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ON_BROKEN_WINEGLASSES

                                                 November 13, 2007
                                                 May      16, 2013

                                           Based on some material about Bill
                                           Cannastra, posted to Wikipedia in
In the John Clellon Holmes                 2007.
novel "Go" Cannastra (alias
Agatson) makes his entrance                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cannastra
to a party:

    "... Agatson, in the tattered, shrunken pair of
    blue jeans and turtle neck sweater, looking as
    unshaven and fierce as a thirsty Portuguese            WILDMAN
    fisherman, shouted: 'Is everyone drunk around
    here? Who are all these people?  Who lives in
    this joint? ... Ketcham, what are you doing here
    of all places?  Bianca was asking about you just
    last night, yes, yes! I told her to shut up and
    stop being sincere!... Is anyone real
    drunk?... I just walked up the street on the
    car-tops and hit only one convertible!' "

   
Bill Cannasta died in 1950 at the        
age of 28, in a drunken stunt             (One account has the date as 1948:
where he attempted to climb out           Joyce Johnson, "Minor Characters".
the window of subway car after it         Probably not right...)
had started moving.              
       

Clellon's account of Bill Cannastra's death,
from in an interview from 1974:

    ... he was on a subway, a local train,
    somewhere downtown, and as the train pulled
    out of the stop-- the windows were open
    because it was warm-- he tried to get out
    through the open window, was about halfway out
    as the train gathered speed and struck a
    pillar. He was very athletic: he climbed up
    fire escapes, and dangled over the sides of
    buildings, and so forth, but he was drunk. 
    The girl he was with claimed that he said, 
    'I'm going to go get a drink.' "

                                               
    "... he seemed a contrast to Neal, Jack and         
    the rest of us. He was an alcoholic; his            
    motivation was embitteredness, the world's          
    approaching end. his way of playing was             
    self-destructive, it was giving wild parties        
    that went on for days, and which were not           
    chic at all but raunchy-- we all dug ugliness       
    then, that is, the worse it was, the more           
    interesting it seemed to be. "                      
                                                        
                                                        
                                            According to a bio in "Women of
                                            the Beat Generation": At age 19
                                            Joan Haverty met Bill Cannastra
                                            and "followed Bill to Manhattan at
                                            the end of the summer of 1949, and
                                            there she hung on to a precarious
   Ellis Amburn "Subterranean               but happy existence, reveling in
   Kerouac" (1998):                         her seamstress job, window-peeping
                                            at night with Bill on the streets
   "Joan sometimes dressed in drag as a     of New York ..."
   sailor and joined Cannastra in kinky
   games, peeping through windows."


               Also from Ellis Amburn: Bill Cannastra
               once challenged Jack Kerouac to a nude
               race around the block (Kerouac refused
               to remove his underwear).


Some lines in Ginsberg's 'Howl':

   who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
      the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic,
      leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced
      on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
      records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz
      finished the whisky and threw up groaning into the
      bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of
      colossal steamwhistles,

                                     Ginsberg explains
                                     the music reference:

                                    _Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny_
                                    Brecht-Weill opera arias 'O Show Me the
                                    Way to the Next Whiskey Bar' and
                                    'Benares Song,' which echoed loud late
                                    nights repeatedly in Cannastra's West
                                    21st Street Manhattan loft 1949

                                               The annotated "Howl" from
                                               1995, Barry Miles (ed)



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