additional Ginsberg prompts for Sunday…

In case you haven’t written a short paper yet (about 1-3 pages), and you weren’t captured by the earlier post with prompts (for January 30th), here are some more prompts to choose from.

Remember: you will need to submit FIVE of these by the end of the quarter, and you are limited to ONE per week.

More prompts…

— Expand a reading of Ginsberg’s “America” as a “Cold War satire.”  What are the politics of a poem which has a multiplicity of voices?

— Discuss Ginsberg’s use of “queer” in “America.”  What are the conventions he is working against?  What are the conventions of reading “queer” today?  Does he mean “queer” in a homosexual sense, or is there a different premise of queerness at work?

— Pick one of Ginsberg’s shorter poems (e.g., “In the Back of the Real,” “Sunflower Sutra,” or any we haven’t discussed yet) and perform a close reading.  Be sure to draw in some of the topics and themes we have covered in this course, to thicken / deepen your reading (think the digging and emptying out of “beattitude” as a way of reading).

— Compare the representation of the Beats which we get from Kerouac and Ginsberg.  Use whatever textual reference you find most helpful to your argument.

“Howl”

What are some thoughts, provocations, insights you had from Rob’s preliminary reading of “Howl”?

You might want to think about: the analogy to Dante which Rob made, which mapped the narrative of the poem onto the three stages of the inferno / purgatorio / paradisio; the necessity of the poem’s “ugliness”; the angelheaded hipster’s role as protagonist, and as questing; the narrative of the poem as a quest…

There are many more talking points to plug into.  Please make it a practice of taking notes during lectures that can be incorporated into a response to the lecture here, on the blog.

Upcoming Exhibition of Ginsberg’s photographs

Here’s a link that I think may interest many of you:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12274697

 

I have a few ideas that I’d also like to float past you:

What kind of readership of poetry is Ginsberg requesting / necessitating in “Howl,” and how might that also lend us a model for readership of photography, or images? Look at some of the passages from “Howl” which are about visual representation, and viewership…

 

What kind of narrative might you trace through these photographs?  How might that narrative be contrasted with that of Kerouac’s prose?

 

Continuing our discussion of the mainstreaming of beat culture in the sixties, how might this manner of self-representation lend itself to this outcome?  How might this manner of self-representation be historically distinct to the fifties?

Important Reminders

I just want to remind you all of the requirements listed on the section syllabus.  This includes weekly contributions to the blog, along with 5 short papers contributed to the blog throughout the quarter.  Be sure to fulfill these requirements…

 

To those of you who have been writing comments and adding invocations, I think this is going in an excellent direction with your participation.  I encourage you to keep writing, and especially to read and comment upon what others have written as well.  Hopefully we can begin working out some more dialogues in this space soon.

How should we read Beattitudes?

What are some suggestions you might give to someone who has not yet read Beattitudes about how it should be read?  Is there a particular way that it should be read?  Are there a set of ways?  What are some issues to raise or remarks to make about the content and form of the book?

discussion group this week

We’re getting into the smaller group meetings this week.  I’ll remind everyone of what’s detailed on your section syllabus: you will need to attend one small group meeting, beginning this week and ending week 8.

Our meeting this week will be at Stevenson coffee shop on Thursday at 2.  Please come with questions or discussion topics for Beattitudes and Howl.

from Justin…

some passages from Gilles Deleuze that make me think of the beats. page numbers correspond to Dialogues II.

“Becomings – they are the thing which is the most imperceptible, they are acts which can only be contained in a life and expressed in a style. Styles are not constructions, any more than modes of life. In style it is not the words which count, nor the sentences, nor the rhythms and figures. In life it is not the stories, nor the principals, nor the consequences. You can always replace one word with another. If you don’t like that one, if it doesn’t suit you, take another, put another in its place. If each one of us makes this effort, everyone can understand one another and there is scarcely any reason to ask questions or to raise objections.” (3)

“Here again it is a question of becoming. People always think of a majoritarian future (when I am grown up, when I have power). Whereas the problem is that of a minoritarian-becoming, not pretending, not playing or imitating the child, the madman, the woman, the animal, the stammerer or the foreigner, but becoming all these, in order to invent new forces or new weapons.” (5)

Invocations?

A couple of students have asked about where to post these… How about here?

On “Sea”

Pushing further on the thematics we discussed in the prose of Big Sur, develop a position on Kerouac’s symbolic, stylistic and narratological use of the Pacific Ocean in the novel’s last chapter, which consists of the poem “Sea.”  As you were not assigned the rest of the novel, approach this as a close-reading exercise: in the short excerpt of prose, what carries over into the poem, and how is this mediated “poetically” or “oceanically”?

Some further questions to reflect upon:

How does the physical limit of land and sea function as a metaphysical limit for Kerouac?  How is this metaphysical limit pertinent to some of the themes we discussed this week (including reality / fantasy, Buddhist “emptiness” / Catholic symbolism and God, representability / unrepresentability in language, speech, literature, etc.)

Larry Keenan’s documentation of the Beats ’65

Sharing some of Larry Keenan’s photographs, for your digestion and reflection on the aesthetics, representations, and identity politics of the Beat Generation…