Sketched

Dear Mr. Wyn: I submit this as my idea of an appealing commercial cover expressive of the book. The cover of "The Town and the City" was as dull as the title and the photo backflap.  Wilbur Pippin's photo of me is the perfect On the Road one...it will look like the faceof the figure below.  J.K.

Kerouac's idea never made it to cover, as you can see from the Kerouac Book Cover archive.

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Gilbert Sorrentino, who passed away last Thursday, made some interesting points about the Beats in this 1994 interview:

The beats can only be understood as a single manifestation, in the fifties, of the general dissatisfaction, among young, unknown artists, with the given norms of art then in ascendance. They have been distorted out of all reality by the popular media, probably because they make "good copy," but they were no less distorted at the time they emerged. Some of them did good work, some not, but that is the case with all "movements." That they were especially iconoclastic is an idea that will not wash, when one considers the remarkable innovations, the formal attacks on the norms of literature present at the time, by such writers as Olson, Creeley, O'Hara, Spicer, and so on. Strangely enough, some of the most compelling beat writers are more or less forgotten now -- Ray Bremser for one, and then, of course, there is Irving Rosenthal, whose single book, long out of print and almost impossible to find, Sheeper, is perhaps the most elegant single work to emerge from that era. To talk about the beats without acknowledging these writers is to assume that the propaganda about that era is the truth about that era. This is all further complicated by the historical blurring that occurs when non-beat writers are lumped in with beat writers, when we are told that such writers as Amiri Baraka, William Burroughs, Michael McClure, even Gary Snyder, are beat writers. That's like saying that Raymond Roussel was a surrealist. Again, to understand the beats, you have understand the general cultural ferment that was going on in the arts in the fifties, the restlessness, the boredom, the unintentional comedy of an era that proffered Randall Jarrell as a very important poet and that valorized Robert Frost to the detriment of William Carlos Williams.

Interesting that he makes the claim that Burroughs isn't a Beat writer.  Earlier in the interview, he discussed Burroughs and Naked Lunch saying, "Burroughs is a legitimate artist, but he is not as good as his admirers think and he is nowhere near as bad as the people who have never read him believe. Of course, Naked Lunch, is the text that most people read, while the rest of Burroughs more or less languishes, even though his trilogy, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express are his best books. But Naked Lunch appeals to the juvenile mind that wants to think of it as the crazy work of a really crazy guy full of smack and writing in a daze--Burroughs as Rimbaud on heroin!" {via}

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Not Beat or book related, but I have to ask: Can you name me one festival/concert that could possibly be worse than this one?

Comments

[jmorrison]

"By John Kerouac?"