Category Archives: Beat Generation

Friday, 21st February 1997

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Lee

Besides getting his toilet fixed by a man called “Dirty Dave,” William Burroughs spent the day reading Asylum by Patrick McGrath. It’s been a long time since I read that book. I remember I enjoyed it but little more. What … Continue reading →

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Friends and Readers

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Lee

I’ve been reading Jack Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz, towards the end of which he describes the way William Burroughs showed support for him in the early years, motivating him to write more as he experimented and found his voice and … Continue reading →

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Empty

Posted on November 30, 2023 by Lee

To be empty inside is to have “no special way of moving or doing things so one way is the same … as another.” You learn things fast and follow instructions well. You are useful to others. “The Dead Child” … Continue reading →

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A little says a lot

Posted on July 6, 2023 by Lee

“In the chair / I decided to call Haiku / By the name of Pop” I like Jack Kerouac’s approach to haiku. As everyone knows, haiku means a poem of seventeen syllables. But Kerouac didn’t think the syllable restriction worked … Continue reading →

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Paradox and Buffoonery

Posted on May 16, 2023 by Lee

“You gotta fight for peace.” And some in the audience must have agreed. If bad people will do bad things you’ve got to do something to stop them. But others just saw the paradox and laughed. One of those who … Continue reading →

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Art and Life: Notes on some Conversations with Allen Ginsberg

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Lee

It begins with the personal. “Life is full of strange experiences,” he says. Allen Ginsberg finds the extraordinary in the everyday. “Each one has his inner nature that he has to satisfy,” says Louis Ginsberg, attempting to account for the … Continue reading →

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Notes on Gregory Corso’s “Variations on a Generation”

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Lee

The Beat Generation was never supposed to become so big, says Gregory Corso, and that’s why it has such a stupid name. If they’d known they might have spent more time thinking about it. Perhaps not. It doesn’t make sense … Continue reading →

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Notes on David S. Wills: Burroughs on Civilisation, Hallucination, and Telepathy

Posted on July 30, 2021 by Lee

For William Burroughs, the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a dividing point in history, marking the moment that Western civilisation finally ended. Could you really call a people capable of such an atrocity “civilised”? And so without civilisation, … Continue reading →

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Beats and Hippos

Posted on July 7, 2021 by Lee

And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks is an early work of the Beat Generation, written in the winter of 1944-45 by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac together, or separately in that they take it in turns throughout the … Continue reading →

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Meaningless to Whom, Exactly?

Posted on January 25, 2021 by Lee

An artist is someone who sees something that others don’t. And then makes that thing visible, in their work, for others to see. What the artist sees is something that did not exist before it was observed by the artist. … Continue reading →

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