125: When I think about Ginsberg
Hello, I hope Border Crossing issue #125 finds you in good spirits, thank you for reading, most importantly I hope you have access to shade and a satisfying quantity of ice cream.
This issue I’ve typed out some thoughts on my relationship with the American poet Allen Ginsberg, on the centenary of his birth.
Also, wishing you a very happy International Day of The Potato, if you celebrate such things. It’s today, so go fill your boots. Sausage and mash tonight.
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Footie season done and dusted. Congratulations Colin Beard’s team ‘Unai Way Or Another’ for winning the Border Crossing FPL league, despite the awful pun, by a healthy margin. Let’s not talk about where I came, my mid-season slump was brutal. Here’s your top five…
Also, wishing Arsenal all the best. I’m hitting ‘publish’ on the morning of the Champions League final.
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I had fun interviewing two time Drag Race icon, Celeb Mastermind winner and hilarious queen Kate Butch for The Old Market Podcast. The link is to Apple but search “tompod” or “old market podcast” wherever you do your listening and you’ll find us.
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Over summer I have availability for creativity consultations if you fancy meeting up. Through July, I’ll be based in Berlin, so if that puts me in reach of you for a conversation about your creative life, get in touch.
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Two weeks ago I wrote a short thing on Facebook —
Bob Dylan getting called “Judas!” at Manchester Free Trade Hall happened sixty years ago today* (thanks Simon Warner for that nugget) which means that when it happened, David Attenborough was already forty years old. He’d been in his late thirties when the Beatles released ‘Love Me Do’.
Perhaps most importantly: in 1979 when the BBC released ‘Life On Earth’ — redefining natural history filmmaking, changing humanity’s understanding of nature in the twentieth century and re-inventing his own career — Attenborough was already well into his fifties. He’d turned down the change to become Director General of the BBC, because he wanted to keep making films. If he’d taken the big job, he would never have hung out with those gorillas.
If you’re feeling stuck right now, know that you’re not done. You could be just getting started. You don’t have to float to the notional top, if that means (for example) sitting at a boring desk and dealing with dweebs. You don’t need to be a David Attenborough or a Bob Dylan to find ways to do what inspires you.
* on 17th May.
Right, let’s get going.
xx
gems
1
I love this vicious tour-de-force alt/perspective on Hamlet by Emma of Past Life, Present Cleavage newsletter.
2
Since the last issue’s birdwatching mini-adventure, I dived into the hugely popular sweet cult documentary film Listers (free on YouTube) about two American stoner dudes chasing as many bird species as possible in one year. Thanks to Manx Stef as well as Charlie Peverett for flagging this gem.
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Jean Smart off of Hacks was wonderful on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ excellent podcast series Wiser Than Me.
4
New podcast discovery: storyteller and writer Laura Markwardt’s Niche ID is conversations with people about making choices in creative lives. I found this show via John Higgs, who she interviews for her latest episode.
5
Mathew Baynton (off of Ghosts and Taskmaster) reads Joel Morris’ ace short story ‘The Circle’, commissioned for BBC Radio 4’s Short Works strand. For everyone who was in a school band.
6
Veteran critic and artist Matthew Collings’ protest exhibition ‘Drawings Against Genocide’ has come under intense, wholly unjust attack orchestrated by the nasty thugs at UK Lawyers for Israel.
7
A couple of days ago, celebrating Eid-al-Adha, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wore his traditional kurta in the branding of Arsenal Football Club. In the rose-tinted haze of their Premier League win Mamdani writes a sweet ‘fan’s eye view’ type essay for The Athletic of his lifelong obsession with the London club.
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Crooked Media’s Mother Country Radicals audio series tells the story of the 1970s United States leftist revolutionary group Weather Underground from a unique family perspective.
potato gems
• Today’s International Day of The Potato is actually run by the United Nations.
• I’m currently growing two pots. I planted commercial seed potatoes (pot on the left) and some random old spuds that had sprouted (pot on the right). The right pot came up fastest and looked best for a while, but more recently the growth has evened out. I’m excited to find out if/how these spuds look and taste differently.
• The Smithsonian reports on how early potato consumption reshaped human DNA.
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What I think about
when I think about
Allen Ginsberg
He would’ve turned a hundred this week, Wednesday 3rd. Like so many twentieth century giants, who we mentally stockpile into that earlier age (Martin Luther King, Anne Frank, Miles Davis) he’s also younger than David Attenborough.
‘Ah, Bodhisattva,’ Allen might’ve nodded, sagely, though with his tongue in his cheek.
I didn’t discover Allen Ginsberg through Howl and Other Poems. Instead my gateway drug was his collection Mind Breaths, which had been published twenty years later, out the other side of Vietnam and civil rights and LSD, distinctly a beast of the 1970s. Fifteen years after that, turn of the 1990s (poet still breathing and writing) the teenage schoolboy me buys (or shoplifts) a copy from the bookshop in the Royal Festival Hall foyer, on London’s South Bank. It feels glamorous to even be here, Thames in the background. That’s the old South Bank, before its early twenty-first century regeneration. It’s my first London safe space, free loos and an easy walk to Waterloo and a train home.
Allen’s friends often call him Ginzy, though Kerouac names him ‘Carlo Marx’, which says more about Jack than Allen.
I’ve grown up wearing the blinkers of being poorer than I appear, on a council estate but in a small, wealthy town. Only just vaguely becoming aware of the Beats and the poet himself, certainly I haven’t yet actually read any. Standing in the foyer shop, mostly I’m taken with how cool this City Lights book looks and feels, in typeface and size. Crucially: I own it before I know what it contains — and only then I’m blown apart by his writing. Allen’s peerless skill with a long scarring or tender tendril sentence, Skeltonic, tumbling and rushing.
I’m staggered by the boundless, joyful, homo-horny fervour of ‘Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass’, at a moment when the notion of homosexuality sits, still a vague mist and a bunch of television stereotypes, out on the edge of my field of vision.
At the same time, radical politics visceral as Public Enemy and NWA.
I encounter Pablo Neruda for the first time, following the thread of ‘On Neruda’s Death’.
Later on, early 1990s: Rage Against The Machine perform their stretched out jam version of ‘Hadda Be Playing on the Juke Box’, bolted onto a loping, jazz-ish bass riff. That’s a ferocious slow burn, bursting for my young communist heart. Zack screaming Allen’s lines on the CIA and KGB as a singular kind of mob, over and over —
One mind, brute force and full of money.
Despite the fury on the page and in readings, Ginsberg comes off convivial, jovial even, where other Beats wear misanthropy and self-absorption as a badge of outsiderness, or at least a bubble of protection. It’s Allen’s skewed sociability, his willingness to mentor, though by all accounts he’s an impatient, demanding teacher. Many peers call him ‘bard’. For me, it’s this very openness that elevates him. He’s never, ever cool, so he’s by far the coolest. David Cope, who knew him for two decades, writes: “If Kerouac taught us to fly, Allen sat us down & made us think.”
Kerouac leaves us in his wake, so I’m not (and have never truly been) a fan, whereas Ginsberg gathers us in, so I’m still sitting in the circle.
Leaving home to study in 1993, I’ve still only flown twice, a school exchange trip to Hamburg. I’ve not had a foreign holiday. I’ve not been to Birmingham or Manchester, let alone Scotland or Ireland. I’ve not eaten beans on toast, had a curry or a Chinese tackeaway, or tried an avocado. Mind Breaths is the most forceful imaginable eye-opener. As an education aid I’d place it alongside the ‘riot grrl’ canon, William Blake, Edge Of Darkness, Carter USM. Thank god, otherwise I was probably in danger of unpacking male adulthood in the shadow of Dice Man and Updike’s worst instincts.
Not only radical, queer, acid-fried, Ginsberg is fat, too.
At pop college, for our first assessed performance, I ask the small audience to rub their hands together, generating a mellow, slightly ‘shushing’ background ambience, while I recite ‘Ayers Rock Uluru Song’ over the top. That fifteen minute, four song performance gets very badly marked — I’ll barely pass — not so much for this track, but for my own (admittedly on the nose) political indie rock song, ‘Ugly Little Blue Man’, which the assessor (whose taste is aggressively bland, technically tidy, folk/blues and apolitical — imperialist — musicology) dislikes intensely.
Later again. In 1997 as Ginsberg dies, I’m in a peculiar, isolated state about him, his imprint still squatting, occupying this forceful chunk of my cultural inspiration that I have no-one to share with: it’s only weeks before Tony Blair will ascend to power. I’m about to leave the north (I’ve done eight months or so on the dole in Leeds). My houseshare in LS6 is now empty and I spend one final night up there, in a sleeping bag on the floor with a pizza. My Dad’s borrowed car parked outside. In the night, down the end of my street (one of the ‘Harolds’) a small but scary riot unfolds, around the Brudenell and Hyde Park Tavern. Windows smashed, a couple of cars set alight, lots of cops, fighting and arrests. It’s not a famous riot but possibly mushroomed off the raggedy edges of a month of labour protests in the centre of Leeds. I lie there listening, thirty metres away. I try to write it in the rhythms of ‘Howl’ or ‘Hadda Be Playing…’ but it won’t come. Really, it’s already the past: Britpop is booming. The scuzzier, more impactful alternative rock that I embraced is being abandoned for plinky plonky wallet music. Blur and Oasis. Cocaine. Britain sets its gaze firmly forward towards the millennium, no looking back. The Internet explodes, which will demolish (for half a century at least) the counter-culture as any kind of an arts-led movement.
Working and living in London, turn of the millennium, I have a signed copy of Howl and Other Poems imperiously gifted to me by the eccentric Wagnerian opera critic Duncan Hadfield, supposedly a ‘thank you’ for covering for him at the office. For what, I don’t remember. But I do remember Hadfield for: claiming to have an infestation of worms under his bed, loudly refusing to tidy his desk on the grounds that “my detritus is commensurate with my dimension” (or was it “dementia”?) and for showing up at work blind drunk in full military fatigues.
In 2004 Jonah Raskin publishes his terrific book American Scream, a biography both of Ginsberg and of ‘Howl’, its gestation and emergence and the visceral reaction of the authorities at the time. You can still buy American Scream today, though it’s quite pricey.
On an episode in season three of West Wing, the newly installed poet laureate Tabitha Fortis, played by Laura Dern, has a small breakdown while trying to read ‘Howl’ in protest at President Bartlet’s administration not signing a landmine treaty. Frustratingly, it all occurs offscreen. I’ve occasionally wished that Dern would publish a reading of ‘Howl’ to complete that circle.
Gently, inexorably, the roar of ‘Howl’ is being quelled — patted on the head — becoming a comfortable signifier for a defeated, outdated left.
Still, for me, Ginsberg’s poetic peaks are easily — easily! — the greatest works that came out of the Beats.
In October 2015, I’m invited to perform in Manchester at Still Howling, a one day symposium and concert celebrating the poem’s 60th anniversary, organised by the great artist Roger Bygott and the great Beat academic and author Simon Warner. A lineup filled with Ginsberg associates and peers, Barry Miles, Steven Taylor, many others. They put me up in a nearby bed and breakfast and I get the attic room. I bring with me a new poem (I’m not a poet) called ‘Cutting A Longbow’, still in-progress really, and written entirely in the shadow of ‘Howl’. I perform it for the first time (I’ve never read a poem of my own in front of people before). I’m thrilled by the terror of doing it, when usually I don’t get remotely nervous about singing in front of people. So I have a wonderful time at this event, out of my depth but hugely enjoying the swim. This event, and my feelings around that performance of a spoken piece, versus my normal songs, is a key trigger in the realisation that my time being the recording artist Chris T-T needs to come to an end.
The following year I’ll include ‘Cutting A Longbow’ on my last T-T album 9 Green Songs and it’ll become a setlist mainstay for my final few months of touring. At first read off the page, then from memory. Its opening two lines go:
I would tell you all about my generation’s great minds
but my generation ain’t got none, we left thinking behind
Further into the piece, I reconfigure Ginsberg’s ‘Molloch!” as Rupert Murdoch. Though I’ve published actual poetry since, ‘Cutting A Longbow’ remains the only poem of mine that I’ve read out loud to an audience. I’ve still never done a set at a poetry night.
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My favourite Ginsberg story isn’t about his work, it doesn’t show him in the best light but I love what it captures of his exuberant (often annoying) main character energy. I may get details of this wrong, because I’m typing from memory:
In the late 1950s, the New York born composer, adventurer and later novelist Paul Bowles (‘The Sheltering Sky’) is living in Tangier, he’s probably the ür exemplar of the bohemian American ex-pat in Morocco. When Bowles first came to north Africa twenty years earlier, the music caught him. He collects the obscure records like mad. Recently, the Library of Congress has vaguely commissioned him to gather field recordings as well. A modest grant means he can order a big reel-to-reel tape machine, which gets shipped over for the job.
Meanwhile, in 1959, across the Muslim world, the traditional Muezzin singers who perform the ‘Call To Prayer’ un-amplified (and of course have done so for generations, back through the history of Islam) are being steadily replaced by modern amplification systems and in some cases tape recordings. Morocco’s last working Muezzin is in Tangier, but he’s finally decided to modernise. So he will perform — for one final time — the country’s last ever pure human voice, un-amplified, ‘Call To Prayer’.
Obviously Paul Bowles is well keen to record this finale. At the same time, Allen Ginsberg has come visiting.
Bowles carries his recording gear to a nearby café and brings Ginsberg along with him to wait for the call. He sets up the equipment, ready for the moment. Unfortunately, Ginsberg is so hyped up by everything going on around them, even as the Muezzin begins his call, he can’t stop banging on, commenting on the meaning of the event, the context, the majesty and bustle of Tangier. On the audio recording, you can’t hear the last ‘Call To Prayer’ at all, Ginsberg has drowned it out. Unusable tape.
Bowles will remain in Tangier for the rest of his life, outliving Ginsberg by just a couple of years, though sadly not quite making it to the millennium.
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It’s vaguely Covid times. I can’t remember exactly when. But at an LGBTQ+ History ‘Late’ event at Brighton Museum, a duo of dancers perform a piece on the floor, audience stood informally in a semi-circle around them like a true happening, their dance set to the gorgeous “Holy! Holy! Holy!” mantra of ‘Footnote to Howl’, using Ginsberg’s own intense reading, with his duck-like mouth. It plays loud over the PA and, a bit like being triggered, I remember its insane power as a renewal.
Patti Smith has often performed that one, over the decades. She, now venerated as guru by comfortable apoliticals as well as broken revolutionaries, she, Great Teacher, here, in the year 2000. And in 2025, as onstage she says William Blake was Allen’s favourite poet, next to Whitman. Halfway through the poem, she amends a word, crying “…Holy Palestine…” and it gets a huge cheer.
The bum’s as Holy as the Seraphim!
The physical world (offline) counter-culture is returning and with it some of the words that painted and shaped and sold it, first time around. The centre isn’t holding. The great old power struggles that were never ended, merely suppressed in false conviviality and distracting leisure technology — pushed out to the edge for a few decades — re-emerge with terrifying new masks on. The inexorable symptoms of our crazy damage of the planet begin to take hold. Ideology comes back, in time for Fukuyama to witness his folly. An overwhelming understanding that our own leaders are now on the wrong side. Actual genocide, hither and thither. I think there’s yet time for ‘Howl’ and several other key Ginsberg works to reclaim their visceral, meaningful edge, their importance and shake off the whiff of establishment twentieth century heritage. As with, say, Woody Guthrie or Frida Kahlo.
Allen Ginsberg wasn’t my favourite poet: for me he defined poetry. He wasn’t my favourite artistic radical: for me he defined artistic radicalism, or radical artistry, whichever you prefer.
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A small grey island of small grey men who go fucking mad if we try to paint anything more vibrantly… they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep it small and grey.
— my wife, the other night
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My dear old friend and teacher Simon Warner’s online magazine Rock and the Beat Generation is publishing an excellent series of reflections on Allen Ginsberg for the centenary, including articles by many Beat figures who knew Allen personally. My favourite so far is Sharon Mesmer’s beautiful memoir of being his student, he’s kind in it. I briefly considered pitching this ramble chat to Simon (I’ve written for R&TBG before) but it’s obviously mine is a fanboy reckoning, not a proper account, hence you getting it here.
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get in touch
email me: chris@christt.com
Instagram: cjthorpetracey
always there
• Sort out your ‘art life balance’ with a conversation to help reset your creativity: check out my face-to-face sessions
• Double Chorus about songwriting and the music industry (irregular, casual)
• Refigure podcast, bitesize arts review show I make with Rifa
• I host The Old Market podcast, interviewing brilliant artists each month
• Two vintage Chris T-T LPs: London Is Sinking (2003) and 9 Red Songs (2005) for the first time on 12” vinyl, limited stocks still available
• A bunch more T-T albums on CD: Love Is Not Rescue (2010), The Bear (2013), 9 Green Songs (2016) and Best of Chris T-T (double CD, 2017) all available via Bandcamp
• My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for beautiful coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off, and I get £5 off a bag too
Thanks again, please look after yourself and your people
all my love,
Chris
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"Kerouac leaves us in his wake, so I’m not (and have never truly been) a fan, whereas Ginsberg gathers us in, so I’m still sitting in the circle": spot on.