The Break from Convention and the Lasting Effect

In her essay, “Locating the Political: Art, Everyday Life, & Legacy of the Beat Generation,” Judith R. Halasz argues that the lasting influence of the Beats was moreso represented by their challenging of literary convention than their pioneering.

“They reflected a countervalent political attitude toward mainstream aspirations and practices,” says Halasz in her opening paragraph.

While many of the postings I have made make reference to the rebellious nature of this group (towards conformity), Halasz goes on to further identify the lasting influence the free spirits of this generation had on todays literary practice.

To break the mold, the writers and poets of this age found inspiration in the booming Jazz Age that had come to heights in their day.

One of the key elements of Beat poetry was the performance which was often accompanied by horns, drums, and chanted verse... all of which helped progress the dramatic rhythm of the poem (Halasz 9).

Jack Kerouac’s adaptation of spontaneous prose was also a flowing form very similar to the way Jazz musicians would “blow,” as they called it in their culture. He even spoke of the influence Jazz music had on him in his cult classic, On The Road.

Halasz also goes on to reveal Allen Ginsberg’s highly critical views on traditional writing forms. He felt it was “too symmetrical, geometrical, numbered and pre-fixed—unlike to my own mind which has no beginning and end, nor fixed measure of thought.”

While Neal Cassady may not have been much of a writer, his introduction of spontaneity to the writers and philosophers he befriended created a good stir among the group. They began to see that “spontaneous juxtaposition” as a pathway to “genius-like imagination.”

Ginsberg also believed that through spontaneous exploration you could learn more about yourself as a writer and as a human being. He felt that without getting lost inside a poem, one would never discover anything new about himself.

This is philosophical stuff, not just a challenge to the conventionalism of 20th century literature at the time. These men (and women) found deeper meaning in their practice than most people will give them credit for.

Their bohemian lifestyle gave them a bad rap. They were outcasted and looked down upon as junkies and hipsters and they faced the trials and tribulations that often come with such reputations. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and Burroughs all were faced with obscenity trials for their work.

What else would you expect from a group of guys who felt their writing styles were a form of “counter-brainwash technique,” as Ginsberg would go on to describe Burroughs’ work.

The influence survived the criticism and is relevant even today in ways we don’t realize. On his zdnet blog, Tom Foremsk compared the beat generation to the blogosphere when he goes on to say:

“Both celebrate the written word, and both celebrate a raw and passionate literature that is largely unedited. And both are disruptive movements.”

Imagine what the literary world would be like today if this generation did not push the conventional bounds of restraint once enforced by tradition.

Below is a video of Jack Kerouac reading his own words with Jazz playing live in the backround...

Sources

Halasz, J. R. , 2005-08-12 "Locating the Political: Art, Everyday Life & the Legacy of the Beat Generation" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Philadelphia, PA Online . 2009-05-25 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p21346_index.html.

Foremski, Tom. (2006, February 10). The Beat Generation influence on blogging. Retrieved fromhttp://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=42.

The Legend of Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady. The man... the myth... the legend... the writer? Not so fast. Neal Cassady was a lot of things, but a writer? That’s a stretch.

While you may struggle to name a book Cassady wrote, he was still one of the most influential persons in American literature.

Neal Cassady was such an eccentric soul that he fascinated the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg who were fueled by the excitement and inspiration he brought into their dim lives.

I found an Associated Content article that gives a brief tale of Cassady’s journey from petty thief, to inspirational figure, to cultural hero, to icon of two of the most controversial and boundry-pushing generations of American literature.

The article goes on to make reference to the “Joan Anderson letter” that was the inspirational influence on Jack Kerouac’s adaptation of spontaneous prose.

In Kerouac’s first experimentation of this new stream of consciousness writing style, he wrote his most famous book, On the Road, about his travels across the country with Cassady, a.k.a Dean Moriarty.

When On the Road was finally published (seven years after it was written), Kerouac and Cassady were instant icons. While Kerouac despised every second of it, Cassady took advantage, though he eventually became ill-minded toward the way he was projected in the novel.

In an interview with Tim Sullivan from the San Francisco Chronicle, Neal’s son, John Allen Cassady, let Sullivan know that his father and the gang never intended to create the beat generation, the hippies, or the anti-war movement.

Regardless of their intentions, they made waves. And leading the way through the decades was Cassady, while Ginsberg followed suit.

As Kerouac faded away into his end-of-life drinking binge, Cassady found himself in the middle of the hippie takeover movement, and then in the driver’s seat (literally) alongside Ken Kesey.

Cassady fell into a crowd with Kesey, a group that would eventually become known as The Merry Pranksters.

Kesey, a well established writer after his best seller, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, led a movement that preached consciousness expansion through LSD experimentation. Cassady was his right-hand man when they hosted their “Happenings” across the crazy scene that was San Francisco in the 1960's.

His iconic fame continued to grow as book after book was published, each one telling the tales of Neal Cassady and his wild adventures.

Tom Wolfe’s book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was written from the backseat of the Merry Pranksters bus that Cassady drove around with the destination of “further.”

Hunter Thompson’s book, Hells Angels, tells a tale of his experience hanging around with Kesey and Cassady at one of their famous parties.

It was his fast living (and arguably Kerouac’s characterization) that donned Cassady what The Associated Article refers to as the “Holy Goof”, a perception that eventually ate away at his spirits.

While he died alone in Mexico laying alongside a railroad track, Cassady’s legendary legacy continued to live on as his influence stretched on through literature and folk music.

Sources

Hopwood, Jon C. (2008, December 24). Neal Cassady: Holy Goof of the Beat Generation. Associated Content. Retrieved from http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1328784/neal_cassady_holy_goof_of_the_beat.html?cat=38.

Sullivan, Tim. (2008, February 7). 11 Things: Neal Cassady. San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved fromhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/07/NS8AURQ3U.DTL.

Old Bull Lee

When discussing or pondering the Beats, the word “obscurity” may come to mind. They were social outcasts in a conservative society, but one of them stood out more so than the rest of the pack.

William S. Burroughs, the third of the beat generation godfathers, was a strange fellow. He was an intelligent man with a Harvard education who grew up financially well off from his family’s business. But something was off.

Perhaps it was his personal “William Tell” moment that best defines his strange aura. As William Padgett recollects in his Suite101.com article on Burroughs, it was an event “that would cause Burroughs’ mysterious reputation to mushroom.”

After the “accident” that left his wife dead from a spousal-inflicted gunshot wound, Burroughs rededicated his life toward a career in writing. What better outlet for a strange man hell bent on opiate addiction and homoerotic fantasies?

Padgett tells of Burroughs’ lifestyle as a heavy handed influence into his work, even going as far as saying that at times it “overshadowed” his work.

One of his most famous novels, Naked Lunch, was largely driven by drug use and homosexuality, both well known character traits associated with the author. However, Petri Liukkonen further dissects the novel in a deeper, more literary perspective.

“It also tries to find from the use of drugs and homosexuality a philosophical statement - addiction is seen as a metaphor of the human condition” says Liukkonen.

When you further look into Burroughs’ work, you may find it more extreme in pushing of the boundaries of the literary world than most of his contemporaries. However, they all sought the same end goal: destruction of the restrictive conformity that plagued their times.

Before the days of the beat generation, and even during their maturing years, America was stuck in its ties to tradition. It was a very conservative life and time.

New strides were destined to be made in the literary world, and Burroughs and the clan would be the ones setting the pace.

While in Tangier, Burroughs lived on a bender at a male brothel, writing frantically on scraps of paper. When Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg went to visit him, they found the various loose pages and notes Burroughs had been writing away at.

With a lot of ideas and no reseblence of order, Ginsberg began to piece together the pages as Kerouac helped him rewrite it, presumably while Burroughs laid on the floor, high as a kite.

Burroughs would later move to Paris and befriend a painter by the name of Brion Gysin.

According to Liukkonen, Gysin influenced Burroughs to write in his infamous “cut-up” technique, using it to cut up and blend random text in an attempt to “restructure the readers consciousness.”

This style was rather reminiscent of the creation of Naked Lunch, making Burroughs a cult hero to a growing generation of anti-conformists.

Sources

Padgett, William. (2009, August 4). William S. Burroughs: Revisiting the Life and Fiction of the Beat's Phantom Elder. Retrieved from http://americanfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/william_s_burroughs.

Liukkonen, Petri. Retrieved from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wbburrou.htm.

The Social Force of Allen Ginsberg

"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,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz"

- Allen Ginsberg, Howl

Allen Ginsberg was the most prolific of the Beat poets and one of the founding fathers of the beat generation. Many described him as a free-spirited soul who spoke passionately through his free verse poems.

His most well-known poem, Howl, was the first defining piece of literary art to come out of his generation and was even brought to trial for claims of obscenity, only to be rejected by the courts.

Some may contest that his homosexuality made many uncomfortable in a time when it was not as accepted as it is today, as Ginsberg has been described as one of the first famous homosexuals to publicly come out of the closet.

Regardless of the controversy that surrounded him, Ginsberg used his fame and popularity to promote social change, something Kerouac was not able to put the bottle down long enough to do himself.

Don’t be confused, Ginsberg was no straight-edge fellow. A PBS write up on Ginsberg described him as a man who promoted drug use as an expansion of consciousness, experimenting himself with LSD, peyote, and marijuana, just to name a few.

It’s no wonder that Ginsberg became so heavily involved in the 1960s counterculture that protested the Vietnam war and CIA. PBS also goes on to document Ginsberg as the man who coined the phrase, “flower power” which became infamous throughout the decade.

A New York Times obituray article written upon the passing of the icon tells of his involvement in marches against the war and his “ubiquitous presence at the love-ins and be-ins that marked the drug-oriented counterculture of the Flower Children years.”

The PBS write up even eludes to the idea that Ginsberg planted the seeds of revolution that intended to “case off the shackles of the calm and boing social life of the post war era.”

Unlike Kerouac, Ginsberg was able to contain his substance abuse and not let it ultimately get the best of him, as he turned away from substance and pursued a life oriented by buddhism in the 70s.

Perhaps it was Kerouac’s death in 1969, and the prior year’s death of Neal Cassady, that influenced his decision to put his years of drug use behind him. Regardless of the reason, his meditative lifestyle provided him the means to extend his social influence throughout the years.

In the NY Times obituary article, they dubbed him the “Master of Outrageous,” yet his outrageous antics were purely artistically intended. He was a literary wave maker, and like many of his contemporaries, he pushed the bounds of constraints.

Below, you can have a listen to Ginsberg reciting his poem, America.

Sources

Hampton, Wilborn. (1997, April 6). Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet Of Beat Generation, Dies at 70. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/06/nyregion/allen-ginsberg-master-poet-of-beat-generation-dies-at-70.html?scp=2&sq=allen%20ginsberg%20dies&st=nyt&pagewanted=1.

Pbs.org. American Masters: Allen Ginsberg. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ginsberg_a.html

Kerouac Jack

This Wednesday coming up marks the 40th anniversary of the death of the legendary writer, Jack Kerouac. When thought of the beat generation comes to mind, the name Jack Kerouac is simultaneously mentioned, as is the mention of his generational and career defining novel, On the Road.

Kerouac had an inventive new writing style that was influenced by the boom of the Jazz era, and also by the letters of another well thought of beatnik, Neal Cassady. It is known as spontaneous prose.

In an NPR article written in September, 2002, the author tells of Kerouac’s 3 week explosion of a creative stream of energy that was fueled by benzedrine and coffee.

While Jack once argued that coffee and inspiration were the only things that fueled his burst of spontaneous prose, it was his reputation that hinted at his drug use. However, Kerouac’s reputation was somewhat misleading.

The NPR article also goes on to quote Douglas Brinkley, a Kerouac scholar, as saying that part of his fame was “predicated on the notion that he was an antiestablishment writer” and that he believes that this did a disservice to Kerouac’s message.

Brinkley goes on to describe On the Road as a “valentine to the United States.”

Former Kerouac girlfriend, Joyce Johnson, said of On the Road’s publication that “Jack went to bed obscure and woke up famous.”

It was the instantaneous fame and the mislead conceptions of his personality and his writing that eventually turned Kerouac toward a downward spiral of alcohol and benzedrine addiction.

Carolyn Cassady, former wife of Neal Cassady, who also had a close relationship with Jack Kerouac, goes on to tell in an interview that Jack told her that he was going to “drink himself to death.”

While the fame got the best of Kerouac’s mind, his lasting legacy is more prevalent now than it was in his day. His style has become increasingly studied and his works continue to sell. In fact, the continuous scroll on which he wrote On the Road sold for a reported $2.4 million to the owner of the Indianapolis Colts in 2001.

Kerouac wrote the way great jazz musicians blew into the horn. His words flowed free from his mind to the paper, creating poetry in the form of prose. His belief and motto was, “First thought, best thought.”

His writing style became influential to up and coming writers that followed. As an aspiring writer myself, I have also taken influence from this form of free writing and have found it rejuvenating as I learn to break away and distance myself from the conventional writing learned in early in life.

After reading On the Road, I felt as though I traveled across the country, that I had seen things that I have never actually seen. As Kerouac said (as mentioned by Brinkley), “Anybody can make Paris holy, but I can make Topeka holy.”

Below you can listen to Johnny Depp read a spoken word passage from one of Kerouac's works...

Sources

Npr.com. (2002, Sept. 9). Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/ontheroad/.

Orr-Ewing, Will. (2007). Carolyn Cassady. Retrieved from http://www.notesfromtheunderground.co.uk/on-the-road.html.

The Meaning and the Influence

The Beat Generation, or the Beat Movement, was one carved out of a distain for the society that encompassed them. The very idea of “beat” was used to describe one who had been broken down to a sense of primal consciousness... weary from the encasement by a society deemed destined to fail in it’s plateau of war, poverty, and social conformity.

John Clellon Holmes described it quite eloquently in his 1952 New York Times Magazine article, “This is the Beat Generation” when he says, “In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself.”

If you study it long enough, you will find that history often repeats itself as time progresses. When reading Holmes' article about the circumstances that spawned the philosophical and literary movement of the Beats, I found a connection that shined relevant to the situations we find ourselves in today.

The time-frame of the prominence of the Beat Generation places them fresh off days of World War II. The country was still hurting from the Great Depression of the 30s and the war that played out in the 40s. There was a sense of belonging that they seemed to lack.

The era of the Beats was a generation very similar to the modern day youth. We live in times of never-ending war and financial struggles through a recession with no certainty to when we may bounce back.

Holmes states in his article that generations are often defined by the wars that separate them. It was certainly the case for these men and women as their war separated them from the era of the Lost Generation of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and from the hippie generation that would follow their lead.

One must keep in mind that it is the younger generations who are sent to answer the call of duty demanded by the elder-statesmen. We are sent to war to fight, prepared to die, often for reasons we don’t agree with. Those of us who are lucky enough to avoid the battle ground unfortunately find ourselves connected to family, friends, and families of friends who have been injected into the conflict.

Eventually, the feelings of national duty go cold and leave us pondering where we went wrong and why we continue to follow in the self-destructive patterns that repeat themselves as the decades pass. This is the normality of being an American citizen.

The Beats rejected these social and political norms in their days and this was the realm of influence they offered. It became a direct precursor for the rebellious years that followed into the 60s and 70s when the battlefront switched from Europe and Japan to Vietnam.

While the Beats where comprised of men and women who were beaten down by the times, they found beauty in their art and peace in their spirituality. Holmes explains that they believed the main problem with their "modern" lives was a spritual one.

Holmes also goes on to explain that the group was reluctant to take claim to their fame, even refusing to accept acknowledgment of their cause. In fact, it wasn’t until the movement reached a popular fad status that it all began to deteriorate.

There was a pressure that came with their cause as they pushed back on society and opened the doors to a literary movement unlike any other since their day. There was a method to their madness and a meaning that fueled it’s exuberance.

Sources

Holmes, John Clellon. (1952, November 16). This Is The Beat Generation. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/ThisIsBeatGen.html.

Introduction

Greetings, and welcome to my weblog inspired by the generation of writers and poets known as the Beats, or the Beatniks. I am a student at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ and one of my classes this semester is Writing, Research, and Technology. One of the key assignments we have been given is the development of a semester long research topic in which we are to create a weblog to track and share our research development.

As a Writing Arts major, I was indeed inspired by a writer who really turned me back on to reading (and writing) after an extended post-graduation recess. It was the first time since childhood that I began to read for enjoyment rather than for assignment and it hooked me back in. Hunter S. Thompson provided an eccentric collection of accounts in his quest to find out what happened to the American Dream and who was responsible for killing it. He was a self-proclaimed doctor of journalism and he created what would later be coined “Gonzo Journalism.” His works have increasingly become common grounds of study for various collegiate majors ranging from journalism to political science. While Hunter Thompson was not one of the dubbed “Beats,” he was heavily influenced by their style and he carried their torch throughout his career.

For those who might be new to the identification of those that make up the Beat Generation, it is comprised of a group of American writers whose prominence reigned from the late 1940s throughout the 1950s. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, and Lucien Carr all met at Columbia University and established an inner-circle that was known to test the ropes of conformity. Eventually, through mutual relationships, Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso would join the workings of these young, up and coming writers and philosophers. Their bohemian lifestyles and controversial practices brought them to the forefront of the American literary limelight, helping to fuel the fire of this budding counter-culture movement and becoming an influential force in American literature.