What I Learned/What I Want to Learn

Freedom:

While freedom is regarded as the ultimate attribute to obtain, the Beats show its complications and test how much “freedom” others can take, and where the quest for self-fulfillment can lead to selfishness.  For them, freedom meant the ability to do whatever they wanted and live the lifestyle they chose to, no matter how unconventional it seemed to others. They could just travel across the country at will, sleep with whomever they wanted to, do drugs, and write about whatever subject matter they pleased.

Their choices also affect others around them, often in a negative way. Neal leaves everyone he comes across in On the Road and never feels the need to apologize for it. Whether it be leaving Kerouac sick in Mexico or abandoning any of his ex-wives with his children, Neal’s desire to be free of all responsibilities overrides what many of us would consider to be common decency.

However, freedom does have its merits as well. Everyone is constantly told to “be true to yourself” and the Beats did that, no matter how strange society might have saw it, and there is something to be admired in that. On top of that, the Beats were also able to develop unique writing styles that they would never have been able to if they stuck to conventional thinking. Ginsberg would smash words that shouldn’t go together in Howl just to get an image across. Kerouac’s stream of consciousness style and lack of punctuation allowed him to make his readers experience his writing instead of just simply reading it. Diane Di Prima also didn’t subscribe to a normal prose style making her work sound conversational, like she was writing all her thoughts into a diary.

Contradictions:

The Beats had many conflicting ideas and attitudes. Di Prima lived as she liked for the most part and chose to raise her child as she saw fit instead of submitting to traditional values, but she still felt pressure from society to conform to gender roles and sometimes she caved (which is definitely not a criticism against her).  All of the Beats are seen admiring jazz and Kerouac especially elevates black jazz players into god like figures, but they end up being oblivious to the casual racism they perpetuate.

What I Want to Learn:

I really appreciated learning biographical facts about all the writers and who influenced them. However, I would like to know what writers have been influenced by the Beats themselves. How have they impacted popular culture? Has their unique writing styles caused anyone else to experiment with how language can be used?

I’d also like to know what ended up happening to the Beats after their most popular work was published. Obviously they continued to write, but were their later efforts ever as celebrated or acclaimed? How did the group feel when LeRoi Jones joined the black nationalist movement and seemed to specifically target what they had written about race in Dutchman?  Did the group continue to remain friends for the next few decades? 

(Diane Di Prima and LeRoi Jones)

Though I got the feeling not all of my classmates liked her, Diane Di Prima’s style really clicked with me. It’s a stream of conscious that I find easy to follow along with. I especially was initially interested in learning about her and the other women Beat writers because I’ve never heard of them and I don’t think a majority of people have, which is a shame.

Even outside of her work Di Prima was an interesting person. She printed a lot of the Beat’s stuff right out of her own house, decided to have a baby while not being married and didn’t care to be, and was firm about her own parenting style, where she would not lose her identity in being a mother and continue to be a poet. The latter especially must have been difficult to do considering the time period. Di Prima wrote about struggling between societal expectations and being true to herself because of this. She had to be a good hostess and do all the cooking and cleaning up, because she did care on some level about what people thought of her. I think most people feel that way, but many don’t want to admit it.

“What I Ate Where” was my favorite piece. The way it was framed intrigued me, showing different points of her life through food. All the little vignettes showed where she was in her life at that particular time-whether it be surrounded by friends and prosperous, or in poverty and reduced to eating “menstrual pudding.” The food corresponds with the mood Di Prima sets.

“Menstrual pudding” in particular made me laugh. Other people were shocked by it, but I thought it was Di Prima trying to be humorous about her situation. The food she can afford to eat is bland at best, disgusting at worst. Why not have fun and name it something that might give others pause? While I love potatoes and tomato sauce, I’m not sure how much I’d like them together and would hate to have to eat them every day.

Di Prima, to me, is the Beat writer that really showcases the full range of emotions that life has to offer. With Kerouac everything is one extreme or the other-either the most spectacular event ever or the most tragic event in history. Even Burroughs stuck to mainly one mood where everything was gloomy and a variation of a negative emotion (even his happier segments have elements of darkness in them).

However Di Prima writes her memories as they happened and is sensible about her experiences. Sometimes she has bad days where she doesn’t have any money or an Old Family Friend harshly judges her decisions about what she does with her life. At other points she’s happy where she can afford to eat decent food, is surrounded by friends, or just chilling out eating Oreos with her neighbors (though she complains that they make you fat). There’s a spectrum of emotions.

My Location

                Gary Snyder’s way of describing his location is very different from what most of us are used to. When Dr. Lennon asked us to keep in mind how we would describe our current location, I got very nervous. I’m still fairly new to Tampa, and am really just here for school. I don’t know anything about my surrounding area except “close to a major road with a small patch of tress nearby.” Though I was initially thankful we didn’t have time to discuss it in class, I ended up thinking harder about what I would have ended up saying.

                Though we discussed the idea that Snyder thinks of manmade structures being “natural”, his description of where he lived focused completely ignored details that we would use to describe our location. Snyder doesn’t give his address or even what town he lives in, but chooses to describe his surroundings. Names that we as humans created are superficial and don’t really describe the place we reside. His description of “on the western slope of the northern Sierra Nevada, in the Yuba River water-shed, north of the south fork at the three-thousand foot elevation, in a community of black oak, incense cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, and ponderosa pine” is so much more beautiful than simply saying “California” could ever be and it really shows his deep appreciation of nature.

                My description of Orlando (what I consider to be my hometown), is one I don’t think could ever live up to Snyder’s. I really admire his love of the natural world, and wish I was able to do the same instead of just appreciating it aesthetically. I find sunsets and oceans beautiful and serene to look at, but it’s not the same as the real joy Snyder would experience. He really respects the natural world on a higher level than most people do, where their definition of “respect” would be “I don’t actively harm the environment.”

                Here is my description however: “I live just an hour away from the ocean, surrounded by thick grass and looming palm trees. Only a hundred feet from sea level, an untouched wood engrosses me, filled with oak, miniature rivers, and wild turkeys.”

                Thinking about my description saddened me a little because my home in Orlando is in a suburb, so a lot of the woods that were once there were cut down so my neighborhood could be developed. It’s also near many popular tourist attractions so much of the natural beauty is ignored or simply doesn’t exist anymore because of all the construction done. I don’t even know too much about Orlando’s forests and wildlife, despite living there for ten years.

                This is basically the only I aspect I miss when I think about where I used to live, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (in a town named Kill Devil Hills-seriously). People of course lived there, and it was a beach town so there were tourist attractions, but the land had remained untouched for the most part. There were swamps everywhere, everyone fished for their own seafood, animals lived in harmony with their human neighbors, and there was rarely new construction unless it involved renovating an old building or bridge. Snyder has given me motivation to learn more about where I live now, because his approach to understanding a place is really fascinating to me.

Railroad Earth

Like what seems to be the rest of the class’s opinion, I also did not care for Railroad Earth. I was confused as to what was happening, and I kept getting frustrated when Kerouac would go off on tangents that had nothing to do with anything. Reading it out loud helped a little bit, but I still had a difficult time with the piece.

The section I chose to read out loud for class, but did not get to, was one another classmate chose, where Kerouac talks about the food he eats for breakfast and the prices of each item. I was really fascinated about how meticulous he was about naming each item and how much it cost (a grand total of 21-26 depending on whether he wanted two or three eggs). He was extremely pleased with how cheap it was, despite that he could afford much better. The food was also disgusting: it had “the smell of soured old shirts lingering above the cookpot steams” and described as being made near rats. His breakfast is also really simple to make (eggs, toast, coffee, and oatmeal), which further puts into perspective how badly the meal was prepared for it to be notable.

When discussing On the Road we talked about how everything Kerouac did or experienced was described as either the greatest event that could ever happen to him and his friends, or the worst thing ever that could happen to anyone. I feel like this passage in particular exemplifies that with how he describes the food. The food he gets at this restaurant is so bad that he has to tell you about it, so you too can experience on some level what he is going through. There’s also the description of the stew: “…one time I had the beef-stew and it was absolutely the worst beefstew I ever et, it was incredible I tell you-.” It is so appalling and “the most intensest regret” that the experience has to be shared, even though the events of Railroad Earth are basically Kerouac’s day to day routine.  

However, sharing the mundane is the point of Railroad Earth. For the beats, everything should be considered holy and everything deserved to be felt. Kerouac writes like you were listening to him talk to an extent: there are many tangents in the middle of a story and words are purposely misspelled so you are forced to say it out loud, so you hear it like someone was saying it. We even discussed in class that you had to read Railroad Earth aloud, because you were meant to feel the piece rather than merely read it. Kerouac’s stream of consciousness style of writing takes you on a journey through his mind, where you’re taken through every single aspect of his day, and made to experience everything that you normally take for granted. I still don’t know if I like Railroad Earth, but I can at least respect Kerouac’s use of language and the thought put behind the story. 

Dutchman

I had never heard of Dutchman or LeRoi Jones before this class, and I’m very glad we got to read him. Lula and Clay work well as representations of white and black culture.  I’m particularly interested in how unpleasant Lula is throughout the play, even before she murders Clay in cold blood. Jones/Baraka’s disdain for the racism that comes from white liberals instead of a more hostile, stereotypical image is present in both Dutchman and The Slave. In part I believe it’s because with overt racists it’s immediately obvious where you stand with them, but people who have studied black culture and claim to be more progressive with their views should, in theory, know better. Their ignorance can be even more staggering as a result.

Lula is very passive-aggressive about her racism, at least before she begins her dancing routine. She bothers Clay at the beginning, but immediately asserts that he was looking at her through the window. Throughout her flirting, she will insinuate that she is interested in Clay, but as soon as Clay flirts back she mocks him and acts as if it’s out of the realm of possibility that she’ll sleep with him. She’ll beg Clay to invite her to the party he’s going to, but once he asks she claims she can’t go with him and that she doesn't even know him. She’s able to manipulate the conversation to however she pleases.

Her claims to know Clay is what really sets him off though. She makes initial assumptions about him, like where he’s from, that he is trying to grow a beard, what his friend Walter is like, and even what his name will be before he says anything. Then she has the audacity to try and tell Clay how to live, that he can’t try and adapt certain aspects of white culture, calling him an “Uncle Tom” and insinuating he isn't acting black enough.

It’s this assumption that a white person can presume to know anything about black people that really seems to infuriate Clay and Jones himself. White people assume that because they've enjoyed certain aspects of black culture, like Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker, that they know everything. We saw Kerouac himself do that in On the Road. He spent a day picking cotton and immediately felt like he knew what it was like to be black. His brief time spent with Beatrice and her family makes him believe he understands Mexican culture. He wants to be black mainly because he enjoys jazz musicians so much.

Clay just wants to be left alone and be able to live however he wants, and Lula comes off as callous and even crazy for trying to make him conform to a stereotype. The larger message to take from this is that white people and black people will never be fully integrated (symbolized by the party Clay and Lula talked about) and only bad things can come from speaking your true feelings (symbolized by Lula murdering Clay and having all the passengers help to throw his body off).  

"The Junky's Christmas" film

          The opening sequence is borderline surreal. Burroughs sitting down and opening a book, preparing to read it aloud, invokes the image of someone's grandfather doing the same around the holidays with the whole family gathering around to hear it. The sets add to the image, where we see many closeups of traditional holiday decorations including a Christmas tree complete with star-topper and gifts, wreaths, and stockings hung over a roaring fireplace.

          However, the movie itself is not like that at all. I described the story in another post as 'Hallmark-esque' and while the ending is uplifting, it is more dark than anything. The decision to have the film in black and white was very smart. It compliments the atmosphere and makes the appearance of color at the end have even more of an impact. Combined with the choir singing 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing', the feeling that Danny gets, the 'immaculate fix', can be further understood and appreciated as an experience of the divine. 

           

        Claymation was also an inspired choice. Just using live-action actors would not have had the same impact.  This style of animation allows for more exaggerated movements and over the top facial expressions. I think it makes Danny more accessible for an audience to sympathize with because animation is seen as a media for children so it's not seen as threatening, even though Danny is a junky and the story revolves around him trying to find drugs. There's also a lot more room to work with lighting, which would have been a lot harder to produce on a larger set or actors that would constantly be moving. Even when Danny is outside walking in the sunlight, there's still a gloom about the world and shadows are all over the place. We mentioned in class how a lot of Burroughs's stories had a noir feel to them, and the shadowy alleyways in the film really exemplify that atmosphere.

        For me, the film also helped me realize how sad the story is at times. The juxtaposition of all the Christmas music and Danny frantically searching for a fix is depressing. While Christmas is viewed as a time for being with family and friends, Danny instead is alone for most of the film, and at the end only really bonds with the man in the hotel room next to him after giving him drugs. His only thing to look forward to the entire day was obtaining his high.

      That brings me to the ending of the film. I thought that interpretation was interesting. A lot of the class had thought Danny had died at the end, the immaculate fix being the peace that death brings, which was his reward for a selfless act. The film however clearly has Danny alive at the end; he's seen breathing heavily in his sleep as the picture fades to black, with no indication that he's about to die. The film takes the immaculate fix as a feeling of euphoria that comes solely from generosity, with no strings attached.

Interesting tidbit: Francis Ford Coppola (director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now) who produced this, also produced the film version of On the Road. 

   

 

Comparing the three beat writers

My experience with William Burroughs before this class had been limited to reading Naked Lunch back in middle school (which didn’t pan out well as I had almost no idea what was happening in the novel the entire time) and hearing mentions of him in Patti Smith’s memoir. From what we’ve read I like his prose style and that Burroughs is the most straight-forward out of the three authors we’ve read.

                There was one subject however that I noticed that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs all briefly touch on: underage sex. As distasteful as I find the subject, it is there in all the texts. I started thinking about it more when our class started discussing each of the author’s views of freedom. I believe that the treatment of underage sex in each of the works is indicative and enforces the ideas we came up with in class about each of their mentalities.

                On the Road starts with Neal marrying Louanne when she’s 16, and near the end Kerouac and Neal are in a Mexican brothel, where most of the girls are around 14. While the latter especially may be cringe worthy, it’s never really commended in the work. It is simply what happened, and to be fair those two examples are actually legal.  Kerouac was the most conservative out of the three, wanting to be different and searching for something more out of life, but found comfort in middle class sensibilities.

                Ginsberg on the other hand celebrated marginalized people, outcasts, and being an individual. Howl even has a stanza explicitly mentioning pederasty: “who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication.” Ginsberg’s view of freedom was more spiritual and involved anything that was outside of mainstream ideals and conformity. Ginsberg himself was a member of NAMBLA: “Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance” (http://nambla.org/ginsberg.html). I’m fairly certain that Ginsberg himself was not actually a pedophile though, and people who knew him insist that he was only advocating for the right to free speech. 

Lastly, Burroughs has the most explicit act of underage sex in Queer, with Lee and the boys in Mexico. Burroughs thought freedom should have no moral boundaries and was rather dark. He believed that in all of us where animalistic urges that were only held at bay by societal conventions. To be truly free is to give yourself over to all your desires, though you can never know what you ultimately want out of life.

Burroughs’s writing reflects that. It’s very clinical in a sense, even when he’s talking about a subject like heroin use or sex. He does not hold back on gritty details and creates a seedy and unpleasant world around him. Even his most Hallmark-esque story “A Junky’s Christmas” involves drug use and finding a woman’s severed legs in a suitcase. Unlike the other beat writers Burroughs isn’t interested in idealism.