I can't wait to ride the BART. I've ridden it once before, years ago. I like the Beat Generation poets. They aren't my favorite, but I like them. I love that they were such a community, and I love that they inspired a new movement through art, together. Their values are certainly not mine, nor is their style... but in some way, I feel I can connect with them. I like how they rejected materialism and the status quo. I'm a big fan of the Romantics, so of course I like their influences in the group. And I can't deny the affect that they have had on spoken and written word today. I saw a group biography on them when I was at the Eliot Bay Bookstore last. I carried it around the whole store, and then put it back. If you know much about the Beat Generation, you'll understand how these thoughts are all connected. I think I'm going to bring a journal for my BART ride.... I also think I might buy that book and read it while I'm in San Francisco. :)

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes "AWWW!"
- Jack Kerouac

Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerely putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires.
- Neal Cassady

...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...
- Jack Kerouac

They are not moral or religious heroes. They are not even literary heroes, to me. But they are undeniably, examples. They were obsessed with drugs, sex, and rebellion: the predecessors of hippies. They spent themselves up, "I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money," said William Burroughs. But they were men and women with a powerful word to speak, a community to ignite together, and the skill to mark it out, and redirect art and language. I'm interested in communities that did something.   Artists that became something, through an authentic community. You see it over and over in the history of art, music, literature. Groups that lit themselves on fire and changed it all. They spent themselves up and were consumed, and in the end, you find what lasts... or what doesn't. 

In the end, three things remain. So we needn't really fear when we ourselves consider being spent and burned up in marking life and culture.


Idealistic, romantic that I am? Yes... that may have been a tirade. But only if it never comes true.


Note Bene:  Please do not take this as a suggestion you start reading the work of the Beats.  I am not making that suggestion.