This is one of the funniest interviews I’ve ever read in my life.
My favorite passage:
GINSBERG: I should say my sexual preference is not just for boys, but also for middle-aged men, straight men, and women. I’ve occasionally had fantasies about making out with trucks as well as beasts. And maybe I’ll be making out with you, before it’s all over. [laughs]
LOFTON: Well. maybe I could drive that truck while you make out with it, perhaps an eighteen wheeler, with the pedal to the metal.
GINSBERG: Now there’s your fantasy. [laughs]
LOFTON: Excuse me. but you raised the idea of having sex with a truck.
GINSBERG: You extended it.
LOFTON: I’m just trying to accommodate you. I even offered to drive the truck. And you attacked me. But to hell with you. I won’t drive the truck. Get your own truck.
GINSBERG: Oh, you can’t get out of it that easily. You’ve already driven the truck in my mind. Gosh, you’re funny. But you’ve got this sort of contentious obsession—God knows what’s underneath all that.
LOFTON: Well, yes, He does know.
It reads like dialog out of Lorca’s The Public. I keep expecting Ginsberg and Lofton to start contemptuously/seductively stripping at one another while four white horses in leather studded S & M garb crack whips and blow trumpets at them!
The back-and-forth about Whitman is equally priceless. It had never occurred to me before that a relatively intelligent, contemporary person wouldn’t be able to wrap their head around Whitman’s “I contain multitudes.” It seems almost self-evident that we all have our endless collection of masks and personas we draw from, even if we typically do so unawares. But, of course, this is precisely the core bone of contention between the funadmentalists and the rest of the world — the belief in an immutable and eternal soul as the core of one’s being, one’s “true self,” versus the kind of fluidity Whitman speaks of, and most of the non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic world along with him.
Anyway, I’ve had a rather crappy week, and that interview made me smile, so I share it with all of you. If you scroll down the comments at the bottom, Lofton leaves some links to his own blog, and though it’s a bit overwhelming in a sensory overload kinda way, it’s rather entertaining in its own way. I do have to laud him on being an out ex-Republican and having the balls to speak up against this soon-to-be-former presidential administration on the matter of torture.
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