Expecting Rain

I dig the beats. Kerouac mostly. It's hard not to like Howl. but I feel that Ginsberg like the beatles wrote only on the influence of drugs and was only inspired by drugs making the words sound interesting yet pointless. (I know a lot of people are going to hate that comment) I do love listening to him read his stuff as i do kerouac.

One of my english professors met him and he said he is a real jerk. I guess at a book sign he made a girl cry and run away. Ginsbeerg said he didn't give a x about her and why should he give a x.

Other than Howl, I mostly cared about Ginsberg as a commentator about Dylan, honestly. He'd always have some unique take nobody had thought of.

has anyone ever read this: http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/allen-ginsberg-criticizes-bob-dylan-mmp.html?
it's interesting.

"how can anyone write after Rimbaud?"

i like that...

I've heard this story too and it has always made me wonder if Lennon is at least some part of the character of Mister Jones...

I did a fair bit of work on Ginsberg at Uni; if I ever get the time to find it (and the confidence to share) I might put up one of the pieces here.

Stephen Scobie has a nice section on the pair in his book Alias Bob Dylan Revisited; some of it:
"...Both Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan had to cope, from very early in their careers, with the demands of fame, with being seen as the poetic spokesmen of their generations. In his biography of Ginsberg, Dharma Lion, Michael Schumacher suggests that the two of them were fascinated by each other's very different responses to these demands.

Ginsberg was almost compulsively open, laying himself bare (sometimes quite literally), making himself vulnerable to all sorts of attacks, allowing himself to appear foolish or naive, but always, with heroic honesty, bearing witness to his beliefs and convictions. Dylan has tended to protect himself more, taking refuge in secrecy, isolation, and disguise: preserving within himself a private place which none of his fans has been allowed to enter. Like Schumacher, I believe that their friendship was to a large measure based on their respect for each other's positions. I'm sure that Ginsberg often wished he was Dylan; I'm not so sure that the converse is true.

What they ultimately did share was a conception of the poet as prophet. Both of them saw the poet's role as far more than the expression of purely personal feelings, but rather as a public statement of a morally responsible position. Ginsberg's three greatest poems are all elegies (and an elegy is, by definition, the public statement of a private grief): Howl was an elegy for his friends, the pioneers of the Beat generation; Kaddish (which the very private Dylan saw as his greatest poem) was an elegy for his mother, and for his own childhood; The Fall of America was an elegy for his nation. Put them all together, and what you have is what Bob Dylan has been singing about all his career, from "Hard Rain" to "Highlands": a world gone wrong. Within such a world, the only voice that is possible is the voice of the prophet: Jeremiah or Blind Willie McTell; Allen Ginsberg or Bob Dylan."

^I love everything you post from that book. It's in my cart on Amazon. I'll order it after Christmas.

I find the relationship between Dylan and Ginsberg touching and inspiring.

Dylan said that Al Aranowitz introduced him to Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky above a bookstore on 8th Street in the fall of '64 or '65

In the mid sixties Dylan liked to claim he was rewriting a movie that Ginsberg was writing. It was a horror cowboy movie in which Dylan would play his own mother. Later on he would say that he did write a little of it.

Dylan listed Ginsberg amongst his favourite poets, along with WC Fields, Charlie Rich, Smokey Robinson and the trapeze family from the circus. (In actual fact a pretty good summation of Dylan's aesthetic.)