Syntax of Things

Howl

A wordle of Ginsberg's Howl.

Going Once

A couple of interesting items have gone up for auction the last few weeks.  Of course, they are/were out of my price range, but a man can dream, can't he?  Anyway, see if you can guess what these are.

Answer here.  {via}

Answer here.

Random Crazy Factoid

From an interview with Ben Jones (Cooter from The Dukes of Hazzard), who will be doing multiple readings from his new memoir Redneck Boy in the Promised Land in the Triangle*:

He was born into an active port city during World War II, and he once exchanged drunken hellos with Jack Kerouac as they both urinated on a fence in Chapel Hill.

*Along with the reading, "On Thursday, June 19, in Chapel Hill, 'Ben Jones Day' will be observed with a book signing and pig picking at the Dead Mule Club from 4-7 p.m."  Heh!

BMW's On the Road

Seriously, is nothing sacred?  BMW is using On the Road in a Spanish TV ad.  And using one of the most overused quotes from the book at that:

 

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

But isn't it interesting that only the title of the book appears? Where's Kerouac's name?  Could it be that the words appeal but the person who penned the words might turn off the Beemer drivers they are trying to attract?  Who knows.  Maybe I'm just being sensative.  Judge for yourself.

Yawn. {via}

Waiting

There shall be mostly silence around these parts the rest of the week.  Blame end of fiscal year.  Blame Excel's vlookup.  Blame the too early in the summer 95 degree days.  Blame the neck pain.  Blame a Clinton.

Hopefully it won't be as bad as all that but just in case...

Here's a Tom Waits interview from 1976.  In it he discusses some of his influences, including the Beats, and tries, in that uncertain way that only Tom Waits can "try", to explain why he doesn't necessarily consider himself a Beat.

First part of the interview can be found here.

Ginsberg on The Dharma Bums

The Village Voice's great Running Scared blog has made another great "Clip Job" available, this time a review (of sorts) of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums written by Allen Ginsberg in 1958:

The next step (after the rejection of the original “Road”) was to redo the subject, chronological account of the hero’s life, in regular gothic-Melvillian prose.

That was started with one magic chapter about a Denver football field. But then K said, shove publishing and literary preconceptions, I want something I can read, some interesting prose, for my old age. “Visions of Neal” and “Dr. Sax” (1951-53) and another dozen subsequent books (prose, poetry, biography, meditation, translation, sketching, novels, nouvelles, fragments of brown wrapping paper, golden parchments scribbled at midnight, strange notebooks in Mexico and Desolation Peak and Ozone Park) follow.

Writing is like piano playing, the more you do it the more you know how to play a piano. And improvise, like Bach.

Not a mechanical process: the mechanical and artless practice would have been to go on writing regular novels with regular types form and dull prose. Well, I don’t know why I’m arguing.
Too many critics (all incomplete because they themselves do not know how to write). Pound said not to take advice from someone who had not himself produced a masterpiece.

Am I writing for The Village Voice or the Hearing of God? In a monster mechanical mass-medium age full of horrible people with wires in their heads; the explanation is hard to make, after everybody’s cash-conscious egotistical book-reviewing, trend-spotting brother has bespoke his own opinion.
It’s all gibberish, everything that has been said. There’s not many competent explainers. I’m not speaking of the Beat Generation, which after all is quite an Angelic Idea. As to what non-writers, journalists, etc., have made of it, as usual—well, it’s their bad poetry not Kerouac’s.

Cassady

A new biopic, Neal Cassady, premiered last week on IFC.  Unfortunately I forgot to set the DVR and now can only hope that they run it again in the near future.  Or I guess I can wait for the DVD.  Here's the trailer:

And here's more on the film from IFC:

IFC Festival Direct presents a film that poses the question: What happens to someone's life when they become famous through a fictionalized account? Noah Buschel's intelligent and unusual new biopic focuses on the life of Neal Cassady, one of the central figures of the Beat Generation. Chronicled by greats like Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson, Cassady became an antihero for a new age. But, it was as Dean Moriarity, the lead character in Jack Keroucac's historic On the Road, that he was immortalized. Later in life Cassady hopes to settle into an ordinary family life, but the pressure from Beat fans to act like Moriarty haunts him. Shot gorgeously with a searing dreamy tone that mirrors the writing of the generation, "Neal Cassady" is the story of a man trying to live down his own legend. Before it kills him.

Coney Island of the Mind Turns 50

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point professor William Lawlor reminds us that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of SoT-favorite Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind:

Ferlinghetti remarks, "People come up to me after poetry readings and say, 'You know, I read your book when I was in high school, and I split,' or 'I left home,' or 'It changed my life.' "

Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States, admits his debt to Ferlinghetti's "little amusement park of a book." Collins carried "A Coney Island of the Mind" in his pocket "up and down the treacherous halls of high school."

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of "A Coney Island of the Mind," New Directions is releasing a special commemorative edition, complete with a CD of Ferlinghetti reading from the text, with some recordings dating back to 1957, when Ferlinghetti read at the Cellar in San Francisco with the backing of the Cellar Jazz Quintet. The cover of the commemorative edition is new, but the text, which includes poems from Ferlinghetti's first book, "Pictures of the Gone World" (1955), is almost identical to the original. For readers who have $100 to spend, New Directions offers a limited slip-cased edition of 200 autographed copies.

Actually, if you don't mind doing your shopping at Amazon, you can preorder the signed copy of the 50th anniversary edition of A Coney Island of the Mind there.

Carolina Avant-Garde

I moved to this area a few years too late to attend the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's conferences on the Beats and its hosting of Kerouac's On the Road scroll, but starting today, I will be able to catch UNC's new exhibit "The Beats and Beyond":

The emergence and evolution of American counterculture poetry in the third quarter of the twentieth century is the topic of the exhibit The Beats and Beyond: Counterculture Poetry, 1950-1975 in the Rare Book Collection of UNC's Wilson Library.

The Beats and Beyond will showcase approximately 100 publications, drawings, photos, and handwritten items associated with writers from groups such as the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, and two generations of the New York School of Poets. The exhibit will also examine the literary counterculture's engagement with issues such as censorship, feminism, Black nationalism, and the Vietnam War.

The Beats and Beyond builds on successful UNC Library exhibits about Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2002), Allen Ginsberg (2004), and Jack Kerouac (2005) to launch a broader examination of American counterculture poetry between World War II and the Vietnam War. Poets represented include Ginsberg, Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara, and Amiri Baraka.

Some exhibit highlights include:

• The first volume (1970-71) from Beat poet Diane di Prima's manuscript journals that eventually spanned twenty years and eight-two volumes;
• an unproduced play (ca. 1953) by New York School poet Frank O'Hara titled Amorous Nightmares of Delay: An Eclogue;
• works by poets including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov who were associated during the 1950s with North Carolina's Black Mountain College near Asheville; and
• a sampling of "little magazines" (small-run publications in which many poets published their work during the 1950s, as part of the so-called "mimeograph revolution").

The Beats and Beyond will be on view through April 21 through July 3 in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room on the third floor of Wilson Library. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

Never Beatified nor Pummelled

There's another nice "clip job" up at the Village Voice blog, this time it's a 1958 letter to the Voice from Kenneth Rexroth:

As for the Beat Generation. Let’s all stop. Right now. This has turned into a Madison Avenue gimmick. When the fall book lists come out, it will be as dead as Davy Crockett caps. It is a pity that as fine an artist as Jack Kerouac got hooked by this label. Of course it happened because of Jack’s naivete—the innocence of his heart which is his special virtue. I am sure he is as sick of it as I am. I for one never beatified nor pummelled. I’m getting on, but I’ve managed to dodge the gimmick generations as they went past; I was never Lost nor Proletarian nor Reactionary. This stuff is strictly for the customers.

As for Jack himself. Yes, I threw him out. He was frightening the children. He doesn’t frighten me, though when he gets excessively beatified he bores me slightly. I think he is one of the finest prose writers now writing prose. He is a naïve writer, like Restif de la Bretonne or Henry Miller, who accurately reflects a world without understanding it very well in the rational sense. For that, Clellan Holmes is far better on the same scene, shrewd and objective; but, as I am pretty sure he himself would be the first to admit, not the artist Jack is, and lacking, because of his very objectivity, Jack’s poignancy and terror. One thing about Jack and Allen Ginsberg, who, I might remind you, are Villagers, and only were temporarily on loan to San Francisco: I had to come back to New York to realize how good they are. They have sure as hell made just the right enemies.

Hobohemianisms

From "Clip Jobs", a running series on the Village Voice's blog in which every day they run an excerpt from their archives, here's Jimmy Breslin in 1958 reporting on a Jack Kerouac "meet the author" event in Brooklyn {see update after the quote}:

Every campus Bohemian, Hobohemian, and Subterranean had donned crew-neck sweater, taken pen and notebook in hand, and marched right down to that lecture to find out just what this crazy Kerouac and his beat generation are all about, anyway.

Jack, however, who had left Columbia “because I quite the football team and had to start paying tuition,” declined to make any pronouncements for the academy.

“What’s the beat generation’s outlook on life?”

“It’s an illusion.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s an illusion, not real—man, you ought to know, you go to college!”

The simmering hostility of the crowd boiled up as Kerouac identified his literary influences as Dostoevski and Walt Kelly. He calmly informed the Brooklynites that he wrote because he was bored, and published to make money.

Jack further declared that he was a story-teller and preacher, like Dostoevski, and that his writing, like a Chinaman, “spits forth intelligence.”

When a student inquired whether Kerouac was at present sober, Danny Price, one of Jack’s bushed entourage, broke in:

“There’s probably not one person in this room who doesn’t think he can write a book. But remember, this guy you’re putting down has written one.”

“Why don’t you answer our questions?” someone complained.

“I’m a Zen Master,” replied Kerouac.

Update: Apparently, this isn't that Jimmy Breslin.  That Jimmy Breslin had even less respect for Kerouac:  "It is not me. I knew Kerouac he lived in Richmond Hill, on 134th, near 101st.... The Philadelphia Inquirer, gave him the whole roll of UPI [teletype] paper so he could just keep typing. I should've given him a fucking box of periods. Taught a whole generation how to write run-on sentences. A disgrace!"

Re-Boiled Hippos

It looks like Penguin is going to the Kerouac well again, and this time their able to dip their toe in the Burroughs fount at the same time:

A novel co-written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two giants of the "Beat Generation" of poets, writers and drug-takers, is to be published for the first time more than 60 years after it was written.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945, was inspired by an actual killing which led to the arrest of both authors.

The novel draws upon the stabbing in 1944 of a homosexual, David Kammerer, by Lucien Carr, a friend of the duo and another Beat leading light.
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Carr served two years after admitting manslaughter, claiming Kammerer had been obsessed with him and had become violent.

Carr confessed to Kerouac and Burroughs, who helped him dispose of the knife but did not go to police. Kerouac was arrested as an accessary to the killing in 1944 and was put in a Bronx jail but he was freed after his girlfriend, Edie Parker, stood bail.

Burroughs was arrested but escaped incarceration after his father put up bail.

Krishna

Ol' William F. Buckley died yesterday, many years after surviving his encounter with Allen Ginsberg:

Austin Beats

If you happen to be in Austin between now and August 3rd, you might want to check out this exhibit at UT's The Harry Ransom Center:

Featuring more than 250 items drawn from across the Ransom Center's collections, the exhibition will take visitors on a journey through the cities, landscapes and communities that fostered and shaped the most important works of the Beat Generation, from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s. The exhibition runs from Feb. 5 to Aug. 3 in the Ransom Center Galleries at The University of Texas at Austin.

Jack Kerouac's scroll manuscript of "On the Road," on loan from the collection of Jim Irsay, will be on display from March 7 through June 1. The first 48 feet of this 120-foot "page" will be visible in the gallery. This visually stunning first draft has no paragraph or chapter breaks, and the characters are referred to by their real names.

[...]

The exhibition is drawn from the Center's extensive Beat holdings, which include letters from Ginsberg to Kerouac, "cut-up" manuscripts by Burroughs, the draft of Cassady's memoir of his childhood riding the rails with his father in Colorado, the papers of Corso and a 1948-1949 notebook in which Kerouac recorded notes for his novel-in-progress, "On the Road."

Other highlights include first editions of Beat publications, issues of Wallace Berman's experimental magazine "Semina," Larry Rivers's study for a portrait of Kerouac and prints by the poet and artist Kenneth Patchen.

You can also complete the "Are You a Beatnik" questionnaire for a chance to win a private tour of the exhibit.

Literary Kicks Remembers

Levi remembers Neal Cassady on the 40th anniversary of the man's death by a railroad track in Mexico:

I don't like living in the past either, but I'll make an exception for Neal Cassady, because he has always been one of my very favorite Beat Generation figures. Some of the very first articles published on Literary Kicks were about the connected careers of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey, and probably the very first exciting and impressive thing that happened to me after launching LitKicks was that I was put into contact with Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who had circulated a short article about the origin of the Grateful Dead song "Cassidy" online. I asked if I could give the piece a home on LitKicks, he happily agreed, and you can still read his excellent piece about "Cassidy" and Cassady here.

Be sure to stop by and read Levi's interview with Carolyn Cassady.  Great stuff.

Below is a short video (part of Jerry Aronson's Allen Ginsberg documentary) of Cassady at a City Lights Bookstore appearance with Ginsberg.

Yes Sur

This just popped up on the radar: a new Kerouac documentary produced by Jim Sampas et al. 

One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti’s cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. The story unfolds in several synchronous ways: through the narrative arc of Kerouac’s prose, told in voice-over by actor and Kerouac interpreter, John Ventimiglia (of HBO’s The Sopranos); through first-hand accounts and recollections of Kerouac’s contemporaries, whom many of the characters in the book are based on such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson and Michael McClure; by the interpretations and reflections of writers, poets, actors and musicians who have been deeply influenced by Kerouac’s unique gifts like Tom Waits, Sam Shepard, Robert Hunter, Patti Smith, Aram Saroyan, Donal Logue and S.E. Hinton; and by stunning, High Definition visual imagery set to original music composed and performed by recording artist, Jay Farrar of Son Volt, with additional performance by Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie.

You can watch the trailer here.

In the Grove

I couldn't tell you the last time I actually made it out to see a movie.  That will change next week with the release of No Country for Old Men.  And I'll definitely find a few extra hours to take in this one if it makes it to my stretch of the woods:

"Obscene," the chronicle of a publisher's fight to print the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm X, Che Guevara and others, has been picked up for worldwide distribution by Arthouse Films.

Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor's docu looks at Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press and Evergreen Review who waged repeated U.S. court battles over freedom of the press. Interviews and footage with Amiri Baraka, Jim Carroll, Al Goldstein (no relation to the author), Erica Jong, Ray Manzarek, John Sayles, Gore Vidal, John Waters, Lenny Bruce and William S. Burroughs are featured.

"Obscene," produced by the directors' New York-based Double O Film Prods., examines Rossett's public fights and personal demons. The soundtrack includes music by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Patti Smith, Warren Zevon, X and Ella Fitzgerald. Arthouse plans a 2008 theatrical and DVD release.

We've Got Spirit

I'm always a sucker for stories about good college rivalries, especially when murder and the Beats are involved:

In 1924, in one of the first Crime(s) of the Century, [University of Chicago] students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb misread Nietzsche and murdered (chloroform, chisel) a random boy to prove that they were supermen. It was quite a big deal because a) it was 1924, and b) they were rich, smart, Jewish, and gay.

In addition to two good films (Rope, Swoon), the murder/trial spawned the film Compulsion, which suggests that all this unpleasantness could have been avoided if they had only talked to girls once in a while. There have been no films, however, about the Columbia murder, which is, quite frankly, bullshit, because whatever the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr lacks in malevolence, it more than makes up for in sordidness and famous people.

Carr was 19, rich, straight, and, by all accounts, a hot piece of ass—oh-so-hetero Jack Kerouac describes him as both a “fantastic male beauty” and “a mischievous little prick.” He had already bounced out of Andover, Bowdoin, and, obviously, the University of Chicago, where he tried to kill himself (head in the oven). Apparently none of these were deal breakers for the Columbia College admissions office, so he came to New York, with Kammerer one step behind.

Kammerer was 33 and had been—enjoy this moment, because your mind is about to be made up forever—the leader of Carr’s Boy Scout troop in St. Louis, and he had “followed” Carr to each expensive school. But he had good qualities, too. Allen Ginsberg writes of the “wonderful, perverse Kammerer.” Kerouac notes that he was “not a bad guy in himself.” If nothing else, he introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to his hometown friend, William S. Burroughs.

Minor Character

Joyce Johnson speaks to the Guardian about her relationship with Jack Kerouac:

For the time they were together, it seems Kerouac leaned heavily on Johnson; both before and after the hurly-burly that proceeded On the Road's publication, she represented a rare fixed point in his life. "When I met him in the January of '57, he had absolutely no idea what awaited him," she says. "Because he'd suffered - he'd had a novel published in '49, The Town and the City, and he'd written several other novels, including On the Road, and none of them had been published. And he'd lived an impoverished life, essentially the life of a homeless person. It's all very romantic to go on the road, but it's also rather terrible not to have a place of your own. And he was always sort of searching for a place he could be, but because of the way he was, he could never find that. He'd set off for a new destination imagining it was gonna be great, and then he'd get there and bad vibes would come, and the bad vibes were inside him, of course ..."

Kerouac took, it seems, a similar attitude towards relationships. "Yes," she nods, "I think he had a grass-is-greener idea about women. I also think he was very messed up about women because of his overly intense relationship with his mother. And in a way, I think, flitting from woman to woman was his way of staying faithful to his mother - no one was ever going to supplant her as the fixed figure in his life." When Johnson and Kerouac finally split for good, it was after he had spent an evening drunkenly flirting with another woman right in front of her. "Choked with pain, I searched for the worst words I could think of. 'You're nothing but a big bag of wind!'" she writes in Minor Characters. "'Unrequited love's a bore!' he shouted back. Enraged, we stared at each other, half-weeping, half-laughing. I rushed away, hoping he'd follow. But he didn't."

Folkloric

I posted a little bit about this last year, but the Toronto Star provides an interesting take on a Canadian interview Kerouac did in 1967:

The setting was Sel de la semaine (Salt of the Week), at the time the Montreal-based, premiere televised interview show on Radio-Canada, hosted by the late Fernand Seguin. Seguin, elegantly dressed in a suit, speaking elegant French, introduced his guest to the audience – the famous American author Jack Kerouac, born in Lowell, Mass., to Quebecois parents.

The entire show, taken from the Radio-Canada archives, can now be seen on the Radio-Canada website. Sel de la semaine was clearly an intellectual show – interviewer and interviewee sat on a bare stage, with a jazz combo to the side. Most of the members of the audience looked like well-scrubbed university students, with the men wearing jackets and ties.

Kerouac himself was dressed in an open-necked shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. He was clearly ill at ease – furrowing his brow, fidgeting in his chair, as he tried to answer Seguin's questions in French. Almost immediately, the audience started laughing. Kerouac was puzzled. He asked Seguin why they were laughing.

"They came to see an icon – you know, Jack Kerouac, On The Road – and then he starts to speak French," explains Yves Frenette, a historian at the University of Ottawa. "But it's the French of an older generation. It's not a broken French, it's not even the French of an Anglo speaking French, it's the French of someone who's a farmer, someone far from Montreal."

Pierre Anctil, director of the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa, agrees. "His parents came from a rural area of Quebec in the Gaspé," he comments. "They knew the Quebec of farms and quaint people and small towns and there he was in Montreal, where the entire crew spoke French. He wasn't used to that."

To the members of his audience, anxious to be part of a modern Quebec, hearing Kerouac's French was like an educated American audience hearing a famous author speak in the hillbilly, southern accent of a guest on The Jerry Springer Show. "The way he was speaking, it wasn't so much the words by themselves, it was just the rhythm of the sentences," Anctil says. "It appeared as rural and unlearned and folkloric."

God forbid.

Sidetracked

I knew there was something missing from all the On the Road anniversary celebrations earlier this month:

In a rare move by a publishing house, the Penguin Group is suing a prolific biographer for the return of a $200,000 advance on the grounds he didn't deliver a manuscript by the contracted due date. The author, Douglas Brinkley, was commissioned in 1998 to write a biography of the 1950s "Beat" writer Jack Kerouac in time for the 50th anniversary of his breakthrough 1957 novel "On the Road." Because Mr. Brinkley was unable to complete the manuscript in time, the Penguin Group filed suit this week in state Supreme Court in Manhattan to wrest back the $200,000 they had advanced to Mr. Brinkley and the Kerouac estate.
Typically in such situations, publishers simply cut their losses or privately negotiate settlements with authors, according to industry experts.

Mr. Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University in Houston who has had five of his biographies selected as "Notable Books" by the New York Times, said he had been unaware of the lawsuit until he was contacted by The New York Sun, and that he thought it was "just a snafu between three parties."

According to the suit, the original deadline was December 2001, which Mr. Brinkley and Penguin extended to September 2005, and then to June 2006.

The Best Part of Waking Up

Three quickies before I start my day with a nice breakfast of Excel washed down with a warm cup of Project:

1. A few weeks ago after mentioning the fact that I had no idea that Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, NC, I asked if anyone knew what other famous person spent a significant amount of time in that small town not far from Raleigh.  Well, the News & Observer decided to help you out with the answer.
2. This MetaFilter post is the perfect way to waste away the day, especially if your idea of wasting is checking out what seems to be an endless supply of Nick Cave-related links, including a boatload of videos, all in celebration of the man's 50th birthday.
3. Finally, Luis Alberto Urrera has posted a poem of his that appeared in the recent immigration edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review.  A must read.

Ink

The New Yorker is looking like a must read this week.  Not only do we get a story by Roberto Bolaño, but also Louis Menand offers up his idea of "what the beats were about":

“Beat” is old carny slang. According to Beat Movement legend (and it is a movement with a deep inventory of legend), Ginsberg and Kerouac picked it up from a character named Herbert Huncke, a gay street hustler and drug addict from Chicago who began hanging around Times Square in 1939 (and who introduced William Burroughs to heroin, an important cultural moment). The term has nothing to do with music; it names the condition of being beaten down, poor, exhausted, at the bottom of the world. (It’s used often in this sense in “On the Road.”) In 1948, Kerouac is supposed to have remarked, in a conversation with the writer John Clellon Holmes, “You know, this is really a beat generation” (followed by a spooky “only the Shadow knows” laugh), and Holmes thought enough of the phrase to use it as the working title of a novel, eventually published as “Go,” and to write an article for the Times Magazine, in 1952, called “This Is the Beat Generation,” in which he credited Kerouac with the term. (The article was solicited by the man who, five years later, wrote the Times’ review of “On the Road,” Gilbert Millstein.)

Holmes wasn’t referring to a movement. He was referring to the Cold War generation, which, he said, had been disillusioned by the war, the bomb, and the “cold peace,” but was obsessed with the question of how life should be lived. Holmes thought that Beats were optimists, risk-takers, seekers—young people with “a desperate craving for belief.” The article popularized the concept, and Kerouac began using it himself. “Beat Generation” was one of his early titles for “On the Road.” (Another was “Shades of the Prison House.”) After the book came out, he wrote a play called “Beat Generation,” an article for Esquire on “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation,” and another for Playboy on “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” in which he added “beatific” to the meanings of “Beat.” In interviews up to the end of his life, he talked about his conception of the Beat Generation, and the literary movement associated with it, proudly, affectionately, and defensively. In his final appearance on television, a falling-down-drunk performance on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line,” he insisted that his idea of beatness had nothing to do with the hippies (whom he despised).

It’s true that the Beat writers were caricatured and abused. In the literary world, academic critics, whose aesthetic was all about form and restraint, ignored them, and the New York intellectuals, whose ethic was all about complexity and responsibility, attacked them. Irony was the highbrow virtue of the day, and the Beats had none. This response probably did matter a little to Ginsberg and Kerouac. They were Columbia boys. They had genuine literary aspirations, and they wanted to be taken seriously. On the other hand, they could hardly have lived in hope of the approval of people like Diana Trilling and Norman Podhoretz.

Scroll Stole

As part of the Kerouac/OTR celebration, here's the short story "Cut Up (The Stolen Scroll)" by friend of SoT Bill Ectric from his collection Time Adjusters and Other Stories.

Fitty

You might expect me to do nothing today but lounge in my LaZBoy, drink strong coffee, read the last paragraph of On the Road over and over and, as far as the blog, do nothing but link to Kerouac items. But unfortunately I'm unable to take a day off from the paying gig to pay honor to On the Road's fiftieth birthday.  I will put up a few items of note here and there as time allows.  I've written before about how much this book and Kerouac meant to a fifteen-year-old boy in small town Alabama, one full of innocent wanderlust who could through the pages of that book imagine that there was still an American frontier to explore.  And even better, that that frontier could be found both in the real world and in the pages of a book.   

For now, check out Slate's Book Club back-and-forth about the novel between Meghan O'Rourke and Walter Kirn.  O'Rourke gets it started:

I confess, I didn't much like the book at first; the opening pages seemed callow and I bridled at the way the women are disposed of, as if utterly lacking in intellectual worth. But by the end, I felt the ground had shifted under me; and the terrain I was on was wobblier and stranger than I had expected it to be. When we talk about On the Road today, we tend to exclaim over its sense of headlong movement and the convivial energies of friendship and bebop and excessive consumption (of alcohol, of Benzedrine, of sex, of gasoline) that animate it. But having heard so much about all that, the quality that struck me most was how much anxiety and constraint suffuse the book, too. This isn't just a jolly quest for "kicks" and beautiful girls and good times to be had at cheap prices. It's a book about death and the search for something meaningful to hold on to—the famous search for "IT," a truth larger than the self, which, of course, is never found.

On the Road is saturated in Sal Paradise/Jack Kerouac's obsession with trying to live in a kind of endless present, a perennial now. And so even the small changes in his outlook are full of import—and I found the trajectory of the book, from melancholic optimism to a kind of apocalyptic pessimism striated with hopefulness, enormously moving. Sal starts off his travels in July of 1947 fearful but optimistic, and at first he experiences nearly everything with a sense of, well, ecstatic transport. Think of those passages early on where he's in the truck with "Montana Slim" and the other hobo-types hitching a ride out West, looking, almost greedily, at the fields passing by: "Soon I realized I was actually at last over Colorado … looking southwest toward Denver itself a few miles away. I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out … I felt like an arrow that could shoot all the way." By the end of the book, on his final trip to Mexico with Dean Moriarty, Sal is enfolded in a more palpable spirit of pessimism; when he looks outward, it's in a mood of apocalyptic fervor: "At Childress in the hot sun we turned directly south on a lesser road and highballed across abysmal wastes to Paducah, Guthrie, and Abilene … we burned slowly into Abilene and all woke up to look at it."