Allen Ginsberg writing about fucking boys

All Ye Brave Boys

Come all you young men that proudly display
Your torsos to the sun on upper Broadway
Come sweet hearties so mighty with girls
So lithe and naked to kiss their gold curls
Come beautiful boys with breasts bright gold
Lie down with me in bed ere ye grow old,
Take down your blue jeans, we'll have some raw fun
Lie down on your bellies I'll fuck your soft bun.

And so on for three more stanzas full of "studs," "sturdy cocks," "tight assed," "come in your butt" et cetera. He really did produce a lot of tosh, that Ginsberg. And there's no excuse in his remark that he wrote this at 4 a.m. It's simply not a civilized time to be writing a poem.

Twenty-two years later he wrote

I am the King of the Universe
I am the Messiah with a new dispensation
Excuse me I stepped on a nail.

This is possibly even worse. He's like a photographer who elaborately printed and framed every single out-of-focus snapshot he ever took.

Destroy your cell phone

Evidence is increasing that cellular telephones are a direct line to Satan. (More fun if you start the two clips at the same time.)

Saint Valentine's Day entry

For as long as he could remember, Sam had accompanied every meal worthy of the name with a small salad of julienned baked tofu and cilantro dressed with lime juice, sesame oil, soy sauce, salt and black pepper. Today is no exception.

Last night's dream: a love affair with a soft blond woman whose front yard needed work and afterward was bare dirt and tree trunks. She knew her neighbors. I kissed her by drawing her lips into my mouth and holding them there. When I went inside she and Bono were watching her music video, which was a single close-up black and white shot of her hair being blown about. I said something about her fans.

John Updike was a fussy writer, but unlike so many of his epigones, he was able to write the occasional sentence that did not have the padding of artistic adjectives. Memories of the Ford Administration.

Is there an English word that does not rhyme with "pish"?

What Nat and I cooked

(1) Cucumber onion salad
(2) Watercress sesame salad
(3) Taro watercress soup
(4) Braised shiitakes with Shaoxing wine
(5) Lotus root stew with tomato and fennel
(6) Noodles with bean paste and shiitake sauce

We drank California wines with dinner, after Nat and I swilled a Nigl grüner veltliner as we cooked.

恭喜發財

一帆風順， 二龍騰飛，三羊開泰， 四季平安， 五福臨門， 六六大順， 七星高 照，八方來財， 九九同心， 十全十美，百事亨通， 千事吉祥，萬事如意

fuggery, aka "In the great bowling alley of your mind, I am your pinboy"

Last year I bought a biography of Allen Ginsberg and a big, handsome collection of his poems. The poetry is magnificent, funny, wild, and it goes on and on. Reading about AG, I saw he was a gentle apostle of love and pot, a tamer of Hells Angels, traveler, experimenter. One has to love him.

Two days ago, home from work a bit early, I walked over to Vinyl Planet and bought some videotapes (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, 9 1/2 Weeks, Who Am I?) and some records (Bob Dorough, Enrico Rava, X). I got an album by The Fugs, and Allen Ginsberg, who used to open every poetry reading by chanting "Hare Krishna," does just that on this marvelous Fugs record. (It also has a picture of a naked AG inside.)

I think The Fugs are good.

Edges

I am drawn to the places where built meets natural. Gardens, the surfaces of buildings, the tidal zone under bayside houses. Such places are forever incomplete: I take on the role of finishing. Sometimes gardens work different degrees of built into a web. The statues of Cervantes, Emmet, Verdi and Key, no matter how rusticated their plinths, impress me as more fashioned even than the pollarded London plane trees on the music concourse.

New year's resolutions

During 2009 I hope to write an opera entitled "The Marbles," write a screenplay entitled "The Lynx," find a new job, read "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Boswell's journals and as much as I can stand of "Capital," see spring blossoms in Point Reyes and Ring Mountain, listen most attentively to Purcell and Haydn, and look the world in the face.

A certain angle

I want to present a new ethics that responds to biological and cultural drives. I don't believe that an appeal to nature justifies human behavior. We stand outside nature, though our shadows are sucked into it. Culture with a history that stands outside of our genes, culture that involves planning and reflecting, is possible only when we forget much of our animal being. Animals are not peaceful. Animals are not wise. Animals do not settle for a reasonable amount. Animals simply are: there is no point assigning emotional descriptors to them.

I also want to appeal to scholars to remember that every document is produced for a different audience and with a different attitude toward that document. People who study books and words too often forget that it is extremely difficult to compare a book Virginia Woolf wrote when she was young to one she wrote when she was no longer young: not only had Woolf changed, her attitude toward what she was writing and who was reading it changed. This must be considered at every turn.

Not I

Ballast installation

Click on subject heading.

The sheet looks marvelously shiny in the rain.

When I saw it yesterday, the surface details were beautiful, especially along the edges on the eastern sheet.

doorkijkje

I flirt with life.

Purchase

I buy things because I like making things happen. Money moves things and people around.

Film

A few of my favorite places

I live in a town of sixteen thousand people, mostly Euro-white and Latino, with a few visas granted to those who run and staff the handful of mediocre Chinese restaurants. People drive pickups or Priuses. We're on the border between redneck and California liberal.

Years from now I'll ennoble the railroad tracks, the empty lot with oaks and fearful housecats, the footbridge over the river. For now, though, my topophiliac thoughts drift to a bay, a financial zone, a Hyde Park playground viewed from a garage roof.

There are places that lift my spirits. Places are more reliable than people because it takes more to kill them, they're always there when you need them, they never say mean things. And there's a marvelous blend of the predictable and the chance: you know that if you walk along Battery between three and four the light will enchant, the architectural sculptures will cast handsome shadows, the flags atop the Embarcadero and a few other tall towers will be backlit; but you don't know which way the breezes will twitch, who will pass you in alligator boots, what unexpected Chinatown scent will slap you.

115 million annually

The following is a quotation from a report announced in August:

The Dr Hadwen Trust and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection have collaborated on a major new initiative to produce the first ever statistical analysis of global animal research numbers, the results of which have been published in peer-reviewed journal ATLA1.

Our research reveals that an estimated 115 million animals are used in laboratory experiments around the world each year. However even this massive figure could be an underestimate due to the way figures are compiled.

Despite widespread public and political interest in animal research worldwide, our research reveals that a mere 21% of countries (37 out of 179 countries) actually collect data on their national animal experiments. For the rest, no official record is kept of the animals used in their laboratories or the suffering that they might have endured.

Rules

1. No parent shall ever call a child a disappointment or indicate any disappointment that is not sympathetic.

2. Strangers in need shall be assisted.

3. Efforts shall be made to avoid boring others.

4. Except in cases of immediate self-defense, nonhuman animals shall not be killed or otherwise harmed.

5. Weapons shall be destroyed.

6. Inheritance shall be abolished and gifts shall be carefully scrutinized.

7. A minister of language shall identify tiresome turns of phrase.

8. Humans who whine shall be beaten.

9. Water and petroleum shall be heavily taxed.

10. Sunsets shall be admired.

Picture of me in my Hallowe'en costume

the Truths

At every moment, in every place, a variety of incompatible truths circulate. Nowadays we've got the biological truth, the Catholic truth, the born again truth, the New Age truths, and the postmodernist nontruths. And many, many others. You can't really subscribe to more than two or three without becoming an ontological mess. I happen to be partial to mainstream, rational, academic truths. I believe in that which can be demonstrated by means of the conventional sciences and epistemologies. If the size of the universe, the speed of light, the limits of human machinations, the breadth of my knowledge can't make room for an idea, I reject it mercilessly. Hence my disdain for God, UFOs, ghosts, many conspiracies, terroir, and one thousand other jolly illusions. But I suspect that my predilection for the demonstrable is ultimately little more than class bias. When I endorse checking New Age truths against academic truths, I am baffled when I try to explain the ultimate benefit of subscribing to my truth. What is the value of finding out what an Oxonian scholar or a Nobel winner said if one is delighted by the assertions of a guy with a website? Even if I could convince every man, woman, and child who had ever stepped into the Salt Lake LDS Temple that Joseph Smith was an arrant knave, what would be the point? How would it benefit them?

Dumb Democrats

I am amused every few years by the partisan frenzy that sweeps over my otherwise politically apathetic friends. All of a sudden the Republican candidates are execrable, horrifying, satanic. No appreciation at all of how close the two big parties are, and how unlikely either of them is to undo any of the fundamental injustices and inequalities that make America great. So this year's target has been Sarah Palin. She makes even a dumbshit like Biden look good. But he has not ceased to make unfathomably asinine statements.

Juggling