Supermarket in California

By King Meera -
9-10 on Sept 28
  • Beat counter-culture (very male-oriented)
  • Diogenas
  • "wag the dog"
  • anti-establishment sentiment
  • Greenwich village project
  • concept of space - Ghettoisation
  • gray area: what is right and what is wrong?
  • CSNY - Woodstock
  • Jack Karouac - On the Road
  • notion of lunacy employed by writers
  • lunacy:
  1. drug abuse, LSD experimentation prevalent among artsy, writing, thinking types
  2. people exempt from the law: lunatics (do not comprehend the law). jesters (have diplomatic immunity), government (is the law)
  • the body electric
  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • Emily Dickinson-Walt Whitman-Allen Ginsberg - formed the trinity of American anti-establishment thought
  • institution of marriage
  • licentiousness
  • NOT an internal monologue
  • migraines an occupational hazard for thinkers
  • Ginsberg not really an escapist
  • Karmakohla - Geeta Mehta
  • Whitman's questioning of lifestyles became an actuality, the norm, during Ginsberg's time
  • self-consciousness - important for the Beats - awareness of every part of yourself, of all those around you.
  • fatigue (which comes with a return to reality, especially from a narcotic high)
  • shopping indicative of consumerism
  • neon - Simon and Garfunkel - Sound of Silence
  • don't turn your back on science
  • JFK image of family
  • peaches (slightly homosexual) and avocados (ovarian) are symbols
  • Garcia Lorca - bohemian writer and artist - wrote (for the first time in Spanish literary history) about gypsies, not mainstream high society
  • 2nd-person writing too intimate for most readers. Makes them uncomfortable as it is directly  addressing 
  • childless - irony - Whitman spawned a generation of writers but had no actual offspring
  • Angel - those doing more hallucinogenic drugs
  • sunflower - a symbol of attraction, beauty being derived from the sun (as with the body and its celebration through sex)
  • pan-optic century
  • "solitary" - together in isolation (alone with someone - freedom and comfort in solitude)
  • open corridors - contradiction
  • cashier representation of consequence - social censure is the price you pay
11-12 on Sept 29
  • observation-reflection-construction
  • "Emotion recollected in tranquility"
  • smoking bank - Varanasi
  • Last stanza is the anchor of this poem
  • there exists, in classical poetry, a guide to help navigate the journey (and again we meet Mr Journey, a vastly overused symbol in American Literature.)
  • "The body is the way" - Whitman - Ginsberg uses Whitman as a guide:
  • Which way does your beard point tonight?
  • I feel absurd - it was the age of nihilism
  • but the beat movement, with its constant reinterpretations of 'carpe diem' was a direct opposition to this
  • "nothing's going to get me down" was a prominent sentiment
  • solitude not the same as loneliness
  • we are all looking for mirrors - for reflections of ourselves in all that is around us

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