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

[alice malice]

But employers also need to tackle the problem of self-control at work.
If they do that successfully, we might have another revolution in
productivity.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/upshot/looking-at-productivity-as-a-state-of-mind.html?ref=business&abt=0002&abg=1



On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l