Once again, the Beatniks wish to tarnish the good name of realist literature — truly the only form of literature that’s good for you. The latest nonsense comes to us from a thirty-year-old whipper-snapper from San Francisco fond of reciting obscenities. It is rather childishly called “Howl.”

Let us examine this “poem”‘s first few lines:

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 machin-
ery 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 tene-
ment 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,

And so on. Ginsberg cannot get to the point. He prefers nonsensical religious imagery like “angelheaded hipsters” and “Mohammedan angels.” He cannot put the adjective before “tenement roofs” like a proper writer.

If I were forced to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey after several shots of Stoli, I could easily identify this, without effort, as the kind of prose fashionable among the beret-wearing riff-raff who declare themselves “artists” or “poets” or “writers.” What does Ginsberg mean by ‘dragging themelves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix?’ Streets are not racial! How is a fix angry? One does not bare one’s brain to Heaven. There is no El in San Francisco last time I checked. Ginsberg can’t even decide on what one must hallucinate. Is it Arkansas or Blake-light tragedy?

I certainly cannot see any literary scholar taking such a preposterous poem seriously fifty years from now.

My profile of Marianne Wiggins can be found in this week’s issue of Time Out New York.

Yahoo: “Metallica singer James Hetfield was investigated by UK airport officials who believed he was a terrorist this week, it has been claimed. The star was barred entry to Luton airport on Thursday and questioned by staff who were concerned about his appearance. Fears that Hetfield might be involved in terrorism were apparently founded on his ‘Taliban-like beard’, according to The Times.”

I am unsure why a correspondent (who I shall not name in the interests of retaining her privacy) has deemed me responsible for what Tao Lin’s Intern Army (recently trademarked) does in promoting Tao’s books. I am neither employed by Melville House, nor do I represent Tao Lin in any capacity. But at the risk of participating in a potentially fabricated and guileful publicity masterstroke from Tao’s Intern Army, a correspondent (does she work for the New York City Transit Authority?) has written to me to complain about a sticker currently affixed to the top surface of a turnstile at the 14th Street — Union Square station. She has even helpfully sent me a copy of Section 1050.5 of the Rules governing public safety, demonstrating quite clearly that the mysterious individual who had the temerity to place the sticker on the turnstile (nay, THE HUBRIS AND THE EFFRONTERY to sully the Great City of New York in such an insolent manner!) has clearly broken the law.

Well, this may indeed be the case. But surely such a sticker-specific blasphemy is not exactly going to, as this correspondent puts it, “alienate book customers and readers in the city.”

Then again, I’m new here. So for all I know, all New York book customers and readers are highly sensitive to incongruous stickers, particularly those illegally placed on a subway seat or a newspaper kiosk. Perhaps, such a sight causes the book customer to see sudden flashes of light, hear the voice of Elijah Wood instructing them to exact justice, and thereby enter the clean and noble McNally Robinson with a semiautomatic to retaliate for a CLEAR WRONG against the City of New York.

You tell me.

The onus, of course, falls upon the Tao Lin Intern Army. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen Fritz Lang’s M more times than I should. And if such unwarranted blasphemies continue, I will gather together a vigilante mob, hunt Tao Lin down, and interrogate Tao Lin in German, uploading the resultant black-and-white video onto YouTube, whereby the Great Democracy of New York can make their final judgment.

[UPDATE: It appears that this correspondent also left a comment on Tao’s blog.]