Kerouac, long after Schopenhauer

Thanks Mercy for giving me something to write about.

Seeing the beats through modern eyes:
I can see why you would not be hooked by chilling with hobos and having no fixed residence. I didn't read the whole thing, but it looks like guys escaping the waspish middle class culture by disobeying its conventions. I think the lack of dialogue and sentence breaks is probably what made it special back in 57.

In history
before
But i wonder how aware he was of previous bohemian generations? I think Jacques Barzun in Dawn to Decadence makes a great point of how many twentieth century causes, particularly counter culture, free love, drug use as transcendental, and a fascination with eastern religion were taken up in the late 1800's and early 1900's
That time was also the time of great labor unrest, the Red Menace, and the assassination of Mckinley by an avowed anarchist.

Also, whats the difference in style between Kerouac and Ulysses/Finnegans Wake?
I think the beat generation were part of a resurfacing of the counter cultural trend that was probably suppressed through war-induced patriotism and the Great Depression.


But the main elements, that is the bohemian lifestyle, transcendence of conventional reality and disregard for literary conventions were nothing new, but merely a recurring theme throughout western civilization.

History
aftter
Two good things I can ascribe to their lineage: One is the poetry or lyrics of Saul Williams. Although he is in the genre of spoken word, I have downloaded three of his albums and they are fucking brilliant.
The other is a renewed emphasis on the illusory nature of conventional social reality. The transcendence of ego and the importance of the infinite/god.

One bad thing that the beat movement inseminated was the lineage of anti-convention which , via the hippies and post-modern bullshit led to the complete and utter lack of any criteria with which young people might be able to evaluate the assemblage of language into something having the properties of good and/or bad. That is to say, my self indulgent bullshit is just as good as yours.
Remember in the Nineties how all those lower class black and white guests on Jerry Springer (or equivalent) would say "You cain't judge me!" and in the r&b songs they would say they "There's only one judge, yo, and that's God."???????

One ugly thing they played a causal role in was the glorification of substance abuse. (I forogot to mention that Rimbaud abandoned poetic form and civilization, in favor of drugs, several decades earlier and proclaimed the universal primacy of love before becoming a nihilist.) I recognize that drugs/alcohol really do help one to escape from their current state of mind. But there is no connection between talent and alcohol. Being a pathetic junkie or drunk who happens to be gifted, doesn't excuse one's destructive behavior.

I do believe that weed and hallucinogenics really do open your mind in the sense that they alter your perception, so that you might not forever be a slave to the features of awareness that dominate you merely through their persistence.

But it disgusts me how many times I've seen these movies about artists/junkies or lushes wherein nobody ever points out that there addiction is not the tragedy of a great artist, but the common tragedy of any 'average' person unable to escape their destructive behavior, like a child molester or someone who beats their wife and kids.

Wait, I forgot blacks, blacks, blacks!
How and the fuck can you listen to those beats without talking about how much of their style comes from black people? Syncopated diction, love of Jazz, unconventional, wild lifestyles, drugs and living on the edge. Dude, that's white kids looking at the black side of town. That's black people through white eyes. Think about how they would have seen them in the forties and fifties: No work ethic, no place in society, love to sing and dance, fond of getting their smoke and drink on, sexually amoral. Jack Kerouac mentions this relation in "The early history of Bop"

So, I don't want to sound down on old Jack, but if I was there around 1960 or so, I'd say "I think you're doing good work in showing another way to live and write, but, don't bullshit yourself, there's still a long way to go. You say there's no world, the infinite is love and all that. Go for it. But, if you want to escape some new shit, escape your own bullshit. Escape the pretenses that you've been keeping inside of you. Escape your addictions. You say there's no real, we're all insane,but your self-destruction is real. The pain and fragmentation around you is real. There's still a long way to go to freedom, so don't stop."

As I write this, I'm listening to various readings by Kerouac. Not bad..