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

[Mark Kohut]

Yeah, right on ( enough) in my opinion. 

To MB: I think his attitude to the churchgoing and confessing of Catholicism changed massively from his early college years.....

At the least we know the style, that bop prosody of the Beats, influenced him. Trying to write, with all of his deeply read influences, that Hemingway and symbolic rain story-- " blocked" him at least one time we know. 

So, ON THE ROAD, " freed" his style, he says. And perhaps gave him a vision to react against, in some ways. My loose speculation. 

Sent from my iPad

> On Sep 28, 2014, at 6:19 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Interesting stuff. So why do people find it easy to disbelieve the
> Pynchon's denial of the Playboy screed and so hard to believe that
> Pynchon was influenced by the Beats?
> 
> In his SL Introduction (still the best thing we've got on Pynchon's
> development as writer and young person),  he tells us in plain words
> that the Beats were a big deal to him and to his generation of
> aspiring writers (see also his Introduction to Been Down so Long).
> 
> I guess folks are more attracted to his application for a grant,
> wherein he tries to impress them and talks about his early phases and
> where he sees himself as writer, because the application, like some of
> his letters, the stuff taken from his trash cans, the Jules portraits
> etc, are more exciting some how....
> 
> But we tend to treat P as one solid and unwavering man because we
> don't have anything to go on. Other than his work, and, of course,
> that's not enough. And besides it's much easier to read a letter than
> a book like M&D. In any event, a Foucault outlines it from St Jerone,
> we want a constant, solid, name that we all can agree to, a saint.
> Never mind that he is so young, and so a-political, so not going to
> change his hair style or religion, never mind that he, like young
> people everywhere and all the time,  finds his flavor of the month in
> books he gobbles down, a strong reader (n Bloom's sense, though a Slow
> Learner still), never mind all that.
> 
> Forget that he left college to get that low-life-data. There were Pigs
> enough at Cornell, but were their any ladies like Fina? No chance. And
> her brothers, those cockroaches riding the yo-yo shuttle? Alligators
> in the sewers arre the stuff of books and comics, urban legend, but
> Angels the sewer are not.
> 
> The Priest down there with his congregation of Rat Saints might be
> found in American Literature, but not Angel, and not the bums. They
> had to be lived, on the road.
> 
> 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.
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