Alison Croggon wrote:
> >From Slate, by Stephen Burt
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2140162/
>   
...Where was I?

I remember my father (d. 1954) both incensed at and fearful of Joe 
McCarthy.  I recall the "Let's Talk Yiddish So Kenny Won't Understand" 
routine when my extended family circled its way into the Rosenberg 
nightmare because some of them actually knew Julius Rosenberg & Ethel 
nee Greenglass, who really were very uninteresting people: middle-class 
Jewish people from the Bronx who had leftist politics.  BFD.  I didn't 
quite understand what was going on.  I can say I still don't, not 
entirely.  I think of the 1950s now, I want to buy up all the master 
tapes of "Happy Days" and incinerate them.  Based on how I recall the 
'50s, "Happy Days" is the moral equivalent of that famous dirty joke 
"The Aristocrats" but not as funny.  Hey, yo.

I am far more a faith-based than political initiative (here we don't go 
again), but sometimes the two intersect.  In other words, something of 
the political culture rubbed off.  I knew what La Nausee was in facing 
my own culture as well as my own life, long before I ever heard of 
Sartre--indeed, my self-disgust found a refuge in the Fifties subculture 
of artistic-political rebellion.  "Howl" was only one part of it.  "The 
Organization Man," which I read in the 9th grade (this is NOT a joke) 
counseled deft forms of defiance (the epilogue was called "How to Cheat 
On Personality Tests," a skill I mastered and use to this day).  Marya 
Mannes, whose family founded the Mannes College of Music in New York, 
had a Sunday evening TV talk show, and her essays were published in a 
book called "More in Anger."  Yes, anger was very much a part of the 
1950s "resistance" to what Lowell called "the mausoleum" of the 
Eisenhower years; it was an acceptable and necessary emotion even if it 
didn't invoke Moloch, and it dovetailed nicely with my own unearned 
free-floating rage which, like any rage, turned out to be corrosive.  
There was another show on Sunday night called "America's Great 
Teachers," weekly interviews with university professors who David 
Horowitz, that pathetic Court Jew, would have at now. The two I remember 
were Polykarp Kusch, 1955 Nobel laureate in Physics who taught at 
Columbia, and another Columbia faculty member, Jacques Barzun, who 
captivated me even as my cousin--working on a Columbia Ph.D. she never 
finished (love them dissertations) thought Barzun was an asshole.  I 
didn't care.  "Teacher In America" was one of my inspirations for 
years.  I recall Philip Wylie, who attacked almost everything, as did an 
Anglican priest in the UK named Bernard Iddings Bell.  There was a book 
called "Must I Conform?" because conformity was a big issue in the 
'50s.  Note: It still is.  Vance Packard wrote a book on advertising 
called "The Hidden Persuaders" that made me think little people were 
inside my head telling me which toilet paper to buy.

Early Jules Feiffer mocked the culture of fanged torpor, in league with 
Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl.  Feiffer, PS, years later wrote the story of 
my life, "Tantrum," one of the funniest cartoon books I ever saw.

Ginsberg was only one part of a culture of rebellion.  Early Jules 
Feiffer mocked the culture of fanged torpor, in league with Lenny Bruce 
and Mort Sahl.  Feiffer, PS, years later wrote the story of my life, 
"Tantrum," one of the funniest cartoon books I ever saw.  Ginsberg 
himself was not all rebellion.  "Kaddish" made me cry long before my 
mother died.  Back then, "guilt by association" was alive and well.  
Slightly long hair...and I do mean slightly...got you associated with 
"beatniks."  And such a stupid word was supposed to tell everyone 
everything they needed to know about you.  Man, like...people smoked 
"gage" long before the Sixties.

The realization that white people used drugs was shocking and 
horrifying.  It was on the level of something entirely different but 
allied in shock value, the beating death of his adopted daughter by Joel 
Steinberg in 1987.  The whispered truth was that if one of the 
"schwartzes" or "PRs" had done it, nobody would have given a shit 
because That's How They Are and "The death of young wolves is never to 
be pitied."  But here was this white Jewish guy, professional man, 
monstrously abusing his girlfriend and beating his daughter to death.  
Same difference as pot and heroin moving down from Harlem and the South 
Bronx into the West Village.  Now you get to look at it, get it out of 
the Ghetto, see it invade the middle class: drugs and child abuse together.

The Slate article strikes me as a bit overblown.  It scares me to think 
I'm that old (62) that I can remember that little City Lights 
paperback.  But (blah-blah-blah) what did "Howl" really change?  Whitman 
changed the poetic "landscape."  AG dove inside Whitman's soul and 
worked from that trailblazing style (which probably goes back before 
Whitman anyway).  The words are colossal.  But "change"?  Who?  Ginsberg 
is a lethal weapon who can seduce people into trying to write that way. 
I have seen and heard more crappy poetry at Manhattan and Jersey opens 
written under the influence of Ginsberg et al. than I want to 
remember--but I suppose that is inevitable.  But you can also say that 
Ginsberg adds tools to the poet's arsenal.  We're back to the same 
question.  Do poets change stuff?  I honestly don't know.  Novels may 
change things: if we believe the story, The Jungle brought about changes 
to the meat packing industry.  Reality or propaganda?

Blame Eliot Weinberger for making me a bit less enthused about Ginsberg 
and the whole "Howl" anniversary than I might otherwise be.  He's the 
guy who presented Ginsberg as one of Trungpa's finks at Naropa, and that 
whole prophetic image goes a bit southward after that
. 
Ken

---------------------
Kenneth Wolman		www.kenwolman.com	rainermaria.typepad.com

I wouldn't want to have lived without having offended someone.--Anon.