Call me a square, but William H. Burrough's ramblings in the compilation of interviews with him entitled 'The Job' didn't do much for me at large. There were a few nice ideas in there, chiefly his diagnosis the self-perpetuating structures of control imposed on the pre-Columbian Mayan's and its resonance with the idealised 60's American society and the idea of the nuclear family that he lashed out at so, but claiming that one could recapturing control through audio and written "Cut Ups" seemed to do nothing but act as a vehicle for an uncalculated subversion, something of a perversion of the promises Watergate seemed to make.
This is indicative of the whole rebellious spirit that accompanies the counterculture of a 60s avant garde, who paradoxically prefer to rediscover the primal through the use of precisely designed high-tech chemicals such as LSD. Confused, frustrated and restless in their inability to find accommodation in the mainstream, instead of aggressively protesting against the mechanisms of control that restrict their freedoms to express themselves in an artistic manner, they proclaim peace and love as it is a convenient opposite of the American dream and the Second Amendment, or abdicate intelligent activism as in Burrough's personal case.
Burroughs et al represent an absolutist philosophy that through associating itself with the celebration of vice and anarchy only condemned itself further as a perversion of the stability that could have seen such philosophies actually considered by a wider social and political context... And yet, also curiously traditional in its echo of the first American frontiersman: He who surrendered himself to the satanic promises of the sublime wilderness of an unknown continent populated by a tribal Indian population and a gradual alignment with their satanic ways. It is perhaps reassuring however that the protestors down at St. Paul's at the moment choose to distance themselves from such a debaucherous celebrations of expressionism by eschewing alcohol or drugs on the site of their academic Glastonbury Festival, and instead prospect the frontier of the mind at their 'City University' rather than obsessing over aboriginal nostalgias.
Likewise, Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl is more seductive a portrait of the American mind raging against the restrictions of mainstream expectation. Firstly, due to the fact that he does it in an infinitely more imaginative way conjuring the beautifully disgusting imagery that would lead to lawsuits against his anthologies, but most importantly through taking a clearly definite stance: Ironically, through this it becomes an accidental act of deliberate design, imagining as it does the sous-rature world of "Moloch!" as a definite image to repel, as opposed to Burroughs attempts to choreograph deliberate accidents to generate design through the stochasticity of his "cut up".
But how do we rage against Moloch, "whose name is in the Mind", the only remaining frontier for the 60's poets and authors to retreat to through drugs or art? In Part 1 of the poem, it seems that it is achieved through the restless nomadic hedonisms of Burrough's literary universe as Ginsberg evokes the seedy underbelly of a world populated by the nameless "who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripst". However, after taking us on a whistlestop tour of scenes of meltdown in Laredo, Brooklyn, Idaho, Kansas, Baltimore, Oklahoma, etc and ultimately the imagined city of Moloch (the world itself meaning "a thing demanding or requiring a very costly personal sacrifice") he goes on to eulogise his fellow writer-cum-asylum inmate friend Carl Solomon: Ginsberg's clear, opinionated and terrifying language is the essential architecture of his rebellion and his anti-Moloch activism, far more powerful than Burrough's retreat into obscure hallucinogenic inducing and generating vagaries, that suicidally become dry wanks as mentioned in Barnes' literary theory of the previous post.
This is indicative of the whole rebellious spirit that accompanies the counterculture of a 60s avant garde, who paradoxically prefer to rediscover the primal through the use of precisely designed high-tech chemicals such as LSD. Confused, frustrated and restless in their inability to find accommodation in the mainstream, instead of aggressively protesting against the mechanisms of control that restrict their freedoms to express themselves in an artistic manner, they proclaim peace and love as it is a convenient opposite of the American dream and the Second Amendment, or abdicate intelligent activism as in Burrough's personal case.
Burroughs et al represent an absolutist philosophy that through associating itself with the celebration of vice and anarchy only condemned itself further as a perversion of the stability that could have seen such philosophies actually considered by a wider social and political context... And yet, also curiously traditional in its echo of the first American frontiersman: He who surrendered himself to the satanic promises of the sublime wilderness of an unknown continent populated by a tribal Indian population and a gradual alignment with their satanic ways. It is perhaps reassuring however that the protestors down at St. Paul's at the moment choose to distance themselves from such a debaucherous celebrations of expressionism by eschewing alcohol or drugs on the site of their academic Glastonbury Festival, and instead prospect the frontier of the mind at their 'City University' rather than obsessing over aboriginal nostalgias.
Likewise, Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl is more seductive a portrait of the American mind raging against the restrictions of mainstream expectation. Firstly, due to the fact that he does it in an infinitely more imaginative way conjuring the beautifully disgusting imagery that would lead to lawsuits against his anthologies, but most importantly through taking a clearly definite stance: Ironically, through this it becomes an accidental act of deliberate design, imagining as it does the sous-rature world of "Moloch!" as a definite image to repel, as opposed to Burroughs attempts to choreograph deliberate accidents to generate design through the stochasticity of his "cut up".
But how do we rage against Moloch, "whose name is in the Mind", the only remaining frontier for the 60's poets and authors to retreat to through drugs or art? In Part 1 of the poem, it seems that it is achieved through the restless nomadic hedonisms of Burrough's literary universe as Ginsberg evokes the seedy underbelly of a world populated by the nameless "who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripst". However, after taking us on a whistlestop tour of scenes of meltdown in Laredo, Brooklyn, Idaho, Kansas, Baltimore, Oklahoma, etc and ultimately the imagined city of Moloch (the world itself meaning "a thing demanding or requiring a very costly personal sacrifice") he goes on to eulogise his fellow writer-cum-asylum inmate friend Carl Solomon: Ginsberg's clear, opinionated and terrifying language is the essential architecture of his rebellion and his anti-Moloch activism, far more powerful than Burrough's retreat into obscure hallucinogenic inducing and generating vagaries, that suicidally become dry wanks as mentioned in Barnes' literary theory of the previous post.
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