Beat Generation

"Heart Beat," a film about Beat Generation legends Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and the woman they both loved, is a meandering character study that lasted in movie theaters (in 1980) only a few weeks. But for anyone fascinated by these cultural revolutionaries and their high-flying lives, the film is an enjoyable piece of nostalgia; a kind of '50s version of "Easy Rider."

The story of the Beat Generation is often seen as a tale of two cities: The movement began in New York and blossomed in San Francisco. A UCLA Library exhibit sheds light on "a third, lesser-known hub" - Los Angeles, specifically the beachside bohemia of Venice. "The Beats were an influential part of our literary environment," says Susan D. Anderson, a library special collections curator who specializes in modern L.A. history. "We want to highlight their presence as well as the rich diversity of other nonmainstream writing [that was]

Thomas F. Parkinson, 71, a poet and authority on the Beat Generation. A retired professor of English at UC Berkeley, Parkinson was the author of "A Casebook on the Beat," analyzing San Francisco's North Beach poets. He also wrote two books of criticism on the more traditional poet William Butler Yeats. Parkinson had been injured in 1961 by a shotgun blast fired by a religious fanatic who said God told him to kill "Communist" professors. On Thursday in Berkeley of a heart attack.

Without Sterling Lord, there would be no Jack Kerouac - not Kerouac as we know him, anyway, the writer who introduced the Beat Generation. Lord was a former magazine editor and fledgling literary agent working in a basement apartment in New York when Kerouac walked in, handsome and scruffy, "On the Road" manuscript stuffed in his backpack. It took Lord four years and canny magazine placements to land Kerouac a book deal, but he persevered, even ignoring Kerouac's pleas to give up. "When I read the manuscript, I knew this was a very interesting voice and very interesting writer, and he should be heard," Lord says from his home in Manhattan.

Jack Micheline, 68, a Beat Generation poet who published more than 20 books of poetry. Born Harvey Martin Silver in New York City, he served in the Army Medical Corps and eventually settled in San Francisco where he befriended Beat icon Jack Kerouac. Micheline, who legally changed his name in 1963, wrote of poor workers, petty criminals, prostitutes, junkies and destitute artists, weaving poetry of street speech and ethnic dialects.

Jan Kerouac, novelist and only child of 1950s Beat Generation chronicler Jack Kerouac who met him only twice but fantasized about their becoming "drinking buddies," has died. She was 44. Kerouac, who had fought in recent years to reclaim her father's archives, died Wednesday in Albuquerque of kidney failure. She had been on dialysis for the last five years.

Stella Sampas Kerouac, widow of Beat Generation novelist Jack Kerouac, died over the weekend, the Boston Globe reported. She was 71 and died Saturday of unspecified causes at a hospital here. Born and raised in Lowell, also the birthplace of her husband, Mrs. Kerouac worked in a dress factory and held other jobs before her 1966 marriage to Kerouac, whose wanton life style came to symbolize the Beat Generation. Kerouac, best known for his book "On the Road," died in 1969.

Writer John Clellon Holmes, who coined the term "beat" to describe the literary and social rebels of the Beat Generation following World War II, has died of cancer, it was learned today. He was 62. Holmes wrote of the "beat" life style in "Go," his first novel in 1952.

Janet Forman's "The Beat Generation--An American Dream" (at the Nuart through Thursday) offers a comprehensive and engaging study of a small group of writers who had a far greater and lasting impact than they could have ever imagined. Not only does Forman talk to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who so often turn up in documentaries on their times, but also to many crucial yet less familiar individuals.

The defining moment of the Beat Generation came in 1956 when poet, publisher and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"--and was forced to defend himself in court against charges of obscenity. "Without Allen Ginsberg, there wouldn't be any Beat Generation," insists Ferlinghetti, dean of the surviving Beat poets, in "San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets," edited by David Meltzer (City Lights, $19.95, 379 pages). "He created it out of whole cloth."

From 1958 to 1966, the Venice West Cafe served as a gathering place for disciples of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the other pioneers of the Beat Generation who planted the seeds of L.A.'s counterculture movement. Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for the Doors, recalls the spot as a hangout for post-beatnik intellectuals in dark turtlenecks and jeans, where he and bandmate Jim Morrison, under the influence of LSD, drank espresso and ate croissants while reading Camus and Sartre. Although the style of the building on Dudley Avenue near Ocean Front Walk is listed as "commercial vernacular" and nobody seems to know who designed it, the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission is expected to decide today whether to recommend that the site be designated as a city historic-cultural monument.

LOWELL, Mass. -- Manya Callahan, manager of the Barnes & Noble Downtown store, sees them all the time, young and old, looking for books by Lowell's most famous citizen. "They're usually wearing backpacks and they kind of have a sense of adventure about them," she says. "They walk inside, looking kind of nervous, then go up to me and ask if I have anything by Jack Kerouac."

All this was before--before Adler Alley had been rechristened Kerouac, before the Condor Club tossed its kitschy sign (complete with stripper Carol Doda's flashing red pasties) and long before anyone, anywhere, would have the temerity to open a "Beat Museum."

THE cautionary tale is one of the casualties of the 21st century -- along with telegrams, Playboy magazine and poise. Sex tapes are released, and the only time eyes blink are to swish away tears of scornful laughter. Lawsuits and settlements are the new bootstraps by which one aims to pull oneself up. When all is forgiven, when no one really cares anymore about things like shame and personal ruin -- after all, it didn't happen to you -- what place has such a story in the modern world?

Half a century ago, a young writer named Jack Hirschman wrote to Ernest Hemingway, seeking advice. He was stunned when perhaps the world's most famous author wrote back. "I can't help you, kid," Hemingway wrote. "You write better than I did when I was 19. But the hell of it is, you write like me. That is no sin. But you won't get anywhere with it." Hirschman took the advice, developing a working-class style of poetry that made him a vital, if lesser-known, voice of the Beat Generation.

IN 1950, a young writer from Lowell, Mass., published what he hoped would be an important American novel, a book that evoked the country at a critical cultural shift. His name, John Kerouac, the book, "The Town and the City." Despite largely polite, even generous reviews, Kerouac was weighed down by doubts. It wasn't the story, it was the telling -- which to his ear, lacked urgency.

Jan Kerouac only met her father twice. The last time, in 1967, she was an adolescent; he was an alcoholic. She was longing to live; he was waiting to die. "I wish I had known him better," said Kerouac, now 38. "He could spout all kinds of things on paper, but in person, he was non-communicative. He was drinking out of a bottle of whiskey when I saw him, and he showed me artwork on his wall. He didn't know what else to say."

Gregory Corso, a streetwise poet who was a central member of the Beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, died Wednesday in a hospital in suburban Minneapolis. He was 70 and had been suffering from prostate cancer. Corso, who had a disastrous childhood and discovered literature while incarcerated, saw poetry as an ethical act that could change society. The Beat movement that embraced him presaged the social and political unrest of the 1960s.

An auction of first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts and letters by Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski raised $225,000 in San Francisco to benefit a publisher left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans resident Edwin Blair, 69, said Thursday he reluctantly agreed to auction the items he had been collecting for 40 years as a way to help his friends, Gypsy Lou Webb and her husband, Jon, who published some of Bukowski's earliest works.

Fans of Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel "On the Road" will soon have the chance to see a portion of the original 120-foot manuscript that inspired a subculture of restless Beats. Thirty-six feet, a little less than one-third, of the yellowed scroll will be available for viewing at the San Francisco Public Library from Jan. 14 to March 19. The exhibit at the Jewett Gallery will also include books and pictures that detail Kerouac's life and the history of the Beat Generation.