Cut-Cut-Cut–in-out-up-off

1) Define cut-up. Is there a difference between the collage and cut-up?

i.e. what Ginsberg, Kerouac and diPrima seem to be doing and what Burroughs (and possibly Kaufman) does? Is Ginsberg’s piece in the Yage Letters a cut-up? Is Kerouac’s work with dashes gesturing towards the cut-up?

How do you know a cut-up when you see it on the page?

2) Comment on Amy’s comment: “Cubism is problematic in that ‘words’ cannot be rearranged in just any order if one wants them to make sense. However, the beats found a way around this issue and found a way to rearrange stories to create new ones very creatively. They referred to this production as ‘cut ups.’”

3) Address the idea of worlding as a rearrangement of space and time (through the cut-up). Describe the new kinds of space and time that arise, perhaps through a close reading of a cut-up.

4) Make your own cut-up, cut-in, or cut-off

Kaufbo(m)b

1. Write your own newscast. Start with current headlines but at an appropriate point shift your reporting so that it reals hidden sources of the event being currently described.

Ex.“Civilian Defense Headquarters unveils new bomb shelter with two-car garage, complete with indoor patio and barbecue unit that operates on radioactivity, comes in decorator colors, no down payment for vets, to be sold only to those willing to sign a loyalty oath” (87)
Or
“Remember your national emergency signal, when you see three large mushroom clouds and two small ones, it is not a drill. Turn off your TV and get under it.” (87) –what is Kaufman trying to say about national consciousness, TV and our propensity for war?

2. Think about heartbeats and musical beats. Orchestrate a poetic or conceptual symphony.

3. Coin a new term that refers to several things that in your ideal world would be combined in the same term. Ex. For for Kaufman: frinking=drinking, thinking, fucking, funking.

What does it mean for Communism to be connected with French absurdism via the word Abomunism?

4. Rethink a foundation or origin as Kaufman and Lorca did with Crispus Attakus. How does changing a description of “the first or founding hero” change our ideas about the meaning of an event and our ideas about what should follow from it?

5. Write about the beats as “white negro’s.” That is white people who wanted to be black people inside. Is a white negro comparable to an “Oreo” or “Apple”? or is this crossover a totally different phenomenon?

Paper Topic Quesions and Suggestions from Rob

LTEL 120H: Beat Literature & the World

GETTING STARTED ON YOUR FINAL PROJECT:
(1) Due: By Mon., March 7 class (Write-up to 5 Questions [see below]).
(2) Due: By Thurs., March 17 (Final Project to be handed in).

As described in the initial handout for the course, “There will be a final paper (due no later than Thursday March 17, to be submitted at the scheduled final exam time of 7:30-10:30PM or by arrangement with your TA). It will consist of a “research” essay, ranging in length at around 8 pages, and in the form of critical (or creative) analysis with footnotes and bibliography. The main topic will be to pick a Beat author, genre, site, or cultural phenomenon and discuss the cultural, geopolitical, and social dynamics making this object a world “Beat” phenomenon, movement, or expressive formation.”

This final project should reflect upon some of the readings done, theories discussed, and concepts developed in this specific course framework, though not exclusively so. In “brainstorming” for this project, you should go over your own set of 5 “reaction” papers you posted for your section’s website blog, as this may lead you to a do-able and interesting project.

You must present written answers, handed in to your TA, at the latest by Monday March 7, to all of these five questions relating to the topic you are interested in pursuing:

a) What is the topic you are interested in pursuing and why?

b) How does this topic relate to materials or frameworks read for the course? Which of the readings are particularly relevant to this topic?

c) What are some of other materials or sources you will need or want to read and/or inter-connect to cover this topic?

d) What is your provisional “thesis” (hypothesis) at this point concerning this topic and these materials?

e) What problems, limits, or anxieties do you anticipate in pursuing and framing materials, writing up, and setting parameters of this topic?

LTEL 120H: Beat Literature & the World:
FINAL PROJECT TOPICS (pick any one):

1) Pick some site or place connected to Beat literature and culture and its post-Beat aftermath that you know or are fascinated by and do some research, or interviewing, and use literary and filmic examples to reveal some of the historical, cultural and “world” implications of this site. Examples would include sites like City Lights Bookstore or the Pocket Poets series, the SF Beat Museum, Big Sur, North Beach, William Everson’s house in Swanton, Haight Ashbury, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the Chelsea Hotel in NYC, bohemian neighborhoods like those covered in Beat Hotel, Santa Cruz “beat” sites, and so on.

(The form you use to write this portrait need not just be a critical essay but could take the form of a collage, set of poems, manifesto, narrative, autobiographical memoir, travelogue, polemic, Snyder-like journal cum essay, and so on. This issue of using alternative forms also applies to the other topics, but you will need to explain and justify your aims.)**

2) Take any author read and discussed for the course– Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Burroughs, di Prima and so on– and read one or more of their other works (like Kerouac’s Satori in Paris or Mexico City Blues, or Di Prima’s Loba poems) to articulate a fuller vision of what their approach to “Beats and the World” is. How does this author define some of the historical ingredients, cultural traits and attitudes, political struggles, gendered dimensions, and social tensions that go into making the Beat world?

3) Pick some current or relatively recent cultural formation or object like a web site, manga, video game, music group, film, item of fashion, cartoon series, newspaper item, web journal, television series and so on that makes use of some aspect of “Beat” or post-Beat culture (or semiotics, places, and values). Define and explore how the imagery, meanings, narratives, and ideology of the Beat are being used and transformed in this new formation.

4) Focusing upon two or more works, define some recurring theme, image, problem, or subject matter that, in your own terms, ties these works together and has been an important concern in the “Beat literature & the world” materials. (The works you draw upon need not be limited to those read, seen, or discussed in class; one suggestion, for example, would be to contrast the worlds and social-bio tactics of Beat Hotel and A Blue Hand.)

5) After going over the passages in Beat Attitudes that help to define “post-Beat” as a cultural and social phenomenon, focus upon some author, group, artist, or social formation that helps to extend and transform the Beat vision (examples would include such figures as Bob Dylan, Anne Waldman, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs, the poetry of Jim Morrison, the Doors, Tom Waits, Richard Brautigan, Lisa Jarnot, Albert Saijo and so on).

6) Focus upon any character or author (Ginsberg, Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Hope Savage, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky et al) as portrayed by Deborah Baker in A Blue Hand: what values and vision drive this person to come to India, and what do they find there that changes or fails to change them via contact with the world of other cultures, languages, and peoples? How does Baker’s portrayal emphasize or distort certain aspects of this person?

7) The “dharma bum” is transformed into the “dharma revolutionary” in Revolutionary Letters and Earth House Hold: what does Di Prima’s and/or Snyder’s vision of Buddhism add to revolutionary tactics or values in either or both of these works?

8) Using a mix of quoted passages and your own commentaries, write your own version of “Beat Attitudes” that helps to link some of these attitudes and values to your own understanding of contemporary society and the quest to find alternative values and stances affiliated to the Beats.

9) Pick one of the woman writers from Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation (such as Carolyn Cassady, Jan Kerouac, Mary Norbert Korte, Joanne Kyger, Joyce Johnson et al) and discuss one or more of their published works in terms of what it tells us about “Beat literature & the World” and how women saw it or added something different or new.

10) Define your own topic (in relation to topics and concerns like those suggested above). Please discuss and clear this topic with the your TA (and/or in discussion with Rob Wilson) as you begin to do so.

**If you do some creative project, you will also need to provide a one- to two-page description of (a) what you are aiming to achieve through the form and the techniques you have used in relation to Beat authors; and (b) cite the authors and research materials drawn upon as a model or source when you hand in your final project.

Up Snyder Mountain

Here are a couple of humble suggestions from me, but see, also Rob’s much more intellectual questions below.

(1) Bridge the gap between people and the non-human world.

Ex. p. 12

“Boys on bicycles in the asphalt playground wheeling and circling aimlessly like playful gulls or swallows. Smell of a fresh parked car.”

or, more acerbicly, while maintaining a gap. p. 21

“Skirt blown against her hips, thighs, kns
hair over her ears
climbing the steep hill in high-heeled shoes

(the Deer come for salt, not affection)”

(2) Try out one of Snyder’s preacherly commands, or make up a command of your own:

ex. p. 4: Look within and adjust the mechanism of perception.

see also: “skin perception” p. 36.

And now, from Rob…

SOME SUGGESTED Section “Blog” TOPICS ON GARY SNYDER:
Pick any one section or passage of Earth House Hold and discuss this in its own terms and relation to some of the larger and recurring patterns, tactics, or themes in the book?

How and why does a “dharma bum” turn into a “dharma revolutionary” in the journeys of this book?

Why does Snyder turn to Asian cultures and places, as well as to Native American cultures and tactics to expand and deepen his American “world”?

Discuss some of the journeying patterns Snyder makes in Earth House
Hold? Discuss something you find problematic or off-putting in the tactics, style, or concerns of Earth House Hold.

What seems dated in this book, what seems still relevant and interesting to you?

How does Snyder figure a vision of “beat,” and what resources and tactics does he draw upon to come up with this vision?

What are the gender politics of Snyder in this book? How is “the family” being re-imagined, and what are women’s role in this family or in the broader world of ecology as an “earth house hold”?
Discuss what Snyder means by “white Indians” (110) in “Passage to More than India.”

How does Snyder use the figure or “tribe” (see “Why Tribe” section etc.) to re-imagine family, nation, people, or place?

Why do the concerns of this book and Snyder’s whole body of work
increasingly turn towards a vision of ecology as what he calls “earth
household”?

Blue Hands

1. Consider quotes like: “He saw himself as a latter-day Amazonian adventurer hacking through the deepest jungles of his own mind for the Inca Gold he was certain was there” (79). The beats used drugs to open themselves up, and today we seem to see them as a trap. What accounts for the difference? Did we just discover there was no “Inca gold there”?

2. Write a narrative (poem or prose) in which lives from different times and places intersect.

3. Use some of the materials from the diaries and letters. Do they shed light on the poems or can you get everything that you need from the texts themselves?

4. Write Hope Savage’s lost poems.

5. What is Hope’s place in the beat cannon? What is the place of India? Why is expatriote life so important to the beats?

A repost of Zac’s first week collage picture

Diane di Priming

1. Write an anticonsumerist ecopoem, or poetics, or manifesto.

So you want to start a revolution?

see Letter 19 “If you want…”

Make sure that your poem is addressed to more than one person.

And perhaps use a chant format. See Revolutionary Letter 49.

2. Respond to one of Rob’s prompts: (below)

1)   Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters is an historically evolving “serial” work, as she adds new letters in response to new events and configurations of herself, the city, the country, the world.  Write your own version of a “revolutionary letter” in a poem or in a brief essay, working in some aspects of the contemporary situation you face.

2)   Discuss one of the Revolutionary Letters in which a woman’s point of view and values adds something different or new to the beat perspective on the world, and its beatitude quest.

3)   What other worlds, other cultures, other ways of connecting to an alternative to American dominant culture are enacted in The Revolutionary Letters?

4)   Discuss one of more of the “revolutionary letter” poems that can be connected to tactics of “revolutionary urbanism” or Guy Debord’s tactics of “detourning” and urban-space repurposing that Madeline Lane outlined.

More suggestions:

3. How would the “beat generation” have to be defined in order to include more women in the cannon?

Ex. Do women do bop prosody?

How does diPrima’s inclusion into the cannon change your views of what it means to be beat?

(Rob’s book actually offers a broad enough definition of ‘beat’ to make such a rethinking of the cannon possible, but often the cannon is limited to people who write in the same style AND attended some parties or readings…)

4. How do you interpret di Prima’s dedication to Dylan and her grandfather? Especially in light of the first poem, p. 5. Is it ironic, sarcastic, sincere? Is it an example of accepting everything that comes to you in the same way as Kerouac does?

5. Compare and contrast a poem by di Prima and one by Ginsberg or Kerouac.What techniques to they share? How do they differ?

6. Show us your psychogeography.

Ginsberg

1. Find a short phrase, like “angel headed hipsters” that describes your friends (or your generation) and use a “base word” like who to tie a lot of quick descriptions about them together. Describe, especially, all of the places that they’ve travelled, or places that they’ve gotten their ideas or products from. The idea is to get many individuals (including yourself) to blur into a single creature.

2. Kerouac uses metaphor to create his worlded collages. Ginsberg uses “base words,” “elipsesm” and repetition to link different places in the world at a more literal level. Compare these two techniques. Do they affect you differently? Do they give you different pictures of what worlding’s about?

3. Make a constellation of the forces of our times.

4. Feel free to combine some of these assignments or make up your own.

To consider for your future projects: two interesting modernizations of Howl:

and

(actually I think that you guys can do better than this second one if you will stick to very specific stories of people you know..)

Be-at-titudes/Be-attitudes

Suggested assignments for Rob’s book:

1. Add your own definition of beat compiled out of but differing from the ones that you’ve read. Especially interesting would be an explanation of what beatitude might look like in our own time.

2. Read two quotes and compare and contrast them to explain how they reflect on one another. (It’s often when you get into the differences that the discussion becomes interesting).

Ex. “Poetry can measure the force of a counter-image, a dialectical reversal of the neo-capitalizing everyday. [Ex.] The mutating urbanscape and rusting industrial infrastructure of America…[and the] counter-message of earth-care” — Rob Wilson p. 46

AND/VS.

“Dear Lorca…A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. The words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the body. No mummy-sheet of tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it.” –Jack Spicer, p. 37.

3. Bob Dylan says on p. 43. “The space between despondency and hope can be as large or small as we make it, depending on who we are.”  Would you describe the beats as a revolutionary or oppositional movement? If so, what exactly is their power made of? If not, why not.

4. As Bob Dylan says on p. 43. “Make your own Album”

Kerouakking

Suggested assignments:

1. Choose a short passage from your Kerouac readings and describe the world map that it suggests. (Feel free to use pictures and drawings). Is Kerouac mostly creating a world-collage out of products or words or religions or what?  Are the connections hierarchical or hybrid? How would you describe the relationships between/within worlds?

OR

2. Find a documentation of the “square” history of the times.  What worldview was Kerouac reacting against?

OR

3. Kerouac calls his writing “spontaneous prose” but what preparations go into making up that spontaneity?  What’s the relationship between spontaneity and his “scribbled notebooks?” How does his technique affect his use of collage?

OR

4. Why do you think that the beat writers place so much emphasis on music and listening? How does the ear as a collage mechanism differ from the eye (which we might say was emphasized by the surrealists)?

5. Make up your own darn assignment.