Find a passage that is pretty far away from the one that you read last week--maybe not even on the same topic and tell what is the same and different between it and the one that you read last week.
Ex. Brechin looks at a tall building and started reading about underground mines.
Rosa looks at the Golden Gate Bridge and started reading about the little fire symbol on Girl Scout pins.
Brittany compares subway tunnel sex in Howl to 1950's bedroom decor.
What should happen when you start asserting those violent comparisons is that a whole field of implications should start to pop up. You may want to start with by thinking: if these two things are connected, then what else is also connected...
The comparison can also help you to read for the choices that the writer of your primary passage didn't make.
Ex. Does gay sex have to be underground or is that undergroundess in Ginsberg's poem a specific reflection of the ways in which sexuality was repressed in the bedroom and an explicit connection with a political movement?
Does Ginsberg's turn to the somewhat machinic subway metahpor also make an important connection between women being forced out of the WWII industrial factories in order to give jobs back to men? Does it say something about mechanical relationships to sex?
What else could happen if we make wild connections?
Try to also have some fun with this.
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My paper topic is how the competing symbolisms of imperialism and death of the Golden Gate Bridge interact.
Last week I analyzed the Golden Gate Bridge official tourist website, which was filled with commodified mythology, cheesy souvenirs, and a glaring lack of bad news.
This week, I watched Eric Steele’s documentary The Bridge. It is strikingly different than the website in almost every way, except perhaps the beautiful shots of scenery surrounding the bridge. It follows the stories of people whose family members committed suicide on the bridge and a few people who tried to kill themselves and didn’t succeed for a variety of reasons. Although the personal stories begin to feel repetitive after an hour, the documentary paints a clear picture of the bridge’s sinister mythology. People are drawn from all parts of the country to end their lives on it. These people see a grandeur and drama in a bridge suicide. Especially compelling are the shots of people actually jumping and hitting the water. Some jump quickly, some sit on the edge and ponder their decision, and others are pulled back onto the bridge by concerned passersby. There are hundreds of people near and on the bridge enjoying themselves; the suicide seems shockingly sudden and out-of-place.
Most of these suicidal people have some sort of medical or psychological disorder. Only a fraction of the stories were of people who were just depressed, down-and-out, or drug addicted. Whatever the reason, the bridge drew them to end their lives there. The film explores reasons for that affinity (the drama, visibility, and accessibility). I intend to explore the mixed metaphor of the end of western expansion with the “end of the road” for suicidal people as an additional and less obvious reason.
The filmography and setup of the documentary are what I found particularly interesting. Most noticeable is the absence of a narrative voice. The film relies solely on the voices of the subjects and creative camera work. There is not even an interviewer speaking with the families. They discuss the reasons they feel their loved ones killed themselves and why they think they chose the bridge. Camera angles are the most interesting part of the film. It opens with an opaque fog that slowly floats away to reveal pieces of the bridge, only to cover it again. This already gives it a mysterious air. There are several shots from the bridge itself facing east toward Alcatraz, and the only view of the bridge is its dark, imposing, sinister shadow against the deep gray water. At other times, the bridge is shown from far away with beautiful scenery surrounding it, and it seems like merely a beautiful and useful piece of construction. The shots of people falling are often from far away so a viewer can barely see them fall and only notices the splash at the bottom. This wide view makes the suicide look incredibly small and inconsequential, even though it is the focus of the entire documentary. The bridge’s grandeur eclipses the death.
Kevin, the one man who survived the fall (and, ironically, wanted to survive) was plagued by mental problems for his entire life. As his father’s voice-over was explaining how the rest of his life would be dictated by regimens, hospitals, medications, and very little enjoyment if he wanted to survive, viewers see someone setting up a photo souvenir shop in front of a panoramic view of the bridge. As they listen to a terribly sad personal story, viewers focus more on the capitalist appropriation of the bridge. Kevin’s troubles are glossed over and hidden by the beauty and tourism, just as the truth is purposely hidden by the same tactics in reality.
Something else I noticed as missing from the documentary is any mention whatsoever of a barrier proposal. I can see how this may have been outside the film’s intent, but it is information I will need for my paper. I will tie the fight against the barrier because of aesthetics as a parallel of society’s disinclination to recognize the unfortunate or outright evil aspects of itself or its history.
This film is truly a treasure trove of useful information for my paper. I’m very grateful to the multiple classmates who suggested it to me!
This week I found an article online in the archives of Native Peoples Magazine. The article describes the history and current status of members and leaders of the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, as well as what the author feels the movement “accomplished” and didn’t accomplish in terms of legislation and awareness.
Last week, when I was re-reading Snyder’s “The Rediscovery of Turtle Island,” he mentioned that most whites weren’t aware or weren’t doing much to assist in the Native American Civil Rights/Renaissance Movement in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s. I thought that was pretty typical of them, but clearly whites could have done a lot had they not been so privileged and complacent. (I hope to discover what, exactly, can be done to secure civil rights and reparations for Native Americans throughout the course of this project.)
There were two acknowledged leaders, or at least forerunners, of the occupation: Richard Oakes and Fortunate Eagle. The two of them masterminded the Nov. 9th invasion, in which no one made it onto the island due to lack of planning for the tide. Then, students planned the next siege for Nov. 20th, when they knew Fortunate Eagle would be away from San Francisco at a conference. Fortunate Eagle had managed to work his way into the middle class despite the government’s every effort to destroy and illegitimate Native Americans; this, however, created tension within the group of occupiers, and put Fortunate Eagle at odds with his peers. Author Ben Winton writes: “the college students had always been distrustful of Fortunate Eagle because of his age and his middle-class status in the White man's world.”
Though Fortunate Eagle had been an organizing founder of the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, and though he continued to gain support and supplies for the movement during the entire eighteen months of occupation, classist and fearful attitudes kept him out of the main structure of Alcatraz. I don’t blame those particular Native Americans for being distrustful of whites and for wanting to keep the planning and implementation of the movement within “pure” participators (I use that word to imply participants who had no ties to whites). However, distrusting Fortunate Eagle because he had managed to beat the system which kept his people repressed since Columbus’s arrival seems dismissive and unwise.
I am not sure how much Fortunate Eagle’s particular exclusion hampered the movement for Alcatraz, but I do wonder how differently events would have transpired had he been more instrumental in the implementation of the Nov. 20th invasion. Would he have had more far-reaching and permanent ideas for island leadership and negotiations? Would he have kept Oakes in charge, and vice versa? Or would power have continued to divide until people were glad to leave in July of 1970? Fortunate Eagle was largely excluded from the occupation because of his peers’ distrust of his ties to the white world of privilege; could any white person have been included at the time? What are or aren’t white people doing to help the movement now? Was Snyder simply referring to the fact that white youth would have gotten more involved, but faced exclusion from Native Americans because of their race?
It is impossible to predict what effects white people would have/could still have on the Native American Renaissance/Civil Rights Movement. But the real question for me is, what can anyone do that will bring all, or any of, us closer to equality in America?
Last week, I conducted a close reading of Ray Smith's relations with his brother-in-law focusing on an argument regarding the family dog. I concluded that the disconnect between the two involved a deep disconnect concerning fundamental values, here specifically economics. Ray valuing the freedom of all living things, and his brother-in-law valuing the traditional concerns of capitalistic consumerism and property values.
In this week's readings I chose a very different passage from Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey to compare and analyze back to my earlier close reading of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums:
"'I think that it is fucked to make contacts rather than to make friends. I don't like contacts. What do you say to one? "What are you offering?" "To what or to whom is your end connected?" A party is a party...What good am I to you and your associates?' Wittman meant that he didn't want to do business whatsoever. There has got to be a way to live and never do business" (116).
Wittman Ah Sing is arguing with his friend Lance Kamiyama at Lance’s party of “Young Millionaires” and “business men,” where almost everyone seems to be conducting one form or another of experimentation—either with L.S.D., watching a “snow show,” or even simple socializing. The party, according to Wittman’s above complaint, was created in order for the people in Lance’s broad social circle to meet and connect in order to network and develop business relations. In Wittman’s objections to treating people like “contacts” (“What are you offering?,” etc.), he expresses his valuation of human beings as subjects, not objects. As a “contact,” a human being is nothing more than a means to an end, not the end itself. According to Kant, treating a human being as such is immoral.
Although Kant’s theory only concerns persons, Wittman’s valuation of human life does relate back to Ray Smith’s valuation of Bob the dog’s freedom. Both Ray and Wittman value life and freedom. Ray treats the dog, a fellow sentient being, as an end in himself. Ray, unlike those making “contacts” at Lance’s party, does not value the objectification of sentient beings nor does he value the effect that a traditional, business-like approach has on society as a whole. Later in the party scenario, Wittman narrates that others might say of him, “He believes in voluntary poverty” (129). Thus, not only does Wittman argue against making “contacts,” but also does not wish to place himself (through his business connections) as one more body coinciding with the consuming capitalistic agenda. In placing a value on the traditional ideas of wealth and worth (like Ray’s brother-in-law), Wittman would be subjecting himself to a concept which he considers immoral—the use of other persons as means either as clientele, business partners, or ways to advance himself up the economic ladder. Being aware of the immoral effects of capitalism and discussing them over the topic of business contacts, Wittman illustrates the importance of resisting the alluring (yet dehumanizing) possibilities of the traditional valuation of wealth.
Thus Ray’s dispute over the freedom of a dog and Wittman’s dispute regarding his disgust with making business connections both argue against the same societal structure—traditional values of wealth in the context of capitalism. Kingston’s narration expresses Wittman’s desire of “there... [being] a way to live and never do business.” This desire can easily seem like a disillusioning utopian dream—so far removed from our current socioeconomic relations and practices. Although such drastic societal changes could not occur easily over night, they would not occur without visionary minds and compassionate hearts like those of Ray and Wittman.
My paper topic will be a mimicry of Richard Brautigan’s story, “Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren”. Last week, I analyzed his thought process while writing the piece. Because Brautigan often fictionalized autobiographical stories that he told his family, accounts provided by friends and family are often puzzling or conflicting. Thus, it seems as though his entire existence was weaved with lore, giving him fuel for the stories he would later write in Trout Fishing.
This week, I have chosen a passage from Dharma Bums, as I have come to rely quite heavily on his material for guidance in this project:
“But on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, I’d also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel.” (Kerouac, 29)
In some ways Brautigan and Kerouac are very similar, and in other ways their styles are very different. For example, Kerouac seems to enjoy writing in a stream-of-consciousness manner; his run-on sentences crash into one another with a steady flow of patience, as though he doesn’t necessarily have a clear destination, but he is following a specific path. Meanwhile, Brautigan’s sentences are always very composed. You can tell that he wracked his brain for hours critically analyzing each paragraph for errors, trying to make it just right. And he usually achieved this feat. Aside from these differences, both authors seem bent on exposing the world to something shocking. For Kerouac that might be contained within his spirituality, for Brautigan it might be contained within characters such as Trout Fishing in America Shorty.
Last week I analyzed some of the poems in a collection of Allen Ginsberg's works that dealt with homosexuality and talked about some of the explicit images and forward language he used in his depictions of same sex relationships.
As another facet of the gay rights movement and being closely tied to San Francisco, I've also been reading about Harvey Milk. I picked up a biography of his life from the library and it has been a pretty interesting read.
Obviously one of the main differences between the Harvey Milk biography and Ginsberg's poetry is that the former takes a much more historical and chronological approach. The emphasis is on Harvey Milk's life and most of the text deals with accounts of past acquaintances of his and his place in factual dated events. My analysis dealt a lot with the themes in his work and the images in his literature as opposed to his life and how other saw him. I do find the biography useful because the author includes interviews with Milk's old classmates and other past associates. How he presented himself outwardly to others is a big factor in framing my comparison between his ideas and those of Ginsberg. Outwardly, Milk was a typical athletic young man. He had a love of opera and theater that he kept well hidden from his peers to avoid association with the queer community and suspicion of his sexuality. For Milk, his orientation was something to be ashamed of. The early chapters discuss how his mother used to warn him about the dangers of predatory homosexuals and how they would do 'bad things' to innocent boys. One interesting anecdote summarizes Milk's attendance of his brother's wedding and how his friends and relatives remember most clearly how Harvey danced with nearly all the young women in attendance. He portrayed himself as a sociable athletic 'ladies man', masking how he truly felt.
I thought this kind of attitude to be in stark contrast with the ideas expressed in Ginsberg's poetry. After reading poems such as "Please Master" and "Sphincter", Milk's secrecy and enigmatic treatment of his sexuality seems much more conservative and non-confrontational. Ginsberg wanted to confront the world with his sexual identity and the idea of love and physical attraction between men while Milk did everything in his power to avoid addressing the issue. For Milk, it was a matter of being a social outcast or disappointing his family. One could argue the historical circumstances were a great motivation for Milk. The book references the persecution of the homosexual community by the police: men without shirts could be taken in for 'indecent exposure', they would notify the employers of patrons of gay establishments who would often lose their jobs, undercover cops would arrest men for "soliciting for deviant purposes" which would require them to permanently register as sex offenders, etc. These consequences and the fear of exposure drove Harvey Milk to pursue the double-life so many other homosexuals were forced to lead.
It seems that the two men differ most in their dealings with conventionality and traditional American morals. Both men existed in a time when anything outside of the boundaries of a normal heterosexual relationship constituted deviancy and immorality. For Ginsberg it seems that his approach was a rejection of conventional ideals concerning love and sex, while Milk in his early years was compelled to give in to conventionality. I think the idea of trying to achieve normal a normal existence despite a homosexual identity contrasting with the need to fully express one's identity is relevant even in contemporary society. Within the gay community there are those who scorn flamboyant and outlandish behavior as detrimental to the efforts of the gay rights movement, while others feel that to repress any aspect of their sexual identity would be giving in to oppression. Harvey Milk is an important figure to consider in this kind of struggle. In his personal life, Milk felt the need to hide socially unacceptable aspects of his identity, but ended up becoming one of the most widely known figures within the gay rights movement. He seems to represent a balance in Ginsberg's confrontational approach to sexuality in which one strives for the advancement of rights and equality, but in a manner that persuades and ingratiates people to the cause, rather than establishing the truth of the identity and rejecting the need for acceptance.
The last two weeks I have focused on the readings from Kerouac and found many different notions that I discovered to be applicable to the society we currently live in.
This week, I chose to analyze a completely different work, Tripmaster Monkey, by Kingston. In an Asian American Literature class I took several quarters ago, I was given the opportunity to read Woman Warrior (also by Kingston). When I learned that we were reading Tripmaster Monkey (to which my A.A. Lit teacher constantly referred), I anxiously awaited an opportunity to discuss it further.
I found Woman Warrior to be deeply significant to all literature through its messages and themes, and Tripmaster Monkey was no different. The line I wanted to compare and contrast with Kerouac was actually the first line of the novel.
I found the line "Whittman Ah Sing considered suicide everyday...entertained it (Kingston 1) to be particularly relevant in regards to the assignment of finding a noticeably different passage from the previous week.
Initially, the passage reminded me of our previous study of Ann Garrison's description of the Golden Gate Bridge of a symbol of beauty and death. Though Sing obviously expresses a more complex conflict throughout the novel, this first line clearly echoes some of Garrison's ideology ("Anybody serious about killing himself does the big leap off the Golden Gate" 1).
When I first read this quotation, I couldn't help but reflect on my previous studies of Kerouac and, in particular, how these ideas differed from his proclamations.
The Kerouac passages I have been focus on dealing with discovering the good in people and the motives that inspire that goodness. This notion is particularly different than the works of Kingston which tend to analyze a characters struggle to become "good" or happy in the society they must exist within. Though there are obvious structural differences between to the two authors, it becomes clear that their messages begin to reflect a similar thread. It becomes clear through a further examination of the novel that Sing's impact to the novel is crucial to an understanding of the piece as a whole. The ideologies he promotes thus mirror many of Kerouac's similar beliefs. At times in the novel, I felt that the character of Sing was quasi inspired by Kerouac. He seems to deal with similar struggles that Kerouac faced, and the themes he symbolizes also somewhat reflect many of the beliefs that Kerouac discusses in on the road.
Initially I felt there would be no way to connect these two works, but through the character of Sing, I discovered that Kingston's ideology is clearly in a similar vein as the concepts which Kerouac similarly discussed
In last week’s post, I wrote on an article hailing Crissy Fields as a role model for public parks, and I tried to expose the bias this article has towards areas which become parks only to attract new tourism and hide the region's true origins. To contrast with this article, I will focus on the “You Are Here (You Think)” article from Reclaiming San Francisco, which provides a view on tourism which differs from the praiseworthy account given by the author of the Crissy Field article.
The closing paragraphs of “You Are Here” are given by the authors in a rather personal account, as they give their final thoughts on the reasoning behind the progressive tour of San Francisco. Recounting the moment during the tour when they were told the true history behind the Palace of the Legion of Honor, Dean writes that we “must find new grounds for excitement beneath and behind the conventional”, rather than buying into the chains of tourism popular in large cities (148). Although Crissy Field is a beautiful and well designed place for tourists, the important history of the location is not told in regards to the present meaning it has within San Francisco. As Julie notes in the article, these “conventional attractions are only there to hide and suppress the unconscious” both of the history of the location and the historical significance this has for the collective untold history of San Francisco (148). To claim that a certain landmark of the city is an innovative and gleaming example of public space without interacting with that landmark’s history overlooks an important aspect of this location, and undermines the present meaning as a whole.
The honesty given in “You Are Here” is truly refreshing, as locations of popular interest are called into question for what they really represent and why they are truly successful. Many tourists do not want to be bombarded with the ugly historic facts of a location when visiting a new city, and the fluffy and meaningless tourist spots created are directly related to this desire to escape reality. It is likely that most people, tourists or not, are unaware of the mass grave buried far underneath the soil of the Legion of Honor, but revealing this information to the public creates a closer attachment and respect for the historical significance the land has beyond the artistic treasures it now supplies.
“Ray suggests the embodiment of an ‘all-American’ identity. The effect is to heighten the sense of rebellion provoked by Smith’s conversion to Buddhism and to appeal to the nascent ‘beatnik’ community of middle-class white youths who want to believe that forms of counter-hegemonic resistance are also available to them despite their conservative heritage” (Gair 104).
This quote is from a book titled The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide by Christopher Gair. It covers several of the beat authors and goes into detail about their works. The chapter where this quote is from gives an analysis of Dharma Bums and discusses the negative view of America the book portrays. While I do disagree with parts of the quote, some of it does make sense to the overall work. Ray does convert to Buddhism but he still holds onto his “conservative” heritage through Catholicism. Since he still believes in these ideals, he is not completely rebelling.
The book does appeal to the beat generation because of the theme of Buddhism and anti-consumerism/government but I do not feel Ray is resisting things from his upbringing. Ray holds onto his heritage since he represents Jack Kerouac but does stray from it, showing how I agree and disagree with the quote.
My quote from last week was from Dharma Bums and discusses Ray's ability to conquer the mountain:
“We got up and started back. Now when I went around that ledge that had scared me it was just fun and a lark, I just skipped and jumped and danced along and I had really learned that you can’t fall off a mountain. Whether you can fall off a mountain or not I don’t know, but I learned that you can’t. That was the way it struck me” (Kerouac 87).
The mountain shows how Ray has escaped from the city that he is rebelling against, creating the freedom he is dying to achieve. The nature involved with the passage relates to the Zen Buddhism included in Ray’s life, and also relates to the idea of getting away from what he dislikes from the city. He resists the city by going mountain climbing, something he is not familiar with, and to get away from the crowded city and be in an open area. These two quotes show how the book involves the rural and the urban and shows how both are an important part to Ray’s life.
The contrasts that I'm going to examine are perhaps a little different from expected because I'm going to try and interweave in with it an indication of what i'm writing my final paper on. Lat week I read Ginsberg's "America" and noticed things in it such as his revolutionalry language, slandering the American government and the emergence of post World War II mass society. However, this week I'm going to contrast this with the actual literature that was prominent in the mid 1950s: literature that reflects mass society.
In "America", Ginsberg makes numerous refences to "Time Magazine":
"I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed with Time Magazine.
I read it every week..."
It is because of such refences to this particular literature that I asked myself the question: so what actually is Time Magazine about? What standpoints on politics and culture does it base itself on? Unsuprizingly, it becomes immediately apparent what Ginsberg was getting at. Throughout numerous columns, everything American is portrayed as fantastic and everything unAmerican (especially the Cold War Soviets) are portrayed as evil scum who threaten to destroy mankind. It is from this stark contrast in outlooks then that one can really appreciate the magnitude of Ginsberg's rebeliousness. Through going against the grain in such stark fashion, Ginsberg drags the reader away from fifties mass society into more like what we are today- aware and informed (hopefully). This being said I have four words that I think describe Alen Ginsberg more than any others: "ahead of his time".
My paper topic in on Brautigan and his portrayal of women especially the categories he puts them into.
In a passage in The Abortion, the male character offers someone a cookie and that person asks if he made the cookie. He's completely taken aback because he'd never been asked that question before.
This indicates the correlation by society of domesticity and women. Since women usually do the cooking and cleaning, of course the male character had never been complimented on his cookie making abilities. One simple thing like this is extremely indicative of an entire social structure.
Although the previous passage I brought up explicitly discussed women, body image discomfort, and Brautigan's brush off of any sort of compassion for a woman who feels uncomfortable in her body and this passage is about domesticity, they are clearly indicative of the issues surrounding women's current status and position in society and Brautigan's portrayal of them.
Anything anyone says or does has to do with women because the whole structure of our society produces the way women are viewed.
Brautigan is not a misogynist. He was just a male living in modern society.
The Girl Scout Promise
On my honor, I will try
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law
The Girl Scout Law
I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout
The Girl Scout Promise and Law are a kind of sutra shared and recited by all members of the Girl Scouts. They represent an agreement of action by Girl Scouts everyday toward one another and the world. I found the Promise to somewhat conflicted with the Girls Scouts support of the development of strong independent women and the characteristics described in the Law. The line “to serve God and my country” seems almost military in reference. This kind of vocabulary; law, God, country, seems inappropriate in an institution developed for little girls.
In contrast the Girl Scout Law does seem to support the underlying theme and mission statement of the Girl Scouts; a cultivation that of leadership, responsibility, and education. These are characteristics that were have seen repeatedly abused, ignored, and forgotten in much of the other literature regarding society in San Francisco. In Ferlinghetti’s “I Saw One of Them” the community institution established to support the homeless is shooing them away. Additionally, in numerous readings we have investigated there is the reoccurring theme of environmental overuse, neglect, and destruction.
Perhaps the Girl Scout Law would be an appropriate mantra for all individuals to adapt. In a city like San Francisco in which the disenfranchised are continuously being displaced, ignored, and forgotten, perhaps the social and communal responsibility fostered by the Girl Scouts could benefit the population of the city as a whole. Dishonesty, detachment, and disrepair have created not the Queen City by the Bay but the Suicide Capitol of the Country. If only some of the many positive principles suggested by the Girl Scout Law were enforced as real law maybe the current state of the city could be refurbished to something more closely linked to what many inaccurately perceive as a culturally diverse, community based, socially accepting place.
Richard Brautigan to 1950’s Nursey rhymes.
In my paper, I’d like to look at Richard Brautigan’s “Flowers for those you love” and compare it to a few common nursery rhymes. The poem goes:
Butcher, baker, candlestick maker,
Anyone can get VD,
Including those you love.
Please see a doctor
If you think you’ve got it.
You’ll feel better afterwards,
And so will those you love.
By making this poem sound like a nursery rhyme, he mocks the tone. He portrays it as a catchy tune, as if it were a jingle. This is contradictory of the preconceptions of the times. The normal 1950’s rhymes were like:
Cinderella
Dressed in yella
Went downstairs to kiss her fella.
She made a mistake
And kissed a snake.
How many doctors will it take?
1! 2! 3! 4! (etc.)
Ice cream soda, cherry on top
Who's your boyfriend/girlfriend, I forgot;
Is it an A! B! C!
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see the elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump the fence, fence fence
They jumped so high, high, high
They touched the sky, sky, sky
And didn't come back, back, back
Till the fourth of July, July, July
I’d like to explore their catchiness, as well as how the content isn’t over sexualized and how Brautigan’s is.
In his essay "Homosexuality and Utopian Discourse in American Poetry" Tom Yingling argues that Walt Whitman's texts are "radical" because they have the ability to "imagine relations between men as not based on commercial, sexual, or racial exploitations. Male bonding for Whitman is not based on displacement of a desire but its enactment freely between two men whose sexuality requires no mediating other." Utopia is then a "strategy of displacement," of "rethinking all together the notion of patriarchal institutions and their control over the individual," (Breaking Bounds, 144).
Just to remind you, my final paper will be a comparative analysis between Whitman and Ginsberg, specifically the way these two poets adapted "orientalist" assumptions. The bit of insight above poses an interesting contrast to the orientalist discourse that pervaded the West in the 19th-century, one that I will argue relates to the 'beat' reality of Ginsberg and others.
The absence of the feminine from Whitman's idea of utopia, ignoring for the moment its potential sexists meanings, can be considered a drastic shift from the patriarchalism the circulated throughout western society in that era. European orientalists saw the East, particularly Muslim regions, as both sexual and despotic, and approached it voyeuristically. Western men and later women feminists used the orient, particularly the image of the sexualized harem girl, as a metaphor for women's oppression and despotism in the West. It can be argued that Western feminism was founded on this manner of looking at the orient as a eroticized and exoticized feminine body.
That Whitman deletes the female from his utopian equation is significant to an understanding of his orientalism. Homosexual utopianism offers a vision in which an "alternative social organization" is imagined, marking the beginning of a continual questioning of the dominate orders of social control. "Homosexual utopia is not a place but a practice," (145).Whitman's "reimagining" of society is similar to the discourse that emerged in and around San Francisco in the 50s and 60s, a vision that seeks to transcend injustice, mechanistic modernity, imperialism, orientalism...
But more than offer solid proof that Whitman's America was not orientalist, Yingling's scholarship hightlights the complexities of the poet and the problem of pinning him down into anyone identity, including that of orientalist. After all, if Whitman had a vocation, it would be "to avoid vocations that entrap one into fixed identities," (Trachtenberg, 169).
I am doing a creative topic in which I try to mimic Kerouac's spontaneous prose and the various elements that make it up.
In that regard, I think one of the most interesting sections of the novel is the section on yabyum:
"She was just a little off her nut but when I heard her say 'Bodhisattva' I realized she wanted to be big a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the only way she could do express it was this way, which had its traditional roots in the yabyum ceremony of Tibetan Buddhism, so everything was fine."
It's curious to me that an event that is essentially a glorified 'gangbang' could also have such a religious implication. There is a dichotomy there in which both Princess and Japhy seem to think Princess subjecting herself to that sort of event was as truly pious as she could make herself, whereas Alvah is purely interested in the idea of having weekly sex with a fresh, young woman. Ray is caught in the middle with his attempts at abstinence in the name of not bringing more suffering into the world through the birth of babies, yet at the same time, he recognizes Priness' desires to be a "big Buddhist" and in a way, him consenting to the yab yum was the nicest thing he could for her. Like many aspects of The Dharma Bums and in fact all life, there are two sides to every coin, and although I don't really know how that connects to Kerouac's spontaneous prose, it certainly is a good representation of one of the many facts that Kerouac seems to dwell on frequently in his novels.
Dedicating the poem to the unsung heroes of his generation, Ginsberg depicts those “who howled on their knees in the subway” (Ginsberg 13). Setting the scene in public areas, such as the subway, defies the usual rigid image of sex in the bedroom and shows that sexual acts, homosexual or heterosexual, can occur anywhere and do need to be concealed or hidden in the bedroom. The use of sound in these stanzas (such as “howled” and “screamed”) brings a voice to homosexuality and insists that this is a topic desperate to be talked about, especially in public situations. In fact, setting this scene underground simply emphasizes how the public felt gay sex needed to be repressed and stomped down upon. Furthermore, Ginsberg might have been alluding to various civil rights movements that were stirring underground at the time, such as the African American civil rights movement which began making an impact in 1955, one year before Howl was published, and homophile groups like the Mattachine Society, which created safe zones for gays to meet and interact.
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