And the beat goes on
I was planning to head over to Alcatraz, after a pastry and a 'medium' (massive) coffee in a coffee house.But as I wandered, I came to City Light Books.
I hadn't really given them much thought, but SF was sort of a hub for the beat poets (you know, Kerouak, Ginsberg and all that mob) and City Light Books was sort of the hub within SF for the whole deal.
In fact, Ginsberg's seminal poem, Howl (no, I didn't know any of this either, but travel is about learning right?) was actually published by City Lights, after a reading that was, as far as I can see, the same thing to the poetry world that that first Sex Pistols gig was to music.
i.e. everything changed. Given a push, perhaps by an obscenity trial to help things along the way.
It turns out City Lights bookstore is still there, and it has a poetry reading room. So I went up there, and I wrote a poem...
City Lights Poetry Room
Ideas conceived, creation's womb,
But also maybe I should mention,
This feels a bit like just pretention.
Do not just read, be seen to read,
In this, a trendy place indeed,
Artistic leanings all on show,
It might be cool, I just don't know.
I do know this just isn't me,
I can't take things so seriously,
For beauty's truth and sets you free,
But boobs and jokes mean more to me.
I shall await offers of publication.
That said, I did go to the Beat Museum (although that alone seems like something of an epitaph too) where I learned a lot more about Kerouac and the rest of them.
But what struck me most of all, for all their talents and significance was that alone, none of them were really anything. Honestly, if any one of them had written their material in an Iowa farmhouse and sent it out for publication, nothing would ever have happened.
That's the thing about movements. Even a supposed 'outsider' movement like this is actually a community of outsiders - a shape with an inside of its own.
Well that's what I wrote in my notebook at the time anyway, finishing... "the true outsider remains wild, alone and isolated - a hermit or madman. You accomplish nothing alone."
See what visiting these places will do to you?
Another interesting thing I found myself feeling. A lot of people visited the bookstore, pausing only to glance at the place and take a photo and I think I suddenly realised how a devout Catholic must feel watching tourists visit a cathedral.
These people knew they were visiting something of significance, but didn't seem to have really engaged with it on any level. Not even asking questions, let alone waiting for answers.
It was just a building to snap themselves in front of with a grin, then move on to Planet Hollywood.
So sorry, to all you proper religious people out there, for my glib approach to your significant monuments in the past. (note: this will in no way prevent me from doing more of the same in the future).
All in all, it was quite a day, leaving me asking questions of myself I would rather not deal with.
Time for a drink, I think.
n.b. 'time for a drink' was, in essence, Jack Kerouac's response to most issues after his unexpected and sudden fame, so this is actually a cleverly themed response to the situation, not a sad, alcoholic ploy. Probably.
posted by Peter The Great @ 11:30 PM
17 Comments:
Aww I liked this post. Much to think about, and I'm quite insanely jealous of you going to City Lights. I'm not so sure that nothing would have happened with their poetry alone though, no matter how mediocre - Pam Ayres is still somehow making a living from her 'poetry'.
As for accomplishing nothing alone, surely it all depends on the motivation behind being an outsider? One with a system of thought drastically different to that of the mainstream is forced into the outsider role - that is not to say they wish to be there, nor that they would shun like company, nor that they necessarily would force change to convert others to their school of thought either. On the other hand, one who chooses to become an outsider accomplishes exactly what they wish simply by remaining that way. That the ripples stay within their world and not ours should not imply that nothing is achieved.
Actually screw that. Having read through what I just wrote, I think I prefer drinks, boobs and jokes too...
Not sure the concept of outsiders can really exist. See definition below of outsider art:
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut (IPA: /aʁ bʁyt/, French for "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.
While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "outsider art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the institutions of the mainstream art world; in many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Much outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.
True outsider art would be something like Nek Chand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nek_Chand
The better explanation, for me anyway, is that Kerouac and his peers were members of a community whose values and aspirations chimed perfectly with the spirit of the times. As a former devout Catholic, I eventually came to the conclusion that no one can really know the mind of God, not even the Pope, and that all you can do is hold true to your own beliefs, find a community that shares those values and aspirations, and be prepared to live and die by them. I'm still looking for mine.
I wouldn't be too hard on the tourists. I'm a little happy snappy myself on occasion. Sounds like you're having a great time. I look forward to hearing some of these nuggets incorporated into your act.
Surely the definition of 'outsider art' can change with time? Cardinal's definition came some 20 - 30 years after Kerouac and the Beat Generation movement began and was supposed to reflect Dubuffet's own. I have no doubt that in these early days, Kerouac et al would never have been described in this manner. But one could argue that even Debuffet's definition became more broad over time ("Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses - where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_Art ).
Language evolves and meanings change; there is no point in keeping the term strictly for use in its original sense when it is now used so widely to define that which is not created in the art mainstream. Permitting and acknowledging language change can be a powerful tool. Though the Beat Generation may have *eventually* 'chimed perfectly with the spirit of the times', I'd argue that they definitely didn't originally - hence why the movement and the liberalization of what could be published was so long in the making. To me, that definitely implies they should be granted 'outsider' status, and their art defined as 'outsider art'. What else to call it if not that? I do think there is also the need here to distinguish between being an outsider and being a loner. Chand is both, in my opinion, whereas Kerouac et al were a community of outsiders - a sort of leper colony in the art world, if you will...
Dissertation procrastination is a marvelous thing.
PS Norman - I had thought that it was widely considered that no one can really know the mind of God anyway. 1 Corinthians 2:11 "It is only a person's own spirit within him that knows all about him; in the same way, only God's Spirit knows all about God." Surely a community with shared beliefs over this and similar beliefs shouldn't be that hard to find?
Obviously, you've not been a devout Catholic or raised in a deeply devout Catholic environment. The Pope knows all! That's why we have papal infallibility in matters of doctrine.
'To me, that definitely implies they should be granted 'outsider' status, and their art defined as 'outsider art'. What else to call it if not that?'
Um... insider art? The one thing I realised once I started to take a greater interest in art is that true outsiders do not really exist in the art world - Nek Chand being the only exception of which I am aware.
Let's examine the beat generation:
Kerouac -
Kerouac's athletic prowess led him to become a 100-meter hurdler on his local high school track team, and his skills as a running back in American football earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame and Columbia University. He entered Columbia University after spending a year at Horace Mann School, where he earned the requisite grades to matriculate to Columbia.
Ginsberg -
In 1943, Ginsberg graduated from Eastside High School and briefly attended Montclair State College before entering Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson.[3] In 1945, he joined the Merchant Marine to earn money to continue his education at Columbia.[7] While at Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal, the Jester humor magazine, won the Woodberry Poetry Prize and served as president of the Philolexian Society, the campus literary and debate group.[6]
Williams S Burroughs -
He finished high school at Taylor School in St. Louis and, in 1932, left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University.
Ken Kesey -
Kesey attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957, where he was also a brother of Beta Theta Pi. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958 to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did the following year.[3]
Outsiders? Who exactly are we kidding here? They were as inside as you could get. Each and everyone of them were the scions of white privilege. They were all privileged young white men.
A bunch of poor black men pulling the same shit would not make it out of a Chicago police station alive in the 60s.
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against them but outsiders? pffft.
If you want to talk about real outsiders, I take my hat off to these people:
The Little Rock Nine was a group of African-American students who were enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The ensuing Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, and then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower, is considered to be one of the most important events in the African-American Civil Rights Movement.[1]
I have no opinion on their poetry, not having read any. But they do not fit *my* definition of outsiders.
To illustrate my point my clearly, I reproduce an article contrasting the different experiences black and white students had of a campus occupation:
1968 and the Spirit of Hamilton
by Robert Friedman
Last weekend, several hundred participants in the 1968 student protests at Columbia occupied buildings on campus—this time legally—to reflect on the meaning of those events. This time the students had the benefit of 40 years of hindsight. This time, too, black students (now doctors and judges and teachers) and white students (now also doctors and judges and teachers) were together again under the same roof.
That might not seem like such a big deal at a moment when a black man (and a Columbia graduate) stands on the doorstep of the White House, but at one commemoration session Friday night at the Columbia Law School, something historic took place.
These two groups had long gone their separate ways: first that night in April 1968, when white students were asked to leave Hamilton Hall and take over their own building, and then for the next 40 years. Resentments festered. Black students felt their story had never been told. White students felt they never got a good explanation for why they had been sent packing.
The room at the Law School was crammed with about 400 alumni, current students, and observers. But I wish more of the Columbia community had been there to witness what unfolded during a three-and-a-half-hour living-history pageant in which three dozen participants told bits and pieces of the larger story of the Columbia uprising.
Zack Husser, a black football player at the time, talked about his anger at coach Buff Donelli’s “stacking” system, which involved putting most of the black athletes at the same position, regardless of where they had played in high school, resulting in all but one of them sitting on the bench. Al Dempsey, now a judge in Atlanta, talked about how his experience at Columbia—including being stopped by security guards every time he entered the campus—was more painful than growing up in the South. Indeed, he said, more painful than anything in his life other than watching his wife die of cancer.
Most of the whites in the audience, although they were classmates of Dempsey's and others with similar experiences, had never heard this bitterness. They didn’t know what drew many blacks into Hamilton Hall. Now, 40 years later, the stories were being shared—without acrimony, in front of all.
We learned from Juan Gonzalez, now a columnist at the New York Daily News, that there were indeed guns inside Hamilton Hall that first night. But the more important story, we also learned, was that the black student leadership ordered them out by morning. We also learned that the Student Afro-American Society thought the white students were hopelessly undisciplined and politically splintered into what Ray Brown, now a criminal defense attorney, described as 72 varieties of Marxism. Michelle Patrick, who wore a yellow cable-knit sweater to the revolution and later cut it into squares to protect against an anticipated tear-gas attack, talked about how she spent hours cleaning up after the white students left to make sure the building was presentable if the cops came.
By evening’s end, no one wanted to leave the cramped Law School classroom. There was a reaching out across the years and a realization of how central the experience of black students had been to the Columbia 1968 story, even though the protests are almost always described as the acts of a band of white radicals led by former Columbia student Mark Rudd.
The next night, at a literary event featuring readings by many of the writers who were at Columbia in 1968 and who took part in or supported the protests—Paul Auster, Mary Gordon, Thulani Davis, David Shapiro, Hilton Obenzinger, Ntozake Shange, Meredith Sue Willis, Sharon Olds—author Paul Spike offered an apology to his long-ago classmates for being what he called “a good German” and asked for forgiveness.
Forgiveness was a theme throughout the weekend. And it is past time for the University not only to forgive but also to embrace those who took a stand 40 years ago—a stand against Columbia’s ties to a military think tank that did research for the Vietnam War effort and a stand against the University’s land grab in Morningside Park. University President Lee Bollinger took a step in this direction when, on Thursday night, he welcomed the graying protesters back to campus. What he didn’t say—but what I believe to be the case—is that Columbia is a much healthier institution today as a result of what happened that year.
Yes, those were traumatic times. But social change, as Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian professor of philosophy, pointed out in a talk at a panel on the ethics of protest, only comes about as the result of disruption.
Political protest has a long history at Columbia, dating back to the days when Alexander Hamilton agitated against the Tory masters of King’s College. Nearly 200 years later, his heirs went into a building named in his honor, put their careers on the line, and said “enough.”
Columbia today is a far more diverse community, as those of us who walked around the campus over the weekend couldn’t help but notice. There’s a University Senate where none had existed before. The curriculum is more inclusive, and instead of an unsightly construction pit in Morningside Park, there’s now a beautifully landscaped lawn and pond. On Sunday, the Friends of Morningside Park planted a weeping cherry tree above the pond to mark the spot where the gym wasn’t built. It is a fitting memorial, which will last for generations, to the spirit of 1968.
The author is a member of the Columbia College class of 1969. He was the editor in chief on the 92nd Managing Board and one of the organizers of the Columbia 1968 commemoration.
Outsiders? Maybe to a degree. But OUTSIDERS in capitals? Sorry. Not now. Not ever.
I'll be brief as I'm on a crappy keyboard with no space bar (hello ctrl-v) and sticky keys. Yes, I do completely agree that Kerouac et al were certainly not OUTSIDERS. However, I *have* read their poetry and the more 'mainstream' (T. S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, etc) that was permitted to be around at the time. The manner in which they wrote was originally considered shocking and obscene in both content and form. It was definitely new, radical and far from the norm. Before the movement, their poetry was shunned as being sub-standard and of little literary value. Though the authors may all have been priveleged white young men, this should not detract from the focus of the debate here - whether their art was true 'outsider art' or not. Yes, in this day and age there might not be much which strikes you as true outsider art, but I'd argue that a lot of the reason this is the case is because of the beat generation movement and the impact it had on liberalization. It is very difficult to make judgements now about how radical they were at the time without recognising the correct historical context, especially as their success has impacted our current standing so drastically and moved their work more towards the norm.
Yes, the Little Rock Crisis was appalling and yes, it did force many young black students to be OUTSIDERS. In my opinion though, it is the art itself and not the creators of it that should be able to stand alone in 'outsider' status. The reasoning behind Debuffet's original definition was that true art brut could not be assimilated into the mainstream. We must either hold to this definition and focus very specifically on the lifestyles of the authors and artists rather than the art itself, or focus on the artwork with an eye to context. Poetry that remains unpublished through being too controversial may not make the big news as that which is unpublished due to race discrimination might, but it can still definitely be outsider art.
All this about the beat poets and not one person stopped to ask about the hotel room and bottle of tequila?
Also, I've found your community. They're called 'Protestants'.
'Though the authors may all have been priveleged white young men, this should not detract from the focus of the debate here - whether their art was true 'outsider art' or not.'
What I was trying to express, badly apparently, my view that your background informs your worldview and therefore your art. It's not a criticism of the beats that they were privileged young white men, merely that BEING privileged young white men, meant that being outsiders was never really possible without doing more than they actually did. Let’s see... drop some acid, smoke a little weed, get laid, bum around, write some poetry. TRULY RADICAL. All art evolves and any quantum leap will raise hackles in the community that has a vested interest in the status quo. Did they change the art form? According to you, they did, and I am happy to take your word for it. Does that make them more than just the first Gap Year students? I’m not so sure.
I think the problem is that being the products of a middle class upbringing and, ultimately, having middle class sensibilities, their revolution is a little too bleached out and timid for me to take seriously.
Let’s look at Ginsberg a little more closely:
He studied poetry under William Carlos Williams, who was then in the middle of writing his epic poem Paterson about the industrial city near his home. Ginsberg, after attending a reading by Williams, sent the older poet several of his poems and wrote an introductory letter. Most of these early poems were rhymed and metered and included archaic pronouns like "thee." Williams hated the poems. He told Ginsberg later, "In this mode perfection is basic, and these poems are not perfect."[6][17][23]
Though he hated the early poems, Williams loved the exuberance in Ginsberg's letter. He included the letter in a later part of "Paterson." He taught Ginsberg not to emulate the old masters but to speak with his own voice and the voice of the common American. Williams taught him to focus on strong visual images, in line with Williams' own motto "No ideas but in things." His time studying under Williams led to a tremendous shift from the early formalist work to the brilliance of his later work. Early breakthrough poems include "Bricklayer's Lunch Hour" and "Dream Record."[6][23]
Here’s a sample of his work:
"Lightning's blue glare fills Oklahoma plains, the train rolls east casting yellow shadow on grass Twenty years ago approaching Texas, I saw sheet lightning cover Heaven's corners... An old man catching fireflies on the porch at night watched the Herd Boy cross the Milky Way to meet the Weaving Girl... How can we war against that?"
Come on. Which common American speaks like that?
This is an example of a common American:
[Frank] Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Italian immigrants Natalie Della (née Garaventi) and Anthony Martin Sinatra.[6] He left high school without graduating,[7] having attended only 47 days before being expelled due to his rowdy conduct. His mother, known as Dolly, was influential in the neighborhood and in local Democratic Party circles, but also ran an illegal abortion business from her home; she was arrested several times and convicted twice for this offense.[8] Frank's father Tony served with the Hoboken Fire Department. During the tough years of the 1930s, when the Great Depression hit North America very hard, Dolly nevertheless provided ready pocket money to her son Frank, the family's only child, for outings with friends and fancy clothes.[9] Frank then worked for some time as a delivery boy at the Jersey Observer newspaper,[10] and as a riveter at the Tietjan and Lang shipyard.[11] It was in the early 1930s that Sinatra began singing in public.[12]
It all comes down to definition, I guess. If you define outsiders and outsider art as being outside the mainstream, and you define ‘outside the mainstream’ generously, then yes they would qualify.
BTW: I’m starting to think the Buddhists are my chosen people although I’ve started to successfully find a way of combining my taste for ascetism and the monastic lifestyle with my love of occasional sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Not to mention stand-up comedy.
Again, it is not the artists but the artwork that should be focussed on here. Whilst I fully appreciate that you cannot ever completely escape your background's influences on your worldview and art itself, that is not to say that you cannot expose yourself to the world outside what you are used to and glean some experiences from that. I don't really understand how your feel qualified to comment on how 'bleached out' and 'timid' their revolution was for you without having read any of their works - particularly the more pivotal and influential pieces such as 'Howl'. The example of his work you gave was a short extract from a longer and much later work entitled 'Iron Horse', which wasn't published until 1974; its mentioning seems irrelevant to me. Your beliefs on whether pieces should be considered 'outsider art' or not appears to be largely governed by your views on the importance of literature from different classes; take a gander at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7993920.stm - would you consider Chand's work as 'outsider art' if it had been created by someone else?
I am confused over your mentioning of Sinatra; does his being an example of a more 'common American' make him more or less mainstream? His music was immensely popular at the time and very much in line with the mainstream culture. Copying and pasting large chunks of text directly from wikipedia adds little weight to your argument when large portions of it seem irrelevant and without explanation.
Buddhism, sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll? You could be Kerouac reincarnate. Although I'm not sure about the stand-up comedy in his life - wikipedia says nothing about that, so I couldn't possibly comment :)
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I accept the criticism about not having read the works. Fair cop, guv. I shall check out the beats. Accepting the criticism of my criticism of the beats being bleached out and timid - tell me - in what way did these guys actually change the world? Rattling a couple of teacups at a poetry soiree doesn't cut it for me.
It is unfair but not being either white or american, for me the beats are representative of a generation of privileged white people who confused beating some drums and smoking pot for doing something revolutionary. Although I accept it's probably a criticism that could be more fairly levelled at their followers and I've met enough of these self-absorbed navel gazers to be left singularly unimpressed.
The point I was making, again very badly, about Sinatra was that poetry is by its very nature an elitist art form and by extension an outsider poet is so much of an insider that they've pretty much disappeared up the establishments' arse.
I have conceded that if you define 'outsider art' as being art not in the mainstream then yes the
stuff churned out by the beats would be 'outsider art'.
You are right that I determine whether an artform as 'outsider' in part based on the class of the artist. But not only that. For me revolutionary implies that they changed the world in some significant way. Did they really? Did a single poem produced by any of the beats actually change anything?
Did they advance the poetry form? You say they did and I'd go with that. But the claims advanced on behalf of these people extend to a far greater extent. See here:
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761553702/beat_generation.html
'The term Beat Generation was first used by Kerouac in the late 1940s. The word beat had various connotations for the writers, including despair over the beaten state of the individual in mass society and belief in the beatitude, or blessedness, of the natural world and in the restorative powers of the beat of jazz music and poetry. Beat writing generally called for a renunciation of material goods and acquisitiveness in favor of a rediscovery of the erotic, artistic, and spiritual self through the use of drugs, casual sex, music, and the mysticism of Zen Buddhism. The term beatnik was coined in the late 1950s to refer, often disparagingly, to people who embraced the ideas and attitudes of the Beat writers.'
What's changed since then? What is the difference between the beating the protestors got outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 and the beating the G20 protestors just got in London? Yep, thanks to the beats and their world-changing vibe, the Rodney King beating never happened. No one got waterboarded by the US government. Given the credit crunch situation we're now in and what's happened over the last couple of decades, I'd say that the revolution effected by the beats was a resounding failure.
They were the forerunners of our very own lovely Gap Year kids. They opted out in the full knowledge that opting in was always possible. That's not a revolution - that's a holiday excursion.
I guess we're discussing two entirely different things. For me, an outsider is someone who exists outside of the mainstream establishment. The point about Sinatra was that his art might have been mainstream but certainly at the outset, he could legitimately be regarded as an outsider.
My own personal view (limited to only me) is that outsider art can only be produced by outsiders and by definition challenges the mainstream in a way that the beats could not be virtue of who they were.
BTW. I consider myself as mainstream as it is possible for a first generation non-white economic migrant in this country to be. I have a professional job, my friends are all middle-class (regardless of the colour of their skin, although they are mostly white), and therefore not wholly an outsider.
As for being Kerouac reincarnated - think I'll pass on that. I'm happy to be mainstream and don't pretend to be anything else.
It's been fun discussing this with you : )
Hoorah - do check out the beats! They're quite enjoyable if you can permit yourself to forget their heinous upbringings. I do think we have been arguing slightly different points here. I'll agree that they have done little to bring about lasting change in terms of a physical revolution. However, they certainly shook up the literature world and brought about fairly radical changes there - despite just beating a few drums and having casual sex. Perhaps we've strayed along the way, but this is why their art was 'outsider art'. Going back to the original definitions, 'outsider art' is simply art that is created outside the bounds of mainstream culture - it makes no mention that this art should bring about any change or revolution, nor challenge the mainstream at all. I'd argue that it should carry on wherever it flows without so much of a nod to the mainstream in its truest forms.
If Sinatra as an outsider could write 'insider art', why can't Kerouac et al have created outsider art?
How often does the art world actually bring change into the nitty-gritty everyday actions of life? Art is there to both reflect and escape from the real world; though I might dream that something I write will change the world in the same way that many artists before me have dreamt the same, I believe it is naive to think that this will ever become a reality - unless I become some politician who manages to write a new and improved declaration of independence or similar. Despite having seen and read many works that reflect philosophies I may agree with, at the end of the day I have to survive in a world with many other people with different schools of thought to my own, and the way to do that is to remain mainstream. I may suspend my disbelief and enter a fantasy world where it's all very different, but it stops for me on the last page.
The beauty of the beats, for me, lies in the fact that they truly thought (in their naive, middle-class, 'viva-la-revolution-as-long-as-it-suits-me' minds) that what they wrote would alter the world - and I'd argue that it did for them and their worlds; they lived beyond the back cover. They weren't content with normal society, but unlike me they chose instead to form their own in the form of this community of people with similar ideals. Does it matter that these views and the perpetual gap student lifestyle didn't serve the generation beyond them?
As an afterthought (and on a slightly unrelated note) have you ever read 'Comedians' by Trevor Griffiths? It's another piece that vehemently believes in its power to change the world, with a nice intersection with stand-up comedy.
I've really enjoyed discussing this with you too :) And hoorah for not being Kerouac - I love what he wrote, but he did sound like a bit of a self-righteous moany bugger in real life.
Norman, cut the verbal diarroeha and get a life. This blog is meant to be entertaining.
realist
Norman, cut the verbal diarroeha and get a life. This blog is meant to be entertaining.
realist
Oh gody- opportunity for me to have the last word on Kerouac: cock. (Misogynist and dull to boot).
I'm with you, Jo..
Post a Comment
<< Home