The Beats and their writings

[hopeingod]

Has anyone ever taken a deep dive into the writings of Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and others of the Beat Generation, either from their days in the US or while most of them, except Kerouac, were living in a bohemian Beat Hotel in Paris?

That's where Burroughs was told by Brian Gysin about the "cutting technique", an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text. Gysin's book Minutes to God was made this way from his original cut-up experiment, unedited and unchanged.

I read Kerouac's On the Road and Dharma Bums in the early 80s, and related a good bit to the lifestyle. I was fairly free in my twenties -- not a freeloader, just free. I travelled when and where I felt like it across the US which opened me up to the notion of bohemian living, but I never came upon any writers and artists living among one another.

I wish I had; maybe then I wouldn't have spent so much wasted time hanging out with religious types who were much less creative and freethinking. Followers, all the way, we were, at the expense of becoming what we later called being "so heavenly minded that we were no earthly good." With our eyes in the sky, we still remained broke and suffered health issues for which there were no free clinics or handouts.

If they asked me, I could write a book....

[David Dawson]

They are a bit of a gap in my knowledge, a slightly incongruous one given my partisanship for post-1945 US novels. But other than having read On the Road (albeit as a teenager) and a basic familiarity with Howl I'm shamefully ignorant. Although Patti Smith's Just Kids is a wonderful autobiography, in which Ginsberg at least features.

[hopeingod]

The film documentaries that have been made, such as "Beat Hotel," were eyeopening, although I have heard differing accounts as to the tidiness of the joint. Some say that the tenants (handpicked by the owner) were allowed to be as messy as they wanted while others say there was a kind of rule about picking up after yourself.

The off-any-traditional-kind-of-thinking path, I cannot relate to, since I am so much a realist. I will write what is there, not what seems to be; but then, there might be where the story is, within the imagination or drug influenced mentality. Hashish was said to have been the predominant smell of the place, and the bathroom facilities were atrocious. Nothing but a hole on the floor with two ceramic tiles stationed to the front sides to indicate where one's feet were to be placed. Seldom was there any toilet paper, I understand. So, it was a bit of a hovel in truth.

Plus, the tenants were a bit crazy all in their own ways, yet intellectual. Go figure. Maybe that is what has to be to become a beat or one Lost.

-- 02 Jun 2014, 15:55 --

[ladybug31]

If you can, find the Portable Beat Reader. It has selections from all the greats and some of the people that hung out on the fringes of the greats, and every section has a mini-biography at the beginning. It's a great companion to the other books. I've read most of Kerouac's books, along with Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe. By far, the best ones that encompassed the whole feeling of the era were books like Junk/Junky (depends where you find it. I think Junk was the original title but Burroughs changed it on the suggestion of his editors) and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I love how that whole group thought and the freedom that they had.

[the biblophile]

the beats were ahead of their time. Howl was a work of genius. Bukowski was king in my book.