Empty Phantoms – Interviews and Encounters With Jack Kerouac (Expanded & Revised)

Afterwards Rexroth, a middle-aged man in velvet jacket and string-tie who has the face of a bleached Eartha Kitt, added to Kerouac's definition: "Beats? Well, you could say we're like anonymous messengers from another planet just roaming around in the electric-razor age. One way I figure we can communicate with each other is through this poetry-jazz work-out. This isn't just a gimmick for the unwashed cats and

You know, meditate. You gotta live simply. Not consume. Everyone in America just consumes. My motto is: Love, suffer, work. I work in spurts -- prepare myself, then I really go, man. I put a roll of teleprinter paper in my typewriter and type 90 words a minute."

probably would not have had much to say to each other. I felt both very young and very old: young, in the sense that it seemed to me I found life less overwhelming than Kerouac did, and old because I knew I could not offer any simplicities comparable to his platform of raucous hedonism.

Alcohol, sadly, was the mechanism through which he overcame his introversion.

A -- The political apathy of the Beat Generation is in itself a "political" movement; i.e., will influence political decisions in the future and possibly transfer politics to their rightful aims, i.e., sense

The political apathy of the Beat Generation is in itself a "political" movement; i.e., will influence political decisions in the future and possibly transfer politics to their rightful aims

What I believe is that nothing is happening.
Q. What do you mean?
A. Well, you’re not sitting here. That’s what you think. Actually, we are great empty space. I could walk right through you . . . You know what I mean, we’re made out of atoms, electrons. We’re actually empty. We’re an empty vision . . . in one mind

The Beat Generation loves everything, man. We go around digging everything. Everything means something: Everything's a symbol. We're mystics. No question about it. Mystics."

"I guess I was the one who named us the 'Beat Generation'," he said. "This includes anyone from fifteen to fifty-five who digs everything, man. We're not Bohemians, remember. Beat means beatitude, not beat up. You feel this. You feel it in a beat -- in jazz -- real cool jazz or a good gutty rock number

I'm really a quiet fellow; shy. It's only when I come to New York that I got to start drinking and talking