Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy! Defiance is holy!

I have been continuing my thought on this idea of "precious images, sounds, touches," and then today in class we were talking about defiance. I was immediately reminded of this "Footnote to Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, in which there are sentences like "The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!" That is beautifully defiant. Just like the idea of the dandelion as a favorite flower. It defies what most of the world views as "beautiful," "a flower," "a weed," or "holy." 

I have posted this Footnote to Howl for you to read and please give your thoughts, but I think I want my book to use these different senses (sight, sound, touch, etc.) to defy what the viewer may consider "precious" or "holy." 

Footnote to Howl

BY ALLEN GINSBERG

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!

Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!

Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!

Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!

Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!

Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!

Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!

Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!

Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!

Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

My roommate and I did a practice run last night.  At first I liked the idea of putting the quote on the top of my hand to create an opposite effect but now I don't quite like the way it turned out... I think I'd rather put the quote on the palm of my hand.  This was just a practice so we can still fix that, but I'm imagining a series of body parts just like this :)

Varieties

So much variety in nature --what are preferences? --how do you know that what you consider "preferences" "really" are "preferences"? --what does it seem that nature is "against"? --how can "nature's" attitudes (if any) be assessed?

Ran across this passage in David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King (which, as a posthumously published work, raises some interesting questions about what it means for a book to be finished). Maybe touches on some of the things we've been discussing with regards to technology:

To me, at least in retrospect,[26] the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us[27] spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.

Thoughts on Social Media

Some Alt-Lit image-macros poems I made about how social media has affected me and made me think over the past year.

Selling is Human

Would be interested to know reactions to this article:


http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/01/dan-pink-to-sell-is-human/

Anxious.

Today, not just any day.
But a day that will never come back.
It is a day of understanding and challenges
A day of determination if one so chooses.

It is a day. A bridge.
A temporal connection to your
next journey. Your tomorrow. It
is not here so that It'd be ignored.

But today is waiting....

For you to respond.