Friday, September 15, 2006

Howl



Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Writings, one of the 20th Century’s most influential books of poetry completes 50 years in print this year. And while Ginsberg is not around to perform it any more, the poem’s technique and message continues to find new followers and continuous relevance.

Published by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights press in 1956, the poem shot to fame after an article on the San Francisco poetry scene in the New York Book Review declared Howl to be “the most remarkable poem” of the entire body of poetry coming out of the West Coast. This same article resulted in a landmark obscenity trial in 1957. That year, copies of the book were seized and charges of obscenity were brought against Ferlinghetti . The resultant trial proved to be a landmark in the history of American censorship laws and practice. The staid, conservative political and social climate deemed many passages in the book- which freely references drugs and sex- as obscene and unsuitable for public consumption.

To defend the book, literary experts testified on its merits, both as a literary text and as a social document. In addition to that, the book was strongly supported by the American Civil Liberties Union. Ferlinghetti won the case, and along with Ginsberg, escaped possible imprisonment after the presiding judge ruled in favour of the poem for its “redeeming social importance.” And thus, a legend was born.

The literary world’s introduction to Ginsberg’s first volume of poetry, Howl, especially the title poem, was a revelation. On October 6 1955, Ginsberg organised a group reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco along with other poets in or associated with the Beat circle: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac. Passing around jugs of wine bought by Kerouac, the audience was treated to the first performance of Howl. As Jack Kerouac described it,

“Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six (Six Gallery) that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook (Ginsberg) was reading his, wailing poem "Wail" (Howl) drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling "Go! Go! Go!" (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes (Kenneth Rexroth) the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping tears in gladness.”[1]

Howl began on a note of extremes. The words did not wait to jump up and take the reader deep in to the experiences of the radical Beat generation in the heart of conservative America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunt of communists, and the ever-present threat of war. Yet, it was as much a personal document as it was a call for social change, “…the first blow for freedom” as Ginsberg himself called it.

“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

smoking in the supernatural darkness of

cold- water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,”[2]

The rolling, muscular cadences of the long line does not let go, nor does it offer any respite. However, it does vary its pace, allow for a draw of breath, before blowing again, like a jazz saxophonist. The world described by the poem is a blistering vision of intense emotions and turmoil, of movement and of violence. The full prophetic message of the poem follows a process of condensing chaos into a closed space and then making it explode upon the senses and thus altering perception.

This contraction and jumps in space and time are what Ginsberg refers to as “ellipsis”- a way of presenting images as they flash through the mind. Thus you have the densely packed images in vivid cinematic detail that remove the voice of the author from the lines and help create a democratic area of reception where the images get translated according to the perception of the reader,

“…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…”[3]

Thus all action is condensed into one white- hot moment producing and reproducing the same tropes through the repetition of words and lines and themes. This in turn, produces its own unique meanings.

The treatment of homoeroticism in the poem is fairly graphic. To Ginsberg, this was only a matter of taking Walt Whitman’s idea of democratic love to its logical conclusion. Ginsberg was himself homosexual and in Howl he describes the agony and ecstasy of the experience,

“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.”[4]

Even in all this self- referential action, strong allusions are constantly made to the terror and tyranny of the totalitarian American dream and its threat to destabilise all that he considers is the natural, the unmediated. Even the unabashed sexuality of many of the experiences are tempered with reminders of the wider social prudery,

“…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

the one eyed shrew that does nothing but

sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden

threads on the craftsman’s loom…”[5]

The poem goes into the prophetic mode only towards the end when Ginsberg screams of the loss of those madmen angels to the “sphinx of cement and aluminium” which “bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination…” The mad, loveless “Moloch” of repression; whose mind is “pure machinery”, blood of “running money… whose fingers are ten armies”; the spectre is the embodiment of all that is enslaving and castrating. Moloch is the mythical equivalent of Blake’s “Nobodaddy”, a fearful, jealous god, devouring the imagination- and by extension, the organic and political self- of man with his “granite cocks” and “monstrous bombs”. Moloch is Ginsberg’s metaphor of industrial America and in this vision America is an immovable stultified, all- consuming behemoth. The “madmen angels”…

“…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!”[6]

Howl continues to be- along with Jack Kerouac’s On The Road- hugely popular with over a million copies in print. The relevance of Ginsberg’s vision has not faded with time, nor has his influence. Whether its Bob Dylan’s lyrics or the rap of New Journalism, Howl’s long line and social comment find echoes even today. Since his death in 1997, history has seen America take a step back towards the paranoia and conservatism of the Fifties, and as the ‘War Against Communism’ of that decade finds its eerie echo in the ‘War Against Terror’, Howl continues to find a sustained resonance in its depiction of a mad world fighting its own demons.

-Bibek Bhattacharya

13.09.2006


[1] Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, New York: Penguin Books, 1993. pp. 10.

[2]Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1956. pp. 9.

[3]ibid. pp. 10.

[4]ibid. pp. 13.

[5] ibid. pp 24.

[6]Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1956. pp 25.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Choo

And here it is finally folks. My jab at consistent typing. I'm starting a serialised novel. Don't ask me what its about 'cause I dunno. I'm just gonna rap and ramble and see what I can come up with. A writing exercise if you please. When I take a break I'll be listening to Theme Time Radio with Your Host Bob Dylan. And so here it goes...

Net Wonders

To someone who doesn't really investigate the internet beyond the usual avenues- read me- sudden discoveries are the toast of life. Temporary residence at me friend Sathe's house and the lack of anything to do, has engendered the copious use- and abuse- of the internet. So when I'm not downloading songs like a madman (the entire new Bob Dylan album and Paul McCartney's latest for example), I keep stumbling across things which warm the cockles of my heart. The greatest joy has been afforded by my chance discovery of www.youtube.com. Like most things, its discover came by way of Wikipedia. A couple of days ago, while reading up on Kula Shaker, I came across a link to YouTube for some live appearance of the band or the other. Imagine my joy at finding a site where you can watch music videos, ads, live performances, blah blah blah.
So I watched a few George Harriso vids. Then some Beatles. Then Stones, Byrds, Who, Kinks, Kylie Minogue 'Agent Provocateur' lingerie ads. Ah the joy. I even signed up and downloaded videos and made a playlist and uploaded them.
Now I'm investigating the newly-launched Google video. Same concept, just more streamlined and corporatised. For this same reason, the quality of the videos are better...but the content is nowhere near as mindblowing as YouTube. Where else would you find, 15 different videos of The Who performing "My Generation", from 1965 to 2006! Or the Stones's 1967 Ed Sullivan show performance where they had to change the lyric of "Let's Spend The Night Together" to "Let's Spend Some Time Together". Or the studio film of the Beatles miming to "Rain" for Top Of The Pops? Fragulous I say. I'm smitten. I even have my own playlist called The Velvet Rope on the site!!!
A minor aside. Those interested in the urban myth of Paul McCartney dying in 1966 in a motorcycle crash, check out the fab Wikipedia write-up on the subject. Entire books have been written on the subject, one as recently as last year. Its too vast to explain in a paragraph. You'll find the article here
Once you've done that, check out this link. It'll lead to really fab download. A cultural artefact I daresay, in which the Dark Knight meets the Fab Four.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Pot Pourri





What is it with Paul McCartney and grass? The weed has such a hold on him that even today, some 42 years after he probably smoked up for the first time, he continues to espouse it. Even the man who had allegedly rolled it for the Fabs in 1964 seems to have given up the joys of the weed. And though Paul's ouvre or his appeal will never be on the counter-culture scale of Dylan's, none can accuse him of being a conservative or a sell-out either. Important as his music has been, its those little quirks about him that still endears him to the young turks and makes him a godfather and not a grandfather. Let me try to put this into some perspective.
Paul was late to the scene in the 60's. Lennon and Harrison beat him to mind-expanders. But once he got there, he fell in love for life. First grass and then acid. It was Paul who actually wrote that famous ode to pot- 'Got To Get You Into My Life'. And again, it was he who went public with acid first in '68. In between, The Beatles were the biggest name to sign a landmark petition to legalise and de-criminalise marijuana. Well, those were the days, and it seemed natural that the fabs would be involved neck-deep.
What's intriguing is that despite McCartney's long creative slide since the demise of the group , and his percieved 'square'ness among hip circles, his fondness for the radical smoke of choice never wavered. He ambitiously, and injudiciously, planted cannabis plants inj his Arizona ranch, only to be busted. Then in 1980, he was arrested in Tokyo airport for carrying grass on his person. Following that particular peak, no more was heard of his fondness of the weed. Linda being as much part of the 60's set as Paul, it seemed unlikely that she would do something as square as banning the dope. Come to think of it...vegetarianism, peace, love and grass...sounds familiar, doesn't it? Only, McCartney wrote 'Silly Love Songs' to make the point where he had written 'Here There And Everywhere' before. Just a slight decline in standards, not in faith. Then, after a long lack of any news on McCartney's smoking habits, comes this big one in 1997.
The recently knighted McCartney, in the wake of the immense successful Beatles Anthology and the acclaimed solo album Flaming Pie, goes and marks the 30th anniversary of the Summer Of Love by saying that he still thinks cannabis should be legalised, at least decriminalised! Furore furore everywhere! A knight of the British Empire? Unthinkable! Simplify man!
But all things must pass. Around 2000, McCartney falls in love with Heather Mills. Heather is no hippy, and so McCartney has to choose between love and the drag. He opts for love, and makes an announcement about it. Why not? Such long relationships don't just end, and that too without fanfare. As is his wont, McCartney's pot references have been missing for some time now...but Heather Mills too is gone...now, erm, matey...could I have a drag? After all, his latest album does have a sweet song about, ahem, English tea...

A minor aside. When McCartney quit, it caused many around the world to shed a tear or two. Message boards on countless green sites were full of heated discussions about whether this was right, or whether Heather was jealous or if Paul had a supplier or grew it himself. If he grew it, then, as one punter said, the plant should be procured and put o good use. After all, as he said, he would be honoured to smoke the leaf from the plant that supplied Macca's tokes... here's the link:
boards.cannabis.com/showthread.php?t=49112

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Monkey

If a great town was known for its sound, would the ruhing heebeejeebies come and steal whatever little fruit from the town orchards. A ponderous question it is, and one that deserves as little attention as can be given it. On the other hand was a monkey who hated mistakes. His was a hard life, trying to be perfect and hustling the right people to better his lot in the order of things. Not that he really objected to any objectification that came his way. After all, it got him grants and entry to select parties where he could avoid making mistakes and wear a beard just to be sure. One day he decided to go abroad to better his lot and lay the foundation for future wealth. Who wouldn't want a little bit of money for a tail comb. So he wrote books of fantasy and gave exams in a/c trees. Alcohol he touched but only so.
In the red corner was the marmeluke counterpart of the Syrian flagstaff who said he came from a house of infidels that did not know. But then if your lot is to be stuck on mountain peaks with the best of them, then you might pine for donkey's tails.
Cheerio and good luck.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

My Favourite Things

There's something about the way that John Coltrane plays the saxophone. The way he holds the melody to "My Favourite Things" so beautifully in the first few bars, you are just not prepared when he launches into those mindblowing improvisations where he blows the tune all over the place, hooting, shrieking, bending notes beyond their breaking point. Yet, in the blink of an eye he's back with another soothing passage, the sax muscular yet sensual, carrying you away in a wave of winking genius.
Yeah, that's what I'm doing, waiting for the rain to fall. Its been threatening for some hours now but I don't think that it'll actually come. But the overcast sky and the occasional gust of rushing wind seems to be the perfect setting for the master to wave his wand.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Why, a blog!

After months of fits and starts, finally there's rain. Its been pouring since yesterday, and happily there seem to be no signs of the clouds letting up. I was wandering the streets of south Delhi looking for a place to go, and all I got was sweet showers. On days like these, it seems hard to imagine that the sun exists. And what joy. Big fat drops, splattering all, visibility nil. If you're in an auto, all that you can do is to maneouver the best you can so that some fucker in a car doesn't splash you.
But anyways, it was the driving rain that finally forced me to find shelter in my good old C R Park internet parlour. Now that I'm here, and have checked my non-existant mail, I guess I'll update my poor blog. Its sad to watch a blog fall into disrepair. After a while, you sign in and wonder what to write about. Mostly you can't be bothered. When you CAN, you try and write something...some sad story or the other...and you publish. Then you check it and find out that its horrible and full of grammatical and spelling mistakes. So you feel inadequate and delete it...and its sometime before you look at your blog again.
Yesterday, I spent a most weird day at the railway station. Due to unforseen circumstances, me and my friend Dhruba reached the station at 8 am. His train, incidentally was at 4 :30 pm!! Don't ask why. That'll be another story.