" ... everything that drove Ginsberg to take a trip that not only changed his life but helped spawn several generations of hipsters, hippies, writers, artists, rock stars, mental cases and self-annointed medicine men. Such Ginsberg biographers as Barry Miles ("Ginsberg: A Biography") and Bill Morgan ("I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg") have given brief accounts of the visit. In new and far greater detail, and with a contagious sense of enjoyment that sometimes pushes her into the present tense and the personal, Baker shows how much the Beats owed their name and their legacy — including some of their politics of protest and a persistent head-shop aesthetic that ultimately benefited the Indian economy — to their embrace of Eastern beatitude. Columbus went looking for India and found America; in 1961 Irwin Allen Ginsberg went looking for India and landed in a whole lot of what would become the American counterculture.
One hilarious stop on the way was Cannes, during the film festival, no less. Another, which turned depressing, was with William Burroughs in Tangier. But Baker dates the intellectual orgins of Ginsberg's India sojourn, much of it with the beautiful, drugged-out Peter Orlovsky by his side, to the summer of 1948, when, an over-age Columbia undergraduate subletting an East Harlem walk-up filled with theology books, he had his well-known auditory hallucination of "an unearthly voice" reciting the William Blake poem he had been reading. It was followed by a vision of the sky, he would later say, as "the living blue hand itself." Baker proposes "a divine mood swing." ... "
~ From the NYT review of 'A BLUE HAND - The Beats in India' By Deborah Baker ~
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