Guest Lecture Feb. 16, 2004

1
Guest Lecture Feb. 16, 2004

• An On Off Beat
• Kerouacs Beat Etymologies
• Bent Sørensen

2
An 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

3
Philament

• 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

4
Abstract

• 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.

5
Kerouac and Beat

• Originator and namer of Beat Generation
• Beat Daddy of them All
• King of the Beats
• Beat Avatar

6
Was Kerouac a cool Beat road-tripper, womanizer
and drinker of rot-gut wine?
7
Or - was Kerouac the sensitive writer type,
intelligent, rugged, yet handsome?
8
Or was Kerouac a Mama's Boy and a pussycat?
9
The truth lies somewhere between
Kerouac was an On Again - Off Again Beat
10
Etymologies 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)

11
Off-Beat forms of beat

• beatan
• beted
• beaten

12
On(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

13
Etymologies 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

14
Off-Beat

• 1927 Unaccented beat in music
• 1938 Unusual, unconventional

15
Jive 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

16
Negative 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
17
Beat 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.

18
Beat 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

19
Beat 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

20
Etymology of Beatific

• Beatifique
• Beatus
• Beare
• Bé át
• Beat pronounced with an off-beat becomes Bé át
  (ific)

21
Beat to Beatnik

• -nik
• Beat-nik
• Sputnik
• Nudnik

22
Beat 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

23
Hippie, 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.

24
Old School Catholicism

• Being a Catholic, I believe in order, tenderness
  and piety.

25
The 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.

26
The 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.