Poet vs theist
Allen Ginsberg Vs. John Lofton « A Nice Place:
GINSBERG: Do you ever have sexual fantasies?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: None at all?
LOFTON: No, I said I am a Christian.
GINSBERG: You’ve never had any sexual fantasies!
LOFTON: Before I was a Christian, I had them, absolutely.
GINSBERG: And since you’re a Christian you don’t?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: And when you had them, did they involve any dominance/submission fantasies!
LOFTON: Mine were pretty orthodox heterosexual kinds of fantasies. But there’s no doubt they were bad. And I am so glad that Jesus Christ delivered me from them.
GINSBERG: You have no erotic dreams now, at all, that you remember!
LOFTON: None that don’t feature my wife, no.
GINSBERG: Yeah.
LOFTON: It’s an amazing thing what Jesus can do for a person.
GINSBERG: Uh-huh.
This might be the most adversarial interview I’ve ever read. The whole thing is worth reading in terms of today’s “culture war.”
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literature, poetry, writing, ginsberg
Ginsberg is a classic example of how brain-cells damaged by drug use do not regenerate and how a mind is, indeed, a terrible thing to waste.