Howl

            Before leaving for my first 20^th Century US Literature class of the New Year, I went across to the LCBO to buy a beer to have with dinner when I got back. The liquor store was almost empty and there was only one bored looking cashier waiting for a customer.

            On the way downtown there were an abnormal amount of car doors open and sticking out onto the College bike lane. Two of them were back doors open with the drivers’ butts sticking out even further in my way.

            Just before Bathurst a car on my left slowed down and as I moved into its blind spot it began to swerve towards me because the driver wanted to park on the right side of the bike lane. Before he was able to hit me I shouted, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” until he stopped turning and let me pass.

            The second half of my full year English course would no longer be held in the Fitzgerald Building but rather in the very familiar University College, which is the one building where I’ve spent the most time at U of T, for either courses, tutorials or exams. Last year I was there for my full year of Canadian Poetry, in the same room where we would be taking this course.

            By a strange coincidence, on almost every Tuesday night last year, from January on, either rain or snow made my ride to class wet. On this Wednesday night the coincidence continued.

            While I was locking my bike I set my gloves down in the basket of a nearby bicycle. On my way to class I used the washroom but on the way out I realized that I’d forgotten my gloves. I went back, dreading that someone walking by had scored a free pair of new winter gloves, but they were still there.

            Unlike the previous location at that hour, there was no prior class taking place when I arrived. There were quite a few students already there, none of whom I recognized. I sat in the same seat I’d claimed the previous year.

            Scott was nearly ten minutes late. He started playing the Howl DVD, which started with the volume down as he went through the roll call. The trailer of an East Asian movie was playing and Scott wondered if he had the right one. He recounted that a colleague of his in the States once began playing a movie from his laptop for a class of 300 students, but he’d accidentally clicked the wrong file and it turned out to be porn.

            This version of Howl is the one starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg. Scott joked, “Boy, did I pick a good day to show James Franco!” referring to the recent sexual misconduct allegations against the actor and director.

            Apparently five women have come forward so far about Franco, but only one of the allegations seems to me that it fits as sexual misconduct. That would be if he really did try to force a woman’s head down onto his penis. The other ones seem a bit iffy to me. One involved him asking an actress to do nude scenes in two movies that he’d directed. I suppose it might have been inappropriate of him not to put it in the contract, if that’s what happened. The other one is an accusation of him unsuccessfully trying to pick up a 17 year old. Is that really sexual misconduct? It might not even be illegal for him to have had sex with her, let alone proposition her, depending on what state they were in at the time.

            I had already watched the movie before Christmas and the parts I liked then I still liked. I think that James Franco is a good actor and she shows it in this role but he still doesn’t look or sound like Allen Ginsberg. When Scott asked for our impressions I said that I think that the animated parts would have worked as a film all by themselves, but without Franco, because he really didn’t do the poem justice. They could have just used one or many of the recordings of the author doing the reading and that would have worked out great.

            Scott said that the animations were created out of the images that had been in a graphic novel based on Howl.

            To achieve honesty in poetry, the first thought is the best thought. Howl shows that form should follow and never precede content. It has to be felt in the body first.

            The trial made Howl famous but it wasn’t Allen Ginsberg that was on trial, but rather Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Bookstore.

            Scott said that Columbia University, Ginsberg’s alma mater, gave him $1 million for his papers. But it was actually Stanford University and they didn’t only buy his papers, but 300,000 items that he’d collected over the years, including his dirty old sneakers.

            The footnote to Howl was actually written much later because Ginsberg’s father had complained that the main poem was too negative.

            There’s lots of Shakespeare in Howl and a ton of William Blake. It’s a reflection of the 50s but it’s not Happy Days.

            The kind of repetition that Ginsberg uses in Howl comes straight from Whitman and the name for it is anaphora.

            The first few lines of Howl introduce the subject that is the rest of the poem.

            It occurred to me that Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” must have been directly inspired by the apocalyptic aspects of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. I read later that when Ginsberg first heard the song he wept with joy because he knew that a torch had been passed.

            William Carlos Williams wrote of the young Ginsberg that he’d known in Paterson, New Jersey, “He was always on the point of going away where it didn’t really matter; he disturbed me. I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a book of poems. Howl is an arresting poem … Ginsberg has been through hell. It is a howl of defeat. He has gone through defeat as if it were a trivial experience.  He proves to us that the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the art to persist. Poets are damned but not blind. The poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own and laughs at it. Hold back the edges of your gowns ladies. We are going through hell.”

            Howl moves west. “I” disappears into the poem.        

            What is Beat besides jazz? Tiredness. Being fed up. Beatification but also beating your meat.

            The line that really got the poem busted was, “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.”

            Some of the powerful images in the poem are “hydrogen jukebox”. At first I made the same association of hydrogen with the hydrogen bomb, but hydrogen is also the most primary, the simplest and lightest element in the universe. Hydrogen is the fuel of stars. I pointed out the phrase, “Bop apocalypse”.

            Howl is full of alliteration. It is also a howl of laughter.

            “Publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull”.

            In the first line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked”, the original word had been “mystical” but after changing it to “hysterical” it made all the difference.

            Scott told us that despite his friendship with Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac was a raving anti-Semite.

             I left while Scott was giving back the tests because I’d picked mine up before Christmas. I got home at around 21:00 to discover that I’d once again been blocked from Facebook for 24 hours. This time it seemed to be over nude photos that I’d posted on my Josephine Baker fan page. That’s crazy, since nudity was one of the things that made Baker a historical figure. I was warned that if I continue to not comply with Facebook’s “community standards” my account would be permanently shut down. Fuck Facebook! I will never accept their censorship. It’s like your landlord trying to tell you that you can’t hang certain pictures on your walls. It’s like someone telling me that, in terms of content, I can’t read the poem of my choice at a reading. I will not give in to censorship. I will post whatever I consider to be appropriate and if it gets me shut down then so be it. I began to prepare for that possibility by beginning to set up Google+ as an alternative because I’ve read that Google does not have the same puritan ideas about the posting of non-pornographic nude photos.

            I still have an account under the name Myown Dick, and so I can still communicate with my friends on Facebook. My ideal though would be if all of my friends that like to follow me would still do so on Google+.

            I found out that Josephine Baker and Allen Ginsberg were both born on June 3^rd, so it was an interesting coincidence to come home from watching a movie about Ginsberg being censored to finding that I’ve been censored because of Baker.

            I watched the first episode of Star Trek Discovery and found it disappointing. It didn’t have the same magic of any of the pilot episodes of Star Trek spin-offs. The drama at the end when the first officer, insisting that they should fire upon the Klingons first because that’s their way of saying “hello” was more interesting. The captain refused to fire first and so Michael tried to unsuccessfully take over the ship in order to fire but she was overwhelmed just as they were surrounded by the Klingon fleet at the end.