Via billmon.org, a reminder that Allen Ginsberg’s epic Howl is 50 years young today. And I’m repeating the quotation Billmon lists on his entry:

Because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “AWWW!”
— Jack Kerouac
On the Road, 1957

If you haven’t read either author, you’re missing two very important voices in Amercian literature.

How can you read the Kerouac quotation (above) and not be intrigued?

Or how can you deny the raw emotion and terrible beauty of the first few lines of Howl?:

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,
angelheaded 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…