Musing about the Beat writers

of which I include Neal Cassady. I read an interview with Carolyn Cassady,http://victoriamixon.com/2010/02/17/gobsmacked-the-carolyn-cassady-interview/
 one of Neal's wives, in which she had kinds words for Neal and Jack Kerouac.


I finally saw  a utube clip from French Tv of a not completely drunk Kerouac doing an interview.

Got to wondering about Mardou Fox (alene lee) the black/cherokee love interest of leo Percepeid (jack kerouac) in the book Subterraneans and found this photo of her sitting next to William burroughs. Ol bill didn't spent much time with the ladies.

I think she later hooked up with Lucien Carr. Enough name-dropping today. Burroughs is the character Frank Carmody in the book. Btw, George Peppard as Kerouac and Leslie Caron as Mardou are curious choices for the movie, but Jim Hutton as the allen Ginsberg character (adam moorad) and Arte Johnson as Gore Vidal (Arial) are the true head-scratchers.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054351/

3/1/13

  I recall attending a talk by Charles Plymell, a poet and associate of the Beats, in the early 1990's at 8X10 club on Cross St in Baltimore, He mingled with the crowd, and I bought him a beer and asked a few questions about Kerouac and Burroughs, He said in many ways Kerouac was a regular guy, and he nearly chuckled when I asked about Burroughs nasal twang, which he blamed on Missouri air.

He suggested that the Herbert Hunckes of NYC were a dime a dozen.

5/18/13

  It seems I've neglected Allan Ginsberg.  I never dug his politics even when I was younger and left leaning. I liked a few lines in Howl,  but I viewed him as mostly cock and bull.

6/19/13

 I'll add Gregory Corso to the list of Beat  affiliated authors that I didn't dig.  Gary Snyder was decent.

10/6/13

Two weeks late on the news of Carolyn Cassady's death on 9/22/13. Her friend Estelle Cimino, co-owner of the Beat Museum in San Francisco, confirmed the death to the Associated Press. No cause of death was given.

12/26/13

Thanks to my nephew for an interesting  chat yesterday on Kerouac. Jack has his arm  around Neal.

4/14/14

Interesting casting decision in the movie Kill your Darlings . Jennifer Jason Leigh as Allan Ginsberg's mom leaps out at me. kill your darlings  I think Kerouac married the gal who bailed him out of jail.

6/1/14

Kerouac espoused  the Catholic beatttitudes and was not a beatnik.  Ginsberg  saw it as :

  “The point of beat is that you get beaten down to a certain nakedness where you are actually able to see the world in a visionary way,”

It wasn't  Maynard Krebs pounding a bongo drum. banging a congo drum

7/31/14

I've been trying to get through the 2012 release of the movie "On the road" and doubt if I will. Maybe I should hunt around for the "the Subterraneans " released in the 1950's . I mentioned the cast in my  original post. Anyway Kerouac was a Catholic Boy. Here'a snippet from  "Visions of Gerard:

"His life.... ended when he was nine and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying words because they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven

10/4/14

Re-read sections of Howl and think less of it. Ginsberg's, a one time ad-man in NYC,  description of Burroughs is quite a positive spin on Burroughs' move to Mexico after shooting his wife

 who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit

3/31/15

This has been my sense of  Kammerer, and i haven't seen the movie Kill your darings. caleb carr on kammererr

  Every time Lucien Carr moved, and it was several times, Kammerer followed

4/12/15

Gary Snyder on Kerouac: link

 My second favorite novel, which is a better novel, is The Subterraneans. It's the perfect little French novel with a beginning a middle and an end. A nicely structured Flaubertian piece of prose which shows his craftsmanship

4/30/15

Drunk Kerouac joking on the William Buckley Tv show when asked about the war in Vietnam:

"a plot to get Jeeps into the country."

7/21/15

I never thought that Ginsberg was as talented as Kerouac & Burroughs , but his tribute to Bernie Sanders may have been his nadir. BTW, I'm aware that Ginsberg thought  artistic "comparisons are odious." And he couldn't resist this line : Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops. Ginsberg 1986 tribute to Sanders

Plus politics, regardless of your slant, tends to drag a poem down.

5/19/16

Caught up with Beat , a 2000 flick starring Keifer Sutherland as Burroughs and Courtney Love as Joan Vollmer.  Movie was slow and the casting felt odd. Kyle Secor as David Kammerer was interesting. Also, didn't hear  much of that Missouri Twang from the Burroughs and Kammerer characters.

7/26/16

going back to a link I posted last year. Allan Ginsberg's socialist ode to then Mayor Sanders

Isn’t this poem socialist? It doesn’t belong to me anymore.

5/21/17

After viewing a few clips of the " #TheSubterraneans " movie on youtube, I get why #Kerouac shied away from Hollywood. Rumor has it that he turned down  project in which he would be super-imposed over a #BennyGoodman recording session. It  would have been more interesting to have seen him sitting aside #CharlieParker.

6/10/17

Found this quote from #garysnyder on #jackkerouac and thought YEP!

"total absence in Jack of anything elite, or yuppie, or academic, or intellectual, or any of that posturing at all that we associate with learned people, middle-class white people"

01/26/21

 I came across this item while reading a history of Prague and laughed. #AllenGinsberg, an avid lefty, was crowned King of May in Prague in 1965 then the communists kicked him out.

2/24/21

RIP Lawrence #Ferlinghetti  ,who passed away at the age of 101 yesterday. Ginsberg and Kerouac read their works frequently in the 1950s at his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. I admired his patronage of the Arts but didn't dig most of his poetry.

02/11/22

Once a commie always a commie: In the early 1980s goofy, commie sympathizer #AllenGinsberg stated this about #BernieSanders and his Vermont groupies: "Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops." 

Forty years later, Sanders doubled down on his argument that Americans should see Ukraine through Russia's eyes.

May 7, 2023

Plymell (88) is still breathing. In his WikiP profile , no mention of Kerouac- Jack would likely laugh. Plymell, too.

May 25, 2023

RIP Caleb Carr, military historian, novelist, and son of Lucien Carr. In an interview, Caleb once noted that Jack Kerouac was a very nice guy but not a children person.