NAROPA
3 Zen Out or Zone Out?
A flurry of activity signals Naropa's most popular event is finally getting underway. These readings feature beat greats, beat buddies, beat wannabes, and beat groupies who earned a reading by balling them, faculty members, or Naropa organizers. Forty-five minutes to an hour for each wordsmith. Tonight, Michael Brownstein opens, followed by Ginsburg and Burroughs.
On this atmospherically charged evening, Herr Brownstein reads excerpts from his latest novel, Country Cousins. It portrays a woman who exorcises her demons by compulsively sweeping and mopping her country cottage's floor. She sweeps the floor. She mops the floor. She misses the boyfriend who done her wrong. She repeats this exercise a dozen times a day, seven days a week. Sarcasm alert: I would have titled it Moping and Mopping. About halfway through the narrative, I'm speculating whether Shambala Training could help me zone out—or is that zen out—for three full hours until the very last syllable of verse has been pronounced. $40,000 is beginning to feel like a bigger bargain every second.
Much repetitive janitoring later, the crowd is effectively quaaluded. But hope springs eternal: one of the biggest bats of Beatdom—mighty Ginsburg himself—is stepping up to the podium. Excitement builds. Now we're guaranteed some real verbal fireworks, right? "Ginzy" launches into his most recent work, swiftly working up a froth at the mouth an Irish Wolfhound would envy. In case you're unfamiliar with his body of work, well, there's Howl—for all intents and purposes the Beat movement's Torah, and deservedly so—then there's everything else. One example of everything else I'm being, ah, subjected, I mean treated to, is "Sphincter," nothing more or less than an ode to his own arsehole. Exaltation of the anus is apparently a recurring theme harkened back to again and again by every noteworthy Beat. It occurs to me that perhaps I've been taking my own aperture for granted, though not enough to immortalize it in verse ...
... The interminable reading at the junior high gym induces an anamnesis of when I was 12 years old, sitting through Saturday morning service at Temple Beth Shalom in Park Ridge, New Jersey. There was a lot more interactivity at my synagogue. You could invent certain time-killing exercises preferable to taking the easy way out and actually listening to whatever the rabbi was incanting about.
First and foremost on the list of recommended activities for those of us who pioneered what is now known as Attention Deficit Disorder was the gleeful exercise of raising the folding seats of the yids in front of us when they stood for hymns 'n chants. When those daveners tried to sit back down again, well, those trusty wooden slats were no longer there. They'd bang into each other, bibles, tallits, and yarmulkas would go flying. Oh, how that cracked us up! Their startled expressions were perversely gratifying. When we eventually bored of that diversion, which took a while because we kept moving around to different sections of the congregation repeating the same prank, we'd stare at the overhead lights until psychedelic spots appeared. Instant mescaline. I try it in the Sacred Heart of Jesus gymnasium, but can't quite repeat the phenomenon ...
... The rabid rabbi's protracted poetics eventually give way to the star of the evening, one William Seward Burroughs II. "Bill" regales the crowd with up close and personal accounts of life on the planet filtered through his, um, idiosyncratic lens. This is material that the average man on the street can easily relate to. Like what? Like accounts of skulking around the back alleys of Tangiers paying boys to fuck each other while he watches, chronicles of his endless admiration for talking assholes (de rigeur, evidently), and a serving of tasty tidbits about his own exorcism as performed by an authentic Sioux medicine man. I'll go out on a limb and posit this is fare that the majority of The Great Society is unaccustomed to finding in mainstream journals like, say, The Saturday Evening Post. Those tales and others are delivered in Burroughs' signature sepulchral drawl, accentuating his mystique. The fedora-sporting heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune ultimately leaves 'em laughing with droll observations about junkie life suffused with refreshingly little meaning. The riddle of life is best answered at the parties. Everyone knows that.