It's been a while!
Jaramillojp@kktv.com
Thu, 07 May 1998 21:50:28 -0700
Hello
It's been a while since I've had an idea worth posting on this list. But
today I was sitting in this summer course on Beat literature sort of
beat myself and we were talking about Ginsberg and the idea of the poet
as the seer. Sitting in class while more intelligent people than me
threw ideas around, like a vision, I had a Salinger connection that I
wanted to share. We were talking about Howl and how at the end
everything becomes holy to the speaker in the poem's footnote. Even the
most horrible and gruesome images in the beginning of the poem become
angelic to Ginsberg in a very similar way that all the crap that happens
to Holden, even getting smacked in the crotch by old Maurice, becomes a
life memory worth missing for Holden. This all intrigued me because Howl
is a poem very graphic and serious while Catcher takes a much more
mainstream route. That whole idea of the poet in Ginsbergs case and
Holden in Salinger's case both reach a sort of higher consciousness. A
sort of eastern thinking kind of a thing where everything is part of the
human existence no matter what judgement of good or bad or right or
wrong we put on it. I'm not sure where this thought is connecting for me
but only in that the eastern influences in both writer's work stood out
strongly for me today more than they ever had before.
Now the question to anybody who would like to respond is I wonder if
Ginsberg would have been reading Salinger and grooving along on this
idea like I am? I know Catcher was published in 51 about five years
around the same time Kerouac and Huncke and Ginsberg would be meeting in
Nuevo York. I know Salinger might be living in a better apartment but he
was around Columbia for a while wasn't he?
Thanks for the ear and the patience to listen to my ramblings.
Suerte
John Paul
(Jaramillojp@kktv.com)