7.20 .06Pond Scum: The Influence of Anxiety
By Steve Finbow
“Hiroshima, 1945, August 6, sixteen minutes past 8am. Who really gave that order? Answer: control. The ugly American. The instrument of control.”
“Hate is just a failure of imagination,” Graham Greene wrote, or something like that. I’m sitting on the balcony of my girlfriend’s flat in the town of Chitose, Hokkaido, Japan, listening to William S. Burroughs read the “Invocation” from Cities of the Red Night, and I’m worried. I’m fucking worried. Over the last week, I have read The Letters of William Burroughs 1945 to 1949, and Word Virus: the William Burroughs Reader. From a bookshop in Sapporo, I bought new copies of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Visions of Cody, and Big Sur. And I’ve been playing Allen Ginsberg’s First Blues on my iTunes. They’re back. As ever.
By Nicholas Allanach
I first encountered the Beat writers in my friend Des’s bedroom when I was thirteen years old. He had a copy of William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys: a Book of the Dead. I stole it from him. I read it. It blew me away. Ever since that day, the Beat writers have fascinated me. When I’m not reading the Beats, I’m consciously NOT reading them. In the last three years, I’ve only read Naked Lunch (the restored text) and a biography of Burroughs by Barry Miles from my collection of Beat literature. However, I constantly reference works by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and affiliates such as Robert Creeley, Ken Kesey, Anne Waldman, and Paul Bowles. For a long time, I have hated myself for this – have hated the fact that these guys have had such an influence on my life.
I have attempted to deny their influence thrice: denied Burroughs’ truthful life example; denied Allen’s profound bounteous spirit and generosity; denied Ti Jean’s style – be it clothes, alcohol consumption, or prose. I hate them all. I hate Bill for the “Red Night trilogy.” I hate Allen for Howl. And I hate Jack for The Dharma Bums. I hate that I can’t get through a day without thinking of one or all of them. I hate that I cried when Allen and then Bill died. I hate that I never got to meet Jack. Most of all, I hate that I have five copies of Naked Lunch, four of Howl, and three of On the Road – I don’t have the space, guys. Come on.
“I don’t mind people disliking me. The question is, what are they in a position to do about it?” Burroughs wrote in Queer. That could be my motto. That or, “To speak is to lie, to live is to collaborate.” The Beats’ influence on my life reaches deep. My favourite musicians, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Patti Smith, and Tom Waits, are all Beat disciples. Through the Beats, I discovered Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Clark Coolidge. And the Beats kick-started my wanderlust. I first visited New York City to research my PhD on Burroughs at the Butler Library, Columbia University. On that trip, I spent most of my free time in the West End bar (before gentrification), sitting in the wooden booths, imagining Bill, Allen, and Jack’s drug-and-alcohol-fuelled conversations. During a driving holiday in California, I spent my San Francisco days in City Lights Bookstore (and had an argument with a clerk there who had never heard of Ted Berrigan), had my photograph taken in front of the road sign for Jack Kerouac Alley, and downed beers in Vesuvios. My trip to Morocco started and finished in a Tangier’s bar where Burroughs once drank. I walked the hot and dusty streets of the Casbah, the Medina, and the Socco Chico in search of the ghost of El Hombre Invisible. On my second holiday in Rome, I finally got around to visiting the Protestant cemetery to see Keats’s grave and Shelley’s memorial. It went something like this:
Dressed in black and white high-top Converse, ragged and faded Levi’s, a copy of Lonesome Traveler tucked in a back pocket, black angel of death “Boredom” T-shirt, Philippe Starck glasses, hair cropped with a Tintin-like coif, I stand in front of John Keats’s tombstone. Earlier that day, I had visited Keats’s house next to the Spanish Steps. I’d sat in a chair in the library and had my photograph taken – later, when it was developed, it showed a spectral apparition of no one in particular. In the cemetery, scrawny cats beg for food.
Kelly: Steve, come here.
Me: Gimme a second, will you?
Kelly: Come here.I look up. Kelly, smiling, stands by Shelley’s memorial.
Me: What is it?
Kelly: Don’t you know this guy?She says, pointing at the floor. Now, I know I’m quite old and I drink a lot, but I’m sure even I would have remembered meeting Percy Bysshe. I walk over and look down. I burst out laughing. The gravestone reads Gregory Corso…
Me: Gregory, you old sod, how the fuck did you pull this one?
Above my bed, I have a photograph, taken in 1961, inscribed and signed by Allen Ginsberg, of Gregory Corso standing outside William Burroughs’ Tangier apartment. Gregory, hands on hips, mouth wide, teeth-bared in a shit-eating grin very similar to, I would imagine, the one with which he was buried. Last time I was in New York, I visited Bob Rosenthal, Allen Ginsberg’s ex-manager and now executor of the Allen Ginsberg Trust, and Bob explained to me that Gregory’s internment was arranged by friends and supporters who raised enough money for the old bastard to be buried at the feet of his hero. Cool.
Thinking about it, that visit to Bob rekindled my love for the Beats. Bob, as hugely generous with time and gifts as Allen ever was (thank you so much for the books), said something like – and forgive me, Bob, if I misquote – “Ever since Allen died, the world has gone to shit.” You know what? Bob’s right. There is no control of control any more. The ticket has exploded. We need to rethink our escape strategy. Read Allen’s Supermarket in California, read Jack’s Desolation Angels, read Bill’s The Western Lands. As Ol’ Willy Lee himself said, “Death needs time for what it kills to grow in for Ah Pook’s sweet sake, you stupid, vulgar, greedy, ugly American deathsucker.”
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© 2006 Me Three
