Errors-To: owner-tmbg-digest@tmbg.org Reply-To: tmbg-digest@tmbg.org Sender: owner-tmbg-digest@tmbg.org Precedence: bulk From: owner-tmbg-digest@tmbg.org To: tmbg-digest@tmbg.org Subject: tmbg-list Digest #26-21 tmbg-list Digest, Volume 26, Number 21 Monday, 21 February 2000 Today's Topics: TMBG: Re: tmbg-list Digest #26-20 Re: TMBG: Re: tmbg-list Digest #26-20 TMBG: English Majors' Saturdays TMBG: Re: Alright people... TMBG: Re: Alright people... TMBG: Re: English Majors' Saturdays Re: TMBG: Re: Alright people... Re: TMBG: Alright people... Re: TMBG: Re: Alright people... Re: TMBG: Dr. Worm and Broom videos TMBG: Santa Special? TMBG: Oops...Other Dewan Re: TMBG: Alright people... TMBG: Now with 100% of your Daily Poetry Requirement! TMBG: Re: poetic songs (i should be allowed to think) Re: TMBG: Re: poetic songs (i should be allowed to think) Re: TMBG: Re: poetic songs (i should be allowed to think) TMBG: state songs cd thingy Administrivia: If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing send mail to tmbg-digest-request@tmbg.org for instructions on how to be automatically removed. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The views expressed herein are those of the individual authors. --------------------------------------------------------------------- tmbg-list is digested with Digest 3.5b (John Relph ). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: GoodOmenz@aol.com Message-ID: <72.1a88355.25e1009e@aol.com> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 03:32:30 EST Subject: TMBG: Re: tmbg-list Digest #26-20 im not trying to argue, i actually think this is a kinda interesting discusion In a message dated 2/20/00 8:07:46 AM, owner-tmbg-digest@tmbg.org writes: >Your analogy is a very poor one, >as a blank canvas is comparable to a silent song without music or lyrics. >Finding poetry in such a song may be a lot to ask, but, thankfully, nobody >has made a claim of this sort. John Cage 5'33 or whatever it was... someone sat at their piano for the designated time then bowed and left. he made the claim that the audience was actually making the music by shuffling their programs and screaming in outrage as for songs as poetry, bob dylan is annually nominated for the pulitzer prize or some other important literary honor, cant remember which. at least, thats according to the teacher in my poetry class (yes, gotta make sacrifices for a 4 day weekend now lets not speak of it again) who also happens to edit poetry for The New Yorker (make of THAT what you will eh?) taking this class has helped me rapidly come to the decision that poetry ought to be a private affair but thats not the point- i'd say Certain People would qualify. also, i know this won't help your project if your not already familiar with them, but the magnetic fields tend to be eminantly poetic. ah, stephin merritt you mopey little thang. king missile are awesome but i think they're poems already arent they? i'll crawl back to sleep now, later ~liz "On the feris wheel, looking out on coney island are there more stars than there are prostitutes in thailand?" -the magnetic fields ------------------------------ From: MDG0611@aol.com Message-ID: <88.f6297a.25e1079e@aol.com> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 04:02:22 EST Subject: Re: TMBG: Re: tmbg-list Digest #26-20 In a message dated 2/20/00 2:35:33 AM, GoodOmenz@aol.com writes: >John Cage 5'33 or whatever it was... someone sat at their piano for the > >designated time then bowed and left. he made the claim that the audience >was >actually making the music by shuffling their programs and screaming in >outrage This is absolutely true. It's 5 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. In fact, a friend of mine who majored in music wanted to perform it at his senior recital. They didn't let him, can't imagine why- Melissa ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20000220153747.51048.qmail@hotmail.com> From: "jEsSiCa Schleiger" Subject: TMBG: English Majors' Saturdays Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 08:37:47 MST As an English degree holder, and a freelance writer and poet for anyone who will publish my drivel, I'd just like to point out that I spent my Saturday driving in the mountains while listening to Disc Two of Then, and found it all very poetic... Some other things to think about-- 1) There indeed are many types of poetry, but the only real definition for "poetry" is that it is not prose, and even this is a loose definition fit for interpretation... 2) We learn the rules of language in order to break them effectively. Shakespeare didn't always write in iambic pentameter, and I doubt that Oscar Wilde worried excessively about comma splices. ;) Nuff for now, Jessica ~In a world we call our home ~There's lots of world to roam ~Plenty of time to turn mistakes into rhyme ~There's a place for those who love their poetry-- ~It's just across from the sign that says "pros only"... (pardon any errors--pulled this quote from memory...:) ) ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 11:34:45 -0500 From: Adrienne Spruill Message-ID: <38B017A5.D1705951@epix.net> Organization: Student Subject: TMBG: Re: Alright people... I never said that the definition of subjective and objective had anything to do with poetry. Someone had said something about things being objective and/or subjective (I believe it was jose asking Christina how she could call grading subecjtive in a letter dated for Thurs. @ 11:12) I was pointing out that grading is both subjective and objective, depening on what was being graded. Back to my argument on poetry. It was Chris who has the assignment on poetery. In MY OPINION if he (Chris, I'm sorry, I don't know if youre a guy or girl) pickes a random TMBG song and takes it into class and arguees that it's a free verse poem, his teacher will say, "you're right, but you took the easy was out on this assignment." He may as well take a line from a novel and try to pull that off as poetry as well. I think his teacher was more referring to poetics works such as Dickenson or Frost and to have the class disect those poems As for Jose and remarks about why Haiku has so many lines, syllables etc., I don't know why. Maybe you should ask the people how came up with the idea of Haiku. Maybe you can tell me why people go to school to major in art and then argue that it's arbetrary. If it's so arbetrary, why go and learn about it? Shouldn't you just be able to put something on a canvas and call it art? Anyway, you missed my point. -A ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 11:36:36 -0500 From: Adrienne Spruill Message-ID: <38B01814.7B09CA59@epix.net> Organization: Student Subject: TMBG: Re: Alright people... Did I mention that i can't spell worth crap? Adrienne Spruill wrote: > > I never said that the definition of subjective and objective had > anything to do with poetry. Someone had said something about things > being objective and/or subjective (I believe it was jose asking > Christina how she could call grading subecjtive in a letter dated for > Thurs. @ 11:12) I was pointing out that grading is both subjective and > objective, depening on what was being graded. > Back to my argument on poetry. It was Chris who has the assignment on > poetery. In MY OPINION if he (Chris, I'm sorry, I don't know if youre a > guy or girl) pickes a random TMBG song and takes it into class and > arguees that it's a free verse poem, his teacher will say, "you're > right, but you took the easy was out on this assignment." He may as well > take a line from a novel and try to pull that off as poetry as well. I > think his teacher was more referring to poetics works such as Dickenson > or Frost and to have the class disect those poems > As for Jose and remarks about why Haiku has so many lines, syllables > etc., I don't know why. Maybe you should ask the people how came up with > the idea of Haiku. Maybe you can tell me why people go to school to > major in art and then argue that it's arbetrary. If it's so arbetrary, > why go and learn about it? Shouldn't you just be able to put something > on a canvas and call it art? Anyway, you missed my point. > -A ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 11:42:31 -0500 From: "Jose" Message-ID: <88p5ao$1ck9$1@ussenterprise.ufp.org> Organization: They Might Be Giants, Unofficially http://www.tmbg.org Subject: TMBG: Re: English Majors' Saturdays Jessica, I apologize for what was a poor choice of words on my part. Often, I allow the adrenaline of a good reply to get the best of me, and post something stupid. This was one of those times. I didn't mean to infer that English majors have nothing better to do with their Saturdays than blather at each other about the meter of a poem. I credit the work of majors within the field of English and Literature for aiding in the advance of knowledge every day. If I had enough time in my own college career, I would pick up an English major myself. Anyway, enough said about that. I would say that your definition is a good one with respect to literature, Jessica. The rather small distinction between short prose and poetry has come up multiple times in my own literature classes. My definition is more personal and after-school-special-like, I admit, but it allows me to include amazing things I feel should be grouped with the great poetry of society. I think the issues dealt with in TMBG songs are often very similar to those discussed in poetry. Ex: I am holding a literature anthology grouped into topical categories of writing. They are: Love and Hate, Conformity and Rebellion, Innocence and Experience, Death and Dying. TMBG fully spans these ideas (e.g., Ana NG, Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head, Rhythm Section Want Ad, I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die) just using Then and with little leniency needed. The complete body of TMBG songs act as a musical anthology of ideas expressed beautifully, with a few nonsensical songs thrown in for good measure. Regards, Jose jEsSiCa Schleiger wrote in message news:20000220153747.51048.qmail@hotmail.com... > As an English degree holder, and a freelance writer and poet for anyone who > will publish my drivel, I'd just like to point out that I spent my Saturday > driving in the mountains while listening to Disc Two of Then, and found it > all very poetic... > > Some other things to think about-- > 1) There indeed are many types of poetry, but the only real definition for > "poetry" is that it is not prose, and even this is a loose definition fit > for interpretation... > > 2) We learn the rules of language in order to break them effectively. > Shakespeare didn't always write in iambic pentameter, and I doubt that Oscar > Wilde worried excessively about comma splices. ;) > > Nuff for now, > > Jessica > > ~In a world we call our home > ~There's lots of world to roam > ~Plenty of time to turn mistakes into rhyme > ~There's a place for those who love their poetry-- > ~It's just across from the sign that says "pros only"... > > (pardon any errors--pulled this quote from memory...:) ) > ______________________________________________________ > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 11:31:41 -0600 (CST) Message-Id: <200002201731.LAA25361@www2.software.umn.edu> From: Matthew A Schempp (Matthew Schempp) Subject: Re: TMBG: Re: Alright people... Jose wrote: > Your analogy is a very poor one, >as a blank canvas is comparable to a silent song without music or lyrics. >Finding poetry in such a song may be a lot to ask, but, thankfully, >nobody has made a claim of this sort. Actually there has been. The artist is John Cage, and the piece, I believe is named "4:59" (I could be wrong there). It consists of him sitting at a piano at a large concert hall for exactly 4 minutes, fifty-nine seconds. Doesn't play a note. Frank Zappa did a "cover" of this next to a open window on a John Cage tribute CD. MadS ------------------------------ Message-ID: <38AFECA5.9608D1F@osu.edu> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 13:31:19 +0000 From: Diana Kocar Subject: Re: TMBG: Alright people... Adrienne Spruill wrote: > As for TMBG being poetic, they aren't. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but > with the exception of some rhyming in a few songs, they don't fit the > poetry "mold." Well, reading this, I find it hard to believe that you can call yourself a TMBG fan and actually like them enough to join this list if you don't find their lyrics to be amazingly poetic. What is it you like about them, then? I'm not saying you must not like them, because I'm sure you do for some reason, but you're just really putting them down by saying that. The reason I fell in love with TMBG was their interesting and different ways of saying things which were open to so many different interpretations (they're poetic?), plus with the great melodies and harmonies along with them. Being a music major, I may not exactly know what the poetry "mold" is, but I know what "poetic" is. If we're just arguing about the meaning of one word, then that is pretty darn picky. Diana ------------------------------ Message-ID: <38AFEE6C.C5ECD25@osu.edu> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 13:38:53 +0000 From: Diana Kocar Subject: Re: TMBG: Re: Alright people... Matthew A Schempp (Matthew Schempp) wrote: > Actually there has been. The artist is John Cage, and the piece, I > believe is named "4:59" (I could be wrong there). It consists of him > sitting at a piano at a large concert hall for exactly 4 minutes, > fifty-nine seconds. Man, I think you're thinking of Sugar Ray's album, 14:59. :-) Maybe not.... You were close...it is 4'33". Diana ------------------------------ From: DrSaxx@aol.com Message-ID: <15.15abfa3.25e1a941@aol.com> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 15:32:01 EST Subject: Re: TMBG: Dr. Worm and Broom videos right click on the link and pick the option save to disk Harlan DrSaxx@aol.com ------------------------------ Message-ID: <38B063F0.6564@bgnet.bgsu.edu> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 16:56:07 -0500 From: "K.C." Subject: TMBG: Santa Special? Does anyone know where I can get mp3s of the 1995 Hello "Santa Special"? I have Careless Santa (don't start that thread again), but I really want the songs by Brian Dewan. Thanks. -- K.C. Kless "...I am a snake head eating the head on the opposite side..." Commissioner, Triumvir Fantasy Sports Campaign Manager, OUK 2000 docworm@tmbg.org, docworm@icestorm.net ------------------------------ Message-ID: <38B0646F.5BBC@bgnet.bgsu.edu> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 16:58:15 -0500 From: "K.C." Subject: TMBG: Oops...Other Dewan Sorry I forgot to include this in the last message: Does anyone know of other Brian Dewan mp3's besides the ones on the twistid site? -- K.C. Kless "...I am a snake head eating the head on the opposite side..." Commissioner, Triumvir Fantasy Sports Campaign Manager, OUK 2000 docworm@tmbg.org, docworm@icestorm.net ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 17:29:42 -0500 From: Adrienne Spruill Message-ID: <38B06AD6.D08737E@epix.net> Organization: Student Subject: Re: TMBG: Alright people... I like their music. (i.e. instrumentals, melody, hamronies etc.) -A Diana Kocar wrote: > > Adrienne Spruill wrote: > > > As for TMBG being poetic, they aren't. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but > > with the exception of some rhyming in a few songs, they don't fit the > > poetry "mold." > > Well, reading this, I find it hard to believe that you can call yourself a > TMBG fan and actually like them enough to join this list if you don't find > their lyrics to be amazingly poetic. What is it you like about them, then? > I'm not saying you must not like them, because I'm sure you do for some > reason, but you're just really putting them down by saying that. The reason > I fell in love with TMBG was their interesting and different ways of saying > things which were open to so many different interpretations (they're > poetic?), plus with the great melodies and harmonies along with them. Being > a music major, I may not exactly know what the poetry "mold" is, but I know > what "poetic" is. If we're just arguing about the meaning of one word, then > that is pretty darn picky. > > Diana ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 14:25:41 -0800 (PST) From: Nicole Carlson Subject: TMBG: Now with 100% of your Daily Poetry Requirement! Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Feb 2000 owner-tmbg-digest@tmbg.org wrote: > How about "The Bells are Ringing" from Factory Showroom. > With so many levels of interpretation, and so many universal > themes, it packs a lot of meaning into a few words. Hear! Also "She's An Angel". Didn't someone on this list use SAA for a dramatic poetry reading once? --nicole the wonder nerd *** "Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons."--Popular Mechanics, March 1949 Visit Nicolopolis! http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~carlsonn nmcarlson@ucdavis.edu ana.ng@tmbg.org carlsonn@seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20000221044821.15586.qmail@web208.mail.yahoo.com> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 20:48:21 -0800 (PST) From: KRS Tyler Subject: TMBG: Re: poetic songs (i should be allowed to think) My friends said "i should be allowed to think" was stolen from a poem like the lyrics or something but he couldn't back it up can anyone here. -Chris __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Message-ID: <006f01bf7c27$52b18e40$eaa50acf@marymt.edu> From: "Christina Rockwell" Subject: Re: TMBG: Re: poetic songs (i should be allowed to think) Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 23:51:29 -0500 Organization: Marymount College Howl Part One. Ginsburg (or something spelled right) ...it says so in the JH lyric sheet birdh0use > > My friends said "i should be allowed to think" was > stolen from a poem like the lyrics or something but he > couldn't back it up can anyone here. > > -Chris > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. > http://im.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 00:17:30 -0500 From: "Jose" Message-ID: <88qhj2$1vjq$1@ussenterprise.ufp.org> Organization: They Might Be Giants, Unofficially http://www.tmbg.org Subject: Re: TMBG: Re: poetic songs (i should be allowed to think) Allen Ginsberg is the name of the poet. Reading the poem helped to give me a very different interpretation of "I Should Be Allowed to Think" then what was my initial impression. Anyway, I'll let you guys decide for yourselves. The complete poem by Ginsberg, Howl: 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, angelheaded 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 El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan 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 shuddering mouth-wracked 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 after noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking 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, meat 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 Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in 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 in grandfather night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned 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 on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown 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 fire place Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist 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 policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty andintoxication, 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 balled 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 & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her assand snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart apackage 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 gyzym of 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 night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & 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 steamheat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb 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 pushcarts 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 yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & 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, & 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 amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & 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 daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph 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 the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo 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 & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & 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 locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism 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 Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in 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-- ah, 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 ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus 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 bum 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 shadowof the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani 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. II What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the Americanriver! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! III Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I'm with you in Rockland where you've murdered your twelve secretaries I'm with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I'm with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I'm with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I'm with you in Rockland where there are twenty-five-thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep I'm with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a seajourney on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night. My congratulations if you actually managed to wade through this entire poem. Regards, Jose Christina Rockwell wrote in message news:006f01bf7c27$52b18e40$eaa50acf@marymt.edu... > Howl Part One. Ginsburg (or something spelled right) ...it says so in the > JH lyric sheet > birdh0use > > > > My friends said "i should be allowed to think" was > > stolen from a poem like the lyrics or something but he > > couldn't back it up can anyone here. > > > > -Chris > > __________________________________________________ > > Do You Yahoo!? > > Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. > > http://im.yahoo.com > ------------------------------ From: Gegatron@aol.com Message-ID: <32.17fcf08.25e23339@aol.com> Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 01:20:41 EST Subject: TMBG: state songs cd thingy I doubt i'm the first person to notice this but the state songs cd has the states listed as if they were inside an invisible map. To the upper right of "1 IL." is "10 IA". iowa is to the upper left of illinois. get it? Right below ma is nh. Has anyone else noticed this or am i just totally rockin? ------------------------------ End of tmbg-list Digest #26-21 ******************************