Is the new film about Allen Ginsberg and the Howl obscenity trial a little too sane?
Allen Ginsberg, who set out to change the world so that he could fit into it, was admitted to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, in upper Manhattan, in 1949. He was 23. On his first day there, he met Carl Solomon, two years younger but already bearing a history of mental imbalance. Solomon was well-read, with a special interest in the French symbolist writer Antonin Artaud, who had died in a lunatic asylum the previous year, and who Solomon believed had appointed him his representative in America.
The two psychiatric cases sized each other up. "I'm Prince Myshkin", Ginsberg said, alluding to the gentle anti-hero of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. The reference would have escaped most inmates, but Solomon got it. "And I'm Kirilov", he replied (from The Possessed). A friendship had begun, which would be immortalised in a declamatory,...
Allen Ginsberg, who set out to change the world so that he could fit into it, was admitted to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, in upper Manhattan, in 1949. He was 23. On his first day there, he met Carl Solomon, two years younger but already bearing a history of mental imbalance. Solomon was well-read, with a special interest in the French symbolist writer Antonin Artaud, who had died in a lunatic asylum the previous year, and who Solomon believed had appointed him his representative in America.
The two psychiatric cases sized each other up. "I'm Prince Myshkin", Ginsberg said, alluding to the gentle anti-hero of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. The reference would have escaped most inmates, but Solomon got it. "And I'm Kirilov", he replied (from The Possessed). A friendship had begun, which would be immortalised in a declamatory,...
- 2/12/2011
- by James Campbell
- The Guardian - Film News
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