Excellent article, Ian.

I really liked this paragraph:

"Not that Ginsberg was only a protest writer. He was also, the new volume shows, a lyric poet of the old school preocuppied with passion, place and fate, whose consciousness, under pressure from the Bomb, released weird new isotopes into the atmosphere. Since everything was on the verge of being destroyed, it wasn’t enough any longer, Ginsberg realized, to focus on certain phenomena over others, favoring the natural and the shapely over the man-made and the monstrous. He sensed the new ironies of ecstasy: that it could arise in the least exalted settings, from bus stations to supermarkets, and that it was available to anyone, including bored office workers, such as he’d been, and shifty drifters, like certain of his pals. With the help of the joint, the jazz club, the paperback and the great meditation aid called Armageddon, beholding the universe in a grain of sand was not just for William Blake types anymore. Hell, with the right chemicals in his brain, the right music on the stereo and the right classics in his knapsack, a guy could glimpse the cosmos in the grit trapped between his roommate’s filthy toes. What’s more, it was incumbent on him to glimpse it — and, if possible, to celebrate it — since it might be the last of God’s objects he’d see before the final equalizing flash."

Has anyone read this yet? I already have two Ginsberg bios, and numerous Beat overviews, plus about everything he wrote. Does this book add anything worthwhile?