Will Dockery

"Stuart Leichter" wrote:
>Will Dockery wrote on 5/23/07 2:50 PM:
> > "baloney" wrote:
>
> >> Here's some corroboration, not that I necessarily agree.
> >>
> >> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=4950578
> >>
> >> Birth of the Beat Generation: 50 Years of 'Howl'
> >> by Robert Siegel
> >>
> >> All Things Considered, October 7, 2005
> >>
> >> Fifty years ago, poet Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of
> >> "Howl" at a gathering in San Francisco. It was a literary milestone:
> >> Many consider that night the birth of the Beat Generation.
> >>
> >> and here's more:
> >> http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilre...niversary.html
> >>
> >> birth of the Beat generation: 45th anniversary of "Howl" read at Six
> >> Gallery
> >> A `Howl' That Still Echoes Ginsberg poem recalled
> >>
> >> Paul Iorio, Chronicle Staff Writer
> >>
> >> San Francisco Chronicle - Saturday, October 28, 2000
> >>
> >> If the birth of the Beat generation could be traced back to one event,
> >> it would probably be the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem
> >> ``Howl'' 45 years ago this month at the now-defunct Six Gallery in San
> >> Francisco.
> >>
> >> Of course, you will argue that I supplied this information and not
> >> Will. However, it does show that Will is not the only person who has
> >> this opinion, since I've cited two journalists whom I doubt are ill
> >> informed.
> >
> > GB wants to argue whether the "Beat Generation" began when Kerouac met
> > Ginsberg, Cassady, Burroughs et al in the 1940s, or whether it began
when
> > Howl was published, and suddenly the world was aware of "beatniks" (a
term
> > that came even later).
> >
> > Before Howl there was a (relatively) small group of people who knew of
> > "Beat", and most of the writing was unpublished (John C Holmes' Go,
> > Burroughs' Junkie and Kerouac's The Town And The City were years earlier
but
> > none of these came close to the attention Howl recieved, and none of
these
> > "set the beat style" like Howl did).
> >
> > Howl "kicked the doors open" /and/ "set the style" of Beat writing and
> > behavior for thousands, maybe millions of people that followed... which
is
> > more of a /generation/ than the small group of people that were Beat
before
> > Howl was published and was pronounced "obscene".
> >
> > I'm not arguing that there weren't Beats before Howl, but that Howl did
"set
> > the style" of Beat writing for the flood that followed.
> >
> > "The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes
and
> > I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a
> > generation of crazy illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming
> > America, serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged,
> > beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way ..." -Jack Kerouac
> >
> > and
> >
> > "Beat goes back much further than 1948 when John Clellon Holmes (author
of
> > Go and The Horn) and I were sitting around trying to think up the
meaning of
> > the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said "You
know,
> > this is really a beat generation" and he leapt up and said "That's it,
> > that's right!"." -Jack Kerouac
> >
> > But, again, that isn't what I wrote... I never wrote that the Beat
> > generation /began/ with Howl, but that Howl set the style for Beat
> > writing... made it /publishable/, which it wasn't (JK had a dozen
> > manuscripts no publisher would touch, for example) before the success of
> > Howl.
> >
> > On The Road was published in 1957, a year after Howl, and Ginsberg's
success
> > seems to have made the publication of OTR finally possible.
>
> Ann Charters is a scholar -- I recall you mentioning that you were
> conversant with her editions of Kerouac's letters.

Her biography of Kerouac is a favorite of mine, yeah... some of the later
bios, like Memory Babe and Subterranean Kerouac are more detailed, but
Charters' description of the events and /characters/ bring them "to life"
for the reader, rather than just flat descriptions of events.

> But the Beat 'tradition', and Ginsberg's Howl as the agreed-upon prime
mover
> in time are part of common knowledge now -- at least it ought to be among
> anyone who reads and posts here. I'm surprised y'all ain't arguing about
> whether or not Ginsberg sucked off Bob Dylan. I mean, neither of them
poemed
> the event the way Leonard did about Janis. But that was back when blowjobs
> weren't common or knowledgeable.

Did Cohen write about this event besides the verse in "Chelsea Hotel"?

--
"Mirror Twins" by W. Dockery-B. Fowler:
http://www.myspace.com/shadowvilleallstars

"Hasty Pudding" by W. Dockery-H. Conley:
http://www.myspace.com/willdockery