Tuesday, February 22, 2011

News at Eleven: After encountering [Antonin] Artaud in France,

[Carl] Solomon decided that he too should "give up the flesh" and follow the path of the "professional-lunatic saint". It was a vocation that would eventually lead, as Ginsberg recounted in "Howl", to Solomon presenting himself "on the granite steps of the madhouse with the [. . .] harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy".

For Ginsberg, Solomon's journey through madness was a matter of both personal identification and a metaphor for a generation of free spirits crushed by the forces of Moloch, the sun god of the Canaanites to whom firstborn children were sacrificed, "the heavy judger of men", as "Howl" has it.

from Telegraph: Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl': 'I scribbled magic lines from my real mind'
then Little White Lies: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman interview

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