Kerouac Alley Blog

Who Was Ted Joans?

2008-08-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

Theodore "Ted" Joans (July 4, 1928 - April 25, 2003) was an American trumpeter, jazz poet and painter.

Born on a riverboat in Cairo, Illinois, Joans earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University. He later associated with writers of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and San Francisco. He was a contemporary and friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In the 1960s, Joans had a house in Timbuktu. He claimed to be a brother of Leroi Jones, despite the spelling difference, but this appears to be apocryphal.

Joans' painting Bird Lives hangs in the De Young Museum in San Francisco. He was also the originator of the "Bird Lives" legend and graffiti in New York City after the death of Charlie Parker in March 1955. Joans invented the technique of outagraphy, in which the subject of a photograph is cut out of the image.

This Is The Beat Generation by John Clellon Holmes

2008-07-18T02:16:00.000-07:00

This Is The Beat Generation by John Clellon Holmes
The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952

Several months ago, a national magazine ran a story under the heading 'Youth' and the subhead 'Mother Is Bugged At Me.' It concerned an eighteen-year-old California girl who had been picked up for smoking marijuana and wanted to talk about it. While a reporter took down her ideas in the uptempo language of 'tea,' someone snapped a picture. In view of her contention that she was part of a whole new culture where one out of every five people you meet is a user, it was an arresting photograph. In the pale, attentive face, with its soft eyes and intelligent mouth, there was no hint of corruption. It was a face which could only be deemed criminal through an enormous effort of reighteousness. Its only complaint seemed to be: 'Why don't people leave us alone?' It was the face of a beat generation.

That clean young face has been making the newspapers steadily since the war. Standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, it looked up into the camera with curious laughter and no guilt. The same face, with a more serious bent, stared from the pages of Life magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-GI's, and said that as it believed small business to be dead, it intended to become a comfortable cog in the largest corporation it could find. A little younger, a little more bewildered, it was this same face that the photographers caught in Illinois when the first non-virgin club was uncovered. The young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly drinking himself into relaxation, and the energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, who plays Russian Roulette with a jalopy, are separated only by a continent and a few years. They are the extremes. In between them fall the secretaries wondering whether to sleep with their boyfriends now or wait; the mechanic berring up with the guys and driving off to Detroit on a whim; the models studiously name-dropping at a cocktail party. But the face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging.

Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective ... The origins of the word 'beat' are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.

Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills and USO's, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedon, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later.

It is a postwar generation, and, in a world which seems to mark its cycles by its wars, it is already being compared to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself 'lost'. The Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything anymore. It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the 'orgiastic future' or escaping from the 'puritanical past.' Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desparate frivolity best expressed by the line: 'Tennis, anyone?' It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion. Every act in its drama of lostness was a tragic or ironic third act, and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was more than the dead-end statement of a perceptive poet. The pervading atmosphere of that poem was an almost objectless sense of loss, through which the reader felt immediately that the cohesion of things had disappeared. It was, for an entire generation, an image which expressed, with dreadful accuracy, its own spiritual condition.

But the wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeatedinventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, do not concern young people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to 'come down' or to 'get high,' not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiousity, not disillusionment.

Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeapordy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. And it is precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hotrod driver meet and their identical beatness becomes significant, for, unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke: 'If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.' Not content to bemoan his absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides.

For the giggling nihilist, eating up the highway at ninety miles an hour and steering with his feet, is no Harry Crosby, the poet of the Lost Generation who planned to fly his plane into the sun one day because he could no longer accept the modern world. On the contrary, the hotrod driver invites death only to outwit it. He is affirming the life within him in the only way he knows how, at the extreme. The eager-faced girl, picked up on a dope charge, is not one of those 'women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs from public places,' of whom Fitzgerald wrote. Instead, with persuasive seriousness, she describes the sense of community she has found in marijuana, which society never gave her. The copywriter, just as drunk by midnight as his Lost Generation counterpart, probably reads God and Man at Yale during his Sunday afternoon hangover. The difference is this almost exaggerated will to believe in something, if only in themselves. It is a will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. And that is bound to lead to excesses in one direction or another.

The shock that older people feel at the sight of this Beat Generation is, at its deepest level, not so much repugnance at the facts, as it is distress at the attitudes which move it. Though worried by this distress, they most often argue or legislate in terms of the facts rather than the attitudes. The newspaper reader, studying the eyes of young dope addicts, can only find an outlet for his horror and bewilderment in demands that passers be given the electric chair. Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized movements, political, religous, or otherwise, among the young. The articles they write remind us that being one's own boss and being a natural joiner are two of our most cherished national traits. Everywhere people with tidy moralities shake their heads and wonder what is happening to the younger generation.

Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support more on one's capacity for human endurance than on one's philosophy of life. Not that the Beat Generation is immune to ideas; they fascinate it. Its wars, both past and future, were and will be wars of ideas. It knows, however, that in the final, private moment of conflict a man is really fighting another man, and not an idea. And that the same goes for love. So it is a generation with a greater facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them. But it is also the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has been an obsessive problem, quite aside from the reasons for having a particular faith or not having it. It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets, a perfect craving to believe.

Though it is certainly a generation of extremes, including both the hipster and the radical young Republican in its ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e, society) what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the 'square' society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd. Looking at the normal world, where most everything is a 'drag' for him, he nevertheless says: 'Well, that's the Forest of Arden after all. And even it jumps if you look at it right.' Equally, the young Republican, though often seeming to hold up Babbitt as his culture hero, is neither vulgar nor materialistic, as Babbitt was. He conforms because he believes it is socially practical, not necessarily virtuous. Both positions, however, are the result of more or less the same conviction -- namely that the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable.

For beneath the excess and the conformity, there is something other than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest. What the hipster is looking for in his 'coolness' (withdrawal) or 'flipness' (ecstasy) is, after all, a feeling on somewhereness, not just another diversion. The young Republican feels that there is a point beyond which change becomes chaos, and what he wants is not simply privelege or wealth, but a stable position from which to operate. Both have had enough of homelessness, valuelessness, faithlessnes.

The variety and the extremity of their solutions are only a final indication that for today's young people there is not as yet a single external pivot around which they can, as a generation, group their observations and their aspirations. There is no single philosophy, no single party, no single attitude. The failure of most orthodox moral and social concepts to reflect fully the life they have known is probably the reason for this, but because of it each person becomes a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in his own way.

More than anything else, this is what is responsible for this generation's reluctance to name itself, its reluctance to discuss itself as a group, sometimes its reluctance to be itself. For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them. Only the need for them goes on, and it is this need, exhausting one object after another, which projects the Beat Generation forward into the future and will one day deprive it of its beatness.

Dostoyevski wrote in the early 1880's that 'Young Russia is talking of nothing but the eternal questions now.' With appropriate changes, something very like this is beginning to happen in America, in an American way; a re-evaluation of which the exploits and attitudes of this generation are only symptoms. No single comparison of one generation against another can accurately measure effects, but it seems obvious that a lost generation, occupied with disillusionment and trying to keep busy among the broken stones, is poetically moving, but not very dangerous. But a beat generation, driven by a desparate craving for belief and as yet unable to accept the moderations which are offered it, is quite another matter. Thirty years later, after all, the generation of which Dostoyevski wrote was meeting in cellars and making bombs.

This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it. There are those who believe that in generations such as this there is always the constant possibility of a great new moral idea, conceived in desparation, coming to life. Others note the self-indulgence, the waste, the apparent social irresponsibility, and disagree.

But its ability to keep its eyes open, and yet avoid cynicism; its ever-increasing conviction that the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem; and that capacity for sudden wisdom which people who live hard and go far possess, are assets and bear watching. And, anyway, the clear, challenging faces are worth it.

This is the Beat Generation - Kerouac Alley
Beat Generation - Kerouac Alley

William S. Burroughs Quotes

2008-07-14T04:15:00.000-07:00

"There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination." -William S. Burroughs

"The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client." -William S. Burroughs

"Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words." -William S. Burroughs

"Madness is confusion of levels of fact...Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels." -William S. Burroughs

"I have a strange feeling here of being outside any social context." -William Burroughs in Tangiers

“Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.” -William S. Burroughs

"There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks." -William S. Burroughs

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what’s going on." -William S. Burroughs

William Burroughs at Kerouac Alley

Gary Snyder Quotes

2008-07-02T02:24:00.000-07:00

"If Ginsberg is the Beat movement's Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder is the Henry David Thoreau".-Bruce Cook

"I want to create wilderness out of empire."-Gary Snyder

"We . . . must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is."-Gary Snyder

"Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat - and the old, old habitat of humans - falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies."-Gary Snyder

"Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?"-Gary Snyder

"Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant."-Gary Snyder

"We are fouling our air and water and living in noise and filth that no "animal" would tolerate, while advertising and politicians try to tell us we've never had it so good."-Gary Snyder

"Sometime in the last twenty years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment." -Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder at Kerouac Alley

And Here Comes Neal!

2008-06-25T14:09:00.000-07:00

Biography
Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968)
Cassady was born in Salt Lake City, the son of Maude Jean (née Scheuer) and Neal Marshall Cassady.[1] Raised by an alcoholic father in Denver, Cassady spent much of his youth bouncing between skid-row hotels with his father and reform schools for car theft. In 1946 Cassady met Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University in New York and quickly became friends with them and the circle of artists and writers there. He had a sexual relationship with Ginsberg that lasted off and on for the next twenty years, and he later traveled cross-country with Kerouac.

Cassady proved to be a catalyst for the Beat Movement, appearing as the characters Dean Moriarty and Cody Pomeray in many of Kerouac's novels. Ginsberg mentioned him as well in his ground-breaking poem, Howl ("N.C., secret hero of these poems..."). Additionally, he is commonly credited for helping Kerouac break ties with his Thomas Wolfe-inspired sentimental style and discover his own unique voice through "spontaneous prose", a stream of consciousness approach to writing.

After a brief marriage to the teenage LuAnne Henderson, Cassady married Carolyn Robinson in 1948. The couple eventually had three children and settled down in a Monte Sereno ranch house, 50 miles south of San Francisco, California, where Kerouac and Ginsberg sometimes visited. Cassady committed bigamy by briefly marrying a woman named Diane Hansen. He worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and kept in touch with his Beat counterparts even as they drifted apart philosophically.

Following a 1958 arrest for offering to share a small amount of marijuana with an undercover agent at a San Francisco night club, Cassady served a difficult prison sentence at San Quentin. After his release in June, 1960 he struggled to meet family obligations, and Carolyn divorced him when his parole period expired in 1963. Cassady shared a pad with Allen Ginsberg and Charles Plymell in 1963 at the infamous 1403 Gough Street, San Francisco address. Cassady first met Ken Kesey during the summer of 1962, eventually becoming one of the Merry Pranksters. In 1964 he served as the driver of the bus Furthur, which was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He later played a prominent role in the explosive California psychedelic scene of the 1960s.

Cassady makes an appearance in Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, in which he is described as "the worldly inspiration for the protagonist of two recent novels," drunkenly yelling at police at the famed Hells Angels parties at Ken Kesey's residence in La Honda, an event also chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Although his name was removed at the insistence of Thompson's publisher, the description is clearly a reference to Cassady's appearances in Jack Kerouac's works, On the Road and Visions of Cody. His name appears explicitly in the 50th anniversary edition of the original scroll of On the Road (On the Road - the original scroll, Viking 2007).

In January, 1967 Cassady traveled to Mexico with fellow prankster George "Barely Visible" Walker and longtime girlfriend Anne Murphy. Holding court at a beachside house just south of Puerto Vallarta, they were joined by Berkeley folk Barbara Wilson and Walter Cox. All-night storytelling, speed runs in George's psychedelic Lotus Elan and plenty of LSD for everyone made for a classic Cassady performance – "like a trained bear," Carolyn Cassady once said. At one point Cassady took Cox, then 19, aside and told him, "Twenty years of fast living – there's just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don't do what I have done."

During the next year, Cassady's life became increasingly nomadic. He left Mexico in May, traveling to San Francisco, Denver, New York and points in between; then went back to Mexico in September and October (stopping in San Antonio on the way to visit his oldest daughter who had just given birth to his first grandchild); visited Kesey's Oregon farm in December; and spent New Year's with Carolyn at a friend's house near San Francisco. Finally, in late January, 1968, Cassady returned to Mexico once again.

On Saturday, February 3, 1968, Cassady attended a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende. After the party he went walking along a railroad track to reach the next town, but passed out in the cold and rainy night wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. In the morning, he was found in a coma by the track and taken to the closest hospital, where he died a few hours later on February 4, four days short of his forty-second birthday.

The exact cause of Cassady's death remains uncertain. Those who attended the wedding party confirm that he took an unknown quantity of Secobarbital, a powerful barbiturate sold under the brand name of Seconal, that can easily lead to overdose. Cassady was not a heavy drinker, though he may have participated in a toast to the bride and groom. The physician who performed the autopsy wrote simply "general congestion in all systems;" when interviewed later he stated that he was unable to give an accurate report, because Cassady was a foreigner and there were drugs involved.[citation needed]

Legacy and influence
Kesey wrote a fictional account of Cassady's death in a short story named The Day After Superman Died (in his collected short stories published as Demon Box), where Cassady is quoted mumbling the number of ties he had counted on the railroad line (sixty-four thousand nine-hundred and twenty-eight) as his last words before dying.

Cassady lived briefly with the Grateful Dead and is immortalized in the Dead song "The Other One" as the bus driver "Cowboy Neal." [2]. [3] A later version of the same tune, "That's It For the Other One," includes specific references to Cassady's death. A third Grateful Dead song, "Cassidy," by John Perry Barlow [4], might seem to be a misspelling of Cassady's name; in fact the song primarily celebrates the 1970 birth of baby girl Cassidy Law into the Grateful Dead family, though the lyrics also include references to Neal Cassady himself.

The pop/folk band The Washington Squares did a song named "Did You Hear Neal Cassady Died?"

The film The Last Time I Committed Suicide, released in 1997, is based on the "Joan Anderson letter" written by Cassady to Jack Kerouac in December, 1950. Although much of this letter had been lost, a surviving remnant was originally published in an early 1964 edition of John Bryan's magazine, "Notes From Underground".

A 2007 film, Luz Del Mundo, deals with Cassady's friendship and adventures with Jack Kerouac. Cassady is played by Austin Nichols and Kerouac is played by Will Estes.[5]

Another film, the biopic Neal Cassady, is slated for a 2008 IFC release. This film will focus more on the Prankster years and stars Tate Donovan as Neal, Amy Ryan as Carolyn Cassady, Chris Bauer as Kesey, and Glenn Fitzgerald as Kerouac. Noah Buschel wrote and directed the film. Shareeka Epps, Paz de la Huerta, Brendan Sexton, Josh Hamilton and Stephen Adly Guirgis co-star. The soundtrack to the movie includes Johnny Horton, Thelonious Monk, Pharoah Sanders, and Don Cherry. In previews the Cassady family has criticized this film as highly inaccurate. [6] The film deals primarily with how Neal became trapped by his fictional alter-ego, Dean Moriarty.

Cassady's autobiography The First Third was published posthumously. His complete surviving letters are published in "Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison" (Blast, 1993) and "Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967" (Penguin, 2007)

Bibliography
Selected works in Genesis West volume seven published in the Winter of 1965 by Gordon Lish
The First Third (City Lights, 1971. Expanded version, 1981)
Selected works in The Portable Beat Reader Charters, Ann (ed.) Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison (Blast, 1993)
Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967 (Penguin, 2004)

Published biographiesThe Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady, by William Plummer (1981)
Neal Cassady, Volume One, 1926-1940, by Tom Christopher (1995)
Neal Cassady, Volume Two, 1941-1946, by Tom Christopher (1998)
Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero, by David Sandison & Graham Vickers (2006)
Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, by Carolyn Cassady (Original version-Penguin, 1990, first revision Black Spring Press, Amazon.co.uk - sole distributor, 2007)

The Neal Cassady Estate
Neal Cassady at Kerouac Alley

Gregory Corso

2008-06-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

Gregory Corso was born in New York City on 26 March 1930. His mother, sixteen years old when Gregory was delivered, abandoned the family a year later and returned to Italy. Afterwards, Corso spent most of his childhood in orphanages and foster homes. His father remarried when Gregory was eleven years old, and he had his son stay with him, but the boy repeatedly ran away. He was removed to a boy's home, from which he also ran away. His troubled adolescence included a stint of several months in the Tombs, the New York City jail, for a case involving a stolen radio, and three months of observation in Bellevue. At seventeen, he was convicted of theft and sentenced to Clinton State Prison for three years. During his incarceration, he read avidly from the prison library and began writing poetry. After his release in 1950, he met Allen Ginsberg, through whom he also became acquainted with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, as well as other New York writers and artists. In 1952 he worked for the Los Angeles Examiner and later served as a merchant seaman. In 1954 he unofficially attended Harvard University, where students contributed to the publication of his first collection of poems, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems. Two years later he joined Ginsberg in San Francisco, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti published his volume of poems Gasoline. In 1957 Corso joined Kerouac and Ginsberg for a series of unconventional readings and interviews. Since that time he has traveled extensively, especially in Mexico and Eastern Europe. He taught briefly at the State University of New York at Buffalo and occasionally during summer sessions at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. His major publications after Gasoline include The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), The American Express (1961), Long Live Man (1962), Elegaic Feelings American (1970), Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981), and Mindfield (1991).

By Michael Skau

Gregory Corso - Kerouac Alley
The Beat Generation - Kerouac Alley

DAVID AMRAM REMEMBERS JACK KEROUAC

2008-06-22T01:55:00.000-07:00

(Originally written for Evergreen Review in 1969, published early 1970 at the request of publisher Barney Rossett as an obituary for Kerouac)

I used to see Jack often at the old Five Spot in the beginning of 1957, when I was working there. I knew he was a writer, and all musicians knew that he loved music. You could tell by the way he sat and listened. He never tried to seem hip. He was too interested in life around him to ever think of how he appeared. Musicians understood this and were always glad to see him, because we knew that meant at least one person would be I listening. Jack was on the same wave-length as we were, so it was never necessary to talk.

A few months later, poets Howard Hart and Philip Lamantia came by my place with Jack. They had decided to read their poetry with music, and Jack said he would join in, reading, improvising, rapping with the audience and singing along. Our first performance was in December of 1957 at the Brata Art Gallery on East 10th Street. It was the first jazz-poetry reading in New York. There was no advertising and it was raining, but the place was packed. Jack had become the most important figure of the time. His name was magic. In spite of the carping, whining put-downs by the furious critics, and the jealousy of some of his contemporaries for his overnight success (he had written ten books in addition to On The Road with almost no recognition), Jack hadn't changed. But people's reaction to him was sometimes frightening.

He was suddenly being billed as the 'King of The Beatniks', and manufactured against his will, as some kind of public Guru for a movement that never existed. Jack was a private person, extremely shy, and dedicated to writing. When he drank, he became much more expansive, and this was the only part of his personality that became publicized. The people who came to the Brata Gallery weren't taste makers; they were friends.

A few months later, we began some readings at the Circle In The Square. Everyone improvised, including the light man, who had his first chance to wail on the lighting board. The audience joined in, heckling, requesting Jack to read parts of On The Road, and asking him to expound on anything that came into his head. He also would sing while I was playing the horn, sometimes making up verses. He had a phenomenal ear. It was like playing duets with a great musician.

Jack was proud of his knowledge of music and of the musicians of his time. He used to come by and play the piano by ear for hours. He had some wonderful ideas for combining the spoken word with music. A few weeks later, jazz-poetry became 'Official Entertainment', and a few months later was discarded as another bit of refuse, added to the huge mound of our junk culture. It was harder to dispose of Jack. The same journalist and radio and TV personalities who had heralded him were now ripping him to shreds. Fortunately, they couldn't rip up his manuscripts. His work was being published, more widely read, and translated.

In early 1958, all of us went to Brooklyn College, where Jack, Phillip and Howard read. Jack spent most of the time answering the student's questions with questions of his own. He was the down-home Zen master, and the students finally realized he wasn't putting them on. He was showing them himself. If they wanted to meet the Author Jack Kerouac, they would have to read his books.

His public appearances were never to promote his books. They were to share a state of mind and a way of being. The only journalist who picked up on this was Al Aronowitz. He saw Jack as an artist.

In the spring of 1959, the film Pull My Daisy was made. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Larry Rivers and myself - the Third Avenue All-Stars as one wit described us - appeared in it. Alfred Leslie directed it and Robert Frank filmed it. Jack had written the scenario, and after the film had been edited, Jack saw it. Because it was a silent movie, Jack was to narrate it, and I was to write the music afterwards. He, Allen, and Neal Cassady also wrote the lyrics for the title song Pull My Daisy, for which I wrote the music and was sung in the film by Anita Ellis. Jack put on earphones and asked me to play, so that he could improvise the narration to music, the way we had done at our readings. He watched the film, and made up the narration on the spot. He did it two times through spontaneously, and that was it. He refused to do it again. He believed in spontaneity, and the narration turned out to be the very best thing about the film. We recorded it at Jerry Newman's studio. Jerry was an old friend of Jack's from the early forties and afterwards we had a party-jam session that lasted all night. Jack played the piano, sang, and improvised for hours.

In the early sixties I used to see Jack when he would come in from Northport to visit town. Once, he called up at one in the morning and told me I had to come over so that he could tell me a story. I brought over some music to copy, and Jack spoke non-stop until 8:30 a.m., describing a trip he had made through North Africa and Europe. It was like hearing a whole book of his being read aloud, and Jack was the best reader of his own work, with the exception of Dylan Thomas, that I ever heard.

"That's a fantastic story." I told him. "It sounds just like your books."

"I try to make my writing sound just the way I talk." he said. His ideal was not to display his literary skill, but to have a conversation with the reader.

I told Jack about an idea I had for a cantata about the four seasons in America, using the works of American authors. He launched into a travelogue of his voyages around the country, and referred to writers I might look into. I took notes, and ended up reading nearly fifty books, to find the texts. I included a passage from his book Lonesome Traveler. The concert was at Town Hall [in New York City], and Jack wrote that he couldn't come. It was the Spring of 1965, and he didn't like being in New York.

Sometimes he would call from different parts of the country just to talk, and we continued to write to each other. In one letter he said "Ug-g-h. Fame is such a drag." He wanted time to work, but found that success robbed him of his freedom. At the same time, he felt that he was forgotten. I told him that all the young people I met when I toured colleges loved his books. To many, he was their favorite writer. But writer meant something different now. It was what was being said, not how it was said. It was content that counted, not style. Jacks' message was a whole way of being, and he was becoming more an influence than ever.

Truman Capote dismissed Jack's work as "typing." I never heard Jack put down another writer. He went out of his way to encourage young writers. His work reflects this spirit of generosity, kindness and love. This is why his "typing" is so meaningful to young people today. Jack was ahead of his time spiritually. Like Charlie Parker, Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley, his work is constantly being rediscovered.

Through knowing Jack, I wrote some of my best music. Without knowing him, I never would have written my book. More important, young people all over the world are reading and rereading his work. His death only means the beginning of a new life for everyone who shares in the joy of knowing him through his books.

David Amram, October 24th. 1969

David Amram - Kerouac Alley
Jack Kerouac - Kerouac Alley

A Supermarket in California - Allen Ginsberg

2008-06-21T01:48:00.000-07:00

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley, 1955

Allen Ginsberg - Kerouac Alley

A Terrible Need - Charles Bukowski

2008-06-20T03:00:00.000-07:00

some people simply need to
be unhappy, they'll scrounge it out
of any given situation
taking every opportunity
to point out
every simple error
or oversight
and then become
hateful
dissatisfied
vengeful.

don't they realize that
there's so little
time
for each of us
in this strange
life to make things
whole?
and to squander
our lives living
like that
is nearly
unforgiveable?

and that
there's never
ever
any way
then
to recover
all that which will be
thus lost
forever?

Charles Bukowski - Kerouac Alley

Jack Kerouac Quotes

2008-06-19T03:14:00.000-07:00

"But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” -Jack Kerouac - On the Road

"Who are all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me?" -Jack Kerouac

"Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about; the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy." -Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

"Pretty girls make graves." -Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

"Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' — The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' — Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.'" -Jack Kerouac - Big Sur

"The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death." -Jack Kerouac

"Behind us lay the whole of America and everything I had previously known about life... We had finally found a magic land at the end of the road and we never had dreamed the extent of the magic." -Jack Kerouac On the Road

“...and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...” -Jack Kerouac

"All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land." -Jack Kerouac

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”-Jack Kerouac

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.” -Jack Kerouac

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.” -Jack Kerouac

“Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.” -Jack Kerouac

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” -Jack Kerouac

“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.” -Jack Kerouac

“My witness is the empty sky.” -Jack Kerouac

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.” -Jack Kerouac

“Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.” -Jack Kerouac

“What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?” -Jack Kerouac

“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great that I thought I was in a dream.” -Jack Kerouac

"The car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives." -Jack Kerouac

"What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind." -Jack Kerouac

“...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...” -Jack Kerouac

"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back." - Jack Kerouac

“All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.” -Jack Kerouac

“Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.” -Jack Kerouac

“We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.” -Jack Kerouac

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” -Jack Kerouac

“Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, "Fear life, but don't die; you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt." -Jack Kerouac

"John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'" - Jack Kerouac

“Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.” -Jack Kerouac

I'd rather be thin than famous" -Jack Kerouac

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" -Jack Kerouac - On the Road

"I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death." -Jack Kerouac - On the Road

"Sociability is just a big smile, and a big smile is nothing but teeth." -Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

". . . I'd thought in June . . . "When I get to the top of Desolation Peak and I'm alone I'll come face to face with God or Tathagatha and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence," but instead I'd come face to face with myself . . . face to face with Hateful Old Me." -Jack Kerouac

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty." -Jack Kerouac - On the Road

"And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time." -Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels

"...this poor haunted canyon which again gives me the willies as we walk under the bridge and come to those heartless breakers busting in on sand higher than earth and looking like the heartlessness of wisdom --Besides I suddenly notice as if for the first time the awful way the leaves of the canyon that have managed to be blown to the surf are all hesitantly advancing in gusts of wind then finally plunging into the surf, to be dispersed and belted and melted and taken off to sea --I turn around and notice how the wind is just harrying them off trees and into the sea, just hurrying them as it were to death --In my condition they look human trembling to that brink --Hastening, hastening ---In that awful huge roar blast of autumn Sur wind." -Jack Kerouac - Big Sur

"I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures. . . ." -Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

Kerouac Alley

Who Were They?

2008-06-18T02:19:00.000-07:00

". . . In this modern jazz, they heard something rebel and nameless that spoke for them, and their lives knew a gospel for the first time. It was more than a music; it became an attitude toward life, a way of walking, a language and a costume; and these introverted kids... now felt somewhere at last." -John Clellon Holmes

This Is The Beat Generation by John Clellon Holmes
The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952

Several months ago, a national magazine ran a story under the heading 'Youth' and the subhead 'Mother Is Bugged At Me.' It concerned an eighteen-year-old California girl who had been picked up for smoking marijuana and wanted to talk about it. While a reporter took down her ideas in the uptempo language of 'tea,' someone snapped a picture. In view of her contention that she was part of a whole new culture whereGo one out of every five people you meet is a user, it was an arresting photograph. In the pale, attentive face, with its soft eyes and intelligent mouth, there was no hint of corruption. It was a face which could only be deemed criminal through an enormous effort of reighteousness. Its only complaint seemed to be: 'Why don't people leave us alone?' It was the face of a beat generation.

That clean young face has been making the newspapers steadily since the war. Standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, it looked up into the camera with curious laughter and no guilt. The same face, with a more serious bent, stared from the pages of Life magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-GI's, and said that as it believed small business to be dead, it intended to become a comfortable cog in the largest corporation it could find. A little younger, a little more bewildered, it was this same face that the photographers caught in Illinois when the first non-virgin club was uncovered. The young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly drinking himself into relaxation, and the energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, who plays Russian Roulette with a jalopy, are separated only by a continent and a few years. They are the extremes. In between them fall the secretaries wondering whether to sleep with their boyfriends now or wait; the mechanic berring up with the guys and driving off to Detroit on a whim; the models studiously name-dropping at a cocktail party. But the face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging.

Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective ... The origins of the word 'beat' are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.

Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills and USO's, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedon, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later.

It is a postwar generation, and, in a world which seems to mark its cycles by its wars, it is already being compared to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself 'lost'. The Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything anymore. It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the 'orgiastic future' or escaping from the 'puritanical past.' Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desparate frivolity best expressed by the line: 'Tennis, anyone?' It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion. Every act in its drama of lostness was a tragic or ironic third act, and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was more than the dead-end statement of a perceptive poet. The pervading atmosphere of that poem was an almost objectless sense of loss, through which the reader felt immediately that the cohesion of things had disappeared. It was, for an entire generation, an image which expressed, with dreadful accuracy, its own spiritual condition.

But the wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeatedinventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, do not concern young people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to 'come down' or to 'get high,' not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiousity, not disillusionment.

Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeapordy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. And it is precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hotrod driver meet and their identical beatness becomes significant, for, unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke: 'If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.' Not content to bemoan his absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides.

For the giggling nihilist, eating up the highway at ninety miles an hour and steering with his feet, is no Harry Crosby, the poet of the Lost Generation who planned to fly his plane into the sun one day because he could no longer accept the modern world. On the contrary, the hotrod driver invites death only to outwit it. He is affirming the life within him in the only way he knows how, at the extreme. The eager-faced girl, picked up on a dope charge, is not one of those 'women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs from public places,' of whom Fitzgerald wrote. Instead, with persuasive seriousness, she describes the sense of community she has found in marijuana, which society never gave her. The copywriter, just as drunk by midnight as his Lost Generation counterpart, probably reads God and Man at Yale during his Sunday afternoon hangover. The difference is this almost exaggerated will to believe in something, if only in themselves. It is a will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. And that is bound to lead to excesses in one direction or another.

The shock that older people feel at the sight of this Beat Generation is, at its deepest level, not so much repugnance at the facts, as it is distress at the attitudes which move it. Though worried by this distress, they most often argue or legislate in terms of the facts rather than the attitudes. The newspaper reader, studying the eyes of young dope addicts, can only find an outlet for his horror and bewilderment in demands that passers be given the electric chair. Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized movements, political, religous, or otherwise, among the young. The articles they write remind us that being one's own boss and being a natural joiner are two of our most cherished national traits. Everywhere people with tidy moralities shake their heads and wonder what is happening to the younger generation.

Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support more on one's capacity for human endurance than on one's philosophy of life. Not that the Beat Generation is immune to ideas; they fascinate it. Its wars, both past and future, were and will be wars of ideas. It knows, however, that in the final, private moment of conflict a man is really fighting another man, and not an idea. And that the same goes for love. So it is a generation with a greater facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them. But it is also the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has been an obsessive problem, quite aside from the reasons for having a particular faith or not having it. It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets, a perfect craving to believe.

Though it is certainly a generation of extremes, including both the hipster and the radical young Republican in its ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e, society) what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the 'square' society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd. Looking at the normal world, where most everything is a 'drag' for him, he nevertheless says: 'Well, that's the Forest of Arden after all. And even it jumps if you look at it right.' Equally, the young Republican, though often seeming to hold up Babbitt as his culture hero, is neither vulgar nor materialistic, as Babbitt was. He conforms because he believes it is socially practical, not necessarily virtuous. Both positions, however, are the result of more or less the same conviction -- namely that the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable.

For beneath the excess and the conformity, there is something other than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest. What the hipster is looking for in his 'coolness' (withdrawal) or 'flipness' (ecstasy) is, after all, a feeling on somewhereness, not just another diversion. The young Republican feels that there is a point beyond which change becomes chaos, and what he wants is not simply privelege or wealth, but a stable position from which to operate. Both have had enough of homelessness, valuelessness, faithlessnes.

The variety and the extremity of their solutions are only a final indication that for today's young people there is not as yet a single external pivot around which they can, as a generation, group their observations and their aspirations. There is no single philosophy, no single party, no single attitude. The failure of most orthodox moral and social concepts to reflect fully the life they have known is probably the reason for this, but because of it each person becomes a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in his own way.

More than anything else, this is what is responsible for this generation's reluctance to name itself, its reluctance to discuss itself as a group, sometimes its reluctance to be itself. For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them. Only the need for them goes on, and it is this need, exhausting one object after another, which projects the Beat Generation forward into the future and will one day deprive it of its beatness.

Dostoyevski wrote in the early 1880's that 'Young Russia is talking of nothing but the eternal questions now.' With appropriate changes, something very like this is beginning to happen in America, in an American way; a re-evaluation of which the exploits and attitudes of this generation are only symptoms. No single comparison of one generation against another can accurately measure effects, but it seems obvious that a lost generation, occupied with disillusionment and trying to keep busy among the broken stones, is poetically moving, but not very dangerous. But a beat generation, driven by a desparate craving for belief and as yet unable to accept the moderations which are offered it, is quite another matter. Thirty years later, after all, the generation of which Dostoyevski wrote was meeting in cellars and making bombs.

This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it. There are those who believe that in generations such as this there is always the constant possibility of a great new moral idea, conceived in desperation, coming to life. Others note the self-indulgence, the waste, the apparent social irresponsibility, and disagree.

But its ability to keep its eyes open, and yet avoid cynicism; its ever-increasing conviction that the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem; and that capacity for sudden wisdom which people who live hard and go far possess, are assets and bear watching. And, anyway, the clear, challenging faces are worth it.

The Beat Generation - Kerouac Alley

Who Was William S. Burroughs?

2008-06-17T03:11:00.000-07:00

Cover of first edition of "Junkie".
William Lee was the pen name
Burroughs used.

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what’s going on." -William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs Biography

William Seward Burroughs (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, essayist, social critic and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical. He saw all his writing as a single, vast book.

Life

Burroughs was born to a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, also named William Seward Burroughs, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, was the daughter of a distinguished minister whose family claimed to be descendants of Robert E. Lee. Burroughs’ parents ran an antique and gift shop, first in St. Louis, then in Palm Beach, Florida. Burroughs attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, and The Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, but was expelled from the latter because staff had found private journals concerning a budding erotic attachment to another boy. He kept his sexual orientation concealed well into adulthood. Burroughs graduated from Harvard University in 1936.

After leaving Harvard, Burroughs traveled to Europe, where he contracted syphilis. In Austria, Burroughs met Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman fleeing the country’s Nazi government. The two were not romantically attached, but Burroughs married her in Croatia to allow her to gain a United States Visa. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years. Burroughs enrolled as a graduate student of Anthropology at Harvard and later enrolled briefly at Medical School in Vienna, Austria. He was enlisted in the U.S Army in 1941 but was discharged for psychological reasons. Burroughs lived on a monthly trust account from his parents, and this provided him little need, or desire, to earn money. In New York, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Vollmer Adams was married to a GI with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams. Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder. Burroughs began using morphine and quickly became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict but her drug of choice was the inhaled form of the amphetamine, Benzedrine. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. Vollmer would become Burroughs’ common law wife. Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription and was sentenced to return to his parents' care in St. Louis. He returned to New York, released Vollmer from the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital and moved with her and her daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs’ child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr. was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.

He was arrested after police searched his home and found letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg referring to a possible delivery of marijuana. Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola state prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations. In 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of 'William Tell' at a party above an American-owned bar in Mexico City. He spent 13 days in jail before the killing was ruled accidental. Vollmer’s daughter, Julie Adams went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs, Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents.

Burroughs was also a member of the Illuminates of Thanateros.

Career

After Vollmer's death, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, looking for a drug called Yage, which could supposedly ease opiate addiction. He produced two novels during this time, Junky, exploring his heroin addiction, and Queer exploring his homosexuality. He also compiled correspondence with Allen Ginsberg about his search for and experiences with Yage as The Yage Letters. Ace Paperbacks published his first novel, Junky, in 1953 under the pen name William Lee. The Yage Letters and Queer were not published until 1963 and 1985 respectively.

Original Ace Double edition of Junkie (a.k.a. Junky) from 1953, credited to "William Lee". This was Burroughs' first novel publication.Burroughs went to Rome and then to Tangiers, Morocco, and began to write what would become Naked Lunch. Ginsberg and Kerouac helped Burroughs edit these episodes into Naked Lunch, an amalgam of experimental fiction and science fiction. Burroughs sold Naked Lunch to Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias. After the novel was published in 1959, it became infamous across Europe and was popular within countercultures of the 1960s. In countries where the book was banned, copies and even printing plates were smuggled across borders. Published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the state of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" based on criteria developed, largely, to defend the book. The case against Burroughs's novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature prosecuted in the United States. The trunk of manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch also produced The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1963).

In the 1970s he moved to New York City where Ginsberg helped him find work teaching writing at New York City College. Burroughs also associated with New York cultural players Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern, and Mick Jagger. The 1970s also saw Burroughs join, then leave the Church of Scientology [1]. His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of a book entitled Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters that played out in the pages of Rolling Stone. By late 1980s, Burroughs was a counterculture giant and collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Ministry, and in Gus Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy, playing a character largely based on himself. In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical back-up from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He also collaborated with director Robert Wilson and musician Tom Waits to create The Black Rider, a play which opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990, to critical acclaim, and was later performed all over Europe and the U.S.

He was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983.

In 1991, with Burroughs’ sanction, director David Cronenberg took on the seemingly impossible task of adapting Naked Lunch into a full-length feature film. The film opened to critical acclaim. Through the 1990s, Burroughs produced spoken word recordings, including collaborations with R.E.M.. Burroughs lived in Lawrence, Kansas through much of his later life. Burroughs died in Lawrence, at 6:50 p.m. on August 2, 1997 from complications of the previous day's heart attack. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published. A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burrough's life were published as the book Last Words.

Influence

Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may be conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. Others, however, consider him overrated. Others still consider his conceptual ideas more influential than his prose.

Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary fiction writers like William Gibson. The late postmodern writer Kathy Acker often cited Burroughs as her first major influence. He remains controversial because of his homosexuality, drug use, and the often criticized obscene and misogynistic tone of his works, though it should be noted that Burroughs' ideas about and attitudes towards women gradually became more friendly as he aged. Burroughs was regarded as being extremely intelligent and a generally quiet person.

Burroughs' works continue to be referenced years after his death. For example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included an evil character named Dr. Benway (named for an amoral physician who appears in a number of Burroughs' works). Similarly, in the hospital scene in the movie Repo Man both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.

William Burroughs - Kerouac Alley

Neal Cassady Letter

2008-06-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

Neal Cassady Letter to Allen Ginsberg

1073 Downing St.

Denver, Colorado

March 20, 1947.

Dear Allen;

I have just finished copying the poem, since I am not a typist you will see in it several mistakes that are so glaring as to fill me with shame. I have, however, stuck exactly to your punctuation etc. Also, I have sent you the poem in carbon, now, if you need the prime copy or the original don't hesitate to let me know, and I shall sent it on to you.[...] Your speaking of Bill B. only makes me want to meet him more than ever. I trust that in June you will come west we shall see he and Joan at that time. Continue to keep me informed as to his tribulations etc. just as you did in this letter. I place you in such high regard academically that I merely reacted normally to your amount of information concerning the literary scene. I presupposed that it had all come out of your head without effort, just as I without effort can speak of football, therefore, when I expressed amazement at the knowledge, it was artificial in that I was complimenting you simply as a means of showing appreciation. So you see I was not truly impressed, but, rather than using the false complementary style to show my thanks to you. I have given much thought to what I am about to say, I must, I fear, become somewhat incoherant near the end of this paragraph, but, bear with me as I am consciously trying to formulate our, no, my feelings. First, realize I am not intellectualizing nor doing anything other than being governed by pure emotion (incidentally, I feel that is the key to whatever awareness you sensed in me) in my effort to state to you what my present position is.

Now, I shall.tell my fears, desires, feelings of all types, and then, if possible, attempt to analize them. Allen, this may sound strange, but, the thing that is uppermost in my mind at the moment is a fear. How can I state it ? I believe it is almost paranoic in its intensity, with each of your letters I feel it more. I have difficulty in putting my finger on it, but its a real fear of losing you. Its a combination of a knowledge of lack on my part, not only academically, but, in drive as well, also, a sense of outcast that makes me feel at times as if I were really imposing on you for me to try and become closer. I have become more defensive psychologically in direct ratio to my increasing of realization of need of you.

The thing that is closest to the truth is the simple statement that you are too good for me.[...] Allen, forgive me, but I must break off now. I have been really busy these last few days these last few days and haven't had any rest, right now its 5 A.M. and I must rise at 9:30 A.M. I am completely beat, causing fluctuations in thought I think. Let me end on one line in your wonderful letter - "I will be prepared for you I think, when we meet, but on other terms than those which I'd formerly conceived and which I tried to force on you" I find the statement holds true for me as well as you Allen, whether for better or worse we must see, but whichever way it goes, I know I can't help from profitting thereby and perhaps you can also (though, I fear you can't since I no longer have anything to offer, and, therin lies my lonlyness).

I leave you in complete weariness and apology. But, By God, L'enfant or no, whether you think its mad or not, whether "its not as we feel or I want to feel" to quote you. I still love (what a weak word) you.

Bah ! I'm tired.

Neal

Neal Cassady - Kerouac Alley
Allen Ginsberg - Kerouac Alley

Who are These Ghosts?

2008-06-16T04:29:00.000-07:00

"Who are all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me?" -Jack Kerouac

Kerouac never used the real names of the characters in any of his books, and he often changed characters' names from book to book. Below the real names and aliases are given.

Jack Kerouac Character Alias Key

From a list Ann Charters wrote for her 1973 biography of Jack Kerouac.

William Burroughs
Town and City - Will Dennison
Vanity of Duluoz - Will Hubbard
On the Road - Old Bull Lee
The Subterraneans - Frank Carmody
Desolation Angels - Bull Hubbard
Book of Dreams - Bull Hubbard

Lucien Carr
Town and City - Kenneth Wood

Neal Cassady
On the Road - Dean Moriarty
The Dharma Bums - Cody Pomeray
Desolation Angels - Cody Pomeray
Big Sur - Cody Pomeray
Book of Dreams - Cody Pomeray

Gregory Corso
The Subterraneans - Yuri Gligoric
Desolation Angels - Raphael Urso
Book of Dreams - Raphael Urso

Robert Duncan
Desolation Angels - Geoffrey Donald

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Subterraneans - Larry O'Hara
Big Sur - Lorenzo Monsanto
Book of Dreams - Danny Richman

William Garver
Mexico City Blues - Old Bill Gaines

Allen Ginsberg
Town and City - Leon Levinsky
Vanity of Duluoz - Irwin Garden
On the Road - Carlo Marx
The Subterraneans - Adam Moorad
The Dharma Bums - Alvah Goldbook
Desolation Angels - Irwin Garden
Big Sur - Irwin Garden
Book of Dreams - Irwin Garden

John Clellon Holmes
On the Road - Tom Saybrook
The Subterraneans - Balliol MacJones
Book of Dreams - James Watson

Herbert Huncke
Town and City - Junky
On the Road - Elmo Hassel
Book of Dreams - Huck

Randall Jarrell
Desolation Angels - Varnum Random

David Kammerer
Town and City - Waldo Meister

Lenore Kandel
Big Sur - Romona Swartz

Jack Kerouac
Town and City - Peter Martin et al
Vanity of Duluoz - Jack Duluoz
On the Road - Sal Paradise
The Subterraneans - Leo Percepied
The Dharma Bums - Ray Smith
Desolation Angels - Jack Duluoz
Big Sur - Jack Duluoz
Book of Dreams - Jack

Leo Kerouac
Town and City - George Martin

Gabrielle Kerouac
Town and City - Marge Martin

Philip Lamantia
The Dharma Bums - Francis DaPavia
Desolation Angels - David D'Angeli
Tristessa - Francis DaPavia

Michael McClure
The Dharma Bums - Ike O'Shay
Desolation Angels - Patrick McLear
Big Sur - Pat McLear

John Montgomery
The Dharma Bums - Henry Morley
Desolation Angels - Alex Fairbrother

Peter Orlovsky
The Dharma Bums - George
Desolation Angels - Simon Darlovsky
Book of Dreams - Simon Darlovsky

Kenneth Rexroth
The Dharma Bums - Rheinhold Cacoethes

Gary Snyder
The Dharma Bums - Japhy Ryder
Big Sur - Jarry Wagner

Gore Vidal
The Subterraneans - Arial Lavalina

Esperanza Villanueva
Tristessa - Tristessa

Lew Welch
Big Sur - David Wain

Philip Whalen
The Dharma Bums - Warren Coughlin
Big Sur - Ben Fagin

Phil White
Town and City - Jack the Hoodlum

Jack Kerouac - Kerouac Alley