-Paul Simon-

Michael Shaw linked to this image 6 hours ago tweeting, “When you hear that MJ, like an angel, literally permeates the air in LA…the banners are the least of it.” Yes, Amen! And wasn’t this what Paul Simon was getting at with “You Can Call Me Al”? Angels in the architecture of the city of angels.

I’d mostly stayed away from any media coverage of Michael Jackson, hearing about his untimely death while visiting friends in Copenhagen. Danish TV 2 news has been running virtually uninterrupted “news coverage,” not even picking up the Sara Palin stories which momentarily competed for attention in the US market. But last night the wife and I saw most of the Hollywood memorial spectacle. I prefer just listening to his music, particularly tracks off of Thriller, one of the first albums I ever bought. But last night, another song came to mind, one which I hadn’t seen at all referenced by media, family and politicians contesting the right to position the meaning of Michael Jackson’s public memory.

While simultaneously half watching the Staples Center Show and surfing You Tube last night I tweeted, “Media et al. devoured MJ to the end. Most appropriate would have been a Thriller from that casket performance of Scream.”

I’m plannin’ on playin’ Palin next.

Photo: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press/ NYT via Twitter.

Michael Bérubé of Crooked Timber talks about the state of the Humanities, its utility and futility, using an essay by Mark Deresiewicz as his starting point. Drawing on the recent fad for Darwinistic literary criticsm (literature and criticism in an evolutionary context) Deresiewicz mentions the fear of going back to humanistic stereotypes such as impressionistic readings and belletristic writing. Now there’s a word: belletristic. The word refers to the appreciation of writing for its aesthetic qualities rather than for its informative or active content. But belletristic is itself a beautiful word. Much like dyslexic. Yeah. Ask a dyslexic to write that one. Bérubé has some really valid points here though.

The Guardian has an interesting little piece featuring the top 10 most famous ménage a trois in literature. If nothing else, it’s a little funny.

And finally, Associated Press announces that Dick Cheney has signed a book deal. The book is due in the spring of 2011. This should be interesting. Story from the Boston Herald.

Note how the above sentence opens with a conjunction. That’s not belletristic writing. I love that word.

To what degree should a reviewer emerge himself in the material he is reviewing? Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber wonders whether a reviewer should be allowed to review a book he hasn’t read? What if he is really, really sure what the book is going to be like? He winds up reviewing the book as an experiment, arguing that, no matter what, he is going at it with more background knowledge of the author than any potential reviewers, and he also suspects that who-ever ends up reviewing the book will probably not read all of it anyway. This is an interesting notion; I am to review a book for the August edition of a Danish women’s magazine. I have read the original book, but I’m reviewing the book in relation to the new edition. Since the review is rather short (and no one else will have read or are going to read the book), is it okay for me to just read the new preface in preparation for the review? Hmm.

3quarksdaily links to the Boston Globe for a story on how scientists, after years of studying the effects of religion on human health are now turning to the study if the non-religious. The findings are comforting (atheist here): just as religion on the overall seems to make you healthy, so do non-religious people seem to have sound minds and bodies. What I’m wondering then is, how are the agnostics doing?  3quarksdaily also has an item up on the food of Rome. It’s not really relevant here, but it is well written, knowledgeable, and it sounds delicious.

Mark Ford at the New York Times talks about the poetry critic William Logan (no relation) and his savage reviews/attacks on contemporary poetry. Logan’s Our Savage Art is the latest installment in a series of books commenting on the state of American poetry, and sounds like an entertaining read. Admittedly, I’m not that big on poetry, but someone talking about poetry can be funny.

Bo Tao Michäelis reviews the Danish translation of Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog (Danish: I Hundenes Vold) for Politiken, and writes: “We may have seen these infernal borderlands before, with piles of drug money, dirty drug-dealers and merciless mass murder, as told by James Crumley and Cormac McCarthy, but never as intensely political or indignantly provocative as this.” I haven’t read The Power of the Dog, but I am now thinking that I might pick it up sometime, though I doubt it can rival the power of McCarthy.

My interest in her work is quite recent, so I am definitely not an expert on her poetry or scholarly practice yet, but I am currently reading as much as I can of her and on her work. The whole thing started, as it often does, with three apparently unrelated incidents.

First off, the launch of the excellent journal on poetry, Studio - which featured Meena Alexander in their very first issue. They reprint a lot of good selections from her 2004 collection, Raw Silk, as well as supplementary material in the form of a very rich talk on those poems and their writing which Alexander gave at Shippensberg U., and later at Dartmouth – titled “Fragile Places: A Poet’s Notebook”.

Second, I was asked to be the external examiner for a superb MA-thesis on Indian, transnational poetry in English. The student had done a beautiful job in presenting his findings, had a good grasp of theory and of close reading, so we of course gave him the top grade available. One of his subjects was the poetry of Meena Alexander, which he read as an example of what Homi Bhabha calls unhomely texts.

Third (and according to Freud, the uncanny part of repetition is when things repeat themselves not once, but twice), I received a call for papers from a friend of mine who regularly puts on great conferences with themes such as ‘Chaos and Order’, or ‘Pluralities of Interpretation’. This time Daniel in Reims wanted papers on what he proposed to call the ‘Cultural Kernel’, asking/stating provocatively: “The question is: how can we determine when our understanding of a literary work stops? There always seems to be a gap that cannot be bridged, a kernel that will always resist us.” For me it seemed a short leap to start thinking of Alexander as a producer of texts that ought to, for me at least, have a number of culturally specific elements that might be investigated as ‘kernels’ resisting interpretation. Thus, I was all set to propose a paper on her work, and I was accepted and in fact presented my work last week in France…

Even a cursory glance at Alexander’s bio will peak your interest in her: She was born in Allahabad in 1951 to Syrian Christian parents, raised in the Sudan, educated in English-speaking contexts there (BA in English and French from Khartoum University) and in Nottingham, England (PhD in English), returned to India for a number of years, married another Indian academic, and is now residing in the USA, where she is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and CUNY in NYC. Her linguistic history is, if possible even more fascinating: Mother tongue: Malayalam, with a knowledge of Hindi on the side – in Khartoum, exposure to Arabic and French – after return to India, exposure to other Indian languages – throughout a tendency to exploit English as lingua franca, but not stopping at that: developing an acute poetic ability in that language too…

I knew that in Alexander I had found a subject that was extremely different from my own background as a male, white, European academic and that, given my reading protocol with its foundation in those identity positions and difference discourses, I might well hit a few interpretative bumps in my reading of her texts. As it turned out I was to be positively surprised…

Alexander is a very political individual and poet. Her work speaks out for the weak and marginal groups and individuals. She is also extremely conscious of her native country’s troubled history and political conflicts. Raw Silk is written in the aftermath of the violence of two Septembers: Her adopted country, the USA’s 9/11 trauma, and her native province, Gujarat’s ethnic unrest in September 2002. The result is erudite, compassionate poetry about the effect of violence on victims and poets alike, and the poems weave an intricate intertextual web with precursor poets, politicians and philosophers from India: Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel Laureate, 1913), Mahatma Ghandi, and Sankara, the 8th C. Vedantic philosopher and religious teacher…

The poem I mainly analyze is “Fragile Places” which closes the Raw Silk collection. I cannot share my entire paper with you before its eventual publication, but here is an excerpt from the analytical part, where I endeavour to give a ‘classically founded interpretation’ of this particular poem and the collection as a whole:

The key poem in the collection is “Fragile Places”, which is set partly in Gujarat where Mahatma Gandhi lived and partly in Kerala where the 8th century Vedantic philosopher Sankara was born. These two figures, both associated with intense religious and pacifist feelings and ideas, function to structure the poem. Sankara, whose desire was to revitalize Hinduism and point to the identity between self and the whole, figured as the highest (and ultimately only) deity Brahman, is addressed at the poem’s beginning and end, so that the poet speaker’s desire to hear the words of Sankara comes to frame the whole poem. The effect is heightened by the use of a quote by Sankara, “The world is a forest on fire,” as the poem’s motto. The reading protocol an experienced reader of poetry will invoke here is to expect that the motto will set the tone of the poem, as is quickly borne out by the poem’s insistence on violent images involving fire, culminating with the references to the burning child in the second to last group of couplets. Similarly the custom of addressing an absent interlocutor, akin to invoking a distant deity will be familiar from much Romantic poetry and the whole set of conventions concerning the ode. Therefore one experiences little difficulty in encountering the beginning exhortations of the poet speaker addressed to Sankara, pleading for shelter, refuge, protection: “carry me through the house of silt/ the low slung bone,/ wind me in raw silk” – and ultimately insight: “Who dares to burn/ with the stamp of love?/ Words glimmer/ then the slow/ march to sentences./ Sankara speak to me.”The role of Gandhi in the poem is less clear as he is not referred to explicitly. Only the place of the poem’s setting indicates his role in the poem and the culturally competent reader will associate the location of Gandhi’s ashram in Gujarat with the site of the ethnic unrest the poem describes. The ashram would historically be just such a place of refuge as the poet speaker calls for, but in other poems in the collection with the give-away title “Letters to Gandhi”, the nation’s father is gently chastised for not having influenced his inheritors sufficiently, and the shame of his old ashram barring the doors for Muslims seeking shelter from violence, rape and murder is pointed out. Gandhi’s grandson is also mentioned in the notes to these poems, as well as in Alexander’s talk on the poems.

Yet another figure ghosts the poem “Fragile Places”, this time through a more conventional intertextuality, as his poetry is quoted in the Alexander poem. This figure is Rabindranath Tagore, the 1913 Nobel Laureate, who is remembered and revered in India along the same lines as the philosopher and the politician discussed above. The biography of Tagore at the Nobel Prize Organization’s website emphasizes some similarities between Sankara and Tagore’s origins, mentioning his father’s sect which “attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads.” It is well-known that Tagore and Gandhi were close friends, and we thus have a closely linked trinity of men from the past history of India, all representing similar ideals of unity, peace and non-sectarian beliefs, all present in the poem. The quote from Tagore is: “I lay with you at the water’s edge/ a red rose blossomed in my breast.” The complex symbol of the red rose blossoming is decodable as feelings of erotic love (“I lay with you”), or as agape (love for one’s fellow man), or as the blood of the heart running out of a dying man’s body after a stabbing or shooting, or as yet another image of the fires that otherwise crowd the poem. These readings are all fairly conventional, and intertextual precursors including at least Dante, Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot could be invoked here. Again, while the symbol cannot be decoded in an entirely unitary way, the gap presented by the text is not unbridgeable – rather there are almost too many bridges crossing this particular gap, which then hardly constitutes an uncrackable kernel.

If one now turns to the presence of difference discourses in the poem, one is surely not disappointed, nor particularly surprised to find an implicit dichotomy between the three great men, who are ultimately all portrayed as powerless to influence the course of history in a non-violent direction (the two Septembers’ violence was perpetrated regardless of their lasting presence on Indian soil, and Tagore’s words displayed on giant posters in Kolkata have little effect), and the female poet speaker and her references to her matriarchal lineage back to her grandmother whose house the speaker inherits (grandmother’s birthplace is the same as Sankara’s). Another important figure in the poem is the woman who responds to the burning of the child by stopping in her washing of the rice in her kitchen and turning to write instead. This mirror image of the poet is more of an insider to the region, and her donning the writer’s mantle is a sign of hope and her inscriptions a guarantee of the lasting memory of the events: “Words glimmer/ then the slow/ march to sentences.” It is therefore clear that we have a case of the gender difference discourse playing out in a form of reversal in Alexander’s poem. Nothing new or challenging here.

Likewise her figuration of the transnational self is a variation over the in-group/out-group dichotomy that is typical of the national difference discourse. The poet speaker has a foot in each camp: she is rooted in India, yet has left the country only to return and mourn its state. Her presence is problematized as not entirely authentic. While she claims: “I have come to ground/ in my own country,/ by the Pamba’s edge” and her grandmother’s house is her inheritance, there is still a doubt spurred on by her role as an interloper. The poem’s words on identity illustrate this dilemma: “Unable to reconcile those that are scattered/ with those bound in fragile places/ we turn to where alms/ are collected for the poor,/ identity pulled apart/ on the tongs of war.” Scattered, yet bound as the migrant figures are, it is the unpleasant tool of war that creates the identity split in the poet speaker’s tenuous ‘we’.

As you can begin to see, I was not finding the uncrackable cultural kernels I had been expecting in Meena Alexander’s work. I read her memoirs, Fault Lines, where she reflects on her multicultural background, tells stories of her grandparents whose house she has inhereted, and who received Ghandi as a visitor. I read her poetry and reflections in The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience where her academic analysis enriches her poetic practice. I read more of her poems, including her most recent collection, Quickly Changing River, from 2008. I still feel that I understand her very well…

I look at some of the many good resources online for Alexander: This interview, this overview of her work, another blog interview, Ruth Maxey’s Kenyon Review interview… All this reading adds more to my understanding of her.

At the conference my colleagues did not disagree with my interpretation of her poem, nor with my observation that her knowledge of and mastery of Western poetry in all its forms, conventions and intertextualities helped us all to engage with her work. On the question of how I felt as a white, male, not-quite-dead European after having interpreted her work so ‘fully’, I had to answer that such an experience inevitably makes you feel like God in some ‘omnipotent’ way. Of course, in that context, we must always remember that God is a black, lesbian woman….

Representations of the racial Other in the Beat ‘canon’ also are problematic. Kerouac notoriously idolized the racial Other as a Fellaheen primitive, who was more in touch with the land and with the immediacy of human needs and urges, and whose creativity was somehow primordial, and usually pre-linguistic. Thus the great jazz-men of On the Road blow tremendously, but rarely speak – in fact it is their animalistic qualities that are always singled out as their distinguishing marks. The most acute analysis of this figuration of the racial other as the sociopathic, orgasm-directed figure, prowling the subconscious of white disaffected youths, of course remains Norman Mailer’s influential essay “The White Negro” which can now be read on-line at Dissent Magazine‘s website. I recommend that one also reads Frantz Fanon as a counterpoint to Mailer’s discourse to get a perspective on what it feels like to wear a white mask over black skin…

Of all the fellow travellers with the Beat Generation group, the one African-American writer of distinction is Amiri Baraka. Most of the other black figures associated with the Beat phenomenon are relegated to supporting or minor roles as ‘inspiration’, or at best ‘forerunners’. Such figures as the hipsters with the ability to talk ‘the jive’, or the be-bop musicians with their improvisatory skills – almost exclusively black – were major influences on Kerouac’s aesthetic ideals, and with him put their stamp on the diction and tonality of much Beat writing. Some would argue that both hipsters and jazz-men were performers, and that the public and theatrical element of the Beat writing and life-style comes straight from there. The history of the 1940s hipster subculture is not yet something I have personally researched, but the current Wikipedia entry on the subject seems above average for the site, so it may safely be consulted…

Obviously, African-American culture has its own, much deeper roots, and Baraka has always kept a consciousness of this multifaceted heritage at the forefront of his literary and political practice. His participation in the Black Arts Movement from the late 50s onward, including setting up the Harlem based theatre company The Black Arts Repertory Theatre, is a case in point. The link above will take you to one of several resources on the history of the movement, and this is another. Baraka’s several political and aesthetic mutations are detailed quite comprehensively in the Literary Kicks’ web-page on Baraka. His activities with his publishing house, Totem Press, from 1958 onwards were significant to the Beats, but more so his journal Yugen, and later the newsletter The Floating Bear, which he edited together with Diane di Prima. This site reproduces a bunch of issues of the Bear. As Jed Birmingham points out: “It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn.”

Several sites are dedicated to the work and thinking of Baraka: Poetry.org from The Academy of American Poets has a comprehensive page w. bibliography, and a direct link to Amazon.com for the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader and other Baraka titles.

The Modern American Poetry site, as always, features selected excerpts from critical works on individual Baraka texts, as well as some resources situating him in literary and cultural history.

A Finnish site on Books and Writers has a capsule personal biography plus bibliographies of Baraka’s work and selected criticism.

The best portal for Baraka resources, however, remains his own web site, which features a gallery of photos, a short bio, links to and covers from selected books, and – most valuably – links to a wealth of on-line Baraka texts and critical resources.

Of the many YouTube clips available I recommend the following three:

A brief soundbite on the link between performance poetry, rap, and street poetry…

Here is a longish interview from the Blackademics.org site, featuring both Amiri and his second wife Amina Baraka. Note how Amiri liked to hold his head and shake it a bit when he is asked a question that perhaps he finds a bit naive (all of them). Pay particular heed to what he thinks the price is for not being a revolutionary poet…

Finally, my favourite clip is Baraka in performance from 2007. He treats us to what he calls Lowkus, a bawdy form that shouts back in a trickster vein, but very politically so, at the sometimes pale aestheticism of the Haiku. So Lowku, which also puns on ‘loco’, the Spanish word for crazy, and also hints at the whole locomotion Baraka would like to get started against, say Bush, is a wholly original performance genre… Enjoy Baraka scatting and riffing (this is Bud Powell, he tells us) in between the little slogans and joking digs his lyrics consist of…Baraka has perhaps never been so intensely scrutinised in the public eye as after the poem he wrote about the 9/11 events – a poem that cost him his post as Poet Laureate of New Jersey, and generally has been very controversial. Why don’t you read it for yourselves and judge?Somebody Blew Up America

The immediate answer is that of course there were some, but none who have gained as much interest (neither publicly, nor academically) as the big four (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Snyder), nor even as much as the next echelon of writers, which would count Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and perhaps Whalen, Lamantia and Welch (all male). Nor are the main non-writing Beat culture heroes female or black: Cassady, Huncke, Carr – you name ‘em – white males…

Thus the sharp irony with which Joyce Johnson titles her memoir of life as a female member of the Beat circle, Minor Characters, is terribly apt. In fact, this irony of marking alterity, simultaneously with hedged belonging, runs through several of the titles which the Beat women who have published about their own lives, as well as the lives of their famous men or fathers, have chosen: Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road and Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver both play off Kerouac’s On the Road title and road persona. Two other Beat women’s memoirs tell stories of identity crises and formation: Hettie Cohen Jones’ How I Became Hettie Jones, and Bonnie Bremser’s Troia: Mexican Memoirs (apparently Troia is a Mexican slang term for prostitute) both deal with the sometimes shocking sacrifices these wives made for their husbands, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Roy Bremser, respectively…

However, I have chosen to focus today’s blog on two figures who are both excellent poets and have stood up for their identities without subordination and apology. Diane di Prima is a fine, bold poet who has commented on sexual identity and gender inequality through her work (sometimes in a direct writing back to more established male figures), and Amiri Baraka has long since transcended his initial affiliation with the Beats and with his insistence on Black roots and belongings has contributed greatly to political art in the US for at least the last 50 years.

Before discussing these two figures, I do want to point out that the representations of the sexual and racial Other in the Beat ‘canon’ also are problematic. Kerouac notoriously idolized the racial Other as a Fellaheen primitive, who was more in touch with the land and with the immediacy of human needs and urges, and whose creativity was somehow primordial, and usually pre-linguistic. Thus the great jazz-men of On the Road blow tremendously, but rarely speak – in fact it is their animalistic qualities that are always singled out as their distinguishing marks. The most acute analysis of this figuration of the racial other as the sociopathic, orgasm-directed figure, prowling the subconscious of white disaffected youths, of course remains Norman Mailer’s influential essay “The White Negro” which can now be read on-line at Dissent Magazine’s website. I recommend that one also reads Frantz Fanon as a companion to Mailer’s discourse to get another perspective on what it feels like to wear a white mask over black skin…

The alterity representations get even more striking when the racial and the sexual Other melt into one in Kerouac’s prose. Sometimes an unholy marriage of antisemitism and homophobia is found in descriptions of ‘fags’ and ‘queers’, and such epithets regularly spilled over into Kerouac’s own real-life love-hate relation with Ginsberg (no doubt sometimes spurred on by Kerouac’s mother’s rather unmitigated racism and bigotry) and his paranoid belief in a Jewish intellectual mafia trying to discredit him and his work.

On other occasions (as in the notorious description of Mardou Fox, the black protagonist of The Subterraneans, whose genitals are seen by the male Kerouac alter ego as oversized and supplemented by monstrous, non-human attributes) it is the depiction of women of colour as promiscuous beings, usually prostitutes – who are on the one hand hotly desired for their primordial sweetness and immediacy (which translates into availability), but on the other always objects of either contempt (when they give in too easily) or fear, as in the case of Terry, the Mexican girl Sal Paradise seduces in On the Road, whom he then instantly decides must be a whore, whose pimp is waiting at the bus station to steal Paradise’s money. Although she retaliates by accusing him of being the pimp, and they subsequently make up and Sal spends a bucolic fortnight as a Fellaheen farm worker with her Mexican brothers, he ends up summarily dumping her and moving on when the pressures of her love become too insistent for him to handle…

Not just Kerouac had problems seeing women as equals, as Rebecca Metzger points out in her now apparently defunct blog Beat Generation Women, in which she for instance refers to Ginsberg’s less than feminist atitudes towards Elise Cowen, who in addition to being his on-and-off girlfriend during the years Ginsberg experimented with going straight, also served as his typist and would-be friendly critic. Even a quite highly developed consciousness of eco-sensitivity did not stop Gary Snyder from penning a condescending and essentialist poem such as “Praise for Sick Women” (their only apparent sickness being their menstrual cycle), which notoriously begins with these lines:

The female is fertile, and discipline
(contra naturam) only
confuses her
Who has, head held sideways
Arm out softly, touching,
A difficult dance to do, but not in mind.

This reduction of the female to a birdlike simplicity (can dance, but cannot think) is however fortunately not left unchallenged, as Diane di Prima mockingly writes back to him in “The Practice of Magical Evocation”:

i am a woman and my poems
are woman’s: easy to say
this. the female is ductile
and
(stroke after stroke)
built for masochistic
calm. The deadened nerve
is part of it:
awakened sex, dead retina
fish eyes; at hair’s root
minimal feeling

Di Prima rather indelicately reminds the male poet that the vagina has more qualities than he seems to realize: not merely fertile but ‘ductile’ – pliable both for the penis going ‘stroke after stroke’ but ultimately also ductile for the event of childbirth. Females are always objectified by other-labelings: as women poets, writing woman’s poems; as passive receptacles ‘built for masochistic calm’, as ultimately fishlike beings of ‘minimal feeling’… Note how even the form and graphic lay-out of di Prima’s poem, which btw. borrows Snyder’s beginning for its epigraph, parodies his structure and mannerisms, such as the show-off’y parenthesis.

Di Prima’s other poems in collections such as This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, Dinners and Nightmares, and Revolutionary Letters, plus her prose in Memoirs of a Beatnik, are all marked by a surefooted sense if independence and self-esteem, while never shying away from controversy and explicit sexuality. Unlike much other confessional literature di Prima’s texts regardless of genre are strongly anecdotal and funny in their revelations and observations of the follies of others as well as the poet herself with regards to lifestyle and subcultural choices. In this light it is a bit ironic that di Prima’s own official website features a somewhat condescending quote by Ginsberg as its front-page caption, labelling and subtly diminishing her with these words: “A great woman poet in second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.” Why ‘woman’ poet, why brilliant ‘in its particularity’?

Among the several good online resources for di Prima, I recommend Levity.com’s page on her, captioned with a typically ironic “No Problem Party Poem” by her; and, as always with Beat related matters, Literary Kicks has a fine (but too brief) page on her. Why she should be absent from both Poets.org and the Modern American Poetry site is beyond me. Her major later work, such as the poetry cycle Loba has drawn much praise from fellow female poets (Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy), but the testimonials di Prima herself has gathered on her Reviews page come mainly from male colleagues. Her recent memoirs volume, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, has been well received, too, as a chronicle of the Counterculture heyday:

“Because it is so unashamedly personal and true, it will disturb all those who lived that passionate time when theatre and poetry, love and revolution seemed at last conjoined.” – Judith Malina

Listen to her read a poem for her grandfather:

The other women writers associated with the Beats have latterly experienced somewhat of a renaissance, involving getting anthologized more as well as having their work re-issued or published anew in better editions. Among these publications I want to mention 3 memoirs: First, Carolyn Cassady’s now classic Off the Road, which she discusses among other places at this website which is the official site of the Cassady estate. Carolyn earlier on published a shorter book on the same topic, her menage a trois with Neal and Jack, titled Heart Beat, which was actually turned into a Hollywood movie, starring Nick Nolte.Secondly, Hettie Jones, who HAS made it into the Academy of American Poets and has a page at their site, despite only debuting with a poetry collection as late as in 1997, and her very detailed account in How I Became Hettie Jones of life with LeRoi Jones and being his partner in running (out of their apartment in the Village) a publishing house, a newsletter and a journal of experimental poetry, Yugen, which was almost unique in bringing together on its pages the various dissident poetry groups and coteries such as the Black Mountain poets, the New York School of Poetry and the Beats. Jed Birmingham has the following to say about Hettie’s role:

Much of the work of constructing Yugen was done by Jones’ wife, Hettie Cohen. Cohen worked as an editor at Partisan Review which gave her invaluable experience in putting together a magazine. She performed many editorial tasks as well as designing the layout. Like with many magazines of the period, the construction process, such as collating, folding, mailing, and stapling, provided a center for the literary community. Collating parties became literary events. Hettie Cohen’s How I Became Hettie Jones is mandatory reading on the literary community in New York City in the late 1950s, early 1960s, as is Diane Di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman. Both books provide detailed accounts of the day-to-day process of running a literary magazine. I highly recommend them.

And finally, Bonnie Bremser, who paid a dearer price than most for following Ray Bremser into refuge from the law in Mexico. There is a very good write-up of Troia: Mexican Memoirs at Bookforum.com by Ronna Johnson. Here is her evaluation of how Bonnie Bremser manages to transcend the conventional victim position that seems scripted for her through her forced life in prostitution:

Both protagonist and narrator, Bremser is a sexual adventuress partaking in the descriptive gusto usually reserved in Beat writing for freewheeling masculinity; her confessed inner states provide the text’s gritty, visceral discourse. Merging memoir with road narrative, domesticity with adventure, Troia inscribes a revisionist, hybrid female protagonist. In this, Frazer [Bremser's birth name] converts “beat”—the subcultural ethos that rejected traditional values and inhibitions for nonconformity,
self-determination, and existential improvisations—to her own specifically gendered ends.

Returning to Joyce Johnson, she is one of several so-called Beat ‘muses’ or almost-wives who has written about their life with one or several of the Beat luminaries. Her memoir Minor Characters and subsequent other beat related works, such as Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, are special in the sense that they also emphasize the role of herself and other women in the circle of friends and writers, and the real work they did to help the better-known writers to become just that: writers. Interviews with Johnson and Hettie Jones from 1999 (carried out by Nancy Grace) have appeared at the Artful Dodge site, giving also a nice historical frame for the Beats:

Much of my research over the last several years has focused on an attempt to expand the definition of Beat by turning the critical lens toward the women. And there were indeed women involved who were much more than girlfriends, wives, or muses. They were writers themselves–poets, novelists, playwrights, editors–individuals who have thought quite seriously about what it meant, and means, to be Beat.

Closing the book for now on the women Beats, I just want to mention the two readers that have appeared: Brenda Knight’s anthology Women of the Beat Generation (2000), and Richard Peabody’s A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (1997). Of the two, Knight offers the slightly better selection (she includes precursors and a few artists) and more volume. Both volumes have their stars, mostly writers I have already mentioned. Both also deservedly feature Elise Cowen who committed suicide in 1962, but left poignant poems behind showing similarities to some of Sylvia Plath’s work. One volume of critical essays on women Beat writers complements the two readers particularly well: Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation – ed. by Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace.

Peabody’s book is, strangely enough, the only Beat reader to have been edited by a man – Charters, Waldman and Tonkinson who have compiled the three main Beat readers are all women. So it seems there may still be remnants of a gendered division of labour now transposed to the critical field: the men create, the women compile, archive and comment…

The second part of this post will focus on the work of Amiri Baraka and on the racial other in Beat literature.

This sets the tone for the whole novel, which is perhaps even more celebratory of its culture hero than On the Road was in its beatification of Neal Cassady, alias Dean Moriarty. The two protagonists share a relationship of mutual respect and growth – again with Smith as the more passive learner and Ryder as the master woodsman, wilderness survivor, mountain climber, haiku improviser, Zen riddler and seducer of young women into the practice of yabyum (Tantric sex…)

Ryder’s real life model was of course Gary Snyder, the great Zen practitioner among the Beats – a poet who was also a student and scholar of oriental languages and texts, and later among the first poets instrumental in writing from a non-anthropocentric point of view, expressing a deep-ecology ethos and an eco-critical practise. Snyder has often warned that people should not take everything in Dharma Bums as complete truth, but he does acknowledge that Kerouac’s description of his lifestyle is correct in most respects.

In the course of the novel Kerouac paints a very sympathetic portrait of Ryder, and unlike Moriarty in On the Road, this new Buddhist culture hero does not end up betraying the protagonist. Rather it is the Ray Smith figure who at the end abstains from following the hard path to enlightenment that Ryder has helped him embark on, and he decides to literally come down from the pinnacles after a season as a fire lookout on Mount Sourdough’s Desolation Peak and once more rejoin the human community with all its temptations of the flesh. Still Smith misses Ryder who has gone off to Japan to live in a monastery and realizes what a strong, serious scholar Ryder will become.

Again, there are clear parallels between the novel and the real life of Gary Snyder. Snyder was born in San Francisco, but his family moved to the Pacific Northwest, where Snyder’s father began working in the logging industry. Snyder developed a love of the land from an early age on, and acquired forest and mountain craft through interacting with his environment. He studied anthropology in Portland at Reed College and left there with a BA in 1951. Later he pursued graduate studies at Berkeley, switching from anthropology to Oriental languages, to further his understanding of both Oriental poetry and Buddhist scriptures. Snyder has written a mini-autobiography for Modern Haiku and in there he begins:

I was from a proud, somewhat educated farming and working family. After finishing college I went back to work. I went into the National Forests to be an isolated fire lookout living in a tiny cabin on the top of a peak. I worked as a summertime firefighter and wilderness ranger, and then spent winters in San Francisco to be closer to a community of writers.

This mixture of manual and intellectual pursuits came to mark Snyder’s outlook in profound ways and is also one of the reasons behind the frequent comparison with Henry David Thoreau:

“If Ginsberg is the Beat movement’s Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder is the Henry David Thoreau. “– Bruce Cook

This and Snyder’s riposte to the Thoreau comparison, along with a great number of other Snyder quotes can be found here. Whereas Thoreau had his Walden Pond, Snyder had his Pacific Northwest – an altogether more rugged and demanding terrain. Already from Snyder’s first collection of poetry, the sense of place was one of the most striking features of his poems. His programmatic meta-poem “Riprap” (the title poem of that collection) perfectly illustrates the fusion of poetical practice and hard manual labour. The poem can be found in its entirety on-line here and here. The speaker’s absolute certainty of the equal value of building a path up a mountain and composing a poem never ceases to amaze me: each stone and each word matters equally, and the “Solidity of bark, leaf or wall/riprap of things” leads straight out onto the “Cobble of milky way/straying planets” putting us in our place in the Cosmos (this line echoes with Ginsberg’s “ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo [...] of night”, but has no urban angst built into it). Snyder then draws us inward: “In the thin loam, each rock a word/a creek-washed stone/Granite: ingrained/with torment of fire and weight/Crystal and sediment linked hot/all change, in thoughts,/As well as things” – reminding us of the connection between thought and matter and the fiery origins of both. Fire is, in fact, Snyder’s favourite element of change, signalling as much rebirth and life as destruction.

The other half of the first Snyder collection was made up of his translations of the Cold Mountain poems by Han Shan, a 9th century Chinese hermit poet, who took his name after the place in which he lived. Snyder’s congenial translations indicate the strong identification between the young aspiring poet and the old master. Here is Snyder’s translation of “Clambering up the Cold Mountain Path“. The poem ends with a question reminiscent of a koan, or Zen riddle: “Who can leap the world’s ties/And sit with me among the white clouds?” No doubt this reflects what Snyder desired to do…

Cover image from Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems

Snyder describes his years in Japan in the following terms:

I first arrived in Japan in May of 1956. Exposure to Buddhist scholars and translators soon brought me to the Zenrinkushû, that remarkable anthology of bits and pieces of Chinese poetry plus a number of folk proverbs as they became used within the Zen world as part of the training dialog. If one was looking at the possibilities of “short poems” the Zenrinkushû practice of breaking up Chinese poems would certainly have to be included. R.H. Blyth famously said “The Zenrinkushû is Chinese poetry on its way to becoming haiku.” Maybe it is that somebody — one of the old Zen monk editors — realized that practically all poems are too long and that they’d be better if they were cut up. So he cut up hundreds of Chinese poems and came out with new, shorter poems! I now know I was extremely fortunate to have been exposed to the elegant “Zen culture” aspects of Kyoto. But as I traveled around Japan I came to thoroughly appreciate popular culture, ordinary people’s lives, and the brave irreverent progressive vitality of postwar Japanese life. I realized that the spirit of haiku comes as much from that daily-life spirit as it does from “high culture” — and still, haiku is totally refined.

The practice of haiku was already introduced to the American readers by scholarly translations of Basho and other masters of the form, but a much more efficient boost of cultural transfer was performed by the characters of Dharma Bums who trade off spontaneous haikus during a climb of Mount Matterhorn in California like a couple of jazz-men trading riffs and licks. Smith teaches Japhy to be spontaneous, Japhy teaches Ray the discipline of mind required for the haiku to have an enlightening effect. Kerouac has published many of these so-called western haikus (they don’t conform to the syllable structure (3 lines of 5-7-5 syllables, respectively) that Japanese haiku poetry always follows) in books such as Pomes All Sizes, Scattered Poems and Some of the Dharma. Read more about Kerouac’s western haiku practice on this page.

Before going to Japan, Snyder had also been hitchhiking extensively up and down the West Coast, sometimes accompanied by Ginsberg, who had become friends with him after both men had participated in the legendary Six Gallery reading in late 1955. Here is a recent interview where Snyder recalls their reading at Reed College – a tape of which, containing the earliest known reading of “Howl”, has just surfaced.

Snyder had also spent several summers working as a fire lookout for the Forest Service. He recommended Kerouac for the job, and the summer of Snyder’s leaving for Japan, Kerouac manned the small look-out cabin on Sourdough Mountain in the North Cascades. An excellent volume commemorating the stays of Snyder, Kerouac and Philip Whalen on Sourdough has been produced by the very same person who unearthed the “Howl”-tape, John Suiter. His Poets on the Peaks site has sublime photography showing us the things these young men may have seen in the 1950s summers they spent up there in splendid and sometimes terrifying isolation. Kerouac wrote about this experience in two novels, Dharma Bums (somewhat romanticized) and Desolation Angels (with more of an emphasis on the terrors of the void)…

I think Snyder’s work as a fire lookout was directly instrumental in his choosing Smokey the Bear as yet another avatar of the Great Sun Buddha. In what is the funniest Snyder poem I have ever read, “Smokey the Bear Sutra”, the friendly figure known to every child in America becomes both holy, sublime and hilarious in the best “Zen Lunatic” tradition. You can read the poem here (although Snyder graciously allows us all to “reproduce it free forever”, it is a bit long to quote in full here…)

Suffice it to say that Snyder lets his readers participate in a hitherto unheard of non-human centered audience given as “a Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings — even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there.” This message is about the Future of Turtle Island (perhaps better known to the white man as America), where trouble is brewing: “The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature…” Only the figure of Smokey will emerge to put out the uncontrollable wildfires and other destructions that mankind has unleashed on the earth:

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind; Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her; Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs; smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism; Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes; master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

This figure of trust and ancient wisdom – but also the bearer of a cleansing fire – will herald a new age for “Those who love woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children”, who, chanting Smokey’s mantra: “DROWN THEIR BUTTS – CRUSH THEIR BUTTS”, will make the world safe, so we will all have “ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at. AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT.” Amen!

With this radical turn into eco-critical poetry the mature Snyder tone is established. In my session this week I spoke about Snyder’s poetics and its heritage from Transcendentalism and the American Romantic age, esp. in its belief in a chain of beings and a transmission of the divine through all beings, the poet being but a conduit. You can learn more from my agenda for analysis for Snyder which suggests his techniques, themes and some contexts for his work.

In my session I also suggested that Snyder was a catalyst for the meeting of East Coast Beats and West Coast poets (often discussed as the San Francisco Renaissance), but more than that he helped seed the central Beat figures with a more Orientalist outlook, turning them on to Buddhist beliefs and ancient poetry of the East, and furthermore I see him as setting Ginsberg on the course that made him a lynch-pin between the Beat Generation and the 1960s multifaceted Counterculture – a movement Snyder also enthusiastically joined upon returning to the US in the late 60s.

I want to close with a clip from one of the few documentary films on Snyder. It can be found in four instalments on YouTube. Here I embed the first bit and after that you’ll see links to the other three…

Episodes 2, 3, and 4

Here is the Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry and Translations 1952 – 1998 which will give you 600 pages of poetry, essays, interviews etc. to peruse… It contains good selections of poetry from Regarding Wave, Turtle Island, Axe Handles, and Mountains and Rivers Without End, as well as prose from Earth House Hold, A Place in Space, The Real Work and The Practice of the Wild.

Snyder is also well represented in the Buddhist Beat reader, Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, ed. by Carole Tonkinson (out of print, but available second-hand)

Here is a more recent picture of Gary Snyder:

Minnesota Public Radio has audio files featuring Snyder…

Snyder is very much still with us, dwelling among the species that surround us. His most recent book of essays came out in paperback a month ago: Back on the Fire. Most recent poetry collection was Danger on Peaks (2004).

Long may he remind us of our place in space!

Photo: Anne Braaten
View of Hozomeen Peak from Desolation

• Vanity Fair published a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, recreating classic moments with new actors.
• New York Magazine recreated Marilyn Monroe’s photo shoot with Douglas Kirkland for Look Magazine, often referred to as “The Last Sitting”, using Lindsay Lohan as the Marilyn stand-in.
• Latina Magazine has a photo shoot with Jessica Alba recreating moments in famous horror films.

(Please note, that the last two links contain nudity.)

While the timing may be coincidental, it is surely symptomatic of celebrity culture today. As Amy Henderson points out, celebrity culture has always been part of a culture’s self-definition (“Media and the Rise of Celebrity Culture”). By this logic, celebrity culture seems to be looking backwards as much as being interested in the current celebrities. With George Clooney on the cover of TIME Magazine with the caption “The Last Movie Star”, there definitely seems to be some sort of eschatology at work in these photo shoots.

The religious connotations of eschatology are not coincidental, as celebrities generate a distinct cultish aspect through their relationship with the fans. Many celebrities, if not all, function as idols worthy of worship, and the films they star in, the music they produce, the clothes they wear, all have a distinct aura which is desireable for the followers. Yet, for many of the newer celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Alba, they have little in the way of proper cultural production to enforce their celebrity status. Whatever one might feel about Herbie or Flipper as cultural entertainment products, these are not exactly productions that build long-lasting acting careers.

These new celebrities end up in a particular relation with their followers; they become celebrities based on a certain shared experience for some of them – they became stars when they were young, and in productions aimed at people their same age. Therefore, a kinship can be said to exist between teen celebrity and teen follower, since they have been part of each others lives for a long time.

Also, they become celebrities in the newer sense of the word that Joseph Epstein traces to Daniel Boorstin in his book The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream (“The Culture of Celebrity”): “a person who is well-known for his well-knownness”. Lohan and Alba are famous because they have always been famous, and part of their followers’ lives. The same goes for a number of other celebrities, who are still too young to be considered true stars, in the original sense of having proven themselves somehow “worthy” of worship.

This is where the past enters the stage, for what can be more worthy of worship than classic Hollywood culture? Hitchcock and Monroe can serve as master-icons, lending their glamour to the new, upcoming celebrities, thus creating a strange feedback, where the old icons are revived because new celebrities reenact their original iconic status, while the new celebrities can obtain more celebrity status by serving at the alter of the old masters (male and female).

It is this relationship between the old and new celebrity icons which is interesting. There is no parodic thrust to any of these shoots, but rather a desire to recreate, perhaps even channel or ressurect, the old icons. Margaret Rose refers to pastiche as reviving things from the past, without parody’s incongruous structure or comic effect (Rose, Parody). This seems to be a perfect description of these shoots, which also overlaps with Gerard Genette’s understanding of pastiche as imitative (Genette, Palimpsests).

Working from Genette’s definition, Linda Hutcheon points to the fact that pastiche functions as the desire for similarity rather than difference. (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody). This is perfectly clear in the different shoots, as their main purpose is to draw a parallel between the new celebrity and the old, establishing a connection meant to increase the celebrity capital of the new icon.

This desire is most obvious in the case of Lindsay Lohan’s recreation of Monroe’s “Last Sitting”. Monroe’s shoot for the Look Magazine has been called “The Last Sitting” because it was her last photo shoot. Already here, the religious connotations are clear, the name echoing “The Last Supper of Christ”. In the case of Monroe, the parallel to Christ seems to come from the sacrifice that happened to them both; Monroe’s death has always been seen as tragic and as a response to the surrounding pressure of her life. Connecting her death to that of Christ also shows that not only is celebrity partly defined as cultish, but also that celebrity status is always bound up in some form of referral to an earlier icon.

Lohan’s pastiche of Monroe is as full as possible, recreating both hair, make-up and poses. The intention is clear: Lohan is the Monroe of our time and these photos establish that. From a critical point of view, the situation is somewhat different: Lohan wants to be the Monroe of our time, and so imitates one of the most famous photo sessions Monroe ever did. Through this recreation, Lohan hopes to gain celebrity capital by attempting to reproduce a similarity with Monroe, rather than a difference.

Many of Lohan’s followers might not be aware of the original which is being imitated here, but the poses remain a significant part of American culture, and it is likely that they are known by people who do not know who Marilyn Monroe was. The iconocity of her poses extends beyond the historical knowledge of Monroe. Lohan’s photos would still strike a familiar note and provide her with a degree of validity and celebrity capital.

The case of Vanity Fair’s Hitchcock tribute is slightly different. There is no particular reason for why Vanity Fair would do these Hitchcock stills now, other than the fact that this is the Oscar season and all forms of film and film history are more interesting right now. This is further emphasized by the fact that many of the actors used are nominated this year (Julie Christie, Javier Bardem, Marion Cotillard) or have won in the past (Jodie Foster, Renée Zellwegger). Most others have made significant and artistic films, rather than simply popular films.

In other words, there is less a desire for borrowing celebrity capital from Hitchcock and his classic films. Instead, I would argue, the point is to establish that these celebrities are worthy of recreating such classic moments. They have proved their worth in the Hollywood industry and can be permitted to take on the old master. Rather than an attempt to increase their celebrity capital, it is matter of the celebrity culture industry – of which Vanity Fair is certainly one of the leading producers – “knighting” these celebrities, by allowing them to imitate Hitchcock.

Here it is the industry itself which stands to gain from this imitation. By using currently popular icons to recreate classics, they establish that current celebrity culture is just as vibrant, significant and accomplished as old celebrity culture – nothing has been lost. While there is nostalgia at work in these photos, it is a double-coded nostalgia meant to reinforce current culture as much as past culture. The imitation is thus still used to emphasize similarity over difference.

Which only leaves Jessica Alba’s recreations, which is an interesting case of similarity. Alba’s photos come from Latina Magazine which obviously caters to the Latino population in USA. Alba is a Latino star, because she has gained celebrity status in spite of this Latino heritage. Allowing her to recreate classic film moments, is thus to emphasize her status in Hollywood and celebrate that her difference has not inhibited her career. However, there is a certain irony in the choice of films.

All of the films Alba imitates star white females: Scream, Psycho, The Birds, Rosemary’s Baby and The Ring (this is assuming that we are talking about the Hollywood remake of The Ring rather than the Japanese original, something I consider a safe bet). In other words, Alba can only obtain celebrity status by imitating white female icons. We end up being back at similarity rather than difference. Alba is not a celebrity because she is a Latino, she is a celebrity because she can imitate being white. I’m sure there are Latinos that will disagree with me, in fact I hope so, but this does not change the fact that the stars Alba imitates are all white. White is the original celebrity icon, and this has not yet changed, unfortunately.

The final point to be made here, is about celebrity culture as a whole. It seems to me that celebrity culture is turning into a pastiche itself. As Tom Mole points out, the classic understanding of celebrity culture is “structuring the production, distribution and reception of texts around the mystique of a particularly fascinating individual” (Mole, “Hypertrophic Celebrity”). As these photo shoots show us, there is also a new emergent behavior where production, distribution and reception is not structured around the mystique of a fascinating individual, but rather the mystique of the history of celebrity culture itself. Celebrity culture no longer has icons, but imitations of older icons.

As I briefly mentioned in relation to Marilyn Monroe, this has always been the case, but the difference now is that the feedback loop between historical celebrity culture and contemporary celebrity culture is ever decreasing. The Ring was (re)made in 2002 but is already a classic in the vein of Psycho and The Birds. The production of celebrity culture is now as much the imitation of the production of celebrity culture.

References
Epstein, Joseph. “The Culture of Celebrity”. The Weekly Standard, volume 11, issue 5.
Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests.
Henderson, Amy. “Media and the Rise of Celebrity Culture”. OAH Magazine of History
6 (Spring 1992).
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody
Mole, Tom. “Hypertrophic Celebrity.” M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). 25 Feb. 2008 .
Rose, Margaret A. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern.
Stein, Joel. “Guess Who Came to Dinner?”, TIME Magazine, vol 171, no. 9, March 2008.

Ever since an American teaching assistant named Norman decided not to lecture on Shakespeare but to have his students at Aalborg U. read Kerouac instead, I’ve personally been hooked on the spontaneous bop prosody of Jack. Like most migrant workers Norm didn’t hang around very long, but I still owe him a good deal of gratitude for a reading list including not only two Kerouac novels, On the Road and Dharma Bums, but also Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller…

This semester I am offering an elective course at Aalborg U. called “The Beat Generation Revisited”. You are all cordially invited to tag along. The course has its own website, and I have collated links to some of my many Beat Generation writings at the bottom of the page. The course itself is quite basic in that we only use one reader, Ann Charter’s Portable Beat Reader, which has all the essentials but naturally mostly in excerpts. But in accordance with the Aalborg U. project based learning model, I hope that students will spend the latter half of the coming semester writing projects on Beat related topics.

One obvious project would be to look at the spate of publications that came out last year, the jewel of which has to be The Original Scroll version of On the Road. Unfortunately Penguin didn’t actually publish the legendary manuscript in scroll form, so what we get is still a square traditional book, and not a neat little roll of teletype paper…

For scroll fetishists I recommend this little article and the video pasted below…

What is good about the new edition is that not only are there very comprehensive introductiory essays (100 pp.), but the text itself has all the real names of the cast of characters: Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Bill Burroughs etc., instead of the rather silly pseudonyms Kerouac was forced to use in the original published version (Dean Moriarty?!?). Furthermore we get a more breathless punctuation style in this version which emphasizes the speed of Kerouac’s prose style (not unrelated to the speed he reportedly ingested while typing the scroll), and we also get a version that is not edited by Malcolm Cowley who, without consulting Kerouac, made some cuts in the manuscript in the original Viking Press 1957 edition.

To supplement the reading of the scroll version, I recommend that one consults Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 which covers the period of composition of Kerouac’s first novel The Town and the City and of On the Road. I am not too keen on the editing done by Douglas Brinkley for this edition, but I suppose he did what he could with the budget and time allocated to the project. What I am missing is more of the paratext (doodles, drawings, marginalia) Kerouac adorned his notebooks with, and actual plates reproducing more of the notebook pages (the ones that are there are tantalizing). That said, I respect Brinkley for the archival work he has done and for the working out of what Kerouac actually scrawled in the apparently increasingly illegible notebooks. The problem is also that there are so many other notebooks left behind by Kerouac that this publication only makes a small dent in the available stuff.

The two volumes of Kerouac’s letters, edited by Charters are also invaluable companions to a new reading of On the Road. Volume 1 covers 1940 to 1956 (and thus the composition of the novel), but you’d also want vol. 2 for references to the battle of getting On the Road published in the first place.

Finally, I’ve enjoyed watching What Happened to Kerouac, a mid-1980s documentary which finally came out on DVD in 2003, as a companion piece to going on the road again with Jack. In this film all Kerouac’s friends, lovers, wives and literary peers speak about aspects of remembering ‘Memory Babe’ as Kerouac dubbed himself. Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke and Burroughs are only some of the colourful male figures we meet in the film, but Edie Kerouac Parker, Carolyn Cassidy, Ann Charters, Diane Di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Jan Kerouac and other women voices supply a much more provocative take on Kerouac (and his mother!)

The course will end with a look at some of the many Internet sites celebrating the Beat/Kerouac legacy. First and foremost among these is Levi Asher’s Literary Kicks, but did you know about the Kerouac House project in Florida with its rotation of writers-in-residence? Or Beat Angel – the independent fim based on a play titled Kerouac: The Essence of Jack? Or the French project, Memory Babe: A Tribute to Kerouac, that you can still participate in?

The Beat goes on…

Those of you who can read Danish might be interested in visiting Kulturkapellet, a new Aalborg based portal featuring reviews of all things cultural. It covers film, literature, theatre, music, games and the arts. Also featured are occasional essays – slightly longer and more ‘academic’ pieces on cultural and philosophical issues. There are also reviews of non-fiction – and one piece for instance is of clear Am. Studies interest: Steen Christiansen’s piece on Apokalypsens Amerika. More are sure to follow… The ‘Chapel’ welcomes guest reviewers if anyone cares to sign up – check the contact page for details.