The Dharma Bums made the list of “100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library” over at The Art of Manliness, which calls itself “a blog dedicated to uncovering the lost art of being a man.” Whatever that means. I just like the cover they chose.

An idealistic vision from the man who fueled the Beat Generation, a life on the road without concern for wealth or even stability, rather an enjoyment of surroundings, whatever they may be. This is a great book for reminding us to get away from technology, at least for a day, to appreciate nature and some of the more simple pleasures of life. Don’t feel inferior to the beatniks if you still like driving your car…don’t ever let hipsters give you guilt trips.

[The Art of Manliness]

John Leland at the NYT‘s Weekend Book Review has this to say of Harvey Pekar’s new graphic novel The Beats: A Graphic History:

Some of the history is off. Jan Kerouac was not shown by a blood test to be Jack’s daughter (the test was inconclusive), and Pekar scrambles the chronology of some of Kerouac’s books and stylistic breakthroughs. Nancy J. Peters, a part owner of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, was unwisely tapped to help write the chapter on the store, which includes lines like “City Lights is not only a bookstore and publisher, it’s a historic public space and an international cultural center,” and “Today, City Lights has come to symbolize the American spirit of free intellectual inquiry.” Here, nonobjective history gives way to plain self-promotion, and not even cool self-promotion.

Leland is a Kerouac scholar, and while I understand Pekar’s intention with the book, it’s sort of disappointing that I agree with him. Leland’s holding Pekar accountable, as people are wont to do when something they hold very near becomes a little tainted. Leland doesn’t want people to get the wrong idea of what the Beats were all about just because they got some bogus information from a book they only bought because they saw American Splendor after they had already seen Sideways.

I wanted a perspective to compare to Leland’s, so I consulted Twitter. My rationale was such that I was sure at least one or two of our more than 300 followers (Thanks, everyone, by the way.) would have read it, and also that they would want to tell me what they thought about it. User tijean47 had this to say:

I bought it, read it and gave it away. As an ardent Kerouac advocate, I was not impressed. Great idea-bad execution.

That’s two strikes, and both from Kerouac aficionados. I’m still recommending that people pick this up (Amazon), if only for the fact that Pekar’s generally astute and can be revelatory in his observations; and even if he can’t draw he’s still one hell of a great writer when he isn’t taking his cues from a part owner with a vested interest in bolstering her own bookstore.

The Mad Ones [The New York Times]

Jack Kerouac’s New Year in 1939:

(photo by jaycobs)

In what may be one of the most amazing things I’ve stumbled upon all week, Think for Yourself; Question Authority is a collection of essays by Arno Ruthofer that deal with all sorts of psychedelia—from ancient conceptions of psychoactivity to Timothy Leary, the Beats and Cyperpunk.

Leary argues that the millions of Americans who experienced the awesome potentialities of the brain via LSD certainly paved the way for the computer society we now live in. According to Leary, many of the people who were involved in the development of the personal computer got their inspiration from psychedelic drug experiences. He suggests that without the psychedelic revolution in the 60s, the personal computer would have been unthinkable.

[4.2. Countercultures (the Beat Generation, the hippies, the cyberpunks/ the New Breed)]

Gregory Corso has always been—and for whatever reason, will always be—the belabored and underappreciated poet way out on the fringe of what once was the Beat mainstream. The simple fact that he was never acknowledged as being important isn’t likely to change, even after reading this first-person narrative by Oscar Back taken from the long and gone, gone, gone Eat it Alive:

I guess in the Sixties they called them happenings. As it happened, a friend of mine, Charlie Ross, managed to get the Blue Note to open its doors on a Sunday night, July 12, 1981. The scheduled event was a reading by Gregory Corso, with Allen Ginsberg and the Shambala Glass Chicken Rock and Roll Band. What did happen was the result of the fashionably tardy half-hour delay, a crowd left to warp in the rain, and several poets in search of an audience.

   Charlie met my friend Tom and I at 6:30 P.M. so we’d have time to set things up before 8:00, when the doors were scheduled to open. Advance tickets had been selling for $2 apiece, and by the time of the show about a hundred were sold according to a last minute phone tally. In the alley behind the club we pounded on the steel door. Tom, a Michigander versed in cloud augury declared, “Looks like rain.” The manager, dressed in contractual black and white, opened the door and apologized to us for not having the lights on. The switch was thrown and the manager enlightened Charlie as to how the club would handle the gate, absolutely no one under 21 would be admitted, refunds for advance holders would be given out of the till, don’t wreck anything. Charlie, nodding like a foreigner being given directions to Bisbee, Arizona, assented with a final, “Okay. Whatever you say.” He then appointed me Technical Advisor in Charge of Crowd Placement. “You’re the boss,” I said as I took the chairs down from the table tops.

   ”Not quite, big fella,” admonished the manager. “I’m the boss.”

The Best Minds of My G-g-g-g-generation: An Evening with Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg [International Forum for Literature and Art]

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks probably won’t be confused with great literature, then, but as a study revealing two giants-to-be in the developmental stages of their craft, it may be a valuable historical document. Burroughs’s droll Midwestern cynicism is a counterpoint to the youthful Kerouac’s sometimes flighty exuberance, and, in a conversation with “Phillip Tourian” (the Carr character), Kerouac even gets a chance to practice telling the story of a wild, misspent night in Boston’s Scollay Square that will turn up, in a somewhat embellished version, in On the Road a dozen years later.

As in much of both men’s subsequent work, many of the dramatis personae are vaguely disguised depictions of actual people; the reader is left to amuse himself by guessing who’s who, although Grauerholz, who edited the book, hazards a few of his own in his introduction. (The best I can tell, only one figure, the legendary Village character Joe Gould, is represented under his own name.)

James Joyce once said, of a much better novel, that he hoped to leave a portrait of his birthplace “so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book,” and that sentiment may actually represent the more enduring legacy of Hippos. With its evocative rendition of now-vanished saloons, bygone diners, and other landmarks of yesteryear, Burroughs and Kerouac may have inadvertently done for 1944 Greenwich Village what Joyce did for 1904 Dublin.

Back Beat [The Boston Phoenix]

(photo by marklarson)

In light of the fact that I just added a lot of new material to his page—with at least twice as much still in the queue—and the fact that our presidential election is now less than a month away, I thought it only prudent to find out a little bit about what Amiri Baraka might think about our generation’s theoretical shoe-in, Barack Obama.

In a piece entitled “The McKinney Choice,” Kevin Alexander Gray very succinctly explains a lot of what I think Obama is doing with his campaign. From calling him a “status quo politician” to suggesting that he’s trying to align himself more closely with white voters. Baraka is quoted as saying that ”all those not supporting Obama are ‘rascals.’”

Over at the Washington Post, there’s a quote from Baraka saying that the only choice in our election is between Barack Obama or “that patient from the Vietnam War.” Unfortunately, this isn’t so much pro-Obama as it is anti-McCain, which seems to follow the rhetorical lesser-of-two-evils line of thought.

To conclude: it’s clear that Baraka does not like McCain. But what’s a little muddled is what (if anything) he actually supports about Barack Obama. So…

In other news, Amiri will be speaking at Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition and Creative Progress, a symposium being held Oct. 9-11 at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

(photo by wordcat57)

My response system must be flawed this morning because I just read Alexis Simendinger’s article, From the Beats to Barack, where he compared the Beat Generation to the so-called Obama Generation in light of the DNC being held in Denver. It’s an unqualified statement to make and only leads to the belief that Simendinger doesn’t really know all that much about the Beats. Doesn’t it take more than just a city in common to bring the two ideologies together?

In fact, Ginsberg went on to celebrate numerous arrests over the years for participating in anti-war, nuclear disarmament, and drug-legalization protests. “I saw opening up this whole universe where people wouldn’t be able to lie anymore!” he said in 1966 interview.

Without a doubt, war became the clarion call to the Obama generation. The candidate’s early opposition to the invasion of Iraq is now his claim to solid judgment, even in the absence of experience.

Gargi Gupta over at Business Standard reviews Deborah Baker’s literary biography, A Blue Hand, a book that chronicles the Beats (major and minor both) in India:

A Blue Hand is an account of the 15 months that Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky (whom he introduced as “my darling wife”, scandalising his hosts) and (for a brief 12 weeks), fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder and his wife Joanne Kyger spent travelling through India, “from the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills to Delhi opium dens and the burning pyres of Benaras”, in “search for god, for love and for peace”. Their “pilgrimage” culminated in Calcutta where they discovered a group of kindred souls: the “hungry generation” poets like Shakti Chattopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay.

Related:

• New York Times review of A Blue Hand. 
• Buy it on Amazon.

From the Hindustan Times:

The Genealogy of the Beats goes right back to the Romantics, with their “falling and dying” and funereal odes to creatures with wings.

But in more concrete terms – in terms readily understood by those who were looking for a way out of bourgeois reason (the word ‘bourgeois’ here used in the broader nonMarxist sense of the word, as a culture, as a posture of the mind, as an embedment in institutions that serve neither the true nor the beautiful, that seek only to satisfy the majority and enhance gregariousness) – in terms that are both artistic and intellectual at the same time, the Beats would trace their ancestry back to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont and Mallarme, to the beginnings of the European avant-garde.

The word itself comes from Jazz slang for ‘tired’, ‘broken down’, ‘dead beat’ and along with the word came also attitudes and habits, cocking a snook at the world, wearing dark glasses and consuming drugs in significant quantities. The European avant-garde, construed as a movement against bourgeois rationality, took shape and form, first with the Dadaists (“Dada means nothing”, as Tristan Tzara said, avoiding thus the tissue of lies and half-truths that makes up the substance of all merely political revolutions). And then there were the Surrealists, a more ample wave of cultural dissent, buoyed up by practices as esoteric as automatic writing as an instrument to explode the subconscious in public spaces hitherto occupied by socialists and mendicants and soothsayers.

(full article)