Howl

AVB

AVB

Jesus of Cool, I'm bad, I'm nationwide
Joined
Nov 14, 2003
Messages
23,722
Location
Near York, PA.
50 years ago this week this was ruled as not obscene and had "redeeming social importance" Do you think that is true today? Discuss.


Howl
 
One of the single most important American literary works to ever be written. Ginsberg and Kerouac have been huge influence in my writing for the last 10 years. It is sad that I was 25 year old before I discovered them.

Tim

Edit to include Saul Stacey Williams as well
 
AVB said:
50 years ago this week this was ruled as not obscene and had "redeeming social importance" Do you think that is true today? Discuss.


Howl
Click to expand...


MX said:
One of the single most important American literary works to ever be written. Ginsberg and Kerouac have been huge influence in my writing for the last 10 years. It is sad that I was 25 year old before I discovered them.

Tim

Edit to include Saul Stacey Williams as well
Click to expand...

Holding a fun-house mirror to our society (some might say it was/is not the mirror that is grotesquely distorted) is perhaps the most "redeeming social importance" I can grant to anything I call "art."
Reading Ginsberg in certain times of my life, or carrying a yellowed and dog-eared copy of On the Road, Visions with Cody and the others in my back pocket, sneaking bolts of borboun behind a notebook in a class taught by a stoned advanced poetry professor, or a squinty-eyed intellectual, a sneer-faced scientist, a fiery radical feminist, and then realizing, not so many years later, that a life lived and a world viewed in any extreme is not safe for a person nor for one's mind, nor for society....well, I believe pretty strongly in what works like Howl (are there many? America...why are your librbaries filled with tears....)can introduce to the mind, and through them, what they can allow the mind to achieve.
 
Great article in the NYT's Arts section by Patricia Cohen, on why it was on a stream as opposed to on the air. The more things change the more they stay the same.
 
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