I'm not sure of the source of this quote ...but very relevant....... 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, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization...
.and this local television piece from the early 60's in Newquay in Cornwall brings it closer to home:-
Jack Kerouac the 'Beat poet' (who supposedly coined the term..Beat Generation)
and more of him:- speaking French .. which I think gives a better insight into the origins and not a media connotation.
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This shows how his and the 'Beat Generation's' influence lives on ...with Johnny Depp reading Kerouac's 'Beat' poetry .....with style !
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