| -3/25/04
- Gregory Corso - (Marriage)
Gregory Corso was born on March 26, 1930. He and I share the same birthday,
as does my dog Mystic who recently passed away. Given Mystics recent departure
and the fact that this will the first time in fifteen years we havent
celebrated our birthdays together, I thought of her a bit today as I poked
around the Museum. At one point my eyes fixated on one of Corsos most
celebrated books - The Happy Birthday of Death. It seemed kind of fitting.
This book was written in 1960 and the cover features a mushroom cloud.
Thats about the time I, along with many of you, started diving under our
desks at school.
This morning my wife said to me, "You need to say to everyone you
meet today, 'I'm in my forties!'" "Why do I want to do that?"
I asked her. "Because today is the last day you'll ever be able to
say that." So I did. All day. To everyone. I tell you this because
as I'm writing, it is still true. Once you're reading it, though, I've
moved beyond that stage. It's better than the alternative, I guess.
Marriage
by Gregory Corso
from The Happy Birthday of Death
Should I get married? Should I be Good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky--
When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap--
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?
Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son--
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?
O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just waiting to get at the drinks and food--
And the priest! He looking at me as if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on--
then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climatic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a
scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce--
But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust--
Yet if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear not Roman coin soup--
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon
No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking--
No! I should not get married and I should never get married!
But--imagine if I were to marry a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and highball in the other
and we lived high up a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
No I can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream--
O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes--
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there's maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and--
but there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All in the universe married but me!
Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible--
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait--bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.
------------------
Beat Angel premier at Method Fest in LA April 5th
I think everyone knows I'll be in Los Angeles for the maiden voyage of
the Beatmobile from April 2nd through April 9th. The new movie Beat Angel
will be premiering at The Method Fest in Burbank on April 5th with a second
showing April 7th. The latest news is my good friend, John Cassady, expects
to go with me! That'll be a sight. Me and Cassady rolling down the coast
to LA! I'm not too sure if I should trust him with any of the driving,
though - he may not have inherited Neal's driving abilities! Actually,
I'm sure he can handle it as Ken Kesey asked John to drive "the bus"
into Cleveland to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame years ago. So, if you
want to meet John, come to LA.
For info check: www.beatangel.com
www.methodfest.com
------------------------
LASTLY: While John and I and the Beatmobile will be showing LA what life
is all about, many others from the Beat world will be in Chapel Hill,
North Carolina for a terrific event called "The Beats in America:
- Alternative Visions, Then and Now".
Here's the link: www.lib.unc.edu/beatsconf - and check out these speakers!
It looks like a terrific event!
Bill Morgan, artist, freelance archivist and bibliographer of Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, living in New York City. Morgan is the
author of a half dozen books dealing with the Beats, including the popular
City Lights publications The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour
of Jack Kerouac's City and The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary
Tour. His collections of the works of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg form the
basis for the Rare Book Collections holdings in Beat literature.
Ann Charters, Professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut
at Storrs. She is the first biographer of Jack Kerouac and author of innumerable
books and articles on the Beats, including Beat Down to Your Soul: What
Was the Beat Generation and The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America.
Charters is also the editor of The Portable Beat Reader.
Hilary Holladay, Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts
at Lowell. She is the Director of the annual Kerouac Conference on Beat
Literature sponsored by the University.
Jennie Skerl, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, West
Chester University. She is the author of the 1985 critical study William
S. Burroughs; with Robin Lydenberg, William S. Burroughs at the Front:
Critical Reception, 1959-1989; and Reconstructing the Beats, published
in 2004.
Tim Hunt, Chair of the Department of English at Illinois State University.
He is the author of Kerouac's Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction and
editor of the five volume Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.
Gordon Ball, Professor of English at Virginia Military Institute, former
film maker, photographer, friend and associate of Allen Ginsberg. Ball
is the editor of Allen Ginsberg's early journals and other writings as
well as author of his own remembrances including '66 Frames: A Memoir.
Matt Theado, Professor of English at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling
Springs, North Carolina. Theado is the author of The Beats, a Documentary
Volume and Understanding Jack Kerouac.
Nancy Peters, Co-Director of City Lights Books in San Francisco. Peters
is the author (with Lawrence Ferlinghetti) of Literary San Francisco:
A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day.
Barney Rosset, founder of the famous Grove Press of New York. Rosset
has been the publisher of many of the Beat authors, including Kerouac,
Burroughs, and Ginsberg, as well as other American and European avant-garde
writers. He was also publisher of the influential Evergreen Review. A
leader in some of the most important legal struggles against literary
censorship in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, he was involved
in the successful defenses of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover,
Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and William Burroughs's The Naked Lunch.
Robert Wilson, owner of the well-known and respected Phoenix Book Shop
in New York during the 1960s. Wilson has been an important friend, supporter
of the Beats and, through his poetry chapbook series, publisher of many
of the Beat poets.
John Cohen, still photographer for the classic Beat film Pull My Daisy.
Cohen presently holds the Lehman Brady Chair, Professor of Documentary
and American Studies at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.
He has had a productive career as a photographer and filmmaker. Cohen
is a musician with the popular New Lost City Ramblers.
David Amram, jazz musician at the famous Five Spot Café in New
York in the 1950s and musical accompanist of Jack Kerouac in the late
1950s and 1960s. Amram composed the musical score and acted (along with
Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso) in the famous underground film Pull
My Daisy, narrated by Kerouac and produced by Robert Frank in 1959. He
was also the composer of the musical scores for a number of Hollywood
films (e.g. The Manchurian Candidate) and Broadway plays (e.g. On the
Waterfront). Amram was honored as the first composer-in-residence at the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1970s under Leonard Bernstein.
Amram has been a tireless performer of material related to the Beats,
appearing most recently at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary
of City Lights Books in San Francisco, the Kerouac Festival in Lowell,
and last month at the opening of the exhibition of the original manuscript
scroll of Kerouac's On the Road in Orlando, Florida.
Michael McClure, poet. Associated with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance
of the late 1950s, McClure was one of the young poets who performed at
the legendary reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1956, the
occasion of the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg's Howl. A prolific
writer, McClure has published poetry, fiction, plays, and essays.
Steven Clay, the publisher of Granary Books in New York, is an editor,
curator, and archivist specializing in the art and literature of the 1960s
and 1970s. Clay co-authored, with Rodney Phillips, A Secret Location on
the Lower East Side:
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