Drug Use and Beat Writers

The essay draws on fictional and nonfiction accounts of Beat drug use, distinguishing between mind-expanding drugs, such as marijuana, or hallucinogens, such as LSD, and more addictive substances, such as opiates and amphetamines. The essay contextualizes Beat drug use in western literary traditions, while also encouraging course instructors to consider the gender, race, and class differences in drug use and the persistent racial and class stereotyping fuelling anti-drug rhetoric

Teaching Venice West, Lawrence Lipton, and California’s Literary Canon

The essay explores the bohemian community of Venice West, California, during its Beat heyday, focusing on the cultural understanding of that community based on Lawrence Lipton’s presentation of it in his book The Holy Barbarians. The essay highlights Venice West Beat writers including Stuart Perkoff, John Thomas, Bruce Boyd, and Eileen Aronson Ireland. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary Venice West poets writing as Beat legacy.

On the Road

Chapter One explores Robert Crumb’s discovery of Beat literature and the ways the emerging American counterculture became a primary influence on his own artistic and intellectual development. Crumb’s friend Marty Pahls was significant in turning Crumb on to the Beat writers. Crumb created portraits of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Crumb also became fascinated by Buddhism and Hinduism. The Beats’ spiritual quest reflected Crumb’s own desire to find alternatives to Western monotheistic religion. His character Mr. Natural bears several similarities to a Zen teacher, and Zen Buddhist themes will reappear throughout Crumb’s career, for example in his The Zen Teachings of Huang Po. The chapter concludes with a discussion of another author Crumb also greatly admired who is sometimes associated with the Beat movement, Charles Bukowski. Crumb contributed his drawings to several Bukowski books, bringing out themes of alienation which Crumb experienced frequently in his own life.

Charles Bukowski – America’s Poet of the South

One of the most expressive trends in American culture of the 1950s and 1960s, manifested by the treatment of travel as a motive of life in both the mental and creative spheres, can be confidently attributed to the Beat generation. Their consumption lifestyle, crazy undertakings, love and moral fights, in which they entered without any moderation, led them to living problems and, consequently, to being lost. This generation almost automatically brings to mind the portrait of young, vulnerable Americans, rebellious and lost, oppressed and radical, wanting freedom and falling into trouble. The myth of the Beat generation is one of the most distinct myths of American culture of the twentieth century. We know very little about Beat in Poland. Admittedly, there have been several studies concerning the literary output of Beat writers, but they do not fully reflect the complexity of the phenomenon and contexts in which they were shaped. We are constantly looking at them in terms of mythologized rebellion. Associated with beat, Charles Bukowski is the best example of a person whose work was inspired by his own experiences related to sex, alcohol, poverty and human weaknesses.

Genius and Genitality: William S. Burroughs Reading Wilhelm Reich

This article explores the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s theories and writings on the works and thinking of William S. Burroughs. Reich’s significance for Burroughs’ fiction is beyond doubt, as the appearance of Reich’s discoveries and inventions, such as orgones and orgone accumulators, in Burroughs’ major works demonstrates. Yet to date, no attempt has been made in academia to make all those references to Reich in Burroughs’ complete œuvre visible. In order to make the thinking of the Austrian-American psychoanalyst and scientist comprehensible for readers not familiar with Reich, the first section will provide a brief biographical outline. In the subsequent sections, the article will describe how Burroughs and other Beat writers discovered Reich, how and to what extent Burroughs incorporated Reich in his texts throughout his career and what opinions Burroughs expressed about Reich in interviews and letters. For the first time, with a summary as undertaken in this article and by documenting most of the references to Reich in Burroughs’ work, the importance of the former to the latter is revealed in a compact form.

Intertextuality in Diane di Prima’s Loba: Religious Discourse and Feminism

The last three decades have witnessed a significant increase in the academic interest in the Beat Generation. No longer seen as “know-nothing bohemians” (Podhoretz 1958), scholars have extended the scope of Beat studies, either by generating renewed interest in canonical authors, by expanding the understanding of what Beat means, or by broadening the aesthetic or theoretical lens through which we read Beat writers and poets. Among these, the transnational perspective on Beat writing has sparked careful re-examinations of Beat authors and their works that seek to recognize, among other things, the impact that transnational cultures and literatures have had on Beat writers. Diane di Prima’s long poem Loba (Di Prima 1998), a feminist epic the poet started writing in the early 1970s, draws on a vast array of transnational texts and influences. Most notoriously, di Prima works with mythological and religious texts to revise and challenge the representation of women throughout history. This paper explores di Prima’s particular use of world narratives in light of a feminist poetics and politics of revision. Through the example of “Eve” and the “Virgin Mary”, two of the many female characters whose textual representation is challenged in Loba, the first part of the paper considers di Prima’s use of gnostic and Christian discourses and their impact on her feminist politics of revision. The second part of the paper situates Loba in the specific context of Second-Wave feminism and the rise of Goddess Movement feminist groups. Drawing from the previous analysis, this part reevaluates di Prima’s collection in light of the essentialist debate that analyzes the texts arising from this tradition as naïve and apolitical.