My BFFS and Tripmaster Monkey

Kingston uses a Chinese American man to illustrate the assimilation of the nation. She addresses the issue of race in postmodernism with Wittman Ah Sing. He represents the merging of his Chinese culture and his American culture though the Vietnam War. He shows how the bay area represents a place of understanding and as an accepting place.
Growing up in the bay area, I have always had the impression of complete tolerance. In high school, my friends came from a variety of different backgrounds. We all came from different economic backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, and had a mixture of sexual orientations. The best way to examine this would be to look at my best friends.

Eric.
Eric is half-Chinese and half-Vietnamese. A First-generation American. I’ve known him since 1st grade.


Daniel.
Daniel is half-Caucasian, half-Mexican. A second-generation American. I’ve known him since freshman year of high school.


Dylan.
Daniel is half-Dutch, half-Irish. A third-generation American.

Maxine on PBS

Brautigan and Rochester

For my paper, I’d like to explore the metaphorical presence within the poems of The Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn’s To The Fair Clarinda. I’d like to compare them to poems from Richard Brautigan and show that throughout his work, he portrays different aspects of love and relationships.

Rochester’s poem is as follows:

The Imperfect Enjoyment
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace, [5]
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love's lesser lightening, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below. [10]
My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,
Hangs hovering o'er her balmy brinks of bliss.
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er, [15]
Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had don’t:
Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.
Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys, [20]
When, with a thousand kisses wandering o'er
My panting bosom, "Is there then no more?"
She cries. "All this to love and rapture's due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"
But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive, [25]
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent. [30]
Ev'n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry, [35]
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.
This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried
,
With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;
Which nature still directed with such art
That it through every cunt reached every heart — [40]
Stiffly resolved, 'twould carelessly invade
Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:
Where'er it pierced, a cunt it found or made —
Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,
Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower. [45]
Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore [50]
Didst thou e'er fail in all thy life before?
When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,
With what officious haste dost thou obey!
Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets
Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets, [55]

But if his king or country claim his aid,
The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;
Ev'n so thy brutal valour is displayed,
Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,
But when great Love the onset does command, [60]
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar'st not stand.
Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,
Through all the town a common fucking-post,
On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt
As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt, [65]
May'st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,
Or in consuming weepings waste away;
May strangury and stone thy days attend;
May'st thou ne'er piss, who did refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend. [70]
And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

The poem is about impotence and a less overt sexuality. I want to relate this to how overt the likes of Richard Brautigan and his sexualit. Brautigan is obsessed with himself and his own feelings,without even taking into account the peoples who’s interactions he involves himself with.

Dharma Bum

A lot of San Francisco beat poetry is written about one thing, but it is really meant as a social commentary, coded between the interesting prose and the metaphorical diction. In Jack Kerouac’s work The Dharma Bums he focuses on his life through a separate lense. He is incognito in the sense that he names himself Ray Smith. He also alludes to other beat poets through the work and they are as follows:

Gary Snyder is portrayed through the character Japhy Ryder
Caroline Kerouac is portrayed through the character Nin
Allen Ginsberg is portrayed through the character Alvah Goldbook
Natalie Jackson is portrayed through the character Rosie Buchanan
Carolyn Cassidy is portrayed through Evelyn
Neal Cassidy is portrayed through Cody Pomeray
Philip Lamantia is portrayed through Francis DaPavia
Claude Dalenberg is portrayed through Bud Diefendorf
Michael McClure is portrayed through Ike O'Shay
Locke McCorkle is portrayed through Sean Monahan
John Montgomery is portrayed through Henry Morley
Philip Walen is portrayed through Warren Coughlin.

I also enjoyed how he pondered the idea of college saying, “Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.”

ID Q's- MIDTERM

Hey guys! I compiled everyone's answers to the ID and added some of my own answers to make one big list. hope this helps!

1. “Westward the course of empire takes its way…”


-Gray Brechin
-Imperial San Francisco
-manifest destiny compared to an empire
-imperialism, westward expansion
-SF= queen city
-overturning the open minded free loving image
-painting of men on horseback leading families to a golden horizon
- For Brechin, San Francisco is the culmination of that journey, the exercise of power over territory that is the ultimate expression of Manifest Destiny.
Line is originally from the poem "On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning" by Bishop George Berkeley, for whom Berkeley was named. Berkeley is a conceptual extension of SF, and it was named for the man who wrote the motto for expansionism - testifies to how ingrained Manifest Destiny is in SF's history.
Also, the painting that shares this title is by Emanuel Leutze.
This passage and others like it creates an East-West binary that effectively denigrates the orient. The idea that history starts in the east and moves west served to justify San Francisco's control of the Pacific as well as racism.


2. Gray Brechin’s concept of “the contado”
-Gray Brechin
-Imperial San Francisco
The word "contado" is Italian. Brechin compares SF to Rome because of its extensive contado.
GRay Brechin's concept of the "contado": the idea from Imperial SF of SF being a "Queen City of the Pacific" dominating not just over nearby geographic areas, but the entire Pacific Rim according to Brechin through the Spanish-American War in the Philippines with military bases located in various locations around SF (East Bay area); seen explicitly through the vast aqueduct set-up which allows SF to dominate and control natural resources from the Sierra Nevadas (Hetch Hetchy and Mokelumne Aqueducts; see pg. 112, map 3)
“For [the Italians], the civilized world was a duality made of the city and its contado -- that is, the territory that the city could militarily dominate and thus draw upon. The contado provided the city with its food, resources, labor, conscripts, and much of its taxes, while its people (the contadini) received a marketplace and a degree of protection in return” (xxxi).

“The contado contains other cities and villages that owe tribute to the dominant city. Providing the essential resources and labor that power the capital, the contado is the outer ring of the urban whirlpool, but very much of it” (xxxiii).

“For an imperial city such as ancient Rome or modern Washington -- which San Francisco sought to become -- the contado is national, continental, or even planetary” (xxxiv) Rob described contado as: "the idea of SF's vast urban periphery providing material resources as well as huge labor needs and inputs to build up the wealth and splendor of the "imperial city" a la Rome or Constantinople.



3. “A Walden Pond for Winos” / Washington Square in SF
-Richard Brautigan
-Trout Fishing in America
-three beats drinking port in a park across the street from a church
-this park is the picture on the cover of the book
-discussed how their future was either a flea circus or an insane asylum (better at asylum)
-represents the beat way of the world and how the main stream culture looks down upon them (business girls calling them ‘winos’, but really they are doing nothing to offend anyone
By calling Washington Park the "Walden Pond" of SF, he implies that it is an isolated safe haven for artists and dreamers.
ALSO, don't forget Brautigan's commentary regarding the cover of TFinA: Ben Franklin representing the American Dream that any man can make it (and "Was it Kafka...who said, 'I like Americans because they are healthy and optimistic"), while hungry people "gather in the park across the street from the church"; contrasting what we often choose not to see in America with images which we all too often glorify

4. Tony Bennet, “I Left my Heart in SF”
-1954
-sings of how it’s the best city in the world
-lovelier than Paris and has more glory than Rome but it’s not as busy as Manhattan
-no matter where he goes his heart, his home, will always be SF
In 1965, this was made the official theme song of SF in an attempt to preserve this harmless, mythical image of the city. It is undermined by most of the Beats, who recognize the underbelly of SF society and see that it isn't all wonderful. Also, writers like Brechin and Snyder attack the ways the city harms California.
"Mythical" is an appropriate way to describe the picture of San Francisco that Bennett creates in the song. It relates San Francisco to Rome and implies that Bennett's visions of the city conforms to Brechin's imperial city.


5. Moloch
-Allen Ginsberg
-Howl
- a deity whose worship was marked by the propitiatory sacrifice of children by their own parent
- Ginsberg intends that the characters he portrays in Part I be understood to have been sacrificed to this idol
- Part II is a rant about the state of industrial civilization, characterized in the poem as 'Moloch,' and how it’s devouring the angelheaded hipsters
This section of "Howl" comments on the materialism of cities (not necessarily just SF). Professor Wilson suggested that this is an exorcism in a way, leading the Paradise of the "Footnote."

6. “I was certainly surprised to be named Poet Laureate of the far-out city on the left side of the world.”
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
-Inaugural Address from San Francisco Poems
-not a Beat, hard worker
-far-out is a play on words for the time
-left side is both political and imperial
-Poet Laureate is opposite of Beat, which is San Francisco
This helps undermine the materialistic, imperialist image sometimes associated with SF. The city is embracing less conventional, more socially conscious poets who step outside of the city and look at its faults as well as its virtues.
That Ferlinghetti used "left" and not "west" signifies a movement away from the romanticized expansion west and the imperial connotations that come with it. As if Ferlinghetti believes that SF can transcend its past. This is very imaginative, but, after all, Ferlinghetti discarded Williams dictum "No ideas but in things" (29).



7. “Such was life in the Golden Gate: Gold dusted all that we drank and ate, and I was one of the children told, ‘We all must eat our peck of gold.’”
-Robert Frost
-it’s all about imperialism and the pursuit of wealth and land
-gold dusted all we drank and ate = it influenced even our basic needs
-dust = poverty, gold = wealth
-dust only appeared to be gold when against the sky, none actually was
-written from a child’s perspective

8. North Beach
-Gary Snyder
-“North Beach” A Place in Space
-one of if not the only place in America where all ethnicities gets along
-people walk there and have a sense of community
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
-“A North Beach Scene” San Francisco Poems
-a place where many cultures can be heard
-center for free thought and the bohemian way
-Ferlinghetti feels like it’s losing this
-his poem has multiple references to white; “white washed sins, gold hair; white shrouds”
-there are chaulkess homes (without filling), voiceless laughter and choiceless gesture

9. “Coming Into the Watershed”
-Gary Snyder
-A Place in Space
-beginning theme seems to be that SF could be anywhere (northern winds, southern point for puffins…)
-nature doesn’t follow our imagined constraints, it has its own
-the only thing that will last in the world of nature is the watershed, and even that changes
"Coming into the Watershed": seems to me to be Snyder's reply to Brechin with regards to SF's domineering contado and influence, while suggesting our human-made boundaries to enhanced by understanding natural "contados" for example the ideas of watershed or bioregion


10. Citizen Kane / William Randolph Hearst
The story of Kane is very similar to that of Hearst. By setting it in FL and changing the name, the filmmakers were able to comment on the situation without fear of consequences.
Brechin mentions the mystery and curiosity that surrounded what he calls "the Hearst enigma" (214). Citizen Kane can be considered Welles' interest and desire to understand the infamous newsman. At the end of the movie we learn that all Kane ever wanted was to be loved.
“…Hearst’s memory is increasingly invested in his favorite palace. When he is remembered at all, it is as a publisher, a connoisseur of fine arts, and the patron of architect Julia Morgan. Only Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Citizen Kane, continues to significantly trouble that reputation with its unflattering depiction of press lord Foster Kane” (239)




11. Hetch Hetchy Reservoir
-Gray Brechin
-Imperial San Francisco
-1906, earthquake and fire destroyed SF
-afterwards, society called for a dam at H.H. to bring them water
-government, due to voting, is leading the public to believe the water will be free to stop the hysteria
-confrontation between progressives and preservationists
-any dissent to the popular dam was social suicide, but no one knew what was really happening
-dammed Yosemite National Park for water and raised land values
-opposite of the Beat culture
Completed in 1934 SF draws 85% of its water from it. This was an enormous and blatantly selfish expansion the SF contado.

12. Alcatraz is not an Island
-In November 1969 a small group of Native American students and urban Indians began the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. Eventually joined by thousands of Native Americans, they reclaimed “Indian land” for the first time since the 1880s, forever hanging the way Native Americans viewed themselves, their culture, and their sovereign rights.
-SF is the city willing to see change and doesn’t hesitate when approached with an idea that is contrary to popular belief
The Native Americans only knew how to fight the takeover of their land and culture with an expression of aggressive imperialism, which is how they were wronged in the first place.
The title suggests rethinking the way we look at geophysical space, inherited as it is from capitalistic notions of property, borders, and limits (to our imaginations). See Snyder and also Ferlinghetti's "Great American Waterfront Poem".

imperialist counter-takeover.

13. “The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead”
-Richard Brautigan
-The Pill versus the Spring Mine Disaster
-rain stormed against SF = even nature herself was angry with the city for busting these icons for drugs
-alligator = reference to a song of theirs
- people in society that he will not let have power over him
- bob weir and rob mckernan were arrested on narcotics charges in San Francisco in the 60s. They were living near Haight street in the city- so that's the only thing that really relates to san francisco. Other than that i guess you could talk about san francisco's free spiritedness and how richard brautigan embodies this in his poem?

14. Turtle Island
-Gary Snyder
-A Place in Space
-a futuristic name for the United States
-no longer divided by invisible lines assigned by the government, but instead by natural beings such as rivers and mountains
-I picture it like the shell on a turtles back, the land on which we live, is broken into sections naturally, not forced
This is the name for the entire North American continent, not just the US. It erases all political borders, including international ones.
Turtle Island: "the old-new name" for the North American continent (243); "rediscovery" of Turtle Island coincides with Snyder's idea of "reinhabitation" and really knowing, valuing, and living off of your "place in space"; suggests mutual respect and engagement (a oneness) between humans and nature
-relates back to various Native American cultures' creation stories


15. beatitude / the Beats
The term "Beat" was coined by Jack Kerouac. Many originally thought it meant "beat down," but he expanded it to mean "beatitude," or kindness, loving of all life, sincere, practicing endurance, etc...like St. Francis.
-Beatitude: "the perfect happiness and inner peace enjoyed by the soul in heaven"
-This idea of transcending the real and structural by falling out of the mainstream, living among "the teeth and excrement of this life," is paradoxical (Intro to Howl).
-Ginsberg: "angel headed hipsters... in the machinery of night"
-Beat is to Beatitude as Brechin's imperial SF is to Ferlinghetti's "far-out city." That is to say, this is about re-imagining reality, not material/technological advancing, but using imagination and creativity to move out of this world, to "see" with the eyes of angels.
Where the term "beat" comes from; started by Jack Kerourac and means utmost bliss



16. “…our beautiful but lethal Golden Gate Bridge”
-Ann Garrison
-Reclaiming San Francisco “Suicide in the City”
-Suicide is only one of many dramas acted out on the bridge; the city’s landmark structure has long been a stage for street theatre (protestors against war, research, destruction of nature)
-the gate is bet known suicide site, and SF has been accused of taking a perverse pride in its reputation
-SF has become known as the country’s suicide capital
-support personal choice and officers should not intervene (in suicides)
-multiple suicide barriers have been brought to attention, but denied by popular demand
-repeated decisions against erecting a suicide barrier have been consistent with SF’s longstanding preoccupation with personal freedom
-“What are we known for more than our tolerance and determination to pursue our own paths, except, perhaps, for our beautiful but lethal Golden Gate Bridge?”

17. City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, SF
-started by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
-first to publish Howl by Allen Ginsberg
-basically ground zero for Beat Generation
City Lights Bookstore: Snyder regarding the beats, "It published its poems in its own little magazines, and didn't even bother to submit works to the large established highbrow journals that had held the monopoly on avant-garde writing for so long" (9); City Lights gave the Beats the freedom to stray from mainstream literature tropes and monopolies
1953.


18. “Franciscan” San Francisco
-The San Francisco that Ferlinghetti evokes, a pre-imperial San Francisco named after St. Francis de Assisi.
-represents the beatific, or saintly, vision of SF, as opposed to the industrial, imperial and car-wrecked.



19. The concept and role of “metatourists” in “You Are Here (You Think): A San Francisco Bus Tour”
-Reclaiming San Francisco
-Bernie, Dean, and Juliet
-tourism in SF is a string of sights and attractions (Bridge, Wharf, Park) with empty spaces between them
-their tour filled in those spaces with things that aren’t officially designated as worthy tourist spots
-“If anything could make the old sites new, it is the possibility of reconnecting them to individual experience – personal and social discoveries through real interactions with places as they are now – as we are now. The tourists would become the tour.”

20. legacies of the Beat Generation as portrayed by Nancy J. Peters
-Reclaiming San Francisco
-Nancy J. Peters
-In those days San Francisco was a rapacious (greedy) society that offered boundless opportunities for the savage exploitation of man and nature.
-There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism. The first is devotion or addiction to one of the Seven Arts, the other is poverty
-After WWII, the mass media celebrated common sense, social adjustment, conformity, churchgoing, and togetherness. The good life was defined by a house in suburbia, a new car, and synthetic products.
-San Francisco was unique for the open and friendly relations between blacks and wites who had gone underground
-the beat poet was excoriated as juvenile delinquent, drug addict, and sexual outlaw
-Life magazine: ‘bums, hostile little efemales and part-time bohemians are foisted into polite society by a few neurotic and drugged poets…[they are] talkers, loafers, passive little con men, lonely eccentrics, mom-haters, cop-haters, exhibitionists with abused smiles and second mortgages on a bongo drum – writers who cannot write, painters who cannot paint, dancers with unfortunate malfunction of the fetlocks.’
-J. Edgar Hoover warned America the three greatest enemies are Communists, Eggheads, and Beatniks
-Counterculture offers an irresistible narrative opportunity, with a colorful cast of characters and the seductive themes of transgression, exile, and utopia
-eventually covered by press and became a tourist attraction
-brief period of close collaboration of beat writers and artists was over by 1956

21. Bayard Taylor
-Gray Brechin's Imperial SF (p. 49)
This was the poet who argued that the rape of CA was a good thing because it produced great men and a great, rich society. He originally thought CA was a waste of time, but after returning after much progress was made, he changed his mind and advocated for more development. He prophesied that CA would be like Greece and that her future generations would more than restore the damage done by those who conquered her.



22. “angelheaded hipsters”
-Allen Ginsberg
-Howl


23. Timothy W. Drescher’s concept of “street subversion”
Found in Reclaiming SF.
Organized neighborhood murals are a way of speaking out against government, authority, intolerance, etc. People with a common goal organize and creatively express their opinions. It's a constructive way of recording history and voicing injustice.



24. “[ ] creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. Several phrase and the title Howl are taken from him.”
-Ginsberg dedicating Howl to his friend Jack Keroauc, calling him the "New Buddha of American prose". -Enlightenment


25. “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

-title of the song could possibly be related to a novel by Kerouac called The Subterraneans, which was about the Beats. But even before Kerouac's novel was a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky called Notes From The Underground which was popular with Beats like Ginsberg
- one could notice the incorporation of music into the beat movement. The cross over into other media (rather than just poetry) reflects how pervasive and important the aforesaid commentary within the song was really becoming around this time. It foreshadowed similar movements that would follow as well.
-

SF Songs

Here are some familiar and some not-so familiar SF songs. Enjoy!

Create a playlist at MixPod.com

Trip to San Francisco

My boyfriend was really concerned because over the summer he heard about the SF bridge possibly getting suicide barriers. So we headed to SF to see the sights and take some pictures with the bridge while it still had its beauty.Also, because of this class, we did some walking tours and saw some other monuments as well. Here are a few of the MANY pictures!

The Rose that Grew From Concrete

I am currently taking a class on Orientalism and the main portion of our text is based on Orientalism by Edward Said. Said’s Orientalism illustrates binaries just as Brechin tries to. When I view San Francisco, I view it with an extremely realistic view, almost in the manner that Brechin does. I’m from San Jose and I still consider San Francisco as my city by the bay. It represents power and industrialization just as the West does in Said’s book and presents the other cities as the “other”. Brechin presents the city of San Francisco in a very realistic manner. I feel however that even though SF may represent something very industrious, it also represents something beautiful and something uplifting. It reminds me of a poem by Tupac, a prominent rapper and poet from CA.

The Rose that Grew from Concrete (By Tupac)

Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?

Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk with out having feet.

Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air.

Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.

The poem shows that something wonderful can come out of something so bland, so grey, so solid.

Ghosts of San Francisco and Brautigan

In the Halloween Mood

In the spirit of Halloween, I thought I’d share a poem by Brautigan about ghosts.


Boo, Forever

by Richard Brautigan

Spinning like a ghost

on the bottom of a

top,

I'm haunted by all

the space that I

will live without

you.

When I first approached this poem, I took it literally and saw it as the death of a loved one. I saw a young, torn Richard Brautigan mourning and losing clarity within his solitude. Then I reviewed it a second time and viewed it as a wounded Brautigan in an ended relationship. The loss of someone that he cared about and lived with had a profound affect on his life from my second interpretation.
Knowing Brautigan however, I saw this as a nostalgia for old San Francisco. I saw it as the world spinning around and changing. From the old shops and the amusement places to new condominiums, I saw the poem as a yearning for the former version of San Francisco.

Ginsberg, Forca, and Whitman: questioning

I saw A Supermarket in California as a critique of commercialism. Allen Ginsberg also used the poem to illustrate the ambiguity of his own sexuality. At first, I didn’t know too much about Garcia Lorca, but after some research, I found that he had a harsh struggle with concealing his homosexuality. Garcia Lorca was diagnosed as depressed in the late 20’s (it is speculated that this might be because of his ordeal with hiding his sexuality). The more famous that he became, the more difficult it was for him to hide his true self. In the case of Walt Whitman, he was more extroverted about his sexual orientation. Both Lorca and Whitman represent a form of Ginsberg himself: a man that is sexually ambiguous and authorial. These authors are torn between the line of being in the spotlight and being able to balance their private lives. Just as Ginsberg writes Supermarket mentioning Walt Whitman, Lorca once also did the same thing. Lorca’s admiration mirroring Ginsberg’s admiration for Walt Whitman presents a poignant message about their relationship: that Ginsberg does not wish to hide his life, and that he admires Walt Whitman’s openness. Supermarket goes from overtly sexual tones, using food as a metaphor for the audience’s sexuality. He critics American’s perception of sexuality by saying, “Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados! Babies in the tomatoes!” This section describes how the nuclear family is established, and how this societal pressure affects those that are not heterosexual to conform to the rest of the fruit in the grocery store. It continues to be very sexual when Ginsberg says things like, “Which way does your beard point tonight,” and “I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”
When he writes to Whitman, he asks, “Will we walk all night through the solidarity streets?” in regard to sexuality. He wonders whether or not he will be able to stand proudly and openly instead of being confined to find clarity within his own solitude.

The Artist

Ferlinghetti goes against the grain and critiques those that stray away from their roots. He describes a group of people that were once original and daring that fall to the path of being the poster children of pretentious artists. He writes, "The party hoppers/wolfing down cheese and wine/without a glance at what might be considered art," to criticize how people fall into stereotypes and lose track of themselves. In this sense, he chooses artists to represent the assimilation of people within the field of art. The stereotypical artist, has wine and cheese, is well-dressed and analyzes other people art. He does into further detail as he says, "sheathed in silk and Christian Dior/ holding long stemmed glasses" to illustrate the assimilation within the the world of artists, people that are supposed to be have unique ideas that essentially, all end up the same way.
Toward the end of the poem he implies that a young artist falls into the trap of being a stereotypical artist.The artist questions, "...Is this/ what I'm painting for?" because he has lost his way within the art world. He has consciousness about the fact that he has strayed away from his path of originality and settled for the typical artist life. Ferlinghetti ends the poem by commenting, "No wonder then that he/ adrift this society/doth drink too much/ and roll upon the floor."This makes a bold statement about the artist, asserting that he "[drank] too much," meaning that the artist lost track of himself and found himself being consumed in pleasing the perpetual preconceptions about artists. By saying that the artist was "rolling on the floor" like a drunk person, he implies that the artist is not himself, but the artist was influenced by something beyond himself, and in this case, it was the people of the art world.