Title: Guest Lecture Feb. 16, 2004
1Guest Lecture Feb. 16, 2004
- An On Off Beat
- Kerouacs Beat Etymologies
- Bent Sørensen
2An On Off BeatKerouacs Beat Etymologies
- Off-Beat
- On Off-Beat
- On Off Beat
- An On Off Beat
- On Again Off Again
- An On Again, Off Again Beat
3Philament
- The Off-Beat Issue
- Call for Papers
- Off the beaten track, ex-centric
- Walk the beat reporters, cops
- Beat off Repel, masturbate
- Off the beat, out of rhythm
4Abstract
- If one does a search in the MLA database for
off-beat as a title word, the number of hits is
limited to four different entries. This can mean
one of two things Either the notion of
off-beat is seriously under-theorized and
something needs urgently to be done about it or
else the notion of off-beat is completely
marginal to literary and cultural criticism and
should best remain so. This talk proceeds in the
belief that the former is closer to the truth and
that a venture off the beaten track is always
worthwhile, and not merely another exercise in
academic beating off. Let us therefore examine
the etymologies of beat and off-beat, and use
them for a discussion of Jack Kerouac and his
cultural politics and poetics.
5Kerouac and Beat
- Originator and namer of Beat Generation
- Beat Daddy of them All
- King of the Beats
- Beat Avatar
6Was Kerouac a cool Beat road-tripper, womanizer
and drinker of rot-gut wine?
7Or - was Kerouac the sensitive writer type,
intelligent, rugged, yet handsome?
8Or was Kerouac a Mama's Boy and a pussycat?
9The truth lies somewhere between
Kerouac was an On Again - Off Again Beat
10Etymologies Beat
- Beat strike repeatedly
- Root beatan (occurs in Beowulf)
- Past tense beat
- In Middle English beted
- Past participle beaten
- Occasionally beat (as in dead-beat)
11Off-Beat forms of beat
12On(e) beat forms of beat
- Infinitive To beat
- Imperative Beat (him)
- Present trense That beats it all
- Past tense I beat him
- Variant past participle Im beat
13Etymologies Off
- Pre-1100 One word for both Off and Of
- Post-1100 Gradually splits into
- Adverb off
- Preposition of
- Original spelling Offe
- This is of course an off-beat spelling
orthographically
14Off-Beat
- 1927 Unaccented beat in music
- 1938 Unusual, unconventional
15Jive Jazz
- 1928 Jive boasting talk (Louis Armstrong
Dont jive me) - 1918 Jazz empty talk (college slang)
- 1913 Jazz syncopated style of music
- 1909 Jazz name of a ragtime dance
- 1897 Ragtime Music with syncopation
- 1597 Syncopation shifting of accent in music
16Negative to positive connotations
- Syncopation Contraction Altered beat
- Jazz Boast Musical style
- Jive Boast Dance Style of talk
- Off-Beat Unaccented beat Cool hipster deviance
This movement in meaning is called Bricolage
17Beat defined
- More than the feeling of weariness, it implies
the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It
involves a sort of nakedness of mind. - You know, this is really a beat generation
- Man, Im beat
- The word beat originally meant poor, down and
out, deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in
subways but now means people who have a certain
new gesture, or attitude, which I can only
describe as a new more.
18Beat á la Spengler
- Beat is the Second Religiousness of Western
Civilization as prophesied by Spengler, and it
always takes place in late civilization stage
The 2nd Relig. is sublime, it takes place
during the coldhearted days of big city skepsis
but it is indifferent to that because it is a
reappearance of early springtime forms of the
culture and as such well-rooted
19Beat to Be-át
- I went one afternoon to the church of my
childhood and had a vision of what I must
have really meant with Beat the vision of
the word Beat as being to mean beatific I
knew it then
20Etymology of Beatific
- Beatifique
- Beatus
- Beare
- Bé át
- Beat pronounced with an off-beat becomes Bé át
(ific)
21Beat to Beatnik
- -nik
- Beat-nik
- Sputnik
- Nudnik
22Beat as vision
- People began to call themselves beatniks, beats,
jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was
called the avatar of all this - The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we
had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen
Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late
Forties, of a generation of crazy illuminated
hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America,
serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking
everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an
ugly graceful new way
23Hippie, Yippie A Bippie in the middle
- Im a bippie in the middle
- This is not a second-religiousness generation
but the very opposite, granted, maybe, yes, our
vision of the hitch-hiking Negro saint WAS but
that only lasted till 1949 or so the 1950s
began a new sinisterness in America, and now the
Soaring Sixties is just really a soaring
hysteria.
24Old School Catholicism
- Being a Catholic, I believe in order, tenderness
and piety.
25The A-political Blues
- Oh the beat generation was just a phrase I used
in the 1951 written manuscript of On the Road to
describe guys like Moriarty who run around the
country in cars looking for odd jobs,
girlfriends, kicks. It was thereafter picked up
by West Coast leftist groups and turned into
meaning like beat mutiny and beat
insurrection and all that nonsense they just
wanted some youth movement to grab onto for their
own political and social purposes. I had nothing
to do with any of that.
26The King abdicates
- Paradoxically, for a writer who made the open
American road his beat, he preferred to stay at
home with his beloved Memêre, and in the 1960s he
rarely went on the road even to lecture or give
readings - By the time of his death his beat had extended
to cover all of America and most of the world, as
youngsters used On the Road literally as a
roadmap for their search, but Kerouac himself had
long since abdicated as King of the Road as well
as King of the Beats.