Nor is it what Lichtenstein means to me. But that's neither here nor there.
It's strange how we can carry around mental postcards of people we've never known, stranger still how it's impossible to envision them in any other scene. Or fashion. Or skin.
I'm physically incapable of picturing William S. Burroughs as anything other than a withered old raisin of a brilliant junkie who shot his woman dead. Just can't buy the young man pre-William Tell version. Allen Ginsberg exists only as words on a page and a disembodied voice as Jack Kerouac howls drunkenly in the background.
Samuel Beckett is a portrait hung above my favorite table in a pseudo-Irish pub in Berkeley. And the sound of isolating laughter in a darkened London theatre off Picadilly Circus.
David Foster Wallace is his black & white author's photo at the back of Infinite Jest... which I guess is better than the memory of a man whose light was extinguished at the end of a rope.
And Sylvia Plath? Not the broken woman with her head in the oven, not to me. Just quick, clean, cold:
Dirty girl. Thumb stump.
Anyway. Watch "Beat." Good movie.
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