It’s Bird (Charlie Parker)’s Birthday today, born 1920 in Kansas City (tho’ he swiftly escaped from there)
“Charlie Parker looked like Buddha” (Jack Kerouac)
Always a pleasure to play again Jack’s mellifluous words
Happy Birthday in Eternity, Bird
As America’s cultural wars alarmingly deepen, an experiment in cultural perception conducted by Harvard fellow and Cornell PhD Adam Szetela, author of the new book That Book Is Dangerous: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing (MIT Press, 2025), reminds us, if we didn’t know it already, of the dangerous combination of ignorance (inaccuracy) and social pressure, a mind already made-up and weaponized, more than pertinent in this case regarding Allen Ginsberg.
Szetela speaks of an experiment he made:
“(W)e used A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg- a poem that, in the real world, has never been accused of anything…the poem is just about shopping in a supermarket. When we gave it to the first group, no one found it problematic. Then for the second group, I wrote a fake critique saying it was homophobic, and attributed it to a respected critic..”
about 35 percent of respondents clicked “homophobic.” I was like, wow, we just got people to call Allen Ginsberg – a gay poet—a homophobe. That’s how powerful this is.”
Adam Szetela and Quillette’s Zoe Booth in conversation – here
Natalie – Robert Dumont‘s vital exploration/examination of the life of Beat muse, Natalie Jackson comes out this week.
As the publishers attest:
“This haunting and lyrical book does not attempt a traditional biography—nor does it fictionalize the life of Natalie Jackson into a seamless narrative. Instead, Natalie is a literary collage, composed of shards and fragments: first-person narratives, archival echoes, journal entries, photographs, and remembered voices…Jackson…emerges not as a single fixed image, but as a figure refracted through many lenses..”
For more on the book – see here
Another new book out this week – (from City Lights) – Austin Carder‘s translation of the final book of Andre Breton, André Breton, “Perspective Cavalier, (Cavalier Perspective – Last Essays 1952-1966), rendered into English for the first time.
Lucy Sante writes:
“Cavalier Perspective shows us the lion in winter, André Breton near the end of his life, trying to reconcile all the contradictions of his extraordinary career. It is unexpectedly moving to watch him wrestling with his ghosts, aiming for magic, fitting himself uneasily into the new alien landscape of the 1960s.”
Read an excerpt from the book (in The Paris Review) here
September 11 (10pm EDT) Garrett Caples will interview Carder about the book – see here
A signed copy of Straight Hearts Delight (signed to Joan Baez) came up for sale this week, -asking price 1,750 pounds (approx $ 2367) – “For Joan Baez and all of her loves and lovers from half of the authors (sic), visiting San Francisco, June 29,1980, Poetry reading w/Gregory Corso” (signed also by the publisher Winston Leyland)
And a late last-minute urgent call (excuse the pun!) – anyone up for preserving Allen’s old organ?
For reasons too labyrinthine to go into, the venerable instrument needs to be summarily dispensed with (we have until September 14th! ). The fortunate recipient will need to travel to Mamaroneck (Westchester County) to retrieve it. We’re really hoping it can find a loving and fitting new home.
The basic premise of Szetela has been well known for a very long time under the heading “confirmation bias” as you point out when you say “reminds us ,if we didn’t know already”. Yes -most PhD dissertations say nothing new.
I suspect that Szetela is not much of a literary critic, or Ginsberg scholar, if he thinks that “A Supermarket in California” is a poem “just about shopping in a supermarket” . Doesn’t Szetela pick up on the resonances and connotations of Ginsberg(or the persona in the poem if you must) saying”Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber…eyeing the grocery boys”…and later in the poem asking “will we walk all night through solitary streets”. Not much of a stretch to think that G-berg is poignantly expressing the fear of becoming a lonely old man as a result of his sexual orientation, which today could very well be considered a form of internalized homophobia, which Ginsberg does point to in many other poems : think for example of “Ignu” where he says “The Ignu may be queer though like not kind” In fact when ,at Brooklyn College ,I showed Ginsberg himself my line about him in “Psychedelic Steppenwolves “-“when Allen Ginsberg’s Uncle Sam hat fell off his head and out popped a self-hating Buddhist narcissist whose gift of Utopian insight remains unopened in the howling heart’ he chuckled and nodded approvingly.