped and farted, just so he wouldn’t have anybody following him!  - I mean he didn’t want anybody.. I mean he used to… He thought that I was a monster for showing my face in public like I do  - my horrible hairy face, misleading children, trying just to get laid? – I mean, god! – 

Q: What I mean is the energy, say, from On The Road, inspired a  lot of people…

AG: Yeah

Q:  ….just to get on the road and follow it (Dharma Bums, you know, and Kerouac).  Do you think that that type of approach, defining any approach to our society is still (so)  popular?

AG: Yeah, the hero-character of Dharma Bums is Gary Snyder, Japhy Ryder, who is, like, 
a very great poet, and a very disciplined Zen Buddhist meditation practitioner, and an ecologist of note, who’s leading a lot of ecology action now around (the) Berkeley, San Franciso area, and infusing the whole Left revolutionary group there with some kind of ecological planet consciousness. So I think, like, conceptions that Kerouac was so lyrically exact about, and so sensitive about, and have proved to be like lasting perceptions about the nature of our country, and the American countryside.. See, what Kerouac was saying in 
On The Road was get out of the cities and go explore the land again, get back to the...get back to the body of the nation, get back to the Western twang, get back to the provinces, get back to the land, because “the earth is an Indian thing”  (I think that’s a phrase in one of the earlier books, possibly On The Road - “the earth is an Indian thing” – which he wrote in 1952, which is an early early vision of that,which is like coming true now, or coming true in people’s consciousness. It’s a pretty line – “The earth is an Indian  thing”
 (as distinct from, like “The earth is an engineer’s thing”   – “The earth is an Indian  thing” - [Editorial note - "The waves are Chinese but the earth is an Indian thing" - Jack Kerouac - On The Road, Chapter 5]

So, the other thing is…. I hate to (speculate).. It’s hard to figure out what his “thing” was – he had to take care of his mother, didn’t want to "throw his mother to the dogs of Eternity” he said. And so wound up drinking too much. I had, in fact, mixed feelings about.. in fact, I argued with him a lot. Especially, in the last few months, I wrote him big long letters, because he’d written something that was putting down (David Dellinger) and I thought that was not very Kerouac-ian!  And we’d.. you know, kept conflict quite a bit, you know, aesthetic, but, on the other hand, he was always smarter than me, I always felt, he was always way ahead of me in a lot of... you know, very.. Buddhist ways, and psychological ways, like, and language/poetry ways, so I really adored him as a guru, you know, and so it was hard for me to fight with him – in memory even.

I felt a funny kind of joy when he died realizing that I would never have to fight with him anymore! –And also that he was better, like where he wanted to be (“Poor!, I wish I was free/ of that slaving meat wheel/ and safe in heaven dead” – that’s a line of his. [Editorial note - from Mexico City Blues- "211th Chorus"] -  And it took me a day to begin crying. (I guess crying for my own youth that was dead, gone, finally). So it was a lyrical thing that he had and that lyricism is too exquisite to be by-passed, as long as people still have tender bellies and hard-ons - Yeah?

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-four-and-three-quarter minutes in (fourth segment) and comcluding at approximately forty-nine-and-a-half minutes in] 

Friday' s Weekly Round-Up - 262

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["WAR IS BLACK MAGIC/ BELLY FLOWERS TO NORTH AND SOUTH VIETNAM/ INCLUDE EVERYBODY/ END THE HUMAN WAR/NAME HYPNOSIS FEAR IS THE/ ENEMY- SATAN GO HOME/ I ACCEPT AMERICA AND RED CHINA/ TO THE HUMAN RACE - / MADAM NHU &  MAO TSE TUNG/ ARE IN THE SAME BOAT OF MEAT" - Allen Ginsberg, in 1963, in San Francisco, in front of the Palace Hotel, picketing the visit of Madame Nhu (the First Lady of South Vietnam)"]  


Wait Till I'm Dead is reviewed in the San Francisco papers  - Diana Whitney:

"When asked how he wanted to be remembered, Allen Ginsberg smiled modestly at his BBC interviewer and said, "Father Death Blues". Then he opened up his harmonium and sang the poem on television - a sweet, mournful Buddhist spiritual, more vulnerable than the exuberant "Howl",the counterculture anthem for which the Beat poet is renowned.
This humble performance came two years before Ginsberg's own death in 1977. Now we have Wait Till I'm Dead, an intimate new collection from the "shy but outspoken Jewish bard", as Rachel Zuckerdubs him in her artful foreword, Concisely annotated by editor Bill Morgan,Wait Till I'm Dead gathers Ginsberg's "stray" poems, those previously unpublished or printed in obscure journals.  
For readers (like myself) familiar only with Ginsberg's greatest hits and daunted by his 1,200 page collected works, Wait Till I'm Dead expands our vision, takes us on a wild road trip with the poet and his friends through the second half of the twentieth-century, from high school to his final years.
Arranged chronologically by decade, the collection reads like a mini-autobiography, often citing the date and place of a poem's composition. We enter Ginsberg's journal and sometimes his bedroom, see him riding with a stranger  "on a lonely bus/for half a night", or savoring a sexual encounter in a Turkish bath.
"War is black magic", Ginsberg declares in a poem he carried on a poster during a 1963 anti-Vietnam demonstration in San Francisco - "How many boys been slapped around/by midnight cops downtown in/the colored section" he asks in "Busted", showing parallels between the 'Sixties fight for peace and social justice and ours today given the war on terror and the Black Lives Matter movement.   
Ginsberg celebrated candor in poetry above all else; like his "ultimate American mentor"Walt Whitman, he wanted to make the private world public. Whether mourning John Lennon's murder, writing a postcard to Bob Dylan, or taking a pee after meditating, he reveals his inner life with magnificent range, from traveling epics to lucid haiku. "(A) message may arrive as a soft electric  shock of feeling", he writes in a birthday poem for Marianne Moore, and  Wait Till I'm Dead offers such a message; Ginsberg's singular voice, speaking out from the past."



Memories of Allen - (we continue to encourage and look forward to featuring these). Here's Zen practitioner,  Shiju Ben Howard, recalling Allen's visit to Alfred University in October, 1978 - "My unexpected teacher":
"During his three-day residency, Ginsberg gave an exuberant reading (where he recited the entirety of "Howl"), delivered a scholarly lecture on modernist poetics, engaged in lively conversation with students, and joined my first wife and me for dinner at our wood-heated farmhouse. A generous. sweet tempered man, he treated everyone with courtesy and respect, and he seemed more interested in looking and listening, than expounding his opinions. "What is that bush called?", he asked me, noticing the red-leaved sumac along Elm Valley Road. "A work of art", he remarked while viewing our fuel supply; twenty face cords of firewood, split and neatly stacked.." - More of Howard's recollections - here 

Essays on Allen - Here's a recent one - Delilah Gardner - "Ginsberg in the Underground - Whitman, Rimbaud, and Visions of Blake" in (the ever-readable) Beatdom.   

Ipswich in England once again this week hosts its Festival of the Beats. Among the highlights - John Power and Jordan Savage (speaking on Women of the Beat Generation), music and spoken word (featuring Adam Horovitz and Serious Times) and the UK premiere of  Nic Saunders' "The Good Blonde" (adapted from the short story by Jack Kerouac)



Speaking of women and the Beats, don't miss John Yohe on Tony Trigilio's edition of

And, Anne Waldman's birthday - check out this space tomorrow.


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