 So, I've been building up new Viz software for these videos and one thing I put in was some scrolling stuff for reading chunks of text, but one of my rules for giving talks is don't read your slides, paraphrase them somehow, it's less insulting to anybody that's following along and it gives you two chances at everybody else between what the slide says and what you say, some drifters might get caught in the crossfire. So, as a test, I'm going to try reading part one of Allen Ginsberg's most famous poem, Howl. Now, if you're not familiar with Howl, be warned it's pretty filthy and full of, at least today, stereotypical takes on gays and blacks and women and sexuality and just about everything else, including insanity and New Jersey. So trigger warnings, but it's also got this relentless tumbling imagery and lots of striking language and for me it holds up amazingly well considering how old it is, I mean it's not exactly Chaucer, but when it was first recorded I was minus 10 months old. So I'm going to try reading it through, I'm going to try reading it pretty fast, we'll see how bad I screw up. Howl by Allen Ginsberg for Carl Solomon, part one. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix. Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high, sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold water flats, floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to heaven under the L and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake like tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms and underwear burning their money in waste baskets and listening to the terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beers returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire and paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoryed their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol, and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuttering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada and Patterson, illuminating all the motionless world of time between, peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront burrows of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ash can rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuttering mouth racked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in Desalette Fugazzi's listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously 70 hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yakety yakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes meet for the synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering eastern sweats and tangerine bone grindings and migraines of China under junk withdrawal and Newark's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go and went leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms and grandfather night, who studied plot in this post St. John of the Cross telepathy in Bapkabala because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loaned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels who were visionary Indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma and the impulse of winter midnight streetlight small town rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and eternity a hopeless task and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico, leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, who reappeared on the west coast investigating the FBI and beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy and their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of capitalism, who distributed super communist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down and wailed down wall and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in police cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking peteresty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim the sailors caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who bawled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish bath when the blond and naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their love boys to the three old shoes of fate, the one eyed shoe of the heterosexual dollar, the one eyed shoe that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shoe that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer, a sweetheart, a package of cigarettes, a candle and fell off the bed and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last jizumu consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen nightcars, Neil Cassidy, secret hero of these poems, coxman in Adonis of Denver, joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots and diner backyards, movie houses, rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses and familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings and especially secret gas station solipsisms of johns and hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies where shifted in dreams woke up on a sudden Manhattan and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless toke and horrors of 3rd avenue iron dreams and stumbled to unemployment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the east river to open to a room full of steam heat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon and their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lambs stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their push carts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals long heart feet tail borscht and tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for eternity outside of time and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue and mid blasts of lead and verse and the tanked upclatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglyceran shrieks of the fairies of advertising and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of absolute reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly days of Chinatown soup alleyways and fire trucks not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair fell out of the subway window jumped in the filthy peseic leaped on negroes cried all over the street danced on broken wine glasses barefoot smashed photograph records of nostalgic european 1930s german jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles who barreled down highways of the past journeying to each other's hot rod Golgotha jail solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation who drove cross country 72 hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out eternity who journeyed to Denver who died in Denver who came back to Denver and waited in vain who watched over Denver and brooded in London Denver and finally went away to find out the time and now Denver is lonesome for her heroes who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts until the soul illuminated its hair for a second who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to alcatraz who retired to mexico to cultivate a habit or rocky mount to tender buddha or tangiers to boys or southern pacific to the black limo locomotive or harvard to narcissists to woodlawn to the daisy chain or grave who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism and were left with their insanity in their hands and a hung jury who threw potato salad at ccny lecturers on daddism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide demanding instantaneous lobotomy and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrizol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy ping pong and amnesia who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic ping pong table resting briefly in catatonia returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood and tears and fingers to the visible madman doom of the wards of the mad towns of the east pilgrim states rocklands and gravestones feted halls bickering with the echoes of the soul rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude benched omen realms of love dream of life a nightmare bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon with mother finally fogged in the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window and the last door closed at four a.m. and the last telephone slammed at the wall and reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet and even that imaginary nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination carl while you are not safe i am not safe and now you're really in the total animal soup of time and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalog a variable measure in the vibrating plane who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in space time and space through images juxtaposed and trapped the archangel of the soul between two visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of peter omnipotence eternal days to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head the madman bomb and angel beat in time unknown yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of america's naked mind for love into an illa illa llama llama sabbathani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years