Am Anfang war der Schlag

In the beginning there was Beat. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Here were writers who took the same words everyone else had at the time and used them in new ways, much like the bebop jazz players of the ’40s who had the same notes at their disposal on their saxophones and trumpets and pianos but played the music as if it was a different form altogether. The Beats wrote like those jazz guys played, and were about pushing the boundaries and not accepting the status quo. Kerouac defined the Beat generation as „a swinging group of new American men intent on joy“. / Sydney Morning Herald 18.10.03