THE BEAT GOES ON

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road changed American literature and the people who portend to make it.
Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs paid him homage.
When the Age suddenly laid hands on itself, Kerouac’s were the hands. The Beats, whom he later disowned, helped make Kerouac an American icon, only to see him succumb to a furious, dismal reactionary lament. His brother in arms, Neal Cassady, became court jester to Ken Kesey and died alone on a Mexican rail track in 1967. The Beats, having aged well, have finally gotten their fair share of the sad pie in the face of literary fame.
If Updike was right—“Fame is a mask that eats the face”—then Kerouac proved his case in titanium. His tortured life and the Zeitgeist he found and then lost have yet to be understood. All will be revealed, but it will take your full attention—and a poetic sensibility honed in the age of cyber sound bite.

OPEN UNIVERSITY OF THE LEFT
and
writer, critic and musician Warren Leming
present
“Tales of Beatnik Glory: Jack Kerouac’s
ON THE ROAD”
with respondent: Carl Davidson
Thursday, Sept. 23 7 PM
Acme Art Works 1741 N. Western
$5 donation requested