"Hey Siri, play music."

I said into my AirPods. So nonspecific! I was out and about and not in a good position to skip things, but I was also forcing myself to accept whatever it was that I had put into my iPhone music library. I have so many audiobooks, but they're in a different app, so it's only rarely that spoken word comes up when I'm playing the "Music" app randomly. I can tell Siri to skip a track, so it's not as though I'd need to dig the iPhone out of my bag and squint to read it in the sunlight. But I sometimes adopt a discipline of listening to what The Randomness wants from me at any given moment.

Yesterday, it was "Kaddish," written and spoken by Allen Ginsberg, because a CD collection I bought long ago — "Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs" — took up residence in the Music app and not the audiobook app. There's other spoken word in the Music app. In fact, there was one thing I told Siri to skip yesterday — the oral argument in King v. Burwell. I will submit to The Randomness, but only so far. I considered skipping "Kaddish," but, I thought, I can do this. How long can it be? I dug in. It's an hour. (Audio. Text.)

Anyway... that radically changed the nature of my outing. But I stuck it out. Sample text:

Eugene got out of the Army, came home changed and lone—cut off his nose in jewish operation—for years stopped girls on Broadway for cups of coffee to get laid—Went to NYU, serious there, to finish Law.—

That caught my ear because I went to NYU School of Law and because one of the news stories of yesterday was "Georgia Senator Is Criticized for Ad Enlarging Jewish Opponent’s Nose/Senator David Perdue, a Republican, drew a quick rebuke from his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff, who said the Facebook ad employed the 'least original anti-Semitic trope in history'" (NYT).

There's an annotation at Genius.com on "cut off his nose in jewish operation":

This refers to [Ginsberg's brother] Eugene changing his ‘Jewish-sounding’ surname from Ginsberg to Brooks.

I'm happy to see that Genius is a place to annotate poems and not just song lyrics. Unfortunately, there are very few annotations in "Kaddish." I wanted more, but at least I got a hint of what "jewish operation" might refer to. Not the nose, even though "nose" is right there? Maybe "nose" is there to call to mind the saying "Don't cut off your nose to spite your face," and whatever that saying is supposed to mean is what Eugene was doing in changing his name from Ginsberg to Brooks.

More about Eugene from "Kaddish":

But Gene, young,—been Montclair Teachers College 4 years—taught half year & quit to go ahead in life—afraid of Discipline Problems—dark sex Italian students, raw girls getting laid, no English, sonnets disregarded—and he did not know much—just that he lost—
so broke his life in two and paid for Law—read huge blue books and rode the ancient elevator 13 miles away in Newark & studied up hard for the future

Some law school casebooks are blue — and there are also the red ones and the brown ones. You can commute to NYU — in the heart of Greenwich Village — from your apartment in Newark, New Jersey. It does sound gloomy, I thought, as I bicycled around Lake Monona on the sunny day that was yesterday. When I went to NYU, I lived right there in Greenwich Village.

Ah! Here's the building. It's a co-op now, and I think the very studio we lived in is on the market now. $600,000 to buy into the privilege of paying $4,000 a month. Somehow, that makes me feel so lucky. What a nice .6 mile walk I had on that street with its own Bob Dylan song... back in the days when I didn't even have a way to pipe music — or talking — straight into my ears.

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You say “How are you? Good luck!”/But you don’t mean it....