Kerouac at 90 on 12 March

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i read the road and bum books breathlessly listening to Parker and Billie when i was fifteen at least chronologically speaking but i could have been several millions of years old or only seconds old for all i knew but there was a guy who told me about the road thing and i was hooked and what i still can not believe are the sales numbers for this loop text etc .... and how did this drunk understan that even staying home it would feel like no fixed abode and that internal exile was the new thing but he overblew on Shearing dontcha think ....

[charles t]

The Dharma Bums paperback, I found in a box on the floor, in a used books place in the Loop in Chicago...located near a burlesque club.

Anyways, after the cheap acidic pages decrepitated, you now find the survivors book-ending an actual autograph (the provenance of same, I will not mention.)

[verismissimo]

At boarding school, under the spell of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1958 (was I the only one?), I wrote a pseudo-drug-filled pastiche which our English teacher read out in full to the class in his best American-poetic voice. Although he had not himself read Kerouac, he sensed fundamentally what it was. I was overjoyed.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

blissed out man blissed

[johncorrigan]

blissed out man blissed

I feel rather ashamed to say that though I followed my thumb for a long time, I'm only just in the middle of 'On the Road' for the first time and loving the energy of it all, and wishing I had that energy still and wondering what difference if I'd read it in my teens.

[charles t]

" If you ever get to San Francisco... "

http://www.kerouac.com/

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

a beatnik museum is an oxymoron ....... watching the ink dry is already a fixation with the past ....

[Serial_Apologist]

a beatnik museum is an oxymoron ....... watching the ink dry is already a fixation with the past ....

Watching the sped-up version - water evaporating on a hot plate - is rather fun tho'.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

... not to mention a spoon ...

[Serial_Apologist]

Bummers (in what sense, I hear you cry?) might be interested in the following extract from "Alan Watts - Zen and the Beat Way", Mark Watts's recollections of his dad, scrupulously reproduced by Y.T. for your delectation:

'In 1953 Watts - now father of two children - moved from the San Francisco peninsula to the hills of Marin County just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Here Gary Snyder's practical and scholarly interest in Zen was a continuing source of inspiration for Alan. When Robert Anton Wilson asked Alan about Gary Snyder during his interview for The Realist, Alan Replied, "He's a true Dharma Bum, a man of complete integrity. He's just the way Kerouac describes him in The Dharma Bums - little, wiry, bearded, Oriental-looking, always dressed in clothes that are old and patchy but scrupulously clean. I don't practise Zen the way he does, but there are many ways of doing it. I think very highly of Gary". Alan was living with Dorothy and their growing clan of children in Homestead Valley, and Gary was living in a cottage on a nearby hill that was called alternatively Marin-an, or "the horse forest hermitage". Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were in town in those days, and they came to visit Gary, and naturally Alan became involved in their goings-on. One such affair was a famous party (recorded in The Dharma Bums) thrown by Locke McCorkle, who had a house down at the bottom of the hill below Gary's cottage. At the party, Kerouac, McCorkle, and Ginsberg all ended up running around naked, while Alan sat with old friends from Chicago dressed in their business suits.

'However, the most significant aspect of the scene for Alan was not the parties but Gary's little cottage on the hill. As he later recalled:

"Gary had figured out - really and truly - how to live the simple life. Everyone complained about beatniks being dirty, and having filthy pads, but here Gary had this sweet, clean, neat little place. And he explained to me how to get by on practically no money - where to go for second-day vegetables, how to get certain kinds of grains, how to use Goodwill, and so on. He had a very nice place, and I felt that although I was trying to be involved in respectable public affairs because I had children to support, that the very existence of Gary's place gave the universe a little bit of stability".

'Shortly after the famous party, Gary went off to Japan to begin "a real Zen study". For a time Alan continued his involvement in the San Francisco Beat scene and in 1959 wrote Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen, which eventually earned him the somewhat undeserved reputation as "father of the hippies". However, his 1956 classic, The Way of Zen, had become a bestseller, and while others appreciated the Beat trend for its purity as a literary movement, Alan became less interested in the Beat movement than in the assimilation of Oriental culture into Western society. He whimsically predicted that within a few years Asia would become covered with superhighways and neon-lit hamburger and hot dog stands, and that at the same time frustrated Tibetan lamas would be studying Buddhism at the University of Chicago.

'Alan's second marriage did not survive the wayward influences of the Beat movement, but he spent the rest of his life speaking and writing - humorously and with insight - about Taoist, Buddhist and Hindu traditions. In his works he always expressed a particular affinity for what I think of as the earliest "beatniks": the Eastern wandering sages and masters who went "beyond the pale" and returned to the forest to regain the original state of being and to experience life as it was "on the first day" and as it is, underneath all our planning and thinking, even now'.

(From "Zen and the Beat Way" - Alan Watts" - Chapter Two, "The Beat Way of Life", Eden Grove, Enfield, Middx, 1997, PPxxi-xxiii).

(Well, Asia certainly did get there... in the end... )

S-A

[handsomefortune]

At boarding school, under the spell of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1958 (was I the only one?), I wrote a pseudo-drug-filled pastiche which our English teacher read out in full to the class in his best American-poetic voice. Although he had not himself read Kerouac, he sensed fundamentally what it was. I was overjoyed.

great post! i would so love to have been there myself, witniss verismissimo's early writing, and the teacher's best American-poetic voice.. wish i had a time machine, (but have to make do with utube)

a while back, there was a thread about 'how did you discover jazz'? over on the r3 jazz forum....initially i couldn't recall the 'discovery'. then i remembered my 'jazz dance' teacher, and the extra batty pianist they bought in for these specific free dance 'lessons' ..... in retrospect, i'm wondering if perhaps they'd both been reading the beat poets too? neverthelss, 'i was over joyed' in pretty much the same way as verrismissimo remembers too.

as i see it, i get the impression ginsberg triumphs: didn't stay at his mum's, and was 'up for it' much longer, more useful in fighting the social prejudices that are to surface. after the extreme sublime, openess, energy of the beats ... the extreme violence of political struggle. (sorry to put a dampner on things though).

the earliest "beatniks": the Eastern wandering sages and masters who went "beyond the pale" and returned to the forest to regain the original state of being and to experience life as it was "on the first day" and as it is, underneath all our planning and thinking, even now'

yes, if only we could have a huge influx of those!

[verismissimo]

Thanks hsf. Of course, I imagined that I'd be in serious trouble over it (as usual). This was a seriously conformist school. I re-discovered that English teacher again a few years ago, now in his eighties and full of life and fun.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

alas at my school at the relevant time the English faculty were all fascists ...... as a matter of fact none of the members of staff had any beat sympathy or appreciation whatsoever ... not a bongo in sight then a wonderful chap arrived with a beard and an alto sax .... and off we went on poetry and jazz!

[Serial_Apologist]

At the pubic (sic) school I went to it was Shapespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, year in, year out. The Bard's play specific to that year's English Lit A level was the one staged. Then at age 16 a new teacher, double-barrelled complete with umlaut, no less - came in with what amounted to a revolutionary new itinerary. Posh as his name implies though he was, he was the coolest thing since his predecessor was "moved on" following allegations of small boy interference - nothing to do with little kids blocking the TV screen; he drove around in an open Aston Martin, gorgeous raven-haired girlfriend parked beside in the biggest shades you ever did see, headscarf a-blowin in the wind. West Side Story was put on; my best mate played Riff, and Yours Truly put in charge of the offstage choir, for which, for the sake of invisibility, along with the stage hands, we had to wear black polo necks and dark jeans: in '63 the last word in . No idea who the professional musicians brought in were, but the drum solo climaxing the "Cool" fugue was, as we would say, having got the Ornette album then just out, "something else". Derek Bourgeois the composer later told me that "Cool" fugue was built on a twelve-note row, and, as the saying goes, one never looked back.

S-A