Friday
It’s been such a grim week that I feel the need to end it with some humor. I owe today’s subject to a couple of tweets referencing Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl.
I’m not up on all of social media’s forms so I need a little help in deciphering the tweets. First, however, here are Howl’s famous opening lines, in which the poet announces that the best minds of his generation are poets, jazz musicians, drug addicts, homosexuals, and other outcasts, who stand in stark contrast with what the Beats saw as America’s mindless conformity.
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,
angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery 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 tenement 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…
Jeet Heer and Molly Jong-Fast see today’s best minds as social media junkies fixated on the debates that whirl constantly on twitter, Instagram, ticktock, substack (independent media platforms), and other avenues of communication. As with so much of the internet, social media is both a boon and a curse. On the one hand, it allows kindred souls to connect with each other, debating ideas and sharing important information. But of course, it can also (like drugs) pull people into dark holes where they spend all their waking hours while losing any sense of reality. Heer and Jong-Fast are satirizing the latter, including themselves, in their Ginsberg allusion:
Heer wrote,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by debate club, starving hysterical naked, cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, dragging themselves through my twitter feed at dawn looking for an angry fix,
“Angry fix” is sadly accurate since, if you want to remain perpetually angry, twitter is a good place to go. For her part, Jong-Fast riffs off of Heer’s tweet:
I saw the best minds of my generation engaged in the discourse, starving, hysterical naked, cowering in substacks, tweets, fleets, Instagram stories, ticktocks.
Yes, at times social media sounds like an endless howl.