Today I came across an article in the Independent celebrating Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at 60. I read Kerouac’s book when I was an undergrad writing my own poems and short stories, and scheming my own cross-country road trip which I actually took in 1992. Kerouac’s book, page-to-page, was both the best and worst book I’d ever read at that time. Years later I found Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans and felt that by sticking with one location — San Francisco — the author was able to condense the all-over-the-place expressing of On the Road into a love story full of angsty longing.

On the Road may not be the best book of the Beat Generation, but along with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch it’s one point of the holy trinity of the Beat canon. It’s also a book that continues to inspire young dreamers. Here’s the Independent…

All I really knew was that On the Road absorbed me completely. It was like nothing I’d read before. It didn’t follow any traditional structure of fiction that I’d encountered previously. The language was lyrical and urgent and demanded to be read out loud, under my breath, to appreciate the rhythm. It was poetry and prose all mixed together that bounced along to a head-nodding, foot-tapping cadence.

My copy of On the Road was a Penguin 20th Century Classics edition, with a pale-blue spine. On the front cover was a photograph by Robert Frank, entitled “Teardrops”. It depicted a table in an American diner with its jukebox selector, and the ghost of a wide American car in the background. Somewhat surprisingly, it survived the trip to Pamplona in remarkably good shape; I still have it today.

On the Road is the Jack Kerouac novel everyone has heard of, but it’s only one part of Kerouac’s great literary endeavour; a vast, Proustian tapestry of his life and the others that weave in and out of it. There’s The Dharma Bums,The Subterraneans, Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax… 13 novels in all, which I tracked down and devoured, slowly realising that the recurring characters under fictional names were all real people in what Kerouac dubbed The Duluoz Legend – Duluoz being one of the alter egos he created for himself at the behest of his publishers who feared these tales of drugs, booze and debauchery might bring legal problems on their heads if Kerouac used real names.

Still, is is On the Road that is the pivotal book in the whole series. It is, in a way, Kerouac’s “A New Hope”… just like the seminal film Star Wars began halfway through the sequence, it’s the one beloved of most…

Here’s the second chapter of the excellent Rebels: A Journey Underground series that introduces the Beats…

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So I found an interesting article at Please Kill Me yesterday. It seems that poet/rocker Patti Smith may have bought the childhood home of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Along with Jim Morrison and William S. Burroughs, Rimbaud is one of Smith’s great heroes — her song “Land” from her classic album, Horses, features the singalong lines “Go, Rimbaud!” Here’s the word about Smith’s recent purchase, and the neverending allure of Arthur Rimbaud…

Perhaps no performer in rock music has been more influenced by Rimbaud than Patti Smith – early on with her own poem “Rimbaud Dead” from “Babel” (1978), and in her music – the song “Land” on her first album “Horses” (1975) – her incandescent chanting of “Go Rimbaud”…

In 1976, Smith told Rolling Stone, “I saw the cover of ‘Illuminations’ with Rimbaud’s face, y’know, he looked so cool, just like Bob Dylan. So Rimbaud became my favorite poet.”

In an interview with Thurston Moore in BOMB Magazine in 1996, Smith talked about her youthful influences: “I had devoted so much of my girlish daydreams to Rimbaud. Rimbaud was like my boyfriend.”

It came as no surprise then, when I read in Architectural Digest that Patti Smith recently purchased “a reassembled version” of Arthur Rimbaud’s childhood home in Roche, a small French village near the Belgian border. Like Bob Dylan (who famously went on a public tour of John Lennon’s boyhood home and in 2008, showed up by himself at Neil Young’s childhood home in Winnipeg, asking to see Neil’s old bedroom), Patti Smith has an affinity for visiting the important places of the heroes and inspirational figures in her life. It was at his farmhouse in Roche where Rimbaud spent much of his childhood at age 19, wrote his most famous work, “A Season In Hell.”

The farmhouse has a long history. According to the 1987 biography “Rimbaud” by Pierre Petitfil, the farmhouse was acquired in 1789 by the poet’s great-grandfather. In 1918, it was destroyed by the Germans in World War I. It was rebuilt in 1933, only to be destroyed again in 1940, during World War II. The current farmhouse is said to be in a state of reconstruction.

Celebrating National Poetry Month, here’s Smith talking about Rimbaud’s last written work, and offering a recitation of her own “People Have the Power”…

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Sitting down to get a week of blog posts started I turned to {R}emnants for some ideas and found this doozy that Ezra had left there. It’s an article written by a guy whose grandfather was a gun runner who ran with William S. Burroughs. It’s a great tale about history, genetics, and the people we may not even know who have made us — literally — who we are. Take a look…

Josephine, my mother, is not a sociopath. She just has tendencies. At 69, her capacity for violence has diminished, but I think if she had to tackle a burglar, he would probably end up with a kitchen knife deep in his chest. My mom has gone through life with the kind of ruthless energy usually encountered in gangsters and soldiers of fortune.

I didn’t think about any of this as a child, except knowing that it was a good idea to keep a safe distance if I’d pissed her off. My school friends called her “Don Jo.” The pertinence of the moniker only occurred to me years later, after uncovering a buried family history that spans three continents and includes a once famous criminal, an upcoming murder trial, and a part in one of the 20th Century’s most important and disturbing novels. It is a history that taught me that nurture only goes so far in explaining who a person is. Sometimes, your blood does your thinking for you.

As I got to know my mom as an adult I realized she was capable of calmly making decisions that would cause others to shudder. In 2006, when I was 23 and she was 62, we spent two months backpacking around India. It was something my parents had planned to do when they retired. Tragically, my father took permanent retirement much earlier than we had expected, so I took his place. We had a great time driving up the Himalayas and trekking for elephants in the jungles of Kerala. However, one incident in particular convinced me that she could survive pretty much anything that life could throw at her.

We were walking along a beach in north Goa during monsoon season. It was overcast and windswept. There was a rusted cargo ship wrecked on the shoreline and large waves curled vindictively in on themselves before smashing into surf.

I jumped in.

It was an act of immense stupidity. I swam among the waves for a few minutes and then decided to exit. When I got to the shore and tried to stand, my feet didn’t touch the bottom. I went under and a wave pounded me and pulled me out. I swam hard to get back in.

I got to the shallows again. Except, I hadn’t. One foot down and it was like missing a step; a step into an empty elevator shaft. The current dragged me struggling from the land. As I swam back I could see my mom stood watching. Then she turned her back on me and walked up the beach.

Check out the rest of this illuminating article at the link above and watch this video of William S. Burroughs making paintings with a shotgun to get you in the mood…

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Last night I stumbled across a piece at the ce399 Research Archive which pointed to a piece of William S. Burroughs’ writing from the mid-1980′s, and posited that the author might have predicted the new rise of global fascism. Here’s a look…

And what would the future look like if such groups actually exist and if they do combine and take over? An elitist World State very much along the lines laid down by the Nazis. At the top would be a theocracy trained in psychic control techniques implemented by computerized electronic devices that would render opposition psychologically impossible. Entry to this privileged class would be permitted only to those whose dedication to the world state was absolute and unquestioning. In short, you don’t get in by merit or ability but by being an all around one hundred percent shit. – The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. “Mind War” – William S. Burroughs (1985)

Read the whole article here, and then watch the illuminating documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within…

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As is our way, we stick to traditions around these parts. We hate the rituals of the bourgeois and we shun the religions of the rich, but we still feel an attachment to the best of our own, and we fly this same freak flag every year:

Here’s William S. Burroughs’ “A Thanksgiving Prayer..”

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Performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson was one of the only women inside of William Burrough’s clique of friends and collaborators during the 1970′s, while some critics were pointing to what they saw as misogyny in Burrougs’ writings and statements to the press, women like Anderson and punk priestess Patti Smith befriended WSB, and were praised by the writer who trusted in their mutual friendship and praised them as artists.

Hear Anderson’s remembering of Burroughs in this remarkable portrait on BBC radio…

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Burroughs: The Movie is a 1983 documentary by Howard Brookner about the author William S. Burroughs. Brookner shot the film for five years with Burroughs’ full cooperation. The two became good friends before Brookner died of AIDS in 1989. In 2012 Brookner’s archive was discovered in a variety of locations, and the filmmaker’s nephew, Aaron Brookner, oversaw the restoration of the Burroughs film including the recovery of never-before-seen interviews with the likes of Andy Warhol and others. That film was re-released last year to coincide with the Burroughs Centenary. This year, Aaron is premiering his own film about his uncle and his work at Sundance, and the trailer for Uncle Howard reads like hanging out in the greatest scene in New York’s late 1970′s and early 1980′s…

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The late great David Bowie made changing his artistic identity look easy by borrowing freely from every creative discipline within his reach — Bowie studied mime, played the saxophone and was well-versed in Beat Generation lit…

Here Bowie demonstrates his own application of Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique…

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After being mortally shot in a restaurant urinal, German-Jewish American gangster Dutch Schultz slipped into fever and hallucination before dying. Schultz’s surrealistic screed of last words has since become a thing of literary legend. Here’s the Wiki…

Schultz’s last words were a strange stream-of-consciousness babble, spoken in his hospital bed to police officers who attempted to calm him and question him for useful information. Although the police were unable to extract anything coherent from Schultz, his rambling was fully transcribed by a police stenographer. This includes the famous:

A boy has never wept…nor dashed a thousand kim.
But the entire text (linked below) is much more rambling, for example:

You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it.
Oh, Oh, dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy.
One of his last utterances was a reference to “French Canadian bean soup” (French Canadian pea soup is a popular dish that is still produced as canned goods by many food companies).

Schultz’s last words inspired a number of writers to devote works related to them. Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs published a screenplay in novel form entitled The Last Words of Dutch Schultz in the early 1970s, while Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson connected Schultz’s words to a global Illuminati-related conspiracy, making them a major part of 1975′s The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

Burrough’s screenplay tells a strange tale of its own. Again, the Wiki…

Despite the title, very little of the screenplay deals with Schultz’s cryptic words. Although Burroughs specifies that a recording of Schultz’s dying words should be playing throughout the film as the soundtrack, virtually nothing which is actually depicted onscreen has anything to do with the real Schultz’s dying monologue. Burroughs creates his own dying words for Schultz to actually speak, and which reflect Burrough’s narrative; occasionally, these made-up snippets of speech include Schultz’s actual words. Similarly, large segments of the story are told from a third-person perspective, as opposed to being told from Schultz’s perspective.

The screenplay is made up of a series of loosely connected vignettes in roughly chronological order. It begins from the point of view of a dying Dutch Schultz, looking up at two police detectives. He has a brief flashback to his own shooting; from there, the movie makes a transition to Schultz’s memories of childhood, with the remainder of the movie a series of loosely interconnected vignettes in chronological order depicting Schultz’s childhood and rise to power. Occasionally, there are brief, surrealist digressions depicting real events which occurred during Schultz’s life (such as the Stock Market Crash), interspersed with equally surreal yet seemingly unrelated digressions involving Burroughs’ own fictional characters. A lengthy segment is dedicated to Schultz hiring a carnival sideshow freak who can hypnotize people by speaking phrases which plant subliminal messages; Burroughs inserts this fictional character into Schultz’s legal team during his income tax trials, and credits him with helping Schultz avoid prison time. Large segments are dedicated to Burroughs’ own creation, “Albert Stern,” a morphine addict who randomly appears at intervals throughout Schultz’s life and who ultimately attempts to take credit for his murder.

Although there have been occasional reports over the years of filmmakers wanting to adapt Burroughs’ story for the screen, to date no one has seriously taken on the project. For a brief period, Dennis Hopper owned the rights to the film, but nothing ever came to fruition. The closest it has ever come to being filmed is a 2002 Dutch short combining live action and rotoscope animated scenes. The short only features portions of Burroughs’ script, with some segments varying slightly from the source material. The film features Rutger Hauer as the voice of Schultz.

Here is The Last Words of Dutch Schultz…

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In the 1970′s few women were allowed in William Burroughs’ clique of male friends and colleagues. I’ve seen lots of lovely pictures of Burroughs with Patti Smith and I’ve read that she had a crush on the writer. According to this new BBC program, another woman who had access to The Bunker – as Burroughs’ NYC basement apartment in a former YMCA was called – was experimental composer and performer Laurie Anderson. Listen to Anderson profiling Burroughs here with Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted here…

As a bonus, here’s Anderson performing at the Nova Convention honoring William S. Burroughs in 1996…

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