i12bent

Marilyn private at Arthur Miller's Long Island place..

I'm watching the first episode out of ten in the new series on Danish television, DK4, Tankens Magt (The Power of Thought). This is a very good initiative started by my colleague at Roskilde U, Vincent F. Hendricks. Hendricks is a professor of formal philosophy interested in the relation between math, logic, and the everyday life. As far as I can gather, one of the aims of the series is to demystify the role of philosophy as far as the masses are concerned. The argument is that we use philosophy every day, even when we don't always begin our mornings with questioning what the meaning of life is. So philosophy, apart from posing big metaphysical questions, also poses small questions, self-evident questions, irrelevant questions, interesting questions, boring questions, subtle questions, disturbing questions, comforting questions, appealing questions, revolting questions. The list can go on.

In Jack Kerouac's novel Dharma Bums the protagonist, alter-ego of Kerouac, named Ray Smith, encounters 'the number one Dharma Bum of them all', Japhy Ryder, who instantly decides that Ray is a great Buddhist sage, possibly a reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Great Compassion Bodhisattva (more likely, though, a reincarnation of Goat or Mudface, Ryder teases Smith later on), and when they enter a San Francisco bar together and their friends inquire where they have met, Ryder gleefully announces: "I always meet my Bodhisattvas in the street!"

This week's blog version of The Beat Generation Revisited lecture takes us on a journey into a dark continent of drug abuse, pretty boys who orgasm as their necks snap in the hangman's noose, and marks and narcs melting into one another - in the flesh - turning into ectoplasm. You've guessed it: we are not Stanleys looking for Dr. Livingstone here - rather the topic of inquiry is William Burroughs and his gallery of characters from The Naked Lunch, led by the mad master surgeon, Dr. Benway who's never met an abdomen he didn't want to slice open and eviscerate...

The recently discovered first recording of Ginsberg reading Part I of the poem (the famous 6 Gallery reading in October '55 was not recorded) has now been made available to the general public...