Word: kerouacs
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...suck on the scars of the wounds we suffered in the sixties, films that have to discover every Lost Generation that wanted to stay Lost. Heart Beat tries to take us back to Haight Street and Greenwich Village, to throw color on the black and white legend of Jack Kerouac, to show us in elegiac tones where we came from and to tell us in loud whispers where we can still go. It's time, Hollywood says, for us to see the truth about Kerouac and the Cassadys...
Looking like a skinny William Shatner, Heard's Jack appears as unlikely to start the Beat Generation as the real Kerouac must have. Torn between the genteel sobriety of California suburbia and literary fame as a New York author, Kerouac compromised and died an alcoholic wimp in Florida. We last see him warming in the sun, a camp blanket tossed across his kness as if he were a suburban Ezra Pound who had anticipated his usefulness or outlived his youthfulness and was only good for gardening, pushing down daisies...
Somehow I had hoped that the reams of feminist criticism of American literary sexism (see Andrea Dworkin's Woman Hating; see my article on Kerouac in the September 1978 Seventh Sister) would knock writers like Mailer off their pedestals, would make younger writers realize that they could criticize an author's male chauvinism while admiring his use of language. Perhaps this is too much to ask of Harvard, where, as we all know, the pugilist has a private little ring at 21 South Street...
...written another history of the '60s, in a superior and unconventional way he has. The history is grounded in the civil rights movement, in Brown vs. the Board of Education, in E.D. Nixon and his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It is grounded in the "new values" of Jack Kerouac's prose--an inspiration for Tom Hayden--and of Allen Ginsberg's poetry, particularly his seminal work, Howl. And from those seeds, Viorst says, "the Movement" rose up, at times singularly eloquent, at times wanton and reckless. In an epilogue, Viorst says the '60s taught Americans that their country...
Burroughs disassociates himself from the Beat movement, and writers like Kerouac. "I don't think I have very much in common with the other Beat writers from a literary point of view. You couldn't find two writers more different in their approach and style than myself and Kerouac." He rejected the term modernist as "meaningless," and claimed to be part of the picaresque tradition, "very definitely." He cited Conrad, Graham Greene, Kafka, Rimbaud and T.S. Eliot among his influences. Of course, he belongs among them, no mere cult figure but an important American writer in whatever tradition you care...