Beat Blues - Raskin, Jonah

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Résumé :
Part road novel and part reality-inspired fiction, BEAT BLUES: San Francisco, 1955 explores a time and a place when the American counterculture was born, southern racism was exposed, and the Cold War began to thaw with the publication of Ginsberg's Howl, Kerouac's On the Road, Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind, Bob Kaufman's Abomunist Manifesto and the magazine Beatitude. BEAT BLUES takes readers behind the scenes at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and into the enclaves of San Francisco where bohemians, artists and hipsters dig jazz greats and rub shoulders with Gregory Corso, Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir. A well-woven spy novel set in the seething, influential Beat Generation milieu of San Francisco, 1955. Raskin has done his research. When he has Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Shig Murao and Gregory Corso speak, the results are in the ballpark of reality. He's good at depicting the moiling lives of Beat era figures, such as the tragic Natalie Jackson, featured in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. The novel skillfully blends activities of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement into the liberation-loving Beat era. -Ed Sanders Rendezvous with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman, Neal Cassady and their near constant companion, Natalie Jackson, all of them on the border that divides anonymity from notoriety and madness from sanity. Beat Blues observes the Beat phenomena through the eyes of Norman de Haan, an ex-New Yorker and a veteran of World War II, who moves back and forth from North Beach to the Black neighborhood in the Fillmore District, where the Civil Rights movement reverberates and the characters mourn the murder of Emmett Till....

Biographie:
Jonah Raskin is the author of six poetry chapbooks published by Running Wolf Press, Jaxon's Press and the Alexander Book Company. The author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, he has written about the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. Regent Press published his literary and cultural study, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature, a sequel of sorts to The Mythology of Imperialism. An ex-New Yorker, Raskin lived and worked for 40 years in Sonoma County, taught literature and media at Sonoma State University and performed his poetry with jazz musicians, Steve Shain and Steve della Maggiora, in Santa Rosa, Graton, Healdsburg, Cotati, Petaluma and the town of Sonoma. For a decade, he worked at Don Emblen's Clam Shell Press, printing his own broadsides and working with artist, Bobette Barnes. Since 2021, he has made his home at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where he reads at Black Bird Books and Sealevel, both on Irving Street. He belongs to the Write If Your Dare writing group and co-edits the magazine, Caveat Lector. He has written about The City's poet laureates, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima and Tongo Eisen-Martin, and has published interviews with those Beat poets, Michael McClure, Joanna McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Sommaire:
Part road novel and part reality-inspired fiction, BEAT BLUES: San Francisco, 1955 explores a time and a place when the American counterculture was born, southern racism was exposed, and the Cold War began to thaw with the publication of Ginsberg's Howl, Kerouac's On the Road, Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind, Bob Kaufman's Abomunist Manifesto and the magazine Beatitude. BEAT BLUES takes readers behind the scenes at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and into the enclaves of San Francisco where bohemians, artists and hipsters dig jazz greats and rub shoulders with Gregory Corso, Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir. A well-woven spy novel set in the seething, influential Beat Generation milieu of San Francisco, 1955. Raskin has done his research. When he has Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Shig Murao and Gregory Corso speak, the results are in the ballpark of reality. He's good at depicting the moiling lives of Beat era figures, such as the tragic Natalie Jackson, featured in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. The novel skillfully blends activities of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement into the liberation-loving Beat era. -Ed Sanders Rendezvous with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman, Neal Cassady and their near constant companion, Natalie Jackson, all of them on the border that divides anonymity from notoriety and madness from sanity. Beat Blues observes the Beat phenomena through the eyes of Norman de Haan, an ex-New Yorker and a veteran of World War II, who moves back and forth from North Beach to the Black neighborhood in the Fillmore District, where the Civil Rights movement reverberates and the characters mourn the murder of Emmett Till....