RECOVERED HISTORY

FIFTY YEARS OF 'HOWL'

PAUL KRASSNER - Although November 1st is the 50th anniversary of the
publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, I knew him more as an activist
than a poet. Our paths had crossed often--at civil rights marches,
antiwar rallies, marijuana smoke-ins, environmental demonstrations--and
when it came to gay rights, he was on the front lines. As a researcher,
he meticuolously acquired files on everything that the CIA ever did, and
I'm pleased that they're included in his archives at Stanford
University.

In 1982, there was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Jack
Kerouac's On the Road at Naropa, a Buddhist college in Boulder,
Colorado, where presumably they refer to his book as On the Path. I was
invited to moderate a discussion, "Political Fallout of the Beat
Generation." The panelists: Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman
and Timothy Leary.

During that panel, Ginsberg said: "I think there was one slight shade of
error in describing the Beat movement as primarly a protest movement.
That was the thing that Kerouac was always complaining about. He felt
the literary aspect or the spiritual aspect or the emotional aspect was
not so much protest at all, but a declaration of unconditioned mind
beyond protest, beyond resentment, beyond loser, beyond winner - way
beyond winner - beyond winner or loser. . . but the basic thing that I
understood and dug Jack for was unconditioned mind, negative capability,
totally open mind--beyond victory or defeat.

"Just awareness, and that was the humor, and that's what the saving
grace is. That's why there will be political after effects, but it
doesn't have to win because having to win a revolution is like having to
make a million dollars."

As moderator, I asked, "Abbie, since you used to quote Che Guevara
saying, 'In a revolution, one wins or dies,' do you have a response to
that?"

Hoffman: "All right, Ginzo. Poems have a lot of different meanings for
different people. For me, your poem Howl was a call to arms."

Ginsberg: "A whole boatload of sentimental bullshit."

Hoffman: "We saw in the sixties a great imbalance of power, and the only
way that you could correct that imbalance was to organize people and to
fight for power. Power is not a dirty word. The concept of trying to win
against social injustice is not a dirty kind of concept. It all depends
on how you define the game, how you define winning and how you define
losing - that's the Zen trip that was learned by defining that you were
the prophets and we were the warriors. I'm saying that you didn't fight,
but you were the fighters.

"And I'll tell you, If you don't think you were a political movement and
you don't like winning, the fuckin' lawyer that defended Howl in some
goddamn obscenity suit - you wanted him to be a fuckin' winner, I
guarantee you that. That was a political debate."

Ironically, Ginsberg was very insecure about Howl, and he questioned the
big fuss over it. "There shouldn't be a trial over this poem," he once
lamented. In fact, a biography of Allen Ginsberg - American Scream by
Jonah Raskin - has a surprising revelation: "In the mid-1970s, in the
midst of the counterculture he had helped to create, he promised to
rewrite Howl. Now that he was a hippie minstrel and a Pied Piper for the
generation that advocated peace and love he would alter Howl, he said,
so that it might reflect the euphoria of the hippies.

He would include a 'positive redemptive catalogue,' he said." The famous
opening line of Howl was, "I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." Abbie Hoffman
would've been shocked to learn that Ginsberg had planned to rewrite
Howl, this time beginning with an upbeat line: "I saw the best minds of
my generation turned on by music..."

On one hand, Ginsberg was a pacifist. When he first started taking LSD,
he thought that world peace would come about only if President Kennedy
and Russian premier Nikita Krushchev would take acid together. And yet I
remember a scene - this was in the early '70s - Ken Kesey, my daughter
Holly and I were visiting William Burroughs in New York. He lived in
this huge loft, with a great many cardboard boxes and one cat, and he
was wearing a suit and tie with high-top red sneakers. We decided to
visit Ginsberg in the hospital.

He'd had a stroke, and part of his face was paralyzed. He was in bed,
and I introduced him to Holly, and he graciously struggled to sit up and
shake hands with her, but he was weak and deep in some kind of
medication. A little later - in psychiatry this is called a "primary
process" - he blurted out, "Henry Kissinger should have his head chopped
off!" It was a pure case of Ginsbergian Tourettes' Syndrome.
Subsequently, Kesey would reminisce, "I was at a party one time, when I
first knew Ginsberg, and he was standing by himself over by the
fireplace, with a wine glass in his hand, and people milling around, and
finally some young girl sort of broke off from the rest of the crowd and
approached him and said, 'I can't talk to you - you're a legend.' And he
said, 'Yes, but I'm a friendly legend.'"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/

SAM SMITH, WHY BOTHER? - we tend to think of the 1950s as a time of
unmitigated conformity, but in many ways the decade of the 60s was
merely the mass movement of ideas that took root in the 50s. In beat
culture, jazz, and the civil rights movement there had already been a
stunning critique of, and rebellion against, the adjacent and the
imposed.

Steven Watson credits the term beat to circus and carnival argot, later
absorbed by the drug culture. "Beat" meant robbed or cheated as in a
"beat deal." Herbert Huncke, who picked up the word from show business
friends and spread it to the likes of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg,
and Jack Kerouac, would say later that he never meant it to be
elevating: "I meant beaten. The world against me."

Gregory Corso defined it this way, "By avoiding society you become
separate from society and being separate from society is being beat."
Keruoac, on the other hand, thought it involved "mystical detachment and
relaxation of social and sexual tensions."

Inherent in all this was not only rebellion but a journey. "We were
leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble
function of the time, move," wrote Kerouac in On the Road. It is
instructive during a time in which even alienated progressives outfit
themselves with mission and vision statements and speak the bureaucratic
argot of their oppressors to revisit that under-missioned,
under-visioned culture of what Norman Mailer called the "psychic outlaw"
and "the rebel cell in our social body." What Ned Plotsky termed, "the
draft dodgers of commercial civilization."

Unlike today's activists they lacked a plan; unlike those of the 60s
they lacked anything to plan for; what substituted for utopia and
organization was the freedom to think, to speak, to move at will in a
culture that thought it had adequately taken care of all such matters.

Although the beats are frequently parodied for their dress, sartorial
nonconformity was actually more a matter of indifference rather than, as
in the case of some of the more recently alienated, conscious style.
They even wore ties from time to time. Yet so fixed was the stereotype
that the caption of a 1950s AP photograph of habitués in front of
Washington's Coffee 'n' Confusion Café described it as a place for
bearded beatniks when not one person in the picture had a beard. Rather
they were a bunch of young white guys with white shirts and short
haircuts.

Cool resided in a nonchalant, negligent non-conformity rather than in a
considered counter style and counter symbolism.. To a far great degree
than rebellions that followed, the beat culture created its message by
being rather than doing, rejection rather than confrontation,
sensibility rather than strategy, journeys instead of movements, words
and music instead of acts, and informal communities rather than formal
institutions.

For the both the contemporaneous civil rights movement and the 1960s
rebellion that followed, such a revolt by attitude seemed far from
enough. Yet these full-fledged uprisings could not have occurred without
years of anger and hope being expressed in more individualistic and less
disciplined ways, ways that may seem ineffective in retrospect yet
served as absolutely necessary scaffolding with which to build a
powerful movement.

WHY BOTHER
http://prorev.com/order3.htm

HOWL
http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/ginsberg.html#howl

GINSBERG
http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/ginsberg.html