“Keep on tossing those pages, friend,” he thought. “I’ll clean up after you. Heh heh. What a team. . . .” (From chapter 3)
On a September day in 1969, the poet Allen
Ginsberg visited the campus where I was a sophomore English major.
I was also a full-time reporter so I talked my editor into letting
me cover his visit to classes and his evening public lecture. As
he prepared for his afternoon presentation, I asked him if he’d
pose for a picture. “I never pose for pictures,” he said
quietly but firmly. I nodded, disappointed. But he did sit down and
began fooling with his instruments and I realized he was doing it
for me, this green kid reporter who was in awe of him. Later, I followed him and an English professor up
the sidewalk to the building where the English classes were taught.
They were talking about poetry and the death of his friend Jack Kerouac.
I was maybe five steps behind. As Ginsberg carried on the conversation
he let out a long fart. He did it casually as if it were as natural
as breathing, which it is. We spend our lives trying to hide our
farts (unless you’re a group of guys and then everyone farts
as loud as the force of the wind allows). Ginsberg simply paid no
attention to it. That one casual fart transformed him from the god I’d made him as I read Howl and other poems, to a living, breathing, farting human being. Good lesson.
Like a lot of others, I was also into Tolkein’s The Ring Trilogy.
* * * Skip to a specific chapter below:
Click here to return home
|
|---|
