#Allen Ginsburg

[tomoleary]

Robert Crumb “Meet the Beats” portraits of Beat authors and poets: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs (1985)

[lets-get-lit]

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,  

- Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

[authordanielpawlowski]

The Spirit of Boulder

The Shadow Guy Origin

The Shadow guy had repeated the same explanation for the doppelgänger phenomenon and other unexplained events that were unique to Bolder. He told Frank “Time flows like a river. Sometimes water forms eddies and pools around transient objects and allow for something wonderful to be exposed or to join the river itself.” Which really told him nothing and he might as well have recited the standard…

[a-passing-storm]

Hellfire by black midi gives me so many thoughts!

[partialbirthabortion]

This guy my mom saw at NOLA pride

[thewestern]

freshcoes

[alternative-munster-goes-fourth]

The fact so many of 60s/70s counter culture icons were sex pests and pedos says way too much about the modern left

[lizbethborden]

There really is no female Jeremy Allen White. He is an objectively weird looking man who is now considered a heartthrob and is playing Springsteen in a new biopic--that's a romantic hero role if ever there was one. I'm not saying that's bad or wrong but I am saying no woman who naturally looks as wonky as he does would have success like him. Like he is actually UGLIER than young Bruce was.

They UGLIFIED Bruce Springsteen by casting him.

Meanwhile, women in human reality like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Gilda Radner, who HAD strong, distinct features like his, are being played by these people in fictionalized versions of their lives:

The fact that this is how history is choosing to remember these women is insane and bizarre. Truly, you cannot exist as a woman in public eye or public memory unless you are ornamental. Worse than ornamental, you must be generically ornamental, made on an assembly line, as female beauty often is now via plastic surgery.

I feel that this kind of commentary is not being made because it's politically suspect to talk about women's looks--and don't get me wrong, I understand what's at stake in terms of not just human emotion, but falling into misogynist traps. But we MUST recognize that this is a problem. It's one thing for fictional women with no basis in reality to be cookie cutter--not a good thing, but certainly a different thing. But for real women who actually existed to have their simple, natural, human characteristics erased and replaced with flavor of the month plastic surgeried generic Hollywood Female nonsense is disrespectful in the extreme. (Especially because Gilda Radner and RBG were Jewish and their Jewish features would have deeply impacted their lives.)

[jadenameless-blog]

moderate "Howl" vibes

Watching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap devour basic moral practice in real time is fascinating in a terrible kind of way

[priapusintheshrubbery]

Jack Kerouac Avenue A across from Thompkins [sic] Park 1953 New York, his handsome face looking into barroom door—This is best profile of his intelligence as I saw it Sacred, time of Subterraneans writing. 1953. - Allen Ginsburg

[urbeautifulandiminsane]

your month, your quote 💗🌟

January - “One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die” - Franz Kafka

February - “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence” - Sylvia Plath

March - “For years I begged you/ to just take me in your arms/ you wouldn’t, couldn’t” - Lana del Rey

April - “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” - Allen Ginsburg

May - “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

June - “I did crave attention, but I refuse to humiliate myself by asking for it” - Ottessa Moshfegh

July - “…her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly” - Simone de Beauvoir

August - “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself” - Virginia Woolf

September - “With the exuberance that only doing nothing can bring” - Lana del Rey

October - “Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards” - Vladimir Nabokov

November - “I talk to God but the sky is empty” - Sylvia Plath

December - “I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy” - Franz Kafka

ps.. i wanted to include this alexander hamilton quote - “i never expect to see perfect work from an imperfect man” - but i couldn’t decide, take it if you’d like 💗

[authordanielpawlowski]

Boulder Noir: The Town is Still a Little Quirky.

Boulder:Quirky but lovable

Long after Allen Ginsburg, Timothy Leary and Mork left their mark on Boulder Colorado, it continues to be shall we say a little quirky . It’s not as obvious as it once was but if one were to slow down and pay attention, signs of quirkiness will reveal themselves. “I sat at the leftover desk in my “abandoned” office pondering my discussion with the entity I call the shadow. I tried not to stare…

[pommedepersephone]

I watched Queer yesterday and I have FEELINGS about all of it. First of all, brava, it was amazing. The acting, the costumes, the cinematography, the soundtrack, it all worked for me. I am going to be gnawing on this for a while. But to satisfy my immediate urge to scream into the void about this movie, I want to talk about cameras, in both the book and the movie.

In the intoduction to the 1985 edition of Queer, William S. Burroughs wrote-

What Lee is looking for is contact or recognition, like a photon emerging from the haze of insubstantiality to leave an indelible recording in Allerton's consciousness... Lee does not know that he is already committed to writing, since this is the only way he has of making an indelible record, whether Allerton is inclined to observe or not.

For context, the semi-autobiographical Queer makes Burroughs into Lee, and Eugene Allerton is the fictional version of Lewis Marker (seen here with Burroughs in 1951), who Burroughs pursued intensely.

In a letter to Allen Ginsburg, Burroughs states, "I wrote Queer for Marker." Their relationship fell apart in the course of writing the book, with Burroughs penning repeated letters to Marker in an attempt to reconnect. The longing for "recognition", to leave an "indelible record", is pervasive in the narrative. And the camera serves as a physical manifestation.

🚫 SPOILERS FOR "QUEER" BELOW THE CUT 🚫

In the book, the camera makes its first appearance immediately after Allerton and Lee first sleep together. Lee mentions that Allerton's camera is in pawn, and he offers to buy it back for him.

After they get the camera out of hawk, Allerton does not express any gratitude, and becomes "nervous and irritable" and after a tense conversation the the cafe he abandons Lee, refusing to make future plans.

In the movie (at least the theatrical cut, I mourn for that lost hour) the camera just appears as an object belonging to Allerton. However, the tense scene in the cafe remains, and ends with Allerton getting up to abruptly leave, nearly leaving the camera. Lee stops him, handing him the camera before he goes.

Lee in the book sees the incident with the camera as indicative of their relationship, saying -

He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee's affection irritated him... Allerton did not recognize friends who made six-hundred-peso gifts, nor could he feel comfortable exploiting Lee. He made no attempt to clarify the situation. He did not want to see the contradiction involved in resenting a favor which he accepted. Lee found that he could tune in on Allerton's viewpoint, though the process caused him pain, since it involved seeing the extent of Allerton's indifference. "I liked him and I wanted him to like me," Lee thought. "I wasn't trying to buy anything."

While the story of their trip I to the jungle is vastly different from book to movie (which I am sure will be its own future ramble) they end very much the same - abruptly and with no closure.

While Lee wanted reciprocal affection, when he realizes that is unlikely to happen, he does buy Allerton's attention by paying for their trip to South America. In the book, the camera isn't mentioned during their journey, but its inclusion in the movie feels like a solid artistic choice. Allerton is along as an observer, after all, giving Lee the recognition and indelible record he longs for.

The final chapter, in the book and the movie, finds us back in Mexico City, two years after Lee's trip with Allerton and an extended absence by Lee himself. In the book, Lee is seeking subjects to take pictures of, but mostly resorts to snapping portraits of unwilling people. He says -

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, incorporate, a sexual pursuit of intimacy.

The movie, though, offers an absolute gut punch. Two years have passed in the literal blink of a cinematic eye, spitting Lee back out with a camera and Allerton's haircut. It is as if he has become the observer he so desperately wanted, but still he is seeking out Allerton. It made me think of a line from Burroughs' introduction to the book -

While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer.

One of the things I find fascinating is the self editing that took place between when Queer was written in 1952, and published in 1985. Burroughs writes in the introduction about how the death of his wife had influenced the book, and never once mentions Marker. But his memory clearly still stuck with Burroughs, as the editor of the 2010 edition of Queer notes that Allerton appears as a character in My Education and The Soft Machine.

Annnnnyway, I can promise I will be revisiting Queer. AND if you are like me and could not get into Junky, I highly suggest still giving Queer a read.

[kvetchlandia]

Burt Glinn Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso, Greenwich Village 1957

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable 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 smoke-stacks 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 madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, 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!

-- Allen Ginsberg, "Howl, pt. II 1956

"The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream. " Jack Kerouac, "On the Road" 1957

"Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power." Gregory Corso

[partialbirthabortion]

This guy my mom saw at NOLA pride

[vandals-took-the-handle]

Daily Dylan 2024 - 121

By Allen Ginsburg