Galen & Ginsberg in Wichita (circa 1966)

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Subject: GALEN & GINSBERG IN WICHITA; circa 1966; II

Thursday
November 30, 2006
(Before the Blizzard)

Dear Magda & Jaromir,

Now that you've had the opportunity to read a few lines of Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra," please allow me to share with you the short version of how I'm most directly connected with that poem.

Before I do so, however, I wanted to mention a very well-known and generally highly-regarded American novel from the 1920's. It' entitled BABBIT and was written by Sinclair Lewis. With regard to all that Jaromir and I have talked about over the past few weeks, it occurred to me the other day that Lewis's BABBIT may well be the one single book which most compactly contains my own vision of what's wrong with life today in Johnson County, Kansas. I understand that you're both as busy as I am nowadays, but I happen to know for a fact that BABBIT is available on both cassette and CD, in case you have time to listen to it in your car or home sometime. If, by chance, you're already thoroughly familiar with it, perhaps we could chat about it in the near future and discuss its critical bearing on our mutual discontents with our mutual culture, both global and local.

What I'd started to say before remembering that I'd meant to mention BABBIT to you (especially Jaromir) was that Allen Ginsberg's longish hallucinatory post-Beat poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" holds a rather special place in my heart. There are several reasons for this. One obvious reason is that it was evidently composed in and around and is therefore inevitably highly referential to Wichita, Kansas, the small city where I grew up and went to school.

A more personal reason, however, is that I actually had the privilege of coming into a kind of distant contact with Ginsberg when he was visiting Wichita in 1966, back when I was a junior at East High School there. How this came about was that my adoptive mother Margaret mentioned to me at the supper table one evening that she'd read in the paper that Ginsberg had recently given several performances of his (by 1966 Wichita [a la Babbit] standards) outrageous poetry at a place called The Skidrow Beanery, a rundown old 19-teenzish vacant retail space in one of the older sections of downtown Wichita, just west of the train station. At the time, I happened to be dating an unusually moxy, adventuresome, bohemian kindred spirit my age named Pam Batchelor, who was probably the only girl in a high school of 3,000 students who'd have had the spunk and grit and curiosity to let me take her to this mysterious, decadent Skidrow Beanery one evening, in search
of the legendary Allen Ginsberg.

The short version is that someone else was reading instead that evening; but Ginsberg was present, lurking in the shadows, behind one of those beaded-string curtains that were to become so modish a few years later. There he was, the living legend himself, bearded and younger than I am today, swaying silently in a shadowy haze of incense to the wildly homoerotic post-Beat-style hallucinatory rantings of a Ginsberg wanna-be who called himself something like Dallas Townsend, and who, decades later, lived across a rundown 20's-Hollywood-style 4-plex courtyard from me on South Old Manor Road and was thrilled to death to learn through casual conversation that, as a curious Ginsberg-worshipping teenager, I'd heard him read his poetry that evening in 1966 at the Skidrow Beanery.

It wasn't until 1973 that I finally got to meet Ginsberg in person and to hear him perform, when I was a grad student at the University of Utah.

To Be Continued,

Galen


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