Beat be Zen Buddhism
Kerouac Ben Zooter
Take off your clothes
Climb on your scooter
To Europe for Five Months
The apartment (formerly Max Ernst's) is a four-flight walk-up, and I galloped up the first two landings with a heart aflutter because for me this was like going to interview Beethoven. "Slow down now", came a smiling voice from high up, and in a moment there he was, erect, twinkling-eyed 72 among cartons and crates. "We're moving", said Marcel Duchamp, the living legend. I asked him where? "To a warehouse," the artist said. "We're going to Europe for five months".
If you want to go to Playa del Carmen, click here.
I asked him what he felt was his most worthwhile work. "The Glass" he said, that being his private name for the painting "The Bride Striped Bare by Her Bachelors Even" a famous painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Glass shows no direct influence.
Jack Kerouac
In 1948 Jack Kerouac meets John Clellon Holmes and the term beat generation is invented.
In 1942 Jack writes to a girlfriend:
...went to work as a laborer on the New War Department project in Arlington, Virginia...A Negro laborer went by with his shovel singing the loveliest blues I ever heard--and I followed him all over the field, listening and smoking...
In a letter from Nova Scotia in 1942 Jack writes:
...was I drunk last night! ...conversed biologically with a woman thrice, to the sound of sad mine-whistles. How Green Was My Wallet then-
In a 1945 letter to Allen Ginsberg Jack writes:
I feel an indescribable need to talk to you...Not because I'm high on Benny, and alone in the cursed kitchen, ... I want to confess that I've grown very found of you again.
In 1950 Jack writes to a critic who gave favorable reviews of his first published work The Town and the City ...The English language is a tool lately found (here Jack refers to the fact as being of French Canadian descent, his proficiency in English came later on. He goes on to say 'the reason I handle English words so easily is because it is not my own language. I fashion it to fit French images.'
In another one of Jack's 1950's letters (and one of my favorites) to Neal Cassady he describes styles of radio announcers. (Keep in mind old Jack is high and it is the time of the World Series).
...he is proud of his verbs...when a groundball is hit, he'll say ...a slow twisting weak roller as if baseball was the significance of life itself. Jack then compares this style to that of the great Mel Allen. Who, according to Jack has that simple back-country mind like Dean Moriarty (main character from his book On the Road).
Just pointing things out like:
Well, there's Johnny Mize mopping his face with a handkerchief...
or
there's Del Ennis picking up a bat at the batrack
Can you believe what this man can do with pros? If you want to get some books by Jack Kerouac, I recommend:
- On the Road
- Doctor Sax
- Mexico City Blues
- Tristessa
- Desolation Angels
- The Dharma Bums
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In the Dharma Bums Jack is living his dream as a Zen lunatic. Two young men search for Truth the Zen way. Here Jack goes beyond prose right to Haiku.
Buy the book now on a secure server. Just click the link below:
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Gregory Corso
In a City Lights book of some of Gregory Corso's poems, Allen Ginsberg writes in the introduction:
'...mad children of soda caps.'
'-a hip piss on reality...'
'Power is not to be dropped from a plane
Standing on a streetcorner waiting for no one is power'
'When Bird Parker or Miles Davis blow a standard piece of music they break off into other own-self little unstandard sounds-well that's my way with poetry...'
And Corso says 'the sun does not know what it is to like or dislike'
'I have seen many paintings of this;
the same inflictions,
the same sad face;
I have forgotten them all...'
This section will be continuing, so if you dig this kind of thing, let me know and it'll grow...
like the hallucination below:
 | The basic story line in this book surrounded a junky Mexican prostitute named Tristessa of whom Jack has fallen madly in love with. Jack can't find a way to tell her, and she sends him completely mixed signals, and is constantly too hung up on her drug addiction to care about love. At one point he leaves to go up to California, and the story picks up a year later when Jack returns with his urgent need to see Tristessa. Another story line of Tristessa involves Jack sitting in the pad where Tristessa and her friend Cruz live, and his fasination with the animals that live there (a Chihuaua, a cat, a hen, a rooster, and a dove). He meditates and watches them, wondering what they're thinking.
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