Desolation Angels [antikvár]

Introduction BY SEYMOUR KRIM All of us with nerve have played God on occasion, but when was the last time you created a generation ? Two weeks ago maybe? Or instead did you just rush to your psychiatrist and plead with him to cool you down because you were scared of thinking such fantastic-sick-delusory-taboo-grandiose thoughts? The latter seems more reasonable if less glamorous; I've chickened out the same way. But Jack Kerouac single-handedly created the Beat Generation. Although Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corse and William Burroughs brought their separate and cumulative madness to the yeasty phenomenon of the BG (and you will find them in this book under the names of Irwin Garden, Raphael Urso and Bull Hubbard) it was Kerouac who was the Unifying Principle by virtue of a unique combination of elements. A little boy tucked into the frame of a resourceful and independent man, a scholarly Christian-Buddhist who dug Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and ice cream, a sentimental, apolitical American smalltowner who nevertheless meditated on the universe itself like Thoreau before him, Jack Kerouac threw a loop over an area of experience that had previously been disunited and gave it meaning and continuity. The significant thing about Kerouac's creation of the Beat Generation, what made it valid and spontaneous enough to leave a lasting wrinkle on history and memorialize his name, was that there was nothing calculated or phony about the triumph of his style. He and his friends in the mid to late '50s, before and while the Beat flame was at its hottest, were merely living harder and more extensively than any of their articulate American counterparts. One of the minor characters in Desolation Angels, an Asian Studies teacher out on the Coast, says at an outdoor party that the core of Buddhism is simply "knowing as many different people as you can," and certainly this distinguished Kerouac and his boys with a bang. 7