If I walked a mile in Kerouac's shoes

[revolutionR]

I walked in Big Sur on the hills through the forest
when the day reached through the tall trees
with sun rays and shone on me like gold
I walked along the primordial beach
with sea foam licking my toes
along the cliffs looking out at the vastness
of the ocean of eternity, I breathed deep
the huge feeling of this pristine place
like no other, and I imagined what it would
be like to walk in Kerouac's shoes
when he wrote about his stay here in this
God's house of almost unbearable beauty

then I imagined drinking red wine with him
on the other side, when the jazz sounded
like poetry, and the poetry sounded like jazz

[the mingo]

Rev, if you walked a mile in Kerouac's shoes you'd be drunk on your feet no matter where you stood plus you'd be half a Catholic pretending to be half a Buddhist & a big problem to yourself no matter where you went - if you could walk a mile in Kerouac's shoes you would be emotionally incapable of sustaining any viable relationship to anyone - if you could walk in Kerouac's shoes you would spend the bulk of your final years as a grown man living with your mother - where's the poetry & jazz in that ? Sure, the guy had his writing but that was nowhere near the whole story and it was the bigger part of that story that put him in an early grave ... these are not judgements of mine, they are the clear cold facts - he never was, nor ever wanted to be, a hero
- that particular circus had to wait until after he died -

[dune]

And who the hell are you? Save your judgmental moralizing for church.

So, we still buds, or what?

rR, it was incredible how he brought jazz to the page. Not just to write about it-- his prose sounded and felt like jazz.

[revolutionR]

I liked the beatniks, as a young teenager I thought of myself as a beatnik, I liked Dylan because he sounded like a poet, But I really liked William Burroughs, when I first read Naked Lunch when I was seventeen, I read Ginsberg when I was eighteen when I was in jr. collage I did not read Kerouac until I left home a year later. But soon after I began reading French poets.Didn't read Bukowski until a few years later. I was reading all the surrealists I could find. When I discovered Philip Lamantia and Bob Kaufman, Bob was a kind of jazz/surrealist poet, like Ted Joans who was a jazz/beat/ surrealist. i did spend some time in Big Sur, I passed through there a lot going up and down the coast highway.If you have ever been there it is a very magical place. I never got to see Kerouac, but I saw Ferlinghetti, Ginsburg, Bukowski, Philip Lamaniia, Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, William Burroughs, William Everson, Andrei Codrescu. and many others, many unknown poets too.

[dune]

Don't know much about Lamantia. LeRoi Jones, Ted Joans and others definitely connected with the "Beat" movement into the sixties-- the black perspective/experience. Joans fused the blues and jazz into his poetry, and some of it had an ironic sort of "edge" to it (his father was killed in racial unrest in Detroit). Kaufman seems the true "one-off" original of the "Afro-hipsters" of the time. Some of the shit I've read by him is amazing. And those spontaneous "happenings" on the scene with him and Eileen ...

Burroughs came from a completely different side of the tracks-- from upper class privilege. He had a towering intellect. I've never been able to get very far into his writing, but it is astounding stuff.

I doubt I could have been any sort of major participant in that whole "scene," had I been alive and coming of age in that time, and obviously not all of the scene or its art was "good," but it was a real force to be reckoned with. It was powerful.

[revolutionR]

Philip Lamantia met the leader of the Surrealist movement Andre' Breton when he was fifteen or sixteen, he lived in New York for awhile. So he was a surrealist poet his whole life, he lived in North Beach in San Francisco his whole life, he had inherited from his father who was Italian had owned market business. Philip did also travel, spent time in Mexico.Philip was like the real soul behind the Beat scene in North Beach beside Bob Kaufman, he was published by City Lights. He was an influence on Ginsberg's Howl, if you notice it has a surreal feel. I talked to Philip on the telephone when I was about twenty, my mentor poet friend had seen him read in S.F. and had gotten his phone number. I have written a lot of poems about that phone call.

[dune]

JK was a literary giant, and a flawed human being, full of contradictions. He came to reject the '60s hippies-- which his outpouring of writing a decade+ earlier had perhaps played the major role in inspiring-- because he saw them as taking the idea of a counterculture rebellion too far, to the point of overall ruin. Yes, he even "cheered for Tail Gunner Joe" (McCarthy) in those anti-Communist witch hunts in the '50s (or so it's claimed), and later in life he went on W.F. Buckley's show-- the common thread running through this so-called "right-wing" side of JK's outlook seeming to be an ongoing hatred of Communism. And let's face it, the rise of corrupt totalitarian Communist regimes of the 20th Century did a LOT to set back the cause of any ideas/programs even remotely "socialistic," politically, and this mindset became deeply imprinted on the national consciousness-- what you could find of it.

The 20th Century in general-- there was little or no Balance to it. No one could get their stories straight; the old dynasties tried to get in their last major land and power grabs while they still might, and then the outrageously-exaggerated, dangerously weaponized "Power Struggle of Competing Social and Economic Systems for the Future of (growing masses of) Humanity" took center stage (McKenna wrote about this). It was All or Nothing-- there had to be a clear "winner" and clear "loser"-- the idea of finding any sort of balance was lost in that madness. There was never going to be a completely socialistic, nor completely capitalistic "solution" to accommodate humanity's needs as the world continued to fill in, but you'd never convince the endless raging parade of madmen and demagogues.

So yes, for all of JK's great visions, and "seeing the face of God" where time suspends itself, etc., and for being among the first literary voices to recognize postwar America being debauched and drugged by the "clanking alienation" of the new industrial state, heading so far out of balance toward materialism, it's odd that he took such hard line stances. But when you consider the monumental upheaval of history unfolding at the time, not entirely shocking.

[Arcadia]

on the other side, when the jazz sounded
like poetry, and the poetry sounded like jazz

cool...!

I´ve never read Lamantia or Kauffman... no idea... Yes Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs...now I´m reading a book published this year: "Argentina beat 1963-1969 derivas literarias de los grupos Opium y Sunda": no idea about them neither...!

[revolutionR]

I was not a big Kerouac follower, but he was more a part of the Beat thing, so you can't just speak of Kerouac, it was the writers and poets that surrounded him, he had a voice that seemed to resonate a kind of moment of transition from the fifties to the sixties, a voice for a new generation of writers.What was it that Truman Capote said about his writing, that;s not writing that's typing or something like that. I don't see Jack as a thinker as such he was a feeler. And as far as his supposed rejection of the hippies
, well he came from a different time, the hippies just sort of popped out of nowhere suddenly
you could say that the beatniks were kinda like hippies, but they were on bennies , coffee and wine, and even though they had jazz, they were more into saying things were a drag, man.Kerouac came more out of that. Then the psychedelics came along and suddenly you had hippies, and add the Vietnam war. I was much more influenced by William Burroughs, he was a thinker writer and you never saw him on TV interviews with Steve Allen or William Buckley.But Jack liked Charley Parker . I heard someone recently say that Jack's favorite book was Dr. Sax. Kerouac really did not have time to remove his past. his Catholic upbringing,and all the rest, all that stuff that fueled his whiskey imagination, but the jazz man, got into him. And a little Gary Snyder zen.

[dune]

"...the jazz man, got into him. And a little Gary Snyder zen."...

Yes. And pretty much in that order, after taking up with Neal. (from On the Road onto The Dharma Bums, and the rest of the journey). The jazz scenes in OTR are pretty incredible, almost to the point that you wish you didn't have to push through so much of the other narrative-- pages and pages of it-- to get to those scenes. But given the way OTR was written, in a 3-week frenzy of typing on a scroll, spontaneous prose, first thought-best thought and done-- without which the book could never have come to be in the first place-- that was bound to be the result. The book really is a great inspired work of art after all is said and done. I've read it several times now, including recently.