What are you reading ?

[Dark_Raven]

I have been reading Milton's Paradise Lost off and on.

 

Plus I have been reading Philp K D!ck's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

[Darth Launch]

I've just started reading Chomsky's Hegemony Or Survival

[Kor Qel Droma]

I picked up a copy of Willie Nelsons' The Tao Of Willie Nelson. Once this stupid migraine goes away I'm sure reading this book will be more enjoyable.

[Baley]

A selection of W.D. Ehrhart poems from his site.

 

 

 

Singing Hymns in Church   

 

 

My mother loved to sing,

but couldn't sing to save her life.

My childhood passed from week to week,

counted out in Sunday mornings

I would have to sit beside her

in the first pew, pretending I was

far away and she was not my mother

while she bellowed out the hymns

so loud and badly I was sure

God or Mr. Hoot would silence her

with lightning or a sharp word

and look at me as if to say,

"Why don't you keep her quiet?"

 

At home, she couldn't sing out loud.

Her husband and her sons were quick

to say what God and Mr. Hoot

were too polite to tell her.

All those many hurts she carried

in the stillness of her heart

we never thought of, being men

too conscious only of ourselves,

too ignorant to understand the beauty

of the Christian Church where once a week

my mother sang for God and me,

and all the angels sang along,

and what she heard was joy.

 

The Trouble with Poets   

 

 

So after I had read my poems,

the man who'd promised two hundred dollars

"payable the night of the Poetry Reading"

gave me this soft-shoe song-and-dance shuffle

about hard times in Poetryville and a guy

named Dwight who'd split for DC

on short notice

[Enoch]

Sadly, I've been reading nothing but the BAR/BRI Conviser Mini-Review lately.

 

Studying for the Bar Exam sucks. Why is it that one has to memorize volumes of stuff for the bar, when, in most situations, it borders on malpractice for a lawyer not to look everything up compulsively to double-check his/her recollection?

[Draken]

The Rum Diary, by Hunter S. Thompson.

 

Good stuff.

[the dude]

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Marquez...pretty good book

[Baley]

America - Allen Ginsberg

 

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

I can't stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go **** yourself with your atom bomb

I don't feel good don't bother me.

I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I'm sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

I'm trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for

murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.

I won't say the Lord's Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over

from Russia.

 

I'm addressing you.

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie

producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

 

Asia is rising against me.

I haven't got a chinaman's chance.

I'd better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals

an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and

twentyfivethousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in

my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

 

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his

automobiles more so they're all different sexes

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they

sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the

speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the

workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party

was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother

Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have

been a spy.

America you don're really want to go to war.

America it's them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take

our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our

auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black ****.

Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

I'd better get right down to the job.

It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts

factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

 

From Howl and Other Poems.

 

Bought today:

 

 

Sample.

 

-

 

 

Sample.

 

Liked the film. Not sure about the novel.

Edited June 23, 2006 by Baley

[Pidesco]

Damn, I really hate the Beat movement. Bunch of annoying halfwits.

 

This post is just to show you. Silly prog hater.

[Baley]

Suppose you're sort of right. Suppose most of them were halfwit children who just needed a path in life. Suppose they tried building one but failed and cried and hollered. And. Maybe. They just needed a guiding light, an escape from their ordinary lives with their ordinary parents and their ordinary girls. Suppose you blame the hippie movement on them. And the mindless turmoil of aging sheep that were once more lost, alone in a world they knew zilch about, from the moment they opened their eyes anew and saw nothing but hate, ignorance, Jesus, the holy Buddha and prophets of Gods long dead and buried. But, trust me P, some of the **** they wrote, oh man, some of the **** they wrote is ****ing great. I love it.

[metadigital]

Sadly, I've been reading nothing but the BAR/BRI Conviser Mini-Review lately. 

 

Studying for the Bar Exam sucks.  Why is it that one has to memorize volumes of stuff for the bar, when, in most situations, it borders on malpractice for a lawyer not to look everything up compulsively to double-check his/her recollection?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

To have something to look up and double-check?

 

 

After all, what if some advanced conspiracy were hatched to fraudulently replace all the law books in the prosecutor's office to assist the defendent's case ... "

[Pidesco]

Suppose you're sort of right. Suppose most of them were halfwit children who just needed a path in life. Suppose they tried building one but failed and cried and hollered.  And. Maybe. They just needed a guiding light, an escape from their ordinary lives with their ordinary parents and their ordinary girls. Suppose you blame the hippie movement on them. And the mindless turmoil of aging sheep that were once more lost, alone in a world they knew zilch about, from the moment they opened their eyes anew and saw nothing but hate,  ignorance, Jesus, the holy Buddha and prophets of Gods long dead and buried. But, trust me P, some of the **** they wrote, oh man, some of the **** they wrote is ****ing great. I love it.

 

 

Don't think I don't know their work and ideas. Just today I did a test which included Kerouac's On The Road and a poem by Ginsberg.

 

They kept complaining about american society, its materialism and the way they were stepping from the "true american roots". But they offered squat to solve or change these problems. In fact, all they did was runaway from their own problems, get high and think highly of themselves while doing diddly squat. Bottom line they were all talk, nothing else. On The Road sucks.

 

I do like Burroughs, but he wasn't really a beat like the others.

Edited June 23, 2006 by Pidesco

[Baley]

I do enjoy Kerouac's writing style, but you are correct. He's tremendously overrated. And I'd only read On the Road as a historical curiosity. Few books have done so much for a country's history. My post was honest, P, but I will ask you this, did you truly get nothing from that poem I posted? No feelings? No emotions?

 

Because, P, art is fairly immaterial once you get down to it. Sure it can inspire you, and teach you and make you feel something where it counts. But It can't keep you alive, it can't cloth you, it can't free your body, maybe your mind but I'm not too sure. Food. Water. Are not to be found in words and pretty pictures.

 

And the Beats did do something, P, they inspired an entire generation of youths, from Bob Dylan to the unnamed junky in the gutter. And those people inspired other people who in turn inspired other people and what we get is this big web of inspirations. And through this web change appears. Revolution. No, not the one with guns, nor the one with laws, that most subtle revolution of minds and culture. The beats did a lot of things for this world of ours, P, by mostly reshaping a small part of our collective soul-mentality-heart-and-mind. You see, P, the thing they offered was hope. And art is all about this most precious illusion, P, hope.

 

 

With what Ginsberg poem did they mentally assault you?

 

And now,

My Father - Charles Bukowski

 

was a truly amazing man

he pretended to be

rich

even though we lived on beans and mush and weenies

when we sat down to eat, he said,

"not everybody can eat like this."

 

and because he wanted to be rich or because he actually

thought he was rich

he always voted Republican

and he voted for Hoover against Roosevelt

and he lost

and then he voted for Alf Landon against Roosevelt

and he lost again

saying, "I don't know what this world is coming to,

now we've got that god damned Red in there again

and the Russians will be in our backyard next!"

 

I think it was my father who made me decide to

become a bum.

I decided that if a man like that wants to be rich

then I want to be poor.

 

and I became a bum.

I lived on nickles and dimes and in cheap rooms and

on park benches.

I thought maybe the bums knew something.

 

but I found out that most of the bums wanted to be

rich too.

they had just failed at that.

 

so caught between my father and the bums

I had no place to go

and I went there fast and slow.

never voted Republican

never voted.

 

buried him

like an oddity of the earth

like a hundred thousand oddities

like millions of other oddities,

wasted.

 

From Septuagenarian Stew.

 

Sample.

Edited June 23, 2006 by Baley

[Pidesco]

I do enjoy Kerouac's writing style, but you are correct. He's tremendously overrated. And I'd only read On the Road as a historical curiosity. Few books have done so much for a country's history. My post was honest, P, but I will ask you this, did you truly get nothing from that poem I posted? No feelings? No emotions?

 

Because, P, art is fairly immaterial once you get down to it. Sure it can inspire you, and teach you and make you feel something where it counts. But It can't keep you alive, it can't cloth you, it can't free your body, maybe your mind but I'm not too sure. Food. Water. Are  not to be found in words and pretty pictures.

 

And the Beats did do something, P, they inspired an entire generation of youths, from Bob Dylan to the unnamed junky in the gutter. And those people inspired other people who in turn inspired other people and what we get is this big web of inspirations. And through this web change appears. Revolution. No, not the one with guns, nor the one with laws, that most subtle revolution of minds and culture. The beats did a lot of things for this world of ours, P, by mostly reshaping a small part of our collective soul-mentality-heart-and-mind.  You see, P, the thing they offered was hope. And art is all about this most precious illusion, P, hope.

 

 

With what Ginsberg poem did they mentally assault you?

 

 

Well yes, I have to agree they were a stepping stone towards newer and, arguably, better things. Still, they did this unwittingly and it only happened because, at least as far as I know, there was no other movement at the time for the younger crowd to follow and admire. I guess it was just that they were new and edgy at the right time.

 

And the poem was A Supermarket In California. It's in Howl.

 

I don't think I should comment on poetry as my knowledge of it is sketchy at best. Anyway, generally poetry isn't my cup of tea, especially the more modern stuff.

[Baley]

Emotion is the key to poetry. Without it all you've got are pretty words and the Dictionary-Man flexing his dictionary muscles right in front of you. The greatest poems speak to you, in various tongues and styles. You just have to hear and feel a little. And never analyse poetry. It's a crime. To dissect words and forget their original meaning. It's murder, in a way, you're killing the sentiment.

 

As for the Beats, what they did was crucial to both American history and the mentality of those that came in contact with their writings. There's no denying that, P. Maybe they didn't set up to change the world, few do and those few are often fools or ailing dreamers, but they managed something beautiful, especially in fighting moral conservatism and every day sanctity.

 

 

 

A Supermarket in California - Allen Ginsberg

 

          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?

 

From Howl and Other Poems.

[Pidesco]

They did set out to change the world. The problem is that all they didn't actually do anything to accoplish that goal, and to top it off managed to change it nonetheless.

 

Perhaps their message is that the key to changing the world is to do bugger all. In fact, it could be argued that this would fit well with their fascination with oriental religions as it's kind of a poor man's interpretation of taoism.

 

Anyway, don't mind me Baley. I'm just bitter because I'm too lazy to do anything really creative, and spend all my time consuming other people's creativity. On The Road is better than anything I've ever written. My style is better, though.

[Baley]

I've always thought the original New York group's goal was more personal and focused on their own existence. Petty Crime. Drugs. A bunch of rich kids learning how to live. Compare this to the Dada movement or the Surrealists. The Beats were definitely more informal, honest and casual. A good start to winning me over, you see. Though I would agree there was a change in the fifties. The Search for more of an extended-general betterment, if you will. More on the Ginsberg side. Idealists finding idols and idols finding fresh minds to shape.

 

P, what should they have done to actively change the world? What more can writers do but write? What were you expecting? They wrote and wrote and their work inspired thousands. Change lies in numbers. Change lies in people. In young people with young thoughts in young heads tied to young beating bodies just waiting for the thrill.

 

 

On the Road is dated. It existed in a time of its own. And honestly, it wasn't that good to begin with. But the one great thing it did was getting the mojo running for a bunch of boys and girls with pristine minds. And that, I think, is its most laudable gift to the world. Change.

Edited June 23, 2006 by Baley

[Pidesco]

P, what should they have done to actively change the world?

 

 

I don't know. However, they did decide to try to change it. As the saying goes, they made their own bed and now they have to sleep on it.

 

Speaking of which, I haven't made my own bed but I'm still going to sleep on it. Nighty night.

[Baley]

Check your PM box, gajo.

 

 

 

An Almost Made Up Poem - Charles Bukowski

 

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny

blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny

they are small, and the fountain is in France

where you wrote me that last letter and

I answered and never heard from you again.

you used to write insane poems about

ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you

knew famous artists and most of them

were your lovers, and I wrote back, it

Edited June 23, 2006 by Baley

[Calax]

shot myself in the foot last night and only got 3 hrs of sleep because I had to read Freedom Phalanx by Robin D. Laws.

[LadyCrimson]

Old Possums' Book of Practical Cats - T.S. Elliot

 

Short but fun

[CoM_Solaufein]

An A+ certification book. I think it's time to get myself certified in PC repair.

 

For leisure reading I am reading Stephen King's On Writing.

[11XHooah]

I just finished up Steel My Soldier's Hearts, and now I'm on to About Face.

[Musopticon?]

I'm reading Salvatore.

 

 

What? I have to get my hate from somewhere, don't I? :D ALthough without that Drizzit-dude, he writes semi-decent fantasy crap. The kind of stuff you read in one night, without really thinking.

[Baley]

Organized Konfusion - Black Sunday

 

 

Lawd, help me out now

We gotta get together

We gotta organize

No matter the weather

Its a black sunday, hey..

 

[pharoahe monch]

I used to watch my grandmother catch the holy ghost in church

For her soul she would search

Five years later now Im off to work

In a department store, Im foldin pants and shirts-ah

At the end of the week-ah, lawd

Just enough loot to put some cheap sneakers on my feet

Thats when I made a promise to my momma I said

I betcha you see me at the apollo one day and ima..

Be kickin that fat funk ****;

Black, mackadocious -- speakers in the back trunk ****

Cause the boss is boss and need is costing me

To miss classes and I feel he spoke to me

To be a jackass in the future; then, whos gonna shoot ya?

At this point in my life is where I chose to write rhymes..

.. instead of doing crimes

Nineteen eighty-six to nineteen eighty-nine

Organized konfusion, did not, get, signed

But we will soon one day, until then

I return at twelve at noon on the track, black sunday

 

Chorus:

 

Lawd, help me out-ah

We gotta get together

We gotta organize

No matter the weather

Its a black sunday

 

[prince poetry]

Yeah, remember losing a loved one, lawwwd help us to make it over

Delete the pork cigarettes and forty-nine cent soda

We came a long way and Im still runnin for my freedom

Still have one hundred miles to go, escape from the

Crack villllles, so, you can feed that baby

I used to ride the elevator with the crazy lady

I year later I made demo cassettes with the monch

And ? tastik? was on the fader, rhymes ran out quick so i

Encouraged monch to start writing rhymes

And mrs. j cooked dinner then we came into same hard times

Sour contract shouldnt have been on the plate

Two apes escaped, back to l.a. with our demo tape

The state of mind I was in since paul sea died is that

I gotta get mines, representin 40 projects so im

All-in, gotta make papes and all that

Close my own record deal cause I cant fall for that

Old snake ****, hissin in the grass

For the cash, little cents, intuition listen

If youre missin my money, my fist you will be kissin

Dang... I dont even understand

 

Chorus:

 

Lord, help me out now

We gotta get together

We gotta organize

No matter the weather

Its a black sunday

 

Outro:

 

Check it out

Like to say whassup to my whole herd

Like to say rest in peace to my man ? dilu?

And rest in peace to my man juice

Three strikes

+

 

Ogden Nash - Family Court

 

One would be in less danger

From the wiles of a stranger

If one's own kin and kith

Were more fun to be with.

+

 

Philip Larkin - Vers De Soci