Are You Dead or Are You Sleeping?

The Beat Movement has raised more questions then answers. An entire subculture spawned out of five guys writing for each other and look now, an entire college course is devoted to their writing. And what they did to the entire world. I like to think that none of it was a waste, and that none of it is over. Even though it was a while ago.

Most of them are dead now. And yet.

This was a great course.

"What matters most is how well you can walk through fire."

-Charles Bukowski, a beat poet.

Howl, or at least a creative Murmur

I have seen the best minds of my generation...

fall, subside to carelessness and alcohol,

more interested in doing shots of liquor then reading,

the metaphorical dust on my bookshelf growing thicker still;

who ignore cries of help for attention,

who vaguely feel repulsion for the pursuit of knowledge,

who are enticed and attracted to the words,

like fuck and asshole in their prose and poetry,

who DO NOT realize that there are better words than these,

who can list roster after roster but cannot understand why

we are morose on the day JD Salinger died.

No one is raving mad, naked, no angel headed hipster,

just ironies and misplaced fashion, icons

who fail to create anything really meaningful,

who have lost their eyes

not to real blindness

but blinded by the hopeful chance to read the written word,

who ignore and neglect the spoken word

who could give two shits who is with us in Rockwell or anywhere.

And I ask,

who will listen in fifty years

when fifty years ago people were listening.

Who is still with me in Rockwell?

And There Was More...(The Soundtrack, Ferlinghetti, the Future)

In No Particular Order...

Ferlinghetti:

He is the grand-dad of the Beatniks. Not only is he a fantastic poet, but, he is also the defender of the Howl in court, the publisher of many (heck, all) notable beat poets as well as scores of other writers, curator of City Lights bookstore. He is also the penman behind my favorite collection of poetry.

"A Coney Island of the Mind...expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them - as they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the Mind, a kind of circus of the soul."

What a gorgeous way to describe a collection of poetry!

"The scene shows fewer tumbrils but more maimed citizens in painted cars and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America," reads "I." I believe it is important to see Ferlinghetti's ideological vision of America and the beatniks "devouring" it; after all, he is responsible in part for publicizing these works.

He, in a completely genuine way, markets and distributes the beat movement without exploiting it, which is remarkable and worthy of examination. He's also a great poet.

The Soundtrack:

Bebop in Pastel-Bud Powell: is a real, full band jazz tune. Bumping with rhythm while not letting individual tracks lose their identities, each member of the ensemble band gets to explore and improvise. A jazz typical.

Oop Bop Sh'bam-Dizzy Gillespie: does a fantastic job putting down some improvisational jazz, while incorporating the poetic usage of words to create sound in a scat-ish fashion, this track really explores the space of sound and image.

Bird of Paradise-Charlie Parker: is a little more subdued that Dizzy, mimicking the sounds of a bird perhaps, using his jazz and soft spoken beat to melt the saxophone or trumpet. I can picture beat poets tapping their feet.

Body and Soul-Coleman Hawkins: has a quiet, soft piano intro. It is met with jazzy rhythm, imitating the seduction two bodies play when coming together. This is a sexy tune, not unlike the visual imagery of beat prose or poetics, full of bodies crashing into bodies.

Better Get It in Yo' Soul-Charles Mingus: is supposed to be an improvisational master, Mingus indeed does such. Filling the musical space with loud, untamed blasts of trumpet and brass, this track is an essential counterpart to the spontaneous prose that the Beats write.

Bird Calls-Mingus: Mingus again, now he is just showing off.

The readings on the soundtrack are very poignant, especially Kerouac's improv on the Steve Allen Show; his lectures also clear up murky space in the murky definition of the Beat Generation.

But I propose: couldn't it have been something less pinned down? Something they made up as they went?

And the future?

We will continue to look at the beats. And never fully understand.

I Have Seen The Greatest Minds...Howl

Howl. Where to start? Line one I suppose...

Is it giving Ginsberg too much credit to say that his opening line is perhaps the most important and known opening line in the history of American poetics? "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix."

Despite notoriety or not, the line is a familiar one. But what the hell is the underbelly of Howl? It is a poem in the form of a brick of prose, a long, three part laundry list of things Ginsberg has seen happen to the "greatest minds of a generation." Is that all? Sure. People often try too hard to look inside a poem's lines and miss that sometimes, at least in the case of Howl, a poem damn well can be a list.

Take part 3: "I'm with you in Rockwell," is repeated over and over, just a list of the different ways he (and the poem) are reaching out to Carl Soloman locked up in the loony bin.

"...who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade" writes Ginsberg in part 1. I particularly love this line; it does such a good job typifying the naivety of the Beatniks. Of course, to a generation confused and disillusioned after a decade of war, time would be an abstract menace. And this pursuit of Eternity that Ginsberg hints at, a large part of the "Junky"-esque pursuit of that "final fix."

It is, however, a fruitless pursuit.

Again though, they will attempt. "...who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity" and yet, it is sadly implied, that Eternity is never found.

Howl is an exploration of this disillusion. Simply put. It, at times, is difficult to struggle through because of how dense the scholarly Ginsberg dumps so much raw emotion onto readers.

It is almost, as if, Allen is on top of a soap box shouting; and if you've heard him reading it, you'll agree with me.

Here we see James Franco's interpretation of the man, reading the final part of the poem. He accurately captures the energy, sporadic inflection, and even the nasally voice.

I wonder what the atmosphere was like in San Francisco when the poem was first read at that famous reading. I can't help but think that some of the poem was written specifically for them, for that time. All 'wish I could have been there' feelings aside, I do know that the poem has stood the test of time (and obscenity!).

It is a raving, great mind howling out into a disillusioned, dark night. After all, it is our closest look at the generation outside of On the Road.

Putting Out the Fires With: Gasoline

Awesome video of Corso reading and teaching...

Also, be sure to spot Allen Ginsberg having a royal time joking about math.

Give this a listen while reading...

Title Track: David Bowie's 'Cat People (Putting Out Fires)

But enough technical fluff, let's dive into the meat. Gregory Corso is considered the youngest Beat poet to run in the inner circle of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Born in 1930, Corso wrote at Harvard, and lived in Boston, New York City and Paris. He was through and through an East Coast beat; following closely in the footsteps of Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac's philosophies as well as writing techniques, the poetry of "Gasoline," Corso's 1958 collection published through City Lights is all over the place and reeks of Beatnik influence.

Ginsberg says in an introduction: "Open this book as you would a box of crazy toys, take in your hands a refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere." What a fantastic way to introduce a book of poetry. As Ginsberg continues to outline, the Corso's poetry is filled with playfulness; he uses language in the same way a child would rummage through a toy box. Corso introduces his work a little differently: "It comes, I tell you, immense with gasolined rags and bits of wire and old bent nails, a dark arriviste, from a dark river within."

I see both of these appraisals, for lack of a better word, in the collection. Each poem in its own way playfully approaches some pretty dark topics, like the discontent that is often categorized in "post modern" poetry (as Corso often is). "The streetsinger is sick / crouched in the doorway, holding his heart / One less song in the noisy night," reads the first section of "Three." The poem offers sporadic, short on detail vignettes, concluding with "Death weeps because Death is human / spending all day in a movie when a child dies." While this poem is an experiment in form, it reflects on life and the nature of art; coming to the tragic conclusion that part of humanity is it ending. It burns with satire and dark comedy like fire, and whimsically plays with images.

Corso typifies Beat poetry in one way: it is a unique play on a known standard and format. He uses all kinds of dark images and topics to navigate life honestly, brutally sometimes, but it burns with honesty. He sometimes is using fragments, like Kerouac, other times using long lines, narrative like Ginsberg, and all of the time, Corso is making these styles his own. If the Beatnik movement was all about making one's own out of the mess of the times, and creating something beautiful that one can own, and label, and put their name on it, Corso succeeded at making a style of poetic writing.

"Gasoline" is a brilliant collection, a keystone in the City Lights pocket series, and an important vision of the Beat movement.

And, a final thought, Allen's too: "He's probably the greatest poet in America, and he's starving in Europe."

Windblown World: Wave of Mutilation

Windblown World is a collection of the journals of Jack Kerouac from the years 1947 through 1954. This seven year span sees all different sides of Kerouac, but mostly portrays him as a self conscious, occasionally drunken, always depressive mortal human. It's unnerving to see this side of him, particularly when considering that Beatnik culture relies so heavily on glamorization and romanticization. Thus, this grounded, volatile and vulnerable vision of the great beatnik hero are at times shocking.

Not only does it show the "private" Jack Kerouac (yes, this is hard to rely on, the collection is published, so we have to assume that he is, at least at times, creating a persona). But we also get a workshop like look at Kerouac's famous "spontaneous prose" technique for writing.

From the April 1949 "Road Logs"

"Wrote 500 words - (more, actually, but making up for yesterday's miscalculated count.) I figure for the whole novel, right now, at 225,000 words. Some ways off eh?"

Some ways off? Holy s**t Jack! And just one day later on the 28th, you "at 4 in the morning wrote 500 words - again, with the admonition to 'Keep it moving.' Thank God for work!"

Yes, thank God for work indeed. Kerouac goes on to illustrate his working process, which can be easily summarized as sporadic. He also laments how lonely he is without companionship or his family, who he is waiting for to move out West with him. He says:

"I need my typewriter. NO furniture, no family, nothing. I can't understand all this delay. It took me 60 hours to get out here, and another 48 hours to get a house. It's taken them close to three weeks...and all I do is wait, wait, wait."

It's difficult to get a read on lines like this, is Jack trying to be funny? Or is he literally so crippled that he can't function without familial comforts? His other work would say otherwise. Sal Paradise, the Jack Kerouac of On the Road is an awful son/nephew to the family coffer that is seemingly nothing but a blank check and ticket back West. But, when you take into consideration books like "Visions of Gerard," which fictionalizes and romanticizes the death of Jack's older brother at a young age, readers see a very vulnerable Kerouac. Windblown World seems to further display him as a suffering man.

And journals from the early fifties only tip the iceberg.

He concludes Rain and Rivers journals with "I don't have to go to museums, I know what's there..." after pages of theorizing philosophy, religion and presumably, meaning. The Kerouac that Big Sur sees falling into alcoholism and deep depression is all together present here.

For a long time we have been trying to get inside the mind of Jack Kerouac. The metamorphosis he underwent, from unknown small time poet, to the definitive leader of a generation, the the crumbling, depressive alcoholic wasting away on the beach; the best we can do is track his feelings throughout his short career. He was indeed prolific and disturbed, but, he is still brilliant, often in these journals touching on vast, heavy and thick ideas about life.

It's just a shame he had to diminish. I wonder if the mysticism would be the same if Kerouac had rode out the later years of his life in a normal, less alcohol driven fashion?

Who knows?

Footnote: interesting to see a Beat work NOT edited by Ann Charters.

On the Road

Jack reading on the Steve Allen show.

I'm going to out myself for something right now: "On the Road" is my favorite book ever written and if you say it's not the best book ever written I'm likely to fight you, but guaranteed will ignore any comment you ever make of any literary notion again. So...

Oftentimes, when outsiders, or the media, or anyone who is not involved with something tries to label or typify that something, they are so far from correct its borderline offensive. Not the case with "On the Road." Penguin Classics hails it as "The novel that defined a generation," the New York Times says "a historic occasion...the most important utterance yet made by the generation," and another NYT critic writes "it is not so much a novel as a long affectionate lark inspired by the so called "beat" generation."

So how does wide eyed Sal Paradise's odyssey single handedly typify a culture? And while we're at it, let me clarify, this "culture" for the majority of it's lifespan, was four or six guys sharing what they thought was beautiful writing. So, Cassidy, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burrughs are somehow captured in the pages of one novel? Yes.

Shallowly, all of these characters pop up inside the journey taken in On the Road. More densely, Kerouac is able to capture two sides of the beatnik spectrum.

"Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line I knew the pearl would be handed to me" (8) sets off a young Sal Paradise on his first attempt at going west. Of course, he fails completely and returns home; but it is undeniable the optimistic and juvenile sense of freedom he feels, first setting out to hitchhike and claim the pearl of the nation out west.

And of course, as many beats would discover during their time, the pearl isn't out there. Burroughs never found his final fix, for example. So Kerouac has crossed the nation, broken hearts and been played by Cassidy innumerable times, been out of the country to the bottom of Mexico and abandoned. Where does that leave him?

"I finally came to understand that he was gone. By that time he was driving back alone through those banana mountains, this time at night. When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life" (302). It leaves our hero alone and bitter.

The experience, in conclusion, appears to be worthwhile. "So in America when the sun goes down...nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody" Kerouac reflects on his journeys and Cassidy in such a way that is neither shallow nor bitter.

So how does that leave us? The generation?

It was loud, fast and only fulfilling after realizing that most of it was a waste? No, of course not. I see On the Road, as the "beatnik essential book," serving one purpose. Showing the value of reflecting on experience. Does it always turn out that there was value? No, again, of course not. But, after reflection, there is always real, true experience had.

The Beatniks valued this. Kerouac did. On the Road glorifies it.

So what's wrong with romanticizing a nation during its darkest and (according to them) it's phoniest? Nothing. It is patriotism like never before seen.

And its value obvious, here we are decades later still looking at the Crazy Dumbsaints for help.