The Beats revisited

ColoradoGuy

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The Times Literary Supplement of March 3 has a couple of interesting reviews of recent books about the Beats. The first discusses a book about Jack Kerouac with some information I didn't know: The Unknown Kerouac. The review also discusses two reissues of his books, Collected Poems and Old Angel Midnight. Kerouac's notion was he wanted to use language like a jazz musician. In his own account he was in the hospital for several months in 1951 with phlebitis (a blood clot). This was before he wrote On the Road. During that hospitalization he wrote in the copious notebooks he kept that he was listening to the "beautiful, sad long phrases" of saxophonist Lee Konitz and "he [Konitz] was doing what I'm doing with a sentence like hints of heartbreaking loss that filtered in with chunks of October daylight from the street." The author of Unknown Kerouac puts much emphasis on where that language may have come from and believes much of it stemmed from the fact Kerouac was not a native English speaker. This was news to me. I knew he was from Massachusetts of French Canadian extraction, but I didn't know he didn't learn English until he went to school; he first spoke a Quebecois patois, and continued throughout his life to use that with his family. So in a way he wrote English as a closely observing outsider, something that attuned him to the musical rhythm of the language. He even wrote some things in his native language just before he started On the Road. In the words of the reviewer:

Kerouac's ambition to capture the living moment (crucially for him, recapitulating memory) developed poetic form in 1954 with his collection San Francisco Blues, and it reached greater fulfillment with the sixty-seven free-association passages of Old Angel Midnight.

Later he spent a lot of time with Northern California Buddhists listening to meditative chants. Kerouac wrote this was "a multi-lingual sound representing the had-dal-da-babra of babbling world tongues coming in through my windows." He used extensive alliteration and assonance to try to capture this.

The second TLS article in the issue reviews a couple of new collections of work by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who is the last surviving original Beat at age 99. Ferlinghetti founded City Lights bookstore and publishers in San Francisco; he published many of the Beat writers. The Travel Journals are interesting, but more interesting to me was the collection of correspondence between Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsburg. It appears that, although Ferlinghetti and Ginsburg were life-long friends, the former wanted City Lights also to publish modernist and avant-garde writers from the US and Europe. The editor of the collection calls Ferlinghetti "part Zen clown, part establishment man." He did share a bit of Kerouac's point of view about language. From his travel journals:

Sometimes it is better not to know anything about a country when you visit it. Especially it is important not to know the language or languages. Thus every sound, striking the ear like a small bell or animal cry, without any associative meaning, takes on the immediate quality of poetry, with the percussive effects of pure sound in a void.

I have always enjoyed reading this stuff, maybe because I grew up in the 1950s and dreamed of California. My small Minnesota town was certainly Ozzie and Harriet-ville. But my mother was an English professor and she found the Beats fascinating and a refreshing burst of creativity for the era. Also, my long-time agent took over the agency from her father, who had been an agent for several Beat writers and even wrote a book about them, an annotated collection of Beat writings.

I think the TLS reviews are behind a paywall. If anybody is interested I can access them and send them to you. Here's a cool picture of Ginsburg and Ferlinghetti taken in 1988.

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blacbird

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Fascinating. I had an interesting personal (not intimate) experience with Allen Ginsburg, back in 1968, when I was a hick undergrad at the University of Northern Iowa. It was in February, as I recall, with the weather being Iowa winter brutal, and Ginsburg had been invited to spend a week there interacting with undergrad English honors students, of whom I was not only one, but the Vice-President of the Honors Students Association. So I got delegated to be his chaperon. He was absolutely wonderful, a delightful, funny man quite generous with his time and energy. One morning during that visit, in the midst of a horizontal snowstorm, I had gone to a local café just across the street from the ancient building that housed the English department, and was sitting alone at a small table next to the street window, drinking atrocious black coffee. I looked out and saw Ginsburg dashing across the street, neckscarf and hair and beard extended by the wind, otherwise dressed in flimsy garb more appropriate for maybe Atlanta than the northern Midwest. He had spied me through the window (God knows how he recognized me, except that he may have been on the lookout for the UNI gold medal recipient in the category of Lack of Sartorial Style). He, himself, fit in to Cedar Falls, Iowa's milieu about as well as a cane toad fits into a soufflé, and when he came in, the other denizens of the eatery turned to look at him with the unison of a school of herring. He immediately came to my table, plopped down in the opposite chair, and resumed a literary conversation we'd had the night before as though he'd been out to the restroom for a moment.

The conversation, as all did with him, in my limited experience, flashed from one thing to the next in connections only known to him, but fascinating to feeble-minded me, and ultimately lit on that neckscarf he was wearing. It was kind of a tan, with brick-red designs on it that looked vaguely Southwestern Native American culture to me. He'd been given it by Bob Dylan, and it is pictured on the front of the Dylan record album John Wesley Harding*, he said.

I had the album, and damn if it wasn't the same thing. The cover features a photo of Dylan with three neighbors from his New York state residence; the scarf is on the Indian gentleman at the left of the photo. That whole conversation, and the entire week, remains a wonderful memory for me, to this day.

As an aside, for anyone interested in the Beats, Kenneth Patchen is an important and interesting guy. His "novel" The Journal of Albion Moonlight, is really worth a look.

caw

*This album features the title song, which is fabulous, and to my knowledge has never been covered, and more famously, "All Along the Watchtower", done magnificently by Jimi Hendrix, and "Dear Landlord", covered equally well by Joe Cocker.
 
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M Louise

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The Beats are a favourite with me too, love anecdotal recollections by those lucky enough to meet them or know their San Francisco.

You can hear Ginsberg and Kerouac and others recorded on PennSound. Here is a special treat that blew me away when I heard it for the first time: Jack Kerouac reading/performing the opening passage of October in the Railroad Earth. Jazzy, bluesy melancholy and sensuousness.
 

ColoradoGuy

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The Beats are a favourite with me too, love anecdotal recollections by those lucky enough to meet them or know their San Francisco.

You can hear Ginsberg and Kerouac and others recorded on PennSound. Here is a special treat that blew me away when I heard it for the first time: Jack Kerouac reading/performing the opening passage of October in the Railroad Earth. Jazzy, bluesy melancholy and sensuousness.

That is fun -- thanks!

Was reading Howl last night. Apparently the line length was related to average breath length, which is an interesting notion to me. Hard to believe Ferlinghetti was charged with obscenity for publishing it. I grew up in the 1950s, but that was a different time for sure.
 

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Was reading Howl last night. Apparently the line length was related to average breath length, which is an interesting notion to me. Hard to believe Ferlinghetti Ginsburg was charged with obscenity for publishing it.

Sorry. Had to make this correction.

It's useful to remember that this was in a period of time when TV couldn't show a man and woman in bed together, and when pre-Johnny Carson late night host Jack Paar got suspended from the air for making a joke about a "water closet"; the very word "toilet" was unmentionable on air.

caw
 
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