Plymell: GINSBERG IN KANSAS/ WILLIAM BURROUGHS JR.

So every time I open the 701 pg confettibook, something's fucked up. Now its pg 423 where it is said I booked a half dozen readings for Allen. Now I'm an Impresario! I have never booked a reading for him! I went with him and Peter and Julius on the bus trip to Lincoln where the police were supposed to have stopped the bus along the highway. Bullshit. He was recording all this shit in the tape recorder that Dylan had given him ...in the back of the bus he'd bought with a Guggenheim. Peter had total disability for life. Both had ten grand grants from NEA. Poor fuckers. Allen & I picked up my mother who worked at a minimum wage factory job. He gave me a hundred bucks, I guess that was for poverty. Really poor fuckers on that bus! He asked me to supply the names of things on the landscape like the oil pumpers and windmills. I didn't know it was a poem he was recording. He seemed to blame Kansas for the war. I think more soldiers were from his state of New Jersey and New York. He asked how big a prick has the president. I asked how big a prick has his guru. We were near Eisenhower's town where his folks lived on the wrong side of the tracks and his father worked on a dairy farm. If you remember Ike was the General who brought the mayor and citizens out of their village to bury and witness the holocaust victims just in case history tried to deny it. Good thinking for a soldier. He also warned of the military industrial complex which is bringing the country down, ironically all based on faith. And when Allen got back to Wichita, he debated at length a Methodist minister about faith, His or whose can justify any war now can't it? Well, so much for the poor poets ride through Kansas. They say it's a good poem. Leafing through the book I find that Allen is amazed that Dylan was able to emphasize words not done since the Greeks. He was always amazed. In the book that was just brought to me by a friend from Lawrence, A much more important book in my opinion Cursed From Birth/ William Burroughs Jr. Allen is amazed again that his guru could prophecy that William Jr. was not going to die but has a lot of anger and resentment to work out etc.. New Age garble...no Allen any fool could have "prophesiesed" such. Maybe that's why William was sitting in our house in Cherry Valley when Peter came in and asked had we heard about guru and his illness? Burroughs said" I don't give a shit if he lives or dies". The guru had shown up at the hospital in Boulder and told Burroughs he thought that William Jr. was going to live. Back to the pronoun I celebrating the reflexive pronoun and the fucked up ego. The relationship with me had ended? What relationship? And I thought that Allen was trying to steal my girlfriend? What girlfriend. Fame and money has created a Ginsberg industry that has twisted history. Want to know Allen's reaction when I first played him Dylan? Stay tuned Dick Cheney biographers of the world.

Charles Plymell