re Slow Learner Intro, Beat poets, "new cultural synthesis"

[David Casseres]

I remember Shigeyoshi (Shig) Murao, standing behind the counter at
City Lights. He was a big, imposing figure, with uncut hair and beard
flowing down over his shoulders and chest.  In those days, hair that
long on a man was almost unheard of, at least in San Francisco.

And the idea that a Japanese-American guy would grow his hair out like
that would never occur to anyone.  So people asked him the eternal
question that always makes Asian-Americans roll their eyes: "So, what
are you, anyway."  But Shig didn't roll his eyes, he just told them he
was an Eskimo.

On 11/13/06, pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ...it's a great thing to live in a town with a guy
> like Ferlinghetti still around and writing. My old
> Berkeley neighbor, Charlie Zemalis, was a regular in
> the KPFA scene mentioned here, a Beat poet back in the
> day, and knew all these guys, many a happy hour spent
> talking with Charlie about those days....
>
>
> A free-speech landmark -- 50th anniversary of 'Howl'
> Lawrence Ferlinghetti
> Monday, November 13, 2006
>
> To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the
> precedent-setting free-speech trial over Allen
> Ginsburg's "Howl and Other Poems," we've reprinted
> here the introduction to "Howl on Trial: The Battle
> for Free Expression," (City Lights, 2006).
>
> The "Howl" that was heard around the world wasn't
> seized in San Francisco in 1956 just because it was
> judged obscene by cops, but because it attacked the
> bare roots of our dominant culture, the very Moloch
> heart of our consumer society. At the end of World War
> II, I came home feeling disconnected from American
> life, like multitudes of Americans uprooted by
> military service. And we didn't stay home long. With
> new larger perspectives of the world, many of us soon
> took off for parts unknown. And the "white arms of
> roads" beckoned westward. I didn't know the actual
> demographics of it, but I had the sense that the
> continent had tilted up, with the whole population
> sliding to the west. It was a time of born-again
> optimism, but there were also new elements in the
> smelting pot of postwar America. There was a sense of
> great restlessness, a sense of wanting more of life
> than that offered by local chambers of commerce or
> suburban American Legions, a vision of some new wide
> open, more creative society than had been possible in
> pre-war America. And -- as an idolizer of James
> Joyce's Stephen Dedalus -- I even envisioned myself
> articulating "the uncreated conscience of my race."
>
> It took until the mid-1950s for this postwar ferment
> and the visions of new generations to coalesce in a
> new cultural synthesis. And it happened in San
> Francisco, then still the last frontier in so many
> ways, with its "island mentality" that could be
> defined as a pioneer attitude of being "out there" on
> your own, without reliance on government. After all,
> San Francisco had been founded, not by bourgeoisie,
> but by prospectors, sailors, railroad workers, gold
> diggers, ladies of good fortune, roustabouts and
> carney hustlers. When I arrived overland by train in
> January 1951, it didn't take me long to discover that
> in Italian, bohemian North Beach, I had fallen into a
> burning bed of anarchism, pacifism and a wide open,
> nonacademic poetry scene, provincial but liberating.
> There were two or three anarchist poetry magazines
> spasmodically published, but the central literary,
> political force in all this was the poet and polymath,
> Kenneth Rexroth, who was active in the Anarchist
> Circle, waxed wroth regularly on KPFA-FM, and held
> Friday night soirées in his flat filled with apple-box
> bookshelves loaded with books he reviewed on every
> subject from anarchism to xenophobia.
>
> The Beat poets, joining this San Francisco scene in
> the 1950s, furthered the postwar cultural synthesis,
> and "Howl" became the catalyst in a paradigm shift in
> American poetry and consciousness. The Beats were
> advance word slingers prefiguring the counterculture
> of the 1960s, forecasting its main obsessions and
> ecstasies of liberation, essentially a "youth revolt"
> against all that our postwar society was doing to us
> (even as Henry Miller in the 1940s had sensed that
> "another breed of men has taken over" in an
> air-conditioned nightmare.) When the Beats -- namely
> Ginsberg, Gregorio Nunzio Corso, Jack Kerouac, Neal
> Cassady, Peter Orlovsky -- first appeared in San
> Francisco, they hardly looked like world shakers. When
> Ginsberg first walked into City Lights and handed me
> the manuscript of "Howl," I saw him as another of
> those far-out poets and wandering intellectuals who
> had started hanging out in our 3-year-old bookstore,
> which The Chronicle had already started calling the
> intellectual center of the city. Bespectacled,
> intense, streetwise, Ginsberg showed me "Howl" with
> some hesitation, as if wondering whether I would know
> what to do with it. Later that month, when I heard him
> read it at the Six Gallery, I knew the world had been
> waiting for this poem, for this apocalyptic message to
> be articulated. It was in the air, waiting to be
> captured in speech. The repressive, conformist,
> racist, homophobic world of the 1950s cried out for
> it.
>
> That night I went home and sent Ginsberg a Western
> Union telegram (imitating what I thought Emerson had
> written Whitman upon first reading "Leaves of Grass"):
> "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," and
> adding, "When do we get the manuscript?" (Despite
> Allen's saving every scrap of writing, this telegram
> is not to be found in his archive.) When City Lights
> published "Howl and Other Poems" in 1956, the holy
> unholy voice of the title poem reverberated around the
> world among poets and intellectuals, in countries free
> and enslaved, from New York to Amsterdam to Paris to
> Prague to Belgrade to Calcutta and Kyoto.
>
> Ginsberg's original title was "Howl for Carl Solomon."
> Editing the poem, I persuaded him to call it simply
> "Howl," making "for Carl Solomon" a dedication, and
> thus implying a more universal significance. Putting
> the collection together, I talked him into including
> "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound." And still later,
> when I asked for more, he sent me "Footnote to Howl."
> We had already published two books by Rexroth and
> poetic pacifist Kenneth Patchen, and they'd been
> printed in England by John Sankey. But the four-letter
> words (not including "love") in "Howl" would cause
> censorship to raise its lascivious head. British law
> held the printer liable for prosecution, and he elided
> certain words, with Allen's and my reluctant consent.
> (Later, after the trial, these so-shocking words were
> restored.) Before sending the manuscript to the press,
> I showed it to the American Civil Liberties Union in
> San Francisco, because I suspected we would be busted,
> not only for four-letter words but also for its frank
> sexual, especially homosexual, content. And the ACLU
> promised to defend us. When we were indeed arrested,
> our little one-room bookstore would have been wiped
> out without the ACLU.
>
> As for myself, I thought, well, I could use some time
> in the clink to do some heavy reading. But for
> Shigeyoshi Murao, who actually sold the book to the
> police officers, it was a heavier story. A Nisei whose
> family had been interned with thousands of other
> Japanese Americans during the war, he led me to
> understand that to be arrested for anything, even if
> innocent, was in the Japanese community of that time,
> a family disgrace. To me, he was the real hero of this
> tale of sound and fury, signifying everything.
>
> In the trial itself we were defended pro bono by the
> famous criminal lawyer Jake Ehrlich, and Lawrence
> Speiser and defense counsel Albert Bendich of the
> ACLU. They were absolutely brilliant -- Ehrlich
> especially so in his presentation of our case to the
> court and his devastating cross-examination of the
> prosecution's witnesses, and Bendich in his expert
> summation of the decisive Constitutional issues.
>
> Among our witnesses, professor Mark Schorer of UC
> Berkeley, coolly defended "Howl" as "an indictment of
> those elements in modern society that, in the author's
> view, are destructive of the best qualities in human
> nature and of the best minds. Those elements are, I
> would say, predominantly materialism, conformity and
> mechanization leading toward war." (Schorer also said
> "the picture which the author is trying to give us
> [is] of modern life as a state of hell," which
> reminded me of Bertolt's Brecht defining Los Angeles
> as a modern hell and Pier Paolo Pasolini saying the
> same of modern Rome.) Allen himself was never
> arrested, though he wrote many supportive letters from
> abroad. We never had a written contract for "Howl, not
> even a handshake," but his letters more than once
> confirmed our agreement, assuring me also that he
> would not "go whoring around New York" for big money,
> and urging me to publish Kerouac, Corso, Bill
> Burroughs, so we could "altogether crash over America
> in a great wave of beauty." When Judge Horn announced
> that we were innocent, a Chronicle reporter shoved a
> mike in my face, and I just stood there struck dumb,
> unable to articulate what I sensed might foreshadow a
> sea change in American culture. (Later I learned, from
> Allen himself, how to use such opportunities "to
> subvert the dominant paradigm.") I couldn't realize
> what was to happen in the revolution of the '60s, but
> I suspected that this was just Allen's first strike as
> the conscience of the nation and a provocateur for
> peace. Fifty years later, Ginsberg's indictment still
> rings in our ears, and his insurgent voice is needed
> more than ever, in this time of rampant nationalism
> and omnivorous corporate monoculture deadening the
> soul of the world.
> Celebrating The Howl's 50th
>
> In 1956, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl
> and Other Poems." Soon after, the publisher was
> arrested for distributing "obscene material." Fifty
> years later, it's time to celebrate the publication of
> "The Howl and Other Poems" and the anniversary of the
> court decision that set the legal precedent for
> subsequent First Amendment battles.
>
> WHO: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, artistic director for Youth
> Speaks, Bill Morgan, editor of "Howl on Trial," Al
> Bendich, attorney who successfully defended Howl,
> Dorothy Ehrlich, executive director of ACLU-NC; and
> others.
>
> WHAT: A reading and panel discussion.
>
> WHEN: 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 15.
>
> WHERE: Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market
> St., San Francisco.
>
> HOW: To get more information and advance tickets, go
> to www.commonwealthclub.org or call (415) 597-6700.
>
> Lawrence Ferlinghetti is the owner and publisher of
> City Lights Books in San Francisco.
>
> Page B - 5
> URL:
> http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/11/13/EDG9ALI9TS1.DTL
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________________
> Yahoo! Music Unlimited
> Access over 1 million songs.
> http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited
>