Kerouac at 90 on 12 March

[handsomefortune]

At boarding school, under the spell of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1958 (was I the only one?), I wrote a pseudo-drug-filled pastiche which our English teacher read out in full to the class in his best American-poetic voice. Although he had not himself read Kerouac, he sensed fundamentally what it was. I was overjoyed.

great post! i would so love to have been there myself, witniss verismissimo's early writing, and the teacher's best American-poetic voice.. wish i had a time machine, (but have to make do with utube)

a while back, there was a thread about 'how did you discover jazz'? over on the r3 jazz forum....initially i couldn't recall the 'discovery'. then i remembered my 'jazz dance' teacher, and the extra batty pianist they bought in for these specific free dance 'lessons' ..... in retrospect, i'm wondering if perhaps they'd both been reading the beat poets too? neverthelss, 'i was over joyed' in pretty much the same way as verrismissimo remembers too.

as i see it, i get the impression ginsberg triumphs: didn't stay at his mum's, and was 'up for it' much longer, more useful in fighting the social prejudices that are to surface. after the extreme sublime, openess, energy of the beats ... the extreme violence of political struggle. (sorry to put a dampner on things though).

the earliest "beatniks": the Eastern wandering sages and masters who went "beyond the pale" and returned to the forest to regain the original state of being and to experience life as it was "on the first day" and as it is, underneath all our planning and thinking, even now'

yes, if only we could have a huge influx of those!

[verismissimo]

Thanks hsf. Of course, I imagined that I'd be in serious trouble over it (as usual). This was a seriously conformist school. I re-discovered that English teacher again a few years ago, now in his eighties and full of life and fun.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

alas at my school at the relevant time the English faculty were all fascists ...... as a matter of fact none of the members of staff had any beat sympathy or appreciation whatsoever ... not a bongo in sight then a wonderful chap arrived with a beard and an alto sax .... and off we went on poetry and jazz!

[Serial_Apologist]

At the pubic (sic) school I went to it was Shapespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, year in, year out. The Bard's play specific to that year's English Lit A level was the one staged. Then at age 16 a new teacher, double-barrelled complete with umlaut, no less - came in with what amounted to a revolutionary new itinerary. Posh as his name implies though he was, he was the coolest thing since his predecessor was "moved on" following allegations of small boy interference - nothing to do with little kids blocking the TV screen; he drove around in an open Aston Martin, gorgeous raven-haired girlfriend parked beside in the biggest shades you ever did see, headscarf a-blowin in the wind. West Side Story was put on; my best mate played Riff, and Yours Truly put in charge of the offstage choir, for which, for the sake of invisibility, along with the stage hands, we had to wear black polo necks and dark jeans: in '63 the last word in . No idea who the professional musicians brought in were, but the drum solo climaxing the "Cool" fugue was, as we would say, having got the Ornette album then just out, "something else". Derek Bourgeois the composer later told me that "Cool" fugue was built on a twelve-note row, and, as the saying goes, one never looked back.

S-A