Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark obscenity case that put Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” on trial in California. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poem’s publisher and owner of the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, was charged with willfully and lewdly printing, publishing and selling obscene writings. The case, “People vs. Ferlinghetti,” went to trial in Aug. 1957, nearly two years after Ginsberg first performed the poem at the famous Six Gallery in San Francisco. Ferlinghetti won the case, which became a landmark in free-speech protection.
On Oct. 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty, ruling that Howl and Other Poems was not obscene but contained “redeeming social importance” and was therefore protected by the First Amendment. “The authors of the First Amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which they believed essential if vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over slothful ignorance,” Horn wrote his judicial opinion.
In 1955, Ginsberg began writing the nearly 3,000-word poem that helped define the Beat Generation. The poem was inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” which captures the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, nameless narrator who rants from his basement window about all the ills infecting Russian society. Ginsberg also attributes Walt Whitman for the free-verse style of the poem and his sympathy for Carl Solomon, whom he met while visiting his mother at a mental institute, for the emotional drive behind the poem.
Read commentary and tributary poem below the fold.
(Commentary) Fifty years later, Ginsberg’s “Howl” still resonates in America, obscene words and all, as Americans grow increasingly frustrated with the political paralysis surrounding them. The citizens howl against the daily injustices in America, but their words fail to resonate in D.C., merely reverberating within the hollow, empty chambers on Capital Hill. The best way to capture the spirit of “Howl,” while simultaneously paying homage to Ginsberg’s timeless words, is by way of a contemporary adaptation of the poem itself.
Howlin’ in the Wind (Abridged)
For Allen Ginsberg: The Beat Goes On
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