"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Monday, March 25, 2019
Hate Mail - You Get No More Today
I've given you two posts and an update, I'll let her speak for me. When One Of Your Last Beat Poet Heroes Turns Out To Be A Pedo
Only he and the beats were never my heroes. Gwendolyn Brooks was.
I read all of his early poems when I was in high school, I remember feeling uneasy about the one about the supermarket, the passage about Walt Whitman. Then I ignored him for a wile, a poem in a small magazine here and there excepted, and then, as I recall, in the 1980s as he was one of a number of gay men who started down the NAMBLA road, Harry Hay, Larry Krammer, Gore Vidal, etc. I became entirely disenchanted. I don't know where I got that collection of his writings published in the 1990s from which contains, among other things, a rather infamous quote:
"Prepubescent boys and girls don’t have to be protected from big hairy you and me, they’ll get used to our lovemaking in 2 days provided the controlling adults will stop making those hysterical noises that make everything sexy sound like rape."
I saw through all of it and despised him. And that was before I knew about things like his sex tourism to Morocco with William Boroughs, going there for the same reason Vidal is reported to have gone to Thailand. And that was before I heard what Andrea Dworkin reported about her encounter with him at a Bar Mizvah in Cambridge MA right after the NY v. Ferber decision. I can't believe he's still held up as some kind of great writer (he wasn't) and hero of the left (he wasn't). He was garbage.
I still like Ferlinghetti. Never had much use for Ginsburg. My copy of "Howl," like my copies of "Ulyssses" and "Finnegans Wake," remain unread.
ReplyDeletelife's too short.....
I read all of his early poems when I was in high school, I remember feeling uneasy about the one about the supermarket, the passage about Walt Whitman. Then I ignored him for a wile, a poem in a small magazine here and there excepted, and then, as I recall, in the 1980s as he was one of a number of gay men who started down the NAMBLA road, Harry Hay, Larry Krammer, Gore Vidal, etc. I became entirely disenchanted. I don't know where I got that collection of his writings published in the 1990s from which contains, among other things, a rather infamous quote:
Delete"Prepubescent boys and girls don’t have to be protected from big hairy you and me, they’ll get used to our lovemaking in 2 days provided the controlling adults will stop making those hysterical noises that make everything sexy sound like rape."
I saw through all of it and despised him. And that was before I knew about things like his sex tourism to Morocco with William Boroughs, going there for the same reason Vidal is reported to have gone to Thailand. And that was before I heard what Andrea Dworkin reported about her encounter with him at a Bar Mizvah in Cambridge MA right after the NY v. Ferber decision. I can't believe he's still held up as some kind of great writer (he wasn't) and hero of the left (he wasn't). He was garbage.