Allen Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues (Chorus 27) continues from here
AG: “(The music) Of Old Father Time/ Mustache on a Jimmy the Greek/stage…” – (“Jimmy the Greek” was an Old Bohemian that hung around San Francisco,I mean around New York’s Greenwich Village, back in the Twenties and Thirties, along with Maxwell Bodenheim, Joe Gould, and then later Jimmy the Greek, from the ‘Thirties and ‘Forties. (Bodenheim and Joe Gould from the ‘Twenties). Joe Gould is the subject of a poem by e.e. cummings that begins, “little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where/to find them.” Joe Gould was writing an oral history of the world. Of course, being an oral history it never got written down. But he’d go around cadging money for drinks, saying, “I’m completing my oral history of the world.” And his famous act in the bars of the Village was his seagull act, where he’d wave his… he was a little short guy with bald head and a white beard and he’d wave his arms and go “arp, arp, arp, arp, arp” – “I’ll do my seagull act for a buck.” He was around in the Forties when we were in the Village, and Jimmy the Greek was just another Village character – Diamond Jimmy the Greek, who made… I think just hanging around, trying to make girls and drinking wine and making believe he wrote poetry, or painted, or something like that. He was just a con man. There’s also the famous Jimmy the Greek of Las Vegas who’ll make bets on anything or some eternal character floating around called “Jimmy the Greek”
“Mustache on a Jimmy the Greek/stage..” – (It’s like a… who’s the celebrated Bohemian? Is there anyone around now that’s a famous Bohemian?
Student: Gregory (Corso).
AG: Gregory, no. Say John Barrymore Sr. Remember Barrymore? “On a Barrymore Sr./stage” – if you wanted a dramatic, melodramatic drunken stage.
So (then) he goes back to “Ork” again – (Ork, I guess, is the last moment when you choke – “Ork!” – “Ork, song of Nova Scotia,/Silly..”
So he’s now going – “(Silly) any, songs,/Floating in the Open Blue”
Then there’s a writer now called Alan Harrington. Has anybody ever… he writes for the New Yorker. He writes brief books, sort of witty American cynical books for the New Yorker. He was living with a Russian emigre, or Old Bohemian, character named Luba, or Lubova, or something, (Luba Petrova) called Luba for short. And there was some parties around in New York in the late Forties and early Fifties with Harrington, Luba, John Clellon Holmes, the novelist, and some.. Jimmy the Greek, and whoever else was around. And one night Luba got really drunk and began repeating the word “balloons” – (she brought in a balloon) – and kept saying that’s what the universe was, it was a big balloon. It was very light – “See, it’s a balloon, you can make it go up to the ceiling”/ And she kept drunkenly insisting all… (I think New Year’s Eve, I guess New Year’s Eve) – and there were balloons, and she was saying that, (Allen affects mock-Hungarian accent) “Life is balloons, my dear fellows, my young American friends, it is all balloons! It is balloonian balloons. Do not take it too seriously. Do not be tragic! If you had the European experience that I did from Hungary you would know it was balloons.”
So he’s repeating that now – “Floating in the Open Blue,/ Balancing on Balloons,/Balloons, BALLOONS,/BALLOONS of Rose Hope” – (Rose wine and rose hope and rose-colored glasses) – “BALLOONS of Rose Hope” – (That is, all hope and optimism is a bunch of balloons) – “the Vast Integral Crap/a/Baloons/ BALLOONS is your time/ B a l l o o n s is the ending/ THAT’S THE SCENE”
That was a great moment for Kerouac – or that was a sort of epiphany. Because he dug her character and he dug the taste and juice and funniness of her statement that everything was balloons, coming from a blasé big-breasted old Russian émigré who was going around drinking and seeing New York and working at the Museum of Modern Art, or working in fashion, or working at Schiaparelli, or something like that – Somebody who knew the world. A very worldly statement.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-one-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-six minutes in