Beatniks !!! Dead or Alive ???

I agree with you that he sought them out, but he was one of them. He was never a "young jailkid" and he didn't have a schizophrenic radical communist mother, however Kerouac's struggle between his traditional values and his idealistic desire for freedom made him even more beat. He did do a lot of that "macho shit" and he wrote about it with a sense of wonder that the other Beats never seemed to express. He called himself a "strange solitary Catholic mystic."

Here...read Gregory Corso's poem "Elegiac Feelings American."
http://beat.wordpress.com/2005/11/24/elegiac-feelings-american/

I don't know which books you've read, but you need to read more than just On the Road to really get it.

 

I was raised by beatniks... my parents. My dad turns 80 in January, and still pretty much marches to his own drum beat.

 

sweet. any more stories ??? opnion is good, but i'm looking for beat stories now.

 

Just to get it straight...
Herbert Eugene Caen (April 3, 1916 – February 1, 1997) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist working in San Francisco. Born in Sacramento, California, Caen worked for the San Francisco Chronicle from the late 1930s until his death, with an interruption from 1950 to 1958 during which he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner. His collection of essays entitled Baghdad-by-the-Bay was published in 1949. He died of lung cancer in San Francisco and his funeral was one of the best-attended events in recent city history. The word "beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958.

so... I don't know why your bringing up Cohen I guess. Maybe cause Zappa rules?

In that quote from On the Road, Kerouac isn't describing what he though of as Beat ideals... he was describing the beauty he saw in the people he liked to surround himself with. And Jack (or Dean) was one of those people mad and desirous of everything. In fact, Jack also said... “What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

The Beat Generation is a term used to describe both a group of American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired.
The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957).[1] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The adjective beat had the connotations of "tired" or "down and out," but as used by Kerouac it included the paradoxical connotations of "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of being "on the beat." The Beat writers emphasized a visceral engagement in worldly experiences combined with a quest for deeper spiritual understanding; many of them developed a strong interest in Buddhism.
Echoes of the Beat Generation can be seen throughout many other modern subcultures, such as hippies and punks.

Author Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948, generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time; the name came up in conversation with the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation"). The adjective "beat" was introduced to the group by Herbert Huncke, though Kerouac expanded the meaning of the term. "Beat" was from underworld slang - the world of hustlers, drug addicts and petty thieves, where Ginsberg and Kerouac sought inspiration. Beat was slang for "beaten down" or downtrodden, but to Kerouac, it symbolised being at the bottom and looking up. Other adjectives discussed by Holmes and Kerouac were "found" and "furtive".
Kerouac's claim that he had identified (and embodied) a new trend analogous to the influential Lost Generation might have seemed grandiose at the time, but in retrospect it's clear that he was correct -- though possibly largely because the prophecy was self-fulfilling.

Not only was he one of the beats, he gave the group it's name. Each one of these people sought out other mad people as kin... in some of Kerouac's stories he talks about them as though he is an outsider but his actions are the epitome of the beat generation (funnily enough, the word generation is use but the title was only used to describe a small group of writers at first haha)

 

oh no.....you did not go there with my man HST.....

I agree with Morrocan Raccoon.....you really should read more of his works (if you have already, go back and read them again). He WAS Beat. And btw, his "semi -fictional" characters....the only thing semi-fictional about them were the name changes. These were real people in his lives. Every single one of them.

 

woo. I feel like my mind is about to explode, in a good way. how do you know so much duck and miss ???

 

Jesus, from reading... and my love of American Lit and Beat writers.... and a healthy dose of using facts off wikipedia so I don't have to type all this shit out myself. haha. All the knowledge is out there...

Kerouac has so many good good books... Dharma Bums is great.. Desolation Angels is a bit weird... The Dreams book... Ferlingetti is one of my favorite poets. Howl is amazing... I didn't much like Naked Lunch i think the slang put me off.. and while its not beat Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-aide acid test is great too.. I like modernish american authors who speak in a similar dialect to mine, I can connect with the characters very easily that way (which is why my favorite two books are On the Road, and The Great Gatsby.)

I have to agree with DollyDagger too...
me and Hunter S. Thompson are like this...

 

The Beat characters in some way remind me a little of Hemingway's anti-heroes.. always struggling towards an ideal but having some sort of fatal flaw.... I like that..

Hey thanks for the link, I haven't read much Corso, alot of the beat poets also remind me of e.e. cummings in cadence I wonder if there was ever any connection, being that Kerouac live in Mass.