OT: The Beat Generation

Rusty

Rusty

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When up in Reno Thursday I picked up a copy of the A Buddhist Bible. I found myself reading it's forward by Robert Aitken when suddenly this part jumped out at me:

"I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings. Whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten. For what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everywhere was silence. Suppose that we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this or that at all?"

( Ray, the young Jack Kerouac )

I'd heard of Kerouac, but never read him. Now I have to! Wonder what else I'll suddenly see?

Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to talk with you again...
 
It never happened.
You can't prove it.
If I'd got caught the records would be sealed as a juvenile anyway.
I take the 5th amendment.

ad infinitum. ;)
 
There's a nice collection of Kerouac's Buddhist writings called Some of the Dharma. The Dharma Bums is also a great read.

--Josh
 
I spent years trying to find the perfect K book. I'm not sure he even is a great writer. But I enjoyed the search, and empathized with Jack very much.

I'll always like the image of him after volunteering for a fire watch position in some remote forest. He went up there expecting a summer of meditation and self discovery- within a couple weeks he was so bored he was going out of his mind and he left the position early.

I'll also remember him drunk out of his mind and dying at his mother's house.

His best friend was a guru of sorts to the Grateful Dead, Cassidy. (sic)

I drank a lot of wine to Jack, via Jack, like Jack. None of it meant Jack.

I'm glad he was alive. Sorry he's gone.


munk
 
Nice going, Rusty. Kerouac will emerge as one of the great American writers if we can keep from blowing ourselves up.

I used to live on a street named Dharma Path in Kathmandu and now I just live it.
 
My Kerouac experience was pretty much limited to "On the Road". I felt pretty hip reading it, but I really couldn't identify with his depth of angst or intensity of pain. About halfway through the book, I realized that his characters and their drunken, drugged ways were a kind of people that I had never met and never wanted to.

Sometimes the light shines brightly when you are looking up from the gutter, but I decided to take a different viewpoint and search for my version of The Truth at a higher level.
 
Another aspect of him, well integrated with the rest.

Think haiku, and most Americans who know the poetic form automatically think "17." That's the number of syllables the Japanese masters used to create their brief, scintillating visions of seasonal life. But Americans who know the form a little bit better might also think "Kerouac."

Jack Kerouac, the poet of inordinate prose, was also a master of haiku, and a master, as always, at deformalizing the formalities of any genre. "Haiku, shmaiku," Kerouac wrote, in a verse that ended, "I can't/understand the intention/of reality." He called haiku "pops," which he defined as "short 3-line pomes." In Kerouac's haiku, now gathered in "Book of Haikus," edited by Regina Weinreich, 17 vanishes as a requirement.

To read these poems is to hear how raucously Kerouac reinvents the genre. Haiku is a poetry of exclusion. Just think, after all, of everything that can't be said in three short lines. And yet Kerouac turns his pops into strange miracles of inclusion. Consider this one: "Two Japanese boys/singing/Inky Dinky Parly Voo." His notion of seasonal allusion — a property of classical haiku — is as broad as his eye is wide. This is how summer arrives: "Beautiful young girls running/up the library steps/with shorts on." His haiku remain fundamentally American. "The windmills/of Oklahoma look/in every direction."

Most of us tend to think of Kerouac as the scroll-making, self-scripting author of "On the Road," a writer who is the soul of effusion. But his haiku are the molecules out of which those effusions are made. Kerouac reminds us how hard this form really is. Only a couple of dozen of the hundreds of haiku in this collection really work. But those poems take us by surprise. "Bird suddenly quiet/on his branch — his/Wife glancing at him." Some catch the authentic Japanese accent: "Useless! Useless!/ — heavy rain driving/into the sea." And some sound like the wise man on the block just muttering his thoughts: "Spring is coming/Yep, all that equipment/for sighs." They sound so easy, so direct. But just try making one. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Click to expand...
 
I'll have what he's having.;)

I'll tak the poetic challenge of the drafter of that article:

"This piece hints at the fanatical following of a guy who never meant himself to be followed (like many wise men and prophets b4 him)"

Kerouak's cads/seasonal scads/jeaned and jackbooted scalawags.

"This next one illustrates the writer's uncanny ability to revel in the summer months, and toil in the winter. Note the reversal of agrarian/urban roles."

bad weather, worker/good weather, shirker


:D:D:D

Keith
 
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