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'The Beats'
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A Coney Island of the Mind: 1962 and 2006
It was a bus-junction cafe in the centre of Belfast, 1962. Neon reflections on the rain- slashed pavement; steamed-up windows; tea, chips and "cream dans". For the traveller one of those wire stands stacked with paperbacks that you turned awkwardly around as you scanned the westerns, romances and true crime; and there amongst the rest with heavy black lettering on its yellow spine - 'The Beats'. The front cover, a black and white photograph of a bearded man and two women sat in an apartment with an abstract painting pinned on the wall promising "raw, penetrating stories, poems and social criticism by Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and many others. Edited by Seymour Krim; A Gold Medal Book." Gold indeed and at two shilling, "...sure thon's great value...".
Two shilling paid and a bus ride later there's a mad exchange of horn fights, naked lunches, a dead painter's ear, fables of the final hour and 'Visions of Cody'. On the last page, poem #5 from 'A Coney Island of the Mind' in which, as we well knew in Belfast, Ferlinghetti's cat "dont't come down from His Tree - Him just hang there..."; it was we who had to move and take off onto "the long street/which is the street of the world/.../filled with all the people of the world/not to mention all the voices."
Now it's 2006 and the street of the world has wound forward two generations, the cafe has disappeared and the buses are skulking somewhere else in the city, but 'The Beats',its spine half-torn and the pages loose and browned with use, still stands on our kitchen shelf and far off in cyberspace Berkely College has just released a digital library where you can jack into the years and hear Ferlinghetti reading from 'A Coney Island of the Mind'.
And Coney Island, Brooklyn, USA and the two Coney Islands - one in Lough Neagh and the other in County Down - in Northern Ireland mesh into multiple cross-currents. The old beachfront with its roller-coaster promises and rundown attractions, the island culture which crafted knives and swords 5,000 years ago and the bird sanctuary by the Irish Sea set off cascades in the flash-pan of the mind like the Leonids scarring the sky. more on coney island
c. Marshall Mateer, 2007.
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'Off the Road': by Carolyn Cassady
'Off the Road, Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg' written by Carolyn Cassady, republished in a revised edition by Black Spring Press, 2007, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Kerouac's seminal 'On the Road'. 'Off the Road' tells the intimate story of two of the most famous, and yet most enigmatic, figures in modern literature Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady ....
:: more at Cassady Estate and Black Spring Press and Amazon.
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'The Beats,' edited by Seymour Krim'
The Beats edited by Seymour Krim was published by Gold Medal Books in 1960.
Seymour Krim was journalist and critic who wrote for Village Voice, IT and other magazines and papers. Associated with the Beat generation and "new journalism". 'The Beats' is a brilliant compilation of extracts, poems and essays including an anti-beat rant by Norman Podhoretz. Each entry introduced by Krim's single paragraph, high-octane, hip intros.
See:Wikipedia's introductory biography and for the complete works consult the Collected papers of Seymour Krim at University of Iowa.
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James Agee
The big book on the coffee table in the photograph on the cover of 'The Beats' is by James Agee. Judging from the thickness of the book it could well be Agee's seminal work 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'. The book, with photographs by Walker Evans, describes the life of three sharecropper families in the South of the USA; part anthropology, part personal journey, part poem and part journalism. It is quite unlike mostbooks at the time - 1941 - and the combination of montage techniques and personal insight might well have been of interest to writers interested in radical ways of working and the new Beat ideas.
More...
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Pull My Daisy and films...
Pull My Daisy is a short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie in 1959; often seen to typify the Beat way of life. The film is based on an incident in the lives of Neal and Carolyn Cassady and tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results..
The script was adapted and narrated by Jack Kerouac from his own unfinished play, Beat Generation and featured: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's then-infant son. See Wikipedia for more on Pull My Daisy the film.
WATCH ... 'PULL MY DAISY' on Google Video.
The film's title is taken from the poem 'Pull My Daisy' which was written by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, taking turns to write a new line in an up-dating of the Surrealist tactic of the “exquisite corpse” .... now write your own... Pull My Daisy, the poem.
'Tonite Let's All Make Love in London'
In 1965 Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Trocchi read their poems to a packed Royal Albert Hall in London and Peter Whitehead used 16mm (colour and black and white) to do for London what Frank had done for America, in a film called 'Tonite Let's All Make Love in London' - a title taken from Ginsberg's poem 'Who be Kind to' about the "theft of British culture". Details of the film and who appeared in it at IMDB ''Tonite Let's All Make Love in London''
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Gold Medal Books
Gold Medal Books were a publishing innovation in the post-war period of the 1950's bringing new novels straight to the market, without being in hardback first. They targetted the male population in the US who had returned from the war with new reading habits - comics, magazines and the pulps - and seized on the new production techniques of the paperback and the 'overnight' success of Mickey Spillane with 'I the Jury' in 1948, to cultivate a new style, genre and mass market for their books. Gold Medal published Elmore Leonard, Kurt Vonnegut, John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams, Vin Packer and David Goodis amongst many others. James Warner Bellah wrote westerns and went on to script John Ford films.
It is interesting to read the blurb on 'The Beats' - "raw penetrating,...the drive, the frankness...ruthlessly honest... etc..." - in this light, though not very helpful in disentangling the Beat myth from the actuality and the lives of the people involved. The publisher had complete rights over the covers - title, artwork and text - and somtimes even altered the author's chosen title.
The Gold Medal phenomenon was part of the wider cultural landscape in which the Beats published their early works.
:: Gold Medal Books by Michael Bolwhard who argues for their influence on films and other literature. By some sort of near-but-not-really-coincidence he chooses as a typical Gold Medal cover the illustration for a book by David Goodis, 'Cassidy's Girl'.
:: Wikipedia Gold Medal Books article.
:: Picador to go Straight to Paperback
November 2007, UK: The Gold Medal publishing model of straight to paperback is being introduced by book publishers trying to reposition their business planning in response to the impact of the Internet and [book clubs such as 'Richard and Judy's'] on their market. Picador announced that ,as from next year, 2008, all it's books will go straight to paperback. Hardback printing will only be used for limited and special editions to satisfy the niche markets of collectors and fans. Other publishers are expected to follow suit.
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Naked Lunch in Gold Medal...well nearly
Talking of Williams Burrough's book 'Naked Lunch' the poet Allen Ginsberg remarked in a letter to Kerouac:
"if Laughlin (editor New Directions) no want, we'll peddle it to a cheap paper covered 25c Gold Medal or Signet Books, like, 'I Mobster'." (letter from Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, 1951, quoted in 'Off the Road.')
If only...I wish.
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Belfast, 1962...
The old cafe, College Square, Belfast.
The old cafe has been demolished and in it's place.....slabs of vertical concrete and dark window slits replacing the old four-story brick buildings that housed the cafe throwing welcoming light and smells out into the street. A 'Nighthawks' sort of place....Now it's 2006 and the street of the world has wound forward two generations, the cafe has disappeared and the buses are skulking somewhere else in the city ...
"cream dan"
A particular delicay in 50/60's Belfast.. a half-bagette sized sweet bread roll split along its length, spread with jam and piped full of artificial cream. You want one or two?
Old money
Two shillings in old money = about 25p today; though by that reckoning, paperbacks now cost 20 times more than they did in 1963...or we earn/acquire/desire 20 times as much.
The Leonids
"Each November we stand in awe and wonder as the Leonids scar the sky in momentary sparkling sprays burning out as they hit the cornea of the earth's atmosphere." NASA on the Leonids a yearly shooting star spectacular.
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On Finding Books
"Reading Yeats I do not think of Ireland but of midsummer New York," Ferlinghetti recalls coming across a blue covered copy of Yeats' poems on the Third Avenue E1 subway. What is it with transport stations and books? And for added resonance two of Yeats' best known poems - The Lake Isle of Innisfree' and 'Under Ben Bulben' - are about the landscape around Sligo, County Galway on Ireland's west coast ...where one of the little islands in the Sligo estuary is called 'Coney Island'. More about this in Shapesoftime's Coney Island page
Patti Smith - another Coney Island devotee - it's a sea-thing for her - discovered Rimbaud's 'Illuminations' in a secondhand book stall in some bus depot in New York; she 'borrowed' it.
George Laughead Jr found his copy of 'The Beats' in one of the Beat heartlands, Kansas in "the only bookstore in Dodge City". See Beats in Kansas Introduction...and George got his copy signed by William Burroughs.
For me 'The Beats' turned up in a Belfast bus-stop cafe. Where did you find yours?
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The Beats
The Beat movement... ...arose in USA after the Second World War. Its poets, writers and artists, born in the Depression years grew up in, and came of age after, the Second World War (after 1945) in an era where they felt without identity, repressed and lacking opportunity.
They broke with traditional forms of writing to reach into themselves and gain a new vision - non-materialistic/non-war/non-conventional/spiritual/risk-taking/visceral - creating along the way a new American myth with Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' (about the late forties,written 1952, published 1957), Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' (1956), and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959) as the touchstone texts. The fourth key person was Neal Cassady described as "a force of nature" who was a catalyst to the other writers and on whom Kerouac's characters Dean Moriarty in 'On the Road' and Cody Pomeray in 'Visons of Cody' are based. In 'Howl' Ginsberg calls him, "NC, secret hero of these poems" and a writer who "enlightened Buddah".
Origin of 'Beats'
The word derived from the sense of "beaten down"; used by Kerouac; explicated and propagated by the writer John Clellon Jones in an article "This Is the Beat Generation" (New Yorker, November, 1952). Later expanded by Ginsberg and Kerouac to include the spiritual dimension of "beatific" and the musical meaning of "beat" (in particular "cool Jazz"). Contains sense of "a quest"...a journey and want to find something.
Short 'essay' on the origins of Beats at RookNet and longer one in Wikipedia 'The Beat Generation'.
More on the Beats in shapesoftime's page on Howl
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Coney Island
Coney Island USA
Originally a popular destination for middle-class New Yorkers who stayed away after the extension to the subway provided access to the working classes who crowded the beaches. In their turn they were replaced by the poorest black sections of society. Now undergoing regeneration with a vehement save-the-character-of -the-neighbourhood movement. Read the full story in Shapesoftime
'A Coney Island of the Mind'
A book of poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and published by City Lights in 1955
:: Listen to Ferlinghetti reading from 'A Coney Island of the Mind' and other poems. It's 40 minutes of streamed video from Berkeley University using Google Video - for best quality download Goole Video's player and then download the file. The video includes some poems from a 'A Coney Island of the Mind'.
Robert Frank Photographs of Coney Island
In 1958 the photographer Robert Frank had made a book/exhibition from a set of 83 photographs called 'America'- he selected the photographs from from 28,000 taken on a trip through the States recording and revealing a previously uncelebrated underside to the American dream. Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction noting how Frank had "sucked a sad poem right out of America" through his camera. Frank took a further sequence of photographs after the 4th July celebrations on the beach at Coney Island. "The images reach into the penumbra of dawn with a felt-black sea and with tired, pummelled sand, strewn with scraps of rubbish and drunken couples crashed-out - beached, desolate, desparate - a new day yet to take hold." (Mateer, 2007) View one of the evocative images Coney Island, 4th July by Robert Frank from the Metropolitan Musuem of Modern Art.
Coney Island, Northern Ireland:
As if one wouldn't be enough, they have two Coney Islands in Northern Ireland:
1. Coney Island is a small island in the South West corner of the biggest inland water mass in the British Isles, Lough Neagh. It has been inhabited for 8,000 years and been a famous point of pilgrimage and spiritual renewal; about Lough Neagh.
2. Coney Island a small coastal area south of Strangford Lough in County Down. It is named after the gaelic word 'coinin' meaning rabbit; history and location
:: Coney Island Van Morrison, 'Avalon Sunset', 1985
Morrison's Coney Island is the Strangford one.
:: Listen to Liam Neilsen's spoken word version on MP3.
:: Read the Lyrics.
12219,More on Coney Island
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City Light Books, San Franciso, California, USA.
City Light Books is in San Franciso, California, USA. It was established in the 1950's by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin. The name 'City Lights' is taken from a Henry Miller story "Into the Night Life".
City lights is a bookstore, meeting room, place of pilgrimage and publishing house: City Lights Books
Image of City Lights bookstore published in low-resolution for education and critical purposes under "fair use"; investigation about it's origin continues.
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The Beats on 'You Tube'
There's a lot of film about 'the beats', kerouac, cassady, ferlinghetti, ginsberg, burroughs, corso, etc... Very variable quality...and a lot of items have no indication of their source or copyright... however, you do get to listen to the voices... kerouac reading 'on the road' and 'american haiku' ... ginsberg intoning poems... and lots of tribute pieces.
My best pick? .. well apart from listening to the voices...there's a little piece of silent black and white footage - apparently New York 1959 - which just shows kerouac and friends - inc. Ginsberg, Robert Frank's wife and children and Lucien Carr - hanging out on the street...no theatricals... just hi guys... beats meet...on the street.
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Ask Professor Zebra
New to The Beats and the poems and writing of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, Ferlinghetti and Burroughs or the 'Pull My Daisy' film....?
Mail your question to Professor Zebra. Hi Professor Zebra!........
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'The Beats': some links...
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Acknowledgements
:: Carolyn Cassady
:: George Laughead Jr
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About and feedback
The Beats is written by Marshall Mateer, first published in June 2007 and was updated on the 24th November 2007. If you have any feedback please write to me at info@shapesoftime.net
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