the Beats: Ginsberg, Gregorio Nunzio, Corsa, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky
- 1873 - Comstock Laws forbid anything that "has to do with sex" from being mailed
- 1954 - Ginsberg takes peyote and has vision of Moloch in the shape of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and the Medical Arts building
- 1955 - "Howl" is published
- 1957 - Trial. Not convicted.
Justice Potter Stewart: "I cannot define 'obscenity', but I know it when I see it."
Ginsberg in letter: "Burroughs is getting fantastically dirty in his mss. but it is high art, but he doesn't shilly-shally, in fact he's been writing pornography with a vengeance lately, and my own work is full of orgies."
Ginsberg: "'Footnote to Howl' is too lovely and serious a joke to try to explain. The built-in rhythmic exercise should be clear, it's basically a repeat of the Moloch section. It's dedicated to my mother who died in the madhouse and it says I loved her anyway and that even in worst conditions life is holy."
"Poetry is what poets write, and not what other people think they should write."
chilicosm: may be defined as the interpenetration of many different levels of cosmic creation.
"... a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."
honi soit que mal y pense: evil to him to evil thinks
"as it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence."
"San Francisco," said a cynic, "is getting too much like L.A. It's where neon goes when it dies"
"The birds have eaten the berries. Haven't I sent this latter before in another life? And haven't you received it?" (Alan Ginsberg to John Hollander, sept 7, 1958)
Ulysses: judge book in its entirety, not word by word!
"The Miscellaneous Man", a Berkeley magazine.
