Comments on: A Howl that went unheard for over 50 years

A Howl that went unheard for over 50 years

Len — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:11:30 -0800

For more than 50 years, it was believed that the first recording Allen Ginsberg made of Howl was in Berkeley in March 1956. Now, an earlier recording – made on Valentine's Day 1956 at Reed College, Portland, Oregon – has been found. Reed have made it – along with seven other poems Ginsberg read the same night – available here. (Click on "Allen Ginsberg reads ..." for drop down menu; apologies for crappy quicktime interface.)

By: solipsophistocracy

solipsophistocracy — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:54:33 -0800

Thank you very much!

By: Rumple

Rumple — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:55:18 -0800

[This is very good]

By: Len

Len — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:56:50 -0800

Hang on, what happened to all my tags? I swear they were there when I posted ... Will try and add them in again, sorry about that.

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:25:03 -0800

A Howl that still goes unheard. Can't get it to play in either Firefox or Safari. Crappy quicktime interface indeed.

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:40:36 -0800

It would be really swell if someone would download the files and upload them in a more user-friendly environment. (Please and thank-you.)

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:51:46 -0800

Well, the direct link to the unedited version is this. It launches QT Player just fine, but all you get is an eternal "configuring" message. I'm thinking it's their server that's the problem. Trying to download the file to disc just give me a "File not found" error. Go figure.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:51:46 -0800

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:52:36 -0800

I swear, I only clicked "Post" once.

By: Araucaria

Araucaria — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:56:22 -0800

Slightly OT: Reed has always had a slight bias toward Apple / Macintosh formats. Maybe because Steve Jobs dropped out of the college in the 70's and has always been a generous donor. I graduated a year too early to get a free mac — it would have made typing up my thesis a heck of a lot easier

By: Rumple

Rumple — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:16:49 -0800

I had no problem whatsoever with any part of that site. kwitchyerbitchin'

By: phearlez

phearlez — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:51:33 -0800

Well it didn't work for me either so kwitchyerbitchinaboutmahbitchin'

By: mistersquid

mistersquid — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:01:20 -0800

I An angelheaded sysadmin is scattering semen freely to whomever clicks on the weblink looking for an angry fix! II Moloch eats the QuickTime streams. Despairs! III The Internet is with you in Rockland.

By: Rumple

Rumple — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:12:17 -0800

MATHOWLIE

                    For Cortexamyn

                           I 

       I saw the best minds of mefi generation destroyed by 
              madness, starving hysterical naked, 
       clicking themselves through the blue pages at dawn 
              looking for an angry fix, 
       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- 
              ery of night, 
       who affluent and smug and middle-class and high sat 
              up writing in the moleskine blackness of 
              momma's basement floating across the streets of suburbs
              contemplating beans, 
       who bared their brains to MeTa under the Grey and 
              saw Steve Colbert's retorts recycled on AskeMe's 
              green, deleted, 
       who passed through universities with radiant blue eyes 
              hallucinating Apple and Prius tragedy 
              among the snarkers of blogs, 
       who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
              hacking obscene odes on the facebooks of the 
              school, 
       who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear whacking 
              their monkey to Manga and listening 
              to Neutral Milk Hotel, 
       who got busted by their fellow nerds returning from 
              Portland with mp3's of Britney in their Zune , 
       who spat fire at meetups or drank lattes in 
              Mecha, banned, or purgatoried their 
              torsos night after night 
       with faves, with fugs, with jrun errors, al- 
              cohol and cock and endless balls, 
       incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and 
              lightning in the mind leaping toward Poland 
              Canada & Portugal, illuminating all the mo- 
              tionless world of Time between ... 

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to 
              pad to bar to blue to Bligh to the BoingBoing, 
       last battalion of ironic conversationalists writing 
              down the planes off iphones off conveyors 
              off Obama State out of the tubes, 
       yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts 
              and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks 
              and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, 
       whole intellects disgorged in italic recall for seven days 
              and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the 
              Banhammer cast on the pavement, 
       who vanished into nowhere Zen 404 leaving a 
              trail of ambiguous picture postcards of flickr 
              fuck all, 
       suffering Eastern croissants and NSFW bone-grind- 
              ings and migraines of  square-eyed snark-with- 
              drawal in Network's clique furnished room, 
       who wandered around and around at midnight in the 
              flameout yard wondering where to go, and went, 
              leaving no broken hearts, 
       who sequestered carbon in hybrids hybrids hybrids racketing 
              through snow toward lonesome farms in Vermont's 
              night, 
       who studied Corticular St. Jess of of the Matt telep- 
              athy and ban kabbalah because the gray in- 
              stinctively vibrated at their fingers at work, 
       who loned it through the stalls of macworld seeking vis- 
              ionary lifehack angels who were visionary lifehack 
              angels, 
       who thought they were only mad when NickySkye 
              gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, 
       who jumped in limousines with the Madam of Ju 
              Ju Jive on the impulse of winter meepzorp street 
              light Tuscan towns, 
       who lounged hungry and lonesome through myfaves 
              seeking taz or sex or Migs, and followed the 
              brilliant Spaniard to converse about America 
              and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took shit 
              to Africa, 
       who disappeared into the volcanoes of overthought leaving 
              behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees 
              and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire 
              place Chicago, 
       who reappeared with miko investigating Givewell boards
              with big pacifist 
              eyes sexism in their dark flags and ethereal incom- 
              prehensible leaflets, 
       who burned cigarette holes in their funfur protesting 
              the narcotic tobacco haze of Bushism, 
       who distributed favorites in Union 
              Square typing and undressing while the sirens 
              of moderation wailed them down, and wailed 
              down flags, and the backchannel fairies also 
              wailed, 
       who spoke down trying in white gymnasiums nekkid 
              and trembling before the machinery of the 
              arcives, 
       who bit detectives in the neck and LOLed with delight 
              in pyjamas for courageous pecking but their 
              own wild blogging pederasty and intoxication, 
       who howled on their knees in the subway and were 
              dragged off the roof waving genitals and page- 
              views, 
       who let themselves be fucked in the ass by cyber 
              motorcyclists, and typed with joy, 
       who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, 
              the sailors, caresses of Atavar and chatroom
              love . . . . . . .

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:23:24 -0800

straight to the sidebar!

By: cgc373

cgc373 — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:25:58 -0800

Yeah, that's pretty danged good.

By: mr_crash_davis

mr_crash_davis — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:43:37 -0800

tl;dr

By: amyms

amyms — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:50:39 -0800

Great post, Len! I'll take this opportunity to pimp my own "Howl" post from October. I think they go well together.

By: Turtles all the way down

Turtles all the way down — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:49:54 -0800

Oh, now Rumple, you shut the fuck up you did not just do that girl.

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:10:38 -0800

while we're in the business of pimping our own howls...

By: middleclasstool

middleclasstool — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:29:49 -0800

God. Damn.

By: trip and a half

trip and a half — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:39:59 -0800

Wow. This reminds me of my first "win" on MetaFilter. (Scroll up for the FPP, down for the win.) Thanks, peacay!

By: goodnewsfortheinsane

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:38:02 -0800

That's not just good - that's all kinds of good. Thanks, rumple, for your brilliance.

By: SassHat

SassHat — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:32:23 -0800

omg you got your ginsberg in my mefi. or wait...?

By: anarcation

anarcation — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:33:56 -0800

Hey, I'm a Reedie. On Wednesday (the 52nd anniversary of the recordings) a professor here gave a reading of A Supermarket in California, Howl, and A Footnote to Howl, preceded by a few snippets of the recordings. Thanks for the link - I hadn't seen that the full recordings were online. The tape was found last year by someone doing research in the library archives, and apparently it was labeled something like "Snyder/Ginsberg 1956 - Tape 2". No one knew what had happened to Tape 1 or what was on it (more Ginsberg? Snyder? oh the suspense!) until Wednesday morning when an alum walked into the archive with a cassette copy of Tape 1. It's Snyder. I hope they eventually release everything online. Or at least let me rip a copy from the archive. It's odd to realize that I'm sitting right here, about two hundred yards away from where these recordings were made all those years ago. Makes me hope that people will give a shit about what I do here in college 52 years from now. PS: Any other Reedie MeFites about?

By: Devils Rancher

Devils Rancher — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:48:22 -0800

I love the Beats. They taught me to live with a blend of utopianism and utter hopelessness, and a love for the word as art. I'm pretty damn impressed by what Rumple just did there, too.

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:29:40 -0800

MetaFilter: a blend of utopianism and utter hopelessness.

By: ottereroticist

ottereroticist — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:07:55 -0800

I'm a Reedie, class of 82. Or rather, I'm an "attrit." I left Reed after three years and eventually transferred to UC Berkeley, thereby (as the old joke has it) raising the GPA at both schools.