Talk:Beat Generation/Archive 1

The Introduction doesn't say enough
I suggest that the the brief introductory paragraph at the top of the page does not actually do a very good job of introducing the subject. I think that in an effort to achieve "neutrality", the page has sacrificed any attempt at quickly explaining the subject for a casual reader. The long series of sub-sections rambling about different things the term might mean must seem very confusing to someone who doesn't already know about the topic.

My original attempt at writing an introduction looked like this:

http://obsidianrook.com/doomfiles/BEAT.html

-- Doom 00:07, 12 October 2007 (UTC)


 * The "Meaning and Usage" subsections aren't just what "Beat Generation" may mean. Those are different ways that term is used.  That's an important distiction to make in an encyclopedia.  For example, Gary Snyder was adamant about not being a member of the Beat Generation, but he's very frequently called a "Beat poet".  Who's right or wrong?  Snyder or the dozens and dozens of scholars?  It's not the place of an encylcopedia to say which one is right; it's the place of an encyclopedia to present the full, accurate picture.  I not only question the neutrality of your original opening; I question the accuracy.  Kerouac himself many times attempted to make the original intention behind the name clear: Not just him and his pals but the whole generation -- the character of the core members of the group, Cassady in particular, was taken as a sort of synecdoche for that entire age group, the furtive generation, the rucksack revolution.  For example, he said James Dean was a member of the Beat Generation.  He was never actually friends with James Dean.  To claim that Kerouac claimed it was just his small group of friends is simply inaccurate.  So the explanation in "Meaning and Usage" is confusing because the issue of naming movements is confusing.  There's no need to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of reader-friendliness.  We should strive to make it accurate AND reader friendly.  How do you propose giving an accurate, reader-friendly summary of the whole movement in one or two sentences?  I'm not saying that as a snide challenge.  I'm saying that as a genuine plea for specific, useful commentary.

F. Simon Grant 14:19, 12 October 2007 (UTC)


 * For example, Gary Snyder was adamant about not being a member of the Beat Generation, but he's very frequently called a 'Beat poet'  Really, where was Snyder "adamant" about this? I've yet to come across anything like that -- and I can point you to places where he seemed willing to accept the label.


 * I already have tried to write a brief introduction on the subject, that's what that link I posted points to. I may indeed try again at some point.


 * There's no need to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of reader-friendliness. The only way out of this sort of conundrum is to lay out some broad generalities first, and then to delve into detail later. An obssession with precision (in a subject where it's nearly impossible) is indeed the enemy of broad generalities... it's a problem with wikipedia: everyone always wants to say *everything* in the introduction.


 *  To claim that Kerouac claimed it was just his small group of friends is simply inaccurate.  A good point, and that's something that's arguably unclear in my attempt.  What I was trying to say was that Kerouac was generalizing from his social circle, making the claim that they were representative of some wider trends.  (Whoever Kerouac was thinking of in 1948, it was not James Dean -- Dean's major films weren't out until 1955.) -- Doom 01:34, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay, I've tried another version of the introduction. What I'm trying to do here, in case it isn't clear, is to keep in mind that most readers will only read the introduction -- so it needs to hit all of the important highlights quickly, without putting people to sleep (and hopefully without distorting the subject).


 * Perhaps regrettably, this also means that there's some language in there that may turn out to be a magnet for wikipedia lawyers (who also typically only read the introduction). It might be a good idea, for example, to write a section defending the point that the big three really are the major writings, and add an internal link from the introduction down to that section.   -- Doom 06:17, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I like the intro in that it's more specific, but I have a few nitpicky things to mention, but first a comment on your comment on my comment: What I said about Gary Snyder here might qualify as original research since a friend of mine told me that when he met Snyder the first thing Snyder said was, "I wish people would stop calling me a Beat poet." I know for certain I've read that other places but I can't recall exactly where -- I'll figure that out since it might be something worthwhile to further explore on the page with proper citations since it was common point of contention among writers who preferred to define themselves as SanFranRen, Black Mtn, NY School, etc.  If you can provide a source where Snyder very adamantly affirms his acceptance of the "beat" label, I'd like to see it.  My impression is that he only ever begrudgingly acknowledged it.  And the James Dean comment – which I should’ve been more specific about originally – was from a very informative essay called “About the Beat Generation” Kerouac wrote after OtR came out (so James Dean would’ve been around).  Kerouac says his concept of the “Beat Generation” dates back much before his time and that James Dean is part of a new incarnation of the Beat Generation and echoes can be seen in Marlon Brando and Elvis.


 * (1) I can believe that Snyder's acceptance was "grudging": my main claim is just that I think he was willing to accept it. I talk about this a bit in the "Talk" page for the Gary Snyder article (um... though I didn't say as much as I thought I had.  Anyway, the main point is that when Synder talks about the Beats he says "we" and "us" a lot, e.g. the quote near the end of the film "The Source").


 * (2) Thanks for the pointer on the Kerouac article. My feeling would be that ten years later is a lot of time, though, and raises questions about a possible drift in meaning over time.  (But this isn't an objection to your original point) -- Doom 19:43, 15 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Here are the nitpicky things about the intro:


 * It’s unclear what you mean by “cultural phenomena” in the first sentence.
 * “Libertine” has negative connotations. Is there a neutral version of “libertine”?  Also, is the designation “bohemian libertines” necessary or accurate?


 * "libertine" has negative connotations to people who aren't libertines, but yes I think it's reasonably accurate. Remember Ginsberg's original name for the group was the "libertine circle".  And I like it a lot better than the last attempt at a synonym (i.e. "ecstatic epicureans" -- was Burroughs "ecstatic"?).


 * The sentence starting “The adjective” goes back and forth between italics and quotation marks. It seems messy.  Maybe go with one or the other consistently or get rid of the italics (this one might just be a pet peeve).


 * I look at it again. Consistency in style is a good goal (albeit a relatively minor one).


 * The last paragraph of the intro doesn’t seem like it really belongs in the intro: the claims are verging on POV. And one sentence is just wrong: “It was arguably the first fully American literary movement since the Transcendentalists.” Saying “arguably” helps only slightly.  But as soon as I bring up the Harlem Renaissance the argument will be over.  The similarities to the Transcendentalists are perhaps more relevant to the factually inaccurate claim that the Harlem Renaissance didn’t exist or is in any way less important than the Beat Generation (I’d argue far more people would recognize Langston Hughes than Jack Kerouac).


 * It sounds like you've got a good point here about the accuracy of the claim ("first since Trancendentalists") -- it wasn't my claim, by the way, I just moved it up from down in the article.


 * In general though, I feel pretty strongly that an introduction to a subject has to explain to the reader why people care about the subject, even if it raises some people's NPOV hackles. By all means, let's tone it down, let's make it more accurate, but it's important to explain why the subject has any importance at all, even if you can't measure that with an importance-meter.


 * In my opinion it’s a good start though.

F. Simon Grant 14:41, 15 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Cool, thanks. Like I said, I'll look at it again. -- Doom 19:43, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

"new" and "libertine"
I would like to comment further on some word choices discussed earlier, specifically "new bohemian libertines." Though I question how accurate "bohemian" is, that may be another pet peeve. However, both "new" and "libertine" go against common arguments made against the Beat Generation; Kerouac argued often that they weren't just libertines, and both Ginsberg and Kerouac argued that they weren't necessarily new. This is how the Oxford dictionary defines libertine:"a man who behaves without moral principles, especially in sexual matters". Kerouac argued often that the Beat Generation was a new flourishing of spirituality. That didn't accept traditional morals, but they weren't immoral. The connotation of "libertine" is too negative to be accurate/useful -- perhaps if this was in a "negative criticism" section, but it's not as basic and factual as putting it in the intro makes it seem. I also question why "new" is necessary. Something that's half a century old certainly isn't new, so I can only assume you mean it was new at the time. In the above mentioned essay, Kerouac argued that the Beat Generation is part of an ongoing rebellion -- in other places he related it back to the 20's and 30's and back to the 1890's (the actual bohemians). Ginsberg often argued against the conservative critics (post-New Crticism types) that the Beat Generation really isn't a rebellion and really isn't new, that it was part of a long standing tradition of rebellion from Whitman through Pound, Williams, etc. (who were still alive and working in the 50's), and a continuation of rebellions by older poets like Olson, Rexroth, Dylan Thomas, etc. many of whom were alive and publishing in Ginsberg's time (Thomas died in '53, certainly not a long time before Ginsberg started publishing). So calling them "new libertines" runs counter to the arguments they tried so hard to make in their lifetimes. F. Simon Grant 15:31, 19 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay, here's the sentence under contention:


 * The members of the Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines, who often engaged in and celebrated spontaneous creativity.


 * Point the first: note the past tense "were". Yeah, they were "new" at the time, or they were percieved as new.


 * What I was after here was a way of explaining quickly to someone what "the Beat Generation" phenomena was about. Whatever you or I think about the subject, their reputation as wild gonzo hedonists is one of the things people found interesting about them, it's one of the reasons that 50s America latched on to them.  So what we need here -- in my opinion -- is some way of saying "a lot of these folks were into wild sex and crazy drugs" in a way that sounds sufficiently stodgy that it can be fobbed off as "encyclopedic" writing.


 * That said the phrase I've been using "new bohemian libertines" may indeed have some problems, in particular I'm afraid it may be a little obscure -- do bright 16 year old kids even know what a "libertine" is these days? -- so I'm willing to listen to suggestions for alternates, I just don't like most of the ones I've heard so far.


 * As for "bohemian", what's the peeve there? Does it bother you they're not from eastern europe?


 * I think I see what you're getting at now with your objection to the "perjorative" connotations of a phrase like "libertine" -- it seems to me that the difficulty is in explaining that they were hedonists but not merely hedonists (to use another Ginsberg phrase "we were on a quest for supreme reality!"). But then for me, the adjective "bohemian" helps to do that.


 * And do note that that paragraph goes on to (perhaps awkwardly) include some stuff about "spiritual" matters.


 * As for the wars between the beats and their critics: it is (supposedly) not for us to take sides in that, right?


 * Hm... maybe something like this would work:


 * "They developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists"


 * I'll try that. -- Doom 16:23, 21 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Better -- the "developed a reputation" makes it much more accurate.

F. Simon Grant 16:29, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Organize
It could just be me, but I find this article very hard to read. It seems that there is a lot of information, but it is not well organized. I would recommend breaking up the mass of words into paragraphs, which group up into segments, and the segments organized so there is a clear exposition and they delving into detail of individual persons. You should be aware that many artiles on American Generations (Baby Boomers, Generation X and so forth) refer to this article as an artilce on an actual Generation, i.e. a large social group that have a cultural common language, but reading this article one gets the impression that this is not the case. Either this article or those should be fixed. DuckeJ


 * I think both your comments deal with one another (and the solution may be in there somewhere). Please be more specific about what sections could be broken up into smaller, more digestible bites.  Also, I scanned through the Baby Boomers article and the Generation X article but I didn't see what you were talking about with referencing the Beat Generation (I didn't read the whole article, so I may have missed it).  The "Meaning and Usage" section, I'm guessing, is the section you're talking about: it's pretty cumbersome.  I wrote most of that section focusing primarily on accuracy and not thinking about reader-friendliness for those unfamiliar with the Beat Generation.  That could maybe use some work.  The thing I was most worried about was what you mention in your second paragraph.  If other articles have that the Beat Generation is a "large social group that have a cultural common language" I'd say those articles only have part of the picture.  Defining the Beat Generation is tricky precisely because the term was originally used (Kerouac's original usage) to refer to a large demographic in a certain time period w/ certain cultural and attitudinal similarities.  That means it could've been millions of people (closer to "Generation X").  The press then used the term to refer to both a large group of writers (including, for example SanFranRen. folks who didn't necessarily appreciate the label) and a small group of writers (Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al).  So that's three meanings of "Beat Generation" still commonly used (only one of which is an actual "generation" and that's the least common usage).  It's not simple to get that point across in a reader-friendly way.  I think working on the reader-friendliness of that section is definitely worthwhile.  If you had in mind other sections, please let us know.

F. Simon Grant 18:13, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I see it has been changed and to me it looks much better now. Good job! DuckeJ 22:18, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Joan Vollmer in "On the Road"
I'm deleting this from the main article because I can't find this description in "On the Road":


 * Joan is mentioned in On the Road, in the chapters dealing with Kerouac's and Cassady's visits to see "Old Bull Lee" (Burroughs) in New Orleans, where she is referred to as "Jane". She is described paradoxically as a distant woman who was "never more than 10 feet away from Old Bull" at any given time, giving the impression that she was complex and difficult to get to know.

I don't remember either point ("distant woman" or "never more than 10 feet") mentioned in "On the Road", and nothing like this is anywhere near Part II, Chapter 6 where they arrive at "Old Bull Lee's" place. -- Doom 09:22, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually this description is in Part Two Chapter 6 - in the paragraph before Dean and Sal start "yelling about a big night in New Orleans". Or page 146 - Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1991. Beatfootprints (talk) 23:52, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Citation for The Beatles' name
The Wikipedia article on The Beatles names various theories as to the origin of the band's name, while this article states that it is based on the root-word "beat." This is not cited, and according to the other article, not true. ([User:Jackmont|Jackmont]] 9:58, 31 October 2006 (UTC))


 * Your claim that the claim that The Beatles weren't inspired by the Beat Generation is based on very faulty logic. First of all your evidence that it's "not true" is a Wikipedia article.  So your claiming something is not true in a Wikipedia article based on a Wikipedia article??  Secondly, the passage you mention is far from a refutation that Lennon was inpsired by Kerouac: "based on the root word 'beat'" does not necessarily mean NOT based on "beat" at it is used by and about members of the so-called Beat Generation.  So the idea that it's "not true" is based on your interpretation of a vague statement in a Wikipedia article.  Based on many recountings I've read -- Ginsberg was quick to mention this, but then again Ginsberg loved little more than promoting Kerouac -- Lennon had, of course, musical beat in mind (just as Kerouac did) but he also had in mind the meaning of "beat" common at that time, a meaning popularized by Kerouac, of whom Lennon was a big fan.  But somebody please do find a reliable source to cite this.  Here's the quote from the Beatles article so you can judge for yourself how "not true" the claim on this page is:

"It is usually credited to Lennon, who said that the name was a combination word-play on the insects "beetles" (as a reference to Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets) and the word "beat". Cynthia Lennon suggests that Lennon came up with the name Beatles at a "brainstorming session over a beer-soaked table in the Renshaw Hall bar."[12] Lennon, who was well known for giving multiple versions of the same story joked in a 1961 Mersey Beat magazine article that "It came in a vision — a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, 'From this day on you are Beatles with an A'."[13]"

F. Simon Grant 20:22, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Lenny Bruce?
I was just wondering if Lenny Bruce is considered part of the beat generation. His dates of birth and death seem to match those of most of the beats. His product also maintains the anti-conformist ideals of the beat gen. He also took the same drugs and was arguably just as influential as many of the other famous beats that are mentioned on the page. (Ngoah89 18:19, 15 September 2006 (UTC))

Allen Ginsberg definitely defended his free speech rights several times. I don't have the full info, but I'll look it up. There's an interesting old Rolling Stone article about Beat Generation humor, about Lenny Bruce's influence on the Beats -- also Lord Buckley whose routines sound a lot like Ferlinghetti poetry.

Aureliano on Neutrality
About Aureliano's recent edits. He made some changes on the grounds of improving the article's neutrality, and I think I've got slight problems with one and bigger problems with the other.

On one point: the introduction lists 3 written works by the early beats presenting them as the major works or the principal works, or whatever. Softening this to say that they are merely some examples of beat writing is not, in fact, correct. There really and trully are the principal works by the principal members, the weight of critical opinion really does support this point.

The other point: it is not mere personal opinion to say that the beat writers were a big influence on 60s culture, (certainly on the counter-culture, aka "hippies", which is what people generally mean by "60s culture"). It's hard to imagine someone who knows anything about this denying the point -- I mean, there are photographs of Bob Dylan paling around with Allen Ginsberg, do you think those are faked? Another point: Neal Cassady was genuinely a cultural icon to the late 60s, early 70s freaks, I know this just from talking to some of them, but if you want some evidence, consider that the Pranksters recruited Neal Cassady to drive their infamous bus.

I think I know where you're coming from on this, you seem to be gunning for examples of empty hype, looking for overblown claims that you can tone down into something more likely to be factual (and certainly I have problems often enough with the pro-sixties clowns who seem to want to insert polemics in favor of psychdelic drugs everywhere). But that's a really tricky business if you don't know a lot about the subject (or aren't willing to stop and research the subject). You really shouldn't just use your nose to identify something that smells un-neutral. -- Doom 20:24, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Hello, nice to meet you and thanks for your feedback on my edits. Here are my responses:

1. Major works

You haven't convinced me, I'm afraid. It is still a matter of opinion what the major works of the beat generation are. As you say, the weight of critical opinion supports the works listed, but that is my point; it is still opinion. An opinion, no matter how authorised or widely repeated, is still opinion. Reproducing the opinion of critics as 'fact' is not the business of an encyclopaedia. Art and literature reviews do that.

What the 'major works' are in a particular culture is determined politically. There is nothing inherently 'major' about an artwork in itself. Hence, it is not fact. Reproducing the institutionally authorised canon of 'major works' as 'fact' is not the business of an encyclopaedia. Art and literature reviews do that.

2. The beat generation influencing 60s culture

The best thing here is to cite your factual examples: that Bob Dylan read Allen Ginsberg or that the Pranksters recruited Neal Cassady to drive their bus and let readers decide for themselves how influential the beat generation was.

I'm strict with arts/humanities articles on neutrality because I believe that when you start to qualify and allow entry for quasi-factual (like those above) statements, you also open the door for half-baked theories and personal subjectivity. In practice, one cannot simply draw a line between what is acceptable and not; you need a substantial buffer zone on either side, otherwise the grey arguments start creeping in and you might as well not have a line at all. This might mean ommitting potentially useful statements like the ones we are talking about but Wikipedia should, I believe, err on the side of neutrality than not. Aureliano


 * As for Major works, yes this is an encyclopedia. As such, we don't use personal opinion but instead use widely accepted canon. That would mean what is widely regarded as the beat Holy Trinity: On The Road, Naked Lunch, and Howl. What your personal opinions about the relative strengths or weaknesses of those works might be is largely irrelevant. It is widely accepted that those three from those three authors are what is considered beat.


 * As for The beat generation influencing 60s culture, I think it is very clear the impact that both Dylan and Kesey had on the 60's and both have widely admitted their personal influences...the beats. Jim Morrison, also a major factor in the 60's...was a huge fan of On The Road and patterned himself after Dean Moriarty according to No One Gets Out Of Here Alive.


 * How can you, in good conscience, claim that these aren't accepted facts? IrishGuy   talk  07:46, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Sorry you haven't responded to any of my arguments. Please re-read my post. Aureliano


 * Of course I did. You just refuse to see it. When you even admit that the vast majority of major criticism considers those books to be major works. Not just that, but look at book sales through the years..those are by every single definition the major works. You can keep writing it off as opinion, but what, pray tell, would be difinitive for you? Would God Himself have to declare them major? IrishGuy   talk  02:06, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Ok, fair enough. However, the article needs plenty of references to indicate consensus by significant majority according to Wikipedia policies A simple formulation, and Characterizing opinions of people's work. Cheers. Aureliano


 * Aureliano -- Much of the "evidence" you're looking for is already in the article, you just haven't read it very carefully. And truth be told, you don't really know very much about this subject, do you?  You don't actually have any reason to suspect that these statements are wrong.


 * If I thought that there was some serious debate about the prominence of these three works, I might happily go off and start tabulating sales figures and the frequency of critical references, but why would I want to do this just because someone is playing what amounts to legalistic games?


 * And I'm sorry that "gray areas" in the applications of principles bother you, but welcome to life.


 * By the way: I took a look at "Characterizing opinions of people's work" and I see that the Shakespere example has been mutating around quite a bit of late. It's become something of a parody of wikipedia, in that it now demands that the crank theory that Shakespeare was really a front for Marlowe be brought in.  -- Doom 05:08, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Moving an odd Holmes/Keruoac passage here
I'm not sure what this Kerouac quote via Holmes is supposed to add to the introduction, so I'm cutting it. Saving it here in case someone else can see a use for it:


 * Kerouac later wrote several articles about coining the term, sometimes with conflicting information, but Holmes recalled him explaining: "like we're a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge there's no use flaunting on that level, the level of the 'public', I mean a kind of beatness...because we all really know where we are"

-- Doom 06:55, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

please avoid hero worship, and don't sanitize
Once again, I'm changing the language from "accidental" shooting to something that doesn't let Burroughs off the hook so easily. Maybe this version will stay there for a little while, but I have no doubt that at some point another Burrough's fan will decide that's it's un-neutral to not go along with whitewashing Burrough's history. (He was drunk, goofing around and he pointed a gun at the woman's head, and pulled the trigger. And we're supposed to call this an "accidental shooting"?  And actually, we just hope that he was goofing around, because none of us were inside his head at the time: there is no way to know what his motives were.)
 * But its hard to argue that he really intended to murder her, which is what you seem to be insinuating. Did he ever beat her, abuse her, degrade her like a typical abusive relationship? I don't think there is evidence of that. If he was trying to kill her why do it in a crowded room? There are a lot of accidental shootings in the United States because there are too many guns and not enough common sense. At any rate, I don't think it is hero worship to point out the facts of the case, and there are plenty of sources that point towards the case of a drunken accidental shooting- meaning his mens rea was lacking for a case of murder. --Mikerussell 17:49, 30 March 2007 (UTC)


 * What I am saying is that we do not know whether this was an "accident", therefore we should not call it an accident. Why is this such a hard point to get? -- Doom 00:22, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm also dropping this bit, for similar reasons, though I could be persuaded that the information belings in there somewhere:


 * She did, however, serve as an inspiration: Allen Ginsberg was said to have written Howl after having a dream about Vollmer, and William Burroughs claimed he would never have begun writing if she had not lived.

-- Doom 06:55, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

-- Misslipstickvogue It seems that there is a bias going against William Burroughs to say that his wife's murder was whitewashed. It was a well accepted fact that Burroughs often played "william tell" and was a fan of guns. As far as Burroughs saying that he never would have become the writer that he did if his wife had lived, in interviews by his friends, they always acknowledged that he really regretted that he felt this was true.


 * On the contrary, all accounts I've read say that this was the absolute first time they had ever played "William Tell". (( Ah, I was wrong: Grauerholtz found one person who saw them do it once before... It was Burroughs himself who claimed they'd never done it before. -- Doom 14:52, 18 August 2007 (UTC) ))
 * The reason I'm calling this a "whitewash" is that everyone calls it "an accidental shooting" as though his gun went off while he was cleaning it or something like that. -- Doom 00:22, 18 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay, so one more time, I've made an attempt at fixing this one. If you disagree with my fix, please read the Grauerholtz reference.  It was not a "manslaughter" conviction, but a "homicide conviction with sentence suspended".  -- Doom 14:50, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Consistency

 * The term 'Beat Generation' is presented with varying capitalisation throughout the article. We should probably decide on a standard. -- Resonance 22:41, Jan 6, 2006 (GMT)

Deleting Elsa Gidlow
I've been uncomfortable with this insertion for some time now:


 * The poet and anarchist Elsa Gidlow, who hitchiked from New York (where she had lived in Greenwich Village) to the San Francisco area in 1940, is representative of independent-minded women in the 'bohemian background' of the popularly recognized Beat Generation. Gidlow later became an integral member of the West Coast circle that included philosopher Alan Watts.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to include this woman in this article, though it might be reasonable to point out that there were women amongst the various pre-beat bohemias... And I definitely didn't like it appended to the end of the first paragraph of the "Women of the Beat Generation" section.

I'm just deleting it for now, though I could be persuaded that it would make sense to have a paragraph about pre-beatnik boho women at the end of this section.-- Doom 05:48, 11 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Actually, I suspect the accuracy of that Elsa Gidlow info... I see elsewhere that she moved to San Francisco in 1927.


 * Anyway, I'm creating a stub article for Elsa Gidlow.

-- Doom 09:02, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Paging Atsab: why so much about David Kammerer?
Hey Atsab... I was reading your expansion of the David Kammerer story in the history section of the Beat Generation node.

I was wondering if you could give us some idea of what you were after there, why did you think this much detail was needed and so on.

It seems to me like the History section is getting kind of long. Possibly some of your material should be in a different node, maybe one about Lucien Carr?

Also, can you cite some sources? For example, how do you *know* that Lucien Carr wasn't bisexual?

-- Doom 05:48, 11 February 2006 (UTC)


 * yeah, sorry about that. I can't remember full details at the moment but I remember going on there and reading some false info. So while I was correcting it I got ahead of myself and started rambling about the Beat Generation (I was using no source other than my memory, hence the non-citing). I was planning on expanding the WHOLE history section but my progress was interrupted and thus, Kammerer incident was the only thing expanded. My bad- though I DO think it's an extremely important part of the whole development.


 * Looking around a little, I've found some small suggestions that Lucien may have been bisexual/bicurious, whatever. I don't particularly care myself, but I think it's important not to project our own interpretations on this story.
 * Similarly, I think it's important not to assert that the stabbing of Kammerer was "self defense". That's certainly plausible, but Lucien Carr was the only witness, and he did do some time for it.

Okay, I'm going to move some clips from the history section to here in an effort to tighten it up a little. If I chop something important, maybe it can be worked back in later (also, the Lucien Carr article is still fairly sketchy at the moment... that would be a good place to add more details of Carr's academic carreer, if you're so inclinced):


 * They developed a friendship. Although Carr was not gay, he apparently enjoyed the attention of the older man and let Kammerer follow him to the various schools he was expelled from, Andower, then Bowdoin, and then (in the fall of 1942) the University of Chicago. That's where Kammerer introduced 17-year-old Lucien Carr to his old St. Louis friend William S. Burroughs.


 * After reading a book called You Can't Win, Burroughs was fascinated with the criminal underworld and in Chicago associated with thieves and the like, plotting to stick up a Turkish bath and rob an armored car. Nothing ever went past the planning stage.


 * Kammerer allegedly claimed he'd kill Carr if they didn't make love immediately.


 * While Carr was in prison, Kerouac and Ginsberg began a close friendship, and soon the two of them and Burroughs formed a trinity.


 * The poem includes many surreal phrases which Solomon mumbled after his shock treatments.

reverting major changes for the last few months
After two months absence, I came back to find this node getting cluttered up with random additions... while there have been some good edits, they were mostly minor. The major changes fall into largely two categories: (1) random remarks that don't seem to add anything (2) irrelevant insertions about someone's hobby horse topics, in particular "Sandra Scoppetone", which seems to be an obsession of: "69.104.76.195" -- my first thought was that this IP address must be the author herself, but it seems unlikely that she would misspell her own name quite so frequently.

To make it a little easier on myself, I did the reversions in one step here, by working "off-line" in a copy of the article that I put in my own version control system. Here's the log for these changes: revision 1.13 date: 2005/07/04 08:14:04; author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -1 Restoring the Gregory Corso quote (I don't care if you don't like his grammar, it's what he said... if I remember right, this is in the documentary "Whatever Happened to Kerouac?", so you can go and check it if you like.): "Three writers does not a generation make." revision 1.12 date: 2005/07/04 08:06:46; author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -1 Deleting this bit: and "Oriental" thought Don't see what that adds to the original remark about Zen Buddhism. revision 1.11 date: 2005/07/04 08:04:07; author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +0 -2 Deleting this random discussion of drugs, and the later editorializing about "sensation seekers": Too many Beats had become sensation seekers, and left the faiths of their parents to make liberal use of wine and marijuana, and some of them had occasionally used benzedrine or experimented with such traditional and natural psycho-active agents as peyote or yagé. Amongst the hippies, generally, there was a widespread fondness for marijuana, and only slightly less an interest in   the synthetic LSD, which largely (though not completely) replaced peyote, always in somewhat limited availability. revision 1.10 date: 2005/07/04 08:02:32; author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +0 -1 Deleting this from the beginning of "Women of the Beat Generation" The "beatnik" stereotype is discussed in another section, below; however, it might be said that the stereotypical woman of the beat period was an artsy or intellectual bohemian who might be studying or practicing modern dance, painting, or theater arts and hanging out in the cafés of   Greenwich Village. Along with men who were also involved in   artistic or free-wheeling intellectual pursuits, they formed the social backdrop for those particular writers who came to   be referred to as the Beat Generation.However this kind of    Activity and mixing of Race and culture had become popular in    America as early as th 1920's when the Jazz age actually began to flourish. revision 1.9 date: 2005/07/04 08:00:37; author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +0 -1 Dropped *The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac (1958) From the list of "Principal writings" -- I like this book a lot too, I like "Dharma Bums" even more, and there are many other fine Kerouac books, and they are not going to be listed here under "principal writings". That list is already too long: the Cassady and the Johnson are already pushing it -- revision 1.8 date: 2005/07/04 07:58:31; author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -4 minor edit: deleted spurious line breaks revision 1.7 date: 2005/07/04 07:57:47; author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -1 Deleting references to Sandra Scopptone [sic]: *Suzuki Beaneby Sandra Scoppettone and Louise Fitzhugh (1961; this out of print Comedy of Manners, dipicts the life   of a Bohemian child Suzuki Beaneand her relationship to a    world full of Squares and conformists.The Story is still    considered a 'Classic' by everyone fromPlayboy Magazine    Editors to members of the Christian Clergy,and teachers as    Good for everyone to enjoy. revision 1.6 date: 2005/07/04 07:56:49;  author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -1 Deleting references to Sandra Scopptone [sic]:    artists (including Sandra Scoppettone and Louise Fitzhugh, the Authors of beatnik lovers childrens book "suzuki beane" )not   to exclude the mention of the many musicians who explicitly    acknowledge their debt to the beat writers revision 1.5 date: 2005/07/04 07:55:30;  author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -1 Deleting references to Sandra Scopptone [sic]:    Sandra Scoppttone (author of Suzuki Beane) revision 1.4 date: 2005/07/04 07:38:03;  author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +2 -6 In Beatnik Sterotype: Folded the two TV cartoon examples into one paragraph. revision 1.3 date: 2005/07/04 07:34:23;  author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -1 Chopped this from the introduction:   The actual word, "beatnik" was introduced by Herb Caen, the   famous San Francisco Chronicle columnist.  Ever the wordsmith,   Caen also coined the words, "hippie" and yuppie. The term beatnik is discussed later.  (I suspect that the Herb Caen fan here didn't bother to read very far.) revision 1.2 date: 2005/07/04 07:32:45; author: doom;  state: Exp;  lines: +2 -2 Moved Beatnik redirect down to the beatnik section.  Once again trimmed the stuff about the programming language.

more (temporary?) deletia
This passage was appended to the "historical context" section. Possibly it belongs in the "influences" section, though I think I would argue against:


 * Nor should it be assumed that the Beat influence was limited to the 1950s and 1960s. Gary Snyder was one of the movement's leaders who institutionalized the Beat ethos on the university level, where he continued to teach writing well into the 1990s, influencing a new generation of authors such as novelist Robert Clark Young.

The trouble is that *far* too many writers have been influenced by the Beats. Naming one of them is an invitation to list hundreds. If there's a point in doing that (and I doubt it) it should be done in another page that this one links to.

I have similar problems with the list of "Principle Works", which already includes *two* obscure works that the author of the list *knew* would be controversial (they might belong on a list of "proto-beat" works, for those who enjoy making lists). -- Doom 17:05, Feb 19, 2005 (UTC)

Talking over some additions with "208.222.71.77"
((I've rearranged things here a little so the discussion is in chronological order... look down for the latest.))

Just to let the discussants know that I added a paragraph that deals with criticism of the beat movement and also the transition from the beat-era to hippie-era. It isn't a full treatment but I do describe Charles Thompson's 1957 novel criticizing the beats, as well as Richard Farina's depiction of the transition years (although Farina builds the story around a protest at Cornell in 1958, the drug use is clearly early 1960s--this mixing of time periods works fine because the characters are so high most of the time that they wouldn't have known it if they were being shuttled back and forth in a time machine anyway!). I hope someone else will deal with Podhoretz and his Captain Ahab style obsession with destroying the beats; he is definitely part of the story. 1-11-05 -- "208.222.71.77"


 * A fellow known only as "208.222.71.77" has added a lot of interesting discourse that I'm moving to here for now. I have a feeling there are some points here that can be salvaged but I'm just not up to it now.  Here's a listing of problems I've got with it, off the top of my head, in no particular order:


 * (1) It doesn't belong at the end of the History section, and myself I would rather not see it sandwiched between "History" and "Beatnik Sterotype", because there's a logical flow from one to the other.


 * (2) Some of the material looks interesting, e.g. the stuff about the novel "Halfway Down the Stairs", and yet it strikes me as not directly relevant to this writeup. 1957 is not an early enough publication date for it to count as a predecessor ("Go" was out in 1952, "The Town and the City" in 1950), and as described it sounds like an example of an older genre of fiction (very common in the early paperback era) where wild immoral people come to bad ends (thus giving the reader vicarious thrills, and also satisfying the moralists).


 * (3) There may be a point here about the Beats being an expression of some sort of larger zeitgeist -- I've been meaning to write a little about other things going on at the time myself -- but I don't know that your examples are really that great... the comparison to the Angries is sometimes made, but no one can seem to decide if "the Angries" ever really existed...


 * (4) But then, it's a general problem that writer's are often ambivalent about being categorized one way or another, and that's certainly true about the Beats... however, at least with the Beats the "big" names were relatively comfortable with the label.


 * (5) I have to say, I know nothing at all about your soviet examples... could it be that they should have an article of their own?


 * (6) Oh, by the way: you went to Cornell, didn't you? It shows. The point of veiw here isn't very "neutral" then, right?


 * Here's the block of material I've moved here from the main article:


 * The Beat Generation is best understood as the most concentrated and "typical" expression of a sensibility and thematic focus that was shared by many writers who were not officially "beats." Certain writers of the San Francisco Renaissance never regarded themselves as beats, and often strongly criticized Kerouac and his pals, but in many respects were part of the same post-World War Two brand of bohemianism. The science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick probably should be considered to have shared the beat sensibility in this larger sense.


 * In "Halfway Down the Stairs" (1957), the novelist Charles Thompson depicted a beat-in-all-but-name group of Cornell University students. This unfairly forgotten novel is set in the same late 1940s period as "On the Road"; the leading figure in the bohemian circle is a Neal Cassady type swaggerer and World War Two veteran roughly the same age as the hero of Kerouac's masterpiece. Thompson is sympathetic to his characters but does not romanticize them. The book ends in tragedy for "Hugh," the Cassady type character; the narrator, living in New York City several years later, expresses ambivalent feelings about this own involvement in the circle.


 * If Cornell was the setting for the first novel to seriously criticize the beats it was also later the backdrop for Richard Farina's "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me" (1966), an attempt to romanticize the movement's campus manifestation circa 1958. The chief significance of Farina's book is that it shows the beat sensibility in transition towards the hippie years and the hard-drug culture.


 * A beat-style sensibility can be seen in the work of the "angry young men" in Britain in the 1950s, although mixed with a working class and lower middle class anger that is more conventional than that of the American beats. The most celebrated of these works is Kingsley Amis' "Lucky Jim."


 * Less well-known is the literary expression of a similar zeitgeist in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev years, when a number of novels and short stories depicting youth in rebellion were published. The best known of these are Anatoli Kuznetsov's "Sequel to a Legend" (1957) and Vasili Aksenov's "Ticket to the Stars" (1961). When the latter book was published in the United States, its characters were compared to the American beatniks. Given the pressures of Soviet censorship, the heroes of these books end up more or less making their peace with the system. But Kuznetsov and Aksenov would both become open dissidents and move to the West.


 * REPLY TO THE [above] FROM FELLOW WHO ADDED DISCOURSE: "Halfway Down the Stairs" was published the same year as "On the Road." It is set in the same years (late 1940s) as "On the Road" and apparently reflects real experiences of its author. The character who leads the bohemian circle, "Hugh," is remarkably similar to Neal Cassady. It was not originally a paperback but was a hardcover that received favorable reviews from legit critics such as Merle Miller. There is no reason to believe that it was some kind of quickie ripoff of Kerouac's popularity. After dipping into Thompson's book for the first time in decades last night, I have changed (below) my description of it to remove the implication that it is in a conventional moralizing tradition. As to the alleged partiality for Cornell (I am myself a graduate of another university in another part of the country), it is merely a historical accident that novels reflecting the early beat years (Thompson) and the late years (Farina) were set at Cornell. It should be pointed out, however, that the beat "movement" would develop a very strong presence on college campuses after 1957, although Kerouac did not write about this. He did note a campus connection earlier at Berkeley in "The Dharma Bums." (The circle at Cornell portrayed by Thompson bears a strong resemblance to the beatnik circle at my own college circa 1961.) I have shortened and made other changes (see below) to the material on Soviet writers, pointing out that the "Ticket to the Stars" characters were compared in the United States to the beatniks. As to the Angry Young Men, perhaps it could be disputed that they were not actually a literary "circle," but there can be absolutely no doubt that they existed as a well-defined trend in the literature, theater, and cinema of the 1950s distinct from any other British trend before or since.


 * Sorry, didn't mean to cast aspersions on "Halfway Down the Stairs"... I just wanted to point out that there were earlier works about the Beat circle than "On the Road", and they, too tended to focus on "Neal Cassady"-types (e.g. Bill Cannasta). The real breakthrough artistically with "On the Road" is the fusion of style and content: celebrating spontaniety by using spontaniety... the image of Kerouac pounding out a novel on a scroll of rice paper has a lot to do with the actual effect that the Beats had (as much or more so than the content of what they wrote).


 * Oh, and my apologies for the undeserved crack about Cornell.


 * Anyway, there's more to say, but I'm going to be off-line for a week or so. If you'd like to play with this some more dive right in... I think most of what you want to say might fit in the section "Historical Context", though I might suggest putting the bit about Farina in the "Influences on Western Culture" section (talking about the beat-hippie transition somewhere or other would definitely make sense). And it looks to me like there's no discussion at all of the "Angries" in the wikipedia as of yet... maybe you'd like to get a node about them started?


 * By the way, why not create a wikipedia account? It makes it a little easier to keep track of who you're talking to... Doom 07:07, Jan 13, 2005 (UTC)


 * I think the main issue here is around other San Francisco Renaissance poets, many of whom do predate the beats. Filiocht 14:27, Jan 13, 2005 (UTC)


 * to expand: The whole historical background needs to be covered: Blake, Walt Whitman (both these esp for AG), Henry David Thoreau, Imagism (esp Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and H.D.), Objectivists, Henry Miller, then the 50s, including the Beats, Black Mountain poets, deep image and the rest of the San Francisco Renaissance. GS read Pound early and was encouraged in his Japan/China interests via Pound's work. Pound was also important to AG and to most of the SFR people (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, etc). H.D. is crucial to Robert Duncan. Rexroth published with the Objectivists. Pound's presence in the States, running the 'ezraversity from his ward in St Elizabeth's from 46 to 58 was a big factor. Williams encouraged a number of beats and wrote a preface for Howl and other poems. 'Independents' like Cid Corman and Theodore Enslin also trace back along this line, and without Corman's publishing efforts, much of the 50's would have remained silent. The 50s are, in some respects, a return to this native American modernist tradition after the disruption caused by the depression and the war. Currently, the article reads as if the Beats appeared ex nihilo.


 * As you may have noticed, I tried to use some of your material here in the main article. I didn't go quite as far as to call the Beats the return of the modernists (why not, say "the revival of romanticism"?), though I don't doubt that that's a defensible thesis.  Doom 23:00, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)

Deletions/Moves
I'm in the process of making some deletions of other peoples additions, and in the event that anyone cares, here's why (possibly some of this should be moved elsewhere, see point 3):

(1) A number of mechanically (if not programmatically) generated links have been appearing, e.g. connecting the word "novelist" to the article on the novel, connecting the place name Manhattan to the article on "Manhattan" (when there's already a link for New York City earlier in the article, even!). This kind of stuff strikes me as a bit inane, a distraction from the main point of the article. Anyone who knows English knows what a novelist is, for that matter anyone who knows English knows what New York City is. Not everything that *can* be linked, *should* be linked (ultimately, an article might exist for every noun).

(2) This mention of a connection to the existentialists strikes me as gratuitous:


 * They were both directly and indirectly influenced by the European trend in Existentialist philosophy.

I don't doubt that they were indirectly influenced by existentialists -- many people were -- but it's pretty indirect. I don't see why it's worth saying... I actually can't remember a *single* reference to an existentialist author by any beat writer. Nietszche was mentioned a few times though; Proust's name came up often; Ginsburg owes a huge debt to Walt Whitman; Burroughs read everything he could get his hands on... a brief article can't possibly list every direct influence, let alone indirect ones.

(3) I'm dropping the assertion that Burroughs revolutionized science fiction:


 * William Burroughs' Naked Lunch was the first of a series of novels in which he completely revolutionized science fiction by introducing elements more usually found in modernist writing. The impact of his achievement has influenced trends in science fiction ever since and can be seen particularly clearly in the writings of Michael Moorcock, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard.

There are many problems with this, not the least of which is that it isn't true. A number of SF writers liked Burroughs, and this short list of writers -- roughly speaking, all members of the "New Wave" circle -- look like they were probably Burroughs fans, but these writers themselves have not really revolutionized science fiction. If you go to the store and look at the SF racks, you'll notice a strong Star Trek influence on SF, but very little New Wave influence. For better or worse the New Wave produced very few permanent changes on the shores of SF.

Another problem: I think the influence of Burroughs on New Wave SF probably belongs in the article about Burroughs, rather than here.

Still another problem: I really don't like it in the History section. Someone else here was complaining about the lack of an explicit discussion of the influence the beats had, why not just create a section about that, and put things like this there?

(I'm of the opinion that wikipedia writing suffers from "appendicitis" -- my pet fact is missing, I'll just append it to the end of some paragraph.)

Oh, and while I'm at it, I've restored my original language concerning Burroughs shooting of Joan Volmer. Calling it an "accidental shooting" let's Burroughs off far too easily, it makes it sound like he was just cleaning his gun or something. The actual event was complicated, and allows many interpretations (accident/murder or even "assisted suicide").

Doom 07:38, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

Why the Simpsons?
Is the Simpsons reference really necessary? I think these modern pop culture references tend to demean the integrity of both the page and Wikipedia in general.. -- "134.117.153.210"

Well "134.117.153.210", we'd have to ask "216.221.81.99" why the Simpsons remark was added. I can only guess, but I think the idea was to give a young reader a point of reference to understand the "beatnik stereotype" which was under discussion at that point. That's why I'm reluctant to delete it, though I certainly wouldn't have added it myself.

As to whether it's "demeaning", I think the answer is no. High art and low are all grist for the wikipedia, and after all, there was a time when beat writers were ranked pretty low. Doom


 * Personally, I don't see why this would "demean the integrity" of Wikipedia... actually, to me, this is why I love Wikipedia. it goes BEYOND what 'normal' encyclopedias would feature.  and, let's say someone is writing an essay about the Beat Generation, wouldn't the Simpsons stuff be great to show how the Beat Generation has influenced our culture, and how the beatnik stereotype can be seen in a Simpsons episode?  Anyway, personally I would definitely leave it there, as that kind of stuff is what makes the articles much more interesting to me... all kinds of little details you wouldn't find in those encyclopedias at the library. - Sourcecode 18:31, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * Funny, while I had (and I guess, have) no serious problem with using the Simpsons as an example here, it's starting to become a bit of a peeve with me -- Simpsons fans seem to take the show way too seriously as a cultural barometer (e.g. anyone who's done a Simpsons cameo *must* be important). If you look around throughout the wikipedia, there are all sorts of gratuitous Simpsons references popping up...
 * I don't know what to make of that other cartoon reference (Doug) that's sprouted in the "beatnik stereotype" section... I'm seriously thinking about deleting it.
 * And I should probably write something for the style guide about how it's possible to have too many examples ("Enough is enough"?). -- Doom 21:32, May 5, 2005 (UTC)


 * Decided to cut the "Doug" reference:
 * On another cartoon, Doug, Doug's sister, Judy, dresses and talks in the manner of a beatnik.
 * -- Doom 00:34, May 6, 2005 (UTC)

User Doom: While I am not going so far as to re-insert the "Doug" reference, I would like to say that when I read that line I thought it was a good way to illustrate the beatnik to younger readers, and is a constant character whereas Flander's parents were a one-time deal (I think). It's hard to really give a picture to generations far removed from an era without examples. Just my two cents. -- cindy


 * Okay, sounds like a good point. I put it back.  Doom 07:03, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

Speaking of modern pop culture references. I noticed that Ferdinand had reverted out the recent anonymous insertion about the "Breaking the Rules" film. I'm not arguing with the reversion, but just wanted to say let's remain open to the possibility that that film may have something to say to this article. Ferlinghetti is featured, and it apparently does start with the Beat gen as a starting point for considering the whole issue of subcultures in America, although it goes far beyond the Beats up to the hip hop and rap cultures of today. I haven't seen the film, personally. Mark Dixon 20:31, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * I haven't seen the movie either, although it looks interesting. But I had a look at the website, and I don't see that it serves as anything other than an advertisement for the movie.  I think deleting commercial links that don't directly have something to say about the subject of the article is justified. I certainly didn't mean to imply that the movie is worthless or uninteresting -- if the link was to a film clip of Ferlinghetti, instead of an advertisement for one, that would be different. --Ferdinand Pienaar 22:29, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand the simpsons and doug references, they are useful as tack on examples saying "beats are often portrayed wearing berets and having goatees, stereotypes like these have been included in shows like doug (judy dougs sister) and the simpsons (the flanders)." as it is these examples have their own paragraphs implying taht it is a sterotype when they are actually just a take on the existing stereotype. I'm not a very good writer, hard for me to say what i mean, but it seems that the examples are useful but seem out of place.

The importance of the Beats
Seems to me that the real question here is why does the article have a section on the stereotype but nothing on why the beats were important, what their influence was (hippies/Ken Kesey/British 'beats'/Russia/Zen in the West/loads more. This needs doing or why bother having the article at all? Filiocht 08:06, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * Okay, since you requested it, I put in a little on the subject. (Though you know, nothing stops you from adding something yourself...).   I tried hard not to mention any names (whenever you try and list two examples in a wikipedia article, the next time you come back it will have become twenty).

Doom 09:06, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

Older discussion (enter Doom)
I'm actually pretty sure that Gregory Corso is a core member of the original beatniks (it was at least a minor frustration to him later in his life that he kept getting written out of the history). I'll check the details before I do any re-writing though... Doom

May 14: Please do add some material - this page needs attention! Talk of 'core' is always contentious though, as he was a later member than the original 4, who'd already developed their ideas quite substantially before he arrived. Perhaps first add some material to the Gregory Corso page!

Doom again: Yes, I was just looking at doing a Corso page. The Gary Snyder page needed some work too (the assertion that Snyder isn't really a beat was pretty silly).

Doom again, after my "total re-write" Okay, I hope that wasn't too contentious a set of changes.

It turns out that there is indeed some ambiguity as to whether or not Corso was one of the original/core members of the scene, and I've tried to make that clear by including dates, and using the word "cannonical" which I think is a little better than core. (cannons are formed later, and it's a literary grouping, not a social one).

On the other hand, the idea that Cassady was there before Hunke isn't right. Also, Cassady wasn't really a writer in those days (though he did later publish an autobio in 1971, "The First Third")...

I dropped the suggestion that "Naked Lunch" was written with the cut-up technique. This is a common misconception, but it's pretty clearly not true (1) the timing is wrong: according to the Ted Morgan biography Gysin came up with cut-up in 10/59, and the first ed of Naked Lunch was in 7/59... (2) if you read "Naked Lunch", it's all pretty conventional linear prose (it's just the subject matter that's warped). Compare it to a later work like "Nova Express", which is nearly incoherent. Now that's what cut-up looks like.

There's probably still a lot of room for improvement here. Here's some additional angles that could be followed up:

suggested issues/topics for future work

 * Photographs. What's the legal status of the typically used photos of the early beats? E.g. the-big-three-plus-hal-chase is pretty essential.  The Joan Vollmer shot is already up in her node.


 * Better to directly quote Podohretz than rely on "Last Intellectuals".


 * Cross-correlate with rise of "juvenile delinquency" (the phenomena, if any, and also the national obession): did it preceed the beats, or follow them?


 * Possibly, a separate topic: "spontaneous prose"?


 * More on music would be good... what kind of jazz were they into, was it only Kerouac who was a fan, etc.


 * what about: role of promiscuity. (A thought: drug "experimentation" is often given credit as a quest for enlightenment, but sex is shrugged off as pure hedonism.  Did the Beats think of it that way?  Think about Reich.)


 * more about their intellectual environment might be interesting. In the forties, you needed to be up on your Freud and your Marx, and what else?  Burroughs was into some odd Big Ideas people, like Spengler and Korzybski.  Nietzsche?  There's no mention of any of the existentialists in any of their writing that I can remember: why would that be?  Was Sartre seen as your Old Man's philospher, a wartime LostGen guy?

 partially done 

Some items from the todo list that have at least been touched on:


 * what about: role of homosexuality ("first subculture" is pushing it: maybe queers were first)


 * There are the connections/imitations of the Jazz subculture.


 * A possible theme: Most of the original beats were middle-class or upper-class intellectuals who seemed to feel that "slumming" was necessary, that the underclass was living a more authentic existence than they were. (In this respect, Corso might be called "the real thing": he was a criminal-convict-turned-poet, not a poet playing at criminality.) ((And as a Snyder fan out there likes to point out, Snyder is the Real Thing of a different sort -- the anti-Corso?))
 * Sub-theme: where did they all get this nutty idea? 30s gangster flicks?

Old items from the todo list above


 * the roots of later "counter-culture" in the beats,
 * Possible topic: the transition from beat-era to hippie-era.


 * Was it all just authors? No beat painters, beat musicians? ((Essentially: No, not in the early years.))


 * Add some more references, e.g. to film documentaries "Whatever Happened to Kerouac?"; and "The Source". Many books could be mentioned:  Morgan's "Literary Outlaw" (about Burroughs) is good for beat history overall.


 * There were other art scenes going on that deserve mention, if not detailed comparison: John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollack, the Black Mountain College scene.


 * A peeve of mine: The movie "The Source" uses a veiw of the transamerica pyramid to introduce beat SF, but it didn't exist back then. What was there was housing, where many writers/artists lived: the Montgomery & Clay block, aka "Monkey Clay".  A lot of the beats, e.g. Snyder hated and probably still hate this pyramid, he calls it "an arrogant and wasteful building".


 * I made no mention here of the Zen Buddhism associated with Gary Snyder and the later writings of Kerouac. This was a major shift in "beat thinking", and it happened relatively late (just before the media circus kicked in).


 * Add a section about criticism of the beats, e.g. Norman Podhoretz.


 * what about: role of drugs, particularly marijuana, heroin and speed.
 * Sub-topic:
 * Did they know what they were getting into (i.e. it was self-destructive) or were they not sure (so possibly it was "experimenting"). My guess: heroin use was self-destructive, speed was experimentation
 * In an appendix to some edition to Big Sur Kerouac is quoted as saying he couldn't write without benzedrine.. I wish I remembered the reference.



Disambig at top
The primary-topic disambig is there instead of Beatnik being a disambig page. If terseness is important to you, please say so here. Deltabeignet 05:47, 15 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, terseness is somewhat improtant to me, but it's not so important in a Talk page, and I can't figure out what you're talking about.


 * I intensely dislike inserting a line about the Beatnik programming language at the top of the Beat Generation node. It makes no sense to me to do so: why would someone reading about the Beat Generation want to know it?  Why not also list the various bands and songs  with Beatnik in their names, and so on?


 * I see that someone has changed the Beatnik re-direct to point at the "beatnik sterotype" section within Beat Generation. Would you object to moving this (rather pointless) "disambiguation" message down to there? -- Doom 06:44, May 30, 2005 (UTC)

Starting the beat?
I recently read in a book about the 1950's that Jack Kerouac actually coined the term "beatniks" (it might have been beat generation). Did he "make it up", or make it popular? Just wondering. Thanks.


 * Never heard that one. As far as I know, what I've written here is correct. "Beat" was slang in use in the NY underworld, "Beat Generation" was Kerouac's coinage, and later Herb Caen invented "beatnik".   If someone has citations that show otherwise, please do present them.  -- Doom 06:47, May 30, 2005 (UTC)


 * All sources I have agree with what's written here - beatnik wasn't coined by Kerouac, beat generation was. Greenman May 31, 2005


 * The term "beat generation" was Kerouac in conversation with JC Holmes. The derogatory term "Beatnik" was aparantly coined by San Fransisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in April 1958. See Ann Charter's intro to the Portable Beat Reader, page xxii.


 * Are you sure 'beatnik' is derived from 'Sputnik'? What about 'refusenik'?  The latter certainly seems more appropriate to the context.


 * Sputnik was launched in late 57, and it was a Big Deal in the press. I have my doubts that 'refusenik' would have been on anyone's mind back then, certainly not Herb Caen's (if the wikpedia pages are to be believed, 'refusniks' weren't really in the news until the late 60s, early 70s).  -- Doom 20:25, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

The Simpsons
I was just looking at some of the above stuff, and the comment on the Simpsons caught my eye. I honestly found the bit of Simpsons trivia interesting (although I'm not a fan), and I can truely say that it appeals to younger readers like myself, (I'm 17), simply because it is a bit of pop culture that we can relate to. I also really loved the Doug reference, because I grew up watching Doug, and I recall not understanding what Judys' "style" was. Well, now I know. Just my two cents of course.

Jackson Pollock
Just a picky thing really, Jackson Pollack was definately supported and apparently most likely funded by the CIA for his artwork. Is it a good idea to compare his work, then, to the beat poets in the Historical Context section? After all, the majority of beat poets were fiercely against the CIA and the CIA against them. Pollock was cultural expression against Communist ideals of oppression, whereas the beats took inspiration from McCarthyist (and so on) repression. I'll happily stand down though. 86.132.181.41 18:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

There is no evidence that the Beats or the public were aware of the CIA connection at the time. In fact, there is no hard evidence that Pollack knew. While this connection is certainly relevant to Pollock’s biography, I can see no reason why it should affect his relationship to the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac distanced himself from the Hippies and even supported Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, yet no one can deny him his rightful place in the history of the Beats. Terry1944 22:49, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

what about
what about george orwell a.k.a. eric artuhr blair


 * no way.

You'd think the beats were just writers/poets to read you guys. Anyone ever heard of Michael Bowen? He not only knew/hung around with Kerouac, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs et al, but he was a prolific painter and connects the beats with the hippies, was the instigator of the human be-in and knew Leary, Hopper and others when psychedelia took over. Pete


 * Well, I fixed the link in the article to the Human Be-In, in the hopes that an interested reader might find out something about Micahel Bowen there (though that article doesn't mention him at present, I don't know why not -- maybe I'll toss in a detail about him and see what happens to it).


 * Michael Bowen himself seems like an interesting guy, though to my eye he doesn't seem like a prominent enough figure on the "Beat" side of things to want to talk him up in this article.


 * As for the "Beat" thing mostly being about writers, yeah, as far as I can tell it definitely was, at least in the early days in New York in the late 40s. By the time you get into the "beatnik" era (post-"On the Road"), I would guess there would be a bunch of identifiable Beatnik artists/muscians/actors/etc, but I can't think of any really prominent ones to mention, and haven't come across any references on the subject.  If anyone can think of one, I'd be happy to read it.


 * (I guess there's Jay DeFeo, the woman who painted "The Rose"...) -- Doom 03:58, 12 May 2006 (UTC)


 * If they weren't a part of the original '40s New York group or one of the very original San Francisco group (circa Ginsberg and Kerouac's first one or two visits) then they aren't by definition part of the beat group. Influenced by...surely. But part of? No. IrishGuy 08:35, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Forgotten?
As far as I know there are two major authors you did not mention. John Fante, author of "Ask the Dust" (among other novels) and Charles Bukowski, author of "Factotum", "Holywood",..... Serge de Gosson
 * Bukowski, though of the same era, isn't considered a Beat generation writer because he wasn't associated with Kerouac, Ginsberg or any of the other generally considered Beat writers. Fante, as far as I can tell, is of the previous generation and dealt with the life of the disillusioned first generation American immigrant. They'd be worth a minor mention, though. RasputinAXP   c  [[Image:Gadsden flag.svg|25px]] 15:47, 5 April 2006 (UTC)


 * John Fante was closer to the Lost Generation of Hemingway. Bukowski had nothing at all to do with the Beats other than meeting Neal Cassady once in passing. IrishGuy 07:18, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Hippie
The hippie movement had absolutely nothing to do with the beat movement. The "beatnik" movement was completely created by the media to mock the beat movement. Please don't confuse them. IrishGuy 08:37, 12 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Hey IrishGuy... first, let me say thanks much for keeping an eye on this page, nice job on the vandalism reverts.


 * Anyway, about the beatnik/hippie business, I think it's an exaggeration to say that these have "absolutely nothing" to do with the beat movement. Case in point, Allen Ginsberg.


 * The picture in my head (reflected in this article, much of which I wrote) is that "beat generation" -> "beatnik" -> "hippie" gradual transformation. There was a small group that was held up as representatives of a "generation", and then became leaders/icons that really did inspire a generation (for better or worse).  Make what distinctions you like, but I think it's hard to find a place draw hard lines between those various stages.


 * That the term "beatnik" was intended to be an insult is obvious, but I think it stuck and became one of the standard names for something that was going on.  -- Doom 20:49, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the compliments. As for the hippie thing, what I meant was that while the hippies were somewhat influenced by the beats, the beats had really nothing to do with the hippies. Kerouac didn't agree with most of them and their beliefs (he was pretty conservative in his later years). Burroughs didn't associate with them (quite possibly simply because by temperament he wasn't a "joiner"). Really only Ginsberg did and that isn't really much to link them. I will agree that the hippies were influenced by the beats. IrishGuy   talk  20:55, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure I get the objection here... one of the three big guys happily crossed over to the hippie side, and I think if you look closely you'll find a lot of minor beat figures had no problem with "being hippies".  What do you think of Ed Sanders?  His take is essentially that the media just changed the label on the bottle.  One year they were calling his friends "beatniks", the next year they were calling them "hippies".  -- Doom 05:19, 13 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Sure, but the minor beats didn't become minor beats until the shift was already happening. The hippie movement was primarily a west coast thing whereas the original beat movement was an east coast thing. IrishGuy   talk  16:53, 13 June 2006 (UTC)


 * The whole of the hippie could probably be traced back to the book On the Road. Not only do I think hippies were directly influenced by the beats, I think that the beat gen is almost just a label given to the first hippies.  Guys like Ken Kesey can be used as an example here.  Is he a beatnik or a hippie?  He had all the same ideals as the beat gen, he wrote influential & intellectual texts and all of his early friends were beatniks, but, he started the psychedelic drug and art trend and gave the world grateful dead and such that would become traits of the hippie gen.  To try and call Kesey a hippie or a beatnik would be difficult.  It's because hippies are basically just the older beatniks.  The only real difference is a change in image.  (Ngoah89 19:46, 26 September 2006 (UTC))

The Poetry Itself
Could anyone include or perhaps point me in the direction of a literary analysis of beat poetry? Similar to what one might find on metaphysical poetry or romantic etc. Just some kind of formal description of typical beat poetry outlining form and style, length and typical subject matter. When one searches for beat poetry it redirects here to this beat generation page and almost all other content relating to beat poetry on the web is taken from here or is also about the beat generation and its very frustrating as someone (like myself) who would simply like to read about the poetry itself for the time being can find only discussions pertaining to the generation that spawned it, which while important, is not exactly what I'm looking for. I'm just hoping for some sort of focus on the poetry itself, I know there is obviously no definitive set of guidelines to officially make a poem, a 'beat' poem but SOME information would be very helpful if anyone knows where to find it or would be so kind as to include it here.

203.166.237.154 00:27, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

This article is lacking in the beat poetry department, and the redirect is doing the community no favors. Beat poetry is distinct from beat writing in that it had musical backing by jazz musicians, and often featured unconvential "poets", ie. Lenny Bruce. Incidentally, there is nearly nothing said of his involvement with beat poetry on his biography page either. I'll place it on my long wiki to-do list. (Mind meal 10:58, 3 July 2007 (UTC))

Rewrite
Does anyone else feel this page needs a rewrite? It's just messy. 71.101.199.152 17:03, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Link to www.johnlong.com
Hello, I did my doctorate in France at the Université de Paris III (the Sorbonne). My thesis was "Drugs and the 'Beats': The Role of Drugs in the Lives and Writings of Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg." I have translated it into English and it was published last year. I invite you to have a look at my website if you wish: www.johnlong.com My question is, would you be willing to put a link to my site on yours? Thanking you in advance for your consideration, I am

Sincerely yours

John Long 193.248.218.190 14:04, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Influences on Western culture - Ginsberg quotations
Ginsberg has characterized some of the essential effects of Beat Generation artistic movement in the following terms: (clip)• Liberation of the word from censorship. Please, "WORD" is correct, not "WORLD." This is a _quote._ It is not debatable. ~cailan 06:01, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Meaning & Usage (Doesn't Look Right to Me)
Hello, I am no Kerouac expert but I think maybe the first couple senteces under the heading 'Meaning & Usage' may have been tampered with. I'll let an expert decide for certain. Thanks. --Unclekybo 16:28, 16 April 2007 (UTC) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Unclekybo (talk • contribs) 16:27, 16 April 2007 (UTC).

Link to Novel
Apparently, I went about this the wrong way previously, and just added a link. My apologies, especially since it was regarded as spam. Nick Mamatas' 2004 novel, Move Under Ground, was released under a Creative Commons online a few months ago, and a link to that novel would be valuable here, I think. It's been very well received, translated into a few languages, now, and Mamatas is notable enough to have his own article, as does the novel. More to the point, the novel's a pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft and Jack Kerouac, with other Beat Generation notables as primary characters.

http://www.moveunderground.org is the link, but a link to the internal article would suffice, I'd think. (The CC version of the novel is already linked there.) Geotaylor 14:02, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Correction: 'Ginsberg' to Hedrick
Dear Editors, I would like to bring the following to your attention:

The following is written under San Francisco:

"When Ginsberg organized the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955, he had Rexroth serve as master of ceremonies; in a sense, Rexroth was bridging two generations. This reading included the first public performance of Ginsberg's poem Howl and thus it is considered one of the most important events in the history of the Beat Generation."

But, I would like to bring to your attention what Ginsberg hiimself said in the interview for Jack's Book, pp 198-199, and cited in Matt Theado ed., The Beats: A Literary Reference, The Beats in the West, pg. 61: Ginsberg recalled: "The Six Gallery reading has come about when Wally Hedrick. who was a painter and one of the major people there, asked Rexroth if he knew any poets that would put on a reading.

Therefore, I would like to make the correction "Ginsberg organized" to "Hedrick organized". Thank you and I look forward to your response. --Art4em 02:10, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Hedrick to Rexroth to McClure to Ginsberg
Why is this so hard to get straight? All kinds of Wikipedia pages have the wrong organizer for the Six Gallery Reading. Check out the Barry Miles biography (and dozens of other sources, but I know for sure it's in Miles). Hedrick may have asked Rexroth but then Rexroth asked Michael McClure who then asked Ginsberg who did the actual organizing. Hedrick maybe had the idea, but if you're talking about actual organization (like, for example, writing an invitation and mailing it out or, say, organizing a list of readers) Ginsberg did it. Read the quote you have here. It says nothing about Hedrick actually doing anything beyond asking. I don't have Jack's Book available but I'm willing to bet money if you keep reading Ginsberg probably said something like: Rexroth then asked McClure and McClure asked me.

F. Simon Grant 17:44, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Many university, cooperative and commercial art galleries have interns to design, label, post and mail out invitations -- I've licked many a few stamps in my day as well: are you inferring that interns are organizers? On the other hand, if Ginsberg or whomever did lick the stamps what does that prove: not much. Ginsberg says in the most recent, learned source that the Reading came about / started because of Hedrick, period.

As for biographical errors in wiki and elsewhere please note this whopper: Jack Kerouac AND WALLY HEDRICK went to get the booze for the Six Reading, but you will never see Wally mentioned anywhere in this regard, when it is so hard not to get straight.

As for the other erroneous instances in Wikipedia, please do your best to remedy the errors as you have just viewed them.

Respectfully, --Art4em 06:34, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Respectfully, he didn't just lick the damn stamps. Hedrick who ran the gallery, right?, asked for somebody to organize a reading. Somebody did organize a reading. Ginsberg organized a reading. He was not an intern, he was the boss. It was STARTED because of Hedrick. It was finished BY Ginsberg. Why are you not reading more carefully the things you say yourself??? "Ginsberg says in the most recent, learned source that the Reading came about / started because of Hedrick, period" does not mean Hedrick organized it. You know the postcard that says:


 * "6 POETS AT 6 GALLERY


 * Philip Lamantia reading mss. of late John
 * Hoffman-- Mike McClure, Allen Ginsberg,
 * Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen--all sharp new
 * straightforward writing-- remarkable coll-
 * ection of angels on one stage reading
 * their poetry. No charge, small collection
 * for wine, and postcards. Charming event.


 * Kenneth Rexroth, M.C.


 * 8 PM Friday Night October 7,1955


 * 6 Gallery 3119 Fillmore St.
 * San Fran"

You know who wrote that? Ginsberg wrote that. Did Wally Hedrick write that? No. No he did not. Ginsberg didn't just lick the damn stamps and it's insulting for you to imply that. I would give you the benefit of the doubt here if you had some actual evidence that I'm wrong. What you have is Ginsberg saying it started with Hedrick. Well, it did. Did it end with Hedrick? No. Did Hedrick even lick the stamps? No. It was held at his place. That's it. Everything else was done by Ginsberg. LOOK IN MORE THAN ONE SOURCE. Any other source would confirm this. And please read these other sources carefully. Saying something started with somebody doesn't mean that person organized it. A random search of the Six Gallery reading pulled up this (try not to misread it):


 * "Ginsberg was now in a state of high excitement, organizing a poetry reading at a converted auto repair shop in the Fillmore district where he would perform in the company of the Bay Area poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. His original plan had been to put on an evening of Beat Generation readings, during which he would read with Jack and Neal, but neither of his friends had the confidence to appear in public." from "Angel Headed Hipsters"

Here's another one from our friend Digaman from the article "How Beat Happened". Please write to Digaman personally and ask him to clarify. He usually edits the Allen Ginsberg page.


 * "Painter Wally Hedrick asked Rexroth to organize a reading at the Six Gallery at Fillmore and Greenwich, and Rexroth asked Michael McClure and Ginsberg to read.
 * Rexroth also suggested that Ginsberg add to the bill Gary Snyder, a graduate student at Berkeley who was translating the poems of Han Shan or "Cold Mountain," a Zen poet of T'ang-era China. Snyder told Ginsberg about Whalen, and Ginsberg told Snyder about Kerouac. The bill was set: Ginsberg, Snyder, McClure, Whalen, and Philip Lamantia, with Rexroth as M.C. Kerouac declined to read.


 * Ginsberg put up signs, and inscribed a hundred postcards with the following advertisement" [The "six angels" thing]

Now the phrasing in this one might be difficult for you, but notice: Hedrick asked Rexroth to organize it. Did he say to Rexroth "Hey, I'm organizing a reading and you'll show up but I'm doing all the organizing"? No. Did he say, "Hey, Rexroth, lick some stamps for me"? No. It seems from this passage like Rexroth is doing the organizing, but then look at the phrase "Rexroth also suggested that Ginsberg add to the bill Gary Snyder..." How would Ginsberg have the power to add anybody to the bill if he's just licking stamps. That's a pretty powerful intern if that's all he really is. Read McClure's account in Scratching the Beat Surface (where McClure says he was given the duties by Rexroth but then gave the duties to Ginsberg). Read Barry Miles' account in his Ginsberg biography (which corroborates everything I just said). Read a dozen or a hundred other accounts. I would say the latest scholarly info isn't necessarily the rightest, but the info you've given here doesn't prove me wrong at all. Please read more widely and more carefully before you insult other people's intelligence.

F. Simon Grant 14:52, 20 August 2007 (UTC)


 * In Scracthing the Beat Surface McClure doesn't actually specify who planned the Six Gallery reading, but in an article called "Painting Beat by Numbers" McClure says, "When I was asked in August to organize a reading at the Six [Gallery] I said okay, but then, too busy, I asked Allen to do it." Then he says, "Allen's comic/serious mailer announced..." meaning Allen wrote the mailer.  And the Miles biography supports this.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Special:Contributions/ (talk)

Like I said above, what's wrong with the original, primary source? ie Allen Gingsberg. I know that today, this is a crazy idea. In other words, I don't buy any of the secondary sources (many suspect) other than Ginsberg's that states it plain as day -- sorry. However, given that it appears that I might have unintentionally bruised some feelings, I won't use the words "organized by Hedrick", instead I will use "conceived by Hedrick"...Wally would had preferred the more brilliant, inventive statement anyway. That you and respectfully, --Art4em 04:11, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Plain as day? What in the world are you talking about?  Are you even reading even reading your own supposed bomb shell source?  It says it started with Hedrick.  Started.  Hedrick had the idea.  That's what Ginsberg says.  Does Ginsberg say "plain as day" that Hedrick organized it?  No, it says it started with him.  All it proves is that Hedrick had the idea.  My feelings aren't hurt.  This has nothing to do with feelings.  You just have this obstinate refusal to actually look at facts.  And what do you mean the secondary sources are suspect.  Do you even know what you're talking about on any level of actually understanding the mechanism of fact?  Michael McClure is a suspect secondary source.  He was at the event, he was asked to organize it, he passed it off to Ginsberg.  That's not a damn secondary source.  That's as close to being primary as you can get.  And good friend Barry Miles is a suspect secondary source?  And please call Digaman a suspect secondary source.  I would love to see how he responds to that.  Your condescention is groundless.  Please don't try to force others to acknowlege your poor understanding of fact and then condescendingly recant.  Fact is fact, dude.  No amount of condescention will change that.


 * Here's your own conclusive, "plain as day" evidence in case you forgot: "The Six Gallery reading has come about when Wally Hedrick. who was a painter and one of the major people there, asked Rexroth if he knew any poets that would put on a reading." I also believe this is your handiwork (from the "Howl" article): "The poem was first performed at the famous Six Gallery in San Francisco. The reading was conceived by Wally Hedrick – a painter and co-founder of the Six – who approached Ginsberg in the summer of 1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery…At first, Ginsberg refused…But once he’d written a rough draft of Howl, he changed his 'fucking mind,' as he put it."


 * The argument here is about saying "Hedrick organized." Clearly, based even on what you've provided, that's an error of fact.  Go to your vaunted, trustworthy primary source if you want to.  It proves you wrong.

F. Simon Grant 16:59, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

"The idea started with Hedrick"! Nice! Right, yes, thank you again, we shouldn't be polite or diplomatic! Thank you! That is even better than the previous better! I appreciate all your assistance, thank you, and respectfully, —Preceding unsigned comment added by Art4em (talk • contribs) 23:40, 1 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Just because I'm a hard-headed Aries who can't let things go, and because this might be a good thing to integrate into the actual page eventually, here's what the rest of the quote from Jack's Book says (and, again, this is Ginsberg speaking): "Maybe Rexroth asked McClure to organize it and McClure didn't know how or didn't have time. Rexroth asked me, so I met McClure and Rexroth suggested I go visit another poet who was living in Berkeley, which was Gary ... Then Gary and I decided we ought to invite Rexroth to be the sixth -- sixth poet -- to introduce at the Six Gallery, be the elder, since he had linked us up."  There's a difference between polite diplomacy and fact, and there's the fact based on your own standards.

F. Simon Grant 17:56, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Addition To: The Beatnik 'Stereotype'
Currently, only a 'term' defines this important passage 'Stereotype'. What is missing is: a 'real' stereotype.

I propose that you include one of the most famous "popular beatnik stereotypes" in recorded history. This figure would inform the passage from 'term' to 'stereotype', and act as a practical guide so as to inform the transition from 'term' to an 'actuality' from which the "thousands of young people on college campuses and even in high schools came to regard themselves as beatniks" could draw some sort of visual inspiration. A 'stereotype' is empty without a figure to cut its teeth on.

That figure is Wally Hedrick.

Indeed: Vesuvio’s bar, located on Broadway Street across from City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco, nurtured and cultivated the city’s struggling artists, poets, and musicians, and became popular among The Beats -- Jack Kerouac was practically a fixture at Vesuvio’s. In the early 50's, Vesuvio’s famously employed the artist Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped ushered in The Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 50's; in fact, by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene.

If you are unfamaliar with Wally Hedrick, his apartment was, from 1955-65, 'The Unofficial Epicenter of the Small San Francisco Art World'.

This is a very exciting passage, and, unless you have another or additional recorded citations (Wally actually thought his wife at the time was the 'first' beat stereotype - but it is not documented), I would like to introduce the passage in some form. Please advise. Thank you...--Art4em 02:46, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Deleting the Generations table
The GENERATIONS TABLE is the product of some rather overzealous fans of Strauss and Howe, a consulting firm. So while Beat Gneration is very important, has popular use, and scholarly backing, the Generations table refers to one corporate consulting groups view of US history. They use these views to help marketing and so forth. It might be fun and profitable, but it's not scholarly. Needs to be deleted immediately. Could folks please second this or dispute this? If someone would take the lead to delete the table, I'd be glad. --Dylanfly 17:04, 28 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Happy to see it go myself. I've always thought it was really dubious. -- Doom 14:54, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

The Corso conspiracy
There seems to be a pro-Corso conspiracy afoot to make Corso the central figure of the Beat Generation. My questioning of this is in no way a shot at Corso. I love Corso passionately and wish he really was more widely appreciated. But is it accurate to make him a central figure? The Burroughs/Kerouac/Ginsberg junta is pretty widely agreed upon as a central focus. Add Corso to that and you might as well add Cassady and Orlovsky too. I mean is "Bomb" accuarately up there with Howl, On the Road, Naked Lunch? I don't mean quality, just widely accepted importance? That keeps being edited back and forth; I would prefer to open up that discussion instead of constantly going back and forth. A few other very minor points: A lot of the new Corso stuff is interesting certainly, but I question some of it. I also never heard that Corso had anything to do with the Hippos Boiled in their Tanks. I've always only ever heard that was Burroughs and Kerouac -- each writing one chapter back and forth. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, please let me know. I could easily supply a dozen sources that only mention B and K; I would be very interested to know if/why those sources left off Corso. Anyway, the back and forth editing is an indication that this should definitely be a topic we discuss here. F. Simon Grant 19:51, 26 September 2007 (UTC)


 * The Corso material is far too much. Undue weight. Of course, after removing it, I received this harassing email:


 * I have been asked to be a witness to submissions made by "noncorporeal" to the Beat Generation Page which you have been removing. I have saved the page as it is now at 9:20 pm GMT.  As soon as "Nocorporeal" posts their Beat Generation Page entry, I will save that, and note the GMT time.


 * I have thoroughly reviewed Wikipedia policy. If you, subsequent to "noncorporeal"'s posting,  in my opinion, violate the policy I will assist in escalating this to a dispute.


 * I am a published authority on Corso and have the largest private collection of his work: books, manuscripts, notebooks, tape recordings, film and other objects.


 * Several wikipedia scanners will be employed to indentify your isp.


 * How nice. IrishGuy talk 22:02, 26 September 2007 (UTC)


 * That's just ridiculous. The supposed expertise of "Noncorporeal" (I'm assuming it's "Noncorporeal" writing [?]) has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Corso's presence on this page is encyclopedic.  That's a basic nonsequitor fallacy; I'm always skeptical of credentials on Wikipedia, but this supposed Corso expert should know what a nonsequitor fallacy is and realize he/she is using it.  I'll definitely back you up on this, Irishguy.  My argument: Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg have a significant presence on this page because most reliable sources list those three as the primary, most significant figures.  Most lit scholars would agree upon the significance of Howl, On the Road, and Naked Lunch, at least in regards to the importance of those three texts to the Beat Generation.  Though historically Corso may have been of equal significance, and "Marriage" and "Bomb" may be great and beloved by audiences and members of the Beat Generation, but neither Corso nor his work is considered by most scholars of equal importance.  It's a shame -- and this is coming from a Corso lover -- but it's encyclopedic.  I would like to ask the person who wrote the email if he/she has read what Wikipedia says about pov and personal agendas.  Anyway, I think discussing it here is much more productive than writing baseless, fallacious threatening emails.

F. Simon Grant 14:10, 1 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Ignore the email. I know very little about the Beats. I scanned the article and found it odd that Corso was in every picture, though if I had to name 3 Beats he would not be one of them. This is a clear example of undue weight. Atropos 00:00, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't mean to side with Noncorporeal here, but I just thought I'd mention that Corso really and truly was regarded as The Fourth Beat on at least through the 70s, and his poetry is good enough to not just shrug him off as a hanger-on or something -- there are reasons that all these photos exist of Corso hanging around with these guys. On the other hand, he didn't write anything that was as influential as The Big Three, so there's certainly no reason his name should be shoe-horned into the introduction.
 * Reviewing the photos, I think that having another solo shot of Coro near the "characterization" sub-section was a little too much, considering there's already one by his name. So I removed this one... [[Image:Corso reads london.jpg|thumb|325px|right|Gregory Corso reading poetry at Royal Albert Hall in [[London]]

The file : has an uncertain copyright status and may be deleted. You can comment on its removal.]] -- Doom 18:13, 28 October 2007 (UTC) ‎
 * Well, the latest member of the "Corso Conspiracy" is Lacostemaison, who not only wanted to write Corso into the big four, he deleted the reference to the Portable Beat Reader, because it doesn't support the claim. Anyway, if you're listening: you don't need to tell me that Corso was a cool guy, a really good poet, and an important figure among the beats -- the reason I got involved with this page is that I thought it was giving him short shrift -- but we're supposed to be making some effort to be accurate here, try not to exaggerate. -- Doom 19:15, 8 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I think I've got it. Take a look at the history of the Gustave_Reininger page: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gustave_Reininger&action=history  A bunch of edits are by a user a suspiciously named "Greininger", as well as "Noncorporeal" and "Lacostemaison".  Reininger has just done a Corso movie "The Last Beat", and I hypothesize that he's pimping Corso to help plug the movie. -- Doom 02:42, 9 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I've reported the sockpuppets: Suspected_sock_puppets/Greininger -- Doom 20:55, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

photos in general

 * As far as photos are concerned, this photo of Hal Chase, Kerouc, Ginsberg and Burroughs from 1945 is the obvious one to lead with, but I haven't had the energy to investigate the legalities of using it.  One option would be to work the dodge of using a book cover, e.g. Tyrell, "The Naked Angels" -- Doom 17:24, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Redundant historical context paragraph
While rereading the Corso add ons and fixing some weird typos I realized this paragraph is needless redundancy of questionable accuracy. There's some interesting and maybe useful stuff here, but most of this was already said in other places and much of it is irrelevant and probably POV. We could prehaps cannabalize out all the useful stuff and throw the rest away:


 * "While modernist poetry is hailed as a new creative form of writing, many historians and writers believe that the beat generation actually helped move sects of poetry away from the modern by referencing and recycling old Surrealist, Dadaist and Romantic works. All three movements, in a sense, developed as a reaction to war, just as the Beat Generation was reacting to the environment of post-WWII America. They both emphasize a desolateness left by their respective wars and that common cause is the possible reason the styles are so similar. Like the Beats, the Romantics emerged as a reaction to war (The French Revolution). And in many ways America of the 1950s saw a reemergence of the Enlightenment ideals the Romantics had fought against.  If literature is seen simplistically as a fluctuation between Romantic and Enlightenment values, the Beat Generation would certainly side with the Romantics. But besides Romanticism, the Beats were influenced by the Surrealist and Dadaists, the recurring theme of nothingness, which the Dadists and Surrealists celebrated along with the Beats; their form, such as syntax and structure, was quite similar as well. In the 1950’s the beat generation prided themselves on not following the norms of the American suburbia class as well as following their rules, and the free form poetry found in the Dadaist and Romantic movements became an inspiration."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by F. Simon Grant (talk • contribs) 20:35, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Stereotypical Beatnik.jpg
Image:Stereotypical Beatnik.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 07:11, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Relevant rock connections
I created the "Rock and Roll Connections" section because I thought it was historical context as important as the connections in the "historical context" section but I didn't think it necessarily fit there. I believe it shows the complex, interconnected tapestry of art and culture of the time and will perhaps give the general reader a better understanding of the character of the Beat Generation. But I'm afraid we need some checks and balances to make sure it doesn't grow out of control and become just a trivia section. Some of the entries I question may have more to do with my own opinion or misperception. For example, Laurie Anderson is a performance artist; is she widely considered a rock musician as well? One line I would definitely support deleting is this: "In the late 1950s, voice actor Bob McFadden collaborated with Rod McKuen on a single entitled 'The Beat Generation' which poked fun at the movement." Neither McFadden nor McKuen is a significant rock musician (though McKuen's complex relationship with the Beats may be a subject to address somewhere on this page); this bit of trivia also doesn't really show the interrelationship and mutual influence of rock culture and Beat culture. I also thought about making the section about connections in pop culture. I tried to figure out how to mention Terry Southern somewhere on the page but couldn't figure out a good way to do it; some sort of pop culture section may be useful but certainly is in danger of becoming a trivia section. Anyway, I thought I'd open that up to general discussion. F. Simon Grant 14:26, 1 October 2007 (UTC)


 * In general this sort of thing is always a problem in wikipedia writing... you can't list two or three examples of anything without it growing wildly out of control (this is one of the reasons I've been trying hard to avoid adding a "writers who say they were influenced by the beats" section). The "Rock and Roll Connections" section is indeed problematic, and as it is it needs to be tightened up a bit, at the very least.  Though on the other hand, I can't see any logical reason to restrict this to "rock and roll", why not make it an "influences on pop culture" section?  I don't think it'll make the problems any worse... as it stands, it's going to take some constant, vigilant editing to prevent trivia freaks from adding the name of every song that has anything to do with Kerouac or Cassady. -- Doom 18:22, 28 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm deleting this bit for now:
 * *In the late 1950s, voice actor Bob McFadden collaborated with Rod McKuen on a single entitled "The Beat Generation" which poked fun at the movement.
 * Rod McKuen is indeed an interesting, problematic subject... as I understand it, he was a prime example of someone exploiting the beat craze, packing them in at poetry readings in North Beach... And those re-leased recordings don't suck as badly as one might expect, considering that in some circles he's synonymous with vapid and shallow (delve into the forgotten vinyl if you'd like to know why...). In any case, he clearly ain't "Rock n' Roll", and it doesn't make any sense to shovel him in there just because he's put out some records.


 * This stuff still scares me, though:
 * *The Beats are referenced in songs by artists such as: The Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, 10,000 Maniacs, They Might Be Giants, Van Morrison, The Clean, Ani Difranco, and King Crimson.
 * Eight names... I bet we get up to a few dozen in the space of a few years. -- Doom 21:48, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Potential Featured Article?
With a bit of slight tweaking, this article can easily become a featured article. Clean up a few sections,most notably "The Beatnik Stereotype", and we'll rapidly obtain a Bronze Star. I don't want to do any tweaking myself because I don't want to screw up a near-perfect article. Just my two cents. AlexRochon 03:07, 3 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Wow, it's good to hear something positive on a discussion page; it's rare. I know I have tons of little things I'd like to change on this page (it's kind of a messy page overall, tons of little fixes to be done -- and including more citation has been a concern of mine for a while).  Do you have specific recommendations?  For example, what's your specific criticism of the "Beatnik Stereotype" section?  I know we need to find another way to say "the universe's capital" which is an informal exaggeration and kind of silly.  But I also want to open the question up to everybody: What specifically can/should we do to make this a featured article?

F. Simon Grant 13:19, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I was simply of the opinion that the Beat Stereotype section was a bit informal... if someone wouldn't mind cleaning it up a little, I'd be extremely grateful... Also, if we could emphasize the quote is indeed a quote, It would make the section more coherent. I thought it was an act of vandalism when I read it, half asleep. And there should definitely be more information on the Beatnik Stereotype, as it is so central to the subject but gets less attention than the (in my opinion) less important Rock and Roll connections. Anyone else have any coins to toss into this discussion?

Oh, also, if anyone has a few good quotes from Naked Lunch or On The Road, it'd make a lot of sense to add them to the Quotes section, which, for such a prominent group of intellectuals, I found to be a bit short. AlexRochon 00:12, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I worked on the Beatnik stereotype section a little, though I'm afraid it needs much more help (though I may be overly critical). I'm not sure which quote you were talking about, but I took out this:


 * In fact, the universe's capital for beat art was a "three-story building at 2322-24 Fillmore, where Wally Hedrick and Jay DeFeo lived and worked; it was the unofficial epicenter of the small San Francisco art world in the years 1955-65.


 * It doesn't seem relevant. Maybe it should go somewhere under "history", but I'm not sure what this has to do with the beatnik stereotype.  I'm wondering how much it really needs to be expanded since there is already a beatnik article.  I put a little bit about the parody stuff (since many of the core Beats saw the whole beatnik thing as just a parody) and a tiny bit about the reaction to it from the Beats, which I think is much more significant to this page, but that stuff can be seriously expanded with more specific details (for example, if I remember correctly, Ginsberg really loved the parody in the Pogo cartoons in particular, and something about The Beat Generation the movie would certainly fit there).  I don't want this mono-focus on the beatnik stuff to shut down broader discussion of what else needs work on this page, so please, everyone, feel free to talk about other possible changes, things to focus on, etc.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by F. Simon Grant (talk • contribs) 18:37, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Distinguished members and hard working enthusiasts, I would just like to make clear that the "unofficial epicenter" is not my phrase, or is it a matter of me looking or finding 'other' words. Actually, those words are a very important fact in an important quote from a very distinguished writer, poet and historian, Bill Berkson, (former ?) Dean at the San Francisco Art Institute.

That said, I would be very happy to put the sentence under question under 'history', but that sentence and fact tied in and expanded upon the previous point so nicely, ie that of the previous sentence, that is where I put it. If however, as F. Simon Grant suggests, he would like to shuffle this most important point to the 'Beat Generation' somewhere else, that's fine by me. Who should do it? I'm happy to do it if no one else wants to do it. Respectfully and onward! --Art4em 03:24, 9 October 2007 (UTC)


 * As for the Beatnik page: I've started (half-heartedly) politicking over there to get that material merged into this article.
 * I've never particularly liked it -- and I think it's funny that it was started by some people who seemed to be pro-"beatnik", but since then it's been veering to the opposite pole... and they're starting to include "beat generation" material with a clear over-lap with this article.
 * Anyway, if y'all think the '"Beatnik" era' section needs to be beefed up, some of the material from Beatnik might do the job. -- Doom 21:53, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Huncke invented name "beatnik"?
I'm deleting this recent addition for now, in part because the term "beatnik" is already discussed later in the article. I'd also like to hear more about the claim that Hunke invented the term "beatnik" -- every source I've ever read attributes it to Herb Caen:


 * Following the launch of the Sputnik rocket in 1953, American's had a new suffix - "Nik" - to be appended to anything that was suspected of being subversive or communist.


 * It was Herbert Huncke who actually first added the "nik" suffix to "beat" to coin a phrase that would define a generation.

This Shuftan book is rather new. If 144.137.192.226 is listening, could you tell us something more about this book? What source does the book cite for this particular claim? (If it's just a claim by Huncke after-the-fact from a much later interview, that might not be good enough.) -- Doom (talk) 18:30, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

P.S. Hey "144.137.192.226", can you open a wikipedia account and log-in? It makes it easier to keep track of who is doing what.

Hedrick press-agentry
Again, instead of a back and forth we should discuss disgreements about inclusions and removals, specifically the Hedrick paragraph. Instead of a disagreement between two people, we can come to a consensus: I personally think it's an irrelevant paragraph and seems like, as it was elegantly put, "press-agentry". It's verging on relevant, but it's like the incomplete Corso discussion earlier: the weight given to it seems exaggerated.

Here's the paragraph under consideration:
 * More specifically, Vesuvio’s bar, located on Broadway Street across from City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco, nurtured and cultivated the city’s struggling artists, poets, and musicians, and became popular among The Beats -- Jack Kerouac was practically a fixture at Vesuvio’s. In the early 50's, Vesuvio’s famously employed the artist Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped usher in The Beat stereotype which ballooned in the later 50's; in fact, by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene.

And here's the reference: William T. Taylor ed., Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons and Impact, pg. 309. I'd also argue that this is not a "famous" citation. If it's famous, surely a significant amount of other people who edit this page have heard of it. I, for one, have never heard of that book, for whatever that's worth. It sounds like an interesting book that I'd like to read one day, but is it really "famous"? F. Simon Grant 14:49, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you Simon Grant for your assistance. I hope you and others will notice that on "02:46, 22 July 2007 (UTC)" I posted the arguement for the addition in the 'TALK' section.

Now, all of the sudden not only is there a problem (with no discussion) with the addition, but slander -- just because someone is an authority on one or two of the critical counter-culture artists in California in the 60's doesn't make him suspect, thank you. Heck, suspect should be gleaned from the pride some champion for not knowing important citations and sources. I am really confused here, given the protocol and community respect that was paid and what was undertaken. You and the others may like to review the JULY 2007 commentary.

Respectfully, --Art4em 22:03, 18 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Frankly, I didn't read your earlier post because I don't really care about the beatnik stereotype section. I simply saw a dispute that I thought would be better settled on the talk page.  I could give two craps whether the paragraph stays or goes, but if we're looking for a consensus among editors (because one editor "all of the sudden" decided it was unnecessary) I would vote to delete it.


 * My most significant umbrage is with the exaggerations: "one of the most famous 'popular beatnik stereotypes' in recorded history" for example. In most sources I've read Hedrick is only mentioned in passing, a footnote at best.  I take no pride in not knowing the Taylor source, but I have been studying the Beat Generation now for years and years and have read scores of books and articles on the subject.  Calling the Taylor source "famous" or "important" is surprising because surely if it was famous I would have run across it in my experience.  If it truly is "famous" and "important" I'll have to check it out, but you must understand why that sounds to me like an exaggeration.  Other editors, please let us know if that citation is genuinely famous and important and I simply missed it.  I'd be interested in seeing other ciations to back up all your claims.

F. Simon Grant 13:30, 19 October 2007 (UTC)


 * A few points (1) Yes, the tone is far too glowing hence the accusation of "press-agentry" (and I have my doubts that someone I've never heard of is so damned famous, but maybe that's just me); (2) I like Vesuvio's a lot myself, but I don't think this advertisement for the place belongs in the Beat Generation page (and Kerouac wasn't in SF for long enough to be a "fixture" anywhere -- mostly he bopped in and out of town); (3) You don't get to make up rules like "you can't touch my writing without discussing it in the talk page first!" -- Doom 16:39, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks again for your comments and suggestions. I appreciate them so let's review the point. The chapter is BEATNIK STEROTYPE ok. Is there a beatnik sterotype in recorded, documented history? Yes, but there was not one in the passage entitled Sterotype. Therefore, I included the most famous beatnik sterotype in recorded history. If you have another include it. Or, if you have a problem with the author's integrity and claims of factuality, write him or do your homework to falsify it.

Next, it would appear to me that if you don't care about the beatnik sterotype section, why enter the discussion other than to waste people's time who take the section serious.

As for the slander of 'advertisement' please take your negativity and objections elsewhere -- whether so and so was in town for a day, or two, or a month or a year isn't the point. Nor is the point whether you like Vesuvio's or not -- since I currently live in Prague, I can tell you there are great many better places to be hanging out in the world. The point is beat stereotype. The heading is beat stereotype. Wally was hired at Vesuvio's as a stereotype-- if you have a better stereotype submit it. It is an important beatnik stereotype legend and substantuiated citation, period. There was not a stereotype in the section so I included one -- and the section is better off because of the inclusion of the stereotype.

Thank you for your interest in this matter...--Art4em 19:48, 21 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't believe we've got anything to argue about at present, but a "stereotype" is an idea, an image, it doesn't actually require an example of a human being that happens to project that image (there doesn't have to be any for the sterotype to exist in people's heads) -- and in fact, there already was an example of that sterotype, namely "Maynard G. Krebs". In any case, I don't object to mentioning that bit about Hendrick posing as a beatnik, it's not a bad detail to establish the kind of thing that was going on at the time.


 * My apologies if I've been misreading your intentions, but you really do need to watch your tone -- sometimes you slip into a style that resembles ad writing, or magazine copy. NPOV and all that.  -- Doom 02:00, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes indeed, thank you, for you are correct that my style is poor. Believe me, I am not proud of that truism. Yet, I am very sorry about that and I admit to my lack of talent and facility -- for this I humbly apologize.

And, thank you again, for noticing my intentions are not 'poor'. Thank you!

(Gawd, even this sounds terrible, but I am in a hurry!)

I will try to remedy my tone and I will appreciate any suggestions you may have in the future in this regards. With all due respect and appreciation, --Art4em 02:27, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * DOING THE HOMEWORK FOR YOU

Dear Mr Simon F Grant, it took me about a minute to find another source of the important sterotype legend in documented history: To Jerry Garcia, Wally Hedrick was a genuine beatnik; even keeping a ‘job’ ironically posing as a bohemian sitting at the bar at Vesuvios, a famous hangout in San Francisco’s North Beach, and it was Hedrick who turned the young Jerry on to acoustic blues. Selz, Peter and Susan Landauer, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, UC Press, 2006, pg.89.

Mr. 4em, thanks for doing the homwork I wasn't the least bit interested in doing (what about it makes it my homework anyway?). To answer your earlier comment (though if you really read carefully I already answered it) I opened up this discussion because I saw that others had a dispute about it. It seemed like something that should be discussed. I personally don't care either way it goes, but it seemed like several people did care. I merely opened the forum and put my dispassionate two cents in so that others who had less dispassionate two cents could also comment -- abiding by the principle of creation through consensus, not monomaniacal spearheading of pet projects.

Though I have no personal interest in the "beatnik stereotype" section, I do have interest in your poor argument since much of your rudeness seems directed at me personally. My comment (and please do read carefully) was that Hedrick in my experience has been little more than a footnote -- therefore, I question your hyperbole, the most famous in recorded history and all that. The source you use seems to support this impression that Hedrick was a footnote in history. If I was the one on defense here, I could easily find a dozen others that mark Hedrick as a footnote in history -- just because there's a dozen doesn't make him not a footnote. I'm not saying Hedrick is irrelevant; I'm just saying he's not as relevant as you seem to be making him. I think a shift in tone, as you mentioned earlier, would probably fix this problem. Throwing out obscure passages from obscure books is far more of a waste of time than opening up this discussion was.

A brief note on your judgement of importance where sources are concerned: Not to bring up an old argument, but earlier when we were talking about the Six Gallery, you claimed Michael McClure was an untrustworthy secondary source. That tells me you either don't know who Michael McClure is, don't know what "secondary source" really means, or you didn't read my comment very carefully. Based on other comments you've made, I'd guess it was the third option. My point is, if Michael McClure is an untrustworthy secondary source, what are we to think of the sources you've chosen to prove your point? Specifically the claim that they're "famous" and "important" -- more famous and important than Michael McClure? F. Simon Grant 16:52, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * The comments are so bizarre that I hope you can just imagine my chucklings...Respectfully --Art4em 17:32, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I have to say that Simon's comments do not strike me as bizarre in any way. -- Doom 08:12, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

We'll, I am sorry to have to go down this road, but let me site just the first three howlers, since I don't have an extra time point them all out:

1. "Hedrick in my experience has been little more than a footnote" -- really, who in the world cares what you think? For that matter, I don't care what I think either, since this isn't about us, its about the source and citation. omg...

2. "the most famous in recorded history and all that" -- Dude, where in the world did you find that comment in my two citations in this passage on 'Stereotype'. The passage is about stereotype, A STEREOTYPE, not the MOST FAMOUS GREATEST STEREOTYPE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD...please if you have another stereotype please put it in -- but heck lose the negativity man, let's have one, just one notable 'real' stereotype in the heading stereotype, and not businesses in stereotypes...omg...

3. "The source you use seems to support this impression that Hedrick was a footnote in history." -- I can't wait to here you tell the millions and millions and millions of Grateful Dead fans that Jerry Gracia (the source) thought Wally Hedrick was a footnote. omg...

On and on all howlers, so please lets end this or else I'm gonna die of laughter and before that I have a few more articles to contribute positively too...thank you and respectfully, --Art4em 08:21, 25 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay, well it's like this: you're a big fan of Hedrick, and you're completely sold on his prominece and importance, but he doesn't seem particular super famous to me, and at this point I've read a fair amount of the standard accounts of these things. Characterizing him as a "footnote" is not all that far off.  I don't object to bringing his name into this article in a few places, but he's just not of supreme importance...
 * You should probably just forget about the word "sterotype" unless you want to think a little harder about what it means. Hint: real people are real people, they are not sterotypes. They may reflect a stereotype, they may "live up" to a sterotype, they may encourage people to believe in a stereotype, but they themselves are not stereotypes. -- Doom 20:40, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you.

"I" do not need to think a little harder, in fact, I can't do anything: the thinking, actions and selections was completed 50 years ago at the time at Vesuvio's. "They" thought Wally was a great sterotype, period. What is there for me to think about now? The chapter is sterotype, and I inserted a "real" sterotype as an example. That's it, period. I asked premission months ago to insert it with no objection. Now you freak out at the word Wally -- just like all the threatened, minor artists did back then, too. If you have another example that gives form to the sterotype, please insert it. But to say that "I AM A BIG FAN" or "A SMALL FAN" or "A GIGANTIC WINDMILL ON THE TOP OF MAUI" doesn't matter one bit, who cares? It misses the point entirely. I just asked permission to put in ONE real, prime, sterotype example in the heading 'sterotype'.

Additionally, I would be very, very hesitant, as Gandolf the Grey says, of "handing out justice so casually" as you two. William Blake was unknown, too, until 30 years after his death. And, if you two tally up all of Wally's footnotes -- and praise from his contemporaries -- you have one hellava footprint, (picture an enormous Mayan ruin hidden in brush) that vitally extends all across the 2nd half of the 20th century, period. --Art4em 02:40, 26 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I definitely think we should drop this nonsense since we keep saying the same thing over and over again and Art4em keeps misreading and saying the same thing over and over again (I was going to drop the whole thing until the "doing your homework for you" comment -- it seemed like intentional provocation I should've just ignored).


 * But this is something significant for the page as a whole: we should all avoid hero worship and base claims on reliable text and scholarly consensus. This applies to the Corso's over-abundant presence and the Burroughs murder/accident discussion.  Art4em's tone concerning Hedrick is more hero worship than scholarly (and to address your complaint #2 above: the extreme hyperbole I was referring to was used on the discussion page; the phrasing used on the page itself was more subtely hyperbolic).  Hedrick's presence is fine; the phrasing is what's not scholarly.


 * When I say he's a footnote, I mean he's simply not as important as what you're making him, and that's no insult to Jerry Garcia. I've seen Hedrick referenced as someone Ginsberg knew; that doesn't mean I'm saying Ginsberg is unimportant.


 * Here's a parallel example to hopefully clarify (and a suggestion for another stereotype since you asked). I love Bob Kaufman passionately.  I read in one place that he was the person Herb Caen was referring to.  Should I call Bob Kaufman the most important figure in the Beat Generation?  I'd love to but I can't because sources can't back that up.  Just because I saw in one source that Herb Caen was talking about Bob Kaufman, that doesn't mean it's necessarily true.  If I made a scale of importance to categorize the people we've been discussing, B/K/G would be up top, Corso would be below that, Kaufman would be somewhere below that, and Wally Hedrick would be below that.  And I can back that up with sources and it would be scholarly.  I'm sure you'll have something to say, but hopefully not the exact same thing you've been saying.

F. Simon Grant 14:59, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, your 'howlers' just keep me howling...Best --Art4em 17:38, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Claiming to laugh at my comments in no way wins you an argument; it just makes you sound like an insane person. If that is the case, I'm glad I brought joy to the mentally troubled. If that is not the case, then I suspect this arbitrariness is intentional agitation; it's far from mature argumentation, the equivelant of sticking your tongue out and saying "I know you are but what am I" -- and is best ignored. F. Simon Grant 14:05, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh man, why do you continue to waste our time. Arguement? What arguement.

You 'state' Hedrick is a footnote, that is not an argument, that is your own personal judgment. A poor pitiful one at that.

Dude, first, three months ago, I stated the facts making a case for the introduction of Hedrick as a sterotype. Facts and citations. You did not disprove them, no, not a one. But you wanted more and I gave your more in 30 seconds. Instead of saying, sorry, I'm an idiot, you came up with something else...something 'original' like Jerry Garcia must be a moron for having such stated, categorical praise of Wally Hedrick the footnote.

Then, your brilliance decided that you should just bring in some cockneyed liquor store or other idea in with no stated reference to anything in the chapter heading. Is that an arguement? No. No, but you did completely screwed up the passage. I tried to change it but you brought in your buddy who changed it back to absurdity. As a result, now, in the passage stereotype there is no stereotype, but some trumpeted up hack commercialism in the form of start-up beatnik companies? Geezus, dude, get a grip. The heading is STEREOTYPE...not lame profiteering. Who cares about that...

Next you 'argue' that one should "base claims on reliable text and scholarly consensus". Dude, that is no argument. No, not at all. That is some obvious platitude. Look up argument in the dictionary, it does not say platitude. But I will tell you this much, next time I see Professor Bill Berkson, Dr Paul Karlstrom, Professor Peter Selz, Professor Carlos Villa, Jerry Garcia, Professor Terry St John, Professor Jay DeFeo, Professor Bob Arneson, Poet John Yau, Rebecca Solnit (who will probably win a MacArthur in the next year or two), et al.... that Simon Grant called them a hack. This is just what Tim O'Reilly meant by Web 2.0.

Please lets end this its so boring and my throat is sore from the howling. Thank you. In addition, please remove the 'commercialism' you added, its pointless. But if you want to keep it, separate the sentences like I suggested, so your non-sense is separated from the focus of the interesting and important chapter heading. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Art4em (talk • contribs) 08:00, 30 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I think you have a point buried in here, in that the "beatnik sterotype" section is misnamed, and really should be the "beatnik era" or perhaps "the beat to beatnik transition".
 * But then the actual point that we keep making, that you're all but ignoring, is that you seem to have an inflated notion of the importance of Hedrick -- which is not the same as saying he has no importance. You're objection to discussing commercial concerns in the same breath has Hedrick seems to support the point that you're peddling hero-worship, not history.
 * By the way, you might try reading this: stereotype. The point is that a "stereotype" is a generalization about human beings.  No human being is a sterotype: these are different logical categories.  -- Doom 01:00, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
 * (If I could vote for Rebecca Solinit's MacArthur, I would.)

Geez, enough. Stereotype is a great chapter. Now you want to eliminate the chapter, you two are amazing. Enough, enough.

Read above, please. The point is sterotype, Vesuvio's hired Wally as a sterotype. Where is the hero worship, if you have another, facking post it too, or get out of the discussion with your negativity and sidebars.

WHERE IS THE FRACKING HERO WORSHIP HERE DUDE, OR DUDETTE! I CITED THE FRACKING CITATION AND PASSAGE, PERIOD. IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH VESUVIO'S HIRING WALLY HEDRICK AS A BEATNIK STEREOTYPE TAKE IT UP WITH THEM 50 YEARS AGO. THIS IS A FRACKING FACT NOT A FRACKING HERO WORSHIP FOOTNOTE.

Again, please remove commercialism from my contribution in this important passage, thank you.--Art4em 02:49, 1 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Geez, talk about off the deep end. You don't seem to be reading anything I actually say, so responding now is probably just wasting my time.


 * Firstly, your hero worship is in the discussion page (as I said earlier), not in the actual page. Hyperbole like "the greatest in the world" makes me, and most reasonable people, question your objectivity in this case, regardless of what you actually write on the page.


 * Another clarification (that you'll misread): If entire books are written about someone, and this person is referenced many times in other books, I would say that person is important. If someone is mentioned briefly no matter how reliable the source is -- George Washington, Albert Einstein, and Jesus Christ could all mention briefly how interesting Wally Hedrick is -- he'd still be a footnote.  The authority of the source is less relevant -- if we're talking about the "greatest" this or that and the "most important" this or that -- than the time spent talking about the person and the weight given to the person.  Can you demonstrate that the size of the reference and the weight given to Hedrick is anything other than brief and trivial?  Rebecca Solnit can win a McArthur, Pulitzer, Nobel, be elected president and pope, just because she writes a "by the way these people are cool" type article about Hedrick, DeFeo, etc. doesn't elevate Hedrick any higher in importance because it's still a "by the way these people are cool" article about a group of people.  Please tell me your definition of argument because you're relying heavily on a fallacious over-emphasis on the quality of authority and ignoring the actual point.  And tell Jesus and George Washington I called them hacks; your juvenile nyah-nyah strategies still aren't going to win you the argument.  I'll concede and say I'm sorry if you can actually give me a solid argument.  If you continue with the exact same thing you've been saying, I have no reason to apologize.  I vote for dropping the whole thing since you don't seem to have an argument and you're arguing about something else entirely.  If your response is juvenile as usual, I'll just ignore you like I said I would.


 * p.s. One example of hero worship was this: "the most famous beatnik sterotype in recorded history." Here's a challenge: I would love to hero worship Bob Kaufman (as mentioned above, but I don't because that has no place in an encyclopedia) so I'll throw this gauntlet down: Bob Kaufman is a more significant than Wally Hedrick. Prove me wrong and I'll apologize.

F. Simon Grant 19:55, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

'I' don't have to 'prove' anything, so what are you talking about now?...that would be hero worship which I despise. I just transcribe the citations, and post the sources, buddy. Who is Bob Kaugman? a fellow comedian? What time and channel is he or she on?

Please undo your butchering of this important passage -- or separate it please. All the best --Art4em 04:50, 2 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Why is it critical to "separate" the two passages? Wally Hedrick was hired to pose as a beatnik, right?  That doesn't qualify as a business? And beatnik tours of North Beach, that doesn't qualify as a business? How is this at all different in quality or in kind as the "rent-a-beatnik" business? -- Doom 00:43, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

DOOM ! ! ! ! THANK YOU, THANK YOU THANK YOU for your moments of clarity and insight! BRAVO! You have again pointed out the obvious and brought up the tragedy that has taken place.

See here, stereotype (and not lame hero worship) was indeed a GREAT topic, heading and a IMPORTANT point; ie the making and creation of the 'beatnik' stereotype! Looking back and forward at the time, the beatnik 'sterotype' had a very distinct (1) look and (2) character and (3)mannerism. It is an important American archetype -- (with French roots?).

This stereotype was recognized as such at the time, too -- and it was groomed. Vesuvio's played a KEY role in its development. That is why they brought Wally in. Wally was not hired for business, but as a stereotype. Wally could care less if Vesuvio's made a dime, I assure you. He looked the part and he was penniless at the time and happy to get the free beer they provided and hang out (it was his FIRST job in San Francisco, too!) -- provided he played the part. As a direct result, people from all over the world saw Wally in the window (they didn't have to buy an espresso). In fact, soon people were bused in from all over the world to see Wally happening, saw the stereotype in real terms (American Idol: beard, pipe, bongos, grooviness painting) and, thus, shared in real time in the development of an inspiring, important cultural motif -- watched and shared in its look and feel.

It is a tragedy that you have been duped into being an accomplice in this important passages destruction wherein the discussion culture has been demeaned again by the dollar. Can we please revert it to its original integrity and rationale! Bless You Again! --Art4em 19:09, 4 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Dude, calm down.
 * The image of the beatnik is important, and it's discussed in the "beatnik era" section... that's not going away. Neither is the word "sterotype" (which seems very important to you...).
 * I like the detail that Hedrick was hired by Vesuvio's. That's not going away either.  (How "KEY" it is might be a question, but I think we can write around that one.)
 * I have to say, you seem to have some odd issues about money -- a bar hires someone to do something, and you object to classifying that as "small business" activity?  -- Doom 22:55, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
 * (I don't think Vesuvio's does espresso... you might be thinking of Cafe Trieste.)

I tried to find this "William T. Taylor" book that Art4em has been using as a reference, and I see that there's a book of the same title by a "William Lawlor". I think there's an error in the author's name: Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons, and Impact -- Doom 23:22, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Beware adding hooks for list-itis
Hey, F. Simon Grant - you're also "134.224.220.1", right? -- I think I see what you're up to here with your recent edits, but I really want to add a note of caution about adding hooks for later people to come by and start adding random things. It's a real pain about wikipedia writing, but you can't just say something like "a bunch of writers were influenced by the beats" and give three examples. It won't stay just three examples, not unless you want to camp out and delete additions and field arguments for the rest of your life. Every fan of every writer who says he liked Kerouac or Burroughs is going to want to add the name of their favorite (and then on top of that, you get the self-promotional guys who want to write themselves into Beat history). I'm not sure what to do to block this problem... one possible move is to create a seperate page that's entirely a list of writer's influenced by the beats. Then you try to close off the section with "for more writer's influenced by, see this page". -- Doom 20:48, 7 November 2007 (UTC)


 * What makes you think that was me? It looks like my school's ip, so maybe it's one of my students.  We were just talking abt these things.  Usually they just prank, so this is refreshing.  Anyway, I don't foresee that being a major hook for list-itis.  I think if we shifted that to another page we'd have to shift "rock connections" to another page -- the rock thing is an even worse hook and even less relevant.  I'd vote for keeping both or eliminating both.  But the rock section has been relatively well maintained, not a huge number of list-itis additions and irrelevant stuff gets eliminated or relevantized.  Compare that to the serious problems on the Ginsberg page and the Howl page.  Since lit is less popcultury than music and TV, I'm willing to guess it's a safe addition.  I'd say it doesn't go far enough -- not just Pynchon and Robbins, Beat is a major postmodernism precursor, Burroughs is a postmodern godfather.  I feel it could and should grow even bigger.  I say give it a couple of months.  If it goes chaotic and unmanageable, nix it, but take the rock section with it.  For a parallel example check out postmodern literature, the list of names at the end of the intro -- it's just on the verge of being unmanageable, but I added most of those names early in the summer and I check it on a regular basis and if it gets crazy I'll cut it down.  The only names added by other people are Douglas Coupland and Julio Cortazar, which I think are great additions.  Even more trust worthy people pay attention to this page, so I don't foresee it becoming a problem.

F. Simon Grant 15:19, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Another introduction to the introduction
A recap on my philosophy on "introductions": they need to perform a quick outline of a subject for people who may not read anything else in the article. It is absolutely necessary to state in the intro why the subject is of any significance: why are we talking about this, why does anyone care about it?

The trouble is that this very quickly gets you into the domain of human values and judgements, and it immediately raises the hackles of wikipedia lawyers: many people are deeply confused about what "neutrality" is about, and they think it means that everything you say has to be confined to something that can be measured.

Getting down to the subject of "The Beat Generation" article, the latest line that's attracted hostile attention is this one that I've had at the close of the "Introduction" for a while now:


 * Echoes of the Beat Generation can be seen throughout many other modern subcultures (e.g. "hippies," "punks," etc) See the "Influences on Western Culture" section below.

This apparently strikes the RepublicanJacobite as "unencyclopedic" and "unreferenced". But it's always been referenced, with a pointer to a longer discussion below. And it most certainly is encyclopedic to try to explain quickly to a modern reader what "The Beat Generation" was about. It's not much of a stretch to call it the first of the "subcultures": you need to be someone who doesn't know anything about the subject to think that that's a controversial assertion. Anyway, it was easy enough to add an external reference: the central thesis of the documentary "The Source" is that the Beats were indeed the source.

As for the comment from Tyrenius: "No point repeating it - keep it in on section)": this is the introduction. What happens in an introduction is that you introduce subjects of discussion, you do not attempt to exhaust the subject, but rather save up some detail and go into it later. Make sense?

-- Doom (talk) 05:26, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I only disagree with the "see section" detail, which I've removed. Please note there is no "introduction". There is a "lead section", which should adhere to WP:Lead, i.e. to summarise the main points of the article. Tyrenius (talk) 06:16, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Really? That's the only part you disagree with?  Then why did you delete more than that the first time around?
 * Thanks for the link to the style guide, but while that article is good on a number of points, it is also, as written, insanely dogmatic (e.g. only 4 paragraphs: would hell break out if there were 5?), which means of course that we're supposed to employ common sense and ignore all other rules except try to write a good article, and so on.
 * Exactly what is wrong with doing an internal link to explication of a point if it seems adviseable? -- Doom (talk) 07:25, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, my mistake. I didn't notice the paragraph was in the lead, when it was in the edit box. We are supposed to employ common sense, but that is the guideline which has wide consensus and has done for a long time, so it should be followed in its spirit, which is that the lead is a summary - a short article, if you like, for those that want a basic understanding without having to plough through the whole thing. The reason for not linking is that this would apply to everything in the lead in that case, as it should all be explained in greater detail in the main article. If it's not, then it shouldn't be in the lead in the first place. The thing to do is construct the lead, the article and the headings in such a way that the reader can easily find things for themselves. Tyrenius (talk) 15:06, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * The intro (aka lead) indeed needs to be a brief summary, but it also needs to repel edits by wikipedia-lawyers gunning for technical violations of what they percieve as The Rules: if you state a generalization (planning on supporting it later in the article), someone is going to accuse you of injecting mere personal opinion. Doing internal references is a compromise between the need to use a pyramid structure for the sake of readability, and the insistance by many editors that everything has to be said all at once, all in the same place.  -- Doom (talk) 22:00, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * We don't need internal links. We need verifiable secondary sources. Reference the statements with these and there won't be a problem. Tyrenius (talk) 23:43, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

weasel word tag on "perjorative"
Somone has done a drive by and slapped a "weasel word" tag on the use of one of the dread forbidden phrases "considered by many":


 * 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 (later sometimes called beatniks though this is considered by many[weasel words] to be a pejorative term).

We've got a number of options here, and I thought I would run through them quickly, essentially thinking-out-loud:

(1) Just delete the tag. The "Avoid weasel words" is one of the more dubious entries in the style guide, in my opinion, and none of that stuff is engraved in stone in any case. Problem: another wikipedia-lawyer is likely to do another drive-by and tag it again later.

(2) Re-write the line to say the same thing but avoiding the forbidden phrase, for example:


 * later sometimes known as "beatniks", though this has some pejorative connotations.

Note: this is an entirely cynical maneuver to dodge the very shallow understanding of "weaseling" extant on wikipedia.

(3) Drop the hedge about "pejorative". Indicate that the term is tendentious another way, e.g. by putting it in quotes:


 * (later sometimes called "beatniks").

I'm inclined to do it the third way, myself, but then I think I wrote it that way to begin with. Someone with a phobia of the term "beatnik" added the (somewhat gratuitious, in my opinion) interjection that it has pejorative connotations, at least in some circles. The thing is, we really do need to reference "beatniks" very early -- if anything, that's a more widely known term than "beat" or "beat generation", but I can't see spending a lot of verbiage on qualifying the reference up in the intro.

And actually, I'm inclined to think that the other slang terms "hippies" and "punks" should also be in quotes -- though there's no doubt a style guide entry somewhere against it ("scare quotes considered harmful"), but even so I think they should be there. -- Doom (talk) 22:00, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Actually, perhaps I was wrong about the style guide on this point, there is indeed an article slanted against Scare_quotes, but it specifically allows for using quotes to achieve "neutral distancing" as in the case of slang. So presuming that this page doesn't change tomorrow, I can claim it as "support".  -- Doom (talk) 21:13, 22 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Might I suggest you follow consensual guidelines instead of making up the ones you think should be there. If you disagree with guidelines, then to go those pages and change them. In the meantime we use them. As far as a solution to your weasel word problem, just say who has said this and reference it. Otherwise it goes. Tyrenius (talk) 23:42, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, you can suggest all sorts of things, but the style guide remains advisory, and there is no way you can justify treating these "consenusal guidelines" like they're the word of god. "If you disagree with guidelines, then to go those pages and change them." Been there, done that (ask me if I'm bitter), and I'd rather actually work on articles that someone might read rather than beat my head against the wall.  While we're making suggestions, can I suggest that you try working on articles for subjects that you actually know something about, or are willing to learn something about?  (And you know, you might get in the habit of reading things before you delete them...)
 * As for your constructive suggestion: yes, it's true if someone happened to have a reference to a survey demonstrating that 37% of beat scholars regard "beatnik" as prejorative, we could probably reference that, and it would silence the weasels -- but it doesn't address why someone thought it was important to say that there, and what function the phrase is supposed to serve, so it's kind of besides the point for making this a better article. -- Doom (talk) 21:02, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

New Link
Hello. I have placed a new link under the Beat Generation Tourism Links. Though I use Wikipedia often, I am new to editing pages. I looked at the guidelines and I could not find anything outlawing posting your own links, and since it is non-profit page I did not see the harm. The link is www.beatfootprints.com It contains photographs of Beat Generation landmarks that I took in New York City. Please feel free to comment. Thanks. CJ. Beatfootprints (talk) 05:34, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Under Links normally to be avoided in WP:EL it states Links to blogs and personal web pages. Also, you have a conflict of interest adding your own links. IrishGuy talk 15:53, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Okay, fine. However, I do believe the site contributes to the subject matter. It is not a blog, a page about me or a for-profit site. It is along the same lines as many of the other links on this page - including the Denver Photo Tour, only it is about NYC. I made the website to contribute to the community, and I would appreciate it if someone could please add the link for me. Thank you kindly. CJ. Beatfootprints (talk) 18:48, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Currectly, there is nothing there. The message states The page you tried to access does not exist on this server. IrishGuy talk 18:53, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry. Momentary error - I was making a change to the banner on the main page and did not upload it correctly. It should be fine now. www.beatfootprints.com CJ. Beatfootprints (talk) 19:00, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The site claims Official Site Launch: March 12th, 2008. Seeing that the site launch day is today, what makes an hours old website notable enough for inclusion as an external link? IrishGuy talk 19:05, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi. Have you looked at the site? I've spent countless hours/days/weeks trekking all over NYC to photograph Beat landmarks for other Beat enthusiasts and scholars to enjoy. Forgive me if I am not clear on this, but why would it not be a worthy link, and why would it matter how old the site is? I have actually had the site up for 3 months, but was doing extensive work on it and didn't want to bring attention to it before it was looking complete. I made today the "official launch" date because I needed to draw a line in the sand and decide that the site is essentially done (as you probably know - once you start working on something like this you could go on without end without thinking it is complete). I also wanted to pay homage to Kerouac on his birthday. Please don't misunderstand me - I'm not trying to be difficult - I just thought it would be a happy addition to the Beat community - much in the same way Paul's Denver Tour Page is. If others don't see it that way, then I wont ask for it to be posted anymore, though I think it would be unfortunate. Thanks. CJ Beatfootprints (talk) 19:15, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I've just taken a look at the site, and while I like it, and I think I'm in sympathy with the impulse behind it, I can't say that I agree it should be linked to from this article, at least not in it's present state... maybe if it had a little more annotation (some more explaination of the relevence of the different settings; the date the photos were taken; some more notes on what might've changed over the years; and so on...). And if you take requests I'm somewhat curious about places like Bickford's (mentioned in Howl) or the West End Bar (where Joan Vollmer met Edie Parker) or the apartments on 119th and 118th that were the forties settings...


 * You may have a point that "Denver Photo Tour" is dubious also -- quite possibly it should be removed. Those links really do need to be reviewed for relevance.  By the way, thanks much for bringing up the issue in the Talk page... a lot of people just try to sneak them in and wait to see if we'll notice.  -- Doom (talk) 02:02, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Doom. Thanks for the comments. To be honest - I make a living as a technical writer, and though I have felt I could contribute to this and many other pages, I have shied away from contributing because of this very type of situation. Like you say - I could have placed the link anonymously or had someone else to do, but I wanted to be a good "wiki citizen". I have nothing to gain by it - I just thought it might be of interest to other Beat enthusiasts (I don't come across too many where I am from), and as a result I felt I got a somewhat stubborn response for it - or at least a somewhat closed off dialogue. If the consensus is that my site is not valid enough to be posted as a link - I accept that, no problem.

As for the links, like you say, some of the links here are dubious at the moment. Some are commercial, at least one doesn't work (Women of the BG), and some of the others say nearly the exact same things as others - in some cases verbatim (especially those with bios).

I plan to continue increasing the academic side of my site (these things take a lot of time), including long excerpts from my graduate thesis on Neal Cassady. You can be certain though, that I will not be attempting to make note of it here again; however, I would very much like to make contacts and exchange dialogue with anyone with similar interests - which is the reason why most of us are here, right?

BTW, there are some photos of the West End and the apartment on 118th & 115th Streets. As for Bickford's - it is long - long gone, and there is nothing to take a photo of - somewhat like Hector's Cafeteria. When I expand info I'll try and do those ones first :). Okay, I've taken up enough space here...Thanks. CJ. Beatfootprints (talk) 04:28, 13 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Quite right, there are some good exterior shots of those apartment buildings... and in fact, I think I'll drop in a few links directly to those in the "Photos" section.... hm.
 * As for the external links section in general: the last time I looked at those I was sorely tempted to zap "The Beat Museum" which I'm sure is a vanity link those guys dropped in to promote their business (I've deleted it from other "beat" pages out there already). I think I sorted the links into those sub-sections as a first step toward trimming them, but never got to the second step.
 * --Doom (talk) 16:44, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

was the scroll composed on benzedrine?
I see someone (128.239.109.3) has dropped by to edit out the suggestion that "On the Road" was written while on speed.

I'm restoring the previous version:


 * The legend of how On the Road was written was as influential as the book itself: High on benzedrine, Kerouac typed rapidly on a continuous scroll of telegraph-paper to avoid having to break his chain of thought at the end of each sheet of paper.

I'm doing this for a several reasons:

(1) the "legend" is under discussion, not the actual fact;

(2) editing it out seems like an attempt at sanitizing the legend;

(3) Kerouac was indeed someone who used Benzedrine on occasion, and it's a drug that's known to produce this kind of behavior. It seems unlikely to me that legend deviates from reality in this case, and if it does, it isn't likely to be by very much.

All of that said, I'm open to hearing about references that verify that this widely repeated story is wrong, though I'm afraid this one could be a can of worms -- Kerouac said all sorts of things at different times, and it would hardly be a suprise if he engaged in a ritual denial of illegal behavior at some point. What do we do if, for example, we have hearsay going one way, and a published interview going another way? I would guess that the best you can hope for is a private letter written shortly after the novel was written. -- Doom (talk) 18:09, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, how about this extract from Kerouac's letter to Neal Cassady, of June 10, 1951, about writing the OTR scroll version: "I wrote that book on COFFEE ... remember said rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks." Pitoucat (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:39, 7 May 2009 (UTC).


 * Cool. Where was that letter published?  I gather it's in the "Original Scroll" book from 2007 I stuck that information on the end of the para in question. -- Doom (talk) 18:33, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

i just realized..
that Gregory Hill (writer) and Kerry Thornley wrote the Principia Discordia in that time. It's also a product of chaos and drug usage. So is it somehow related to that topic or even worth a reference? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.227.23.46 (talk) 11:33, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Listitis
There's an accumulating problem with what I think of as "listitis": if you provide three examples of something in a wikipedia article, it will not stay limited to those three examples: anyone who knows of anything that can reasonably be appended to that list wants to tack on their own addition, and each addition that you let slide is used to justify the next.

What brings this to mind is the recent addition of "Hedwig Gorski" to the end of the "Women of the Beat Generation" section:
 * Later, other women writers emerged who were strongly influenced by the beats, such as Janine Pommy Vega (published by City Lights) in the 1960s, Patti Smith in the early 1970s, and performance poet Hedwig Gorski in the early 1980s.

I'm strongly inclined to delete this addition (and I may do so shortly).

Similarly, I worry a little about the sections "As a small group of friends"/"As a large group of writers". The later in particular seems to me like a pretty big expository lump that doesn't read very easily. My inclination is to move those sections down (perhaps to an appendix of some sort) and talk about something else at that stage that a reader new to the subject might be more interested in... perhaps a discussion of the "beat generation" in the widest possible sense, taking seriously the claim that it includes things like the image of James Dean.

-- Doom (talk) 09:43, 17 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Recent edits seem designed to prove my fears -- people have tacked in Patti Smith's name in yet another place, and some evil fellow has inserted the problematic Rod McKuen as an example of a second wave beat poet. I'm taking no action as of yet, but I'm definitely considering some big rearrangments here... -- Doom (talk) 01:21, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

restoring the introduction (aka lede), removing errors
Arguing that the "lede" must work as stand alone article is a point, but in my opinion it already does work that way, and I think it should also be obvious that you can't say everything there, it has to work as a brief introduction leaving some points to be expanded on later.

Further many of the things that were added to the "lede" recently were very dubious, if not completely wrong. There's a clear dividing line in significance between the big three and Corso, and Peter Orlovsky is barely of any significance at all (to a first approximation: he was Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend, and that's it). Calling the beats followers of Surrealism and/or Dadaism doesn't work at all -- that hardly describes Jack Kerouac, for example.

I once again deleted the problematic assertion that "beatniks" is a pejorative term. Please search through the discussion here to see why (briefly, some people think it's a pejorative, some people don't -- and for that matter, some people think beat is a pejorative -- myself, I can't see why the issue is important enough to demand attention in the intro, and doing so in a way that survives NPOV challenges is challenging). -- Doom (talk) 02:26, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

michael bowen puffery
Someone has made a bunch of edits interjecting Michael Bowen's name -- this was the user MB writer (someone who writes about Michael Bowen? Perhaps Michael Bowen himself?). I'm afraid they strike me as puffery: Bowen was an artist whose main connection with the story is that he was the co-organizer (not the organizer) of the Human Be-In. That puts him right on the dividing line between beatnik and hippie. There's already a link to the Human Be-In article, so there's no need to squeeze his name into the text near that link. Some of the references used are very weak: one links to an external page that's just regurgitating text from the wikipedia, in this case the article on Michael Bowen (it was easy for me to spot this, since I helped write it...).

But I'm sympathetic to the idea that we could use some more material (perhaps a section?) about beat painters and other artists, though I think you would have to call them people influenced by the beat writers, or possibly an idependantly occurring phenomena (e.g. Jackson Pollock was not a beat, and yet he and Kerouac have much in common).

Anyway, I'm deleting the additions by "MB writer", moving them to here for now:


 * The Beat Generation is a term used to describe both a group of American writers and artists who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired


 * However, there were many artists in North Beach, like Michael Bowen, who greatly influeced the bohemian lifestyle of the writers and poets.


 * According to Ed Sanders the change in the public label from beatnik to hippie happened after artist Michael Bowen organized the 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park (where Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure were leading the crowd in chanting "Om").

Doom (talk) 19:46, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I’d like to suggest that many artists from the era weren’t “people influenced by the beat writers” but creative people equally involved in the lifestyle and culture of the Beat Generation. While Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Holmes and others gave voice to the Beats in popular awareness, the artist communities were of equal significance. Even when the little gang were in New York they liked to hang out at San Remo soak up the vibes from the painters there; and the influence of Pollack on the notion of spontaneous writing (and living) was quite direct, just in tune with that whole jazz and Zen approach to thinking and doing. This article really needs the artists to be given their due and there is a conflict between the opening that says it is purely about some writers and the section on the origin when Kerouac’s reference is to a social circle of underground, anti-conformist youth. Like Stein’s call on the lost generation wasn’t just about writers either, but an American expatriate temperament. The Beat Generation was not precisely or purely a “literary movement” in the formal sense. In particular there should be a reference to the painter Robert LaVigne (way more relevant than Michael Bowen) who had a significant impact on Ginsberg’s creative development. Gallery spaces like the King Ubu Gallery in SF and Ferus in Los Angeles were important places in the Beat landscape as they showed art and provided spaces for poetry readings and jazz and of course Six Gallery was the setting for the seminal Beat poetry event. The California artists of the period have had much more attention paid to them recently, with retrospectives and books (Secret Exhibition. City Lights) covering Wallace Berman, George Herms, Ed Kienholz, etc. In the bay area, Jay de Feo, Jess Collins, Joan Brown and many more. There are a couple of films in development by Mary Kerr about them, including Swinging in the Shadows. There should also be references here to key figures such as Larry Rivers and artists who were beat filmmakers as well like Bruce Conners and Robert Frank. The west coast Beat art network was well established between Venice West, Big Sur, Frisco and Sausalito. A lot of the energy and talent came out of the San Francisco Art Institute (previously California School of Fine Arts), on Russian Hill, close to North Beach. In the Evergreen Review 2, the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat issue, Dore Ashton covered the west coast scene with a focus on a slightly earlier group, Richard Diebenkorn and Clyfford Still but he also mentions Jean Varda who was central to the Beat houseboat lifestyle in Sausalito. Many writers connected to the Beat Generation are / have also been artists: Ferlinghetti, Bukowski, Burroughs, Henry Miller. There was a later wave of artists in the Beat milieu like William T. Wiley and filmmakers like Robert Nelson and Jack Smith. Regards Bowen again, as far as I am aware the public label “hippie” was well in use before 1967; when a writer for the S F Chronicle named Donovan Bess wrote about the Haight Ashbery and hippies in 1965 (when there were only about 300). Life magazine got on the case shortly after that. Altcult101 (talk) 14:53, 21 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I can't find a quote, but I recall a filmed interview in which James Rosenquist said he got the idea for his earliest paintings from talking to writers at the Cedar Tavern and wondering if it would be possible to do something that could be the visual equivalent of what the Beat writers were accomplishing. Pepso2 (talk) 22:50, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

"Beat Generation"/Lit/Art/Wider Culture
This discussion actually relates to something I wanted to discuss further. Someone mentioned in an earlier post that the three approaches to defining "beat" early in the article are confusing, not reader friendly, and could be moved to a seperate area. I'm mostly to blame for that section, and I realized its imperfections when I wrote it, but I was trying to address the very difficult issue Altcult mentioned above. How do you define "beat generation" accurately and in a way that the general reader will get? I think at the very least Robert LaVigne and Robert Frank are worth mentioning, but how do you accurately define their relationship? Can you really call them Beat artists or part of the "Beat Generation"? I kept the focus in the sections I wrote on literature just because that was a simpler issue to deal with, though far from simple. For example, Gary Snyder is someone you must mention when mentioning the Beat Generation, he is defined by a large number of critics as a member of the Beat Generation, but he was not fond of that term and is probably more accurately associated with the San Francisco Renaissance -- which some people consider a subsection of the Beat Generation and some people don't ... ad absurdum, ad infinitum. You add a whole other level of complexity to the question when you add artists. For example, how do we handle the Abstract Expressionists? Larry Rivers is very much worth mentioning, but can you really call him a "beat" artist? Where on this page could Larry Rivers be most effectively placed? There are a number of complex questions that need to be addressed along this line. I've tried a few things to make it work, but I'm fully away that they're far from perfect (and not exactly reader friendly). To me, this is the biggest issue that needs to be addressed on this page. It goes beyond simply adding a reference to an artist here or there. We need to figure out the best way to handle the broader connotations of "beat generation" -- and make them as accurate as we can -- in a way that's simple and focused enough to be helpful for the uninitiated.F. Simon Grant (talk) 17:42, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

A suggestion for reorganization
Here's one idea to address the problems I mentioned above (it will take some time and work -- I'll certainly get the ball rolling if I get some positive feedback): Instead of the introduction that addresses the three approaches to Beat, we could have a simpler introduction that makes clear the difference between "The New York Beats" (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso, Huncke) and "The Beat Generation," the wider concept that includes other groups like San Fran Ren, Black Mountain, New York School, etc. Then the page itself could be divided into a section about the "New York Beats" (this would include the history section up until they go to San Francisco) and then a "Beat Generation" section that would include all the broader social context, including the other associated groups (labeled "Beat Generation Literautre" or something like that), art (labeled "Beat Generation Art" or something like that), music, culture, etc. We could readjust other parts of the article to fit under that "generation" section. It might be more reader friendly, and we could certainly make sure it's accurate to how "Beat Generation" is generally defined. That would also open it up to the broader, non-literary aspects of the term that are neglected at this point. If anyone is against this suggestion or has a better idea, please let me know.

Just as a clarification: I know labeling a section "Beat Generation" will be confusing, so we should come up with another name; I think the important thing about this reorganization scheme is making a distinction, in separate sections, between the New York Beats and the broader "Generation."F. Simon Grant (talk) 16:11, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Think that's going the right direcion
If you have access to a copy it might be helpful to look at the book published for the Whitney Museum exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America”. Suited to the style of the exhibition there is as much attention given to visual arts and photography as literary relics. There are several chapters of interest but I noted comments related to New Yorkers like Rauschenberg and the West Coast based Keinholz, Conners and others concerning the creation of junk sculpture, making things out of everyday life which paralleled Beat prose and poetry. The theme runs through the assemblages, collages and performance art pieces.

But there are also comments in the book about Beat culture breaking down boundaries in media forms and the way culture venues became warehouses, cellars, coffeehouses, bookshops and private apartments... all places where art, poetry, music and social interaction could occur at the same time. Come to think of it also theatre, dance and film showings.

Regards Snyder. I think there a are a lot of self-confident writers and artists reluctant to describe him / herself as a Beat where the lesser lights and bit players are usually keen for the association. Bukowski, Kesey, Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer – have all gone on record as saying they weren’t a Beat. According to James Broughton, Rexroth had pretty much created the notion of the ‘San Francisco Renaissance’ and had been pushing for some time before Evergreen Review 2 headlined the phrase. It was absorbed into the Beat theme to Rexroth’s dismay.

I think your idea of sections for literature, art, lifestyle perhaps would be a more manageable and accessible approach. And possibly a place for “Beat” theatre here; Leroi Jones, Jack Gelber and The Living Theatre? Wonder if there’s a place to cover how Beat political / spiritual views, narcotics use, frowned on and sometimes actually illegal sexual behaviour and cheap living prompted periods of exile: Mexico, Tangier and Paris? Altcult101 (talk) 17:04, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Postbeat?
Recent edits by HOUSE OF PAINE talk up the concept of "Postbeat" poets, and include a link to a wikipedia article called Postbeat. It might be a good idea for the wikipedia "Beat scholars" such as we are to look this one over, and decide what you think about it... it's already survived one request for deletion (it looks like it made it on a promise to make it better).

My first impression would be that "Postbeat" seems like a freshly made-up category, and ought to be regarded as "Original research" (See WP:OR). The immediate problem for us here is to decide if the linkage from the Beat Generation article to Postbeat_Poets should stay in place. One way of looking at it is that this is yet another attempt at inflating the reputation of some writers by writing themselves into beat history (something we see here quite often, by the way).

But on the other hand -- you could smell my other hand coming, couldn't you -- the article itself isn't badly written, and the term "Postbeat" is reasonably clear and self-explanatory (and one can find other examples of wikipedians willing to over-look some "original research" when they feel like it).

Here's the entire section that HOUSE OF PAINE added to the "Literary Legacy" section:


 * The Postbeat Poets are a direct out-growth of the Beat Generation. Their association with or tutelage under Ginsberg at The Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and later at Brooklyn College not only carried on the activist social justice legacy of the Beats, but also created its own body of experimental and culturally-influencing literature by Anne Waldman, Antler (poet), Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty, Sapphire (author), Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn, Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark and others.

It strikes me that very few of these names are prominent enough that they deserve to be included in the Beat Generation article, and the odds are pretty good I'm going to conclude we need to delete that list from this article. -- Doom (talk) 20:39, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Just to put in my two cents, that article has a lot of good information, if an informal, overly worshipful tone. It struck me at first as being like this nonsense that kept creeping onto the existentialism page about "postpostmodern and neoexistentialism" which seemed like Palahniuk fan worship.  That didn't pass the Google test (not one valid article popped up with those terms) -- "Postbeat" does much better at the Google test, but still, just in my cursory investigation, I didn't find absolute proof of validity.  So I don't think the article should be deleted, just made less worshipful.  If it's deleted, I'd want some of the decent info integrated into this article smoothly.  I certainly think Anne Waldman and Eileen Myles unquestionably deserve some mention in this article.  That's my two cents, but then again I'm more interested in decent info than Wikipedia rules.F. Simon Grant (talk) 21:04, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

quotation (dubious?)
I've never particularly liked this quotation in the context of this article... I'm filing it over here for now in case someone can find something good to do with it:


 * "Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."
 * - Allen Ginsberg

I'm actually not that sure of it's veracity, for that matter. A reference would be nice, if we're going to use it for something.

I just restored the quotes section (again), this time renaming it to see if it'll be protected from the delitionists for awhile longer. -- Doom (talk) 09:20, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Ginsberg & Cassady in SF in 63?
RepublicanJacobite just reverted some odd edits by Beatnester. This might be an interesting detail to use (if it can be verified) Though I don't think Beatnester picked a very good place to insert it:


 * In 1963, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady moved into a San Francisco flat owned by Charles Plymell (publisher of underground comix artists such as Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson). Charles made major contributions to the publishing world around that time as well, but never labeled himself a "beat poet."

--Doom (talk) 21:08, 11 December 2009 (UTC)