Best Minds Of My Generation: A Literary History Of The Beats Download.zip

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Jul 10, 2024, 12:29:13 AM7/10/24

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There's been a lot of talk in the news about guns recently. They're everywhere, from school-shootings to the war-torn stretches of land that remain as inhospitable borderlands between countries. Everyone has an opinion on them, but if anyone knows about guns, it's probably this man.

Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats download.zip

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William S. Burroughs - the godfather of punk. He was a hero to the Beat Generation of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His life was lived with a reckless abandon that is seldom if ever heard about in today's culture. He's a cultural dodo-bird - he didn't give a shit about many things, apart from his words and his guns.

There are many pictures that exist of him, always looking the part of the literary iconoclast - a true eccentric in an era when they were more common than ever. What do all the photographs have in common? His wrinkled skin from a life well-lived? A cigarette? Yes, those things. But also his guns - something that became well-known in Kerouac's On The Road as he took the name Old Bull Lee. A rifle-totin' madman secluded in an old farmhouse. A wandering sage, a teacher of lessons he learned the hard way.

Burroughs, best known as a writer, was also an artist known for using guns to make paintings. It made sense really, he found a way to play with his guns as well as creating something. His history with guns hasn't always been laugh-a-minute though. Once during a drink and drug-fuelled game of William Tell (shooting an apple of another person's head) Burroughs levelled his pistol at his common-law wife Joan Vollmer and shot her straight through the head.

Burroughs must be considered one of the greatest American writers of all-time. His stories range from autobiographical to homoerotic cowboy stories - all infused with the kind of surrealism that is so intoxicatingly inventive that you struggle to questions its authenticity. Aside from content - he also helped pioneer the cut-up technique, borrowed from Dadaism. He chopped up poems to reconfigure them into something harder to swallow. Sometimes funny, sometimes nightmarish gobbledygook that came from one of his mind's darker recesses - they always oozed with creativity.

It was no surprise that he eventually started working in aesthetic mediums as well as text-based. He wholeheartedly embraced the frontierism of the American mentality, he was an outlaw and embraced his image as such. So when it came to making paintings - he knew what he had to do. The methodology is rough and tumble, there's very little in the way of balance in his splatter-art. He blasts his shotgun at a can of spraypaint that simultaneously explodes as well as decimating a hole in the surface - usually boards of wood. His kyphosis-ridden gait, old and frail externally, (yet sharp as a tack internally) holds onto the gun like he would a woman, or a man - both of whom he had loved passionately.

Did the artwork have any redeeming artistic value? What the hell kind of question is that? Of course it did, it came from the same hands that wrote some of America's defining novels on sex, drugs and raucious living. The artwork is from the mind that helped to give us the Beat Generation - the group of young men and woman that opened our eyes to the potential future and irresistible present in American history whereby the preconceptions of behaviour were being challenged on the daily. They weren't hippies though - they were poets, railway men, young college football stars, utterly dazzling minds that wrote with a spontaneous jazz-influenced rhythm that allowed their words to transcend the page.

More than anything else, to own one of pieces of art is like having a lock of Jesus Christ's beard. It must be bestowed with some kind of power. Besides Keith Richards, no other body has managed to survive the ritual abuse that his has, although he passed away in 1997, aged 83. The warped abstract-expressionism has an uncanny similarity of feeling to the devil-dance work of Jackson Pollock. It came from somewhere inexplicable.

When asked about the process he makes it sounds easy, "There is no exact process. If you want to do shotgun art, you take a piece of plywood, put a can of spray paint in front of it, and shoot it with a shotgun or high powered rifle." Even Burroughs considers it a spiritual descendent of the Pollock drip. It sits somewhere between cowboy and artistic genius.

He might well have been cashing-in on his love of shooting things - be they alive or be they not, but there's something mesmerizing about the work. It's like a tragedy caught in freeze frame - a head hitting a steering wheel after a high speed crash or a person that's jumped off of a high building. These ugly, devastating events are hard to look at, but harder to look away from.

The kinetic power of the pictures, painted when Burroughs had long since vacated his youthful shell, shows the bull-hearted energy he rode head-on through his life with. They are moments of great physical power and brutality caught in a colourful landscape of splintered wood and massacred paint. Not many of us could handle the life that William S. Burroughs lived, but through his paintings we can admire the crazy, beautiful, genius from a safe distance.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: San Francisco's beat poets from 60 years ago might not recognize their city today. Amid all the tech startups and social media entrepreneurs, though, one familiar face remains, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was the main publisher of Beat Generation poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Today, he's still co-owner of City Lights, one of the most celebrated independent bookstores in America. At age 96, Ferlinghetti is publishing three books this year. NPR's Richard Gonzales recently paid him a visit to talk about his latest work.LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: So just go right up.RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: Lawrence Ferlinghetti lives in a modest second-story walk-up in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. On his walls, his doctorate from the Sorbonne, an unframed Gaugin print, and posters of celebrated poetry readings dating back to the days when he personified a hip, literate and rebellious San Francisco - not that he's nostalgic.FERLINGHETTI: Everything was better than it is when you're old (laughter).GONZALES: These are quieter days now for the internationally acclaimed poet and painter. His eyes are going, but his mind and humor are sharp. And he's generous with his time as he greets a visitor with a surprise.FERLINGHETTI: I see you've got those reporter's notebooks. I wrote - I wrote a whole novel here in these reporter's notebooks (laughter).GONZALES: Wow.FERLINGHETTI: Seventy-eight of them there.GONZALES: We'll get back to his unfinished novel a bit later. From his desk window, Ferlinghetti can survey his North Beach neighborhood, which he says is changing like the rest of San Francisco. Take, for example, his favorite neighborhood coffee shop, where he says no one talks to anyone else anymore because they're all staring at a screen.FERLINGHETTI: And yesterday morning, I was walking down there, and a guy passed me. I said, good morning. He didn't even look at me. He just went right on past (laughter).GONZALES: The guy probably didn't know he was ignoring the man who helped spark a literary revolution. Ferlinghetti was a young bookstore owner in 1956 when he first published Allen Ginsberg's iconic Beat-era poem, "Howl."(SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "HOWL")ALLEN GINSBERG: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked.GONZALES: Ginsberg's poem is a critique of American materialism and sexually explicit. Its publication landed Ferlinghetti and an associate in hot water. They were busted for selling obscene literature, and their trial drew international attention.FERLINGHETTI: And then Judge Horn rendered his decision that a book could not be considered obscene if it had the slightest redeeming social significance.GONZALES: It was a redeeming victory for Ferlinghetti. His own ideas about freedom were forged as a Navy lieutenant commander in World War II, who not only saw action in Normandy but also the ruins of Nagasaki.FERLINGHETTI: So that made me an instant pacifist.GONZALES: The "Howl" trial also brought national attention to what would be called the Beat Generation. It included writers like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. But Ferlinghetti says he never considered himself a part of that movement because his poetry was less frenetic than the Beats. In 1958, Ferlinghetti published his first book of poetry, "A Coney Island Of The Mind."FERLINGHETTI: Constantly risking absurdity and death. Whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.GONZALES: "A Coney Island Of The Mind" was translated into more than a dozen languages. It would sell over a million copies, making Ferlinghetti arguably the best-selling American poet of the last century. Yet, when you mention his name today, many San Franciscans will likely point to City Lights, his landmark bookstore in North Beach.PAUL YAMASAKI: To put it simply, the last five years have been the best five years in City Lights bookstore economic history in terms of sales.GONZALES: Paul Yamasaki has been working in the bookstore for 45 years. He leads us through the store's many nooks and crannies, crammed full of books from floor to ceiling, perused by City Lights' loyal customer base.YAMASAKI: I think the essence of what Lawrence does is really looking at literature that represents both hope and resistance and broader possibilities of a just world, you know, that also embraces literary excellence.GONZALES: But what the customers won't see is Ferlinghetti himself. At age 96, he rarely visits the bookstore anymore. But he still lunches regularly with friends and keeps a brisk schedule with visitors. And 2015 is a busy year. He's publishing the 60th anniversary edition of the "City Lights Pocket Poets Series." It's a collection of poetry packaged to fit into anyone's back pocket or purse. Ferlinghetti's also publishing a book of selected correspondence between himself and Allen Ginsberg. And there's a compilation of his travel journals, "Writing Across The Landscape," dating back to 1944, which will be published by Norton Liveright Books in September. And then, of course, there's a novel he's working on, the one that's still in all those notebooks.FERLINGHETTI: I'm writing a stream of consciousness novel. It's an endless novel and may never be finished. It could be called "Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Red."GONZALES: An old red, the likes of which San Francisco may never see again. Richard Gonzales, NPR News, San Francisco.