Part of the Editor's Choice series.
Allen Ginsberg in Benares, India. Photo by Pete Turner.
While Deborah Baker’s packed compendium does indeed tell stories of the Beats in India and more—Corso’s confessions of unrequited love, Burroughs’s surly brushes with sex and death, Kerouac’s ad hoc pronouncements on writing and marriage—Ginsberg is the protagonist of this lush tale. As a law student at Columbia University, Ginsberg saw God reciting William Blake’s poetry from his East Harlem fire escape. Ginsberg was temporarily institutionalized for his vision.
By 1961, when Ginsberg arrived in India with Peter Orlovsky, his semi-literate, bisexual lover, he had become a celebrated poet and “Howl” was a generation’s anthem. Ginsberg traveled throughout the subcontinent believing he’d find a guru whom he could make love to, one he could take drugs with, and, in so doing, find ecstasy. His sojourn there, as retold by the astute Baker (who knows India well through marriage and scholarship), is rife with adventure, the Krittiba poets of Calcutta, and the ineffable—in the form of India’s mysteries and the aptly named American muse Hope Savage. Ginsberg could not lose his self in his search for his own immediate satori, one the Indians understood he would not find through drugs. “If you take LSD, can you see what’s in that suitcase?” Ginsberg returned to his homeland, but not until a sage advised him to take Blake as his God. And why not, since, in the pantheon, this poet seemed his personal mentor.
Betsy Sussler is editor in chief of BOMB.
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India was published by The Penguin Press in early 2008.
Memories and literary references fuse and spark in this autobiography about the co-founder of City Lights Bookstore.
The revelatory rediscovery of Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms.
The era is largely the 1960s—the Beats and New York School are active and on both coasts, poets and filmmakers are meeting in productive, transformative ways. In We Saw the Light, Daniel Kane distills these relations, referencing letters, social networks, historical group formations, and interactions between these men (and they are usually men)—whether as audience, scriptwriter, actor, collaborator, or even “houseboy.”
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Meg Stuart, Karen Kelley and Barbara Schroder, Kalup Linzy, Peter Saul, Mike Davis, Boredoms, Will Eno, and James Timberlake.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
