{"id":1098,"date":"2008-11-16T12:02:26","date_gmt":"2008-11-16T19:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/11\/when-burroughs-and-kerouac-killed\/"},"modified":"2008-11-16T12:49:07","modified_gmt":"2008-11-16T19:49:07","slug":"when-burroughs-and-kerouac-killed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/11\/16\/when-burroughs-and-kerouac-killed\/","title":{"rendered":"When Burroughs And Kerouac Killed"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

When a Real-Life Killing Sent Two Future Beats in Search of Their Voices<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust<\/p>\n

William S. Burroughs, left, and Jack Kerouac in 1953.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/nyt_byline><\/span><\/p>\n

By\u00a0MICHIKO KAKUTANI<\/a><\/p>\n

The best thing about this collaboration between\u00a0Jack Kerouac<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0William S. Burroughs<\/a>\u00a0is its gruesomely comic title: \u201cAnd the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,\u201d a phrase the two writers said they once heard on a radio broadcast about a circus fire.<\/p>\n

The novel itself, a sort of murder mystery written in 1945 when the authors were unpublished and unknown, is a flimsy piece of work \u2014 repetitious, flat-footed and quite devoid of any of the distinctive gifts each writer would go on to develop on his own.<\/p>\n

The two authors take turns telling their story in alternating chapters. Kerouac, writing in the persona of Mike Ryko, tends to sound like ersatz Henry Miller without the sex or fake Hemingway without a war (\u201cThere was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark\u201d); his chapters possess none of the electric spontaneity of \u201cOn the Road,\u201d none of the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of his later work.<\/p>\n

Burroughs, writing as Will Dennison, serves up passages that feel more like imitation Cain or Spillane: semi-hardboiled prose with flashes of Burroughs\u2019s famous nihilism but none of the experimental discontinuities and jump-cuts of \u201cNaked Lunch.\u201d In fact, both writers lean toward a plodding, highly linear, blow-by-blow style here that reads like elaborate stage directions: they describe every tiny little thing their characters do, from pouring a drink to walking out of a room to climbing some stairs, from ordering eggs in a restaurant to sending them back for being underdone to eating the new ones delivered by the waitress.<\/p>\n

The plot of \u201cHippos\u201d stems from a much discussed real-life killing involving two men who were friends of both Burroughs and Kerouac. As James W. Grauerholz, Burroughs\u2019s literary executor, explains in an afterword: \u201cThe enmeshed relationship between Lucien Carr IV and David Eames Kammerer began in St. Louis, Mo., in 1936, when Lucien was 11 and Dave was 25. Eight years, five states, four prep schools and two colleges later, that connection was grown too intense, those emotions too feverish.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times When a Real-Life Killing Sent Two Future Beats in Search of Their Voices Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust William S. Burroughs, left, and Jack Kerouac in 1953. By\u00a0MICHIKO KAKUTANI The best thing about this collaboration between\u00a0Jack Kerouac\u00a0and\u00a0William S. Burroughs\u00a0is its gruesomely comic title: \u201cAnd the Hippos Were Boiled in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}