Allen Ginsberg Books

What an idiot! Makes no sense.

Bless my soul jelly roll, this is not ordinary literary criticism about sources and influences but an epic drama, a hero's journey. A murderer, a schizophrenic, a male prostitute and an alcoholic read a proto-Nazi theory of everything and find personal redemption through pop culture.

But is this the final frame of reference? Every generation since has struggled to re-frame the meaning of the past day by day, and I suspect that's what this book (or its subject matter anyway) is "really" about. It's post-modern, rock-and-roll, cheese bait and cadillac fins. You be the poem.

Dr. Lardas' grounding of the early Beats' intellectual program in their communal reading of Oswald Spengler's _Decline of the West_ is an unusually substantive contribution to the field. Too often, monographs on the Beats are either tedious [strange] political treatises masquerading as literary history, or hagiographies of Kerouac's youthful wanderlust, neither of which category of inquiry could possibly add anything to the witness of the individual artists in question through their works. However, Lardas shows that Spengler's vision of the cyclical nature of civilization and the contemporeneity of the end of the Western European cycle led Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg to look for the seeds of the next cycle in the vibrant, marginalized communities of which they were a part.

Dr. Lardas' prose style can best be described as "sparkling ramble". The energy of his ideas, bursting with the Mediterranean vigor of his jacket photo, at times overwhelms the larger structure of the book that is laid upon them. Happily enough this compositional tension congrues with the subject matter.

This isn't an in-depth look at Mr. Ginsberg's life by any means. It's more of a picture book, text dominated by photos, some great photos. That being said, there are several kernals of gold to be mined from the text as well.

Great photographs...but the woman in the picture on page 98 (seated between Ginsberg and Tim Leary) is incorrectly identified as "Mrs. Leary". She is, in fact, Peggy Hitchcock.

While this is not the most in depth book on Allen Ginsberg, it is a very good one. Screaming With Joy gives a brief overview of the life of the poet from his birth to his death, focusing primarily on his experiences and the social and political environments that made him what he was. If you do not know much about this incredible man and powerful poet this book is an excellent starting point; if you are familiar with Ginsberg you will definitely want to check out the over one hundred photographs and the quotations and anecdotes from his contemporaries that the book offers. All in all, I highly recommend this book.

Ginsberg's on-and-off fascination with photography left some nice intimate records of the lives around him. We see a slim and young full-mopped Ginsberg, seen smiling on a ship "smoking what," and candid shots of Burroughs, Kerouac, and other less famous Beats as they interacted with each other. You will find that there's much more to the camaraderie of these guys than just trying to get laid (re: the other review).

Ginsberg's on-and-off fascination with photography left some intimate records of the lives around him. We see a slim and young full-mopped Ginsberg, smiling on a ship "smoking what," and candid shots of Burroughs, Kerouac, and other less famous Beats as they interacted with each other. You will find that there's much more to the camaraderie of these guys than just trying to get laid (re: the other review).

It is interesting to see all the old men with their 'boys' in the photographs from the 1980s. Seems that the beats' endless search for kicks and highs always ended up with the ego-centered desire to prove that they could get laid. Yes, we know that the beats got laid, although their writing about sex always was at about a 9th grade level.

What is weird to a mature eye is that they never got over their childish obsessions with young flesh. And the boys, some cute, most just young, live out their lives as footnotes to the stars. In the age of AIDS, most of the beats would have died before becoming famous at all. Something for young new 'beats' to think about now--before they too become just dead footnotes.

Ginsberg showed love in the early pictures--later, just cold views of the famous and their young sex objects--over and over and over. The beats used people; many in the photographs killed themselves or were pushed out of history. Ginsberg gives us a snapshot of how the myth was created.

Podhoretz has received the Presidential Medal of Honor.
He's a bit too old for this silliness and smearing, but smearing is what he does well.
A juvenile, 'National Enquirer'-worthy account of wealthy, so-called intellectual, low-lifes.
It is an account of the exchanges of Zionist traitors who influence US government.

Norman Podhoretz was a New York intellectual in the 1950's-60's, once editor of Commentary magazine. A left-leaning writer then, in the early 70's he began leaning right and became one of the "founding fathers" of neoconservatism. He was an anti-Communist who rebelled against the anti-American bent of the 60's radicals. (The thought of Jane Fonda all decked out in her love beads sitting down with the North Vietnamese leadership to trash all things American still gives neocons the heebie-jeebies.)

This was when he began breaking with old friends, such as the ones named in the book's title. Most of these people (taken from Podhoretz's viewpoint) are not very pleasant. (Is there anything more vicious than an intellectual scorned?) But Podhoretz is very much on the defensive, and like the "lady who protests too much," makes the reader wary. Whether you go along with his politics or not, I thought it was a pretty interesting book anyway.

This highly readable book is going to be despised on the far left for exposing some of the key intellectual icons/godparents of the movement as insidious buffoons. A useful and brief companion book written years ago for some context would be Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic/Mau Mauing the Flakcatchers.

Podhoretz, the man who recently said what's the big deal about a few thousand dead G.I.'s in Iraq considering what's at stake (without having a clue that nothing is at stake), Norman disparages the artist/intellectual/egotists of the 60's/70's that don't fall in line with his ideology while today he lauds the conservative egomaniacs that have brought our country to its low level of intellectualism and turned a nation founded by intellectual deists into a Disneyworld of McReligion. But it's all fine so long as we make the world safe for democracy. Norman seems to think there is something hypocritical about professing social justice and being a small time celebrity, when in fact, as Freud said, the partial motivation of any "artist" is fame and the love of women (speaking I assume of male artists). Einstein enjoyed the limelight; everyone enjoys the limelight and everyone has his or her weaknesses. Have you ever read Einstein's poetry? YUK! So to disparage the ones you don't happen to like is a bit disingenuous. The true irony is that only an attention-seeking egotist would write a book about such trivial nonsense. But this is all in keeping with a man who explains what writers should be writing if they only knew better, ex., he applauded James Baldwin's early career because he was on his way to being another Henry James; he condemns him when Baldwin's attention turned to racism in America. Imagine that: a black writer distraught over racism in America. The very idea! I think Norm's whole problem can be traced back to his youth, which he relates in his autobiography "Making It," talking about taking the subway from culturally challenged Brooklyn to Manhattan, growing up as a nice Jewish boy, the son of modest working class parents, attending college, and rising among the ranks of the intellectual New York crowd. Nowadays, Norm is comparing the invasion of Iraq to the invasion of Normandy, and explains that Iraq will become democratic by using as an analogy post-WW II Germany's quick transition to a modern democracy (of course, with the help of 2 1/2 million allied troops occupying it). How did this guy ever have friends to begin with???

Norman Podhoretz is one of the most important American intellectuals of the Post- War period. His shift away from the Left toward a Conservative position helped mark a new period in American intellectual life. In this memoir he writes about the ' friends' of a former time, each of whom is a distinguished 'name' by themselves. Allen Ginsberg, Hannah Arendt, the Trillings, Lionel and Diana, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer. Podhoretz blends the personal anecodote with the ideological quarrel in explaining his estrangement from these friends. At one point he talks about how their radical indulgence in their own appetites led to a kind of moral chaos which he understood as destructive and damaging.
There is a question raised by many readers of the morality of turning on old friends in this way, and writing as if one were the only righteous man among a bunch of misguided moral morons. Other readers point out the possible envy motive given the fact that all the people he writes about are probably considered by most to be more important ' creative figures ' than him. Certainly Arendt, and Mailer fit this category.
Podhoretz however should not be underestimated and he as a critic , and as a moral and literary guide is a person of considerable weight and stature. I would not say that everything here suits my taste, but there is a great deal of interesting writing about the intellectual life of the American fifties, and of some of its major characters.

[...]. But then I also suggest getting a subscription to the National Enquirer, for the same rhetoric to be found in that rag is to be found in this book's overtly slanted viewpoint. Every luminary in this significant literary and cultural movement is depicted as psychotic, criminal, racist, and sexually confused. Nothing positive about the Beat Generation is mentioned. Granted, the Beats had their personal faults, but who doesn't? Campbell does a great disservice to his readers by not presenting a balanced perspective of the Beats and the influence they have had around the world. If you're looking for fair, introspective commentary on the Beat Generation...look elsewhere.

I started reading this book with little prior knowledge of the beat movement and authors. I also didn't expect much from the book, thinking that it would probably be a rather academic piece of writing. And what a pleasant surprise it turned out to be! The book was so gripping that I finished it in a few days, reading long passages at a time. It covers the rise to prominence of the dramatis personae of the beat movement (focusing on Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs), giving enough information on their backgrounds to facilitate an understanding of how this influenced them and their writing, but does not dwell on unnecessary minutiae in the process. All the information is presented in a concise and remarkably readable manner. The author points out the foibles of the beats, but is not too judgemental, leaving it to the reader to come to his own conclusions.

But the best thing about this book is the way the author links events and people in a witty, intelligent way without falling into the very beat trap of being pretentious. It can serve as an example to all authors wishing to write an intelligent, accessible work of non-fiction.

THE Beat Poet fails to deliver once again. i seriously don't know where this man's fame comes from. it isn't his poetry (with the exception of Howl and a few other poems). there really isn't much to say about ginsberg's work other than it is bad. maybe if he had spent a little time in revision he could have done better. you're best off with his selected or collected poems.

Regardless of your feelings about the man, his lifestyle, and even his writings, one cannot deny that Ginsberg was one of the monumental figures of 20th century American literature. He was talented, prolific, and was writing good stuff up until the very end.

I was very pleased with the contents of this book. At this point I've read most of Ginsberg's writings. While I do in general prefer his earlier work to his later work, I definitely enjoyed the poems in this book. I'd put it a little above his "Cosmopolitan Greetings," which I also enjoyed very much.

I think it's important to not expect the Ginsberg of the 80s and 90s to be the same as the Ginsberg of the 40s and 50s. Like any creative individual, he evolved over time. Some may like the change, others apparently do not. I like all of his work, old and new, and I consider this to be as important a reading as anything else for anyone wanting to get a clear picture of the whole of Ginsberg. For those starting out with ginsberg, I would recommend the collected works book with the red cover from the same publisher to start with. But if you've already got an appreciation for the man and his work, I can recommend this volume without any reservations whatsoever.

5 stars for this one.

Having been a young gay man in New York during the era covered in these photos, I found myself a bit bemused by this book. A large number of the photos are of skinny lads with their shirts off or grimacing drag queens, whereas my own memories are of more varied crowds. The photos themselves are very much alike, and soon begin to blur one into the other. The photographer was not blessed with an artistic or selective eye. Nevertheless, the photos are a historical record, if a partial one.

The picture captions, however, are nothing short of awful. Written by the gay poet and Beatnik icon, Allan Ginsberg, they read like the giddy outpourings of a junior high school glue sniffer. The publisher has seen fit to print each caption twice, once in type and once in Ginsberg's handwriting - a dubious bonus. They have no real relation to the pictures, which might have been made more interesting with some focused comment.

The cover has been tarted up with art work that suggests Day-Glo flower stickers.

not much to say- a bunch of pics from back in the day- the hot pants and hair and moustaches are interesting to view-

Greil Marcus's review in The New York Times Book Review says it so well: this book is TIRESOME. Most of the contributors seem so in love with their own voices that they don't even listen to Ginsberg's. I found no new critical insights here, but plenty of posturings by the same cronies Shinder features in his other collections. The book will appeal to the same 2,000 (if that) readers who think Sven Birkerts and Carol Muske Dukes are good writers, all evidence to the contrary. It's fun to imagine Ginsberg himself reacting to the egregious bathos collected in this book; he had a low tolerance for phonies, particularly poets intent on nothing but self-promotion.

The complete poem is in fact included.
A 1956 mimeographed copy follows the intro and preceeds the collection of essays.
It also includes a 32 minute CD of Allen Ginsbergs March 18, 1956 "Howl" public reading.
This is a fine collection of essays from a wide variety of authors/artist that have been influenced by this poem.

This book is full of poorly written essays backed only by the authors' direct ties to the beat generation.

Instead, buy this book ("Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author..."), which is cheaper and very very interesting to those fascinated by Howl and Ginsberg, or even just the poetic process.

"Howl Fifty years later" was a great disapointment for me.

The sad truth is that the "praise" this book offers is never very interesting.

Sorry. Love Ginsberg, hate po-biz.