Reading the Obscene by Jordan Carroll;

Author:Jordan Carroll;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Mad Ones, Mad Men

“GINSBERG WORE KHAKIS,” according to a Gap print advertisement from 1994. In the captioned photograph, the Beat poet sits on the ground wearing a rumpled suit jacket and a sloppy necktie, his khakied legs bent into a meditation position. Although his hands, resting on his lap, come together to form a mudra, his face seems more smirking than serene. Behind him we see a Buddhist shrine. Beside him sits his own camera. Ginsberg seems self-consciously staged: his foot slips off the seat cushion because he has been angled toward the photographer. We are being offered a glimpse into his private life, maybe, but everything here is for show. The rest of the advertisement looks like every other entry in the campaign—the celebrity shot, the Gap logo, and a single terse slogan, all in monochrome—except for the fact that, over to the left of the image, we read, “All fees for Mr. Ginsberg’s image are donations to Jack Kerouac’s School of Poetics, The Naropa Institute, Boulder, CO.”

This image joined a spate of Beat-themed advertisements: Jack Kerouac appeared posthumously in the same campaign in 1993, and William S. Burroughs bounced between looping video monitors in a 1994 Nike television spot. While Kerouac was helpless to withhold his product endorsement, and Burroughs seemed happy to be paid as a pitchman, Ginsberg sought to undermine his role in the advertising industry by presenting the full-page ad as an exercise in charity, devotion, and the advancement of poetry. The notice preserving Ginsberg’s opposition to crass marketing strains the eye: its white letters fade into a light gray background, legible mostly to those already in the know. As one might guess from this image, throughout his life Ginsberg maintained an uneasy and uncertain relationship with the field of advertising.

In 1951, just a few years after graduating from Columbia University, Allen Ginsberg began a career in market research and public opinion polling. He started out coding questionnaires part-time for Doherty, Clifford and Shenfield before quickly moving to National Opinion Research Center (NORC), an organization run out of the University of Chicago with an office in New York City.1 Working alongside Carl Solomon and John Clellon Holmes at NORC, Ginsberg helped gather information on Americans’ reactions to issues ranging from atomic energy to socialized medicine in order to help lawmakers, government officials, and academic researchers better understand public opinion.2 One of NORC’s central projects was an ongoing series of surveys on race relations—the first of its kind—which frequently revealed the depths of white racism, discovering that many white respondents considered Black Americans more likely to be unpatriotic and communistic.3

In an October 1960 journal entry titled “Subliminal,” Ginsberg reflects on his past career as part of a broader indictment of 1950s containment culture: “I was working in Market Research. / Who threw poison onion Germs in Korea? / Do big fat American people know their Seoul from a hole in the ground?”4 Ginsberg’s writings on this period reveal American respondents to be blind to their own interior lives as well as their nation’s imperial adventures.

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