What does /lit/ think about the Beat Generation?
Worth reading?
absolute garbage. a time in which an author's personal reputation counted for far more than their work, even by today's standards.
check out Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, and that's pretty much the only good book it ever produced.
Your mileage may vary. Both fans and detractors of the Beats take them more seriously than they took themselves.
Only Burroughs
>Americans love Jack Kerouac
>They do not even know that he is Canadian
>French Canadian
kek
>>7619771
That's such bullshit lad.
It's pretty cool - I greatly enjoyed Ginsberg's Howl when I was younger, around eighteen, and Burroughs is still one of my favourite writers and I'd easily recommend anything he wrote. Haven't read much by the others, Corso's Bomb was interesting and wild and Kerouac I always felt disconnected to.
>>7619771
Sadly true.
>>7619785
He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts desu senpai
>>7619818
>felt disconnected to.
this sounds oxymoronic :p
every beat except perhaps Kesey had one gimmick which they did to death over the course of their entire career with no effort at personal growth or evolution.
they sold because their cult following was more interested in their lifestyle than in the actual works themselves, which ranged from mediocre to absolute garbage.
>>7619758
Mostly self-indulgent garbage that won't stand the test of time into the 21st century. Kerouac seemed like he was honestly a very nice person but almost all of his books are trash. I remember thinking Visions of Gerard was a sweet little book but it would pass better as children's literature.
Allen Ginsberg was a total fraud, though I think he knew that and didn't give a shit. Howl is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get poem. There's not much, if any, depth to it. Unlike Whitman who was a very well read man and whose Song of Myself is a fruitful read both for novices and experts up to Harold Bloom's level, Howl doesn't lend itself to rereads. None of Ginsberg's stuff does.
Burroughs had nothing really to say, but I do think the whole cutup thing with Gysin, while really dumb, was kind of cool. I would never admit that in real life of course.
That said, those who were influenced by the beats, but aren't grouped with them, are usually pretty good. Thomas Pynchon is one. William Gaddis was certainly a beat, though nobody considers him one because he actually took literature seriously. Brion Gysin was really only affiliated with Burroughs but I read his book The Process a while ago and was surprised at how decent it was. Reads like a Beat book without the self-indulgence, and well-written.
But overall it's good that literature got it out of its system. Beat culture was a shallow phenomenon. A logical progression from the optimistic modernist influence of Auden and co. but nothing that will really survive.
>>7619790
Care to explain why you think that? What in Dharma Bums, for instance, gives you the impression that Kerouac thought he was writing something profound, that would be remembered down the ages?
>>7619823
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2aOSoRsoE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yruA7ff93Jw
pls do not take him away
>>7619850
>Burroughs had nothing really to say
He was more of a mentor and compiler more than anything. Plus there's a plethora of musicians and artists influenced by both him and Gysin. Without Burroughs there would be no Throbbing Gristle, arguably one of the most influential groups of that time.
>>7619860
I think it's fair to say the the people who were influenced by the Beats in general were largely much better than the Beats.
You'll never fully understand the beat generation until you accidentally walk into a poetry reading of two gay dudes reading howl and playing guitar
kerouac's reputation and fame greatly detracts from his credentials, it sucks and is so unfair
proust aside, there is simply not a stretch of works in manyy other writers' bibliographies as good as on the road, the subterranneans, the dharma bums, desolation angels, and big sur. read together, they are the american masterpiece of the 20th century
>>7620081
They're all really bad
He has some of the worst prose I've ever read
>>7619758
To me On The Road is one of the great american masterpieces of the 20th century. People who dislike the Beat Generation are crippled snobs who orgasms when a book namedrops Virgil.
>>7620118
you're being too dense for Kerouac, mate. You have to keep dragging your eyes across the words. That's the trick. He doesn't write prose, he writes an unhinged personal monologue.
>>7620178
I've never read him I'm just saying he's shit
>>7620217
you have some homework to do senpai
if you want the abbreviated kerouac experience, find the original scroll of on the road, where he is younger and full of vitality, and then big sur, where he's an old doomgazing broken down alcoholic and it's almost amazing under the circumstances that he even finished
best literary kicks around
>>7620228
Is On the Road your favorite by him?
>>7620241
I love it and have read it frequently in the past six years, but i have to say that you can't read the edited version. That's where everyone goes wrong with him, they read the edited novel version, which is simply not what he wrote. You need the original scroll for anything close to the real experience.
It's probably my favorite of his, but I'm never out of Kerouac. He has a great posthumous volume of papers, poetry, sketches, and early stories from when he was like 15-24 called Atop an Underwood. I feel that the reader of that gets the best picture of Kerouac the living, striving human, and I love it for that as much as I like his real work. And there's a lot to read. Hard to play favorites but OTR is in its own category
i read on the road and found it lacking in both substance and style. it felt shallow and obtuse; the kind of book that attracts only teenagers and young adults who have a rather slim view of the world, ie. the yolo-generation. it's essentially YA for boomers.
>>7620615
Boomers and the so-called YOLO generation are like 2 generations apart bro, make up your mind
>>7620615
original scroll, get to it
>>7619778
Daily reminder that Burroughs murdered his wife and got out scott free because his father was a multi-milllionaire.
>>7620649
the prose in the regular edition is basically that of his editor, the whole syntactic anarchy of the text as written is melted down into something that shouldn't have been
>>7619758
>asks if Beats are worth reading
>posts pic of most well known beat
>pic is irrefutable proof of manlet status
why even ask OP?
Is Jack Kerouac Chad?
Guys . . . I actually like Howl.
>>7619865
Yeah, I'd agree.
>>7620970
star running back in high school
rich and famous in mid thirties
but plenty of years of alchy vagabond and shit jobs in between, so yes and no
>>7619858
Dude that's absolute gold! I've never seen that interview before! Cheers Anon
It's a shame their reputation precedes them. Different books fulfil different purposes - Kerouac's books are simply written but are designed to inspire a sense of awe for the simplicity of life. It doesn't make it good literature in the same way we worship Whitman or Pynchon as good literature - but it is good in its own way; in the way that playing fetch with your dog is can be an inherently rewarding experience despite being ordinarily mundane.
Dharma Bums is my favourite because it is so genuine and sincere - I find it hard to describe such an earnest, innocent book as 'self-indulgent'; and if it is, not to a problematic extent. The problem is that there is such a cult around the Beat Generation that people expect way too much from them - they've become immortalised in a way that does a disservice to their intentions; like >>7619771 says.
>>7619839
Kesey wasn't a beat.
the best beat texts imo are
On The Road
Dharma Bums
Naked Lunch
Junkie
Mountains and Rivers Without End
The Fall of America - Ginsberg
Howl and other poems - Ginsberg
everything else is pretty much trash
>>7619758
Neal Cassady was a catalyst for about three generations of artists and never wrote anything of consequence. He's the real deal.
on the road inspired me to go road-tripping when i was 21 on whatever money had, doing what i could to scrape by in the meantime. it kind of changed my life, even if it wasn't the best book ever, it opened up an avenue of experience for me i never had before. the beats are kind of where i learned about shit like mushrooms and acid too
>>7620081
So wrong and bad.
>>7620985
>rich and famous in mid thirties
...wait how did he get rich?
>Oh god, we did so many more drugs than anyone else. You wouldn't believe how many drugs we did.
Beat lit.
>>7621107
i like his french accent
there is also another documentary about his quebec roots, I can't find it unfortunately, don't remmber the title
>figure ginsberg is shit by nature of being ginsberg
>read howl
>mfw its good
what happens now? am I a pleb? it's like a rambling bob dylan song, i like it
>>7621811
the first third tho
how has nobody mentioned Gary Snyder? GOAT beat poet, defender of mother earth and still living and producing to this day at like 95 years old.
>>7621811
>>7623545
I enjoyed reading Carolyn Cassady's Off The Road more than most proper beat stuff, because the story was actually interesting, and painted an actual picture of Cassady, a supremely interesting man.
That being said, the first third has always seemed kinda flat to me
Burroughs > Cassady > Kerouac, Ginsberg
Burroughs is the only beat whose career mattered.
>>7619758
Of course. Kerouac is a fucking hottie, I'd tap that manlet ass.
I read On The Road in highschool and thought it was childish
I picked it up again post-grad and thought it was fantastic
Not sure why ... I might have been too pretentious in highschool to enjoy such a scrappy book or maybe all the sex was just triggering my virginity ... either way it's a pretty good book and actually pretty self aware of how stupid the whole life on the road is.
>>7623627
this 2bh
i encourage the reading of his biography
>>7623719
>>7620968
he wasn't a manlet for his era autists. On the literary merit of On the Road and Dharma Bums, the books I've by him, I wasn't impressed. Maybe I'm wrong but the work felt almost completely autobiographical, I'm not that interested in some drunk hippy's wanderings with his fruity friends with wannabe-philosophical inner monologues injected randomly. Then again I could have forgiven all of this if the prose had been good, like many anons have pointed out its not. It's workmanlike as fuck.
>>7623797
did you read the original scroll?
if you haven't read that, you haven't read on the road
>>7620968
>>7623797
big sur has...interesting prose considering its drunken ramblings he refused to edit
still very much enjoy On The Road, years after my first read
no other book gives away such a powerful feeling that whatever you're doing right now, you're still wasting time and could be out on something great. started appreciating the book much more, oddly, after reading Kazcynski's "Industrial Society and its Future" and his idea of the power process. from that perspective, the kids travelling cross country are in search of that autonomy to put their physical strength into. that desperation and search for meaning he intended to portray is still relevant, even more so as government and international institutions have just kept growing and growing in the years since
>>7621825
On the Road, The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums all made the bestseller lists
rich by literary writer's standards
he wasn't Warren Buffet or even Stephen King or anything but he lived pretty high off the hog for a while
>>7623834
big sur is written the same way as the original scroll
kerouac and myself would both argue that that was his best mode of writing, even though it is antagonistic to the entire tradition of english
big sur he was limping through because he was legitimately just an alcoholic then, but on the road he had actual ideas behind why he wrote that way, besides the fact that he did so in only like three weeks.
>>7623955
what were the ideas?
>>7619766
Seconding the Kesey rec.
Western Lands by Burroughs is great too actually. It's his only real pensive work imo. It also works as a synthesis of all of his previous works into coherence.
The only other name that sticks out to me is Richard Brautigan. He was City Lights author that didn't really fit in with the beats and was the only one that could match Burroughs' surreal fiction and had a more interesting zen/buddhist influence done than Kerouac.
For what it's worth check him out because Ginsberg hated him.
What do you guys think of Lawrence Ferlinghetti? Was gonna check out Coney Island of the Mind from my local library one of these days
>>7623972
basically, he sacrificed immediate syntax control and broke with the conventional method of paragraphing so he could expound his story basically as his conscience can tell it, not unlike how joseph conrad uses spoken storytelling in heart of darkness and lord jim
plus when he wrote it, he was literally fresh off of the events in the story and the book had been cooking inside of him up until the moment he got to his typewriter.
his bet worked out and he told the fuck out of the story in a way that the literati are still upset about
also, he revised the scroll version a small amount, so it isn't completely just what he wrote as he wrote it. it did get a proof edit and some additions and subtractions
>>7623814
I have
>>7624136
at least there's that
>that last part in mexico where the thrill is gone for jack and then neal leaves
i still feel that feel
