Best Minds of My Generation Page 2
We have myriad “ghosted” bodies—emanating out of the eternal war scenarios, broken lives, and broken neurological pathways. A Bosch-like intensity. Intricacies of surreal body parts: animal with human, experiments of genetic hybrid, sheep and mouse cloning and the like, transplants of all kinds, the torture of the animal, human/metal cyborgian hybrids or advanced robotic weaponry, the drones and reapers. We have the pharmaceutical and porn industries’ marketing and control of desire, euphemism and lies of Operation Enduring Freedom, Shock and Awe, the Clean Air Act or “refined interrogation techniques” or “disposition matrix” (kill list), which amplify words as killer viruses. We have the World Wide Web spying on our lives, NSA monitoring cell phones, whistle-blowers in lockdown. We have killer viruses, AIDS, Ebola, Zika. We have an unprecedented situation in our current US governance that defies all civic norms and poses many threats that the Beats were already on to. Burroughs stands alone in his satiric powerful takedowns.
The women are missing here unless as mothers, lovers, wives, sometimes victims, hamstrung by ignorance, societal prejudice, a patriarchal dominance yet to fully crumble. But many were outstanding poets and writers and their story is unfolding with impressive research and investigation. The Beats were culpable bystanders, although I never felt personally excluded by the mid-sixties. There is palpable fluidity in these men. They are essentially softies. The female principle of cultivating atmosphere, of providing nourishment, emotional depth, and ambiguity drives so much of Ginsberg’s writing and brotherly love. Love is at the heart of the narrative. Allen often quoted Ezra Pound’s “what thou lovest well remains.”
Scholarship has been more intellectual in more recent years outside the US of A. One critic sees Kerouac as an “action writer” placed in the milieu with Jackson Pollock and John Cage. Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge Burroughs’s “set of potentials,” an effect that propagates itself from medium to medium. Beat enclaves—communities of artists (of all genders and ages) around the world who consider themselves part of a spiritual lineage that grasped and held so many other realities and beauties of experimental art and life and alternative politics—are legion. Something propelled these writers into a spotlight of Whitmanic adhesiveness. Being in the right place at the right time. More interested in the fellaheen than the Industrial Military Complex.
Naropa University has gender-free bathrooms now, there’s a diversity center in what used to be music archivist and filmmaker Harry Smith’s residence, which was later the first Naropa recording studio. Brooklyn College is also changing with the times. We are yet again at another trembling crossroads in American culture.
And for whatever future we have, it will have been informed, in part, by the literary power, aspirations, and influence of the Beats who met in an Outrider, rhizomic community through the nexus of Columbia University. Professor Ginsberg will capture and hold our attention for many semesters yet to come. There is something still radically prescient, deeply personal, and riveting in this luminous textbook.
Editor’s Preface
Naw, this isn’t a lost generation,
this is a beat generation
—Jack Kerouac
History of the Courses
In the summer of 1977 Allen Ginsberg decided that the time had come to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. By then he was the codirector of the poetry department at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The college, now known as Naropa University, had been founded in 1974 by the Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a lineage holder of both the Kagyü and Nyingma Buddhist traditions. As early as 1972 Trungpa had met with Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, and John Cage to seek their help in organizing a poetics department for his proposed school and in 1974 the first courses were taught at what Ginsberg and Waldman dubbed The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ginsberg would remain on the faculty and devote himself to teaching at Naropa until his death, in 1997, often for little or no pay. He was a born teacher and loved sharing his knowledge with bright, young students.
When Ginsberg began his very first lecture to his class that summer, he explained that they would cover the major work of the writers of the Beat Generation and would focus on the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Initially his plan was to bring the students up to date on what each poet was doing, concluding with his or her present work. “So the story is not finished but is ongoing, and this Naropa Institute, the Buddhist conjunction with whatever conception or inspiration was involved with the Beat vision, your presence here and my teaching here is a part of that continued humorous story,” he said. “In other words, the movie continues and you are now in it,” he told his class. He outlined ambitious plans for the following twenty sessions of two hours each, and recited a long list of books he hoped to cover during that period. “So we’ll actually have the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies to cover. It’s a little bit more than I’d planned on,” he remarked at one point. As the weeks passed, however, it became apparent that Ginsberg would not have time to bring the students up to date, and in fact he’d be lucky if he could cover just the 1940s during the forty-plus hours he had available to lecture. Of course it was difficult for him to stick strictly to even a single decade because works begun in the late forties might not have been completed or published until the early fifties, and Burroughs’s earliest work was from the thirties. By the end of the term Allen was still working his way through the mid-1940s.
In 1981 and 1982 he decided to tackle the project again by offering two more courses at Naropa. This time he tried to be more realistic about how much he could cover in a single term. Even so, he still wasn’t able to complete the historical survey of the Beat Generation and as time passed there were more and more years to cover. Later, when he was appointed to the faculty of Brooklyn College, he revisited the topic twice, first in 1987 and then for the last time in 1994. By that time nearly twenty years had passed since the original course was conceived. During the intervening years more work by Beat writers had been published and more scholarship about those writers had accumulated. If Ginsberg hadn’t passed away in 1997 he certainly would have tried once more to bring his overview of literary history up to date.
Over the years Ginsberg frequently asked the Beat writers themselves to visit his classes and speak to the students about their own work. This made the classes even more popular and afforded the students the chance not only to read and study the works of the Beats but to meet them and ask questions of them directly. It proved to be a wonderful experience. The students worked with William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Peter Orlovsky, Michael McClure, Ray Bremser, Carl Solomon, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and many others to, as Ginsberg put it, “study at the feet of the masters.” With the support of the Wolfe Institute at Brooklyn College, Allen also hosted several reading series that featured appearances by most of the remaining members of the Beat movement.
In the end, Ginsberg taught the “Literary History of the Beat Generation” course five times for a total of nearly a hundred lectures, which covered a staggering amount of material. Many people are surprised to learn that Ginsberg was a demanding teacher who expected his students to be well read and well prepared for each class. He often heaped more reading assignments on them than they could ever hope to complete. He provided students with an anthology of source material and a course bibliography; the latter is included as an appendix to this book.
Ginsberg mentioned several reasons for offering the course. First of all, many students at Naropa had requested that Allen talk about himself and the Beat Generation, the literary movement that Ginsberg had played a key role in creating. No one knew the topic better than he did. Allen acknowledged that, in addition to the students enrolled in his class, he was also speaking to “scholars and future interested people” with the knowledge that his words were being recorded and preserved. He hoped that someday he’d have the time to edit these tapes himself and create a comp
lete documentary history of his own literary generation. And, finally, he was well aware that his knowledge and intelligence were transient, that his memory would fade, and that he would eventually die, leaving his personal interpretation incomplete unless he took steps to document it himself. For those reasons these lectures were always intended to be a permanent, “once and for all” record of what Allen considered to be the high points of Beat literature.
This was typical of Ginsberg who always felt that it was his job to document the era, preserve the literature, and educate the people as to the importance of the movement he had created nearly single-handedly, for without Ginsberg there would be no Beat Generation. Although there were a dozen or more notable writers working independently, they were not thought of as a literary group. It was Allen who helped forge the public’s perception of these writers as a unified group, exposing them to wider readerships as the fame and importance of the Beat Generation grew. The biggest problem facing Ginsberg in the organization of his course’s curriculum was how to condense the writings of dozens of poets and novelists into reasonably short discussions. And quite frankly that was something he could never do. A single comment about Herbert Huncke would lead to a two-hour discussion of the world around Times Square in the 1940s and might delve into subjects such as drugs, world politics, sex, storytelling, and morality. An introductory remark on Burroughs’s earliest writing might expand to include a reading of that work, a discussion of Burroughs’s youth and friends, visionary experiences, and the power and meaning of words themselves. Allen’s explanation of the importance of that work to Burroughs’s development might stretch to several weeks of classroom conversation. As a result some of his lectures break off into tangents and often resemble musings as he formulated his ideas in front of the students. Many times his train of thought breaks from the strict narrative that his syllabus had set forth and his digressions open new doors to the understanding of the Beat writers.
Scope of the Courses
Ginsberg also faced the problem of separating the work of the writers from their biographies. In addition he was faced with trying to distance their writing from the social phenomenon the Beats inadvertently spawned as their work became public. It was an impossible task, because the lives of most of these writers became their work. Allen comments several times in these tapes on this fusion—how Kerouac and Burroughs became one with their work. This was further complicated by the writers themselves who muddied the waters even more by refusing to acknowledge that they were part of any “Beat Generation.” Understandably, the writers did not want to be pigeonholed into a group that was frequently characterized in the media as nothing more than a bunch of juvenile delinquents. In Kerouac’s opinion the Beat Generation had ceased to exist by the late 1940s, but Allen did his best to extend membership to writers who were barely in their teens during the 1940s.
Just who were the Beat Generation writers in Ginsberg’s eyes? In conversation, Allen conveyed a broad idea of who was “Beat.” These writers ranged in age from William S. Burroughs, born in 1914, to Anne Waldman, born in 1945, too wide a range of years for a single generation. This is a problem that I as editor had to wrestle with in order to shape his lectures into a tightly knit single volume. Allen believed the original group that coalesced around Kerouac, Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and himself in the neighborhood of New York’s Columbia University in the 1940s was the core of the Beat Generation. These figures are the people he covered in depth in his classes and returned to again and again in his lectures. It is not because Ginsberg didn’t want to include the members of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain writers in his history of the Beat Generation, but it was purely because he ran out of time. In some of his later years he addressed the work of younger writers and included them in readings and bibliographies, but he did not lecture about them to the extent that he tackled Kerouac, Burroughs, and also Corso.
Editorial Process, Selection of Texts
Ginsberg’s lack of focus on the younger members of the group made it possible for this editor to place greater emphasis on the original New York Beats and their roles in the conception of the movement. Allen began each of his five courses with extensive lectures on Kerouac, Burroughs, and Corso, then as time permitted he might or might not get to Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Ray Bremser, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, and the others. There was a good deal of repetition and overlap in his discussions on the work of the first three writers and I have collated his comments to make the lectures from the five course offerings as seamless as possible. Although time-consuming, this was easier than it might sound, because Allen’s opinions changed little over the nearly twenty years during which he taught the course. Ginsberg always considered Kerouac to be the greatest writer, Burroughs to be the greatest intellect, and Corso to be the most naturally gifted poet. He often returned to the same lines in their texts to point out an interesting or remarkable passage and his admiration for certain key works never seemed to waver.
Ginsberg’s method of teaching was simple enough. He organized his lectures by author, more or less chronologically. He taught his students through a series of examples. He selected what he considered to be the most interesting and important texts and commented on why he thought each was essential, distinct, or remarkable. Through that process he presented a picture of each writer’s style in a way that a narrative alone could not. He followed that same system throughout the five courses. We are grateful to be allowed to reprint so many of those texts by his fellow writers here, thus avoiding a great number of cross-references to outside resources. In some cases the texts were too long or their importance was not great enough to Ginsberg’s discussion to warrant several pages of reprinted material. In those few truncated entries the symbol [ . . . ] has been inserted to indicate that a portion of the original has been deleted. Otherwise texts are as Allen read them in class.
This is the twelfth book I have edited for the Ginsberg Trust since Allen’s death and my twenty-eighth book on the subject of the Beat Generation. Most of my editorial projects with the Beats have required little or no introduction because their works stand on their own merits and I have always tried to keep myself out of the story whenever possible. In this case, however, there were many more editorial decisions that I needed to make and so it seems important to outline my method.
To begin with, Ginsberg made tape recordings of every lecture he gave. The quality of the tapes vary from day to day, but Allen was obsessive-compulsive in this way and he tried to do his best to document every word. The Naropa tapes from 1977, 1981, and 1982 have been digitized and are available online. In addition, several original cassette tapes exist in the Ginsberg Archive at Stanford University. Many of the Brooklyn College tapes for the 1987 and 1994 classes can also be found at Stanford. I was also lucky enough to be able to transcribe tapes recorded by the Brooklyn College reference librarian William Gargan, who as a serious student of the Beat Generation attended all of Ginsberg’s classes and made his own set of tapes. His recordings were essential in many cases where the “official” tape was either missing or inaudible.
After gathering all the tapes I slowly transcribed every Ginsberg word and utterance. In the end those transcripts totaled nearly 400,000 words, nearly 2,000 pages of text. As someone who is as anal retentive as Allen was (in fact on more than one occasion he mentioned that I shared that trait with him), I would have loved to have published the complete transcript, unedited and unabridged. That would not have been as useful as it seems, however, due to the frequency of repetition. Considerable editing had to be done to pare this compendium down to the size you hold in your hands.
The lectures were then arranged by subject, chronologically. This was the way that Allen approached most of the subjects, but some rearrangement was necessary. The focus remains on the individual writers. For example, because he talked about On the Road five separate ti
mes, these statements had to be collated and repetitive statements had to be eliminated. This involved reading each sentence carefully and selecting the best, clearest, and most enlightening description of a given work.
Allen repeatedly mentions that Corso “tailored” his poems, and I must admit that this work is also the result of tailoring. Due to the nature of classroom lectures, unnecessary spoken words and asides have been omitted without the use of ellipses, because nearly every paragraph would contain a few of these and the work would become unwieldy and distracting. Student questions and remarks have also been deleted. All words not spoken by Ginsberg during his discussions have been placed within brackets [ ]. These additions were made as sparingly as possible where needed to clarify particular comments.
Because the transcripts were taken from spoken lectures, sentence breaks and punctuation are my own, not necessarily Allen’s. Occasionally he stopped mid-sentence, thought of a better way to phrase something, and then began anew. These awkward breaks have been mended without distorting the substance of a thought. Ginsberg also had a few habits that would be distracting if all were reproduced. A majority of the sentences in his lectures begin with the word “so.” Allen used it in much the same way that some speakers use the word “um,” as a pause or a bridge to another topic. “So let’s see where we were,” for example. He also used more than his share of the words “actually” and “like” and these have been thinned out without further note. The scholar who wants to hear all these imperfections will be able to find the complete lectures on websites or on cassette tapes, as mentioned earlier.