Word: kerouac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Proust (though not, perhaps, to the French). It is not that his subject matter is so special as to be outside U.S. sympathy; by now, British upper and middle class life should be less exotic to the U.S. reader than Yoknapatawpha County or the gas-filled pads of Jack Kerouac and his pals. The reason must lie in the curious economics of publishing, which dictate that his current work be issued as a separate novel. It is not a novel. It is the fifth installment* of a work-in-progress titled The Music of Time, which is being imported piecemeal...
...Subterraneans (Arthur Freed; M-G-M). The bushy-bearded Beat Generation is a collective hair farm that the average solid citizen does not dig. Nevertheless, in this picture, which bears about as much relation to Jack Kerouac's novel as Hollywood does to Endsville, Producer Arthur Freed attempts to sell the beatniks back to the mass culture they are desperately and often comically trying to escape. He shaves them down, scrubs them up and presents them, in deadly earnest, as pioneers in the great American tradition, as "The Young Bohemians . . . the makers of the future." Unhappily, the notion...
...considerably longer, is a sort of celluloid-muffled Howl. Financed (for $20,000) by a couple of Manhattan brokers, it features a few well-known beat bards (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky) in a "free improvisation" on a scene from an unproduced play by Jack (On the Road) Kerouac. The beatniks stumble around a pad on Manhattan's Lower East Side, giggle hysterically, wrestle, and mumble "poetry." Even so, Daisy is funnier than most sick jokes, and, considering the subject, it is going over big, particularly in college towns...
McDarrah claims his talent pool now includes just about all the hipsters in Manhattan except the Kerouac-Corso-Ginsberg sort, who are already approaching their first million and don't need the bread. This week he is planning to supply two beats-one cat, one chick-for a birthday party given by a Madison Avenue adwoman for a fashion photographer...
Nobody who has seen Pull My Daisy by Jack Kerouac [with Beat Poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky in the cast] can agree with the distorted impression you have given of it in your Dec. 14 issue. You have completely neglected to mention that Putt My Daisy is an attempt at spontaneous movie making and does not pretend to be anything else. You attempt to compare it to a home movie because the narrator speaks for the characters; yet even your obvious attempt to make Kerouac's prose seem humorous cannot dim its haunting poetic quality...