Beatdom discussion
What to read next??
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Erika
(new)
Jul 22, 2015 04:38PM
I recently read Junky by William Burroughs and I loved it. I started looking into more books read and I've ordered some but I'm rather bored waiting for them. I ordered Naked Lunch, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and Queer. I have The Yage Letters, Women, And the Hippos were Boiled in Their Tanks on my list to read. Any suggestions of what else I should read?
reply
|
flag
I also forgot to include I have On the Road on list of books to read.
Well in my opinion, you can never go wrong with Kerouac, so any of his books would be great in their own way. If you wanted to keep going with Burroughs, he wrote the "Nova Trilogy" where he writes himself as a science fiction cop that tries to fight an intergalactic mob that destroys planets. I read a little of that and it's real good. Word of advice on that though, occasionally in that trilogy, he uses the cut up method he's so famous for.
Im not sure about the science fiction but I'll definitely look into it.
Understandable. Burroughs is kind of an acquired taste, I think you can say. Personally, I like him, but I've had to read him for a college class and I was the only one that liked him.
So far judging by Junky, I like him. Not sure about any of his other books yet. From the descriptions I think I will enjoy them.
He's good in his own crazy way. I'm reading Naked Lunch right now, and it's a world away from Junky. It's a good book though. My advice for Naked Lunch would be not to rationalize it at all because there's no plot, just many different stories that are all about as crazy as Junky if not crazier.
I'll try to remember that advice when I finally get my hands on Naked Lunch.
If you enjoyed Junky there are a lot of similar novels on drug addiction. Check out Wasting Talent Digging the Vein and Permanent Midnight.For a modern beatdom still author check out the work by Harry Whitewolf
I feel like part of understanding the texts is understanding the history and culture of the generation as well. I thoroughly enjoyed Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs
Jackson I would recommend Kerouac by Ann Charters if you are interested In beat history and culture. Jon
I stumbled upon this book recently:http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems...
"The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia." Lamantia is probably not the first name that comes to mind when you think of the Beats, but he was certainly within their orbit, having read along with Ginsberg when the later first read "Howl" in San Francisco. He was close to Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth, and as a child prodigy was probably the first of the Beats to be actually published - in 1943.
He began his career as a Surrealist poet, and was endorsed by Andre Breton, one of the major figures in that movement. As for Surrealism, I think it works well in painting, put in poetry, I have my doubts. Lamantia's Surrialistic poems tend to be highly obscure and he uses personal symbols that are impossible to translate without a commentary. Lamantia also writes about some of the subjects that interests him but that are unknown to the average reader: alchemy, medieval philosophy, Egyptian hieroglyphics, etc
There is an excellent Introduction in this book to Lamantia's life, which is quite interesting. He suffered from Bi-Polar depression and abused hard-core drugs. Several times in his life he would withdraw from Society and be "reborn" with some new interest.
In the 60's I bought one of his books: "Selected Poems 1943-1966," which was part of the "Pocket Poets Series." I struggled with the poems at the time, and found them impenetrable. I am going to give this new book a fair shake - I'll see if my initial impressions are still valid, or my early impressions were the fault of an immature, and then, careless reader.
Mod
It's a great biography, but the new Burroughs bio, Call Me Burroughs, by Barry Miles, is more comprehensive.
I'd say that Visions of Cody is probably Kerouac's best book, but boy does that not do such an important seminal writer justice, but in the end we're judged not by our middling pieces, but the ones that stood out and shined, and this would be Kerouac's writing about Neal Cassady. "On the Road," was Kerouac's most famous book about Cassady, the great Beat hero with no formal education, and the son of a vagabond, who grew up in pool halls, with a mad yearning for philosophical truths that summed up his times, and made everyone feel consciousness speed up a little. Cassady was the muse for the Beat generation and without him they really would've never created their great works except for maybe Burroughs, but even that is questionable since he was tied to the success of Kerouac and Ginsberg, who were endlessly tied to Cassady. Cassady was Dean Moriarty in On the Road, but he was Cody in Visions of Cody, and for this novel which wasn't published until the early '70's, a few years after Kerouac's death, there is almost no narrative, which freed up Kerouac's poetic mind to imagine Cody growing up, or in the present, or even the future, and let loose every stream of consciousness thought he had about the great protatgonist of the Beat generation. Kerouac wrote it at a time when he was at the height of his literary powers, and though Visions of Cody wasn't as accessbile as On the Road, it's much freer. On the Road, which Burroughs jokingly called On the Root, was loosely tied to a narrative, not to mention edited with much tighter tough sentences than Cody, but that doesn't make it better art, and if anyone ever questions the greatness of Jack Kerouac's musical intuition they only need read a few pages of Visions of Cody to be convinced that he was truly one of the greatests prose stylists of his generation.
Visions of Cody is a very long book that can't be read in a sitting or two and is almost like taking on Ulysses, or dare I say it, Infinite Jest, but it's well worth it. Like all great massive tomes that try to transcend the structural limits of their day there is a long section towards the end of a taped conversation between Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac that does its best to capture the mad cryptic enlightened way that Neal Cassady put together sentences, and strung out thoughts. It was done at a time when the tape recorder was a new device much like the internet or any new technology, and I'm sure people at the time thought it was going to make writing obsolete, or change it forever, since all you'd have to do is dictate your thoughts into a tape recorder, but obviously that didn't come to pass. You get this sense of experimentation in the novel, and after hundreds of pages of some of the most glittering prose you'll ever read the tape recorded section comes as a relief, even if it's not quite as radical an idea 50 years later. It sort of remdinds me of how James Agee, another great writer, was obsessed with making a multimedia book out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and included those famous photographs by Walker Evans.
I am currently reading Visions of Cody having read the rest of Jack Kerouac's work. I have to say that for me it is as perfect as it gets in terms of style, content and soul. Your comparison to Ulysses is spot on as far as I'm concerned.
Books mentioned in this topic
Wasting Talent (other topics)Digging the Vein (other topics)
Permanent Midnight (other topics)
