The final instalment in my Beat Generation Revisited course dealt with Beat aftermaths, in the sense of what cultural legacies of the Beat Generation texts and ideals might still be present in the 21st century - whether specifically in the US, or in a Danish/Scandinavian context - or at large in a globalized space/time compressed world... For this session I had asked my students to mail in references they might have come across, whether specific intertextual references or just Beat traces and influences they thought were apparent. 10 of my great students came through with links or tips that they shared with me and the class. This post will mainly serve as a reservoir of those references...
One way of systematising such legacies is to first distinguish between texts that really are straightforward adaptations of Beat texts, on the one hand - and more indirect textual influences, on the other. An example of the first would be movies based on iconic Beat texts, such as Cronenberg's version of Naked Lunch, or the horrible old Hollywood version of Kerouac's The Subterraneans. Both these would be examples of adaptations, but of course adaptations that either add or subtract essential elements of their original 'seed-texts': Cronenberg's film adds a substantial amount of biographical material on Burroughs which is not to be found in his novel, whereas The Subterraneans a la Hollywood has removed the central tension of the novel, which is a portrait of an inter-racial love affair...
Overall, there are surprisingly few film adaptations of Beat novels, and most other Beat inspired films are based on autobiographical material, such as Heart Beat (based on Carolyn Cassady's memoirs), or The Source, based on reenactments of biographical scenes from the lives of prominent Beats (We need this one out on DVD now, please!). TV has also virtually only used stock stereotype characters and incidents in its representations of Beats and Beatniks, and not really done major adaptations. Maynard Krebs is cool, but we could use some real Beat characters on the small screen - why not do Dharma Bums as a mini-series? Anyone? Mr. Spelling??
These and other adaptations are also examples of remediations of Beat texts - all involving shifts from the written medium of literature to other more visually oriented media. A very good example of this is the comix that one of my students found, which is a remediation of Kerouac's life as The Shadow - a reference also to his novel Doctor Sax. Mark Beebe's A Vision of Kerouac as the Shadow is terrific noir stuff, but ultimately also more of a Beebe memoir than a real adaptation of Kerouac.
Other remediations would involve turning Beat characters or narratives into songs, and there are literally hundreds of those, so that would be impossible to cover fully here. Some of my favourite songwriters such as Tom Waits and Van Morrison, should be mentioned here, though, as Beat fans and remediators... If for some reason you are into modern crooners, working in commercial styles that would have sounded familiar to Kerouac and his generation of radio listeners, you could do worse than checking out this video:
Leaving adaptations and remediations, we enter a more loosely defined category of influences from Beats and Beat texts on other, later artists, or artists working in other parts of the world than the US. Starting in a Scandinavian context, I guess the best-known case is Swedish singer-songwriter, Ulf Lundell, who references a Beat ethos in many of his songs and who is also the author of a road novel with the obvious title Jack... In a Danish context I would briefly suggest poets Poul Borum and Dan Turéll as carriers of the Beat spirit, and also as translators and disseminators of the great Beat inspirators in a Danish literary and critical context. More recent 'tough' realist prose literature such as Jakob Ejersbo's novel Nordkraft could also be forwarded here (the book refers specifically to both Naked Lunch and On the Road)...
Ultimately, almost every country in the world has its Beats, and it would lead too far to cover that in this post. I would like to mention, though, as some of my students pointed out, that for instance the poetry slam movement owes a lot to the Beats' practices of spontaneous, uncensored speech. See this example:
Ultimately, almost every country in the world has its Beats, and it would lead too far to cover that in this post. I would like to mention, though, as some of my students pointed out, that for instance the poetry slam movement owes a lot to the Beats' practices of spontaneous, uncensored speech. See this example:
I would like to suggest that we now look at more specific intertextual references, because they also lend themselves to categorization as icon-work - either collaborative or adversarial interactions with the famous (hence iconic) Beat figures and/or their texts. Here one can also distinguish between homage and pastiche, all according to the intentions of the new texts: to celebrate or to imitate (and possibly make fun of) the original. My students found several wonderful examples of this:
Here is a U2 music video which features William Burroughs as 'The Light', playing with all sorts of apocalyptic ideas, alien invasions etc.
Of the many Ginsberg appearances in music videos, I like this one where he revisits his Uncle Sam persona. It's a 1996 collaboration with Paul McCartney.
A hip-hop remix of Ginsberg's voice such as this one seems an obvious case of homage, as well...
The Ginsberg figure in the fantastic 'Dylan'-film, I'm Not There is another case in point...
More unclear examples of pastiche, where the intention seems both to poke fun and to give tribute can be found in these two wonderful Simpsons episodes:
Bart vs. Thanksgiving where Lisa rewrites the beginning of "Howl"! (c. 13 min, 7 secs in)
Hurricane Neddy, where we finally get the back-story for how Flanders became the present-day sanctimonious hypocrite we all love to hate (clue: Beatnik parents) (c. 14 min, 50 secs in)
Both examples reference their objects of pastiche 'silently', relying on our cultural competence to decode them. Therefore I read them as primarily collaborative icon-work - while we are meant to laugh, we laugh with "Howl", rather than at it. In the example with the Flanders parents, we are not so sure, until we learn that the experimental 'cure' that made Ned what he is today involves years of spanking-therapy - thus relatively speaking making the Beatnik style of upbringing ("We've tried nothing, and now we are out of ideas!") seem marginally preferable, at least from my point of view!
In closing we should perhaps mention that hundreds of books and films are dedicated to Beat figures or cite Beat texts as mottoes. Also thousands of web pages and e-mail signatures use Beat quotes in a similar fashion. There are Beat portals galore - some of which I have mentioned in previous posts...
Here is another: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat
It seems that it is fair to say that the Beat legacies are thriving and more with us than ever. Can we have a movie version of On the Road now, please?
