Literature and Popular Music

To coincide with the readings, please view the following videos:
Son House "Death Letter Blues
M.J.Q.
Rev. James Cleveland "I Stood on the Banks"

To coincide with the readings, please view the following videos:

"Blue Monk"
Rolling Stones "Happy 1972"
Maya Angelou on the power of words

To coincide with the readings, please view the following videos:

"Greatful Dead "St. Stephen"
Neil Young "Don't Let it Bring You Down"
Rolling Stones "Time is On My Side"
Also, note the DeLillo novel assigned for Thursday's class and for next tuesday. You'll probably want to get a head start on Great Jones Street this weekend.

Please view the following two short videos for class on Thursday.
Bob Dylan And The Press 1966
Dylan Freestyle from No Direction Home

To go along with the readings please view the following Dylan videos:
"Like a Rolling Stone" 1966
"Like a Rolling Stone" Hard Rain Concert
Interview with Ed Bradley

Class and office hours are canceled (3/25) due to illness.

We will pick up on Thursday with Baraka's "The Screamers," 83-87 and "Dutchman" 363-372 and skip to Gwendolyn Brooks' Selected Poetry 296-301

With the reduced class time this week, we will unfortunately have to cut Brooks' Selected Poetry 287-295 from the syllabus.

In reference to our class discussion last week, Salinger's short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was adapted into the Hollywood film My Foolish Heart (1949). Salinger loathed film and subsequently refused permissions for any of his work to be adapted for the movies.
Here are a few films that "appropriate" his fiction:
Chasing Holden
Directing Rye
Igby Goes Down

Although we've moved on to Salinger, there are still a lot of upcoming Beat-related events of interest happening in conjunction with the HRC exhibit. Some of you may be interested in attending the following:

THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 7 P.M.
Ann Charters, biographer and bibliographer of Jack Kerouac, talks about her association with the novelist in “Celebrating On The Road” at the Harry Ransom Center.

Charters, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, discusses the changing reputation of Kerouac's On the Road since its publication in 1957—from its beginning as a best-selling novel that aroused controversy coast-to-coast in the United States to its present status honored as an American classic throughout the world.

This event is presented in conjunction with the Ransom Center’s current exhibition On the Road with the Beats, on display through August 3. The scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road will be on display March 7 through June 1.

Charters began collecting books by Beat writers in the early 1960s. She worked with Jack Kerouac in the compilation of his bibliography in 1966. She published Kerouac: A Biography in 1973, and she edited The Beat Reader, The Sixties Reader, two volumes of Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac, and the textbook The Story and Its Writer. 

To compliment this week's readings, please viewBurroughs' "Thanksgiving Prayer" and an excerpt from a BBC documentary on Burroughs

Also, for your amusement, humorous skit from Fry and Laurie which lampoons the bodily, drug-and-music-allusive modes of Beat poetry.

We will be looking at a number of Beat writers and poets in class this week.

To go along with the readings please view the following videos:
Ginsberg's "Howl"
Ginsberg "Father Death Blues"
Kerouac Beat Generation"

Also please print out and read the attached article John Clellon Holme's "This is the Beat Generation"