The fight to publish Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/05/09/the-fight-to-publish-allen-ginsbergs-howl/

by everbody • 7 years ago

85 67 7 years ago

lenticular• 7 years ago

It's pretty incredible how recent many of our seemingly inalienable rights (actual freedom of speech, de jure racial equality, right to representation, prohibition of the use of illegally obtained evidence, etc) have actually only been around a few decades, mostly thanks to the visionary Warren and Burger courts.

They were considered dangerous activist judges by many in their time.

nullc• 7 years ago

With the US standing almost alone among developed nations and even the ACLU backing away from its policy of defending impolitic or hurtful speech we can probably expect this recent anomaly of free expression to be relatively short lived.

I'm glad I got to live now and not some other time.

peteretep7• 7 years ago

Could you briefly outline how you think the USA has benefitted from this freedom, in a way that other rich Western countries haven’t? I guess I’m specifically thinking of Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, as all have broadly similar legal systems and robust judiciaries / policing, but not the singular focus on free speech.

jmpman2• 7 years ago

The right to support and be a member of NAMBLA - not our greatest achievement. Just happens to be another of Allen Ginsburg’s achievements.

asveikau2• 7 years ago

Ginsberg's association with NAMBLA is indeed odd and unfortunate, as it taints a lot of his more respectable work. Here is what wikipedia quotes a friend of his as saying:

But, in fact, he was a pedophile. He did not belong to [NAMBLA] out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to [f*ck] children and his constant pursuit of underage boys

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg#Association_w...

In the same way that it's hard to like a Woody Allen film or Michael Jackson song -- you can recognize the quality of the art but then realize they may have a monstrous side.

bloak• 7 years ago

I would guess that to most of the world's population "prohibition of the use of illegally obtained evidence" is a crazy and stupid idea. Apart from the USA, which countries have a rule like that? (Perhaps Germany does?)

I'm not saying the rule didn't serve a useful purpose in some particular historical circumstances, but in general if you know that X is true then you should use that fact to avoid miscarriages of justice, and if crimes were committed in establishing the truth of X then you should hold a separate trial of the people responsible for those crimes (unless of course they are dead or for some other reason cannot be tried).

richardhod3• 7 years ago

I think many here learned to appreciate this poem from HN postings of this analysis of Howl:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

SSC is a great site, and if you haven't, please do have a look^. Do please, however, be aware that spiked-online is pretty alt-right and politically extreme, and although this is a decent historical piece, most articles there are of the ultra-neocon and angry cable talkshow style opinion, dressed in intellectual wording.

yarrel• 7 years ago

Spiked Online is a successor to Living Marxism magazine. It's left contrarianism of the horseshoe theory kind.

richardhod3• 7 years ago

Only partly true, I'm afraid. This source is hard right. I don't want to go down a non HN- rabbit hole bc we're here to talk mostly about tech and information related things, but in extreme cases it's worth noting. I had also once thought Soiked was left wing, its editorial bears no resemblance to the old Left whatsoever. You might call it alt-right-libertarian, and funded by the notorious Koch brothers. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Spiked

dang3• 7 years ago

On HN, it's the article that matters. Most primarily-political sites have a downweight on them, but we turn the downweight off when a good article comes along. Or try to, at least; it depends on whether we see it or someone points it out to us.

mandelbrotwurst2• 7 years ago

Are you saying that they're algorithmically downweighted and that you manually turn that off when it seems appropriate?

Interesting, I thought the feed was just based on chronology + votes! How quaint of me. Is there anything written anywhere about how the feed algorithm works generally?

nemosaltat• 7 years ago

The excerpt in the article is misprinted (2019-05-13-0118 GMT). It should read: _“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”_

In the article _angry_ and _negro_ are transposed.

buzzert• 7 years ago

Fans of the movie Hackers (1995) will recall Dade Murphy reading the first line of Howl in his advanced English class.

The Beat culture of the 1950's was absolutely the predecessor to the hacker/cyberpunk culture of the 1990's.

jlarocco• 7 years ago

Funny, I just bought a collection of Ginsberg's poetry after seeing a reference to 'Howl' in the "Academe's Extinction" article posted here the other night.

pseingatl• 7 years ago

These days, long form poetry is dead.

50• 7 years ago

On a tangent: If you were alive during the counterculture movement of the 1960s/1970s and have strong thoughts about it, I would love to do a short interview via email (email is in my profile bio) - it's for a history paper.

mgr86• 7 years ago

As a Ginsberg related aside I often think his poem "I Am a Victim of Telephone" could be refreshed as a comment on modern life.

    [...]How are you dear can you come to Easthampton we're all here bathing in  the ocean we're all so lonely

    and I lie back on my palette contemplating $50 phone bill, broke, drowsy,

       anxious, my heart fearful of the fingers dialing, the deaths, the  singing of telephone bells

    ringing at dawn ringing all afternoon ringing up midnight ringing now

       forever.

The fight to publish Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’

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