Howl

Im am listening to the ghostly voice of Allen Ginsberg reciting, no, intoning, Howl. No, Howling it, really.


(...)who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried, (...)

I have the obvously fake, but honest recolection that I spent the whole day on it, though objectively it takes little more than twenty minutes to get the job done, and I only listened to it about three times.

It sounds like a mixture of the indifferent reciting of stock quotes by a cold, busy, crackling machine, and the angry intoning of ancient, magically incomprehensible latin mass in an old cathedral by a blind, mad, castrating prophet of doom.

(...)who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, (...)

Ginsberg, crop of 97 for the grim reaper, fits adequately enough into this somber parade of the recently deceased...