http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpOeZzkwPC0
Ballad of the Skeletons
with sound by Paul McCartney
Edgar, Ima have to keep a closer eye on you. That was very cool...
Thanks Edgar, those clips are so interesting. I never realized JK wrote On The Road in three weeks.
Sglass wrote:Thanks Edgar, those clips are so interesting. I never realized JK wrote On The Road in three weeks.
I bet the three weeks doesn't include the rewrites the publisher asked for.
This gets better all the time.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jBILjdzkpzU
First page of On the Road, read by Kerouac himself.
There's a recording of Ginsburg reading "America," somewhere. I'm too lazy to find it on the internet now, plus I don't got no sound card here at work. But he can barely get through reading it for laughing so hard. I love it. The comic angle is the best angle to approach that poem, I think. It softens his accusations, yet makes them more palatable and effective.
Best line? "Why can't I go to the supermarket and buy what I want with my good looks?"
I know that poem. Maybe I can look it up.
Excellent. I'll have to check that out when I get home tonight.
Way cool - finding Sunflower Sutra here days after I finally found it for the first time. I only now am appreciating Ginsberg. The East and West Ballads and is it A Supermarket in California? (yep, she answers her own question and brings it in)
He mentions Whitman in that one... (saw Edgar thought the two would make good bookends...)
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Berkeley, 1955
I remember Watts.
One of the most influential books for me in those days was Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, which is still making the rounds. I have never been a Buddhist, although I attended their rituals and read a number of books. I enjoyed The Buddha's Law Among the Birds, for instance and read The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I wish I could recall a book I read in 1968, about a woman who walked across China to Tibet. I believe her son came along. Also, more in the fictional realm, I read the many books detailing the adventures of Lobsang Rampa. I wrote Rampa a letter. He did not reply directly to my words, but he said, "Oh yes. My books are perfectly true. But I see by your list you have not read every single one of them." (paraphrasing) Fond memories. I don't spend much time with such things these days.
