I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness……….
50th anniversary of ‘Howl’ Wow! Reading this opened so many doors for me. I even called my last son after the author. Recently I walked through Levengrove Park it it all came flooding back. Those golden summer days we thought would never end. Finding it more useful to dodge school & hang out in the park & this book was always in our mind or in our pockets. Sometimes we had no choice & were excluded/suspended from school for whatever reason: I don’t know choose: long hair, bad attitudes to success, red cords (I believe this or hipster trousers, was my own crime).
Those days we had little thought of the future. We didn’t know Tony Blair would drag our little country into a war for American oil & would send my own people here, to kill my own people somewhere else.
Death has also dealt a blow to many of my friends, Lenny Moore, Bobby Cummings, Jimmy Robertson & John Mullen. They all flew too close to the sun & their wings melted.
Who is left & what are they doing? Myself & Peter working in libraries. Jim McNaught keeping it real in the highlands, Colin & Phyllis somewhere in London, Martin spreading the hare Krishna mantra & Caff just being his same old self. John & Margaret Pacetta, their grown up kids & Margaret’s 80+ year old mum & doing, what they can to try & stamp out another great injustice in this world as activists in Glasgow Palestinian Human Rights Campaign (http://www.gphrc.org/).
I hope on the 100th anniversary of this book, my 2 sons (1 of whom is a Bedouin in a tent & the other looks like an Afghani, with his shaved head & long beard) will live in a better world.
Also on a positive note, its taken me a long time to hear Laura Nyro’s, ‘ Eli & the 13th Confession’, but it was worth the wait.
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