Beat Journals



1. Construct an alter ego, that is an alternate personality. What is the name of your alter ego? Describe your alter ego. Give one line of advice from your alter ego. Spend the rest of the page describing your alter ego. For example, You might give him or her a history.

2. Compose two lists. One list, the Johnson list, is the list of your three favorite people to be around. The other list, the shit list, is your three least favorite people to be around. Explain why each person is on each respective list. Please do not include me on either list, especially the second.

3. What one incident changed you the most? Let's avoid the obvious answer of being born.

4. One of Burrough's most consistent themes is that of small "utopias" based on consensus consciousness and similarity of interests. He holds up the "pirate utopias" of the seventeenth century as the model for potential communities that could oppose mass imposition of behavior and thought. Imagine that you are going to start a pirate utopia. Pick three laws or customs that your utopia would be in violation of. Where is the ideal location for your utopia? Who would your chief threat and enemy be? What would your main activity consist of? What type of people would you invite to join your utopia?

5. "What would you do if you lost it?" is a question Ginsberg asks in Mind Breaths. It is a direct quote from Ginsberg's meditation teacher Chogyam Trungpa. If we define ourselves by our material possessions as well as out mental constructs and beliefs, the question asks how these things affects us by their presence or absence. Pick four things, material or immaterial, to say goodbye to. These things can be things that you like or don't like. Explain the rationale behind each choice.

6. Draw a self-portrait of yourself on one page. On the next, spend one typed page examining and explaining your self-portrait.

7. Review Jack Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and follow his methods for "spontaneous composition" also known as "kickwriting" or "wild form." Basically, think of a person, or a feeling, or a situation, or whatever you want, and fix it in your head. Just concentrate on the "thing" for a minute or too like a dragster reving its engine before a race. Then, start writing. Write down whatever you are thinking as you are thinking it. Don't worry about capitalization. Don't worry about grammar with its "false colons" and "timid usually needless commas." Don't worry about punctuation. Kerouac says, use "the vigorous space dash" if you need punctuation. Type for one full page. Don't stop. Don't answer the phone. Don't answer the door. Don't scratch yourself. If you've run out of things to write about, keep writing about how you've run out of things to write about. Eventually, something will surface. You can always write about your surroundings or what you see or hear at the present moment. The only person reading this will be me, so don't worry about getting personal, or offensive, or silly in your writing; shut off the internal editor. Most people type faster than they write, so it makes sense to do this exercise on a computer. Also, I don't want to read your rushed, scribbled handwriting, so like all the journals type it.

8. Think back to a time when you stole something. It doesn't have to be a material object. Tell me the where/what/when/why of the theft. Do you still have it? Was it worth it? Who was with you?

9. Imagine that you are a bar of deodorant. What kind are you? Why? If you can't get a page out of this, then also describe what you see/hear/feel/taste/touch as a deodorant bar. Perhaps you're on a grocery shelf, or maybe you're crammed into someone's nasty gym bag.

10. Describe the most Beat person that you have ever met.

11. Describe the most square person that you have ever met. Again, don't put me in either question 10 or 11, especially 11.

12. This is your free space. You can do whatever you want except leave it blank. Be sure to fill up the whole page.

13-15. For this assignment, I want you to compose an original poem. Take a look back at Ginsberg's "Supermarket in California." Write your own version of the poem in which you run into a famous person in some location. Be funny, sad, or whatever you want. Do not write a piece of prose and then chop it up to look like a poem. I don't want poems that rhyme or that are slaves to lliteration--we went on our way with woe. If you poem starts off

You were my heart,
but you ripped me apart.
I thought our love would last forever,
but you never
even wanted it to start.

revise it. Besides being full of cliches, the rhyme is awful and the words are pushed into it. Boo!

If you poem does this:
So many sad songs we sang
as the rain rumbles and rolls down the rail.
Clever cats count and drive crazy cars,
as dogs drive for dime bags and doughnuts.

Make the alliteration more subtle. Remember, poetical "tricks" are like spaces: they should bring out the flavor but overuse will spoil it. Also, use original word choice but don't choose those "twenty-five cent" words just to show us all that you have a big vocabulary. For example, the stars shouldn't just "move through the sky." They should "streak through the sky" or "pace through the sky" or maybe even "saunter through the sky". If they "perambulate through the sky" or "circumnavigate the sky," then they may had made over a six-hundred on the SAT, but they have no business in this poem. Moreover, original and precise word choice demonstrates skillful use of language, not the mere use of "big" words. As always, obey the golden rule of writing: Show, don't tell. We'll share some, maybe all, of these in class. This might be more or less than a page. It's worth three points and completing a poem doesn't automatically guarantee that you will get the whole three points, so do the best job that you can.

or


Play a song on guitar and sing for at least three minutes. The song can be a cover or an original.