"Stray Prose" of Lee Ranaldo of
Sonic Youth fame. Semicoherent Bob Dylan review, a paean to Kerouac, and an entertaining interview with William Burroughs. Pretentious, but, uh, you know, if you're into that sort of thing...
There's some more stuff of his around his
official site
posted by ITheCosmos
on Apr 10, 2005 -
12 comments
Do you consider yourself a latter-day "beatnik"? Even
young fans of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg proudly
christen themselves with the tag
beatnik these days, apparently unaware that word was originally coined as a
term of ridicule by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. "Beat" was indeed used by Kerouac to denote both "beaten down" and
"beatitude" -- a state of revelation. He
first heard the word spoken by a Times Square hustler and writer named Herbert Huncke; then another writer, John Clellon Holmes, popularized the term "Beat" in a
New York Times article headlined "This is the Beat Generation." But the original Beats did not approve of the term "beatnik" -- combining "beat" with the Russian
"Sputnik," as if to suggest that the Beat writers were both "out there" and vaguely Communist -- as this
hilarious dialogue [note: MP3 link] between a very young Ginsberg, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and an excruciatingly square talk-radio host makes plain.
posted by digaman
on Jan 14, 2005 -
45 comments
