Steve Kuusisto, poet, essayist, activist, lecturer, college prof, and old chum, is planning to teach a course this fall on the Beats.
Oh to be in grad school again!
Steve, being first and foremost a poet, will make sure that his students understand that the Beat movement wasn't all about Kerouac and Cassady driving all night in cars fueled with stolen gas and Burroughs shooting his wife and that its greatest literary achievements might be the work of its poets, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Jones, and, I hope, especially, Gary Snyder.
Though I think there's always been some debate over whether or not Snyder should be counted as one of the Beats.
In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac paints him as something apart. Kerouac saw all his fiction as chapters in one, gigantic Proustian memoir, "except written on the run instead of afterwards on a sickbed." Lucky that last bit. I mean lucky he didn't wait to write it. Kerouac on his sickbed was in no shape to write. He also called his Duluoz Legend a comedy. As in Dante's Divine. Which is a good way to approach it. But I see Kerouac's fiction in graphic terms more than literary ones, and it's not Dante's comedy I think of but Brueghel's. I see it as a continent-sized Brueghelesque mural crowded with little scenes of grotesques engaged in many and various sins, follies, joys, and sorrows, the same comically contorted faces appearing and reappearing, but way over there on the left, in the hills up around where Santa Barbara ought to be, there's a solitary portrait of a saint at prayer---praying by climbing a mountain---in the style of Giotto or Raphael. Japhy Ryder. Gary Snyder.
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
As coincidence would have it, the day before Steve called and told me about the class, I'd returned a book to the library that I heartily recommended he not include on his syllabus.
The Beats: A Graphic History .
"The drawings are ugly," I told Steve, "And unconnected in any way to the characters or their stories. And the text reads like it was cribbed from Wikipedia."
What's more, I said, it doesn't tell you anything new about anybody and it reinforces the notion that the Beats are important because of their bad behavior---which was really mostly Kerouac's self-destructive behavior which got in the way of his art, as he admits and bemoans in the chapter-long sentence that opens Big Sur ---and not their actual work.
"Besides," I added, "the last thing you want to be responsible for is putting the image of Alan Ginsberg going down on Kerouac in anybody's head."
But I've been thinking it over. The black and white drawings are ugly. Each "chapter" is by a different artist but they all seem to be trying to match each other in banality and slapdash indifference to their subjects. The text is trite. And really the last thing anybody needs is that particular image of Alan Ginsburg on his knees in front of a fat-assed Jack Kerouac.
But it's not ture that it doesn't tell you anything new. It would depend on who you are. It didn't tell me anything new. If you are a student thinking of signing up for Steve's class, you might be in the position in relation to the Beats as I was when I was in college and my old pal Rennie shoved his battered copy of On the Road into my reluctant mitts or when I was in grad school Steve had me read Gary Snyder's poems out loud to him---pretty much pig-ignorant on the subject but desperate to learn.
If that's who you are, then The Beats: A Graphic History is as good a starting reference as you're likely to find, not counting On the Road and "Howl," of course.
(Or maybe not. Gerald Nicosia says the text is full of errors. Cory Doctorow posted a more positive review at Boing Boing.)
And maybe you won't find the artwork ugly. These things are a matter of taste. Some people think Brueghel's work is repulsive. I can't see why.
This calls for another poem. But not one by one of the Beats. William Carlos Williams.
Would have made a good epigraph for The Duluoz Legend, I think.In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.
"Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose."
Big Lebowski to the Dude.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Wednesday, June 03, 2009 at 11:52 AM
I just bought the Gary Snyder Reader per another blogger's recommendation... Somehow, even though I recall reading many things by the Beat Generation, his poems had escaped me. Maybe I wasn't ready for them. I am now.
Posted by: Jennifer | Wednesday, June 03, 2009 at 11:58 AM
Funny that Nicosia says that The Beats: A Graphic History is full of errors, his book Memory Babe is full of intentional fiction, mostly the pornographic parts.
Posted by: Holly | Wednesday, June 03, 2009 at 08:07 PM
I was not aware of the series of "graphic histories" or whatever they are, edited by Harvey Pekar, of which The Beats is one volume. Now I know.
And I can see that, art-wise, they've rounded up the usual "alternative" or "indie" comics artists. Dan Clowes, who designed the jacket and I assume did a story, used to have a kind of wacky 60s-influenced style that was simple, jaunty, and fun. Over the years he's perfected this (and his storytelling) into a self-conscious and dry product that is absolutely no fun at all. And for this, his fame increases. Just using him as an example, because I'd guess he exemplifies The Beats. I get the feeling I'd agree with your opinion of this book.
Re Harvey Pekar, he's something of a jazz expert, which might be one of reasons he's interested in the Beats. It seems odd, though, that there'd be as many errors as some have indicated, given Pekar's ability to retain jazz minutia. Or perhaps his contributors took liberties/made errors and Pekar simply wasn't able to catch them all. Maybe there were time and money constraints.
Posted by: Kevin Wolf | Thursday, June 04, 2009 at 03:19 PM