Talk:Beat Generation/Archive 3

LeRoi Jones
It may not be all that important here, but does anybody doubt that LeRoi Jones became a Black Nationalist in the 1960s; perhaps as early as the Umbra Workshop (Umbra poets)?--Radh (talk) 12:46, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Ok - but the phrase "turned Black Nationalist" in a Wiki. entry isn't appropriate, is in fact senseless, and no mention (even appropriately phrased) should be there without any citation.Tao2911 (talk) 15:24, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Films about the Beat Generation
I know this page is a fairly contentious subject so thought I would test the water here first. Films about the Beat Generation includes Drugstore Cowboy because it includes a cameo from Burroughs but I'm not sure that is sufficient reason. I have some suggestions that might be appropriate however, including Chappaqua by Conrad Rooks - it features Burroughs, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Ed Sanders and The Fugs and some of its camera work was done by Robert Frank and Ian Sommerville worked on the sound. For Burroughs in film in a genuinely Beat context there were a series of short films by Anthony Balch: Towers open fire (also with Trocchi in it) and William buying a parrot from 1963 and The Cutups (also with Gysin in it) in 1966. Also worth thinking about are Mary Kerr's documentaries The Beach (1995) and San Francisco's Wild History Groove http://www.beatera.org/index.html  Altcult101 (talk) 11:34, 11 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Considered creating a sub-topic page? This is what we need here, for this and other topics too.Tao2911 (talk) 15:18, 11 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Good call on "Drugstore Cowboy". I deleted it (Burroughs did a lot of cameos):
 * Burroughs appeared at "Drugstore Cowboy" final scenes (1989)
 * (There are other places in the page where that detail might be of some use, but not in a "films about" section.)
 * As for adding more films to the list, a few more wouldn't hurt if they were genuinely significant references, one of the first things someone new to the subject should be directed to. It does sound like you have a lot of detailed knowledge of this subject that might very well be appropriate for another page.  Perhaps Beat Generation Films? -- Doom (talk) 19:31, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

If we're just talking about adding to the list, by all means. No prob here.Tao2911 (talk) 20:10, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

I will draft something for a new page with an emphasis on real Beat culture film works rather than the Hollywood exploitation movies (already dealt with on the Beatnik page). Altcult101 (talk) 09:49, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Other sources for the term "beat"
I just deleted a large chunk of material added by "76.68.245.250" (which I called "trivia" in the edit log, perhaps unfairly). It discusses other possible sources where Kerouac may have picked up on the term "beat". This is looking a little like "original research" to me, but it may be a point that we shouldn't just assume that the story that Kerouac picked up on "beat" from Hunke is the one true story. Here's the deleted material:  It should be mentioned that in Kerouac's "Visions of Cody", at the beginning of the chapter entitled "Frisco: The Tape", Neal Cassady talks with Jack about a book he had read entitled, "Really the Blues",(pub. 1946) by jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe.

Mezzrow was a clarinetist who befriended, worked with, and recorded alongside many of the major black musicians of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. In chapter 12 of his fascinating book, Mezzrow explains the post-Civil War language of poor, southern blacks as "...a self protective code... and "...the tongue of a beaten people", further going on to affectionately praise the hipster lingo and lifestyle of his young, black friends' and musicians' during his own era.

The fact that Cassady had read Mezzrow's book, one can safely make the assumption that Kerouac--himself an avid jazz fan--was well-aware of Mezzrow's lively descriptions, and was not averse to incorporating them into the language of his own literary output--all to prove that nothing is ever completely original.

Indeed, in a recorded interview, Kerouac admits that he'd used the term "beat" from a book he'd read somewhere, but without specifically identifying it.

In another, French-language interview, Kerouac agrees with his interviewer that he considered the word "beat" as synonymous with "pauvre" (poor).  -- Doom (talk) 23:35, 17 January 2011 (UTC)


 * I added a couple of footnotes from Charters and Watson about where Kerouac picked up on "Beat". Charters did observe that Mezz Mezzrow used the term, which helps document how it was used in Jazz circles in the 40s. I'm interested in the timing of the Cassady-Kerouac discussion of the Mezzrow book: Kerouac only met Cassady in '47, and he invented the term "beat generation" in '48. Unless this particular discussion happened very early in their relationship, it's not that strong a connection.  Oh, and as for the French-language interview, yes, I've seen some of that footage, and it stuck me personally as shall we say "problematic", in that Kerouac appeared to be contradicting things that he himself had published in the '59 Playboy article. If anyone has a detailed citation (an English translation of the interview?), though, I'll try to slip it in somewhere.  -- Doom (talk) 01:25, 18 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Okay, it appears that Visions of Cody was written in 1951-1952, and the tape recording that's transcribed in it was made some time during that time period. Given that, this speculation about Mezzrow being a direct influence on Kerouac's choice of the term "beat" isn't supportable without some other source. -- Doom (talk) 04:37, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree with your deleting the ephemera footnote. Your info is maybe interesting, but I'm not sure its not already covered by the line as is. Again, we really have to avoid this kind of granular detail. "Broad strokes" is I think our operative principle. And to say "one can safely make the assumption that Kerouac...was well-aware of Mezzrow's lively descriptions" is sheer speculation - one can NOT safely assume any such thing. Is there a source making this connection, or is this your original research? And so I ask, what is your point? Again, it seems like speculation, as part of a "general discussion." I don't see a proposal here. Tao2911 (talk) 01:01, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Paging "76.68.244.210" (or "76.68.244.250"): Sorry we keep deleting the material you're trying to add. It's not uninteresting, and I appreciate the fact that you have some actual references to published material that you want to use, but there are some problems with what you're trying to do with it. Let's talk it out here, and we'll give you some hints on how to do stuff the wikipedia way. Point the first, it would probably help if you created an account for yourself and did your edits while logged in, it makes it easier to track who's saying what (as it stands we just keep seeing whatever dynamic ip address you have at the moment). Then when you make edits here in the Talk page you can sign off with four tildes to get your handle automatically inserted with a date stamp, like so: -- Doom (talk) 04:04, 14 February 2011 (UTC)


 * The French language interview referred to by the mysterious "76.68.244.*" is used in part in the film The Source at around 15mins and 40sec. It goes like this:


 * Q: Did you invent the term Beat Generation?
 * A: Yes I'd heard two old men in the South, old negroes say it. Beat.
 * Q: In the sense of being crushed?
 * A: Yes, Poor.
 * [...]
 * A: And I suddenly said: Beat... be--at
 * Q: Beatitude.
 * A: Yes.


 * There are a few problems with this. This story about picking up on "Beat" from old southern black men doesn't seem to appear anywhere else (e.g. it is not the Holmes article in '52 or in the '59 playboy article), and nearly everyone else says that Kerouac picked it up from someone like Hunke (for example, Corso in The Source refers to Hunke's usage when asked to define "Beat"). Similarly, the notion that he had an instantaneous flash about Beat=Beatitude is really hard to support (see the discussion up above, Kerouac doesn't seem to have made the Beatitude connection until '56, after coining the phrase in '48).  I realize this is tricky, but you can't count on Kerouac to get details right. -- Doom (talk) 04:32, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Image
Come on guys, let's get a nice high quality image for the heading of this article! --Torsrthidesen (talk) 04:19, 29 January 2011 (UTC)


 * If you'd like to research this, the obvious image to use is the shot of Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs from 1944:


 * http://home.sandiego.edu/~simona-09/hal.jpg


 * This is often used on book covers such as "Beat Down to Your Soul", which says that the photo is copyright by the "Allen Ginsberg Trust", and was used "courtesy Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles". I remember seeing other uses of it that refer to some Columbia University archive.  So that's three different organizations you could inquire to about the licensing and permission issues of that image, to try to determine if it can be used according to: Image_use_policy -- Doom (talk) 07:37, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Beat Poetry
I've noticed that a lot of links about "Beat Poetry" or "Beat Literature" all get linked to this one page "Beat Generation" which doesn't actually talk about the poetry or literature. It talks about the people behind it, which is a necessary article, but is not the information one following those links is expecting to find. As far as I can tell, there is no page talking about the structures or common tropes of Beat literature or poetry. Either that should be a section of this article, or another article needs to be made with that information. cupy_52040 (talk) 03:38, 3 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I second that information about the literature would be good. Probably best on a new article, as this page has already come under fire for being too long. Jonpatterns (talk) 16:41, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Expand influence of Eastern religion?
Influences section includes, Romanticism, Early American sources, French Surrealism and Modernism. But no mention of Eastern religion (even though it is mention in the lead paragraph). Robert Pirsig states that troops were inspired by Korea and Japan, which had an impact on the beat movement in San Francisco youtube v=m8zdT5jYlro (at 2:35) Jonpatterns (talk) 16:57, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Hatnote spam
User:Hearfourmewesique, please refrain from adding hatnote spam to this article. 3 previous additions:


 * 1)
 * 2)
 * 3)

dhart (talk) 06:44, 6 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Call it spam once more and I'll report you for a personal attack. I strongly advise you to review what spam really means. Hearfourmewesique (talk) 19:46, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Call it what you will, but the Hatnote does not meet the guidelines. See specifically the 'Examples of improper use' on the Hatnote page. The hatnote is trivial information and attempts to disambiguate article names that are not ambiguous. dhart (talk) 05:58, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
 * There is nothing relevant in the link you provided – unless you dispute the existence of the album, which can be easily Googled. Hearfourmewesique (talk) 11:59, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm trying to AGF here, but what part of 'trivial information' is unclear in reference to Hatnote? Also, since your latest reversion was just outside the 24h window and feigns WP:SILENCE as a reason, it appears you're gaming the system 3RR. Please wait for a positive 3O before adding this hatnote again. dhart (talk) 05:55, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

3O Response: Unless the subject of "Do not confuse with" is notable to have it's own wikipedia article, there is no need for a hatnote. This is covered under the first example of improper hatnote use WP:TRHAT. If you believe that this album is significant enough to have its own article, then create it and we'll see.}} — Preceding unsigned comment added by ReformedArsenal (talk • contribs)

The album does not have its own article, but Werner does. In any case, I have self reverted, as this has spun out of control... for a hatnote? Really? To – a couple of points:
 * Where's the AGF on your part when you "greeted" me with accusations of spamming, refused to apologize for it, and then decided that I wasn't worthy of a response until I reverted? That's what I thought.
 * The revert, to which you were referring, happened more than four days after yours. How is that "just outside the 24h window"?
 * As stated above, there was over four days of an absolute lack of response on the talk page. I believe that's exactly what constitutes talk page silence.
 * In consideration with everything stated above, your accusations of WP:GAMING and "feigning" are nothing short of a personal attack. Perhaps you should learn some manners. Hearfourmewesique (talk) 13:45, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * You guys should probably both calm down. The matter seems to be settled, now you should probably both go your separate ways. ReformedArsenal (talk) 14:51, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Los Gatos / Monte Sereno, not San Jose
I recall having read that Ginsberg lived for some period in a house north of downtown San Jose but I can't find a reference for it. Although the Cassadys had to have been familiar with San Jose and Kerouac is said to have spent time studying at "The San Jose Library", the Cassady home (where Kerouac certainly visited) was at 18231 Bancroft Avenue in Los Gatos (say "Las Gaddiss"), a block south of Highway 9 (Los Gatos - Saratoga Road). After 1957, this part of Los Gatos was re-incorporated into the City of Monte Sereno. The Cassady house at this address (37.233946,-121.99127) was demolished August 22, 1997. Three quarters of a mile up the hill, at 16250 Greenwood Lane, Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.

Does anyone know of a San Jose address for any of these folks? I would be thrilled to find one. Ginsberg wrote of a San Jose rail yard in The Back of the Real (El Camino Real?  Probably actually in San Jose but possibly Santa Clara; El Camino Real turns into The Alameda at the Santa Clara - San Jose border, very near the old Santa Clara SP rail depot). Rt3368 (talk) 09:33, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

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Still the Beatles.
Despite the old exchange above, the Beatles still did not derive their name from the Beat Generation. If Lennon really said that to Kerouac, he must have been trying to flatter him somehow. Beatles came from Crickets, and the spelling was a typical Lennon word play, with his double meanings - like Rubber Soul or Please Please Me. It's just plain silly to keep it in. Even if it's technically true that Beatles comes from the word beat, it's just not true to say it comes from "Beat". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.3.197.177 (talk) 04:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes. Beatles is far more likely to have descended from Merseybeat than from the Beats. Rt3368 (talk) 09:33, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

My original phrasing used the NYT link (now ref 69) to support the claim that it is commonly believed that the "beat" in "beatles" is in part a "beat generation" reference. Someone came by and did a rewrite to "simplify" things or some such, and ended up introducing a lot of errors like this: myself, I wasn't able to find any good way to support or deny the BeatGen => Beatles link. The trouble of course is that Lennon was always a joker, and rarely gave a straight answer if he could avoid it. -- Doom (talk) 19:02, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

"Significant Figures" section seems like a stub
Currently, Neal Cassady is the only person with his own heading in the "Significant Figures" section. Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg are also mentioned, but not prominently. Should there not be a list of the prominent beat poets here, or on a separate wikipedia page? Thomas Tvileren (talk) 16:24, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

If you're going to try to maintain a list of all "significant beats", it will certainly need to be in another page. Have fun maintaining it, though, as every freak in the world gets the idea it'd be funny to try to slip in his Uncle Alfred. The way I originally presented this material, I used a historical flow, that keeps the cast of significant characters manageable, at least at the outset-- it expands rapidly as the phenomena took off, but in general the current state of the page is pretty weak in discussing the "beat generation" as a cultural craze that conquered the world: it's hard to talk about it and sound "neutral", so we skip talking about it, even though it really did happen and arguably it's the real subject. -- Doom (talk) 19:09, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

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Why capitalized?
Why "Beat Generation", and not plain "beat generation"? (The article Punk rock is about "punk rock", not "Punk Rock".) -- Hoary (talk) 00:14, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
 * My impression, bearing in mind that I'm a simpleton with no experience in the genre itself, is that it was always meant to be "Beat generation". My understanding was that this capitalization specified the kind of "beat", if that makes any sense. It wasn't merely "beat generation", or a generation that felt itself beat in any way. I'd go with whatever WP:RS say, if it's compatible with our manual of style of course. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist  (Speak quickly) (Follow my trail) 20:41, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

misc points
(1) The "beat generation" was originally intended to be descriptive of the post-WWII generation. We do indeed talk about "beat generation" writers, but if you take the beat generation writers seriously, you can also talk about "the beat generation" the way Kerouac and Holmes originally meant it. This is tricky to explain quickly, but that's no reason to punt on it completely.

The next challenge after that is to define the boundaries of who is a "beat writer", then make up your mind about whether there are, say, "beat painters"...

(2) Howl, Naked Lunch and On the Road are indeed "among the best known examples of Beat literature", because they are in fact *the* best known examples, they are far and away the top three works, and I submit that no one who knows anything about beat lit would deny that. This statement keeps getting weakened to satisfy people who think they can detect NPOV by sense of smell.

(3) Meanwhile, this extreme claim is sitting there: "Neal Cassady, as the driver for Ken Kesey's bus, Further, was the primary bridge between these two generations." The *primary* bridge? How about, say Allen Ginsberg appearing on stage at the Human Be-In with Michael McClure?

And are these really two separate generations? That would come as news to someone like Ed Sanders... his take is they called him and his friends beatniks until '62 or so, then all of a sudden they called them hippies, but it's not like they were different people.

Ah, I see there's also this immediately following remark about Ginsberg: "Allen Ginsberg's work also became an integral element of early 1960s hippie culture." That's a classic example of wikipedia writing, a jumble of lines tacked together that were written by different people and don't quite work together if you look closely.

(4) This line is particularly funny: "Marion Paul introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground ... [6]" I've never heard of Marion Paul, and the reference link there goes to an Encylopedia Britanica article which does not mention a Marion Paul. At a guess, someone was playing games and slipped their own name into beat history with a bogo-reference.

(5) The organization after that seems peculiar to me, "significant places", "significant people" (and why so few of them?)? My original flow was historical, starting in New York, then expanding to include the SF Renaissance, mainstream attention after "On the Road", then the beatnik circus.. (If you care, that was my solution to the problem of defining the boundaries: a tiny clique in New York expanding in fits and starts...).

(6) The section "Gender and the Beats" leads with a lot of heavy editorializing that's not supported by references: "The female contemporaries of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs were intimately involved in the creation of Beat philosophy and literature" The big three writers were working early, in the late 40s: I don't know of any women besides Joan Vollmer who were active in that circle.

"Further, the Beat writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs often portray female characters in flat, traditional gender roles ..." Yeah, pretty much, but that really could use some support.

"Rather than offering liberation from social norms, Beat culture actually often marginalized and further culturally repressed American women and, more specifically, many of the female writers of the time period.[29]" That actually looks like personal opinion to me, even if it's the personal opinion of Jennie Skerl-- the referenced author of the intro to "Reconstructing the Beats". (I think if you dug into it you'd find some women found the beat movement liberating, and some didn't-- ditto the hippie movement).

Google books has the book "Reconstructing the Beats" with the referenced passage (an introduction written by Skerl) available, https://books.google.com/books?id=3TfIAAAAQBAJ and I don't think it's very good support for the claim that Beat culture marginalized female writers. The examples Skerl sites aren't really contemporaries of the late-40s scene, e.g. one of her earliest examples of a neglected poet is ruth weiss who actually was active in SF starting in 1952, which is really getting into the second wave. Figures like ruth weiss are indeed often unjustly ignored, but you can recognize their significance without making exaggerated claims.

(7) Then we go off into the material that I wrote (heavily relying on "Women of the Beat Generation"), so unsurprisingly I'm more in sympathy, or I would be, except that it's been hacked up into gibble-gabble. Consider this line: "Joan Vollmer for instance did not write, although she appears as a minor figure in multiple authors' works." Joan Vollmer actually did write stuff, but she didn't "write *and publish*", and in the present context it's hard to figure out what the word "although" is doing there... The actual point, if anyone cares to take on the thankless task of editing the main article, is that Vollmer is a central figure in the late-40s beat circle, and you might take her as analogous to someone like Neal Cassady: they were both people the beat writers thought were very interesting with interesting things to say, but Neal Cassady got a book written about him, and Vollmer is consigned to a large collection of brief mentions, where no one, for example, can be bothered to say much about her ideas, though they all agree on how smart she was.

(8) The section on "Modernism" as an influence on the beats is littered with "citation neededs", and for good reason, it really ought to be deleted. The original beats had a very idiosyncratic selection of writers they were interested in, and I afraid this section looks like a laundry list of stuff that they should've been interested in if only they'd been paying more attention.

-- Doom (talk) 01:46, 14 December 2016 (UTC)


 * No mention of painter Micael Bowen anywhere, yet he was the organiser of the Human Be-In and founder with Alan Cohen of the San Francisco Chronicle. He also found a source for the flowers that were distributed with one helping to create an iconic photograph, of the flower in the gun barrel. PetePassword (talk) 12:46, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

Films
'Pull My Daisy' isn't mentioned in the list of Beat films, it's a 1959 American short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, and adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. I saw it in London in 59 at an art cinema. It includes Kerouac and other Beats and has an undefinable plot. PetePassword (talk) 12:54, 10 April 2022 (UTC)