Getting familiar with the Beatniks

I'm only just starting to get into Beat generation literature. I recently started William Burroughs Naked Lunch and so far, what a shocker. I must say I'm really enjoying it but its very surprising such an obscene work was produced in that time. Also, are most of the other works of the movement in this scatter-brained style? Is that what makes it 'Beat'?
And of course I'm accepting recommendations. What else would you suggest I read after this

 

I've got a copy of On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. I started reading it, but am about half way through so far, and it's been quite educational to discover that the language used then is still in use today (Cool, Hip, etc).

I've also got a copy of The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and in the same book there's Radical Chic & Mau Mauing the Flack Catchers by the same author, Tom Wolfe

These were written about the same time as Naked Lunch (which I haven't yet read), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which my Son has given to me to read.

It was a very exciting time in the late 50's early 60's as writers started to explore the boundaries of what would appeal to the general public. I remember also reading about Sonny Barger and the Hells Angels, which I think was written by Hunter S Thompson, another of the new wave of writers, who have shaped the written narrative of our age ever since.

 

Someone else who may be something of an acquired taste is Thomas Pynchon. His books are very complex and take a lot of brain power to read. However, I've got The Crying of Lot 49, which is his shortest novel, and Gravity's Rainbow, which is somewhat longer. Then there's V, which I haven't read, and several others which I'll have to read after I've shuffled off this mortal coil, as they're too long for me to manage in the years I've got left on this earth.

 

Yes I'm famili

Yes I'm familiar with Thompson's work. I've read many of his articles on Nixon, the Hell's Angels, the Kentucky Derby, Vegas, etc. I started to read Fear and Loathing but then I realized it sounded a lot like the movie and I've watched the movie (both Johnny Depp and especially Benicio del Toro were otherwordly good). I haven't read Kerouac or Tom Wolfe yet, I figure I'll dive into On The Road next

 

I started Gravity's Rainbow 2 years ago, still yet to finish it and I can't move on to any of his other stuff till I do. I like your idea of post-mortal reading a lot, I think I'll believe in that

 

Check out Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Don't worry it's not a technical manual, lol, except for your mind.

 

These excerpts have convinced me. I need to read Pirsig post-haste. Where do I start? Is this Zen book fine for a beginner?

 

I remember going to San Francisco in the 50s with some friends to "look at the beatniks." We saw a lot of people with long hair hanging out. We, of course, wondered "what are they doing and why are they doing it? I guess I found out in the late 60s when I had long hair and was hanging out!!

 

I have in my possession audio tapes of a lecture by Ram Dass from the 1960s. He gave me permission to publish a transcript of the lecture. I've transcribed about a third of it but never finished it. This was many years ago. I've digitized the tapes. They're now in mp3 format if anyone wants to help finish the job...

He is hilarious! He's like a tripped out standup comedian. His stories are classic, reminiscing about his time with Tim Leary at Harvard and his experiences with LSD as well as his time with his gurus in India.

I think I might just post up the mp3 files and let people download them. Easier and better to listen to his voice than read.

Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) was not a beatnik. He became one of the first true modern hippies, by giving up his material world to find nirvana with the enlightened ones in India. Many a hippie followed. In fact, one of his "gurus", a tall blond American was his inspiration, and could be considered a hippie by his lifestyle.

Btw, the original hippies can be traced back to Europe in the late 1800s. You can read Gordon Kennedy's book, Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture online at hipplanet.com.

 

My poetry tradition dates back 12,000 years, but it was the Beatniks who first popularized our poetry in modern times. Being hard core leftists, they were actively searching for things like our poetry, and the first really popular translations of the Tao Te Ching had become available. During the 1960s, some fifty million hippies took up the practice, only for some of us to discover our poetry can be used to design weapons of mass destruction. I've had logicians ask me to write paradoxical nonsense for them, while the same idiots they work for censor my book, and lock up harmless potheads in federal prisons.

Being composed of mostly militant atheists, the Beatniks never could comprehend that they were playing around with fire, and our poems are magic, and math. Nor could most hippies comprehend how our poems are mathematical, so my work shows them how its done. Empowering a few hundred million people to instantly see how to easily use AI to get around all the censors killing everyone, then simply denying they're killing anyone. Language itself is self-organizing, and its intrinsic geometry reflects our mortal fallibility. In order for modern science to take the next step, they must first go down the rabbit hole, or be left behind.