Terrific piece, David. Thanks as always for such great research. Never thought there'd be that much available detail on this period.
I'd like to revise my 'ran out of film' theory to "he probably lost it or gave it to Peter." Was just rereading Ginsberg's introduction to his Snapshot Poetics book and he states "As I left India in ‘63, I must have lost my Kodak Retina at some point or perhaps I gave it to Peter (Orlovsky) when we separated, because I bought a new camera in Hong Kong – a half frame camera – duty free, you know"
Hong Kong would have been a stopover from Saigon to Tokyo of course. I'd be curious to see whether Peter's archive has any evidence of having that Retina. No mention of a camera in Peter Orlovsky A Life in Words (Bill Morgan). For you camera spotters out there, that half frame referenced is an Olympus Pen D.
""Nervous stomach in Saigon not wanting to go to helicopter battlefields in rice paddies & watch Chinese bodies be blown apart?"" there's a political naivety in Ginsberg that takes me aback sometimes ... the tragedy in Vietnam was that it was Vietnames bodies being blown and burned apart.
I think by "Chinese" he meant "Asian." You see a lot in these people's writings from the 50s and 60s a conflation of the two terms, as ridiculous as it seems. I remember reading Hunter Thompson bitching about his Chinese landlord in SF but the guy was Vietnamese. I don't think it was a complete inability to differentiate between the various nations of Asia but perhaps more of a temporary idea that most of East and Southeast Asia was ethnically or culturally Chinese. It's stupid and wrong but I think that's what they were thinking back then.
Terrific piece, David. Thanks as always for such great research. Never thought there'd be that much available detail on this period.
I'd like to revise my 'ran out of film' theory to "he probably lost it or gave it to Peter." Was just rereading Ginsberg's introduction to his Snapshot Poetics book and he states "As I left India in ‘63, I must have lost my Kodak Retina at some point or perhaps I gave it to Peter (Orlovsky) when we separated, because I bought a new camera in Hong Kong – a half frame camera – duty free, you know"
Hong Kong would have been a stopover from Saigon to Tokyo of course. I'd be curious to see whether Peter's archive has any evidence of having that Retina. No mention of a camera in Peter Orlovsky A Life in Words (Bill Morgan). For you camera spotters out there, that half frame referenced is an Olympus Pen D.
Thanks for clarifying that detail, Peter.
""Nervous stomach in Saigon not wanting to go to helicopter battlefields in rice paddies & watch Chinese bodies be blown apart?"" there's a political naivety in Ginsberg that takes me aback sometimes ... the tragedy in Vietnam was that it was Vietnames bodies being blown and burned apart.
I think by "Chinese" he meant "Asian." You see a lot in these people's writings from the 50s and 60s a conflation of the two terms, as ridiculous as it seems. I remember reading Hunter Thompson bitching about his Chinese landlord in SF but the guy was Vietnamese. I don't think it was a complete inability to differentiate between the various nations of Asia but perhaps more of a temporary idea that most of East and Southeast Asia was ethnically or culturally Chinese. It's stupid and wrong but I think that's what they were thinking back then.
Thanks for your great research work!