Carl Solomon
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Carl Solomon | |
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Born | Bronx , New York City | March 30, 1928
Carl Solomon (March 30, 1928 – February 26, 1993) was an American writer. One of his best-known pieces of writing is Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient.
Biography
Solomon was born in the
Solomon first met Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in the waiting room of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Ginsberg dedicated his 1955 poem Howl to Solomon. The poem's third section uses the refrain "I'm with you in Rockland", an institution Solomon never attended. Solomon had many complaints about Ginsberg and Howl, including that he was "never in Rockland" and that the third section of the poem "garbles history completely". The reference to Rockland appears to be a poetic fabrication. Ginsberg likely used the name because it was more appropriate and emphatic than "New York State Hospital" or "Pilgrim" (Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, another psychiatric hospital to which Solomon was admitted).[2] The poem's first section immortalizes a few of Solomon's personal exploits, such as the line "who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy."
It was at Ginsberg's insistence that
One of Solomon's best-known pieces of writing is Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient. It is an account of the electroconvulsive therapy used to treat patients in asylums, drawn directly from personal experience. It was written with Artaud somewhat in mind, because he had received the same treatment while unjustly institutionalized by the French government. The piece was included in the 50th-anniversary Howl facsimile, in an appendix.
In the late 1960s, Solomon published two
References
- ISBN 978-1604735802.
- JSTOR 10.1525/j.ctt1ppbz4.
- ^ 'Junky' Restored by Allen Ginsberg.
- ^ "Carl Solomon". Literary Kicks. August 24, 1994. Retrieved July 24, 2020.
Further reading
- Collins, Ronald & Skover, David, Mania: The Story of the Outraged & Outrageous Lives that Launched a Cultural Revolution (Top-Five Books, March 2013).