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.