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Re: Otr lyric...

On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, Kelvin Bailey wrote:
> --- Dusty Volume <dustyvolume at yahoo_com> wrote:

> > I was accustomed to thinking that the beat poet lifestyle of that time
> > ran counter to the christian dogma, but hey, what do I know?
>
> Maybe that's the point.  'Jacks Valentine' was, after all, not written
> by Keroac, but by Linford.  Maybe it's kind of an attempt to reconcile
> the beat poet lifestyle with Christianity.  ("Dogma" is a very poor
> choice of words, by the way.)  If so, I would be SO interested in
> hearing about that.  I guess it's a question for Linford.

Hmmm, but wasn't Kerouac a Christian to begin with?  I have heard that the
word "beat" itself is derived from, or related to, "beatitude".

   http://www.topica.com/lists/dadl-ot/read/message.html?mid=2001118514

   Hipsters old and modern, like Vancouver's Ralph, riff on things
   spiritual

   Douglas Todd
   Vancouver Sun

   [ snip ]

   And though Jack Kerouac, author of the beat classic, On The Road,
   became an alcoholic, he remained inspired by both his French-Canadian
   Catholicism and Buddhism.

   What's more, the word beatnik, which is a play on the word, beat, has
   direct Christian connotations. It's linked to Jesus' beatitudes, the
   sermon on the mount, in which Jesus proclaimed the downtrodden, not the
   powerful, are the most beatified, the most blessed, of God. 

   In the late '40s and early '50s, Ralph says, Kerouac and others adopted
   the term, beat, to refer to people like themselves, who felt beaten
   down by life. But Kerouac soon expanded the meaning to suggest that
   beaten people, those oppressed by society, like Jesus on the cross, are
   the ones best situated to spiritually find themselves. 

   Ralph is pleased that a new book by John Lardas, which explores the
   almost-ignored religious vision of the beat generation, has just been
   released by the University of Illinois Press. It's titled The Bop
   Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. 

   The scholarly book recounts, for instance, how Kerouac grew angry when
   Mademoiselle magazine ran a cover photo of him and airbrushed out the
   crucifix that hung around his neck. He proclaimed: "I am not ashamed to
   wear the Crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I
   believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his
   only begotten son to it."

   [ snip ]

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
 "I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
      Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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