My dear friend Angela is coming to see me this week all the way from Nashville! I am so excited and in honor of this, I would like to share a story regarding our similar cases of mistaken phone identities.
When we were in college, Angela used to get calls in the middle of the night of people asking for Cash, who was apparently also a person or drug dealer or both. This happened repeatedly until one night she answered and the person on the other line said, "Yo, is this Cash?" and Angela said, no, this is not Cash. The rest of the conversation was pretty one-sided and went something like this:
"Who is on the phone? WHO IS ON THE PHONE? (then, to someone else) Man, I don't know who the f*ck I got on the phone."
She has a different number now, but we still laugh about that line. Then when I moved to LA and changed to a local number, I started getting calls from someone named T-Bone's assistant. They would always come in during business hours, and at the time I was working a normal office job and could never answer and say it was the wrong number. But despite the fact that my voicemail stated my full name, this T-Bone person's rather dimwitted assistant always left desperate messages for whoever to call T-Bone back. Finally one day I got a text from T-Bone himself telling me he was running late for our meeting, and I so wish I had just texted back to ask the address so I could meet this T-Bone in person. Instead, I texted to tell him he had the wrong number. That was the end of that.
Fast forward to last night when I was reading US Weekly (hold your judgment), specifically an article about Reese Witherspoon's wedding to CAA agent Jim Toth. (Coincidentally, the office job I was working during the era of T-Bone phone calls was at CAA.) There I was, mindlessly glancing over details about decor, flowers, and food, when I came across this paragraph:
"Inside, producer T Bone Burnett's pals, rockabilly band the Americans, played during dinner. 'Reese and Jim . . . thanked T Bone for the band.'"
Como what? I sat up straight. Somehow, I knew this had to be the same guy. How many T-Bones or T Bones could there be working in Los Angeles who have frazzled assistants that call about how their boss is late for meetings? I always assumed T-Bone was some kind of gangsta rapper name, but maybe I wasn't that far off if T Bone apparently is this music producer legend.
Who is on the phone, indeed.
Excerpt from "California Plush"
The only thing I miss about Los Angeles
is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing
--pimps, surplus stores, footprints of the stars
--descending through the city
fast as the law would allow
through the lights, then rising to the stack
out of the city
to the stack where lanes are stacked six deep
and you on top; the air
now clean, for a moment weightless
without memories, or
need for a past.
-Frank Bidart
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Thursday, November 11, 2010
In a world where James Franco still has two arms and "Howl" is a movie . . .
I've been trying to figure out for a while now how to work Allen Ginsberg's seminal poem "Howl" into this blog. I didn't want to just drop it at the bottom of an entry as a way of emphasizing some other point. "Howl" is so crucial to who I am as a writer that it deserves the spotlight.
I thank my 10th grade creative writing teacher, Ms. Garrison, for introducing Ginsberg to our class. We read "Howl" out loud and it has stuck with me ever since. I will always be grateful to Ms. Garrison for having faith in her students the way that no other teacher I ever had did. She challenged us to interpret the poem and even take a stab at imitating Ginsberg's style with our own attempts at poetry.
The reason I bring all this up now is that there is a movie called "Howl" that came out in very limited release (New York and San Francisco) in September. It's about the obscenity trial following "Howl"'s publication and Ginsberg's explanation of the poem. There's also an animated part that takes you through the imagery of the poem itself. James Franco plays Ginsberg, and it's got an all-star cast including Jon Hamm and Mary Louise Parker. Here is the trailer:
It looks like the movie could get a wider release sometime in the near future, but until it does, there are still special screenings being held all over the country. Check out this link to see if it's going to be showing near you. And of course, there's always Netflix. I will be on the look out for it, and I hope you will, too. Yes, James Franco is a little ubiquitous right now, but it could be a great way to introduce a new audience to this poem.
Howl was first published in 1956. It is written in three parts with an additional footnote at the end. Below is Part I, which is probably the best known. Notice how Ginsberg repeats the word "who" as a way to keep the rhythm, and think about how the "best minds" of his generation were really societal outcasts.
Howl, Part I
for Carl Solomon
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 Arkan-
sas 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 mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness 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 afternoon 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,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of 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-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather 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 streetlight 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 FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible 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 rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever 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 con-
sciousness,
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 sunrise, 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 steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son 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 regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & 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 alleyways & 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 whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the 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 salva-
tion 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 hypnotism & 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 instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
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 madman 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.
I thank my 10th grade creative writing teacher, Ms. Garrison, for introducing Ginsberg to our class. We read "Howl" out loud and it has stuck with me ever since. I will always be grateful to Ms. Garrison for having faith in her students the way that no other teacher I ever had did. She challenged us to interpret the poem and even take a stab at imitating Ginsberg's style with our own attempts at poetry.
The reason I bring all this up now is that there is a movie called "Howl" that came out in very limited release (New York and San Francisco) in September. It's about the obscenity trial following "Howl"'s publication and Ginsberg's explanation of the poem. There's also an animated part that takes you through the imagery of the poem itself. James Franco plays Ginsberg, and it's got an all-star cast including Jon Hamm and Mary Louise Parker. Here is the trailer:
It looks like the movie could get a wider release sometime in the near future, but until it does, there are still special screenings being held all over the country. Check out this link to see if it's going to be showing near you. And of course, there's always Netflix. I will be on the look out for it, and I hope you will, too. Yes, James Franco is a little ubiquitous right now, but it could be a great way to introduce a new audience to this poem.
Howl was first published in 1956. It is written in three parts with an additional footnote at the end. Below is Part I, which is probably the best known. Notice how Ginsberg repeats the word "who" as a way to keep the rhythm, and think about how the "best minds" of his generation were really societal outcasts.
Howl, Part I
for Carl Solomon
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 Arkan-
sas 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 mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness 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 afternoon 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,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of 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-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather 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 streetlight 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 FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible 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 rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever 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 con-
sciousness,
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 sunrise, 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 steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son 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 regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & 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 alleyways & 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 whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the 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 salva-
tion 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 hypnotism & 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 instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
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 madman 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.
Monday, October 11, 2010
That's not for you.
I was reading through a recently published collection of Charles Bukowski's poems, though he died in 1994 of leukemia. Many of the poems in this collection had been previously unpublished, but his widow and editor took them and put them together. The same thing happened when Michael Crichton died and his editor found a manuscript he had been working on called Pirate Latitudes. The editor made the decision to publish it, and of course Steven Spielberg is now making it into a movie.
Now, I understand that if someone made a living as a writer, you might assume that he was planning to publish this newly discovered work eventually, but you can't know that for sure unless he told you himself. You might think it's very tragic that the author died before he could see his work appreciated. I, however, find it kind of disconcerting that when I die some unlucky person who has to sift through all my crap might happen upon some horrible first draft of a poem or story I've written and would try to put it out into the world. What if I had hated that draft and decided to scrap the idea all together? After you die, are your ideas just fair game?
If the person is famous, I think we feel it's owed to us, the audience, to read his or her last words. I think we view the song or poem or manuscript as a gift that person was working on for us, and if he died before he could present it to his fans, then we will take it anyway because we're sure that's what he would have wanted. "Oh, Grandma always meant to give you this brooch. She never got around to putting it in her will, but take it. I'm sure she would have wanted you to have it."
On the other hand, consider that some things are too personal and not intended to ever be shared. If someone found a poem I wrote at an emotional low point (and subsequently stuffed into the back of a drawer) and then submitted it to a literary magazine, I would have to haunt them so that they could know how pissed off I am. It's like one time when I was on a picnic with some friends. They had a fancy picnic basket given to them as a wedding gift and it came with silverware and wine glasses and specially decorated paper napkins. As we were passing around the food and utensils, I went to take a napkin and one of my friends took it back. "That's not for you," he said. We looked at him, surprised, and then we all burst out laughing because his wife said he really wanted to save those special napkins for some unknown future occasion.
That personal emotional poem I wrote 15 years ago? That's not for you. But that script I've been hawking the last 6 months? That you can have.
waste
"boring," he said from his deathbed,
"I bored everybody, even
myself.
I wasted it, I was a fake, a word-
blower . . . all too fancy . . . all too
full of tricks."
"oh master," said the young poet,
"that's not true at all, not at
all."
"all too true," said the old man.
"my work was overblown
rubbish."
the young poet did not believe
those words.
he could not, he would not,
for he too was writing
rubbish.
but still he asked the old man,
"but Master, what is to be
done?"
"begin at the beginning."
said the old man.
a few days after that
he died.
he had not wanted to see the
young poet anyhow.
now that didn't matter
either.
-Charles Bukowski
Now, I understand that if someone made a living as a writer, you might assume that he was planning to publish this newly discovered work eventually, but you can't know that for sure unless he told you himself. You might think it's very tragic that the author died before he could see his work appreciated. I, however, find it kind of disconcerting that when I die some unlucky person who has to sift through all my crap might happen upon some horrible first draft of a poem or story I've written and would try to put it out into the world. What if I had hated that draft and decided to scrap the idea all together? After you die, are your ideas just fair game?
If the person is famous, I think we feel it's owed to us, the audience, to read his or her last words. I think we view the song or poem or manuscript as a gift that person was working on for us, and if he died before he could present it to his fans, then we will take it anyway because we're sure that's what he would have wanted. "Oh, Grandma always meant to give you this brooch. She never got around to putting it in her will, but take it. I'm sure she would have wanted you to have it."
On the other hand, consider that some things are too personal and not intended to ever be shared. If someone found a poem I wrote at an emotional low point (and subsequently stuffed into the back of a drawer) and then submitted it to a literary magazine, I would have to haunt them so that they could know how pissed off I am. It's like one time when I was on a picnic with some friends. They had a fancy picnic basket given to them as a wedding gift and it came with silverware and wine glasses and specially decorated paper napkins. As we were passing around the food and utensils, I went to take a napkin and one of my friends took it back. "That's not for you," he said. We looked at him, surprised, and then we all burst out laughing because his wife said he really wanted to save those special napkins for some unknown future occasion.
That personal emotional poem I wrote 15 years ago? That's not for you. But that script I've been hawking the last 6 months? That you can have.
waste
"boring," he said from his deathbed,
"I bored everybody, even
myself.
I wasted it, I was a fake, a word-
blower . . . all too fancy . . . all too
full of tricks."
"oh master," said the young poet,
"that's not true at all, not at
all."
"all too true," said the old man.
"my work was overblown
rubbish."
the young poet did not believe
those words.
he could not, he would not,
for he too was writing
rubbish.
but still he asked the old man,
"but Master, what is to be
done?"
"begin at the beginning."
said the old man.
a few days after that
he died.
he had not wanted to see the
young poet anyhow.
now that didn't matter
either.
-Charles Bukowski
Monday, September 20, 2010
The Waste Land
I mentioned the other day that my neighborhood sometimes resembles the Gaza Strip.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
I was thinking about perspectives. When I'm up on the roof, you can usually tell how I'm feeling about things/life at that moment by which direction I'm facing.
The urban palm tree view makes me feel inconsequential when I look out there and think about how many people are in this city. Then I realize that I can't see any of them from where I stand so I imagine it's a post-apocalyptic neighborhood. No matter how bad a problem I might be facing at the moment, there could always be zombies or flesh eating viruses that wipe us out. Things are looking up!
If I have writer's block, I like to sit on the top of the steps that lead to the roof and face the Hollywood sign. I try to get past the horrible conventionalism of it and focus on the idea behind the sign. Then I immediately flash to Pretty Woman where the guy in the street is yelling, "Everybody who comes to Hollywood's got a dream. What's your dream?" Then I wish that I could write Pretty Woman.
If it's just a really gorgeous day out like most days in LA, I might take a beach chair up and face the sun. I will open the latest issue of Bon Appetit magazine and I will plot ways to cook an enormous green tomato.
Today, well, you're getting a limerick so guess which direction I'm facing.
Ode to the Spider I Killed Last Night
You're the second one I've seen so far.
As big as the freakin' Death Star.
Though your game was well-played,
you were foiled with Raid.
Yet I still wonder where all your friends are.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
But then if I stand on my roof and turn slightly to the left, I see this:
And if I turn even further and tilt my head up I see this
I was thinking about perspectives. When I'm up on the roof, you can usually tell how I'm feeling about things/life at that moment by which direction I'm facing.
The urban palm tree view makes me feel inconsequential when I look out there and think about how many people are in this city. Then I realize that I can't see any of them from where I stand so I imagine it's a post-apocalyptic neighborhood. No matter how bad a problem I might be facing at the moment, there could always be zombies or flesh eating viruses that wipe us out. Things are looking up!
If I have writer's block, I like to sit on the top of the steps that lead to the roof and face the Hollywood sign. I try to get past the horrible conventionalism of it and focus on the idea behind the sign. Then I immediately flash to Pretty Woman where the guy in the street is yelling, "Everybody who comes to Hollywood's got a dream. What's your dream?" Then I wish that I could write Pretty Woman.
If it's just a really gorgeous day out like most days in LA, I might take a beach chair up and face the sun. I will open the latest issue of Bon Appetit magazine and I will plot ways to cook an enormous green tomato.
Today, well, you're getting a limerick so guess which direction I'm facing.
Ode to the Spider I Killed Last Night
You're the second one I've seen so far.
As big as the freakin' Death Star.
Though your game was well-played,
you were foiled with Raid.
Yet I still wonder where all your friends are.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)