Welcome
to the Beats!
How
can you know what the 'Hippie Movement/Counter Culture Revolution
of the 60s' was, without first reading and studying the Beat Generation?
The
"Beat Generation's" writers, artists, poets and musicians
were
the fathers and mothers of the HIppie Counter Culturists.
So
many of us started out reading their work
along
with the transendentalists and existentalists.
I hope to offer you a broad range of writers, poets and artists
and
truly hope they spark something inside you that will make you
Think,
Feel , Wonder, Explore, Celebrate
and
truly understand our struggle and our bliss!
I've
tried to organize these bookstores into a coherent assemblage, starting
with the most prolific writers and then creating a second & third
Beat Bookstore's to reflect the emergence of the 'beatnik/hippie'
metamorphosis that occured, in a rather "mind blowing' way. In
finding the best reviews for the authors, I had to rely on the host
of Amazon.com's critics and found myself reading the reviews with
intense interest, leaving me with a thirst to gather more books of
these authors and spend a year or more re-reading them--where I left
off in the late 70s.
I
hope you will also find inspiration here!
PeaceZenHugs
LionHeart
October
2005
"The
Beat Generation brought America a message that's still crucially relevant;
somebody's
trying to take our freedom away, and you'd better pay attention.
"Control
can never be a means to any practical end;
it
can never be a means to anything but more control -- like junk."
-William
Burroughs 'Naked Lunch'-
What Is and Who
are the Beat Generation?
Beat
Generation
by Jack Kerouac, A. M. Homes
Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about
karma—what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning
with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being
down-and-out, passing around a bottle of wine. It ends with a kind
of satori-like reaffirmation of the power of friendship, of doing
good through not doing, and the intrinsic worth of the throwaway little
exchanges that make up our lives.
Written in 1957, the same year that On the Road was first published,
and set in 1953, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate
1950s America. Kerouac's characters are working-class men and women—a
step away from vagrants, but not a big step. Their dialogue positively
sings, suggesting jazz riffs in their rhythm and content, and Kerouac,
like a master composer, arranges it to magical effect. Here is the
heart and soul of the beat mentality, the zeitgeist that blossomed
over the decades and eventually culminated in the counter-culture
of 1960s America. It's a spirit that still lives.
The
Portable Beat Reader
by Various, Ann Charters (Editor)
The Portable Beat Reader is an excellent and thorough study of the
Beat Generation, compiled and edited by Ann Charters, biographer of
Jack Kerouac and one of our most notable experts on Beat literature
and ideas. This lively work of scholarship goes deeply into the history
of the Beat movement, investigating events such as the discovery (by
writer William Burroughs) of the word beat to describe this literary
generation. The reader includes essays on all the major prose and
poetry writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, and offers rare insight into
the literary-historical context of the movement.
Cutting through bohemian posturing and excess, Charters reprints the
most vital material produced by writers of the Beat generation, offering
a broad perspective on the movement by including work by lesser-known
figures alongside that of leading lights Jack Kerouac and William
S. Burroughs.
Huge
Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems
by Michael McClure
"Huge Dreams republishes two books, out of print for thirty years,
which together are a cornerstone of the Beat movement--The New Book/A
Book of Torture and Star. Both were influential in expanding poetry
into a larger world--the West Coast Beat phenomena, which focused
on nature, the environment, antiwar activities, individual anarchism,
Zen Buddhism, jazz, and a kind of romantic mystical thought. With
these books Michael McClure brought an animal energy and a knowledge
of art and physical human nature that was new to the scene.
The New Book/A Book of Torture was written spontaneously while McClure
was in a "dark night of the soul" brought on by psychedelics.
A single long poem of experience and exploration, it offers the means
of liberation from the darkness it examines. Star is a wide-ranging
book of chalice seeking, spiritual discovery, and political protest,
grounded in the emotions and sensations of eros and play."
When
I Was Cool : My Life at the Jack Kerouac School
by Sam Kashner
"With characteristic modesty, writer Kashner opens his memoir
with a caveat to readers: this isn't an encyclopedic history of the
beat generation. Rather, it's his own story of how it felt to leave
home and learn to be a poet by hanging out with the great beat poets,
albeit in their more gentled phase (past their road-tripping days,
but still full of "CrazyWisdom"). It was 1976 when Kashner,
a fresh college dropout, decided to follow his dream and apply to
the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a yet-to-be-accredited
division of the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo. As their
first (and for a while only) student, Kashner's assignments included
finishing and typing Allen Ginsberg's poems; preventing Gregory Corso
from scoring heroin; cleaning the home of their guru, Rinpoche; and
mediating between William Burroughs Sr. and Jr., not to mention attending
the odd lecture. Kashner undertook all this weirdness with fretful
earnestness-e.g., forever worrying that Ginsberg would attempt to
seduce him, that Corso would shoot up and he'd be branded a failure,
that the school wouldn't get accredited and his parents would regret
letting him go there, and that his lack of poetry expertise would
be discovered by his teachers. Were this just the saga of an innocent
in beat bohemia, Kashner's chronicle would be merely amusing, but
his genuine love for his crazy-wise mentors makes this a curiously
affecting coming-of-age story."
This
Is the Beat Generation: New York-San Francisco-Paris
by James Campbell
It covers the rise to prominence of the dramatis personae of the beat
movement (focusing on Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs), giving enough
information on their backgrounds to facilitate an understanding of
how this influenced them and their writing, but does not dwell on
unnecessary minutiae in the process. All the information is presented
in a concise and remarkably readable manner. The author points out
the foibles of the beats, but is not too judgemental, leaving it to
the reader to come to his own conclusions.
But the best thing about this book is the way the author links events
and people in a witty, intelligent way without falling into the very
beat trap of being pretentious. It can serve as an example to all
authors wishing to write an intelligent, accessible work of non-fiction.
"Forest
Beatniks" and "Urban Thoreaus":
Gary Snyder,Jack Kerouac,Lew Welch,and Michael McClure by Rod Phillips,Gary
Snyder, Jack Kerouac,Lew Welch, Michael McClure
"The Beat Movement, which first rose to attention in 1955, has
often been viewed by critics as an urban phenomenon--the product of
a postwar youth culture with roots in the cities of New York and San
Francisco. This study examines another side of the Beat Movement:
its strong desire for a reconnection with nature. Although each took
a different path in attaining this goal, the writers considered here--Gary
Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure--sought a new
and closer connection to the natural world. These four writers, along
with many of their counterparts in the Beat era, provided a crucial
spark that helped to ignite the environmental movement of the 1970s
and provided the foundation for the development of the current "Deep
Ecology" worldview."
Beat
Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?
by Ann Charters
"In this wide-ranging anthology, Beat scholar Ann Charters brings
together more than seventy-five essays, reviews, memoirs, poems, and
sketches that evoke the credos and the controversies surrounding the
Beat generation writers of the 1950s. Charters includes discussions
of all the major Beat figures-Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen
Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, and many more-from
commentaries by the Beats themselves as well as by such writers as
Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Mary McCarthy, Joyce Carol
Oates, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. Charters
also explores the humorous side of the Beat generation, its place
in post-war American culture, and the contribution of the important
women authors who also wrote Beat." (Amazon Review)
The
Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963
by Barry Miles
Miles (Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, etc.), who has been intimately
involved in the documentation of the Beat scene, focuses here on an
international aspect of Beat work: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs
and Gregory Corso's escape from "the conformism and Puritanism
of fifties America" during the six years (1957-1963) they lived
at a cheap hotel on Paris's Left Bank. During this period, the three
pursued such now-famous creative endeavors as "Kaddish,"
Naked Lunch and "Bomb." Their important work during this
time, particularly the "cut-up" method pioneered by Burroughs,
had an important formative influence on the next generation of artists,
according to Miles. Part scholarly study and part gossip-fest, this
account traces the aesthetic, sexual and social goings-on in Paris:
"Within the shelter of the Beat Hotel," Miles writes, "they
had mapped out many of the paths that the 'sixties generation' was
to actually follow: the recreational use of drugs and experiments
with psychedelics..., investigations into magic and mysticism...,
gay rights and sexual freedom , the legalization of 'pornography'
and challenges to obscenity laws." The hotel on rue Git-le-Coeur,
closed for nearly four decades now, still symbolizes the fruitful
ground of collaborative creation among the Beats. The significance
of this period in Paris for the Beats may be slightly exaggerated
by Miles to justify this book-length study, but those interested in
the lives of these cult figures will most likely forgive such overdetermination
in the interests of learning in an entertaining narrative about important
writers now considered American literary heroes.
Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created
the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America
William Burroughs,Allen Ginsberg,Ken Kesey,Timothy
Leary,by Peter O.Whitmer,Bruce Vanwyngarden
Clinical
psychologist Whitmer invites readers on a trip down memory lane via
interviews with '60s-era mavericks. Psychologist Timothy Leary, whose
LSD experiments at Harvard spilled over from the lab into his private
life, poet Allen Ginsberg, and writers William Burroughs, Ken Kesey,
Norman Mailer, Tom Robbins and Hunter S. Thompson reveal the serendipitous
nature of their encounters with one another, their clashes with the
law and the establishment, bouts of drug abuse, and the relationship
between the psychedelic experience and their creativity. Depicted
is a 1982 poetry reading by Ginsberg, the audience divided between
long-haired '60s devotees and '80s preppies on a class assignment
that Whitmer likens to "spending a day at Peabody Museum looking
at pre-Columbian basket weaving for Anthro 1-A." His self-indulgent
prose, where substance is sacrificed for jazziness, fails to transmit
across the generation gap the magic and urgency of the '60s revolution.
The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
by Alan Kaufman (Editor)
Editor and self-proclaimed Outlaw poet Kaufman has gathered into a
single volume the voices of more than two hundred ``poets who don't
get taught in American poetry 101.'' Here are the expected Jack Kerouac,
Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Patchen, Diane
DiPrima, Michael McClure, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ai, and Lawrence
Ferlinghettiall long accepted into the American poetry idiom. Along
with them are more recent poets like Luis J. Rodriguez, Jimmy Santiago
Baca, and Joy Harjo, who have earned significant standing for themselves
even inside academia, as well as performance poets Marc Smith and
Lisa Martinovic, who've garnered reputations only outside it. Anthologized
along with these poets are activists Che Guevara and Abbie Hoffman;
painter Jackson Pollock; and singer-songwriters Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie,
Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Notorious novelists Henry Miller and
Norman Mailer make appearances, as do stand-up comedians Lenny Bruce
and Richard Pryor.
The
Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City
by Bill Morgan
"If you still groove to the work of the Beat poets, and Kerouac
is your idol, a guided visit to their New York stomping grounds is
a mandatory pilgrimage. If, alternatively, you're going to New York
but feel overwhelmed by its size and options, a focus--taking a walking
tour of Kerouac land, for instance--could provide an entertaining
structure. Whatever your reasons, if a Kerouac junket is in your cards,
Morgan's guidebook provides all the history, stories, neighborhood
routes, and Beat trivia you could desire."
The
Beat Generation in San Francisco : A Literary Tour
by Bill Morgan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Editor), Allen Ginsberg (Photographer)
A blow-by-blow unearthing of the places where the Beat writers first
came to full bloom: the flat where Ginsberg wrote "Howl;"
Gary Snyder's zen cottage in Berkeley; the ghostly railroad yards
where Kerouac and -Cassady toiled; the pads where Jack & Neal
& Carolyn lived; Ferlinghetti's favorite haunts. This meticulous
guide also brings to light never-before-heard stories about Corso,
Bob Kaufman, DiPrima, Kyger, Lamantia and other West Coast Beats.
A entertaining read as well as a practical walking (and driving) tour
that covers the entire Bay Area. With an introduction by Lawrence
Ferlinghetti.
Scratching
the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac
by Michael McClure ,Larry Keenan
This insider's view of the Beat scene of the fifties and early sixties
vividly marks the advancement of a new perception of art as "a
living bio-alchemical organism" through essays by a poet and
playwright who helped shape the movement.
We as readers, are exposed to new insight into the Beat phenomenom
but we are graced with the knowledge of someone who was there and
lived it. McClure allows us into his mind and gives us a private tour
of what many literary individuals have meant to him. While there are
many wonderful and deserving books out there on the topic, one can't
help but feel blessed upon discovering this beauty. I found that it
not only allowed me to experience literature in a whole new element
but it also allowed me to experience it through the eyes of a quiet
master of the art.
Pablo
Neruda
1904-1973
More
Pablo
Twenty
Love Poems: And a Song of Despair
by Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin
This collection of poems, first published by Neruda at the age of
19 in 1924, caused something of a scandal because of its frank and
intense sexuality: "I have gone marking the atlas of your body
/ with crosses of fire. / My mouth went across: a spider, trying to
hide. / In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst." It later
became one of Neruda's best-loved works, selling two million copies
by the 1960s. Why? With image after arresting image, Neruda charts
the oceanic movements of passion, repeatedly summoning imagery of
the sea and weather: "On all sides I see your waist of fog, /
and your silence hunts down my afflicted hours; / my kisses anchor,
and my moist desire nests / in you with your arms of transparent stone."
As irresistible as the sea, love is engulfing ("You swallowed
everything, like distance. / . . . In you everything sank!"),
but also departs as mysteriously as it arrived, leaving the poet's
heart a "pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked."
These unabashedly romantic poems, wonderfully translated by Merwin,
are illustrated in this edition by the paintings of Jan Thompson Dicks
with aptly Fauvist tones and iconic formality.
Love
: Ten Poems By Pablo Neruda
by Pablo Neruda
Love, Ten Poems by Pablo Neruda is a romantic short collection by
one of the most sensual and romantic poets I have ever read. Neruda
draws all of your senses into his world and you want to stay there,
never to leave. One wants to find the beauty as he paints it for you,
the reader. His wife is the muse of most of his love sonnets. As Neruda
says, "Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
Love
Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
The
Essential Neruda : Selected Poems
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti(Foreword),Pablo Neruda,Mark
Eisner(Editor),Robert Hass(Translator),Stephen Mitchell (Translator),Alastair
Reid(Translator),Forrest Gander(Translator),Stephen Kessler(Translator),John
Felstiner (Translator),Jack Hirschman(Translator)
The Essential Neruda Selected Poems presents fifty poems by Pablo
Neruda, one of the greatest known Spanish poets, both in their original
language and in new translations created by a collaboration of eight
poets, translators, and Neruda scholars. A captivating celebration,
and a superb introduction to the pathos of Neruda's work one hundred
years after his birth. "Winter Garden": It shows up, the
winter. Splendid dictation / bestowed on me by slow leaves / suited
up in silence and yellow. // I'm a book of snow, / a wide hand, a
prairie, / an expectant circumference, / I pertain to earth and its
winter...
Memoirs
by Pablo Neruda, Hardie St.Martin (Translator)
Pablo Neruda's "Memoirs" is not a comprehensive autobiographical
document. It is a personal memoir, recounted as if the author was
sitting around a table, with good friends and a bottle of excellent
Chilean wine, telling tales of the people, anecdotes and incidents
that were so important in his life. "Confieso Que He Vivido,"
means I confess that I have lived. And Sr. Neruda certainly did that...with
zest, zeal and so much talent. The translation by Hardie St. Martin
is a good one, but it does not do justice to Neruda's beautiful skill
with the Spanish language. He romances the language, like no other,
even with his prose.
The
Poetry of Pablo Neruda
by Pablo Neruda,Ilan Stavans (Editor)
"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote
the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the
author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's
most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's
poet."
This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume
available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of
them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied
by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates
Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English-language
one, and a group of new translations by leading poets testifies to
Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and
readers today.
The Women of
the Beat Generation
"Female
Beats wrote poetry, took drugs, went on the road, listened to jazz,
and lived on the fringe
just as the men
did, but their accomplishments are not as widely recognized."
-B.Knight-
Women
of the Beat Generation:The Writers,Artists,and Muses at the Heart
of a Revolution
by Brenda Knight
"Female Beats wrote poetry, took drugs, went on the road, listened
to jazz, and lived on the fringe just as the men did, but their accomplishments
are not as widely recognized. This volume attempts to correct this
oversight by profiling 40 women of the Beat generation and publishing
samples of their work. Well-known poets Diane di Prima and Denise
Levertov appear in the volume, along with the muses of male writers
and other women who never became famous at all. As Brenda Knight notes
in her introduction, counterculture women in the 1950s and 1960s faced
difficult obstacles: "To be unmarried, a poet, an artist, to
bear biracial children, to go on the road was doubly shocking for
a woman, and social condemnation was high." The first portion
of the anthology is devoted to women who were not Beats but who set
the stage for the movement. Josephine Miles wrote poetry and mentored
the younger Beat poets at Berkeley, while Madeline Gleason founded
the San Francisco Poetry Festival. In the "Muses" section
are short biographies of wives and girlfriends of famous male writers
such as Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. It's widely known that William
S. Burroughs shot his wife Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs; this book
fills in other details of her wild and short life. Profiles of writers
such as Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Janna McClure, and Janine Pommy
Vega account for the rest of the anthology. The lives these women
led are as interesting as their writing, and Women of the Beat Generation
honors their determination to live outside the mainstream."-Jill
Marquis
Minor
Characters : A Beat Memoir
by Joyce Johnson
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Johnson's Beat memoir
is "the safe-deposit box that contains the last, precious scrolls
of the New York '50s" (The Washington Post).
Jack Kerouac. Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. LeRoi Jones. Theirs
are the names primarily associated with the Beat Generation. But what
about Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman), Edie Parker, Elise Cowen, Diane
Di Prima, and dozens of others? These female friends and lovers of
the famous iconoclasts are now beginning to be recognized for their
own roles in forging the Beat movement and for their daring attempts
to live as freely as did the men in their circle a decade before Women's
Liberation.
Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Johnson, an aspiring novelist and a secretary
at a New York literary agency, fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a
blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication
of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. While Kerouac traveled
to Tangiers, San Francisco, and Mexico City, Johnson roamed the streets
of the East Village, where she found herself in the midst of the cultural
revolution the Beats had created. Minor Characters portrays the turbulent
years of her relationship with Kerouac with extraordinary wit and
love and a cool, critical eye, introducing the reader to a lesser
known but purely original American voice: her own.
Door
Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958
by Jack Kerouac, Joyce Johnson
In a hip, literate correspondence marked by high diction and '50s
slang, 21-year-old Johnson (born Glassman) and 35-year-old Kerouac
chart the flowering of the Beats and their complicated love affair.
An initial matchmaking move by Allen Ginsberg led to Johnson's and
Kerouac's first meeting in Greenwich Village, followed by 22 months
of romance, withdrawal and, eventually, friendship. Through her understated
commentary and narrative links, NBCC-Award winner Johnson (Minor Characters)
provides tender insight into Kerouac's troubles, particularly his
unease at becoming the Beat spokesman with the 1957 publication of
On the Road and his "convoluted attachment" to his mother,
Memere, which made it impossible for him to sustain relationships
with other women. Johnson's presence throughout makes the story hers--that
of a sheltered Barnard grad who considered writing "an illicit
and transgressive act" and who must have found in Kerouac a kindred
soul. Yet it was her desire for a more lasting union than Kerouac
would give that led to their breakup: "'You're nothing but a
big bag of wind," she told a dallying Kerouac, and left. Although
the Kerouac romance dominates the text, the author's brief description
of her happy marriage to James Johnson, which ended with his death
in a motorcycle accident, puts the affair in perspective and shows
readers a greater reason for the sadness that suffuses the book. First
serial to Vanity Fair; 3-city author tour.
Girls
Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation
by Ronna C. Johnson (Editor), Nancy M. Grace (Editor),
Nancy McCampbell Grace (Editor)
in GIRLS WHO WORE BLACK Johnson and Grace provide an interesting taxonomy
of "who's beat" that almost makes sense. The Knight and
Peabody books were, of course, groundbreaking collections but their
definitions of who was Beat and who wasn't were so different that
a reader could wind up arguing that Simone De Beauvoir was the quintessential
Beat woman author. In an illuminating intrroductory essay, the editors
aregue that some of this confusion has been caused by the fact that
there are actually three generations of Beat women writers. The first
generation (chronologically) are those born around the time of William
Burroughs, and who thus anticipate the Beate writing sof the 1940s
and 1950s or who were writing contemporaneously to the first work
of the three men most definitely tied into the Beats--Burroughs, Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. Women of the first generation thus include
Jane Bowles and Helen Adam. A second generation grew up, the same
age as the younger Beats (such as Ginsberg, Lew Welch, McClure, Corso).
These women include Lenore Kandel (b. 1932), the late Elise Cowen
(1933-1962) and Joanne Kyger (b. 1934). Finally there are two women
Beat writers of a following generation--the age of Bon Dylan. These
are Anne Waldman and Janine Pommy Vega. This last generation seems
oddly underpopulated, as though Waldman and Pommy Vega were playing
some kind of version of "I Am Legend."
Breaking
the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers
by Nancy M. Grace, Ronna C. Johnson, Nancy McCampbell
Grace (Editor), Ronna Johnson (Editor)
he Beat movement nurtured many female dissidents and artists who contributed
to Beat culture and connected the Beats with the second wave of the
women's movement. Although they have often been eclipsed by the men
of the Beat Generation, the women's contributions to Beat literature
are considerable.
Covering writers from the beginning of the movement in the 1950s and
extending to the present, this book features interviews with nine
of the best-known women Beat writers, including Diane di Prima, ruth
weiss, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Brenda Frazer (Bonnie
Bremser), Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman, and the critic Ann Charters.
Each is presented by a biographical essay that details her literary
or scholarly accomplishments.
In these recent interviews the nine writers recall their lives in
Beat bohemia and discuss their artistic practices. Nancy M. Grace
outlines the goals and revelations of the interviews, and introduces
the community of female Beat writers created in their conversations
with the authors.
A
Different Beat : Writing by Women of the Beat Generation
by Richard Peabody
Peabody's work, which follows close on the heels of Brenda Knight's
Women of the Beat Generation (LJ 10/1/96), covers many of the same
writers, including Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Diane DiPrima, and
Jan Kerouac. With the exception of Leo Skir's moving essay on Elise
Cowen, however, there is minimal overlap because each work presents
different selections by the featured authors. This anthology is the
more valuable for showcasing work by less-celebrated writers like
Bonnie Bremser and Fran Landesman and for providing excerpts from
unpublished memoirs by two of Jack Kerouac's ex-wives, Frankie "Edie"
Parker and Joan Haverty. This well-balanced anthology, which should
focus more attention on Beat women, is recommended for all literature
collections.
Off
the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg
by Carolyn Cassady
In flesh, and
as portrayed in Jack Kerouac's novels On the Road (as Dean Moriarty)
and Big Sur (as Cody Pomeroy), Neal Cassady embodied the zeitgeist
of his generation, among whom was the author, his wife of 15 chaotic
years. He was 22, three years her junior, when she married Cassady
in 1948 and became handmaiden to a passionately devoted brotherhood:
her husband, her extramarital lover Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, all,
as Kerouc put it, " . . . in the car heading for the world unknown."
So hazardous proved the terrain that Cassady died at age 43; Kerouac
the following year, at 47. Of the famed Beat trio, only Ginsberg would
claim his place as elder statesman, his survivorship forecast in his
letters to Cassady: "It ain't right to take on so paranoiac just
to challenge and see how far you can go"; "I feel so evil
when I not agree in blindness." How hard Cassady, possessed of
"humid magnetism" and "dangerous glamour," traveled
is a tale of self-destruction recreated with felt tragedy by a wife
who yearned for conventional family life, to raise their three children
in suburban security on the San Francisco peninsula, to be assured
that her railway brakeman husband would bring home a weekly paycheck.
But compulsive infidelity, drugs, spells in prison, horse-race gambling
and the road kept the well-intentioned Cassady otherwise engaged.
Among legendary Beats who pass through these memoirs are Gary Snyder,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, along with
others who left an indelible impress on the lives of the Cassadys:
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, an astrologer, a cult of clairvoyants.
To the familiar history of the Beat Generation, Carolyn Cassady adds
a proprietary chapter marked with newness, self-exposure, love and
poignancy.
Memoirs
of a Beatnik
by Diane Di Prima
"Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly
erotic portrayal of the Beat years, Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving
account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually
in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom
she lived with and loved. Filled with anecdotes about her adventures
in New York City, Diane di Prima's memoir shows her learning to "raise
her rebellion into art," and making her way toward literary success.
Memoirs of a Beatnik offers a fascinating narrative about the courage
and triumphs of the imagination." (Amazon Review)
Recollections
of My Life as a Woman : The New York Years
by Diane DiPrima
Di Prima, perhaps the best known and certainly among the most talented
of the beat generation poets, captures the heady atmosphere of New
York's avant-garde community in the 1950s and 1960s, while rendering
her own life with intimacy and grace. Born in Brooklyn in the mid-1930s,
she remembers her Italian immigrant grandmother with great affection.
But she describes frightening incidents from her earliest childhood:
her father, a sullen, brooding, man, once beat her until her nose
bled; her relationship with her mother was equally abusive. In elementary
school, di Prima was bullied relentlessly; it was not until she entered
Hunter High School for gifted students that she found a circle of
friends; there, reading the great poets, she resolved to become a
poet herself. Leaving Swarthmore College after what she perceived
as unproductive years, di Prima returned to New York City, and embarked
on an independent life as a writer. She describes her bohemian lifestyle
love affairs with men and women, experiments with drugs with honesty
and wit. Friend to many of the best known figures of the beat world,
including Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde and LeRoi Jones, di Prima found
fulfillment in her work as an editor and poet, and as a single mother.
She tells her story well, skillfully interweaving events with lyrical
commentary on her inner life.
Pieces
of a Song : Selected Poems
by Diane Di Prima
These poems are bohemian and contemporary. They're forlorn in a controlled
way, romantic but smirking, and strong willed. DiPrima truly outdid
herself penning every word.
LAWRENCE
FERLINGHETTI
1919-
City
Lights Books
"All I ever wanted was to paint light on the walls
of life." Ferlinghetti
Pictures
of the Gone World
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Published to celebrate forty years of City Lights publishing, which
began with the letterpress printing of this book in 1955.
It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book, and it has been reprinted
twenty-one times, having never been out of print. The original edition
contained the first twenty-seven poems to which the author has now
added eighteen new verses.
The
Beat Generation in San Francisco :
A Literary Tour by Bill Morgan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Editor)
"A blow-by-blow unearthing of the places where the Beat writers
first came to full bloom: the flat where Ginsberg wrote "Howl;"
Gary Snyder's zen cottage in Berkeley; the ghostly railroad yards
where Kerouac and -Cassady toiled; the pads where Jack & Neal
& Carolyn lived; Ferlinghetti's favorite haunts. This meticulous
guide also brings to light never-before-heard stories about Corso,
Bob Kaufman, DiPrima, Kyger, Lamantia and other West Coast Beats.
A entertaining read as well as a practical walking (and driving) tour
that covers the entire Bay Area. With an introduction by Lawrence
Ferlinghetti." (Amazon Review)
A
Coney Island of the Mind: Poems
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There is terrific erudition under the surface of these delicate, yet
mesmerizing poems. Erudition, of course, is never enough (indeed,
is often the unwitting enemy of innocence and truth), and Ferlinghetti,
full of the smarts, never sells us short. He is a deeply intelligent
and provocative poet, in my view surpassing Ginsberg in flashes -
I Am Waiting is up with Whitman - and rewarding for all readers in
that his hipness is never obtrusive or sham. These poems are resolutely
of an era - their rhythms are San Francisco and underground New York
of the fifties - but therein is their great worth. We might view a
poem as a flower: a burst of beauty in the world. Ferlinghetti has
the rare skill of showing us the bloom and the root.
This is largely a verbal collage, a compendium of memories, impressions,
chants, lists, and lyric fragments. The influence of Whitman is apparent
in the freeform meditations on the human body and the populist tone
of much of the book. This is a cry for people to throw off the constraints
of materialism and return to a simpler way of living. It exalts the
earth over industry, art over commerce, individualism over uniformity.
In other places the shadows of Eliot and Yeats can be seen.
These
Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Combining a Whitmanesque celebration of the earthy with a nod
to the surrealist tradition, Ferlinghetti (Wild Dreams of a New Beginning)
blasted his way into public consciousness with the 1958 publication
of A Coney Island of the Mind, marking him as one of the Beat poets,
though his more refined poetic sensibility showed just how different
he was from what "Beat" came to mean. This compendium of
work from throughout his career, including 27 new poems, reveals an
ongoing interest in matters political and sexual. Unlike Ginsberg,
whose Collected Poems showed an artist struggling with decline and
decay, Ferlinghetti seems to maintain his calm in the face of age;
"The Rebels," from a 1984 collection, shows a remarkable
stylistic similarity to his famous 1958 "Constantly Risking Absurdity."
But where the latter poem borders on a now-cloying self-consciousness,
the former shows a subtle reflectiveness in the face of nature, as
well as a recognition of his connection with readers. Regardless,
it's exciting to revisit in one volume work like "I Am Waiting,"
"An Elegy on the Death of Kenneth Patchen" and "Endless
Life" in this collection by one of America's most popular poets."
How
to Paint Sunlight: New Poems
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is one of the best and widely read of America's
20th century poets, who has been awarded numerous citations, awards,
and recognitions for his work. How To Paint Sunlight: New Poems showcases
for his legions of fans a new compendium of his work that demonstrates
and documents a true literary master. Moored: A boat moored/In the
deep shade/under a weeping willow/in the bend of a river//As the light
fades/so does the boat/with its willow/with its river//Only memory
remains/of the lovers/in the bottom of the boat/moored to each other//They
too/Gone on.
JACK
KEROUAC
1922-1969
Kerouac
Website
On
The Road
by Jack Kerouac.
Another bible and a place to start.
"This book makes you love life, it is extremely entertaining,
uplifting, optimistic, and intellectually and poetically full of analyzation.
Jack Keurouac approaches life in a very strange, yet free way and
on the road gives us an almost first hand experience of it. On the
Road is extremely inspirational, and will make almost anybody want
to grab a few bucks and experience the world. " (Amazon Review)
Dharma
Bums
by Jack Kerouac.
We almost called our company 'Dharma Bums' instead of 60s & Further.
"Jack Kerouac and his friends were a part of a group of individuals
who were known in the early 1950's as "The Beat Generation."
They were the precursors of the hippies of the 1960s. As expounded
in Kerouac's wonderfully expressive and liberating book, the beats
loved to write and to recite poetry, drink wine, laze around, hike
and camp in the woods, sleep under the stars with their rucksacks
nearby, and go rock climbing. Many of the beats road the rails (as
celebrated by Woody Guthrie in the 1930's) or would hitchhike to get
to their destinations. Ray Smith, the hero and narrator of _Dharma
Bums_, does all of these things; he even criss-crosses the country
by thumbing rides. Like many of his comrades Ray is a practicing Buddhist.
He integrates Buddhism and meditation into all aspects of his life,
whether in his relationships with people or in seeking a oneness with
nature. Ray shares in many of these activities with his best friend,
Japhy, who recommends to Ray that he seek a summer job as looker (preventer
of forest fires) with the U.S. Forest Service. Following Japhy's advice,
Ray finds work at Desolation Peak in the Great Pacific Northwest.
It is there that Ray, tasting of the elemental forces of nature, recognizes
that "The vision of the freedom of eternity was mine forever."
Like Ray's unique experience, _Dharma Bums_ is a revelation. "
(Amazon Review)
Big
Sur
by Jack Kerouac
"Big Sur seems to serve as his answer to all of those who were
too quick to automatically idealize the vision he put forth in On
the Road. Its a book that everyone who claims to be imitating Kerouac's
popular image should read. There was a lot more to Jack Kerouac's
talent than just the media hype surrounding the so-called Beat Generation
and Kerouac deserves better than to be remembered for only one (admitedly
wonderful) book. Big Sur is one of the greatest American novels of
the 20th Century and remains Jack Kerouac's most vibrant literary
legacy. Unfortunately, he destroyed himself to create it." (Amazon
Review)
Kerouac
: A Biography
by Allen Ginsberg (Foreword), Ann Charters
"It is about men and ideas that changed everything. That's reason
enough to read it."--The New York Times
"This biography becomes almost a novel in itself. The darkly
intense, handsome young man, the gypsy wanderer, hero and prophet
to everyone but himself...Written with a beautiful combination of
toughness and love, of daring insight and honesty, it is a worthy
monument to a troubled man."--The Los Angeles Times
"Behind the 'crazy rebel' of the novels who inspired a whole
generation to go hitchhiking across America in search of 'the myth
of the rainy night' lay a life of insecurity and wretched loneliness...a
duality perceptively illustrated by Ann Charters in her lucid, well-researched
biography."
Conversations
With Jack Kerouac
by Kevin J. Hayes (Editor)
There are few writers about whom it can be said that they write just
like they speak, but Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) is clearly one
of them. In 1957, Kerouac was a struggling writer trying to create
a new literary aesthetic based on the rhythms of human speech, jazz-based
improvisation, autobiography, and American slang. That year saw the
publication of his second novel "On the Road", which would
instantly propel him to fame and ensconce him in the literary establishment.
By 1969, he was dead of internal hemorrhaging brought on by excessive
drinking. Though his literary reputation may have faded, the revolutionary
zeal of his novels and the originality of his voice ensure that his
books are continually popular. Whether because of his literary merits
or his status as the voice of a new generation of writers, Kerouac
is the unchallenged king of the Beat generation.
Empty
Phantoms : Collected Interviews with Jack Kerouac
by Paul Maher
Empty Phantoms gathers together, for the first time in one volume,
the best of printed, recorded, and filmed interviews -- including
those celebrated, infamous, or obscure -- with the acclaimed American
writer and father of the Beats Jack Kerouac.
Editor Paul Maher, one of the leading young lions of Kerouac scholarship,
has scoured newspapers to glean interviews unseen for decades. Although
many top-notch journalists, from Mike Wallace to William F. Buckley,
conducted the interviews, it is Kerouac who dominates the proceedings,
with his energy, wit, passion, anger, astute insights, playfulness,
literary integrity, and searching spirituality. Best of all, the interviews
are replete with Kerouacisms ("Walking on water wasn't built
in a day," "Wisdom is heartless," "Pity dogs and
forgive men,") that have been a cherished aspect of his literature.
Nowhere else is such a living portrait of Kerouac available beyond
his own works.
Subterraneans
by Jack Kerouac
The book is written in long stringy sentences to imitate the "bop"
improvisatory style of jazz riffs. I was put of by the style when
I began the book but came away concluding it fit the subject matter.
The apparent spontaneity and the sincerity of the narrative move the
story along.
The book describes well the American hipster of the 1950s. It is ultimately
a story of the need for love and the difficulty of commitment. It
is a sad story and I think in the emphasis on the wildness of Bohemia
can easily be misunderstood. Kerouac may have been somewhat wiser
as a writer than he was as a man. He was able to take his inability
to form a lasting relationship with a woman and describe it. He turned
his experiences and personal difficulties into a poignant and lasting
novel. Art in Kerouac as in so many writers becomes a way of understanding
and transcending one's life.
Desolation
Angels
by Jack Kerouac
here are usually two types of Kerouac readers. There are the "On
the Roaders", as I call them. The ones that enjoy his style,
his way of placing his friend's lives into the context of their own
troubles, their loneliness their love-- all the while with a literary
pace likened to a old pickup speeding across the straightaways of
the vacant Montana backroads. And then there are the others, who like
the former, enjoy the style-- but they also look for the sadness in
Kerouac's writing. His ability to deconstruct people with one look
(in Des. Angels he watches a waitress in a bar and tells her entire
life story in snapshot events that underlie the sad look in her eyes),
to find the hidden sentiments in people's actions- whether he's right
or wrong we really don't care.
Desolation Angels is the book for the second group of people. It is
tortuous at times- like his solitude atop the mountain staring Hozomeen
in the face every morning which reveals Kerouac's own struggle to
deal with himself and his past. But I believe among all of his novels
it is the most rewarding. The book takes us to all of his major haunts-
London, New York, San Fran, Paris, the Mediterranean- with many of
his closest friends - Neal, Allen, Williams S. Burroughs, Joyce. There's
even a small part where Kerouac is face to face with Salvidore Dali.
The Windblown World: The Journals Of
Jack Kerouac 1947-1954
by Jack Kerouac, Douglas Brinkley (Introduction)
Much of the book is devoted to issues of writing–character, plot,
style–and a daily obsession with word count that any writer will
appreciate. Discussions of favorite authors like Céline, Twain,
and Dostoyevsky highlight some influences, and Kerouac shows his early
iconoclastic tendencies through an almost rampant hatred of academics
and the literary establishment. Anecdotes about partying with Allen
Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs, the New York jazz world, and finding
a girlfriend are peppered throughout. The final section is devoted
to the cross-country trip made with Neal Cassady and others that inspired
On the Road. These narratives of the landscapes of the U.S. and Mexico
are hauntingly beautiful and contain hints of the quasi-spontaneous
style that made both Kerouac and the Beat movement so different and
so popular. The introduction, notations, and index are invaluable
to those less familiar with the time period or Kerouac's life. But
the real charm of this title is in his words; seeing this young, brilliant
author develop and continually push himself toward greatness is gripping
and astonishing. The reality of Kerouac proves far more moving and
interesting than the bad-boy image.
|
|
|
Neal
Cassady-'On The Bus'-1967
|
NEAL
CASSADY
1926-1968
More
Neal Cassady
The
First Third & Other Writings
by Neal Cassady
"This book starts with Cassady's autobiography of his childhood
years, and a brief history of his ancestors. While the prologue was
interesting, because of where Neal came from, it wasn't as exciting
as the actual text of the first third, which was excellent! It was
written in a style very much similar to Kerouac. I only wish he had
completed the manuscript. following the first third is a selection
of NC's unfinished writings. Next follow a few of Neal's letters to
Kerouac, which are a great insight to the mind of one of the central
figures of the beats (in fact, one of the letters discussed an incident
that i recognize from on the road). The final selection is a letter
to Ken Kesey.
Collected
Letters, 1944-1967
by Neal Cassady, Dave Moore (Editor), Carolyn Cassady (Introduction)
Neal Cassady--that happening, hard-living, hard-loving hero of the
Beat culture is fully here--in his own words. Cassady was part raw
sexuality, part inspiration for Kerouac and Ginsberg, part arrogant
con man, and part insecure, indecisive drifter. The only thing we
can be sure of is that Cassady possessed some major charisma. Women
bore his children and his absences and not only coped with but even
approved of his interchangeable partner approach. Men fell in love
with him, too, whether sexually or in pure awe. Cassady's letters
show this and more, revealing a sometimes manic yet incredibly insightful
and electric mind and a man so charged with emotion for life and open
to his urges that he seemed unable to settle anywhere (including within
his various selves) for very long. Well edited and annotated, this
volume is an essential addition to Beat literature that strengthens
the notion of Cassady as a major Beat figure and, more important,
presents Cassady as a man, not an icon.
Holy
Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady
by William Plummer
Criminal ... Saint ... Lunatic ... Genius ... Muse .... Once described
by Jack Kerouac as "more like Dostoevsky than anyone I know,"
Neal Cassady lived what others could only write about. Serving as
the model for Kerouac's frenetic hero, the hip, Noble Savage Dean
Moriarty in On the Road, and "N.C., the secret hero" of
Allen Ginsberg's provocative poem "Howl," Cassady was a
genius of life lived on the edge of the abyss. Now, William Plummer
strips away the mystery surrounding this enigmatic figure. Plummer
brings Cassady to life: his coming of age in a Denver flophouse, his
hustling across America, the car thefts that landed him in jail, his
meeting with Kerouac and their mad-cap cross-country adventures, his
experiments with sex and drugs, his second marriage to Carolyn Cassady,
his teaming with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on an epochal
acid trip, and finally his bizarre death. Black-and-white photographs
add to this engrossing biography of an outrageous but fascinating
life.
Please
continue on to
Beat
Generation Bookstore 2
Allen
Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gregory Corso, William Carlos Williams,
Henry Miller, Anais Nin, William Burroughs
Beat
Generation Bookstore 3
Ken
Kesey, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan,
Bob Dylan, Richard Farina, and Joan Baez
Ram
Dass, Alan Watts , Gary Snyder and Timothy Leary
Bookstore
Lobby
