It's all about work/ Ginsberg troubled youth/ Pynchon vis a vis Jack Kerouac

[Michael Bailey]

So how about that Allen Ginsberg anyway? I've long had the feeling that there lurks an interesting story, there's part of it quoted below. Interesting that he met William Carlos Williams on assignment for "a local labor newspaper" - different times. 

Admittedly you could peruse union websites and possibly even write for them, maybe still to this day, but general interest stuff or poetry, wow?! Coverage beyond immediate issues of specifically labor-oriented import.

Troubled mother too, post-holocaust angst like that Spigelman (Maus) author's mother maybe. 

The Beat poets and so forth probably did influence Pynchon but like Catholicism (on the one hand his friend from college said he was going to confession all the time (like Martin Luther?) but on the other hand he sent his son to a Secular school, didn't he? A-and there's no imprimatur or nihil obstat (or nemo impune lacessit for that matter) in the book jackets) if you look for it in his work it's all refracted and refringed, etc. 

Pynchon vis a vis the Beats isn't a very profitable avenue, or is it? Ginsberg had some formidable intellectual chops and Kerouac had an oddly productive work ethic for a broken-hearted man all too susceptible to the lures of alcohol. Had they been wise enough to sequester themselves from being public figures they might still be writing. Imagine the mojo swirling around Allen Ginsberg reading his explicitly LSD-inspired poem to William Buckley!
http://youtu.be/eKBAJYceQ54 sitting there on Firing Line holding a cigarette, opening his briefcase to get the poem out. 

The Jack Kerouac house in Orlando where he rented for awhile is set up as a memorial to him with a writer-in-residence program even. (Digression)

Pynchon vis a vis the Beat Generation. Whole Sick Crew, not a flattering depiction. Benny Profane's perambulations, deprecated by author unless I'm way way mistaken, form a counterpoint of sorts to On the Road, one might argue. Whereas Sal Paradise ended up in Mexico City sick and abandoned by Dean Moriarty and his epiphany has always seemed to me something like ya gotta love yer buddies but ya can't completely count on 'em, so even though he raved in glowing terms about the experiences and was understanding about everybody's shortcomings and apologetic about his own, you feel for the guy and it's all rather tragic though exceedingly funny sometimes and his storytelling doesn't really change much but the names (and in the scroll of _On the Road_, which is on audible.com, he didn't even change the names) --- contrasted to _V's_ bringing Benny to Malta where he's on the periphery of a redemption of Pappy Hod by Paola and the Miraculous Medal she wears, but himself doesn't learn anything, or so he claims. And I never felt like Benny was Pynchon or that there wasn't a scheme beyond recounting which could possibly be worked out and offered a certain allure in so doing (in Kerouac's defense, selective recounting can be a very good scheme indeed and winnowing its lessons alluring in its own way.)



But anyway, 


http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/mar_apr10/features1
Around this time, Ginsberg found himself attracted to the outlaw derring-do of a hustler, and another friend of Burroughs, named Herbert Huncke. One night, Huncke enticed Ginsberg to join him and his pals for a cruise through the city in a stolen car. The pal who was driving took a wrong turn on a one-way street, sped away from an approaching police car, and crashed into a telephone pole. They were all arrested. Ginsberg was saved by the intervention of Lionel Trilling, who brought in a professor from Columbia Law School, who in turn convinced prosecutors to commit the young poet to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute, free of charge, instead of sentencing him to prison.

After eight months in the hospital, Ginsberg went home to his father, a high-school teacher and poet, in Paterson, New Jersey. (His mother, who had gone insane when he was in high school, lived in an asylum up in the Bronx.) Allen wrote some articles for a local labor newspaper and asked for an assignment to interview the poet William Carlos Williams.

Williams, who was in his sixties, lived in Paterson, toiling in relative obscurity. Certainly nobody at Columbia, or most other colleges, was teaching his work. Williams took a liking to Ginsberg, and met with him several times after their first talk. Williams came out of the Black Mountain school of poets, former teachers or students at Black Mountain College, an avant-garde school set up in the thirties in Asheville, North Carolina, where artists and writers were encouraged to take their inspiration from materials and objects found in their surroundings.


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