SFLecturesRobWilsonF2011Part3
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For Trey Highton’s blog site (for section B), go to:
I'm following SF Lit and think you'll be interested in it as well. To check it out, follow the link below:
http://sflit-trey.blogspot.com/?psinvite=ALRopfU2J1PtXS3d99IB1QgFYsnbgvwCVXTSH_bzzkfJCXpPoC0EoinazCrHTRdA9-d2Ut00bjlJ_91WY4ZZJTgrXaDztHpcew
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To: robseanwilson@gmail.com
Hello,
I thought maybe you'd find this interesting, especially along with the Beat-atitude book. A number of my friends are in seminary at Union College and are really involved in the "Occupy X" movement.
I also noticed today an interesting new facebook page related to the Occupy Cleveland movement: https://www.facebook.com/notes/harrison-kalodimos/occupychristianity/10150408611365351 and also attached a photo of some of the "religious people occupy Wallstreet" movement.
Take care,
Katie Trostel
(TA for section C)
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OccupyChristianity
by Harrison Kalodimos on Sunday, October 9, 2011 at 12:04pm
The occupation movement represents a growing recognition of just how much influence money can buy in our society. The structure of our society has allowed a relatively small number of wealthy people to amass an enormous amount of power at the expense of our democracy. This is not because bankers or politicians are particularly bad people, but rather because they operate within a system that offers them such excess of power that they are quickly corrupted by it.
Recognizing that it is not the individuals, but rather the hierarchy in which the wealthy operate that begets abuse, the occupation is doing something incredibly important. They are operating without hierarchy in a system that does not allow any particular individual to amass excess power. This represents a keen understanding that the means and ends of any movement are inseparable. If you wish to create a new society, your every action must reflect the society which you hope to create.
This is where I feel the occupation movement has enormous overlap with Jesus’s Christianity. He was born into a world which was rife with abusive hierarchies. The Romans, the Pharisees, and the rich were all using their power to abuse those without it. Each of these groups felt like they deserved their power–the Romans by virtue of their birth into the Roman Empire, the Pharisees for their religious self-righteousness–but Jesus begged to differ.
He then set about overturning all of these abusive power structures, not by violent opposition or by claiming power to himself, but rather by publicly lifting up those who were the downtrodden–the poor, the lepers, the outcasts–and making them his own people. Jesus did not just preach about the fellowship that man ought to have with one another, he lived that message in a radical way. Jesus overturned the predominant hierarchies of his time by living out a set of principles that gave the lie to the oppressors claims to power, and in doing so started in motion the creation of a new society in which the downtrodden could be uplifted. So this brings forth a challenge to Christians. Do our actions resist the abuses of power that are flagrant in our society or are our actions complicit in those abuses?
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997):
His formation as THE Beat poet-prophet of local and world impact is heavily tied to the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village and North Beach SF in 1954; extended stay in India and travels in South America; King of the May in Eastern Europe; a world celebrity of beat poetry in London and Paris, Russia, and Chicago. Now being translated into Chinese, and having a delayed impact.
Joan Baez pays homage to the risk-taking, freedom-seeking politics of Allen Ginsberg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrbR_2apZQ&feature=related
BD & AG in SF, 1965 (Dylan had wanted this/related photos in the alleyways of North Beach near City Lights Bookstore to be used as the cover of his blockbuster Columbia Records album of 1966, Blonde on Blonde)
Allen Ginsberg’s “America” is a Cold War satire, Jeremaic critique, and prophetic vision, to try to invent and project an alternative invisible republic of liberated bodies and souls to counter the over-regulated “square” conformist society of the time (as in Time magazine hegemony):
“Sunflower Sutra” (pp. 35-38)
In the Back of the Real” (56-57)
Listen to NPR interviews of Allen Ginsberg, 1997/1994, in which he discusses “Howl” and “America” and the Beat utopic community he had long been connected to and projects in these poems.
First “subterranean” artistic space Howl reading in 1955 at Six Gallery in San Francisco is portrayed by participant-observer Kerouac in The Dharma Bums (1958).
James Franco re-enacts this reading in the Rob Epstein/Jeffrey Friedman film Howl (2009):play part of scene 1 and scene 2, on writing Howl, digitalized images thereof, and its court room trial in 1957.
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On Reading HOWL:
The “plot” or rough narrative arc of Howl as a quest for a Beat vision of “beatitude” can be compared to the three stages of Dante’s Divine Comedy in its movement from “Inferno” through “Purgatorio” to “Paradiso,” enacting the quest of the “angel headed hipsters” burning for illumination through various stages of excruciating confinement and capture by the false gods/idols of Moloch (sections I and II); through the purgation of Carl Solomon in a mental institution and his rebirth and transformation (“and resurrect your living human Jesus” in section III); shifting into the cosmic Litany of the “Holy” section which blesses the beatitude of polymorphous forms and worlds on all de-sublimated fronts (section IV).
-- crucial to this process of self and world alteration is the transformation of imagery and syntax described as “elipse” and “catalogue” and bop prosody “meter” and “images juxtaposed” on pp. 19-20 of Howl at end of first section.
-- note the polymorphous worlds the poem connects the community of subterranean forces and form to:
“Mohammedan angels” [9], marijuana from Laredo and Mexico [10], mind-quests in Canada [10], Asian Buddhism in “Zen New Jersey” [11], “Tangerian bone-grinding and migraines in China” in excruciating vision quests and drug experiments [11], world literature and philosophy from “Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah” [12], disappearing into volcanoes of Mexico [12], taking ship to Spain and Africa [12], European and German jazz of the 30s [17], “who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys” [18], to Judeo-Christian scriptural passages [20] among others that accrue in the assemblages & linkages of Howl.
“The appeal in “Howl” is to the secret or hermetic tradition of art ‘justifying’ or ‘making up for’ defeat in worldly life… .In publishing “Howl,” I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding inside U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy.”
-- Allen Ginsberg, preface to the annotated facsimile edition of Howl (1986).
Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, & Burroughs as Beats in Paris (1958-1963), after earlier formation of bohemian artistic “subterranean” community in NYC (1943-1953) and SF (1954-1957), find freedom and permission to experiment in art and life and world-transforming projects, and accrue international cultural capital in Europe (Beat Hotel, 4, 19 and everywhere in book).
Allen celebrates Russia’s success with Sputnik and outer-space exploring technologies in 1957, shifting subject from nuclear hegemony over the future to America as it can “lead world to Fraternal Freedom full of comradely hip judgement” and [surpassing Russia] in poetry, to enrich world” (Beat Hotel, 46)
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass....
....I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
-- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 1, 5.
Dylan and Ginsberg pay homage to the spirit of Jack Kerouac at his gravesite in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1975: scene from Jerry Aronson,
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiH9QZzGc_s
As quoted in passages in Beat Attitudes, Gilles Deleuze explains the psychogeography and Beat movement writing as a process of multiplying “conjunctions” with forces and sites and angels of amplifed being outside the self ( as in those “angel headed hipsters”...and...and...and...who...who...who...)
“Writing carries out the conjunction, the transmutation of fluxes, through which life escapes from the resentment of persons, societies, and reigns. Kerouac’s phrases are as sober as a Japanese drawing, a pure line traced by an unsupported hand, which passes across ages and reigns. It would take a true alcoholic to attain that degree of sobriety.”
-- Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues [with Claire Parnet] (51) (1977); Beat Attitudes (46).
“To fly is to trace a line, lines, long, a whole cartography [of the imagination]. One only discovers worlds through a long, broken flight. Anglo-American literature constantly shows these ruptures, these characters who create their line of flight, who create through a line of flight. Thomas Hardy, Melville, Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Miller, Kerouac. In them, everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside..... the flight towards the [American] West, the discovery that the true [Asian] East is in the West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back, to go beyond. The becoming is geographical.”
-- Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues [with Claire Parnet] (36-37) (1977); Beat Attitudes (44-45).
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