Addiction, Advertising, & Easy Virtue (was Re: How far do we go?)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Nov 21 22:42:09 PST 2000


Ian says:


>Drugs are fun not non-alienating. Lots of folks take them out of
>experimental proclivities too, not just escape from alienating
>circumstances. Jerry Garcia was not alienated or oppressed, neither was
>William Burroughs [just try oppressing that guy :-)]

***** Allen Ginsberg, "America," 1956

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing....

...I'm sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?...

...Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?...

...I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I'm doing....

...America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.... *****

***** Allen Ginsberg, "Howl," 1955-1956

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 night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz... who dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls... who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed.... *****

Yoshie



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