Hoa and I leave in a few hours for the Jack Kerouac Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program at Naropa. We're bringing the kids, too. I posted my syllabus here a few weeks back, and I may post a portion of my "lecture" at this blog in a few days. Others teaching and speaking during this final week include: Michelle Ellsworth, Brian Evenson, Simone Forti, CS Giscombe, Joanna Howard, Allan Kornblum, Dan Machlin, Max Regan, Ed Roberson, Alberto Ruy Sanchez, Mary Tasillo, Steven Taylor, Wang Ping and others.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Boulder Bound
Hoa and I leave in a few hours for the Jack Kerouac Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program at Naropa. We're bringing the kids, too. I posted my syllabus here a few weeks back, and I may post a portion of my "lecture" at this blog in a few days. Others teaching and speaking during this final week include: Michelle Ellsworth, Brian Evenson, Simone Forti, CS Giscombe, Joanna Howard, Allan Kornblum, Dan Machlin, Max Regan, Ed Roberson, Alberto Ruy Sanchez, Mary Tasillo, Steven Taylor, Wang Ping and others.
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3 comments:
That sounds like a nice thing to be doing with the lot of your kids and wife, too. Brian Evenson was a close friend at the University of Washington. We used to watch the Jeeves programs together. Steven Taylor and others, I've met too.
Seems like a neat summer.
Does the faculty still stay at the Boulderado apartments, or is there some other lodging now?
Dale, one of the mysteries of Naropa, and of the Beats in general (with certain exceptions) has been their inordinate interest in Buddhism. On one level Buddhism appears to be lovely. On the other hand, it's a monstrous authoritarian system in which certain individuals become demi-gods. The horror at Naropa with the AIDS transfer (I recently heard it alleged that Osel Tenzin may have infected as many as 400 people), is something that you could also find in a Catholic situation, or a Marxist situation.
It's as if no one is really allowed to think for themselves, or even say no.
Therefore, I never understood why so many people fell for it, or continue to fall for it.
Even Kerouac and Snyder to some degree fell for this monstrous authoritarian system.
Corso never did!
Buddhism is possibly the worst of all religions in that it offers peace at the price of handing your brain over to some guru.
What is the point of this unless you're some kind of nervous Nellie, that really needs peace? I suppose the corollary would be turning to drugs as Burroughs did, or to alcohol as Kerouac and even Corso did.
There's something at the heart of the Beat enterprise that was never right, never quite sound.
The reliance on artificial stimulants is part of this, and the reliance on increasingly goofy notions of spiritual discipline, is another part.
Why did they goof everything up with regard to stimulants and their choice of Buddhism of all things?
I always thought it was a little bit like loony land there back in the 70s when I went. I couldn't understand why people were so dumb as to want to sit on a pillow and chant until your mind turns into a mushroom cloud of peace.
What an icky thing to do to your mind!
Trungpa was obviously not an enlightened being, or anything but a fatso who loved the authority he had, but who had no sense of wisdom beyond that.
Tom Clark was one of the few to nail that whole scene.
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