Allen Ginsberg on Vanity of Duluoz – 7

Allen continues his readings from Vanity of Duluoz

“I walk Moody Street  At midnight in bright moonlight.I walk Moody Street over crunching snow and felt something awful that had not been in Lowell before, For one thing I was the “failure back in town” for another, I had lost the glamor of New York City and the Columbia campus and the tweeded outlook of sophomores, had lost   glittering Manhattan, was back trudging among the brick walls of the mills.”

He came back… Since he’d cut out of Columbia, he’d  already broken that pattern of Fitzgerald-ean, novelistic nostalgia fantasy that he’d started out (with), and now was in some kind of awful grid of having to face the solitude of actually being a writer, or worker, and not just going through, sliding along on the fantasy of a youth-time romance, with money making it alright – “The tweeded look of sophomores” – the “glamor” of the “tweeted look of sophomores”

He’s got some suggestions for writers here, since he’s just describing the time when his writing begins getting codified, clarified, his method –

“That’s how writers begin, by imitating the masters (without suffering like said masters till they larn their own style and by the time they larn their own there’s no more fun it in because you can’t imitate another other master’s suffering but your own”

So he’s saying, it’s alright, begin by imitating the masters, but then when you get your own suffering you have your own suffering to write about – and there’s no more fun in it. (that’s page 109)…

So then he actually examines his own early writings, his own diaries, of age of.. oh, I guess eighteen, nineteen,  when he went out on the sea transport, military sea transport:

“All eyes peeled to the periscope. Wonderful evening spent before with the, (not Navy ,excuse me) Army gun crew near the big gun , playing popular records on the phonograph, the Army fellas seem much more  sincere than the hardened seasoned dockrats.  Here’s a few notes from my own personal log.   ( I think he’s, at the age of forty-six, saying, here’s a few notes from my own personal log of my Salingeresque days of 1938)

Note – “There are a few acceptable men here and there like Don Gary, the new scullion, a sensible and friendly fellow. He has a wife in Scotland, joined the Merchant Marines to get back to Scotland, in fact I met one of the passengers, or construction workers, an Arnold Gershon, an earnest youth from Brooklyn – (that’s pretty good actually for, I guess it’s, his earliest journals, (or not earliest but it’s late-teenage journals gig aboard a ship).  And another fellow works in the butcher’s shop. Outside of these, my acquaintances have so far been fruitless, almost foolish.I am trying hard to be sincere but the crew prefers, I suppose, embittered cursing and bawdry foolishness. Well, at least being misunderstood  is being like the hero in the movies  (Can you imagine such crap written in a scullions diary?)” – (this is his 1967 comment on that)  – “I am trying hard to be sincere but the crew prefers, I suppose, embittered cursing and bawdry foolishness. Well, at least being misunderstood  is being like the hero in the movies (Can you imagine such crap written in a scullions diary?)”

Then it gets kind of interesting, because he’s mixing his old early diary writing and then the old master is adding on little phrases to hop it up a little bit, to make it funnier, or parody it, or add on, or just being playful (quoting himself at eighteen and being playful, adding on some late cadenza). So I’ll read this paragraph:

–  “(Can you imagine such crap written in a scullion’s diary?) – ‘Sunday July 26 – A beautiful day! Clear and windy, with a choppy sea that looks like a marine painting…long flecked billows of blue water, with the wake of our ship like a bright green road…Nova Scotia to larboard. We have now passed through the Cabot Straits” – (1967) – “(Who’s Cabot? A Breton?) (Pronounced Cay-beau,Cay beau Strait) – back to:

“‘Up we go, to northern seas.Ah there you’ll find that shrouded Arctic” – unquote – . (“that wash of pronounced sea-talk, that parturient snowman ice mountain plain, that bloody Genghis Khan plain of seaweed talk broken only by uprisings of foam)” –  (there’s a little parenthesis he threw in on top of his journal). It’s funny,  his pure appreciation of vowels and the babble of the mind, the playfulness of it,  and the easiness of the writing of this

‘Up we go, to northern seas.Ah there you’ll find that shrouded Arctic” – (written in 1938, and then his comment – ) – ” (that wash of pronounced sea-talk, that parturient snowman ice mountain plain, that bloody Genghis Khan plain of seaweed talk broken only by uprisings of foam)” – (end parenthesis – with all the implication there, also, like, that it all comes to nothing in the end, great “uprisings of foam”

“Yessir, boy, the earth is an  Indian thing but the waves are Chinese. Know what that means?  Ask the guys who drew those old scrolls, or ask the old Fishermen of Cathay, and what Indian ever dared to sail to Europe or Hawaii from the salmon-tumbling streams of North America? When I say Indian, I mean Ogallag. ( Ogallag – there’s that alcoholic mouthy playfulness  – “When “I say Indian, I mean Ogallag”) – “The earth is an Indian thing” I think is a line from originally, a favorite line of Kerouac’s, from probably On The Road somewhere?  Does anybody know that line? – ” The earth is an Indian thing”

Audio for the above can be heard here, starting at approximately forty minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-six-and-a-half minutes in

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