Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part III

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

Early 1950s. "Kerouac was really a solitary genius, innovating and going forward into as yet unrecognized and unmapped areas of composition all by himself, with the courage necessary to do it . . . He had no support, not only from 'society' but also from his friends, his wife, his mother, or anyone." (p. 225) 

"It was my impression that very few people had a grasp of the phantom, or samsaric, or elusory nature of existence. They didn't have any idea of alternative modes of consciousness . . ." (p. 238)

"Jazz was a kind of speech that went round the world and influenced every country. The only art form, the only cultural push, that came out of America that transformed the political structure of the world through the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and rock'n'roll and . . . youth culture." (p. 243)

"[Walt] Whitman thought . . . that unless the nation were made up of comrades democracy couldn't work." (p. 246)

"Kerouac saw new jazz as a clarion of a new consciousness. It wasn't only bepop, it was the whole notion of American blues and black music." (p. 247)

"Nobody had looked on jazz musicians with that kind of insight, except other jazz musicians." (p. 249) 

". . . archetypal recollections were the very angelic bricks of their own lives, the foundation of their lives. Their early childhood thrills and symbols were the basis of all adult judgment and opinions and trips to the moon. . . a whole hidden memory life . . ." (p. 252)

"Jack's in there writing all by himself, for himself, for his own ear or for some universal consciousness, just for pure art." (p. 259)

Herman Melville poetry. (p. [260])

Sketching: "'like a painter but with words . . .'" (p. [264]) 

Little notebooks: "sketching to total mind's eye." (p. 266)

Gregory Corso. "Tailoring" poems, writing. (p. 278)

Corso: jazz, poetry. Charlie Bird Parker and Miles Davis and "Don't Shoot the Warthog." (p. 294)

From "Hello:"

"Do I wear the cloth of a man who has failed?
Am I the looney man?
In the great serenade of things,
     am I the most cancelled passage?" (p. 299). 

Today's Rune: Joy. 

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part II

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov were our favorite books then . . . (p. 101).

Visions of Cody. "I had the idea that Kerouac was influenced by Neal [Cassady] reading [Marcel] Proust aloud. In 1947 when Cassady was in town we had a copy of Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust and Neal would read that aloud when we were high on grass. He read Proust very beautifully and . . . enjoyed the long organic sentences that were inclusive of many varieties of thought forms and associations that rose during the composition of the sentence. . . . as in [John] Milton, Proust used long sentences to include everything in his mind."  (pp. 105-106)

"When you hear yourself echoed in somebody else's indulgent, tender, sympathetic consciousness, you begin to appreciate yourself." (p. 115)

William S. Burroughs. "Burroughs ascribes Kerouac's enthusiasm and encouragement as the greatest single force in making him write, finally . . . Kerouac and I saw Burroughs as very shy, tender, and sweet, with good manners. Quiet with a sense of humor cutting through."  (p. 116)

Kerouac imagined writing an American Civil War book, with Burroughs as a "morphine-addicted . . . general." (pp. 120-121) 

Herman Melville and "American loneliness. The central image of that for Kerouac was everybody looking for 'the center of Saturday night in America' . . . in the back alley, under a redbrick building, under a neon sign, with nobody looking at him . . . which is where everybody wound up, unsatisfied." (pp. 121-122

"Visions of Cody is the most serious text we'll run into . . . Kerouac . . . undergoes a transfiguration and becomes his art, he ceases to be a guy writing at his art and becomes interchangeable with the art . . . His writing and his personality become identical and becomes a superprofessional in the sense that he's a saint of writing. (pp. 128-129)

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. For Burroughs, writing "was not so much . . . redemption, but . . . a communicative activity which linked him with me and other people, with the rest of humanity, with friends." He found writing to be more practical than "a romantic thing." (p. 153)

Burroughs "sees right through everything immediately with no illusions." (p. 164)

"Trace back along the word vine to find the source of control. Who started the whole maya, the illusion, and to what extent does language dictate to our sense of what we see, hear, smell." (p. 169)

Burroughs on New Orleans: "'The drivers orient themselves largely by the use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly. The transient population is conglomerate and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.'" (p. 171) 

Burroughs as visual writer. (pp. 179-180)

"The Waste Land is not much different from Burroughs . . . collage method . . . Apollinaire . . . I think that the thing Burroughs and Eliot have most in common is 'music down a windy street,' . . . spare, nostalgic, pungent images that will haunt you with an echo of time past." See also Saint-John Perse, Anabasis. (p. 188)

"His unconscious life and his every day life are merged. With Burroughs writing becomes a probe into consciousness, or a probe into depth." (p. 191)

". . . the entire fabric of appearance and phenomenon." (p. 199) 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part I

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman. 

Anne Waldman: "Denver, the place of all possible crossroads." (p. x)  "The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. (p. xi)

Each core member of the Beats "literarily had had some form of break in the ordinary nature of consciousness . . . as the central preoccupation, concern with the very nature of consciousness and with what you would call visions or visionary  experience." (P. 26)

"The element of aggression, of ideological insistency, was considered unhip and by unhip I mean lacking in awareness." (p. 29)

"I'm thinking of 'salt peanuts, salt peanuts,' or some squiggle of rhythm in [Jack] Kerouac's head that follows that off accenting, the irregular accenting, the noniambic accenting of [Dizzy] Gillespie." (p. 35)

With the death of his father, Kerouac "got interested in becoming the recording angel of the dream scene, and began recording his dreams, literally, as well as the dream of life itself." (p. 44) 

"The world hanging in space, the skyscrapers hanging in space . . . you'd realize you were not standing in New York City but you were standing in the middle of the universe, the vast open sky . . . It was the first discovery [by the main Beats, in the 1940s] of a crack in consciousness, that we were made of the same suchness, that we were ghosts. ' ' There's this early hint in On the Road of mind which is already Buddhist-oriented. Appreciating the phantom nature of things, of ourselves, an awareness of the mortal . . ." (p. 52)   

On meeting Jack: "Kerouac was a very mellow, shrewd, observant, tolerant person, so there was mutual curiosity." (p. 55)

Kerouac later "used to stand in the backyards at night when everybody was eating supper and realized that everybody was a ghost eating ghost food. Or that he was a ghost watching living people." (p. 56)

On meeting William S. Burroughs: "When we all went to see Burroughs, it was for that laconic, mellowed-out, cooled-out experience." (p. 86) 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline as a major influence. "I think it's one of the great moments of Western literature, when the hero wakes up in the middle of the battle and realizes that everyone around him is crazy and figures he better get out of there. I would say that is hipness, that attitude . . ." (p. 88)  

". . . little puppets of eternity, clawing each other in their vanity, with great clouds brewing overhead in the empty sky." (p. 96)

". . . panoramic consciousness or time consciousness . . ." (p. 98)

Kerouac: ". . . the flitting ghost-ends of a brood who will grow . . ." (p. 99)

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

Chapel Hill Daze: Pictures of Another Gone World: University Square

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World (The Pocket Poet Series, Number One). San Francisco: City Lights, 1955.  A salute to Ferlinghetti, who is ninety-nine years old -- born on March 24, 1919. Graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1941. I saw him give a reading in Chapel Hill in the 1980s, when he was but a young lad in his sixties. Afterwards, he signed my copy of Jack's Book. (I also remember when Harlan Ellison came to town to write a story based on a given first line -- but that's another story). 

And now it's time to turn to pictures of another gone world, a University Square of the Mind, as it were. University Square was an entry point for me, I liked the area for parking, sitting with cups of coffee, writing in journals. And now it's gone, gone, gone, transmogrified into "Carolina Square." The buildings and entire complex that comprised University Square were demolished in 2015. 

So let's do the Proust thing and bring back some of the names of that lost world. 

In the 1980s, let's say around 1983, you could walk from Columbia Street along Franklin Street on the "north" side, going toward Carrboro, and you'd pass Logo's Book Store (Christian books?), Mr. Gatti's Pizza, the Yogurt Pump, a jewelry store, an electronics store, the entrance pathway to He's Not Here (which always made me think of the Alamo - lots of stories to go with He's Not Here); a Pizza Hut, a sporting goods shop, the Pump House, a funeral home, McFarling's Exxon, Hunam's Restaurant, and a parking lot that ended with Church Street. If you kept going, you'd pass another parking lot, a telephone building, Peppi's Pizza, Woofer & Tweeter, a Gulf station; Fowler's Food (giant deli type meat place), McFarling's garage, Chapel Hill Rare Books, Martin Keith Book Shop, a florist, Phoenicia Restaurant, Village Pharmacy and Noel's Sub Machine. 

The only place left standing from the previous paragraph is He's Not Here.

Let's walk back to the intersection of Columbia and Franklin and cross the street to the "south" side.

Just at the corner is a large Baptist Church (still). Back around 1983, there was next a beauty salon (Scissorium) of which I remember nothing except that maybe it was a small single story stand alone. 

University Square was divided into three large sections: University Square East, University Square, and University Square West. The anchor for East was a CCB (Central Carolina Bank) Bank with ATM designed to trick students into overdrafts (or so it seemed to students). East included Kemp Jewelers: Circle Travel (anyone wonder about travel agencies?  This was one and I went in there occasionally); the Chapel Hill barbershop; Aesthetic Styling Salon; Cabana Tanning Center; Monkey Business -- never went in that one and have no idea what it was pitching.

University Square [Central]. Time-Out Restaurant was a 24-hour place with biscuits and salty kinds of college student food. The aroma of fresh buttered biscuits perpetually hovered about.

There were green and white awnings that fringed the roof edges, and cool passageways that let you cross through to the back side of the complex, one of my favorite design features that I often took advantage of -- built-in desire paths.

Time-Out still exists but has moved to where Hector's once stood, at 201 East Franklin at Henderson, across Henderson Street from the US Post Office.

Swensen's Ice Cream was one of the those old-fashioned places that left me bewildered -- a lot like Mayberry's. There are three Swensen's left in the entire USA, as of this post. Mayberry Ice Cream is down to a couple left in North Carolina, I think.

Other places in the middle section: Ken's Quickie Mart; Knit-A-Bit; Second Sole (shoe repairs, I think); Cameron Craft. The Painted Bird had various types of cool little things, arts type goodies. I think they had stationary and cards, too. 

And there was my favorite University Square hangout of all, on the side facing away from Franklin Street: The Looking Glass Café. More on this at some point, I suspect. The scent of fresh coffee permeated. There's a place with the same name now open in nearby Carrboro, at 601 West Main Street. I'll have to inquire to see if they are connected in some direct way, or even indirectly by inspiration. 

University Square West. Little Professor Book Center. I frequently ducked into this and many of the other Chapel Hill book and record stores. At its peak, there were more than one hundred Little Professor book stores around the USA; there are now (in July of 2018), as far as I can determine, three left.

Other stuff: Tyndall's Formal Wear (rentals, mostly); Shoe Doctor; University Opticians; Fine Feathers - clothes; and T'Boli Imports. The last one had lots of wine, if memory serves.

I have no idea what was in the upper floors of the main buildings: offices, apartments, condos?  

University Square: gone but not forgotten. Anyone who has any idea of what the above is about, please add details, memories, observations. And if not about here, how about somewhere that you once knew that's now part of another gone world?

Photos: "Downtown Chapel Hill" website; University Gazette (2008); Wiki Commons (July 28, 2008). 

Invaluable resource to cross-check memories, places:  OCCUPANTS AND STRUCTURES OF FRANKLIN STREET, CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA AT 5-YEAR INTERVALS, 1793-1998, by Bernard Lee Bryant, Jr. Chapel Hill Historical Society, printed out by J.D. Eyre in 1999. Link here.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Jim Jarmusch: 'Permanent Vacation' (1980)

Permanent Vacation (1980): the first completed effort by Jim Jarmusch, a rudimentary one shot on a shoestring budget, telegraphs his future batch of films. 

I found it interesting and fun, whereas most "regular people" would probably find it aimless and pointless. Permanent Vacation serves partly as a semi-documentary tour of bits of the New York City cityscape in the late 1970s -- shabby and in disarray.

Ali (Chris Parker), the main character, would be quite comfortable in 2018 America as a millennial man-child: weird and awkward, without much ambition or drive other than to do whatever he wants without much cash on hand, slightly brain-damaged in his social interactions. He does muster up enough energy to steal a car for $800 in cash -- hardly something to write home about. 

He seems to drift away from his pseudo-girlfriend after examining the architectural ruins of an area "bombed" by "Chinese" in a some fantasy war where he also happened to stumble on a homeless veteran of the US-Vietnam War.

Ali considers seeing a hip film and interacts with a nodding junkie jazz hepcat, with the final scene from Sergio Leone's Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo / The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966) playing in the background, just barely audible (one of the strangest touches of the entire movie).

Earlier, Ali and his pseudo-girlfriend read from Les Chants de Maldoror / Maldorer's Lay (1868-1869) by Comte de Lautréamont.

Permanent Vacation is a prototype of more "fully realized" Jarmusch films, more like Bohemian bits of flash fiction or poems loosely strung together than a longer work.  

Today's Rune: Warrior. 

What Happened to Kerouac? (1986, 2012)

Regarding Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams' What Happened to Kerouac? (1986, 2012), it's no joke to say this is an "indispensable" cultural library of primary Beat Generation sources. 

Beyond the insights into Jack Kerouac as person and writer, the viewer is treated to the wide range of personalities and dispositions rendering them: from Gregory Corso, a "real pisser," to the more reserved but very serious minded Michael McLure, from the affable priest Spike Morrissette to the most cogent of all, Ann Charters. There is also plenty of archival footage to accompany the literal voice of Kerouac.

Particularly in the expanded 2012 edition, there is an astonishing array of good stuff in here. There is an accompanying website.

Today's Rune: Movement.
     

Coen Brothers: Inside Llewyn Davis

Seeing Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), it's 1961, okay? All across the USA . . . It's set mostly in NYC, Chicago and along the road in between. 

I really like this film, and it'll take a while to absorb. Kind of trippy, kind of existential, kind of like a mythical tale, with realism, magical. On the road between the cities in snow and at night -- these scenes were mesmerizing. And along came Dylan. Can you dig?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 
   

Walter Salles: On the Road (Take II)

Now's a good time for a little something about the characters and actors in Walter Salles' 2012 movie version of Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road, set in the late 1940s in the US and Mexico.

To me, Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) is sort of like Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991). Moriarty (which happens to be one of my family names back in the mists of time) is a sort of prototype for tens of thousands of Americans living in the early 21st century -- careless, reckless, chaotic and driven. One of the best details about him -- which is not the case with his spiritual descendents, I'm guessing, is his holding onto a copy of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way throughout most of the frenetic journeys depicted in On the Road. In Swann's Way (the first part of Proust's massive novel À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time), Swann's obsession with Odette is a powerful thread that ties everything together; in On the Road, obsession runs through Moriarty's psyche (obsessions with fast driving, drugs and sex -- seeking and escaping) and ties him in knots. Several other characters, men and women, are equally obsessed with Moriarty, who serves as a fast-moving Pied Piper for their scurrying activities. Dean Moriarty has some ambition to be a writer himself, so when he hands Swann's Way off, we get the idea that he's finished with that notion.

Kristen Stewart as Marylou has a damaged, mischievous Chloë Sevigny vibe. As for the other women characters, well, let's face it: Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a far cry from a feminist manifesto. Though Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe / The Second Sex was published in 1949, this is not Sur la route in France, but rather North America, and second wave feminism was not yet manifest here. In any case, there are brief interludes that include Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men), Alice Braga, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Marie-Ginette Guay, among others.

Viggo Mortensen is a hoot as Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs) -- right on.

The hardest role is that of Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac). Sam Riley does a superb job with it -- despite sometimes over-the-top corny vocal delivery (this is really how Kerouac wrote and spoke). Who is this guy, this actor? It finally hit me afterward -- my God, he's the British dude who played Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis in Control (the 2007 film directed by Anton Corbijn)!  Ian Curtis -- Mr. Gloom himself -- committed suicide while (or was it right after?) listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot, while also watching Werner Herzog's Stroszek, the offbeat film that ends in the mountains of North Carolina with a Cherokee tribal deputy on the radio to a dispatcher: "We have a 10-80 out here, a truck on fire, we have a man on the lift. We are unable to find the switch to turn the lift off, can't stop the dancing chickens. Send an electrician, we're standing by." It's those damn dancing chickens again, from Chagall to Pop and Fellini . . . worth noting repeatedly because yes, Virginia, everything really does connect to every other thing, plus the effort to make these crazy connections manifest keeps the synapses lively and dementia at bay -- maybe. But back to Sam Riley in On the Road -- he gets an A for his performance.

Today's Rune: Protection.  
  
 

On the Road to Catch On the Road On the Big Screen

Much to yak about when it comes to Walter Salles' On the Road (2012), the movie version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) as augmented by the raunchier, sadder "scroll" draft.

In the USA at this juncture in 2013, you have to pretty much take sail to find On the Road on the silver screen. I don't know what happened to distribution, but I do know this: the box office proceeds for On the Road are sixteen times more outside the US than inside it. I mean, I know On the Road doesn't have the widespread appeal of Operation Dumbo Drop or March of the Ten Penguins or whatnot, but come on, peoples -- American fiction writers and poets don't get no respect in their own country. Support your local sheriff! 

Seriously, there may be prodigious amounts of marijuana, Benzedrine and alcohol in On the Road, as well as a lot of sexual talk and innuendo (no particularly graphic sex, or not much), but why not give it a whirl anyway?  Because it really is worth seeing on the big screen -- a much more pleasant experience than seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012) -- even though Amy Adams is in both (and has a bigger role in The Master), even though both The Master and On the Road have a migrant worker section and even though The Master and On the Road are set in the relatively near past -- mostly in the wake of the Second World War, with a Korean War soon to come.

More about On the Road in the near future, I suspect, dig or no dig. 

Today's Rune: Signals.    
    

Breakfast at the Exit Café: First Take

Thoroughly enjoying Breakfast at the Exit Café: Travels Through America (Vancouver, B.C.: Greystone Books, 2010, 2011), an on-the-road memoir by Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds, two Canadians roaming highways and byways in the post-9/11 USA.

Here's how the accompanying website markets it:
'Put two writers in a car for a couple of months and what do you get? Breakfast at the Exit Café, the story of a trip around the rim of America, against the tide of history and literature, on roads travelled by Steinbeck, Kerouac, Trollope, and Simone de Beauvoir."  http://breakfastattheexitcafe.com/

This husband and wife team alternate sections, which livens things up.  Their observations are pointed, often snarky and therefore hilarious -- even (especially?) when they're wrong about certain details. This is a case study in trying  to figure out how things work from the outside: they hit some nail heads right on, miss the mark on others. Either way, makes you think. That's part of the fun.   

Today's Rune: Journey.

On the Road: Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation

[I originally posted this five years ago today, in 2006]:  

Today is Jack Kerouac's birthday (1922-1969). His reputation has survived quips like Truman Capote's clever if evil line, "that's not writing, that's typing." While he was alive, academia (for the most part) dismissed him as a joke. Now whole courses are taught on the Beats; their books can be found in major bookstores or easily obtained online. They have been absorbed into mainstream culture, and even the originally derisive Cold War term "beatnik" has a nostalgiac ring.

But Beat writing is more about unconventional freedom of movement and alternative lifestyles than it is about nostalgia. There is no uniform philosophy. Some of the Beats embraced Zen Buddhism, some launched cultural and political critiques and jeremiads (Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Gregory Corso's "Bomb"); Kerouac mostly told stories and chronicled his own life and the comings and goings of key friends. William S. Burroughs started with a variation of crime noir (Junky) and moved through experimentation, drugs, voluntary exile, and the cut-up method (in collaboration with the artist Brion Gysin) to create such controversial works as Naked Lunch. The collective impact on interested parties in the 1960s was enormous, from Bob Dylan straight to the present. So happy birthday, Jack! Today your books live alongside Truman's and everybody be happy.

My sister Vickie told me Jack Kerouac's story when I was a teenager straight out of VMI. The first thing I read was an annotated copy of On the Road from the library, which was perfect because the "critical section" set the novel within an understandable context. The novel itself inspired me in many ways, but perhaps most imporantly it opened up possibilities for striking out on the road and living in unconventional ways. Between that and miraculously surviving a dramatic car wreck completely unscathed (the car flipped over and spun around a few times before landing in a watery ditch), I was ready to GO!

And away I went over the span of just four or five blindingly short years -- to New England with my friend Kenny Randall where we met Baba and Louise Toumajan; to Europe on a college trip where I got to know my friend Bill Caughlin; around the country by car with my sister Linda Stine, visiting relatives and Beat shrines along the way in Denver, San Francsico, New Orleans and elsewhere; to Mardi Gras with Bill; to Europe again, with Suzanne DePalma; to Manhattan and the Beat hangouts there; to Boulder, Colorado, with my friend Evan Farris to visit his sister Amy Farris (now Amy Kilbride) -- I'm talking thirty to forty hour car rides, hallucinatory experiences, for sure --then driving with my sister Vickie Charabati [now Stavish] to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she was moving. And in the middle of all these travels, I got a job at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and plugged into the literary world via publishing, as well. Certainly, it all makes more sense now than it did at the time! And certainly no regrets. I still get the travel bug, though I've come to appreciate (and can better afford) airplanes to get from place to place!
 

Kerouac married Edie Parker of Grosse Pointe; he stayed in the area from time to time, frequenting the still-functioning Rustic Cabins bar in Grosse Pointe Park, and the temporarily defunct Wooden Nickel (on Mack Avenue) in an earlier incarnation [now a sushi joint]. "There's no tragedy in Grosse Pointe," Jack proclaimed then, but if he had lived to see it, he'd come to know that on the contrary, there's plenty of tragedy in Grosse Pointe -- just like everywhere else.

A vast storehouse of Kerouac's papers are now owned by the New York Public Library; pleasingly, the same institution recently acquired William S. Burroughs' papers, too. Burroughs' importance will be better understood in due time.

On the road, adieu for now. . . . .

Today's Rune: Wholeness.  

Semiotics: From Pattern to Patter

Only one letter separates pattern from patter, only three brings you to chatter. Of the three words, patter is pure trickery.

Above, you've got a graph via Google Ngram Reader of relative book-recorded instances of word usage: hipcat, hepcat, hipster and beatnik. Hipster spiked around 1959, beatnik in the 1960s. Both have made comebacks. I've always liked the word "hepcat," a compound word building on the band term hep that itself goes back at least more than a century.  Flipping through a book of correspondence between Kerouac and Ginsberg, I noticed the former's use of the word hipcat while in Mexico to see William S. Burroughs.  This is rarer. So words are also mustard seeds. Some are luckier than others.

Howl: Poem and Film

Directed by Rob Epstein -- who also produced and directed the stellar 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk -- and Jeffrey Friedman, Howl is a nifty tribute to Allen Ginsberg's 1955 poem "Howl;" it is also a historically contextualized contemplation of Beat Generation aesthetics, art, the creative process and gender issues. I enjoyed it. Fair warning, however: this is neither a Disney movie nor a Hallmark card, but rather has the definite feel of a modest (definitely not epic) independent film with several interesting things to think about. Though Howl incorporates some of the techniques of a documentary, it is a shaped fictional recreation of Ginsberg and his times, particularly focusing on the 1950s period. In addition, one is treated to the entire poem, threaded throughout the movie and often supplemented with strange animated sequences.

In the acting department, Howl features first and foremost James Franco as Ginsberg. Though popular culture has more recently tended to dwell on Ginsberg as a sort of Buddhist hippie in the 1960s and later, Franco gets to play him as the initially shy and emerging 1950s poet who dresses a bit more conservatively.  In addition to Franco, there are solid portayals of other key players (mostly small parts) by Jon Hamm, David Strathairn, Jeff Daniels, Treat Williams, Mary Louise-Parker, Alessandro Nivola, Aaron Tveit, and others. But no William S. Burroughs! No worries, I've got another film about him to post about in the pipeline.

N.B. Epstein and Friedman initially teamed up on Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), a documentary that I haven't seen.

Today's Rune: Harvest.  

When The Beats Go Marching In

The Beats are alive and well thanks to a slew of new releases. One example: Yony Leyser's William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010). I love Burroughs' work and persona -- though a little of his writing at one time can go a long way, I could listen to him speak for a great while longer. Like Gore Vidal's, his delivery is often damned near perfect. It's always seemed to me that Burroughs will be perceived as a primary 20th century literary figure, ahead of his time. I Compare him to the now well-recieved visual artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who were belittled or virtually ignored in their own time. It's worth noting that artists like Patti Smith and Iggy Pop have always advocated for Burroughs.




















Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl (2010) looks to be good, too. Like most librarians and writers and artists, I've always held free speech as a cornerstone and seen obscenity trials and book bannings/burnings a pernicious joke, the end of freedom. 

Along the same lines as Allen Ginsberg, consider the cases of James Joyce, Henry Miller, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, and suppressed voices like Costa-Gavras (try finding even in 2010 a copy of his films État de Siège / State of Siege or Hannah K., in the USA).

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Jack Kerouac and the Gypsy Curse

If you're easily annoyed by writers and artists "yakking," as Jack Kerouac might put it, you may want to avoid Curt Worden's One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur (2008/2009). On the other hand, if you like Kerouac and are patient, this documentary will be worthwhile.

First, what is the Gypse Curse? "May you get exactly what you think you want" is one variation. Be careful what you wish for. Becoming famous may be hazardous to your health -- or to someone else's health: just ask Mel Gibson, or Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and all down the line. Keoruac definitely has a station down that line. Don't get off there if you want to get out alive. But no one does anyway, so why the hell not?

One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac knew if he didn't regroup from alcohol poisoning, he'd be dead fast, he'd be gone. He went to Big Sur to "dry out." It didn't work. He died at 47 -- nine years after the Big Sur interlude. But he wrote in the meantime, including the novel that became Big Sur (1962).

The film includes good footage that I'd never seen, same with the new photos; Big Sur, New York City and San Francisco scenery; and an effective sampling of Kerouac's voice, rendered in most excellent fashion by John Ventimiglia (the dude who played Artie Bucco in The Sopranos) -- he sounds eerily like Jack Kerouac.




















Today's Rune: Journey.

Phantom Brothers

Kerouac lost his brother Gérard, Johnny Cash his brother Jack, and Elvis his twin brother Jesse.  All three survivors were troubled, though Johnny probably dealt with his deck of existential cards best, in part because of June Carter and maybe luck -- certainly he lived the longest of these fraternal combinations.  A salute to them all, and happy birthday, Elvis Aaron Presley. 

Today's Rune: Signals.  

Valley Days and Mountains, 1982

In the Summer of 1982, my sister Linda and I drove cross country from North Carolina to the West Coast and back again, visiting many now gone relatives along the way. That was coincidentally the 25th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This year will be the 50th anniversary of The Dharma Bums.

Here's a running chronicle dashed off by Linda on August 25, 1982, while I drove:

Wed., Lone Pine, California. Leaving Frontier Hotel (really snazzy). We wake up and look into thine hills and behold craggy faced giants of peppered light tan. Near the Alabama Hills where Clint Eastwood just recently filmed, heading for a good vantage of Mt. Whitney (elevation 14,000 feet or so).

Alabama Hills. Saw Whitney (wow!), ran around the desert a little on the sandy pebbled road. Then a BIG breakfast at the Sportsman's Café (mm). $10.00

Could see rockets fired out of a test range. A thick fuzzy line straight out of the mountains with smaller fighter line above. This "desert" is pure tan micaceous sand with small gulches. Every half foot there seems to be a short tuft of brown brush-tipped sage bushes. Little shaggy bandit pines reach outward.

Erik noticed little Buddhas on top of the hill -- ridge runners. Saw a long, thin chipmunk with bushy rabbit-like tail.

Now into land of vast gulches, caverns, canyons, hills, desert dunes, arroyos, maroon, black, terra cotta, blueish grey, brownish black, mauve, yellow green, white, rusty, cream . . . sparkling whitish green sage, jumbled rocks, mud, dry rivers and streams. Donkey crossing.

Death Valley. Incredible clouds, mirages, sand dunes, color, Borax. Sparser and sparser shrubs. It's raining (average 1 1/2 inches per year). White dust devils. Badwater (lowest point). No signs! Curve. Lake mirage. . . . . (to be continued).

This summer, Linda and Roy are heading for Ireland. Still got the Wanderlust, regardless of higher costs. That's the spirit!

Today's Rune: Partnership.

Road Scholar

I don't think Andrei Codrescu's Road Scholar (1992/1993, Roger Weisberg, director, Jean De Segonzac, cinematographer) is available yet on DVD, but it's worth seeing in any form one can find it. It's an American road trip from East to West Coast, touching down in landscapes as diverse as Camden, New Jersey (think Whitman), Hamtramck (Detroit), and San Francisco. Viva the Beats!


Only because we were both smoking cigarettes on the fringes of an Ann Arbor gathering at the time, I met Mr. Codrescu back in 2002. Very cool guy as well as poet, cultural observer and champion. Much more to say, but for now, a nod to Road Scholar while trying to find a copy to watch again.

Today's Rune: Initiation.

The Dharma Bums at Fifty

My first big Kerouac and the Beat Generation burst came when I was an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill. Not only did Kerouac et alia fire me up for the road and brief visits to any number of former Beat hot spots, but I also picked up some early published editions along the way. I found a first edition of The Dharma Bums around 1983 for $35.00. No idea what it might be going for today, but in 1958 it sold for $3.95 in hardback.

From the original 1958 Viking Press liner notes:

Here is the new Kerouac novel -- appearing just a year after the author's explosive On the Road put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller lists. The same expansiveness, humor, and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novel sparks this one. But a more cohesive story is unfolded in The Dharma Bums, inspired by a more concentrated goal.

The principals are two ebullient young men engaged in a passionate search for Dharma, or Truth -- a search that involves them, together and separately, in a series of free-wheeling explorations, both sacred and profane. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high [sic] Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude -- a lesson that has a hard time surviving their forays into the pagan groves of San Francisco's Bohemia with its marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, experiments in "yabyum," and similar non-ascetic pastimes.

But through it all the two young men remain faithful in their fashion to their quest as Truth Bums, and when we finally take leave of them, each has caught sight of his goal and is on the road to it.

Pretty right on, in fact.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.

On the Road in Vietnam and Iraq

It's Jack Kerouac's birthday, which I've posted on before (see specifically, March 12, 2006 post).

Today this country as a whole is on the road in Iraq, just as forty odd years ago we were on the road in Vietnam. Only then, because of the Draft, more people protested more vocally. Today we seem to say, shucks, then shrug our shoulders and hustle up some money to pay for gas as we drive away from the problem.

To some extent at least, Gore Vidal was right when he called the USA "The United States of Amnesia."

Take the Bush-Cheney mantra since mid-2006: "If we don't fight them there [Iraq], we'll have to fight them here ['The Homeland"].

Hardly original. This "logic" goes back at least as far as the Great War / First World War. And more recently, to Vietnam. Consider U.S. Vietnam veteran Donald Duncan, writing in 1966:

[W]henever anybody questioned our being in Vietnam -- in light of the facts -- the old rationale was always presented: "We have to stop the spread of communism somewhere . . . if we don't fight the commies here, we'll have to fight them at home . . . if we pull out, the rest of Asia will go Red . . . these are uneducated people who have been duped [i.e. the Vietnamese, not the occupying Americans]; they don't understand the difference between democracy and communism . . ."

(Source: Donald Duncan, "The Whole Thing Was a Lie!" February 1966, in Peter B. Levy, ed., America in the Sixties -- Left, Right and Center: A Documentary History (Praeger, 1998), p. 146).


Today's Rune: Harvest.

As we sow, so shall we reap.