I recently finished up a special topic class at Snow College on the Beat Generation, and let me tell you- I'm in love... or at least obsessed. Throughout the semester I felt that what I could read was limited to my school related texts; I've been reading Ferlinghetti, Snyder and Corso, waiting for school to be over to begin other novels of my own choosing. Now that the class is over, I have chosen only to read books from the beat generation; it's all that I want. Let's just say that I have a literary craving that only Kerouac's writing style can satisfy. I love the beats rebellious nature, and defiant lifestyle, shunning society and conformity, each being their own person. They changed the world; what other group of four people do you know has done that?
Anyways, I created paintings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs and a map depicting the four beats' travels throughout America (completely inaccurate), along with a series of photos depicting Ginsberg's poem America. I was able to have the pieces displayed in the student gallery in Ephraim, UT; here are a few photos from the exhibit.
“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization--the subterranean heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style, a new incantation-- But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was short-lived and small in number.” -Jack Kerouac
