Big leg womens, keep your dresses down You got stuff that make a bulldog hug a hound Big leg women keep your dresses down Ahahah You got somethin make a bulldog hug a hound
If you roll your belly, like you roll your dough Peoples is cryin, they want some more Ah, roll your belly, like you roll your dough Heyey peoples is cryin, peoples is cryin for more
Big leg women shore got somethin good Peoples is cryin bout it in the neighborhood Big leg women shore got something good Now how if you don't believe me, ask anybody in my neighborhood.
Mr Tambourine Man The time is early morning after a sleepless night. The narrator calls on Mr Tambourine to play a song and says he will follow him. In the course of the four verses he expounds on this situation often using ambiguous imagery, though the desire to be freed by the tambourine man’s song remains clear.
Chorus
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you. Delirious from a lack of sleep, upset and a bit disoriented the narrator requests a song from his imaginary friend, Mr. Tambourine Man. Some say this character was inspired by Bruce Langhorne, who used to play a large Turkish frame drum in performances and recordings. The drum had small bells attached around its interior, giving it a jingling sound much like a tambourine
Verse 1 Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand, Vanished from my hand, Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping. My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet, I have no one to meet And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.
Dylan began composing this song in February 1964, after attending Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The Mardi Gras festivities had built “empires” in the narrator mind, but come dawn, everyone left and he is lonesome. We all tend to build up an event we are attending into something much greater than it actually is, and of course are left disappointed. The image of sand here represents the passing of time and dissipation of our dreams. The narrator is left with nothing but disappointment at the passing of the ‘evening’ (time) and the vanishing of the ‘empire’ (his expectations). He can’t even imagine what to do next; he stands ‘blindly’. He’s been awake and on his feet so long that they feel burnt. He has no more dreams, but only desperate loneliness
Verse 2 Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship, My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip, My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels To be wanderin’. I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.
The narrator desires to go on a trip with Mr. Tambourine Man, he is ready to go anywhere. Although Dylan may have been using marijuana at the time this song was written, he has denied that it is a reference to drugs. This is a trip on a magical boat, without control, as his feet seem to travel on their own. It sounds like an out-of-body experience. (2) He doesn’t need the wild parades of New Orleans’s streets any longer because he can .be satisfied with the one he can create in his imagination.. This parade may be seen as a way way of finding an escape to get to freedom, the final goal. And to achieve it, the narrator promises to follow, to do anything he can
Verse 3
Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun, It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run And but for the sky there are no fences facin’. And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind, I wouldn’t pay it any mind, it’s just a shadow you’re Seein’ that he’s chasing.
Our lives as the world turns are imagined in a cosmic trip in the solar system. There are no boundaries, and the narrator is simply a ragged clown whose skipping reels of rhyme look for meaning., but in his quest he can only follow shadows (3). Yet we have an ultimate goal, and a need to move forward without worrying about the past, because the best way of owning life is to walk onto the future.
Verse 4
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind, Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach, Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
The protagonist is seeking something deeper than his ephemeral or egocentric needs, is disappearing in something universal, has visions of going to other places, not only outside his physical experience but also his psyche. He navigates through time and space, escaping humanity and civilization altogether. and the place where he is going makes him dance and forget all pain and sorrow. “To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.” is pure poetry. (4) and offers an image of an ecstatic person who has attained a state of rapture. Also the alliteration in the following line is great, reproducing the sound made by the waves of the sea Here the sand is real, that of the beach, and the narrator wants to dance crazily on it, so it becomes circus sand, on which the ragged clown of verse 3, can move happily, forgetting about reality. Circled… circus, with the repetition of the same root word, emphasizes the sands surrounding him on all sides and may refer to Dylan’s audience. His memories of the past and expectations of the future are all drowned deep in the ocean, and he is temporarily able to live in the moment, leaving any other connection behind.
Exactly twenty-five minutes later, a dusty pickup truck with oversized tires came barreling down the road. My pizza had arrived. To my surprise, the young manager was behind the wheel.
“Dude!” he cried, jumping out of the car. “You’re mad. This is awesome!”
He pulled the pizza off the passenger seat and opened the box. It was masterfully crafted, almost as high as it was wide, with lots of pineapple and olives piled on top. It looked like something you’d feed a rhinoceros. I paid the tab, thanked him, and prepared to charge on.
“You’re gonna keep running?” he asked. “Don’t you want a lift?”
“Now that I’ve got some fuel,” I answered, holding up the food, “I’m going to put it to good use.”
“But how far are you gonna go?”
“I’m headed to the beach,” I said.
“To the beach!” he cried. “Dude, Bodega Bay’s at least thirty miles from here!”
Actually I was heading to the beach in Santa Cruz—over 150 miles from here—but I didn’t think either of us was prepared to face up to that reality.
In her memoir Mary Karr uses all kinds of symbols, images, the landscape, weather, etc.. to symbolize the chaos that was in her life as a child. Give me three examples (Quote from text) of these, and explain how they enhance the reader's understanding and involvement with her memoir.
Chose a character and describe him (or her) in two colorful sentences. Make one sentence something visible, such as hair style or a way of dressing. The other sentence might be something physical – a gesture, tick, or mannerism. Combine these two sentences for a thumbnail sketch.
Writing exercise #2: Rounding out your characters
If you have an unsympathetic character in your story (and most of us do) make a list of her (or his) more appealing personality traits. You might describe a mean-spirited person who possesses a rich sense of humor, for instance, or a self-centered person with a surprising generous streak.
Writing exercise #3 Be in the “now” of the past
Close your eyes and mentally return to an episode in your memoir. Take your time setting the scene. Think of it as building and painting a stage set; try to recreate all the visual and sensory details as accurately as you can. Once you have the setting firmly in mind, visualize the scene unfolding around you. Feel, smell, see and hear what you did then. Notice who you are in the past, reinhabit your former self. If the scene involves another person or a conversation, have that conversation. Glance around you as you imagine it, just as you did then. Notice all the details (you may chose not write about all these, but being aware of them will enrich your recreation.)
Corso, Conformity, and Christmas Teeth
Alongside Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Joseph McCarthy, 1950s America
presented a new type of American-- the type of American who wouldn’t eat his vegetables,
refused to come home before dark, and adamantly protested a nine PM bedtime. It was a new
era, from which emerged a generation of youth who actively eluded normality. This generation is
commonly referred to as the “Beat Generation,” and no one better captured the thoughts and
conventions (or lack thereof) of these “Beatsters” (Charters xxi) than the poets of the era, such as
Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, and Gregory Corso. With a deliberate approach toward poetry,
these men, scholars, and hipsters were able to convey the very unconventionality that governed
their everyday lives. In his poem entitled“Marriage,” Gregory Corso impeccably epitomizes the
rebellious, hipster attitude of the beat generation by rejecting marriage as a traditional institution.
To fully appreciate Corso’s “Marriage,” one must first become familiar with the
historical background and the impetus for this counterculture. In The Portable Beat Reader,
editor John Holmes explains that the Beat Generation was a direct result of recent American
involvement in World War II and the Cold War and an active rejection of those wars. The
passage goes on to say that, “instead of obeying authority and conforming to traditional
middleclass materialistic aspirations, these young people dealt as best they could with what
Holmes called their ‘will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional
terms’” (qtd. in Charters xx).
This youthful rejection of conventionality manifests in “Marriage.” With just a cursory
glance, “Marriage” appears to be 112 senseless lines that Corso scribbled down while frantically
debating the option of marriage, asking the reader “Should I get married? Should I be good?”
(Corso 1.1)Yet a more circumspect and considerate analysis of this poem suggests the presence
of a more profound meaning. Gregory Stephenson reviews “Marriage” in his book Exiled Angel,
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explaining that Corso “satirizes the rituals and conventions of courtship, sexuality and marriage,
contrasting the individualistic, imaginative, poetic spirit of the poem's narrator with the norms
and expectations of society” (Quoted in “On ‘Marriage’”). While “Marriage” is in some sense
free-form rambling, it is not mindless in that it portrays a common desire of the era: a longing for
identity and individuality. Corso suggests that one loses himself in marriage:
Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight (5.1-4)
Corso describes this typical newlywed tradition with horror, exemplifying his fear of being a
mindless member of mainstream society.
Corso uses language to powerfully demonstrate his internal conflict, seeking to express
individuality but concomitantly fearing growing old alone. He juxtaposes these two desires by
creating a normal, traditional situation, and then inserting elements of his own absurdity:
But I should get married I should be good
How nice it’d be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf! (6.1-7)
By doing this, Corso demonstrates that marriage and individuality are mutually exclusive. One
cannot reasonably have them both. Thus, Corso predicts the inevitable fate of the beatsters: either
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the “doom of conformity” as Richard Howard would say (Quoted in “On ‘Marriage’”), or the
doom of eternal solitude.
The mere absurdity of the words Corso employs is evident enough of his message of nonconformity. In his discussion of dating, he strays from the standard dinner-and-movie tradition,
suggesting, “Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries/tell all about werewolf bathtubs and
forked clarinets” (1.3-4). Corso certainly had no interest in “all the preliminaries” (1.5),
presenting them as ridiculous modern rituals. Corso’s friend, Nora Sayre, suggests that his
preaching of non-conformity was well-received by fellow Beatsters, but not so much by many
scholars of the time. In “The Poet’s Theatre: A Memoir of the Fifties,” Sayre says “certainly,
when Ginsberg subsequently lauded Corso as ‘a great word-slinger . . . a scientific master of mad
mouthfuls of language,’ he was celebrating a form of poetry that was anathema to much of
Harvard” (103).
Tantamount to Corso’s diction is the poetic structure he utilizes in “Marriage.” There is
nothing orthodox about this poem. The first stanza has a loose, inconsistent rhyme scheme that is
non-existent in the rest of the piece. Capitalization is sporadic. There is no definite rhythm, nor is
there a consistent number of lines in each stanza. Yet, “Marriage” maintains a mysterious,
inexplicable rhythm that allows it to be read smoothly and coherently as poetry. In an interview,
Gregory Corso once explained, “‘I will just let the lines go with the rhythm I have within me, my
own sound, that would work, and it worked.’ In ‘Marriage’ there was hardly any change--there
are long lines, but they just flow, like a musical thing within me” (Quoted in “On ‘Marriage’”).
Corso concludes “Marriage” by professing what he believes to be most essential to the
question of marriage: love. He says “O but what about love? I forget love/not that I am incapable
of love/it’s just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes” (9.1-3). He suggests that marriage has
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simply become a tradition, a mandatory step in life as opposed to a manifestation and public
expression of love between two people.
Corso would probably prefer the “I Love Lucy” type of marriage- the kind that is
completely contrary to societal beliefs (in that it was interracial), always entertaining, and
founded purely on love (Halberstam 196). At the end of the poem, he professes a submission to
attentively await this strange, unique love, which he summarizes “Like SHE in her lonely alien
gaud waiting her Egyptian lover/so I wait-bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life” (10.3-4). As
a Beat writer, Corso actively struggled with conventionality in his poetry and in his life; as a vital
voice of the 1950s generation of hipsters, he certainly succeeded in that struggle.
