Show Notes: Texting, Episode 8
"A Barbaric Yawp Over the Roofs of the World" - Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"
Here, at long last, are the show notes (with timestamps) to episode 8 of Texting! Link to the original podcast audio on Substack or YouTube as you take a deeper dive into Allen Ginsberg’s Howl!
00:00 – opening theme
00:35 – Tomek’s dramatic reading of “Footnote to Howl”
3:14 – “Holy shit!”
3:28 – Tomek on Montenegro and his visa issues
4:43 – Rilke: “Who speaks of victory? Survival is all.”
5:12 – “your precious Ginsberg”
5:40 – background info on Ginsberg and Howl
6:37 – the term “beatnik,” Neal Cassady, Denver, Gary Snyder
9:45 – William S. Burroughs
10:30 – Morocco and Hotel Muniria
11:36 – the term “beatnik” revisited
13:58 – “first thought best thought” and jazz improvisation
15:58 – “often he [Ginsberg] needs to do some editing”
16:24 – Burroughs’ cut-up technique, Surrealist automatic writing, Dadaist found poetry
17:33 – Camus, Sartre, French existentialism
18:27 – my early encounters with Ginsberg: (1) Sgt. Pepper/Summer of Love documentary, (2) HBO docudrama on the Chicago 8, (3) Lou Reed interview
22:53 – from the French existentialists to Dostoyevsky
23:40 – Ginsberg’s Marxist Russian mother
24:28 – structural overview of Howl
25:25 – Carl Solomon
26:46 – intro by William Carlos Williams, Paterson and Paterson, “we are going through hell”
31:43 – “a howl of defeat”?
33:09 – Whitman: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”
34:42 – “A Supermarket in California”
35:39 – my first copy of Leaves of Grass:
36:39 – Whitman and the King James Version of the Bible vs. Ginsberg and the Torah
37:37 – the influence of William Blake
38:08 – “Sunflower Sutra,” “Ah! Sun-Flower,” and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (cf. episode 6 of season 2)
39:28 – “the best minds of my generation” and The Who’s “My Generation”
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