Jack Kerouac: "the originator of blue-collar cool"

First. Follow-up to that last post:

Check this out. Look at the photo caption, and the second paragraph. That's the Civic vs. the 13er. Right there.

On a completely separate note, I was leafing through an old GQ from last year - GQ's 50 Most Stylish Men of the Last 50 Years, I believe it was. Lots of great pictures in that - so classy. I pulled two pages from it and stuck them on my bulletin board. The first was a series of photos of Cary Grant, arguably the most stylish of them all. The other featured a wonderful picture and bit on Paul Newman, praising the simplicity of his wardrobe choices, and on the other half, Jack Kerouac. This is what they said about him:

Flower power was all well and good, but Jack Kerouac often wondered aloud how the Beats could’ve given birth to such Technicolor bravura. Kerouac’s look was broken but unbowed—as he once said: “ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.” And yet his aesthetic is everywhere today: That Brooklyn hipster rocking overalls under his Carhartt jacket while reading Hart Crane? That kid in San Francisco sporting scuffed oxfords and a frayed collar, with Madame Bovary stuffed in his back pocket? They’re paying unwitting tribute to the man who exploded the 1950s world of straight-white pretensions, rejecting the notion that class was synonymous with value. An uneven artist perhaps, and a troubled one to be sure, but unequivocally a man: the originator of blue-collar cool.

Kerouac and his fellow Beats floated around the cusp of the G.I. Generation and the Silent Generation, by Strauss and Howe's definitions. Though technically a G.I., Kerouac belongs with Ginsberg and Cassidy in the Silent Generation of artists that came of age in the G.I.'s "get it done" world.

I love that description of Kerouac. It's so true. That description, in particular, reminds me of a particular turn of phrase in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Dick Diver is talking to Rosemary about a WWI trench and battlefield they are exploring.

'All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,' Dick mourned persistently. 'Isn't that true, Rosemary?'
'I don't know,' she answered with a grave face. 'You know everything.'

In my mind, that is what Kerouac did: he blew up the beautiful lovely safe world with a great gust of high explosive love--in the best way possible. He was only one of many to do so, but still. He coined the term "Beat" in reference to Neal Cassady, but people today remember him as the frontman of that generation.

Kerouac was utterly brilliant. Born to Canadian parents, he grew up speaking French, became fluent in English, and I believe was well versed in German as well. He spent his school years reading every American, British, French, German, Russian, and Sanskrit classic he could get his hands on, reading translations only of the latter two. He went to Columbia University on a football scholarship, only to break his leg during the first game his freshman year. He ended up dropping out, I think, and then came his first of two stints in the Navy. It was after that that he met Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the others. Cassidy was his real inspiration, though; Dean in On the Road (which, I'll admit, I haven't read) is fashioned after him. It was for him that Kerouac came up with his 30 Essentials for the Belief and Technique of Spontaneous Prose, which he employs in some of his later works. Even just his journals are amazing. He changed the way people thought about writing. The scope of his influence in general--I can't even begin to imagine how many people, how many artists of all kinds he and his work have affected over the years.

Kerouac's poetry drips with the sounds of jazz and blues, and his fascination with Buddhism comes out often. Much of his work is informed by his travels around the country, and all of it was essentially taboo when he was writing in the 1950s and '60s. That was a period when most post-war G.I.'s and Silents were trying to raise straight-laced Boomer babies. It was that era I mentioned in a previous post when men were trying to maintain their wartime masculinity yet succeed in the corporate world, and women were trying desperately hard to fit the model of the perfect, feminine wife. Sloan Wilson, Betty Friedan--they both wrote in opposition, but Kerouac and the Beats--they lived it. They rejected the values society chose for them, taking a darker, seedier route instead. Even though the lifestyle and culture they chose is not one I'd chose for myself, I can't help admire the way they did their own thing when conformity was a demand that, seemingly, most Americans surrendered to.

That's the other thing that's great about that GQ piece--at the end of each section, they include a style tip related to the person they wrote about. At the end of the Kerouac segment, they wrote:

Personal style isn't about buying the trendiest labels or most expensive suits. It's about establishing a look that's all yours and sticking with it.

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Now playing: She & Him - Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?