Word: kerouacs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...movie welds snippets of scenes from the novel to elements of the writer's life: his accidental shooting of his wife Joan; his friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Paul and Jane Bowles; his own sepulchral charisma. With his cracked voice and deadpan insolence, Burroughs was the Beat Generation's W.C. Fields -- a raconteur of depravity, a cracker-barrel coroner. Weller gets the haunted look right, but he can't get inside the junkie's pocked skin. Burroughs lived and nearly died there; Cronenberg and the actors are only visiting. The movie is way too colorful -- cute, in a repulsive...
...blues line like John Lee Hooker. It's a daft and reckless mix, but Morrison makes it work through sheer force of spirit, what he once called, in a memorable song, the "inarticulate speech of the heart." His rhythms are irresistible, his lyrics like an amalgam of Yeats, Kerouac and Chuck Berry. The Irish tenor John McCormack said what distinguishes an important voice from a good one is the indescribable but crucial quality that he termed "the yarrrrragh." The yarrrrragh, critic Greil Marcus points out, is "a mythic incantation . . . To Morrison ((it is)) the gift of the muse...
...strongest, most durable voice belonged to Allen Ginsberg, whose poem Howl was taken up as the Beat manifesto. The tribal saga was Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel that celebrated, among other things, the nation's interstate highway system...
Ginsberg and Kerouac were both Easterners who attended Columbia University and then hit the road in search of direct experience and spontaneity. They found it personified in Neal Cassady, a Denver reform-school graduate and car thief with a gift of gab and sexual electricity that connected with the boys as well as the girls. Cassady and Ginsberg became lovers while Kerouac embraced Cassady's bebop monologues as part of his own prose style. Dean Moriarty, the hero and mobile savage of On the Road, is Neal Cassady right down to his pedal foot. "He was," wrote Kerouac early...
...noted that Cassady had a surplus of erotic energy. Carolyn recalls he was not an especially sensitive lover. Sex, it appears, was less a private act between two people than a plot element in the crowded drama he lived from day to day. Carolyn played her part when Jack Kerouac moved in. With her husband's tacit urging, she became the novelist's lover. "I provided for whichever of them was in residence according to his individual preferences," she writes of that arrangement...