The Beat Generation

George Kimball has written a nice, lengthy, gut-spilling review of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, the only novel-length piece of fiction ever written by both Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It’s due to be published on Saturday, more than 60 sixty years since its completion.

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then, but as a study revealing two giants-to-be in the developmental stages of their craft, it may be a valuable historical document.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)