DOI: 10.25549/lipton-c108-217
title: 112. Lipton on Roth v US, 1957; Lipton essay discussion; Radio poetry program

description: Tape 112, side 1) Lawrence Lipton speaking (0:02) on Roth v. United States (1957), the decision of the Supreme Court regarding pornography (the Samuel Roth case), bad laws and their repeal, how laws control people, censorship oversight by intelligent control, choice in buying books, Pure Food and Drug act as intelligent censorship over control of the sale, manufacture, ingredients of drugs, advertising salacious content of pornographic books, Supreme Court and pornography, how laws should only control things that nearly everyone must use, not things that people use by choice, Supreme Court justices' private libraries, penalty for possession of obscenity, censors and informers, communism, ethical, social and moral judgments vs. principles, murder and violence, assassination of good vs. bad men, creating children so dependent on their parents that they commit suicide can be interpreted as murder, loving to death, protection of obscenity as free speech, impossibility of defining obscenity, obscenity laws, obscenity in literature, reading habits of the Supreme Court justices, obscenity cuts across party, class and education lines, changing ideas about censorship at various stages on one's life, the determination of obscenity is purely a personal choice, the type of cases brought to the Supreme Court creates decisions based on extreme cases, William Shakespeare's folios, James Joyce's Ulysses, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, when no specific right is defined by the Constitution the right devolves to the state thus the individual, no external body can dictate what or how a writer writes or a reader reads, revenge and blackmail is encouraged by the Court's decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Smith Act (the Alien Registration Act, 1940) targetting communists and incidentally artists as well. ❧ Television? news broadcast (42:27) on a Science article on AET as protection from radiation, on Charles Dunham (doctor) on fallout. ❧ Lawrence Lipton speaking with a woman on an essay he was writing (43:16, 1:04:12) on performing horses and mules, their defecation while performing, pigeons turning around while defecating on statues and steeples, and from Italian Saint Mark's architecture on Windward Avenue, Venice, California, the latitude of the poet, neurotic personalities and their excretions as an act of love described in in Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Eging's Psychopathia sexualis [Psychopathy of sex], Saint-John Perse's (Saint-Leger Leger's) poem Anabase (not Exil [Exile] or Vents [Winds]) in which are described that upon reaching the promised land Chinese maidens urinate on the land, urination symbolic of fertility and rain, human feces as fertilizer, urine to keep ghosts away, alchemists' use of human excretions, Professor Meckler, Sigmund Freud on defecation as symbolic of money, monkeys throwing their feces at people who tease them, in Lipton's play "Hunger" in Chicago, the older characters stooped, age equating with stooping and speaking hoarsely, where did the notion originate of cavemen dragging women around by their hair, women occupying a lower postion than men (slave and master), Polish practices of tying up curtains, etc., and then untying them just prior to delivery of a baby, potent magic of the Jewish Polish women, highly prized as midwives, killing a weak baby by exposure or drowing in some societies (aboriginal, primitive), the Chinese throwing female babies in the river prior to washing the newborn, similar to Christening a baby, Luigi Gedda's Studio dei gemelli [Study of twins] on when the soul enters the body, use of a syringe to anoint a child in the womb, cult of man as the master in India. ❧ Lawrence Lipton, Venice West, California, introduction to poetry readings by elaborating on poetic style and treatment (1:02:06). ❧ Tape 112, side 2) Poetry readings: Bruce Boyd reads his "Petition" (0:01), "Mi ami kay" (0:38), "This is what the watchbird sings who perches in the love tree" (1:00), "This is how the wind sings lover on the beach" (1:44), "Nocturne for the west" (2:15), "Hubris" (2:59). Stuart Perkoff reads his "To be read on festival days" (3:39), "The swing" (4:16), "On unloading a boxcar" (5:18), "We are forced to wage war against time" (6:00), "Echos, echos" (6:31), "We come on quiet man moving down the street" (7:44), "The caveman and the computing machine" (8:27). Charles Foster reading his "Let us count among the customs of the dying islanders the gift of love" (9:05), "Parlor'" (11:26), "Preliminary report on rarum naturum" (12:49). Lawrence Lipton reading his "How to listen to a poem" (16:19), "How jazz was born" (17:45), "The ultimate weapon" (20:12), "The dreaming hands" (21:51), "To make beautiful" (23:35). -- TIMES indicate where sections begin.