If you have a Kindle, go
here and get yourself a copy of
Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation by Aram Saroyan, which hands down is the best thing ever written about this literary movement and its major figures.
If you don't have a Kindle, no problem, go
here and pick yourself up a good used print copy for less than a buck!
If you already have read it, buy one and give it to a friend. This is one of those brilliant books that somehow slipped through the cracks. Your friend will thank you, believe me.
This is a rare, first rate book. Read it. Own it. Give it to your friends.
In my novel, my protagonist reads this book and is profoundly influenced by it:
THERE WAS A book on the Kindle that was so engaging CJ couldn't stop reading, a book short enough to read in a few hours, Genesis Angels: the Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation by Aram Saroyan.
CJ had not read, or even heard of, Lew Welch before but in Saroyan's hands, writing a kind of prose poetry himself, the Beat poet came alive and wrestled with the world very much as CJ himself had been wrestling with it for most of his adult years. Welch's poem about Chicago brought CJ to tears:
I lived here nearly 5 years before I could/meet the middle western day with anything approaching/Dignity.
Here was a man striving to live in the world with dignity! Moreover, Welch had figured out how to do it:
You can't fix it. You can't make it go away. I don't know what you're going to do about it, But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just going to walk away from it. Maybe A small part of it will die if I'm not around feeding it anymore.
Thoreau had come into the world not to change it but to live in it, whether the world was good or bad. The charge was to make sure you acted morally. Welch had concluded that the only moral action left to him, the only way to live with dignity, was to leave Chicago, to walk away from it.
Maybe a small part of it would die if he were not around feeding it anymore.
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