You’ve absolutely mastered the art of the comment. Y ‘toy de ‘cuerdo con todo. I’ve never read, ni un sentance of Gary Soto. Sad but true.

Irasali,

Thanks. Just saying that alone is kind of you.

Mando,

Te prometo que voy a escribir acerca de Global Voices en español bien pronto. ¿Y como que me envias correos completos en inglés perfecto pero te da pena dejar un comentario en inglés acá?

Cindylu,

I love the bay area Filipino hip-hop scene. Last week Revaz and I were playing some pool with some hip-hop loving Filipinos sportin’ the Fubu gear and cornrows. And the best part was they each had a skinny red-head in Levi’s with them. I love Bay Area diversity. It’s really no wonder there’s so much, I mean “hella” Nor-Cal pride when they come down here. Even if you haven’t read any of the beat authors yourself, I’m sure that a lot of the music, a lot of the authors, and even a good deal of the movies you like have been very much influenced by their writings. I whole-heartedly recommend The Dharma Bums. I have a copy of it, which – if you ever come down and visit me and HP again – I’d be happy to loan you.

swervecurve,

When I was working at Esmeralda Bookstore in Del Mar, Michael McClure came in to do a reading. It was just a couple years after Ginsberg’s death and McClure was probably one of the best known living beat poets at the time. He was such a prick. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to kick him in the shins. Probably shoulda.

CJ,

I would guess that blog friends would happily put you up in San Diego, LA, and the Central Valley (at least). Come on over.

I’ve never read any of those authors you mentioned. I guess I just never had the interest, drank enough coffee, smoked enough cigarettes (or something else), and felt angsty enough.

By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever used dialectical in a sentence and still am not sure what it really means. Applause. Very well written.

oye, ya ponme un post en spañol…… si se ingles, pero mi ingles pocho chicano facil. no al ingles nativo super shido tuyo.

emc: diet 60′s. that’s a great way of putting it.

You’re right, every few years we pick our idols and we try to emulate them until someone else comes and replaces them. in music, it’s much easier to do than in literature because the lit culture and business is so closed and elusive. But the overall pattern is set. And you’re right, wouldn’t we just love that someone loved our writing so much that they tried to do as we do.

I picked up Kesey and Kerouac because they’re prime originators of what developed into New Journalism. An aspect and offshoot of one of my favorite forms of writing: creative non-ficiton. They mixed journalism, travel writing, and added those fiction elements to create something different. However, you’re right, you can always point back to who influenced them–as connections, degrees of separation, etc.

Last Wednesday, I went out for a few beers with my buddy, Joel and talked about the connections between musicians and why we like them. I brought you up and mentioned DMB and how people connected to them because as you said it was like sex, drugs and rockn’roll without the civil rights movement,etc. Our generation wanted to emulate an overbloated idea of the 60′s (Woodstock, beats, hippies,etc) without the hard stuff: Like Diet 60′s. We emulate, we mimic, it’s what we do since we were little mugres.

It’s interesting how you bring up your observations of your surroundings. How did these writers influence and alter those areas. You see people, “overweight has-beens,” those lifers, who remain in that menality. Very much like I laugh at the hipsters and artists I meet in Austin who cloak themselves in this fake-ass-I’m-a-starving-artist-I-suffer-and-I’m-in-pain mentality because they read Bukowski and the beats and want to be like them. To that I tell them: Why not learn from Bukowski’s upbrining which was such aesthetic distance that it was fake. The man held a job, was married and hardly did the things he wrote about but stole much of that material from others. I digress…but is it good what these writers did to those areas?

If I ever visited Southern California, I’d think more of writers like Gary Soto who grew up there and illustrated so much of it in his prose. How him and his brother, starving writer and painter, worked the fields in order to sustain themselves and some modest living. Or I’d think of Gilb’s acerbic take on that area and what he thinks of the beats. Gilb’s work has a lot of foundation on the beats but mirrors more of Raymond Carver while still being all his own.

Yet, we must recognize that the West is so rife with literary history it’s hard not to think otherwise.