This image has been haunting me for a few months now and I’ve been wanting to post it here for as long. I keep mentally filing it in “images communicating our current economic clusterf%#@.”

I’m not suggesting that the image and text above, from McLuhan’s 1967 book, The Medium is the Message, should be read as a prophetic tale of our current national and global order. But it certainly could be. McLuhan was of course interested in the individual neural effects and broader social ramifications of various media. That’s a gross oversimplification mind you.

First, I simply love the aesthetics of this image/text. Graphic designer Quentin Fiore collaborated throughout the project and his illustrations are deployed throughout the book as semiotic systems meant to convey the way different media effect different cognitive processes. These are playful experiments with semiotic systems based on McLuhan’s theory of media. Although McLuhan suffers a bad rap by many historians and sociologists of technology, his ideas continue to resonate throughout media circles and popular culture. In the introduction to his 2007 best selling Assault on Reason for example, Al Gore refers to McLuhan as the “great Catholic prophet.” A bit over the top me thinks.

But back to the present. I can’t help reading, “we march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonaza-land” as an apt description of the disastrous paper for oil economy buttressed by our national myth in the rear-view mirror.  It also speaks to the current Administration’s economic team of rear-view driving policy. And why are we driving on the wrong side of the road, seconds from impacting the oncoming traffic?

There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no end in sight, just a disastrous collision with destiny. Are we not sprawling from grace?

It is the elderly Manson who fuels the imagination of icon workers that use him in a politicized discourse, as witnessed first by a right wing manipulation of Manson’s image, photo-shopped into a photo of former Democrat candidate for President, John Kerry, who was the victim of a vicious slander campaign due to his past as an anti-Vietnam War activist. Here a grinning Manson in a suit modelled on Kerry’s (as is Manson’s hair style) shows the Senator a piece of paper or a photograph (perhaps a snapshot of the original Manson victims), and they appear to share a moment of confidence, although Kerry’s closed eyes might indicate that the image Manson shows him is a bit too much to take in. Note the Swastika on Manson’s forehead (he had used a knife to scrawl an ‘X’ on his forehead during his trial, and this ‘X’ later turned into a Swastika in popular legend), as well as the Kerry campaign button on his lapel.

In a parallel image, this time used to satirize Kerry’s defeater, George W. Bush, Manson’s photograph (the raw image is the same, and here the hair and attire are not airbrushed or photo-shopped) is used for a different type of collaborative icon work, this time more oppositional in nature. It is accompanied by an amusing text calling for the approval by the Senate of Manson as ambassador to the Klingon Empire (referencing the Star Trek universe). In this narrative Manson works for the Republicans as (crudely) indicated by the replacement of the Swastika on his forehead, which is substituted with a GOP Elephant, the symbol of the Republican Party. Bush and Condoleeza Rice are both ‘quoted’ as supporting Manson’s speedy appointment, saying for instance that “questions about Manson’s management style shouldn’t be part of the confirmation process”.

This is by far the most succinct summary of last night’s debacle of a debate TV show hosted produced by ABC News Disney Entertainment. This captures the essence of what is, “the postmodern condition” of US politics.

I selected this image as the most telling frame of the set.

Tuesday was Earth Day btw, but most wouldn’t have known if not for Google’s always clever way of “holiday theming” their logo. Al Gore has recently launched a $300 million environmental ad campaign to increase awareness and apply political pressure. Likewise, some of the other major environmental organizations have also launched public advocacy campaigns like the Sierra Club’s Power 2 Change. The environment is one of the top issues among Democratic voters but it wasn’t discussed during the debate or in any meaningful way since.

But Tuesday was also Pennsylvania Primary Day, which dominated the news cycle. So fitting the severity and importance of the major issues at hand, the three remaining presidential candidates recorded statements on Monday, not to address global warming, poverty, the war in Iraq, or the economy but addressed fans of the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) for the popular program, “Monday Night Raw.”

McCain, I would presume, won the verbal “smack down”, with a subtle mispronunciation of Obama’s first name and a not so subtle gender bias, “If you wanna be the man, you have to beat the man.” Remember Bush Sr. used to deliberately mispronounce Sadam Hussein’s first name in a similar fashion leading up to the first Gulf War. The right wing has repeatedly injected Obama’s middle name, Hussein, at every turn.

Jeez, when will Democrats learn to stop playing in territory which give Republicans distinct advantages? Clinton as “Hill-Rod” was more on cue than Obama’s inauthentic, “do you smell what Barack is cookin’?” Did the campaigns provide their own scripts or were the candidates scripted by the WWE? I initially associated “cookin” with “soul food” and the wrestling character who played Obama in the ring that night was fitted with grossly exaggerated “ape like” ears. But the cooking line could also just be a reference to one of wrestling’s biggest stars, The Rock.

McCain’s,”…and whatcha gonna do when John McCain and all his McCainiacs run wild on you?” was just disturbing. McCain with his own private paramilitary special force of brown shirt goons comes to mind. Obamabots and Hillbots seem to be the most common derogatory slang for their respective supporters. In 2004, Howard Dean’s partisans were referred to as deaniancs. But coming from McCain’s mouth, who’s running a distinctly militarized campaign the personal “run wild on you” feels all the more threating. Of course, this is all just entertainment right? Corporate sponsored entertainment, which is what the Bag so aptly crystallized.

So here’s where this post comes out of the Bag again and looks behind the curtain. President Bush, who now has the lowest approval rating of any president since Taft, appeared on the NBC game show program, Deal or No Deal to address one the contestants, a three tour Iraqi War veteran. See the video here.

There are far too many points to address here in this blog post. Many important ones have been raised at the Bag, not the least of which is the Bush administration’s use of soldiers as political props. But I was most interested in how these three utterly bizarre media episodes might relate to each other.

During the last decade, TV programming has become notably dominated by “reality TV.” For me, these three episodes; the debate, the WWE, and Deal or No Deal, all occurring within a week, signify a continued media commodification of the political public sphere into a realm which ceases to even attempt to recreate or reproduce reality. In it’s place the entertainment industry creates “hyper-real TV” in essential Baudrillardian fashion.

My initial reaction to the Bush megatron appearance was not Orwell’s 1984, which came next, but the Wizard of Oz.

It’s become commonplace today to compare America’s stumbling economy and increasingly economically stratified society to the Gilded Age. This was afterall the backdrop of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was first published in 1900.

While many scholars have read the Wizard of Oz as, “a parable of the Populists”, does the story have any narrative power as an allegory today?[1] Annie Leibovitz’s (stunning) December 2005 “Oz” inspired photo shoot for Vogue may be instructive. Like the first image in this post suggests, who is wagging the dog behind the curtain?

Bent makes an interesting point about how the LeBron photo has been deconstructed, noting that it just as easily could be interpreted through a critical feminist lens. Sure, I suppose. But that fashion models play into gendered roles is nothing new or even much debated. In the context of race in this instance, a feminist reading just feels disingenuous.

It was this statement that really jumped out at me;

“Walker and Husni to me seem to be typical of ethnic minority representatives who are prone to read specific ethnic narratives into mainstream material.”

If that is what’s happening, then we have to ask ourselves why that is. In an earlier post, Disney isn’t Racist, I pointed to an online discussion in which mainly Whites (one would assume) were incapable of seeing inherent racial stereotypes embedded in children’s popular culture. One gets that same sense about this photo. I think to dismiss Walker and Husni out of hand is to dismiss centuries long and deeply embedded racial caricatures.

Men’s Fitness editor Roy Johnson took a more nuanced view of the situation;

“It’s a reminder that as African-Americans, we have come very far to have an African-American male featured on the cover of Vogue, but we have very far to go to continue to educate people within our industry regarding the power of images and the potential impact they can have on their readers.”

I’m sympathetic that Bent in this instance may want to defend the photographer Leibovitz. However, Michael Shaw at the Bag thinks otherwise;

… I think the image is worth our deconstruction, but I don’t believe for a second Vogue/Leibovitz didn’t know exactly what they were doing. In spite of his approval (before, and up to this moment), did LeBron get the shape of it?

I don’t know if Leibovitz “knew exactly what she was doing” but it’s difficult for me to not see the photo within a racialized context. Is it however possible that such an image was chosen on a subconscious level?

But what if Vogue magazine is completely innocent. Do unintended consequences have any bearing on the discussion? What’s more, in response to Bent, is white America also not prone to read certain narratives into mainstream material? When a white American claims that an image like this isn’t racist, is it because of a deep denial or cultural blindness? Perhaps it’s difficult to sympathize with oppression if one’s never been oppressed. I contend that there are several narratives which can be read into the image and that all of them are valid. I accept the idea that Leibovitz as photographer and artist was sincerely intent on simply creating images to match the magazine’s stated mission for that publication.

Sure, like Bent points out, we can deconstruct this image or any image into multiple layered meanings, creating our own narrow constructions out of the pieces. But to deny that this image or anything else racial in the US “has absolutely nothing to do with the legacy of race in these United States” as one commenter stated, is at the very least, dishonest. Something is there or we wouldn’t be talking about it to the extent that we are. 400 years of cultural constructions of the “savage other” can not simply be dismissed, especially in a society were ethnic minorities continue to suffer from both institutionalized and socio-cultural racism.

My point is that the LeBron image, whether intended or not, should be seen within the ugly tradition of grotesquely negative stereotypes of Black men, and as Bent points out, equally disturbing portrayals of women as week sexual objects. Maybe the editor did know what was going on, maybe it was a marketing ploy? Who knows for sure? But old memes die hard.

The University of Wisconsin’s Center for Whiteness Studies has some interesting sources on White constructions of Black on White sexual assault here.

The film King Kong thus belongs to the tradition of Birth of a Nation (click for video clip), which first put on the silver screen blackface images of African American men attacking virginal blondes in traumatic violation of imaginary national and race identities. When the airplanes arrive to shoot down Kong and save the white goddess, we can hardly forget the ride of the Klansmen who come to the rescue of the white South in Griffith’s film.

The image of a Black man as a gorilla, ape, or sexual monster didn’t just disappear. No doubt, some segments of White society are still apt to read the LeBron image as such. While one would hope that this is a very small minority, more troubling are millions of suburban whites who just don’t “see” racism anywhere.

Frank Darabont’s 1999 film adaptation of Stephen King’s, The Green Mile, shows a similar depiction. In this case, John Coffey, an 8 foot Black man is falsely accused and sentenced to death for the murder of two small White girls. Part of the message of the film (I haven’t read the book) is that Coffey is accused and murdered by the state because he fits the dominant racial stereotypes of White society. In another scene, Coffey is taken to the warden’s house to “cure” his wife’s cancer. The wife, wearing a long white satin gown with flowing long blond hair is powerless against “the giant.” The four white men are also depicted as utterly powerless (even with firearms) as they look on. Ultimately, the viewers understand that Coffey is there to help the poor sick woman but the scene plays on old narratives of the savage (Black) raping of (White) purity.

The Green Mile could be seen in the tradition of Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird, which also addresses these same white fears and the injustice that deeply embedded racial stereotypes help perpetuate. Again, despite the good intentions of enlightened whites, liberal justice can not overcome the “black male predator”/”white woman victim” cultural frame.

Whatever the intentions, the Vogue image appears at a time of extra-heightened racial awareness and even perhaps a growing animosity. Ultimately then, the image is not merely a piece of popular culture but part of the now overtly racialized political climate which was always brewing just below the surface before Barack Obama’s speech on race created the firestorm. Nothing currently in America isn’t about race.

One way of systematising such legacies is to first distinguish between texts that really are straightforward adaptations of Beat texts, on the one hand – and more indirect textual influences, on the other. An example of the first would be movies based on iconic Beat texts, such as Cronenberg’s version of Naked Lunch, or the horrible old Hollywood version of Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. Both these would be examples of adaptations, but of course adaptations that either add or subtract essential elements of their original ‘seed-texts’: Cronenberg’s film adds a substantial amount of biographical material on Burroughs which is not to be found in his novel, whereas The Subterraneans a la Hollywood has removed the central tension of the novel, which is a portrait of an inter-racial love affair…

Overall, there are surprisingly few film adaptations of Beat novels, and most other Beat inspired films are based on autobiographical material, such as Heart Beat (based on Carolyn Cassady’s memoirs), or The Source, based on reenactments of biographical scenes from the lives of prominent Beats (We need this one out on DVD now, please!). TV has also virtually only used stock stereotype characters and incidents in its representations of Beats and Beatniks, and not really done major adaptations. Maynard Krebs is cool, but we could use some real Beat characters on the small screen – why not do Dharma Bums as a mini-series? Anyone? Mr. Spelling??

These and other adaptations are also examples of remediations of Beat texts – all involving shifts from the written medium of literature to other more visually oriented media. A very good example of this is the comix that one of my students found, which is a remediation of Kerouac’s life as The Shadow – a reference also to his novel Doctor Sax. Mark Beebe’s A Vision of Kerouac as the Shadow is terrific noir stuff, but ultimately also more of a Beebe memoir than a real adaptation of Kerouac.

Other remediations would involve turning Beat characters or narratives into songs, and there are literally hundreds of those, so that would be impossible to cover fully here. Some of my favourite songwriters such as Tom Waits and Van Morrison, should be mentioned here, though, as Beat fans and remediators… If for some reason you are into modern crooners, working in commercial styles that would have sounded familiar to Kerouac and his generation of radio listeners, you could do worse than checking out this video:

Leaving adaptations and remediations, we enter a more loosely defined category of influences from Beats and Beat texts on other, later artists, or artists working in other parts of the world than the US. Starting in a Scandinavian context, I guess the best-known case is Swedish singer-songwriter, Ulf Lundell, who references a Beat ethos in many of his songs and who is also the author of a road novel with the obvious title Jack… In a Danish context I would briefly suggest poets Poul Borum and Dan Turéll as carriers of the Beat spirit, and also as translators and disseminators of the great Beat inspirators in a Danish literary and critical context. More recent ‘tough’ realist prose literature such as Jakob Ejersbo’s novel Nordkraft could also be forwarded here (the book refers specifically to both Naked Lunch and On the Road)…Ultimately, almost every country in the world has its Beats, and it would lead too far to cover that in this post. I would like to mention, though, as some of my students pointed out, that for instance the poetry slam movement owes a lot to the Beats’ practices of spontaneous, uncensored speech. See this example:I would like to suggest that we now look at more specific intertextual references, because they also lend themselves to categorization as icon-work – either collaborative or adversarial interactions with the famous (hence iconic) Beat figures and/or their texts. Here one can also distinguish between homage and pastiche, all according to the intentions of the new texts: to celebrate or to imitate (and possibly make fun of) the original. My students found several wonderful examples of this:Here is a U2 music video which features William Burroughs as ‘The Light’, playing with all sorts of apocalyptic ideas, alien invasions etc.Of the many Ginsberg appearances in music videos, I like this one where he revisits his Uncle Sam persona. It’s a 1996 collaboration with Paul McCartney.A hip-hop remix of Ginsberg’s voice such as this one seems an obvious case of homage, as well…The Ginsberg figure in the fantastic ‘Dylan’-film, I’m Not There is another case in point…More unclear examples of pastiche, where the intention seems both to poke fun and to give tribute can be found in these two wonderful Simpsons episodes:Bart vs. Thanksgiving where Lisa rewrites the beginning of “Howl”! (c. 13 min, 7 secs in)Hurricane Neddy, where we finally get the back-story for how Flanders became the present-day sanctimonious hypocrite we all love to hate (clue: Beatnik parents) (c. 14 min, 50 secs in)

Both examples reference their objects of pastiche ‘silently’, relying on our cultural competence to decode them. Therefore I read them as primarily collaborative icon-work – while we are meant to laugh, we laugh with “Howl”, rather than at it. In the example with the Flanders parents, we are not so sure, until we learn that the experimental ‘cure’ that made Ned what he is today involves years of spanking-therapy – thus relatively speaking making the Beatnik style of upbringing (“We’ve tried nothing, and now we are out of ideas!”) seem marginally preferable, at least from my point of view!

In closing we should perhaps mention that hundreds of books and films are dedicated to Beat figures or cite Beat texts as mottoes. Also thousands of web pages and e-mail signatures use Beat quotes in a similar fashion. There are Beat portals galore – some of which I have mentioned in previous posts…

Here is another: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat

It seems that it is fair to say that the Beat legacies are thriving and more with us than ever. Can we have a movie version of On the Road now, please?

H/T the Literary Outpost.

This is Ginsberg reciting his poem but I don’t know why the word order is changed from the original. I’m sure Bent could help us with this.

I think this re-mix is fantastic. I’ve emailed the creator of the video to ask her/him about the music and video that was chosen. I love how Ginsberg is adopted and recreated as contemporary political and social commentary.

UPDATE: Here’s the reply I received from the video’s author.

The project had more to do with American history (1932-62) than Ginsberg himself or the Beat movement. It accompanied an essay about how we got from the New Deal to the Communist witch hunts and Cuban Missile Crisis.

The music is from Angelo Badalamenti and the Prague Philharmonic. The reading is from a Library of Congress recording from San Fransisco in 1959. The video is public footage from news reels from the above period and my own archive of family home movies from the Fifties and early Sixties.

I suppose the intention is to project how the population’s own divided feelings about the national identity reflect Ginsberg’s confused feelings about his own identity as American.

• 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…