I hadn’t watched it in a long time, and I was struck by how much it felt like a period piece (produced in 1961) and how parts of it reminded me of The Beats, especially the song/dance number, “Play it Cool.” The young characters are full of rage and anger, and yet the new leader of the Jets urges them to “play it cool.” Even when they’re playing it cool, underneath boils rebellion. Recently, our family watched West Side Story. They all (maybe not Kerouac) are itching to attack the establishment, to rebel. As Dean Moriarty says early in the novel, “Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…” Just going without stop probably helped Kerouac avoid getting “hung-up.”įast-paced seems to be a theme in many of these writers’ approaches. Among other interesting tidbits, it reveals how Kerouac connected sheets of typing paper into a long scroll so he’d never have to slow down to change the paper, allowing him to just burn through his story. You might want to check out an NPR story that ran in the summer of 2007, on the 50-year anniversary of On the Road and Kerouac’s manuscript scroll. My personal favorite of the week is Jack Kerouac. What was perplexing, enlightening, or thought-provoking in this week’s readings? Who were your favorites? Compiled as The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary.Postnuclear Poetry and the Beats–Ginsberg, Reed, Kerouac, and Vonnegut As Bill Morgan's carefully edited edition of Ginsberg's academic lectures attests, Ginsberg was what he and many other Beat writers always were-serious students of literary history (American, European, and others). It is not an altogether inaccurate representation but neither is it true. Peruse any number of handbooks on the Beats, Beat encyclopedia entries, or book and essay chapters on Beat literature and one will find boilerplate language reifying key Beat counterculture mantras: Down with genteel formalism! Down with staid classrooms where the silence of the page obliterates the raucous roots of poetry! Down with stodgy intellectuals whose prudery puffs up a pasty American middle-class identity! Many Beat writers-notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (1926–97)-were responsible for this chronic characterization One of the most enduring narratives of the Beat literary generation is thatBeat writers were united in their stance as anti-intellectuals.

The best minds of my generation