Tuesday, November 25, 2003
this book is advancing on the radar:
| When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School: A Memoir by Sam
Kashner (HarperCollins, $25.95, ISBN 0-06-000566-1) |  |
description from PW DAILY
With characteristic modesty, writer Kashner opens his memoir with a
caveat to readers: this isn't an encyclopedic history of the Beat
Generation. Rather, it's his own story of how it felt to leave home
and learn to be a poet by hanging out with the great Beat poets,
albeit in their more gentled phase (past their road-tripping days, but
still full of "crazy wisdom"). It was 1976 when Kashner, a fresh
college dropout, decided to follow his dream and apply to the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a yet-to-be-accredited division
of the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo. As their first (and
for a while only) student, Kashner's assignments included finishing
and typing Allen Ginsberg's poems; preventing Gregory Corso from
scoring heroin; cleaning the home of their guru, Rinpoche; and
mediating between William Burroughs Sr. and Jr., not to mention
attending the odd lecture. Kashner undertook all this weirdness with
fretful earnestness--e.g., forever worrying that Ginsberg would
attempt to seduce him, that Corso would shoot up and he'd be branded a
failure, that the school wouldn't get accredited and his parents would
regret letting him go there, and that his lack of poetry expertise
would be discovered by his teachers. Were this just the saga of an
innocent in Beat bohemia, Kashner's chronicle would be merely amusing,
but his genuine love for his crazy-wise mentors makes this a curiously
affecting coming-of-age story.
