the world's prettiest girls live in Des Moines IA

Roy R. Behrens, "Allen Ginsberg in Cedar Falls" in The Iowa Source, Vol 39 No. 3 (March 2022), pp. 13ff— 

In the 1960s, as a high school student in Iowa, I was an avid follower of MAD Magazine. I also subscribed to the Village Voice. Concerned about my waywardness, my mother arranged for me to meet with a religious elder for an advisory conversation. I was a youthful artist then, and during that meeting the subject turned to visual art. The sagacious elder said to me that, only that morning, he had read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that claimed that “Modern Art is a dung heap.”

Moments later, I was somewhat put at ease when he laughed goodnaturedly and said that it was his opinion that there was no reason for anyone to worry about me—I was simply going through a phase. Most likely, the source of my problem, he said, was that I was reading “too much MAD Magazine.” Out of politeness, I didn’t respond. But in my mind I wondered if the source of his problem was that he was reading “too much Wall Street Journal.”

I recall that a further concern at the time was my new-found interest in the Beat Generation and in writers referred to as “beatniks.” A few years earlier, a former football player from Lowell, Mass., named Jack Kerouac (one of whose high school classmates had been Ray Goulding of the hilarious Bob and Ray radio comedy team) had published a rambling, unorthodox novel called On the Road. Among my chief interests was literature, controversial or not. I had first read Kerouac’s book around 1962, including that now-famous passage in which he lamented having traveled through Iowa too quickly—“past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.”

When On the Road was first released in 1957, reactions from critics were radically mixed. As its notability spread, so did the fame of its author, who soon became referred to as the King of the Beats. His book was a pivotal influence on a generation of writers, musicians, and others, among them the Beatles, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison.… more>>>

abandon your cat at Clifford's Inn in London

Pandemic montages © Roy R. Behrens 2021

At Harvard, poet Frank O’Hara’s roommate was artist and author Edward Gorey.

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In Lowell MA, Beat Generation novelist Jack Kerouac (author of On the Road) was in the same high school class as Ray Gouding, of the hilarious radio comedy team, Bob and Ray.

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Samuel Butler: “People when they want to get rid of their cats, and do not like killing them, bring them to the garden of Clifford’s Inn [in London], drop them there, and go away. In spite of all that is said about cats being able to find their way so wonderfully, they seldom do find it, and once in Clifford’s Inn the cat generally remains there.”

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E.L. Doctorow: “I have few vices, but one of them is moderation.”

Jack Kerouac Meets Buffalo Bill

Edward Zane Carroll Judson, better known by his pseudonym Ned Buntline, was a 19th-century author of dime novels. It is he who is usually credited with establishing the legend of William F. Cody as Buffalo Bill. Buntline could write as many as six dime novels in a week. His writing method, as it turns out, seems to have anticipated that of Beat Generation novelist Jack Kerouac (a method called spontaneous prose, about which Truman Capote once said, "That's not writing, it's typing"), who is said to have typed his novel On the Road on one long role of paper, with no revisions. Here's how Buntline described his way of working, as quoted in Robert A. Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend (Edison NJ: Castle Books, 2000), p. 139—

I take a bound book of blank paper, set my title at the head of it, and begin to write about the fictitious character who is to be the hero of it. I push ahead as fast as I can write, never blotting out anything I have once written, and never making a correction or modification. If you will examine the leaves of my manuscript you will see that the pages are clean with no erasures—no interlineations. If a book does not suit me when I have finished it, or at any stage of its progress, I simply throw it in the fire and begin again, without any reference to the discarded text.

Brain Dead?

As reported by Sam Kashner in his Beat Generation memoir, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School (NY: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 43—

"I [Billy Burroughs] would ask him [his father, novelist William S. Burroughs] what he was thinking and he would tell me that he was trying to imagine what was going through Lincoln's brain when he was shot."

"A bullet?" I said.