[lit-ideas] Re: early recording of 'Howl' discovered
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:16:27 -0600
Mike: I take it Eric doesn't like Ginsberg
Eric: You must have missed my "de gustibus."
No, I read it. Enjoyed it. You always write entertainingly and cogently.
I just like the understatement of my comment.
I don't admire Ginsberg as a poet like I do Merwin or Ashbery or Thomas or
Hopkins -- to name a few of my favorites, I've seldom gone back to read
Ginsberg. But the man looms large in my mind because of who he was to me in
my twenties. He was Christ in Temple turning over the tables of
moneychangers. You go, guy! He shouted wonderfully offensive obscenities
at smug corporate America. "Enough!" he screamed, "Enough! I need more."
And I knew what he was talking about. He's a cultural icon, not a literary
one, and like Che Guevara, perhaps he doesn't deserve the adulation that
young people especially pour on him in search of a life guru -- but who
does?
Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 11:28 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: early recording of 'Howl' discovered
.
Mike: it's not the soul of the person, it's the book, the painting, the
music, the dance, the poem that matters.
Eric: I just re-read Emerson's* essay "History" (from first series)
wherein he argues that we always read at a more elevated level than we are
in practical force, and that we see ourselves revealed in the sublime of
others' working. So I would add that art shows more in its first face than
in its round. (Wagner is performed in Tel Aviv ... now if only Teheran saw
fit to host Beethoven's Ninth.)
You probably accept the soul or you would not accept the book, the
painting, the music, the dance, or the poem. What is any art but a
striving in materials? What does it strive for, but its maker? What is its
maker but what we metaphorize as soul?
It's the static boho I loathe, not the evolving one. In the '90s, I used
to correspond with Kathy Acker before she died of cancer. My sense was
that she was trying to salvage, if only by appropriation, some order from
a life gone haywire. She was pulling a thorn out of her side, even though
pulling that thorn would kill her. Breast cancer got her first, but one
hoped for that breakthrough from victim-chic to Ur-chic. My sense is that
AG was seduced by his grad-school boys before he got to his Ur-chic.
That's what I resent -- more as artistic failure than personal failure.
Maybe his Buddhism led him to fancy his artistic failure was not
important? I don't know. Besides, I don't matter.
Now Ginsberg is a cult. As a contrarian, I resent cults. Or vice versa. De
gustibus. You may be right, but at least I've told you why I'm wrong.
Eric
_____
*
Who is more "beat" than Emerson? He inspired Nietzsche, made way for
Whitman, and produced some of the finest American prose. All beats are
vernacular footnotes to Emerson, that is, if we want the work not the
life.
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