May 29, 2010

The title of Bill Morgan’s compelling and beguiling new book, “The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation” (Free Press: $28.00, 293 pps.), is inspired by a footnote from Allen Ginsberg’s epoch-making poem, “Howl.”

“The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!”

In that single line, we are able to glimpse what made Ginsberg and the Beats such a powerful force in the remaking of American popular culture. “The Beats of the forties and fifties were the catalysts who precipitated the more widespread social rebellion of the sixties and seventies,” writes Morgan. “The period of upheaval that we call ‘the sixties’ might well have taken place without the Beat Generation, but it would have certainly had a different flavor and moved at a different pace.”

Although Morgan describes the experiences of a generation, “The Typewriter Is Holy” can also be approached as a strikingly intimate biography of Ginsberg. “I would compare the story of the Beats to a freight train, with Allen Ginsberg as the locomotive that pulled the others along like so many boxcars,” writes Morgan.  “The history of the Beat Generation is really the story of this one man’s desire to gather a circle of friends around him, people he loved and who could love him.”

Morgan, a college student during the 60s, came to know and work with Ginsberg and virtually all of the other Beats except Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac.  He represented Ginsberg in the sale of his papers to Stanford University for a cool million, and thereafter “Allen introduced me as a ‘genius’ of bibliography.” 

So Morgan is able to see the Beats as human beings as well as iconic poets, a fact that helps to explain why his book is so lively and so chatty. “The Typewriter Is Holy” is clearly based on a mastery of the available scholarship, but it is also enlivened by Morgan’s fascination with the flesh-and-blood exploits of the men and women he writes about.  So we are allowed to see ardent seductions (both heterosexual and homosexual), backroom abortions, dabbling in drugs, suicide attempts, and even a murder, all of which help to explain what we read in the poems they left behind.

Thus, for example, Morgan recreates the night of October 17, 1954, when Ginsberg took peyote for the first time and happened to glimpse the Sir Francis Drake Hotel through an open window. “In the San Francisco fog that shrouded the building, he saw the hotel begin to glow with the monstrous face of Moloch, the Phoenician god that was described in the Old Testament as a child-eating demon,” writes Morgan. “It was a horrible, terrifying vision, but one that gave Ginsberg a new insight into the greed of man, and the vision lingered in Allen’s brain long enough for him to write down a detailed description.  Those notes would be become the basis for ‘Howl.’”

For the reader who knows the Beats only obliquely or not at all — and even for readers who may still recall the thrill of reading “Howl” for the first time — “The Typewriter Is Holy” takes us beyond the printed pages of poetry and brings us face to face with the troubled geniuses who created a kind of counter-literature.

There’s a small irony at work in the title of Morgan’s book. “The Ginsberg family was Jewish in name only,” he insists, “and both of Allen’s parents were fully agnostic.”  Yet it is also true that Ginsberg’s Jewishness rings out in his poetry — not only in “Kaddish,” a poem nearly as famous as “Howl,” but even in the footnote that provides the title of Morgan’s book, an allusion to a line from the Book of Isaiah that is sung in every synagogue: “Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh — Holy, holy, holy! The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!”

According to the life of Allen Ginsberg as told by Bill Morgan, the same thing can be said of Ginsberg himself, a man whose poetic sensibilities fill the world in which his fellow poets continue to live and work.

Jonathan Kirsch, author of 13 books, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal and can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com

I went shopping today. With the exception of good bras, you can find pretty much anything you need in Karachi. One of the best markets for kitsch is Zainab market in downtown Saddar.
I park at the Karachi Press Club and walk over to the market. We’ve been getting pretty hot weather but what’s worse is the damn humidity. It’s completely impossible to stay ladylike when your whole body is covered with a thin film of sweat that will not disappear no matter how much you swot yourself.
I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t let the heat bother me. It’s about 39 degrees Celsius these days in Karachi, which at least has a sea breeze. In the interior of the province people are dropping dead like flies in 53 degrees.
But nothing will come between me and my shopping. In particular I’m hoping to find a small embroidered bag for a little girl I’m planning on visiting in London in a week’s time. My boyfriend, also a journalist, is back there, packing up his life in London to return to Pakistan because the recession dried up whatever little work there was. The gift is for his goddaughter.
There are two types of shops in Zainab market – t-shirts and lounge wear and handicrafts. Men skinnier than alley cats call out for me to step into their stall as fat-bottomed women in black burqas rub past me. I’ve never been much of a haggler so I always feel a little infantalised when I venture into these areas. I feel they can tell by my face that I’m ready to part with my money if they give me a good enough excuse.
The handicraft shops stock silver filigree, wooden camels, Quran holders, rip-off Arab tea glasses, mother of pearl boxes, hookahs, stuffed cloth dolls in the traditional dress that bear more of a resemblance to Priscilla Queen of the Desert than anything else. There is even one shop I know where you can buy a Russian Matryushka doll set. The cute items are the mini rickshaw models, which I stop to consider. S said L was interested in fairies these days. Modes of transport might not amuse her. I move on.
I’m a sucker for handicrafts, cushion covers, batik, mirror work, shawls, bright baubles, beads, useless things that tend to look tacky the minute I bring them back home. My mother, who will buy nothing less than Hermes Birkin, scoffs at my more ‘slummy’ tastes. I generally like ‘slumming’ it whether it’s my choice of dates or clothes. I’d rather wear a glittery 200-rupee ($2.50) sandal covered in sequins than Nine West wedges.
Some of the shopkeepers call me ‘Baji’ or sister. Others call out ‘Aunty’ which reminds me that I’m no longer a spring chicken with my little pot belly and fleshy arms. At least I looked moneyed, I comfort myself and grip my 7,000-rupee fire engine red leather Jaferjees bag closer into my sweating armpit.
I get into one stall after I’ve decided that they all look the same anyway. I look around at his stacked shelf and remember I’ve been here before. This was the man with the necklines from Mithi, Tharparkar, a desert district nearly bordering India where the women do great work.
I sit down on a stool and he starts pulling the scraps of cloth out. They are tattered and old but the work is beautiful. I feel very vintage. Some of them are even fully stitched. I pull one up and the smell hits me. It’s a musty smell that you get if you’ve been layering rugs.
I pick out a few and decide that even if I’m being ripped off, which is most likely to be the case, I can get the work copied and still have emerged the winner. I barely haggle and he prepares a bill.
Listen, I tell him. If any fresh stuff comes in, call me. I hand him my visiting card and he goes off.
When he comes back, he looks a little perplexed.
“Aunty, the card isn’t working,” he says.
“What?”
“See… It’s not working.” He holds it out. I realize he’s running my visiting card through his handheld debit card machine.