The persistence of the Beats

[JS]

I'm working up a course on the Beat Generation (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder...) and popular culture. And I'm looking around for examples of their ongoing influence, or at least influence past their late 50's historical moment. There's some pretty obvious stuff---Dylan, Patti Smith, coffee-house poetry--but I'd be glad for suggestions of anything I might have missed or that might be a bit more subtle. (Maybe you could say that Jack Nicholson's character in "Five Easy Pieces" fits?) Examples from film, design, visual arts welcome.

Thanks in advance.

[djm]

I'm not an expert by any means, but wouldn't you have to specify and prove each element that you propose is an example that is unique to the Beat Generation? e.g. poetry in cafés goes back at least to the Bohemian movement, so you can't say it is unique to Beat poets. etc.

djm

[Congratulations]

I'm not an expert by any means, but wouldn't you have to specify and prove each element that you propose is an example that is unique to the Beat Generation? e.g. poetry in cafés goes back at least to the Bohemian movement, so you can't say it is unique to Beat poets. etc.

I don't think the argument is that the beats made up the idea of poetry in cafes, but that it was a distinguishing feature of the beat movement.

[doogieman]

I have discussed, with my chidren, the relationship between Dylans "rhythmic, word/sound association" poetry/lyrics and RAP music. Put a Hip Hop beat behind "johnny's in the basement mixin up da medicin -I'm on the pavement thinkin bout the goverment - man in the trench coat, badge out laid off says he's got a bad cough wantsta get it paid off". With one of those Rap chorus shouts on "WANSTA GET IT PAID OFF".

I not an academic, and there may be no "relationship", maybe more like parallel development, but it's a thought.

[Tyler]

I have discussed, with my chidren, the relationship between Dylans "rhythmic, word/sound association" poetry/lyrics and RAP music. Put a Hip Hop beat behind "johnny's in the basement mixin up da medicin -I'm on the pavement thinkin bout the goverment - man in the trench coat, badge out laid off says he's got a bad cough wantsta get it paid off". With one of those Rap chorus shouts on "WANSTA GET IT PAID OFF".

I not an academic, and there may be no "relationship", maybe more like parallel development, but it's a thought.

I think at worst there is a direct paralell, and at the very least a partial line from beat to folk to modern rap music.
I can really hear that song in my head done by Cypress Hill or Limp Bizkit

[SteveK]

I'm not an expert by any means, but wouldn't you have to specify and prove each element that you propose is an example that is unique to the Beat Generation? e.g. poetry in cafés goes back at least to the Bohemian movement, so you can't say it is unique to Beat poets. etc.

djm

I don't see why poetry in cafes would have to be unique to the beats. You would only have to demonstrate that current poetry in cafes, assuming there is any, is influenced more by the beats that by earlier Bohemians. It doesn't really matter that the beats themselves were influenced by earlier Bohemians as long as they mediated any current influence.

Wikipedia gives a pretty interesting history of the beats and discusses a bit about their influence.

[JS]

I don't think it would be hard to document a specific link from the beats to the cafe poetry scene--there are plenty of bios, literary histories, anthologies. It's got to be one of the most documented periods of recent literary history, or so it seemed when I got to work on this. Ed Sanders' very funny, very good poem "Hymn to the Rebel Cafe" would be a starting point (one that also looks back to a larger boho tradition) or his account of the development of the lower East Side scene in "Tales of Beatnik Glory."

But what really interests me about the Beats is a little vaguer and probably easier to guess at than to prove. I think people responded to them because they gave a kind of cultural permisssion for expressing what might have gone unsaid or seemed merely private. Again, Ed Sanders is a good source, his account in "A Book of Poems" of the effect of "Howl" on one midwestern high school kid. So instances of that sort of opening up of possibility are part of what I'm after as well as the qualities of word play, jazzy improvisation, a sense of literature as heard.

Thanks for the connections with Dylan and rap. Anyone know of any examples of rappers actually covering or sampling Dylan songs?

[Darwin]

Kerouac and Snyder, in particular, were very influential in making Zen Buddhism attractive to those who read their stuff--especially Kerouac's Dharma Bums. That's what led many of us to Alan Watts, and on to D.T. Suzuki--and beyond.

In a way, this progression was a bit like the way the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte led many--and often the same ones--of us to the New Lost City Ramblers and Odetta, and on to earlier sources, like those in the Anthology of American Folk Music--and beyond.

One of the areas where Beat poetry was heard into the early '60s was at the little inn at the hot springs in Big Sur, Ca. At some point, this became Esalen, where people "come for the intellectual freedom to consider systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream academia."

The Beats were also a major source of interest in drugs. Heroin and marijuana were already part of the jazz scene, but interest in mescaline and psilocybe prepared the way for the arrival of LSD.

So, I believe that it's reasonable to consider the Beat Generation (or, at least, their public face) to have been a direct ancestor of the Hippie movement, and a, perhaps less direct, ancestor of the whole New Age phenomenon, which still persists.

Also, the re-emergence of the coffee house as a sort of cultural center--but including espresso, which was unknown in the Eighteenth Century--was a big part of the public face of the Beat Generation. I'm sure that this is what made espresso familiar to those of us who had never even been to a city with a distinctively Italian neighborhood. Now we have Starbucks, but also a connosieur movement that mirrors what happened long ago with wine. Just last Friday a couple of friends and I performed a mixture of Bluegrass and Beatles songs at a local non-Starbuckian coffee house. It would take some research to find out for sure, but it could very well be that the idea of live music in coffee houses started with the Beats. I'm not sure if Boswell and Johnson ever saw such a thing.

[JS]

Snyder's a real favorite of mine. His presence along with Ginsberg's at the Human Be-in, Cassady's participation in Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Ginsberg's role in Chicago in 1968--clear links to the later counter-culture.

But Snyder wasn't entirely comfortable cast in the role hippie father-figure. In an interview, he seemed to see the Beats as tougher-minded, and his own practices (religious and ecological) as more surely grounded in traditional knowledge.

Thanks for the link to Esalen. Another way to look at this would be to consider the institutions--Naropa's another--with connections to the Beats.

[SteveK]

Darwin's mention of the beats Esalen got me thinking about its influence in "consciousness" stuff. That seemed to be a big item at the time. The whole era was full of the kind of stuff Darwin was talking about-Drugs, Zen, etc. Not only was this central to the bohemians of the day but a lot filtered into more-or-less respectable enterprises. Gestalt therapy, humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, peak experiences (Maslow), biofeedback, the study of dreams and so on. I doubt that it's fair to attribute any of this directly to the beats but these things all of this was "in the air" in the 1970s. Introductory psychology textbooks began to take notice of this and often included chapters on states of consciousness. Humanistic psychology was mentioned in chapters on personality and psychotherapy. Withing psychology a lot of this was counter-cultural because up to that time much psychology was behaviouristic. Again, the beats weren't directly responsible but there seemed to be a pattern of thought going on.

[JS]

"In the air," for sure. I've got very fond memories of the bookstores of those times--"Howl" next to a shelf of New Directions books next to Jung and R.D. Laing next to "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones."

[Darwin]

But Snyder wasn't entirely comfortable cast in the role hippie father-figure. In an interview, he seemed to see the Beats as tougher-minded, and his own practices (religious and ecological) as more surely grounded in traditional knowledge.

It might be worth noting that "hippie" began life as an adjectival put-down of hipper-than-thou types. In 1962-63, I ran into several guys on the fringes of the Monterey folk music community who qualified for that label. None of them seemed to do anything other than hang out and take a wide variety of drugs. Talking to them was pretty unproductive. One of them seemed to anticipate the theatrical quality of Hippie dress, often wearing a top hat and a black bow tie with jeans and T-shirt.

By the time of the Monterey Pop Festival in '67, that kind of thing seemed quite tame.

Does anyone remember the Ramparts magazine article (probably in '67) on the Hippies? The magazine was very left-wing, but not in a counter-cultural way. The author of the article was very worried about the apolitical nature of the Hippies, fearing that they might be susceptible to some kind of Fascist appeal. He cited the pre-Nazi Wandervögel movement, much of which ended up co-opted by the Nazis.

It's rather ironic that two former editors of the magazine, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, became neoconservatives, while the closest the Hippie movement came to contributing to anything remotely Fascist was in a few personality-cult communes, like that of Mel Lyman. Maybe the Jonestown leadership would qualify, too, though they were very expicitly Marxist in their own minds. (Sorry to have gone off on a tangent here.)

Anyhow, I'd agree that the Hippies--as a group--could be characterized as shallower than the Beats--as a group. On the other hand, I'd say that Kerouac was much shallower intellectually than Snyder. As Watts said in Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen (published in 1958):

The "beat" mentality as I am thinking of it is something much more extensive and vague than the hipster life of New York and San Francisco. It is a younger generation's nonparticipation in the "American Way of Life," a revolt which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather than objective achievement...

When Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, "I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference" - that cat is out of the bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defense. But just because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say "the hell with it," nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes.

Also note Watts' characterization of the "'beat' mentality" as, "a revolt which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather than objective achievement." Perhaps it was that, combined with the effects of pot and LSD, that added up to Hippie shallowness.

[Darwin]

"In the air," for sure. I've got very fond memories of the bookstores of those times--"Howl" next to a shelf of New Directions books next to Jung and R.D. Laing next to "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones."

Ah, and Paul Reps' Zen Telegrams, the publication of which can probably be attributed to the Beat Zen phenomenon. If you write English-language haiku, you can thank Reps for coming up with the idea in the first place. His first book of English-language haiku was published in 1939.

Kerouac did a whole book of them. The one that has stuck in my mind all these years is:

In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
Has died of old age

It may be, however, that Snyder came up with the idea on his own, and that Kerouac got it from him. Reading Japanese haiku in translation sort of leads to the idea of writing them in English, and good translations provide some ideas of how to approach the process.

With R.H. Blyth's English translations of haiku going back to at least 1949, and with Reps having written his own in English as early as 1939, surely it was the combined Beat-Zen phenomenon that finally made most Westerners conscious of them in the late '50 and early '60s.

At the same time, there was an increase in interest in aspects of Japanese culture that seemed to be related to Zen--haiku, flower arranging, Japanese gardens, tea ceremony, martial arts, and so on. The writings of D.T. Suzuki and R.H. Blyth played a big part in this, as well. Even House Beautiful had articles on wabi, sabi, and shibui in the August 1960 issue. (Yes, I was an eclectic reader. )