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Alan Ginberg was Black and Virginia Woolfe sucks

#1 User is offline   civilian_number_two Icon

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Posted 11 October 2007 - 03:51 AM

I thought it was high time we broke off from the "English" is good or bad" discussion, even if we're just about done here.

QUOTE (J m HofMarN @ Oct 10 2007, 08:45 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
And that means they werent influenced by Jazz?

Not necessarily, but in this case, yes. Just like when George Lucas said he was influenced by Classical Mythology to write STAR WARS, they were to some extent being pretentious. Weird, though, given that what they were doing was almost unique and a new direction for poetry, to try to submerge it under a musical style as though to say it wasn't theirs at all. I suppose when they got together to discuss a new direction for poetry they were really just cribbing the album jackets of Charlie Parker 78s? When I hear jazz and listen to the lyrics, I can feel the time and the place that these poets lived in, but some of that is just knowing they were there. I can't honestly say I hear the words to beat poetry in jazz. But when you compare yourself with something in another genre, such as jazz riffs or surrealist painting, you don't have to draw attention to your more prosaic influences, such as the Romantic poets of a couple of centuries before.

Anyway, the Beat poets, getting back to the original idea, are an example of white culture. None of those dudes were black, and few of them even hung around with black people. You might as well say that The Who are an example of Black culture because of Chuck Berry.

RE: Dalloway:
QUOTE
I read to the parts where some creature named Scrope Pervis appeared. because I remember the name. I also recall that someone, possibly Scrope Pervis saw the queen maybe. Where that is, I don't know. Mrs. Dalloway is, in the words of Ginsberg, "An Endless Book that will drive everyone mad"

So you just don't like Dalloway because Ginsberg didn't like Dalloway. Wow.

QUOTE
Dalloway is NOT easier to understand than Howl.

Sez you.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#2 User is offline   J m HofMarN Icon

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Posted 11 October 2007 - 09:53 PM

QUOTE
Weird, though, given that what they were doing was almost unique and a new direction for poetry, to try to submerge it under a musical style as though to say it wasn't theirs at all.


Jazz wasnt the only influence, as I've already stated, Ginsberg owes a bunch to Whitman and Blake, and Carl Solomon, but also to jazz. It's a mixture, and I don't think beat poetry would have been the same without jazz. It doesnt make it black culture, I'm simply saying that was an example of another culture's thing blending and fortifying something in white American culture.

QUOTE
few of them even hung around with black people


I did a full thirty minute presentation on this subject for an event I read at. Ahem

Ginsberg in Howl points out that he had relations with sailors from the Caribbean. Many of whom would likely be of African descent. The line is "And those human seraphim the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love!". I'm sure there are more examples in his poetry and journals, but I havent read those since the report.

Burroughs had a lifetime friendship with a black jazz musician, traveled to Africa with him to make a video, and identified him as a major influence in his writing.

Kerouac and Cassady both hung out in black clubs, many of which, by the way, were still segregated at the time. On The Road has numerous passages on these instances, as well as a week long romance between Kerouac and a Mexican immigrant who he helped out at her job as a migrant laborer.

Tom Wolfe's Kool Aid Acid Test has at least one scene I remember where Furthur parked at a segregated beach and they hung out listening to jazz.

QUOTE
So you just don't like Dalloway because Ginsberg didn't like Dalloway. Wow.


You fail your trivia check. Ginsberg was talking about The Naked Lunch, a long nonsensical book written in stream of consciousness by Burroughs and originally titled The Naked Lust until Ginsberg read Burroughs poor handwriting while editing the manuscript and put it on paper as what he saw. I simply applied the quote to another stream of consciousness book, though truth be told I think Dalloway was better than Lunch.

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Sez you.


So it's to be a battle of numbers then aye? Sockpuppets ho!

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I don't know about you but I have never advocated that homosexuals, for any reason, be cut out of their mother's womb and thrown into a bin.
- Deucaon toes a hard line on gay fetus rights.
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Posted 12 October 2007 - 12:09 AM

Bond, I'm not goig to approve your post since it's completely off topic. Noone here was actually directly comparing Woolfe and the Beats.

Also, this is a pissing match between me and the wolfman. Run along now. Man talk.

--------

Back to it: my bad for misunderstanding your slideways crack about Naked Lunch. And yeah, so they had sex with some negroes. That don't change that they were white guys who had lifelong companionships mainly with other white guys. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I just think calling them an example even of blended black/white culture is like making the same comment of say Eminem or the Beastie Boys.

As for Woolfe, I don't get how she's incomprehensible to you. Her sentences ramble, sure, but all of her clauses are intact. Basically the book is a jumble of thoughts and memories, but as such it's relatively linear; even the flashbacks are mostly in order. You want complicated, read the last chapter of Ulysses.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#4 User is offline   J m HofMarN Icon

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Posted 12 October 2007 - 03:03 AM

If he somehow managed to reference From Russia With Love for some reason I say you approve the post. You win by default if it gives me an aneurism.

As for that, I don't know the identities and races of all their friends, but as for them being guys, Ginsberg was the only one who was ardently homosexual and kind of dragged people into it with him with his personality, etc. Kerouac lived with his aunt pretty much forever, and I think it was Burroughs that shot his wife in the face by accident. Cassady had sex with men, but that was because he'd have sex with anything.

And I still state that the Beats represented one of the first blendings of the two cultures on a national stage. It was the Beat poets who set the stage for a lot of what happened in the sixties. That may be some of the reason that the anti-war movement gelled so well with the civil rights/black lib/gay lib movements.

Are they an exact 50/50 mix, no. But certainly they were influenced by Afro American culture and much the better for it.

On the Woolfe question, I think you have to flow with the stream of thought in order to get stream of thought writings. If you're not On The Road with Kerouac it might seem like a bit of a jumble (easily so, since he wrote it in 2 weeks on a single sheet of paper while hyped on benzadrine)

I was never terribly enamoured with the subject matter. Had Mrs. Dalloway been tearing around Victorian England in an early automobile, its trunk packed with drugs and booze and the back seat filled with girls and some rapaciously sexual drifter she'd met, maybe I'd get into it.

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I don't know about you but I have never advocated that homosexuals, for any reason, be cut out of their mother's womb and thrown into a bin.
- Deucaon toes a hard line on gay fetus rights.
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#5 User is offline   civilian_number_two Icon

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Posted 12 October 2007 - 02:28 PM

Ok, well we can agree on that! I think I need to start work on some sort of Dalloway/Beat fusion.

"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the drugs herself."

Also agreed that neither of us has much more to say than "You are a stinky poopypants." At least, that's all I had to say, poopypants. I don't know why I even bothered to split it when I did, apart from general self-consciousness about cluttering the English Language thread with all that English Literature.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#6 User is offline   J m HofMarN Icon

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Posted 12 October 2007 - 09:30 PM

"We were just outside of Birmingham on the edge of the moors... when the drugs began to take hold..."

Civ if you can write such a book I'll bankroll it and see that it gets published myself. Hell, I'll even let you flay my skin and tan it for the binding.

At least we can agree that Dalloway was if nothing else a good deal better than Naked Lunch or much of Joyce's work, and probably beats Stein's work as well. However Kerouac is always going to be the top stream of consciousness writer in my book.

That is until your epic about the time Scrope Purvis ate some mushrooms and thought she saw the queen drenched in blood and riding a water buffalo stark naked through her living room.

This post has been edited by J m HofMarN: 12 October 2007 - 09:34 PM

Quote

I don't know about you but I have never advocated that homosexuals, for any reason, be cut out of their mother's womb and thrown into a bin.
- Deucaon toes a hard line on gay fetus rights.
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#7 User is offline   civilian_number_two Icon

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Posted 12 October 2007 - 10:43 PM

Hey I really dig ULYSSES, even more than DALLOWAY. When I was in Dublin I went out of my way to see a few key sites that figure in the novel. But NO, I didn't go on no silly "Bloomsday" tour.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#8 User is offline   J m HofMarN Icon

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Posted 13 October 2007 - 01:44 AM

I haven't yet read Ulysses, I read some Joyce years ago but I forget what the name of it was and it affected me much the same as Woolfe did. Portrait of the Arist! that's the one.

Quote

I don't know about you but I have never advocated that homosexuals, for any reason, be cut out of their mother's womb and thrown into a bin.
- Deucaon toes a hard line on gay fetus rights.
0

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