Beat Poet’s Corner- Out in the American Wilderness-Allen Ginsberg’s “America”

…he came out of the womb, came out roaring, came out roaring maybe already with those life-long tinkle bells already welded to his fingers, asking ten thousand questions (and only getting about eight thousand, give or take a few, answers), life questions, death questions, hi how are you what makes you tick questions, hi how are you, why this, why that, in a world he had not created, and had not, no way, been asked about creating, a common malady of the young, of those fresh from the womb. He came out of the Jersey night, the already crowded William Appleton Williams-Louis Ginsberg Jersey night, all jet black against the red brick factory rivers, against the short breeze floating in from brave Atlantic seas, and against up-shore big river cities. He came out of the hard brick world to sing that queer shoulder to the wheel plainsong after escaping hard toil Paterson, all used up (since about 1912 or 1913) and headed to the bright lights of New Jack City (jack literally please, Jack Kerouac, Jack of the dark-haired night, jack of the beat, the sullen heart beat), the 1940s middle of war New Jack City night, hard-pressed to conquer million words, not prose words, but beat words, words that would flow together in that juiced-up be-bop jazz infused world.

But there was more, that plainsong was a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper, as every literary flash hitched his or her star to some cooled out Birdland blast, some Monkish madness, some Dizzy swagger, and so he , restless, 1930s generation restless, hobo nation restless, back from Pacific atolls and Saar valley hide-outs restless, ready to take that first Packard and head west, head to the frontier, the closed frontier and sing his plainsong there, and he did, and the world turned on his dime for just that minute. And no rest, no rest for those who chant howl, howl, howl to a candid world, kindred, brethren, and so he was able to world-historic flourish, to work, despite the mad devil’s workers around him (who, if you can believe this, called him mad, called him fag, called him obscene, called him, Christ-killer as if that would do any good among the felon youth ready to listen).

And then the music faded, the music of his be-bop youth (pictures still fresh in the mind’s eye of hard-edged Jack, golden all-American East boy, cigarette in his hand, golden west boy, all-American West boy, Neal, and Allen, the prophet, although not in prophet garb then, pulling the air out of the tires out of the New York City night) long gone to seed, long gone to souvenirs shops and literary hustles. The music of his manhood faded too (picture of Dylan and Allen up in Jack’s grave land a scene putting paid to two generations who tried to ride the curve, tried make that jail break before the deal went down, as the greed heads, the suit boys, the fruit salad boys, the spin doctors, the language thieves, pulled down the hammer on the last best hope). Pulled it down hard, hard enough to stick. He cried in the wilderness night, cried picking his spots, a cause here, an individual case there, and cried out over eleven hundred, count them, pages of collected non-stolen word s before doctor death who stalked him fiercely flitted the flame...

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman- When Allen Ginsberg Put His Queer Shoulder To The Wheel- A Poetic Biography

Book Review

The Poetry And Life Of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem, Edward Sanders, The Overlook Press, 2000

…he came out of the womb, came out roaring, came out roaring maybe already with those life-long tinkle bells already welded to his fingers, asking ten thousand questions (and only getting about eight thousand, give or take a few, answers), life questions, death questions, hi how are you what makes you tick questions, hi how are you, why this, why that, in a world he had not created, and had not, no way, been asked about creating, a common malady of the young, of those fresh from the womb. He came out of the Jersey night, the already crowded William Appleton Williams-Louis Ginsberg Jersey night, all jet black against the red brick factory rivers, against the short breeze floating in from brave Atlantic seas, and against up-shore big river cities. He came out of the hard brick world to sing that queer shoulder to the wheel plainsong after escaping hard toil Paterson, all used up (since about 1912 or 1913) and headed to the bright lights of New Jack City (jack literally please, Jack Kerouac, Jack of the dark-haired night, jack of the beat, the sullen heart beat), the 1940s middle of war New Jack City night, hard-pressed to conquer million words, not prose words, but beat words, words that would flow together in that juiced-up be-bop jazz infused world.

But there was more, that plainsong was a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper, as every literary flash hitched his or her star to some cooled out Birdland blast, some Monkish madness, some Dizzy swagger, and so he , restless, 1930s generation restless, hobo nation restless, back from Pacific atolls and Saar valley hide-outs restless, ready to take that first Packard and head west, head to the frontier, the closed frontier and sing his plainsong there, and he did, and the world turned on his dime for just that minute. And no rest, no rest for those who chant howl, howl, howl to a candid world, kindred, brethren, and so he was able to world-historic flourish, to work, despite the mad devil’s workers around him (who, if you can believe this, called him mad, called him fag, called him obscene, called him, Christ-killer as if that would do any good among the felon youth ready to listen).

And then the music faded, the music of his be-bop youth (pictures still fresh in the mind’s eye of hard-edged Jack, golden all-American East boy, cigarette in his hand, golden west boy, all-American West boy, Neal, and Allen, the prophet, although not in prophet garb then, pulling the air out of the tires out of the New York City night) long gone to seed, long gone to souvenirs shops and literary hustles. The music of his manhood faded too (picture of Dylan and Allen up in Jack’s grave land a scene putting paid to two generations who tried to ride the curve, tried make that jail break before the deal went down, as the greed heads, the suit boys, the fruit salad boys, the spin doctors, the language thieves, pulled down the hammer on the last best hope). Pulled it down hard, hard enough to stick. He cried in the wilderness night, cried picking his spots, a cause here, an individual case there, and cried out over eleven hundred, count them, pages of collected non-stolen word s before doctor death who stalked him fiercely flitted the flame.

…and hence this song, this life song, the only real way the max daddy wordsmith of the beats, the max daddy wordsmith of the hippies could be remembered, remembered by one who lived the air of the break-out times, and they were the break-out times.

Beat Poet’s Corner-Out In The American Wilderness-Allen Ginsberg’s “Paterson”

 

… on a cold clear winter night across the channel you could see the sparks from the welding torch flying earthbound as the mad monk welder (a modern day sorcerer in his own right) seven stories scaffolding up melded yet another bolt to join the emerging ship’s skin and elsewhere hear the thundering beat of immense hammerings as some deafened laborers laid foundation bones to her bottom (her, yes, her, ships always her against the manly King, or was it uncle, or brother, Neptune who jealously ruled the seas). That beehive of activity created World War II troops transports (one a day collectively to bring bad boy Hitler righteously to his knees and that bastard Tojo too) and later majestic (majestic on launching but barnacled, rusted, and needing paint after a few trans-oceanic voyages) and gigantic floating oil well tankers made old hometown Adamsville stir, made its denizens leap for joy as each new contract came in. Money to spent, money to burn after hard time 1930s depression days (not called great depression, not by the railroad siding, shanty town shack, park bench newspaper for a pillow living, but only anointed as such later by august historians and quirky plainsong singers). He noticed though that those welded sparks and headache hammerings were less frequent, less frequent at night, in childhood 1950s and while he could hear occasional muted hammerings and firefly sparks that gigantic superstructure lost his undivided attention.

His attention now drawn to sullen laborers, mostly kindred Irish, Irish moved south from the great Southie migration when Hitler’s moves demanded a troop transport a day (no I haven’t forgotten that bastard Tojo but Adamsville ships were meant for Atlantic waters) and sturdy hands and fellaheen forbear hearts gave it to him right in the kisser, unemployed now, sitting in Dublin Grille, Irish Pub, hell, Johnny Ricco’s Bar (where they could get credit, drink credit, okay), gnawing over wife- nagging troubles (she tiredly counting out the bill envelopes, food, gas, electric, oil, telephone, no skip that this week ,to cover the weekly graft, or a little  bit to keep the wolves away from the door for another week), kids getting to be strangers troubles (not knowing of  sullen dads, or penny-pinching moms,  but only of Jones’ children with spiffy sporty clothes, not hand- me- downs, personal record players and money, cash money to buy be-bop Elvis records and rock the night away), and rent troubles (no more mortgage troubles, thank god, since the house went last year along with that six payments short of completion up-scale Buick that was a pride and joy).

He noticed too the town at daylight seemed kind of ashen grey, kind of preternaturally quiet against the steel-hammered plated world, trash strewn, uncollected, over ball fields, down Adamsville beaches, up the store front empty Square, average citizens with their heads bent down walking around just to walk around (just to get out of the house, and get, what did his grandfather call it, oh yah, to get the stink blowed off), and houses, too many houses, in need of lawn trimmings, in need of paint to color the world again, in need of, in need of, damn, life.  He swore (an oath, not a Catholic brimstone and damnation no no word) on all that his twelve- year old dreams could dream on that he would get out, get out just as fast as he could.                           

Another sound, a bobbing machine sound, ten thousand bobbing machine sounds at once all day and all night along one blessed textiles to clothe a modern world mile (including modern armies to kick Hitler’s butt, and Tojo’s too), maybe more, all red brick and waspish-sounding owner names, peopled by Irish, Italians, Greeks, and French-Canadians down from Quebec farms and Gaspe ports of call, the ethnics, the usual suspects in mill- town America (who knows maybe the world) another smell, smoke, endless smoke from endless chimneys form long phallic lines (don’t let Allen know that) across the Lowell sky and add look, look at the rushing Merrimac torrent now colored blue ,or red, or yellow, depending on day’s fabric as those looks are carried to the Atlantic seas. Money to spend , money to burn, sounds familiar, after hard time 1930s depression days (not called great depression, not by the Boston and Maine railroad siding, riverside shanty town shack, Daly Square park bench newspaper for a pillow living, but only anointed as such later by august historians and quirky plainsong singers). He noticed, like his Adamsville cousin down the road with his blessed savior ships , that those bobbing sounds, grey smoke belching chimneys, and flash- colored river torrents were less frequent, less frequent at night, in childhood 1950s and while he could hear occasional muted bobbings and see fire- spark crackling smokes, that long red mile lost his undivided attention.

His attention now drawn to sullen laborers, mill hands mostly, mostly too kindred F-C, F-C moved south from the great Quebec migration when sturdy hands and fellaheen forbear hearts were needed to clothe a naked world, unemployed now, sitting in Jacques’ Grille, The French- American Club over in Pawtucketville, hell, even the Galway Pub (where they could get credit, drink credit, a universal need in doldrums days, okay), gnawing over wife- nagging troubles (she tiredly counting out the bill envelopes, food, gas, electric, oil, telephone, no skip that this week , to cover the weekly graft, or a little bit to keep the wolves away from the door for another week), kids getting to be strangers troubles (not knowing of  sullen dads, or penny-pinching moms,  but only of Jones’ children with sporty clothes, not hand- me- downs, personal record players and money, cash money to buy be-bop Elvis records and rock the night away), and rent troubles (no more mortgage troubles, thank god, since the house went last year along with that six payments short of completion up-scale Buick that was a pride and joy).

He noticed too the town at daylight seemed kind of ashen grey not real ash, like some erupted  volcano, just metaphor ash, kind of preternaturally quiet against the bobbing-less world, trash strewn, uncollected, over ball fields, down riverside fronts,  up in Daly Square, average citizens with their heads bent down walking around just to walk around (just to get out of the house, and get, what did his grandfather, universal grandfather, call it, oh yah, translated from F-C patois, get the stink blowed off), and houses, too many houses, in need of lawn trimmings, in need of paint to color the world again, in need of, in need of, damn, life.  He swore (an oath, not a Catholic brimstone and damnation no no word) on all that his twelve- year old dreams could dream on that he would get out, get out just as fast as he could.      

And further south, Jersey town south, down past the Jersey piers, and dotted oil tanks, Paterson, a town of  towns of long ago boss fights and John Reed big story reportings, red, a town name now to make a poet blanche.  Another bobbing sound, a bobbing machine sound, ten thousand bobbing machine sounds at once all day and all night along one blessed textiles to clothe a modern world section of town (including modern armies to kick Hitler’s butt, and Tojo’s too), all red brick and waspish-sounding owner names, peopled by Irish, Italians, Greeks, and occasionally some Jews fresh from New York Seventh Avenue flights to get away from big city noises, crimes, distractions (strangely their sons and daughters, and Adamsville and Lowell son and daughters, will be moth-drawn to the big fussy neon cities), the ethnics, the usual suspects in mill- town America (who knows maybe the world) another smell, smoke, endless smoke from endless chimneys form long phallic (don’t let Allen know that, or maybe he already knows the metaphor ) lines across the Paterson sky and add look, look at the rushing river torrent now colored blue ,or red, or yellow, depending on day’s fabric as those looks are carried to the Atlantic seas. Money to spend, money to burn, sounds very familiar, after hard time 1930s depression days (not called great depression, not by the Penn railroad siding, shanty town shack, downtown park bench newspaper for a pillow living, but only anointed as such later by august historians and quirky plainsong singers). He noticed, like his Adamsville cousin up north with his blessed savior ships and his up north too Lowell cousin with his infernal be-bop bobbings, that those bobbing sounds, grey smoke belching chimneys and flash- colored river torrents were less frequent, less frequent at night, in childhood 1950s and while he could hear occasional muted bobbing and fire- spark crackling smokes, those long smoke stacks lost his undivided attention.

His attention now drawn to sullen laborers, mill hands mostly, mostly not Jewish kindred now (they had moved on to Jersey shore suburbs and away from all cities big and small), but Irish and Italian (and, a few, what did Gregory call them, oh yah, spics, from Puerto Rico, thrown in)when sturdy hands and fellaheen forbear hearts were needed to clothe a naked world, unemployed now, sitting in Billy’s Grille, Nino’s Bar in the barrio, hell, even the Galway Pub (where they could get credit, drink credit, a universal need in doldrums days, okay), gnawing over wife- nagging troubles (she tiredly counting out the bill envelopes, food, gas, electric, oil, telephone, no skip that this week ,to cover the weekly graft, or a little bit to keep the wolves away from the door for another week), kids getting to be strangers troubles (not knowing of  sullen dads, or penny-pinching moms,  but only of Jones’ children with sporty clothes, not hand- me- downs, personal record players and money, cash money to buy be-bop Elvis records and rock the night away), and rent (no more mortgage troubles, thank god, since the house went last year along with that six payments short of completion up-scale Buick that was a pride and joy).

He noticed too the town at daylight seemed kind of ashen grey not real ash, like some erupted  volcano, just metaphor ash, kind of preternaturally quiet against the bobbing-less world, trash strewn, uncollected, over ball fields, in front of abandoned downtown store fronts,  up in the square, average citizens with their head bent down walking around just to walk around (just to get out of the house, and get, what did his grandfather, universal Jewish grandfather, call it, oh yah, to unwind the mind and think kabala thoughts of ancient times, or, simple Hebrew translation , just to get the stink blowed off)  and houses, too many houses, in need of lawn trimmings, in need of paint to color the world again, in need of, in need of, damn, life.  He swore (an oath, not a Talmudic brimstone and damnation no no word) on all that his twelve- year old dreams could dream on that he would get out, get out just as fast as he could.      

… yah, towns to get out of, towns to be long gone daddy gone from.

Paterson

What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money?
How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes,
bathe my body reeking of masturbation and sweat, layer upon layer of excrement
dried in employment bureaus, magazine hallways, statistical cubicles, factory stairways,
cloakrooms of the smiling gods of psychiatry;
if in antechambers I face the presumption of department store supervisory employees,
old clerks in their asylums of fat, the slobs and dumbbells of the ego with money and power
to hire and fire and make and break and fart and justify their reality of wrath and rumor of wrath to wrath-weary man,
what war I enter and for what a prize! the dead prick of commonplace obsession,
harridan vision of electricity at night and daylight misery of thumb-sucking rage.


I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins,
eyes and ears full of marijuana,
eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border
or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman;
rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun;
rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati;
rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies;
rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver,
pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain,
come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage,
streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions,
with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp,
screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality,
screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world,
blood streaming from my belly and shoulders
flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways
by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

Allen Ginsberg

Beat Poet’s Corner-Allen Ginsberg’s “America”

…he spoke truth, truth all oil-splashed  steel and iron carnage twisted truth, twisted up by cold war red scare, “his mommie was a commie” what will he do, turn her in? or rather read kaddish ashes, and angel forgivenesses, mother angel forgivenesses over her grave, although he could not forgive, then anyway, the red scare cold war night, and railed against moloch, railed against Time magazine, railed against General Motors business suits, and spoke some funny off-hand truth running underground in some ‘Frisco town garage filled with speechless bow down poets, hipsters and other nomenclatura of new age desolation angel peaks.

Now famous, or, no, infamous, he could speak, Whitman shoulder speak, Whitman queer shoulder speak, Whitman queer shoulder  20^th century America rusted leaves of  grass prophet speak, speak to make every thinking man wish for just that moment, just that fresh warm breeze 1956 moment blowing over artic worlds, that he too could take up his queer (hell, straight , if that was the hand he was dealt)  shoulders against monster moloch (spewing oils, and metals, and  atoms , and, well, plastic out into the drive-in, billboard highway night) , against the dread of the negro streets (not Saturday night 125^th street joy, flash suit, flash car, flash spindle dope, flash women , a few white, but Monday morning bus, back of the bus, back of the line), against the death bombs (mega, kilo what?) against the convenient, very convenient, loony farms (to adjust to Ike’s social reality of course) where they put his, the Whitman prophet’s poor downtrodden queer head.

And that thinking man, if only for a moment, could  find some solace, some tea high divine solace in a renegade quasi-Trotskyite girl’s arms , bourgeois to the core, all cashmere sweater and girl next door beautiful, but slumming in Village, in Soho, in Ann Arbor Quadrangle, in Chi town Chi school Old Town, in Red Fez North Beach jazz night clubs listening for that one high white note drifting toward the bay, walking with her king hell king walking daddy before she goes back to Riverside (read Mill Valley, read Grosse Pointe, read Forest Lawn, read  Wellesley) and that handsome johnnie stockbroker  after she found out those million, count them, one million Trotskyites turned out to be Irving Howe and the ghost of Max Shachtman and so came up a little short on the prophet number, and a quick call from J. Edgar’s boys clinched it.  Jesus.

And that Whitman prophet left just then to shoulder, queer shoulder to high heaven before his om om time, before his robes and incense and sticks and bells and whatever time beloved names, communist, beloved names Trotskyite (even if short 999, 000), beloved names, Sacco and Vanzetti and ban death ban death penalty, beloved names, Abraham Lincoln Brigade and premature anti-fascist Spanish red blood soil fights, beloved names, beleaguered old labor fighter Tom Mooney abandoned, beloved names, on and on hoping, hoping against that red scare cold war night, all dark and foreboding, that he, that thinking man he could have put some bruised shoulder to some wheel too…                        

…hence Allen Ginsberg

**********

America

Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.  I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.  Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Beat Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the 1994 film documentary "The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg" reviewed in a separate entry in this space on this date.


HOWL
by Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational
therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

From “Howl” To OM- The Life And Times Of Beat Poet Extraordinaire Allen Ginsberg

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Allen Ginsberg reading from "Howl".

DVD Review

The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg, his family, his lovers and his “beat” and hippie friends, New Yorker Films, 1994

Recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. It all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space near the Merrimack River.

Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s “bad boy”, the “king of the 1950s beat writers, Jack Kerouac. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and a whole ragtag assortment of poets, hangers-on, groupies and genuine madmen and madwomen come to mind. So that is why today we labor under the sign of one Allen Ginsberg.

As I pointed out in recent review of a film documentary about the life of Jack Kerouac, “What Happened To Kerouac? (which I gave a five-star rating to, by the way) I was just a little too young to be directly influenced by the “beats”, and just a little too driven by the quest for political solutions for what ailed me and what I thought ailed this society. Nevertheless, as I recounted in that review entitled, “On The Road” And On The Sidelines”, after I came of political age I kind of crept back, like a million other members of the “Generation of ‘68” and re-evaluated that influence. In short then, starting with Kerouac’s “On The Road”, through William Burroughs “Naked Lunch” and on to Ginsberg’s madman-like, but provocative, “Howl” and sensitive “Kaddish” I devoured every “beat” thing I could get my hands on.

And that last sentence is a good place to start in reviewing this one and one half hour production about the trials and tribulations, the fight for literary recognition and the journey of discovery of one hell of a beat poet, Allen Ginsberg. The film speeds through the now rather familiar saga (for that generation that was born between World War I and II and formed the core of what is deemed “the greatest generation”) of a dysfunctional Jewish immigrant family, additionally burdened by a very overwrought and frequently institutionalized mother. The real story for our purposes, however, starts in the neon-driven glitter of 1940s New York where some very alienated youth like Ginsberg, Kerouac, Holmes, etc. and their mentors like Burroughs meet up and start a quest, literarily and physically, to ‘discover’ America. And they did it on their terms, at least for a while.

Along the way Ginsberg becomes very aware of his innate poetic skills, that unique beat in his head, his previously submerged sexual orientation and his almost surreal sense of the absurdities of living in post-war America, at least on the “squares” terms. Things begin to happen though in the 1950s . His classic “Howl” was premiered in San Francisco in 1956 to critical acclaim, Kerouac’s “On The Road” finally got published to rave reviews and suddenly in Eisenhower’s America it becomes almost a rite of passage for the young to show up at some poetry reading in some smoky café, or dress in the de rigueur black, or like black musician-driven jazz. And that is where my generation and I come in. That is where, if nothing else, we owe a debt to the beats- and to the king hell beat poet who, unlike Kerouac who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the transition, came over with us when we started pushing back against the monster.

And that is the positive side of the Ginsberg story, the ability to transition, as least partially, as the leftward cultural currents shifted. I would not, and I believe psychologically that I could not, go on that psychic consciousness-raising trip that led him to Buddhism for a while. Moreover, in viewing the film of his role in the 1968 Democratic Convention as a messenger of tranquility only brought the hard fact that that was not the way to fight the monster home. But, I was then as I am now very indulgent of our precious poetic spirits, the protest song singers, and the other cultural figures who “rage against the monster”, in a politically correct manner or not. What bothered me in this presentation more than anything though was Ginsberg’s fate in his later career when he was no longer front and center in the public eye. In one of the many informative Ginsberg interview segments that dot this documentary, which was produced in 1994 just a few years before he died he notes, I believe while he is reciting one of his poems that one of his life achievements that he was proud of was that he had become a 'distinguished professor' (I assume, of literature) at Brooklyn College. That is an unpardonable sin Brother Ginsberg, Where did you go wrong?

Note: One of the great things about this documentary were the great number of evocative photographs, including many taken by the closet “shutter-bug” Ginsberg himself, of various personalities of the “beat” generation that I had not seen before like the young Ginsberg, Burroughs (was he ever young?), Cassidy and Kerouac. Additionally, for poetry buffs, there are a number of segments included where Ginsberg read from his works (and with his poet father in join readings, as well). You do not know how really good and provocative “Howl” and “Kaddish” are as poems of rage and remembrance, respectively, until you hear his readings.

Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"- The Film- A Guest Review

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated September 26, 2010, concerning a review of Howl, a film adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's famous poem.

Markin comment:

Needless to say this little cinematic effort to put the sense of Allen Ginsberg’s seminal modernist poem, Howl, on the screen is more than welcome in this space. As I have repeatedly emphasized on previous occasions any poem that starts of like this one is going to get my attention and keep it every time:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .’’

I have also of late made note of the influence of the “beats” in my own youthful political and social development. A prima facie case can be made by me, and has recently in this space, that Ginsberg’s Howl is his search for the blue-pink great American West night that animated my youth and that I have been ranting on about.

Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night-Allen Ginsberg: An Elegy

DVD Review

Allen Ginsberg: An Elegy, Allen Ginsberg and assorted “beat” and non-“beat” modern poets and admirers, 2004

If a rough dictionary definition of an elegy is a poem of lament and praises for the dead then this little documentary tribute to the seemingly very inelegant Allen Ginsberg is the correct term here in celebration of his life that ended in 1997. I have discussed in other entries the central role that Ginsberg played in both the “beat” literary movement of the 1950s and the godfather of the “hippie” counterculture movement of the 1960s. I have also mentioned the influence that he had (and they over him as more material from this period, especially his “Journals” have come to publication) over his fellow literary figures from the earlier period, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady and too many others to list here properly.

I have also spoken about the influence and affect such classic Ginsberg poems as “Howl” and “Kaddish” had on me when I first read and then heard them. No, not at the time they were written and read, especially that famous (or infamous) reading of “Howl” in that ‘garage’ in San Francisco in 1956. What could a ten year old boy from the housing projects make of Whitmanesque plea to rethink the contours of modern American industrial society, especially of a pious Catholic boy in regard to a Jewish writer who swore and talked about homosexuality in a positive sense, to boot? Moreover, he did not “speak” to me even during the height of the “hippie” movement but rather a little latter when I actually heard his work read both by himself and others. The essential blues rhythm beat that I believe influenced and drove his work finally meshed with the blues beat in my own head.

And that last point from the last sentence is exactly the point the producers of this effect have tried to reach for by bringing many of the poets from Ginsberg’s time, most importantly Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder, and some of those who were influenced by him to read from his work and share their recollections. Additionally, as seems to be just right for a poet who whatever his vast literary abilities was very aware of the need to play the troubadour to get his work before the public there are plenty of segments of his reading himself, especially the lyrical “death” poem which ends the presentation. Kudos to all kinds of people here from the readers to those like Anne Charters who have spent their whole academic careers trying to get the word out about the “beats” to the modern American literary tradition. Yes, beat and blues that is the essential Ginsberg language. It might e underappreciated now, but we need it more than ever as we face the “monster’ of today’s version of the American post-industrial society.

*Writer’s Corner- “The King Of The Beats”-Jack Kerouac- On The Road To “On The Road”-“Maggie Cassidy”

Click on title to link to a site that gives a thumbnail sketch of the biography of the be-bop writer Jack Kerouac

Markin comment:

Every year, in October, in Jack Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts a Jack Kerouac Festival is presented to keep his be-bop working class fellaheen memory alive. The link is http://www.lowellcelebrateskerouac.org/lck-2010
********
Book Review

Maggie Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Books, New York, 1993

As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD,The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on one of Jack Kerouac’s lesser works under review here, Maggie Cassidy, where the action takes place in his hometown, that this fade back to be-bop-ness all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old-time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting granitic memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of Jack Kerouac's better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.

And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, On The Road, his classic modern physical and literary "search" for the meaning of America for his generation, the generation which came of age in the post-World War II period, readily comes to mind. No so well known is the fact that that famous youthful Kerouac novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition in many volumes, starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times.

Maggie Cassidy focuses on the trials and tribulations of growing up absurd in the 1930s, the inevitable schoolboy quests and missteps of sorting out what love is, teen love, Jack's desire to excel at sports which has driven young men for ages, and, off-handedly, the “meaning of the universe” of his high school days in Lowell and a little about his prep school days down in New York City in the late 1930s in the series that bears the general title The Legend Of Duluoz. So that is why we today, in the year of the forty-second anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign, no the spell, of Maggie Cassidy.

I have mentioned in a note to a review of On The Road after a recent re-reading of that master work that Kerouac's worldview, not unexpectedly for a novelist of the immediate post- World War II generation, was dominated by what today would be regarded as deeply, if not consciously, sexist impulses. Moreover, the whole “beat” experience of which he was “king” was, with a few exceptions, a man’s trip, hetero and/or homosexual. All of the books that I have read of his have that flavor. They may be, some of them, great literature but they are certainly men’s books.

Also, not unexpectedly, for a shy, sly, French-Canadian (with a little Native-American thrown in) working-class athletic youth from Lowell, Kerouac’s escapades center in this book on his high school male-bonding experiences with his “corner” boys. And being, from all reports and a quick glance at his youthful photographs, a handsome-looking man his exploits with young women. And here enters the sultry Maggie Cassidy, to the lace curtain born, the Irish colleen dream of every heterosexual young man. Although the dramatic tension of this book is not exactly gripping, after all despite some very grand, descriptive narration about Lowell, about the neighborhood, about the beauties of the Merrimack River, and above all, about young women, the episodes here clearly fall under the category of high school hi-jinks which have already had a long and honored literary exposition. Still, this is a nice little trip down memory lane and I can visualize some of the same streets around the "Acre and Pawtucketville, and some of those frosty mill-driven buildings that he refers in this book from those long ago connections that I mentioned above.

Note to Jack Kerouac wherever you are: Damn, you should have ‘talked’ to me about Maggie before you got involved with that vixen. I grew up in a part of a town in Massachusetts that while not “Little Dublin” was close enough to bear that title here in America. I knew a million Maggies (and Moe Coles too) and I could have warned you that chandelier, lace curtain, or shanty these nice Irish Catholic girls will break your heart, or something else, every time. Now that I think about it though I never listened to any well-intentioned advise on the subject either. Farewell grand working-class fellaheen.

Out In The Be-Bop Night- Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- Westward Ho!

Markin comment:

The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline .

Scene Six: Westward Ho! In The Search For The Blue- Pink Great American West Night


As I stepped down onto the yellow-sunned, farm-fresh soil from the farm-fresh cab of the farm-fresh truck that had deposited Angelica and I out into the waving-fielded, farm-fresh Neola, Iowa September day I quickly flashed back to stepping down from Colonel Eddie’s truck cab in Winchester, Kentucky that had started this whole segment of the trip westward. Christ that seemed like an eternity ago although it had been only a few summer heated, summer sweat-soaked heated weeks. Life on the road had it own tempos but this one, for reasons that I will discuss later, had run out of tempo and we were living on pure fumes just then.

While I am thinking about Winchester, Kentucky I might as well tell you what had happened since then to get us here to yellowed-sunned, waving-fielded, farm-fresh country and that will go a long way to explaining our need, our desperate need, for a jump start. Needless to say if you read the last scene, the scene where fair Angelica and me are kicking our heels up at a barn dance (and kicking those same heels after as well) in greater Prestonsburg, Kentucky and me about four sheets to the wind, no five or six sheets to the wind from the local , well-aged (about six minutes) “white lightning” then you know that we, thanks to Angelica, got promised a ride from Prestonsburg to Winchester which is just outside of Lexington, Kentucky.

Our chauffer, our Angelica-smitten chauffer, for the occasion turned out to be one ancient hard-driving (as we quickly found out), hard-drinking (as I knew from his condition as we met up with him), ghost of a truck-driving Colonel Eddie. (The colonel part is made-up, made up by him, all these Kentucky guys from the lowliest pig farmer on up call themselves that, or did back then. I think for about two bucks you could get yourself an “official” certificate designating you as such. If old Eddie had been a “real” colonel then that would go a long way to explaining the South’s righteous lost back in Civil War days). And despite this awful build-up of the guy, and a little off-hand character assassination above, he actually got us there, to Winchester that is, in one piece. Colonel Eddie was one the last of the good old boys, for sure.

What that one piece, by the way, looked like after traveling more back roads in the Commonwealth of Kentucky that seemed humanly possible in order to us get there is another story. See that is where the “white lighting” (rotgut, according to a somewhat miffed Angelica) had something like seven lives. Every time I thought I was feeling better, just a tiny it better like maybe I would actually survive the day, we would hit a double-reverse triple somersault hairpin turn followed by a triple-reverse double somersault hairpin turn that made me wish that, if there was any mercy in this flea-bitten old world, we would just go over the top down into some heavenly embankment and be done with it. But, as I said, we got there, and although we were pinching pennies a little, my condition was terminal and we needed, as a matter of simple primitive medical wisdom, to stay at one of those cheapjack motels that dot the back roads of this world to rest up for future battles, for future tilts at the westward windmills.

No, I am not going to descript this cheapjack motel, this back road, and what did or did not happen there, for the simple reason that I don’t really remember much about what it looked like it, or what happened there. Except this, this is etched in my brain and I can feel the cool- handed, cool-toweled sensation even as I am writing. Angelica, miffed or not, had taken a towel, wrapped some ice from the ubiquitous, usually whiskey fixings-friendly motel ice machine in it, and placed it on my forehead and held her hand on the compress for a while until I fell asleep. Of such kindnesses long-lasting civilizations should be created.

But enough of medical reports and folk wisdom medicines, sweet gestured or not. We were on the road west now, the blue-pink road west and for the first time since Angelica and I had met really on our own. Winchester, Kentucky heading to Lexington on our way west. Next morning, next already hot, steamy, sulky July Monday morning, having had a decent night’s recovery, and a thimbleful of food in my stomach to be on the safe side, we are off. Tonight we will sleep in no “bourgeois” roadside motel, ice cubes included free of charge or not, but out in the great outdoors, out in the promised great American night, and save our dwindling cash for stormier times. Thumb out, Angelica thumb out here, and we are indeed off. A half hour later after being picked up by a wayward sedan, driven by a nondescript but kindly driver, we are on the road to Lexington. And arrive we do without fanfare, or flourish.

This is really what is important about Lexington though. See, like I told you and I know I told Angelica before, that suitcase that she had packed up for Steubenville in her Muncie break-out days was fine to live out of for Steubenville motel cabin existences but no good on the hitchhike road, of whatever color. I didn’t tell you this before because Angelica had been such a trouper, especially with that ice-encrusted towel, but she had complained like hell about the damn dangling suitcase every time we had to push on in a hurry. Truth be told I had carried the thing more than she had, invalided as I was. So when we hit Lexington we hit the first Army-Navy store we could find to get her one of those fungible mountaineer backpacks.

Army-Navy store? Ya, Army-Navy store. Don’t snicker about so, well, about so yesterday, okay? Out on the hitchhike road you needed sturdy stuff, whatever it was you needed, because stuff got pretty banged around and your “faux” hitchhike road designer goods would last about seven miles (or about as long as the owner of such goods would be on the road before hailing a cab to the nearest airport). And as much as we hated the notion of deadly military weapons and anything military in those days we, we of youth nation, were strangely drawn to that fashion look, and the indestructible nature of their “camping” equipment. Besides the stuff was cheap, remember it was bought as World War II surplus mainly, hell, maybe World War I, but cheap.

Naturally, as events kept unfolding Angelica was showing more and more her origins as a Midwestern flower, and although a total stranger to such a place was thrilled (and mystified) by this place, including the odd , musty smell that goes with such stores. I will quote her, “Wow, does all this stuff really work?” So you can see by that simple statement that, every once in a while, she will throw out her Indiana naïve to confuse me. In any case, soon enough she will know whether it works or not. Of course she took forever to decide on which of two types of olive green backpacks “fit” her. Christ, women (oops, sorry). After that we made other purchases in order to set up “housekeeping”. Like. Well, like a small very portable army pup tent, complete with staves, to shelter us from storms and summer bugs. And a couple of canteens, small useful three-prong knives, a shovel, and mess kits.

I, as I write this, still smile over the fact that Angelica talked for days about how whoever invented such a useful thing as a mess kit was a genius, a pure genius. So you see again what I meant about that Muncie thing. Best of all to her sheer unmitigated delight we purchased a warm, cozy, snuggly army surplus sleeping bag (hey, the best kind okay, you can’t have soldiers freezing their buns off in Alaska, Korea, Northern China or wherever). And also delighted, blushingly delighted, when I, off-handedly, whispered in her ear about how many people could fit inside the thing, in a pinch. And, finally, a green (naturally) army blanket, for emergencies, real emergencies, not those in a pinch kind.

After completing those purchases we stepped just outside the store door to a nearby bench, placed there probably for just such purposes, and ceremoniously transferred her stuff from the suitcase to the backpack. Here is the kicker though, which may tell about human nature or maybe not. I just kind of threw everything into my knapsack and hoped for the best. Hope, for example, that a pair of socks, matched, showed up when needed. Angelica, as I noticed back in the Steubenville pack-up, neat of suitcase also took pains (and would do so throughout the trip) to keep her stuff organized just like in the suitcase. I wonder if we had decided that plastic bags were absolutely the best for travel gear whether she would have done the same. Probably. In any case, Angelica’s yesterday Angelica miffs had turned around and she was beaming, at me, at her new existence, at the whole wide world for all I know. I liked it, I told her so, and we are off to a campground just outside of town that the Army-Navy store owner told me about to “camp out” in the great dark American night. Hell, even I was excited. Still I noticed, just a glimmer of a notice, that she turned back wistfully for just a second to take one last look at the suitcase that we left on that bench for someone else in need.

Every once in awhile, just as things are going right and this old world seems full of bright-eyed possibilities, things get twisted around. Let me tell you about it and see what you think. As we were walking, Angelica proudly practically hip-hop walking with her new backpack bouncing up and down with each step, decided she needed to discuss something, one of our little “adjustments” talks. Apparently the miffed Angelica of yesterday was not so much miffed at my condition as that when we went to sign in at that cheapjack motel I wrote down my real name and her real name indicating that we weren’t married, or at least not related. Some primordial sense of modesty, no, I know, just Muncie conventionality, made her feel ashamed.

Christ Angelica, there is not one cheapjack (or five star, for that matter) motel, hotel, inn,
Youth hostel, ashram, whatever in the whole world that in the year 1969 cares who you sign in as. I could have put down Queen Elizabeth and Richard Nixon (although that combination might have raised my eyebrow) and they would have been nonplussed, as long as the coin of the realm, cash, was in hand. I didn’t put quotation marks around the above sentences but I think I could have because that, in my mind’s eye, is probably exactly what I said to her. Her plea, and here I will quote, “I feel ashamed and like a tramp (exact word) and couldn’t we just say we were married when we signed into places?” Apparently the time I was going to spend with this woman was going to be filled with throwing in towels because that is just what I did, I agree to this proposition. Why? Well, in those days I, frankly, didn’t have an opinion, at least a strong opinion, about married or not married and to keep peace I conceded the point. Now would be a different story. But, hell, let’s get to the camp and the great American night.

There are camp sites and there are camp sites. Today you can belly up to some sites with your seven ton, overloaded monster “trailer” home and put in plug or two and act just like you never left Cicero, Albany, or whatever your port of origin. Or you can go back up into the hills, some forlorn shaggy hills, mainly some Western hills these days, carrying in with you whatever you are going to bring on your back, and be not that far removed from those old pioneers who feared every dangerous animal, dangerous man, dangerous natural condition step of the western way, and carried on nevertheless. The real westward ho crowd. That day though Angelica and I found ourselves at a plain old-timey campsite which we could see from the road in was dotted with various tents, some small trailers sitting in the beds of pick-up trucks, some free-form trailers pulled by trucks and a couple of psychedelically multi-colored converted school buses. The last had been popping up on the road ever since people started hearing about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and their mad eastward escapades a few years earlier. Not a monster trailer in the house, a good sign. I can see a little river as well. Best of all there a small supermarket right across the street. Yes, this portends to be a great American night, and maybe nights.

After I passed the test at the camp office we went to our site, a cozy little site for a tent not too far from the river. What test? Come on now, pay attention, you know the test. Did I or did I not sign us in as Mr. and Mrs. (no Ms. then). Well, I am still sitting here writing this thing so of course I did. Angelica was beaming, beaming like an old married lady (at nineteen, jesus) but, maybe, just maybe because her “hubby” played it straight with her. (I never did get all the details, and she never put them all out there for me, but back in staid old homey Muncie some guys definitely did her wrong, tramp-treating wrong). Of course unlike the “bourgeois” upper class dwellers here in their little campers we were primitives (a word I have actually seen used to designate some campsites) and had to set up camp from scratch. Hell, we had more fun trying to set that damn Army-Navy tent and setting up for dinner on our little fireplace. There are not many times in life when just a couple of goofy, simple things provided so much entertainment. We napped then feasted.

As it got dark though I heard some music, the Stones, I think coming from one of the multi-colored painted, converted buses down the dirt lane. Nothing loud, but also something that said “youth nation” among the families of three and four that seemed to dominate the camp. We moseyed (like it?) on down and as we got closer I knew we had found kindred spirits, at least I thought we had. Angelica said, “What’s that strange smell?” Of course it was nothing but grass (marijuana, herb, ganja, whatever your term), and from the smell high-grade stuff. I thereafter proceeded to tell Angelica the “skinny”. She seemed a little non-plussed by the news but, however, confessed that she had never smoked or done any other drugs. And from the tone of that response seemingly did not want to.

Those were good and simple days to be young, especially on a road situation like this. Perfect strangers, unknown to one another, except by a telltale beard, or longhair, or long dresses or some slightly off-key sign, immediately embraced and as a welcome “gift” passed you a joint (or whatever drug of choice was available that day) and you passed whatever you had. We had some store-bought wine. I knew, knew from hard Arizona and Connecticut experiences, as well as the lore of the road, that carrying drugs was not “cool.” Many a road comrade spent many a night in some godforsaken cooler for making that mistake when the grim-reaper, usually small town, cops needed to boost their arrest records. Thus, for me it was nice to have a chance to get “high.” (inhaling even) although Angelica passed and was happy getting a little silly on the wine. We spent a nice night hanging out, listening to the Stones and the Doors, and a couple of other things that I don’t remember. I do remember, as we went back to our own site to turn in, that Angelica said she finally “got” what her parents, her neighbors, her minister, her schoolteachers, and some of her former boyfriends were afraid of. The feared great boxed-in break-out. She started to go on about it, but I gave her a knowing “preaching to the choir” smile and she stopped.

We wound up staying for few days, got to know most of the twelve or fifteen people connected with the buses (two at two adjoining sites, actually) and found out that they were on “vacation” from a little farm house that they all lived in communally, including some primitive farming and weaving to keep body and soul together, just outside of Springfield, Illinois. They were leaving Saturday morning and we were welcome to join them and stay at the farm for a while. We talked it over and it seemed right, especially for Angelica, as we could by-pass sweet home Indiana that she wanted avoid at all costs, so we left with them. That Saturday morning Angelica with great tenderness, and by herself, struck our camp (“our home” she called it by the end) as we prepared for the next leg of our journey. Ah, pioneer woman.

You know some towns you can say that you have been in but that is misleading. You might have passed through them, you might have been caught having to sleep on some forsaken bench in some lonely bus stop there, or stretched a watery cup of joe in some lonelier diner against some cold , rainy night wait, or, in flusher times, just hopped on a plane out of the place. So, yes you can tick that town off on your map as you move along in the world but you don’t know the town, no way. That is my recollection of Springfield. Oh sure I knew it was Lincoln’s home area, I knew it was the capital of the state of Illinois, I knew that people in that area were not Mayor Daly’s (the first one) people and that there was plenty of farmland there. But Springfield on this trip (or ever) was just that dot on the map because once we passed through it and we got to the farm a few days and joints after leaving Lexington that was it. We spent some quiet, well maybe no so quiet when the music went decibel high, but youth quiet time on the farm, did a little work for our keep, Angelica got a little more sun that she thought was good for her, and we relaxed before pushing on. Westward ho, ever westward ho in the blue-pink great American West night.