I Knew This Guy Once

I knew this guy once, named Joe. Raconteur, man about town, serial philanderer, the kind of smooth talker who could gamble away his entire paycheck in one evening of playing craps with his buddies in the back room of John's Bar and then somehow manage to talk his constantly-pregnant young wife out of being furious at him. When he got very, very drunk you got the sense that there was a big hole there where the "person" was supposed to be; you had the eerie sense that you were dealing with some cleverly-designed construct that merely emulated a human being. Joe's "Rosebud" moment happened when he was 8 years old. His beloved father, a young man of 28, died slowly of blood poisoning from an abscessed tooth (this was the pre-antibiotics era, and poor immigrants generally couldn't afford proper dental care). The last words he heard from his father (delirious from infection and mostly likely insane from pain and fear of death) were words his father screamed at him: "Who are you? WHO ARE YOU???" I believe Joe grew up and spent the rest of his life trying desperately not to answer that question. At the age of 77, he made the calm, rational decision to starve himself to death as penance for his sins, real and perceived.

He was my Dad.

Quote of the Week

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

-- Thomas Paine

Quote of the Week

"This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in."

Charles Dickens

Quote of the Week

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.

Edward Dowling

On this day in 1968

Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I had gone to bed before it happened, but I remember the next morning. I sat on the front stoop of our Jersey City tenement, watching my father standing out in the middle of the street -- drunk, unkempt, unshaven, awake all night, driven a bit insane I believe now -- screaming over and over again at the top of his lungs "They shot Bobby! They shot Bobby! They shot Bobby!!!" And crying, crying endlessly like some baby in a wrinkled business suit, something I'd only ever seen him do once before -- in November 1963.

Meditation While Drinking My Morning Coffee

I drank my coffee this morning before sunrise, as I always do, listening to the occasional outbursts from the rooster at the farm down the road, as I always do. And I thought about how things were changed now.

I got to see Sputnik go over in 1957. It is my earliest memory in this life; the memory probably stuck with me because my parents were making such a big fuss about it.

I got to watch Walter Cronkite intoning about how Russia had built some kind of weird wall splitting Berlin in two under cover of darkness.

I got to see that same wall come down, so many years later.

I got to see the best and the brightest minds of a generation gunned down one by one, turning so many Americans bitter and inward.

I got to see America lose a war, and then got to see America forget the lessons of that war and go charging into Iraq, flags flying, blissfully unaware that by doing so they were driving nails into the coffin of their fragile empire.

And now, this morning, this. A skinny black guy with a goofy grin and a funny name is my party's candidate for President of the United States of America. I feel old this morning. And I feel young.

Happy Birthday, Allen Ginsberg

There are really only two great, unforgettable openings in the whole history of epic poetry. There's:

Rage! Sing to me, O Muse, of the Rage of Achilles!

And then there's:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked"

Mad, frenetic, hypnotic, like Whitman on speed, Ginsberg's masterpiece must be read out loud, in a single breath. Buy a copy from your local bookseller, mosey out in the woods for some privacy (or, if you're daring, wander the city streets unashamed) and read the entire poem out loud, with the emphasis on 'loud.'

From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Allen Ginsberg born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His father was a schoolteacher and occasional poet. His mother was a Russian immigrant and devoted Marxist. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions all through out his childhood and had to undergo electric shock treatments and a lobotomy. Ginsberg went to Columbia University on a small scholarship and there he began consorting with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs. After college, he got a job in marketing research, wore a business suit everyday, and had on office on the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building. He says he started writing there, and that there he learned about careful manipulation of words.

He moved to San Francisco and became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Ginsburg's first major work, Howl.

By his 30s, he was prematurely bald with a ring of hair on the fringe of his head and thick long black beard streaked with gray. He wore black rimmed classes and his Buddha belly was one of his most distinguishing features.

Ginsburg's reading of Howl was reputed to have "turned the 1950s into the 1960s overnight." It began:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

The death of his mother affected Ginsburg deeply and for a long time. He wrote his poem "Kaddish" for her, which began:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk
on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night,
talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles
blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after —

He once said, "There's no bar to us proclaiming our delight and that's the strength of poetry."