Jimmy Fazzino

This essay presents multi-racial/ethnic/gendered responses to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, illustr... more This essay presents multi-racial/ethnic/gendered responses to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, illustrating how cultural experiences of Beat and Chicano/a gendered identity shape one’s understanding of material and imaginary spaces. In addition to On the Road, the essay discusses Hunter S. Thompsons’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing, Maria Amparo Escandon’s Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Co.: A Road Novel with Literary License, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

World Beats

, they believed, truly serve India's needs, and their example highlights the multivalent legacies... more , they believed, truly serve India's needs, and their example highlights the multivalent legacies of European imperialism, the complexities of decolonization, and, to a much greater extent than has been acknowledged, the interest of Beat Generation writers in such matters. The tensions within Bengali intellectual life and among Kolkata's adda poets: between the past and the present, colonial rule and national in dependence, "their gods" and "the gods of modernism," as Deborah Baker puts it, mean that India for Ginsberg is not timeless or unchanging or utterly exotic (hallmarks of orientalist thinking) but vital and dynamic; it retains the specificity of its historical moment and engages with head in North Carolina, Williams had recently made waves by arming the local African American community against the Klan. Williams, who would return to Cuba in 1961, wanted by the FBI, represented a more militant wing of the civil rights movement. He would inspire the future Black Panthers, and his philosophy was something that Baraka began to find more and more appealing as the 1960s wore on. to reassess their place in mid-century American history and literature, to recontextualize Beat writers within the larger arts community of which they were a part, to recover marginalized figures and expand the restricted canon of three to six major figures established from 1956 to 1970, and to critique media stereotypes and popular clichés that influence both academic and popular discourse about the Beats." 8 obstinately U.S.-centric understanding of comparativism in opposition to more capacious and fluid paradigms such as those of Micol Seigel and Wai Chee Dimock. Gillman and Gruesz envision a "transnational analysis [that] would draw multiple circles, replanting the foot of the drawing-compass in different, central points, moving across different scales of observation. In so doing, it aims to avoid what is all too frequently, as Seigel demonstrates, the outcome of comparative analysis: a patronizing affirmation that the Other is different, but essentially just like Us." 13 Their title alone-"Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network"-registers multiple levels of analysis: nation, hemisphere, and world, and within this productive slippage of terms lies the recognition that the hemisphere, like Dimock has been especially interested in the expansive intimacies of writers reading other writers' work-radically transformative events that leave even the most iconic and canonical texts permeated by diverse elements and energies. Within the U.S. canon, this applies to Emerson and Thoreau perhaps above all. In her "Deep Time" essay, Dimock writes, The Transcendentalists were avid readers. Comparative philology and comparative religion-two newly minted disciplines of the nineteenth centurywere high on their reading lists. The relative claims of various civilizations In "Song of Myself" and elsewhere, Whitman praises science and progress per se; here, he singles out technology's ability to "span" the globe, to make "the distant brought near." The earth as "Rondure" could easily become an abstraction without the voluptuousness of the word to make it tangible. And as with Thoreau and Emerson, the physical always has its spiritual counterpart. The flight of the soul has it within its grasp to "Eclaircise the myths Asiatic," which become the necessary analogue of progress (paradoxically into the past). The poem declares, "Nor you alone ye facts of modern science, / But myths and fables of eld, Asia's, Africa's fables, /. .. / You too with joy I sing" (531). But as his song unfolds, the poet becomes plagued with doubt. What next? he asks. We've spanned the globe, but where has it gotten us except right back where we began? The speaker of "Facing West from California's Shores" faces Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta.. .. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. 37 Matthiessen, contrasting Thoreau with John Donne at one point, calls Thoreau's experience "inevitably more literary" and says that "one of his chief distinctions. .. is the infusion of his reading into his percep-The author emphasizes the salutary estrangement involved in such a pursuit when he writes, "Only when we can vividly imagine this fact [of the "bubbles"] will we recognize in our own world the bubble that encloses each and every one of us on all sides." 45 Uexküll's perspective, which radically decenters human consciousness and imagines a dense, rhizomic web of inputs and interactions among all life forms, is picked up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and has come back to the fore in the field of animal studies and among today's theorists of posthuman biopolitics. This talk of worlds and bubbles is strangely reminiscent of Leibniz even, whose rationalist abstractions seem miles away from Uexküll's empiricist The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark. 51

Download

The Beat Manifesto: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Worlded Circuits of African American Beat Surrealism

The Transnational Beat Generation, 2012

John Clellon Holmes’s essay “This Is the Beat Generation,” which served as a public introduction ... more John Clellon Holmes’s essay “This Is the Beat Generation,” which served as a public introduction to the notion of “Beat” when it appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 16, 1952, is but the first of many published attempts at self-definition and self-assertion on the part of Beat writers. While the Beats never produced a “Beat manifesto” as such, a whole range of Beat texts contain what we might call a manifesto function as key figures such as Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, in addition to many “minor” Beats, believed themselves compelled to define and redefine their aesthetic and social practices, to state and restate their opposition to post-World War II American conservatism. Exploring the ways in which Beat writers have borrowed and adapted the formal and rhetorical features of the avant-garde manifesto, an initial claim of this essay will be that the Beat movement owes as much to European traditions of the historical avant-garde—futurism, Dada, and surrealism chief among them—as it does to a strictly American tradition of Whitmanian democracy and the open road mythos. But at the core of my argument lies the further assertion that to reevaluate Beat writing in terms of its engagement with European experimentalism is also to reassess the role played by African American writers in the Beat movement as a whole. The work of Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, and Bob Kaufman evinces a particularly intense and longstanding commitment to avant-garde poetics and politics, and by illustrating their truly worlded conception of the history and legacy European avant-garde, I hope to shed new light on the internationalism of Beat writing.

A Trap Well-Enough Woven of Words": The Many Worlds of Brion Gysin's the Process

Journal of Beat Studies, 2012

British-Canadian writer, artist, and lifelong expatriate Brion Gysin is best known to Beat audien... more British-Canadian writer, artist, and lifelong expatriate Brion Gysin is best known to Beat audiences as a one-time resident of 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, the famed "Beat Hotel" that was occupied at various points by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse, and other notables. There, Gysin and Burroughs pursued an intense collaboration leading to their joint development of the "cut-up method."1 In "Cut-Ups Self-Explained" (1964), Gysin argues that "[w]riting is fifty years behind painting," a charge made all the more trenchant by the fact the Gysin was himself a prolific painter Back 132).2 During an earlier stay in Paris in the mid- 1930s, there ostensibly to attend classes at the Sorbonne, he instead fell in with the Surrealist group in operation at the time. Gysin was invited to show his work at a group exhibition that included such luminaries as Picasso, Miro, Magritte, and Dali, but he was devastated to find, on the day of the opening, his pictures being removed by order of Andre Breton on murky grounds of "insubordination" (Geiger 45). The same gallery would later hold a solo exhibition of Gysin's work, which was beginning to move away from overtly surrealist influences and would become increasingly complex and innovative over the next several decades. By the late 1950s at the Beat Hotel, Gysin was producing canvases that overlaid grid-like patterns with Eastern calligraphic scripts and sought to liberate language in ways analogous to his and Burroughs's cut-up experiments.Jason Weiss has noted that Gysin's multi-genre, mixed-media approach to his work, which seems to vacillate or occupy a kind of middle ground between visual art and the written word, has led to both his unfortunate obscurity and his enduring significance "in this age when scholars and readers are eager to think across the disciplines, to find connections between cultures, to discern the underlying matrix of an artistic moment beyond fixed horizons of identity or traditional expectations" Back ix). The hybrid identities (formal, linguistic, cultural, and otherwise) that Weiss views as central to Gysin's oeuvre are in many ways the obverse of a loss, even a refusal, of personal identity that becomes equally important to Gysin's mythos and worldview. He once confessed, "I have never accepted the color or texture of my oatmealy freckled skin: 'bad packaging' I thought. Certain traumatic experiences have made me conclude that at the moment of birth I was delivered to the wrong address" - adding: "I have done what I can to make up for this" Here xvii). This last statement could apply to Gysin's incessant travels - a self-imposed exile or a pilgrimage with no known destination - and to the sum of his creative endeavors. His best-known work of fiction, his 1969 novel The Process, in which shifting identities and itineraries mirror the ceaselessly shifting sands of the Sahara, represents Gysin's most profound attempt at "making up" for the very fact of his birth.The imaginative detours that cut a meandering path across Gysin's novel, however, not only "make up" for his birth but also contribute significantly to Beat discourses on race, gender, ethnicity, and religion as they offer an alternative, even a corrective, to familiar depictions of the "exotic" in Beat writing or the standard fare of what Brian T. Edwards has dubbed "hippie orientalism."3 The cross-cultural aesthetics and wildly innovative narrative and figurative strategies that Gysin employs throughout the novel enable him to comment on racial and ethnic difference in a particularly complex and nuanced manner. The willingness of the novel's protagonist, Ulys O. Hanson, to "go native" in Morocco (where Gysin himself spent the better part of the 1950s after an initial invitation from Paul and Jane Bowles to join them at their Tangier villa) is perhaps unsettling at times, but a highly performative means of counteracting the relentless othering that has always been an orientalist hallmark. …