Apologies, this blog is a bit out of sync with the lectures but will get the previous one up tomorrow.
……bit worried this is going to be a hard entry to write, but let’s give it a go.
Howl. Now that was intense, and the flowery language caused the elderly lady sitting next to me on the tube nosing at what I was reading to raise an eyebrow!
Written in 1955, Ginsberg wrote the poem amidst a culture of the ‘Beat Generation’ involving experimental sex, mind altering drugs and all manners of alternative means of expression.
Howl really fucked with my head on first reading, but that came as no massive surprise, as I come from more liberal but still fairly conservative generation and after being heavily involved with the piece at the start I found myself wandering away toward the end (I suspect a heavy dose of whatever Ginsberg was taking may just have cured that).
By no means subtle, ‘Howl’ shouts in the face of the commercialised and industrialised ‘machine’ and Ginsberg doesn’t pull any punches. Despite being shocked by the poem, a lot of the references such as homosexuality are embraced far more today than in 1955. At the time this must have hit the listeners like an atomic bomb and in fact, the sellers of the book were charged with ‘disseminating obscene literature’ in 1957.
The poem is a clear and blatant dismissal of the status quo and a direct challenge on the ‘corporate machine’ in the fifties. As I touched on earlier, our generation, despite seemingly giving off a façade of being more liberal is in fact one that has been or is being consumed by the machine that Ginsberg is addressing. In the fifties and sixties, the experimentation of mind expanding drugs was there to help free ourselves but now anyone willing to take the step up to protest has to do so in a clear state of being. Whilst I’m not encouraging the use of LSD, maybe we should engage in the more endearing aspects found in the ‘Beat Generation’ and use it to form an ‘LSD mentality.
This brings me neatly onto William S. Burroughs and the Job. Addicted to drugs, Burroughs was another prominent figure of the ‘Beat Generation’ who spoke out against the ‘machine’ through his work.
‘My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus that made the spoken word possible.’
The focus point that I took from the job was Burroughs’ referral to the ‘machine’ and the control it has particularly through the use of the written word. At that time advertising was blossoming, with the use of media such as radio and more importantly billboards and television. It is an involuntary action to consume whatever we see, especially as we drive past the ten metre high billboard proclaiming that we buy a particular product. Everywhere we look we are not asked or encouraged but TOLD to do things. Eventually, corporate giants and governments have systematically spoon fed us enough that we find ourselves following this mass existence.
You’re born, you must go to school, you must go to University, you must work a 9-5 job, you will get married, you will have 2.4 children, watch the X Factor on a Saturday night, retire when we say and die.
Okay, so I’ve been a little bleak here, but I feel this is what Burroughs is getting at, and it’s a view I share. Although, I can’t help feel that his views come across as a little too intense and reading it conjured up the image of Bart Simpson sitting in his bedroom in a tin foil hat so Major League Baseball are unable to track his habits.
I think the crisis we are suffering at the moment, could perhaps be a start of a new era of revolutionary thinkers. In the eighties and nineties we fell into the machine but after being lied to for twenty years I think people have finally had enough. The majority generally conform because it’s easy, but let’s hope that in this generation there is a Ginsberg or a group like Archigram among us who can help get us thinking again.
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