Vonnegut & Ginsberg

 

Jeffrey St. Clair:

+ In 1973, Allen Ginsberg and Kurt Vonnegut were both inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. During his speech, Vonnegut turned to Ginsberg and said of the most famous poem of the Beat movement:

I like “Howl” a lot. Who wouldn’t? It just doesn’t have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg’s closest friends, if I’m not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first — and after that biochemistry. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.