Root beer float :) (Taken with instagram)
I'm Yvonne Georgina Puig. I've written for The Texas Observer, Los Angeles Magazine, Anthem, Variety, and This Recording, among others. Be in touch here: yvonnegeorgina (at) gmail (dot) com
I'm Yvonne Georgina Puig. I've written for The Texas Observer, Los Angeles Magazine, Anthem, Variety, and This Recording, among others. Be in touch here: yvonnegeorgina (at) gmail (dot) com
Dynamite new tumblr on Houston architecture then and now: Houstoric Project
Gillman Pontiac (now Gillman Honda) in 1965 - currently the Houston Press Building at 1621 Milam. Crazy to think that GTOs and Bonnevilles were sold in the lobby.
from “The Gnostic Gospels,” by Elaine Pagels (1979)
In December 1945 an Arab peasant made an astonishing archeological discovery in Upper Egypt. Rumors obscured the circumstances of this find- perhaps because the discovery was accidental, and its sale on the black market illegal. For years even the identity of the discovered remained unknown. One rumor held that he was a blood avenger; another, that he had made the find near the town of Naj Hammadi at the Jabal al-Tarid, a mountain honeycombed with more than 10 caves. Originally natural, some of these caves were cut and painted and used as grave sites as early as the sixth dynasty, some 4,300 years ago.
Thirty years later the discoverer himself, Muhammad Ali al-Samman, told what happened. Shortly before he and his brothers avenged their father’s murder in a blood feud, they had saddled their camels and gone out to dig for sabakh, a soft soil they used to fertilize their crops. Digging around a massive boulder, they hit a red earthenware jar, almost a meter high. Muhammad hesitated to break the jar, considering that a jinn, or spiit, might live inside. But realizing that it might also contain gold, he raised his mattock, smashed the jar, and discovered inside thirteen papyrus books, bound in leather. Returning to his home in al-Qasr, Muhammad dumped the books and loose papyrus leaves on the straw piled on the ground next to the oven. Muhammad’s mother admits that she burned much of the papyrus in the oven along with the straw she used to kindle the fire.
… Sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo, the manuscripts soon attracted the attention of officials of the Egyptian government. Through circumstances of high drama, as we shall see, they bought one and confiscated ten and a half of the thirteen leather-bound books, called codices, and deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. But a large part of the thirteenth codex, containing five extraordinary texts, was smuggled out of Egypt and offered for sale in America. Word of this codex soon reached Professor Gilles Quispel, distinguished professor of religion at Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Excited by the discovery, Quispel urged the Jung Foundation in Zurich to buy the codex. But discovering, when he succeeded, that some pages were missing, he flew to Egypt in the spring of 1955 to try to find them in the Coptic Museum. Arriving in Cairo, he went at once to the Coptic Museum, borrowed photographs of some of the texts and hurried back to the hotel to decipher them. Tracing out the first line, Quispel was startled, then incredulous, to read: “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.”
…Other passages, Quispel found, differed entirely from any known Christian tradition: the “living Jesus,” for example, speaks in sayings as cryptic and compelling as Zen koans:
Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
What Quispel held in his hand, the Gospel of Thomas, was only one of the fifty-two texts discovered at Nag Hammadi. Bound into the same volume with it is the Gospel of Philip, which attributes to Jesus acts and sayings quite different form those in the New Testament:
... the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended]… They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you as (I love) her?”
Other sayings in this collection criticize common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, as naive misunderstandings. Bound together with these gospels is the Apocryphon (literally, “secret book”) of John, which opens with an offer to reveal “the mysteries [and the] things hidden in silence” which Jesus taught to his disciple John.
… Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of the texts tell the origin of the human race in terms very different from the usual reading of Genesis: the Testimony of Truth, for example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent! Here the serpent, long known to appear in gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while “the Lord” threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it. Another text, mysteriously entitled the Thunder, Perfect Mind, offers an extraordinary poem spoke in the voice of a feminine divine power:
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin…
I am the barren one,
and many are her sons…
I am the silence that is incomprehensible…
I am the utterance of my name.
Tonight I realized a childhood dream
I snuck into a posh resort
Walked among slow tourists in tropical shirts
With my chin held high like I belonged
And jumped into the big fake meandering lagoon
Where I slid down all the water slides
Even though the pool closed at 7:00
And it was 7:30
Ginsberg sings “Put Down Your Cigarette Rag” (excerpt):
Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke
Dont smoke
It’s a nine billion dollar
Capitalist Communist joke
Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke
Dont smoke
Smoking makes you cough,
You cant sing straight
You gargle on saliva
& vomit on your plate
Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke,
Dont smoke smoke smoke smoke
You smoke in bed
You smoke on the hill
Smoke till yr dead
You smoke in Hell
Dont smoke dont smoke in living Hell Dope Dope
Dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke
You puff your fag
You suck your butt
You choke & gag
Teeth full of crud
Smoke smoke smoke smoke Dont dont dont
Dont Dont Dope Dope Dope Dont Smoke Dont Dope
Pay your two bucks
for a deathly pack
Trust your bad luck
& smoke in the sack
Dont Smoke Dont Smoke Nicotine Nicotine No
No dont smoke the official Dope Smoke Dope Dope
Ginsberg sings William Blake’s “Nurse’s Song:”
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still
Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise
Come come leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies
No no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover’d with sheep
Well well go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
And all the hills ecchoed
I love this so much, Ginsberg sings “Father Death Blues:”
Hey Father Death, I’m flying home
Hey poor man, you’re all alone
Hey old daddy, I know where I’m going
Father Death, Don’t cry any more
Mama’s there, underneath the floor
Brother Death, please mind the store
Old Aunty Death Don’t hide your bones
Old Uncle Death I hear your groans
O Sister Death how sweet your moans
O Children Deaths go breathe your breaths
Sobbing breasts’ll ease your Deaths
Pain is gone, tears take the rest
Genius Death your art is done
Lover Death your body’s gone
Father Death I’m coming home
Guru Death your words are true
Teacher Death I do thank you
For inspiring me to sing this Blues
Buddha Death, I wake with you
Dharma Death, your mind is new
Sangha Death, we’ll work it through
Suffering is what was born
Ignorance made me forlorn
Tearful truths I cannot scorn
Father Breath once more farewell
Birth you gave was no thing ill
My heart is still, as time will tell.
I don’t believe in religion. I believe in Christ and I believe in the example of a perfect human being… if you can live for other people away from yourself you will be happy and if you live for yourself you will be unhappy and then you will not be able to sleep or do anything else… Insofar as people do live with the other fellow in mind they have to be happy because it raises you up… Committing a stinking act to someone else should make you unhappy, if it doesn’t you’re diseased. - Katharine Hepburn on the Dick Cavett Show
If hurt is a well
Then my well is bottomless
Words are only words
Pain feels like a ten
A blade lives in my tummy
It turns like a mill
Anger is one step
And there are a million steps
I am so tired
Your name is a bomb
How many times have I died?
Your name is a knife
My name is Yvonne
I try to be sweet in life
My pain is a ten
Now I’ll read a book
It may make me feel better
But you don’t like books
Thin
How anything
is known
is so thin—
a skin of ice
over a pond
only birds might
confidently walk
upon. A bird’s
worth of weight
or one bird-weight
of Wordsworth.
-Kay Ryan
