Howl-lelujah

In preparation for this blog post on Ginsberg, I am readying some tea and clicking Thelonius Monk on the stereo… Of course, when I say tea, I mean camellia senensis and not cannabis sativa as Ginsberg and the Beats would probably be talking about, though if I had a little of that, this post might really bop. I am also going to re-read “Howl” so I can be on the right vein when I dive into this… and, done.

In simplest terms: I love “Howl.” When I am in the midst of quoting the lines, which I have to do out loud, It makes me wish I was alive in the fifties and I could chill with those crazy cats, take drugs and talk into the wee hours of the morning or the next day perhaps the day after that when my body just can not take any more of the abuse and shuts down of its own accord. For that is where it ends. The Beats lit up the world for a while, and if I were some extra-terrestrial reading the book of history up to that moment, in the midst of their existence I may have had hope for things to turn around, until the wages of their self-destruction finally took them down, snubbed out their glow.

As I read “Howl” I always get caught up in the who’s. I pass over the first line, and get lost in the rhythm of Ginsberg’s world. The rhythm is such that it is often that not until I finish the first section that I remember the opening lines: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” (2865). It is like getting lost in a jazz solo, the power is in the moment, and not until it is all done that one can listen back over the recording and consider the meaning of it all. It is like the beats themselves: history buys the record, listens back over their momentousness then puts it away. They were alive then, that’s what they had to say, and they burnt out. It is really, really sad. I weep for them and the countless others who have followed that path. Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs: the insight they possess, the drive to live and breathe that is so inspiring that it makes them do it all at once and then they are gone and no-one pays attention to them because they are "deviants" and "addicts."

late post on Barn Burner

I found it hard to escape the bias given to me by creative writing workshops in my reaction to William Faulkner. As a writer, I exist more on the Hemmingway side of the spectrum: I appreciate short and to the point sentences in my fiction. So I found it hard not to want to put in periods and edit the hell out of Faulkner's complex and unnecessarily long sentences. I do not know why he decided to write like that, but it has been my experience that those I have met who practice that kind of writing, are often pompous windbags who care more about self-gratification in showing off their intellect, than they care about telling a good story. One of my instructors called that type of writing “masturbation on the page.”

It took some meta-cognitive exercising to get myself out of that mindset in order to appreciate a sentence like: “He merely ate his supper beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father called him, and once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth – a shape black, flat and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin: “You were fixing to tell them” (Faulkner 1793). In the end I decided to define it more as prose poetry than short fiction. I know that good writers know no genres, but as I am still a novice myself, it helped me to appreciate it more by playing with the definitions.

Faulkner’s descriptions, the depths he visits within his sentences capture the certain complexity of the scenes that he is trying to describe. There are a lot of levels to this story, and every sentence helps convey that meaning by making it difficult to read. If I swallow my bias, and my own favoritism towards concisely written story telling, I can appreciate this difficulty for the way it reminds me of life itself. Life is difficult: there are layers upon layers to how we see the world, if we are thoughtful, just as there are layers upon layers to how this boy sees the world. Many times, these layers do not come one at a time, but rather all at once, and making sense of each moment is very important to understanding the whole story.