I had to break out my Allen Ginsberg box set this morning to run through a few 1950s classics while rushing on Tuesday deadlines. "Supermarket in California," "Howl," "American" - it had been a long time. All three aged well; the neon nightmare he railed against then is not so distant from the digital one we live in today. Just hearing those ripe words once again seeded new inspiration for my own writing.
Reading a book at the bar typically earns a few stares and nothing more.
But not yesterday. I tried to squeeze in a few pages of Old School while my laundry cycled across the street. Contrary to popular belief, the book is not an adaptation of the Will Ferrell film, but Tobias Wolff's look into an elite prep school and the literary teens bustling inside it.
I ended up seated next to Bob, who originally hails from the former Yugoslavia, studied literature as a college student and now sells used cars. We talked up and down the canon of 20th century lit, about how he met Ginsberg (he recorded him talking about the genesis of his great works), loved Bukowski, and lamented the dearth of reading done away from a computer in modern America.
But Bob's greatest success was in pulling a dusty tome from my past. Ginsberg died ten years ago as I took a counter-culture literature course heavy on the Beat Generation. I never jived with his later work, but his early stuff ran with the mantle of Walt Whitman in a way not often appreciated anymore.
On the night he died, I climbed atop the garage of the apartment complex where friends Tom and Turbo lived. Trough a few beers, we took turns reading from "Howl" and the other two. We filled the air between 2 and 4 a.m. with our overly loud recitations, and not a soul, electric or otherwise, took notice. It seemed right then yet so foreign now - the personal lives of the Beats had long since driven me away from their works.
Yet it's just another of a million memories that slipped into the shadows until a literary stranger unwittingly kicked them into light.
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