Book review: Listening to the Beats with Naropa anthology

Clay Evans

The Daily Camera

Posted: 06/26/2009 03:34:00 AM MDT

Among those who know of the Beat Generation, its works, its personalities and its impact on American literature and culture, there seem to be a few basic camps.

First, there are those who virtually idolize the Beats, most notably the "biggies" -- Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, William S. Burroughs. Interestingly, the lionizers cannot be easily roped off by generation: Passion for the beats seems to crop up repeatedly, so that one is just as likely to find a 20-something fan as one 60 or older.

Then there are those who really couldn't care less, who see the Beats as oh-so-yesteryear, hardly more relevant than hippies.

And there are those who fall in the middle—I count myself as one—who recognize the influence of the Beat movement but don't accord rock-star status to its featured players.

"Beats at Naropa," a new compilation of interviews, "rap sessions" and panels taken from the extensive audio archives at Boulder's Naropa University, which played a key latter-day role in maintaining the Beat mystique, is a fascinating opportunity to eavesdrop for the curious and the besotted alike.

Not everything will appeal to the casual reader. Some pieces, such as "Reading, Writing and Teaching Kerouac in 1982" by Ann Charters, "Commonplace Discoveries" by Philip Whalen and "Basic Definitions" by Gary Snyder, are essentially lectures.

But it's an awful lot of fun watching Beat brains in action. The recorders were on, but the banter in "'Frightened Chrysanthemums': Poets' Colloquium" and the fascinating interview, "You Can't Win: An Interview with William Burroughs," reveal the personalities as cranky, odd, brilliant and fascinating.

The "Poets' Colloquium" records a freewheeling conversation at Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's Boulder home between Naropa's founder (who "was curious to meet and converse with the poets" ) and Beat giants Ginsberg, Burroughs, W.S. Merwin, Anne Waldman and several others.

From "astral travel" to meditation retreats to writing, they're all over the map—just as you'd expect in casual conversation. Burroughs, for example, reveals a certain skepticism of Trungpa's thoughts on meditation, and the rinpoche comes off as almost frustrated:

"BURROUGHS: But I would like to have a typewriter.

"TRUNGPA: Well, a typewriter becomes an out for us...

"GINSBERG: Yes, but he's also saying the typewriter, the use of typewriters, is his zafu, that's his yoga. Is that possible?

"TRUNGPA: It's possible, of course, but it's very deceptive.

"WHALEN: Or you could take the ribbon out."

The seemingly cantankerous Burroughs—the reader is free to apply emotion to the words on the page—is delightfully stubborn: "But suppose in retreat (the writer gets) an idea for a great novel?"

The conversation goes on for almost 30 pages, and it's anything but boring, magically revealing the personalities in the room.

The 1978 Burroughs interview is equally fascinating, and he comes off as both brilliant and somewhat humble. He is remarkably prescient, arguing against Dr. Timothy Leary's fantasies of sending all humanity off to live in space and firmly disputing the notion that there will be a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. He counters Waldman's assertion that "the planet will have to have some sort of world socialism ... to survive ultimately." And you have to love that he cops to not reading "much serious fiction," preferring the "science fiction, horror," that Waldman calls "grade-B pulp stuff."

Beat fans will eat up "Beats at Naropa," as will anyone who just feels nosy and wants to "sit down" with some of the characters and listen in. And who knows? Maybe the eavesdropping will be enough to inspire the curious to try out a few of the more academic pieces.