Chapter Eleven’s “The Beats”, is a very interesting topic to bring into Writing About Cool and Rice had very pertinent and interesting points to make drawing from both Keroac and Burroughs contributions. There were a few ideas, however, that stood out significantly.
One of these was spontanous writing. Found in Kerouac’s, The Subterraneans, this method of writing occurs when the sentences run into eachother and the ideas switch without much transition. Rice determines that, “it gives the assumption that he wrote whatever came to his mind as quickly as possible and that the image of this type of writing may be more imortant that actually doing it”. According to the text, for the “Beats”, this style of writing reflected the speed at which technology was developing at the time.
Kerouac’s rhetoric of race was another notable topic in chapter eleven. Picked up in Kerouac’s indirect method of describing Leo and Mardou’s inter-racial relationship (The Subterraneans), Rice claims, “it provokes comments on race in complex ways”. Rice also believes “Kerouac’s rhetoric of race can be directly related to popular perceptions of racial identity. The types of words and cultural ideas he uses stimulates emotions”.
Nostaligia was another element Rice drew from and compared to modern technology. Picked up in Kerouac’s novel, Visions of Gerard, it treats nostalgia as a tool for organizing the narrative. Rice describes nostalgia as the activity of longing and believes it replaces the present with an idealized past. On page 110, Rice relates this to the Kerouac’s day in time by comparing it with the nostalgia of technology. Kerouac isolates various cultural markers from specific temporal moments that will encourage emotional response.
On page 112, Rice addresses Burrough’s invention of the “cut-up”. Rice’s definition says the cut-up “involves taking a piece of writing, cutting it into sections and rearranging the sections into new ways. Rice then links cut-ups to revealing unspoken ideas tht sometimes act as resistance to the text’s original meaning. He says the idea behind it is experimenting with language to produce alternative positions through association.
Bringing the cut-up into the comparison brought new perspective on the cut-up of today’s technology but in considering it, we also had to consider the element of juxtaposition. This was the next major point of the chapter. The book defined it as “placing items together, often including items that have little of nothing to do with one another”. Rice relates this to ‘cool’ writing by referring to Burrough’s practice of placing unlike text with unlike images. He then demonstrated its effects.
The last major topic of the chapter centered around the tape recording experiments. These are a reference taken from Burrough’s book, The Subliminal Kid. They are his example of juxtaposition. The kid remixes recordings of bars and cafes and ends up with what Rice calls, “a disorienting yet persuasive construction of new arguments about contemporary issues.”
Overall, chapter eleven was very effective at explaining Kerouac’s and Burroughs alternative forms of expresssion, as well as how these forms of expression reflected the function of technology at the time.
Chapter 12 was centered more on technology but particularly on the topic of “Skratching”. Skratching itself (on page 127) is defined as “the extension of a record’s rythms and beat by carefully moving the record back and forth and spinning it in short bursts. This idea came into play as we a looked at how to apply “technogically oriented commmunicating systems”. Rice states that “skratching has played a major role in rethinking how technology shapes expression and proposes that writing can take place in alternative venues”.
Rice eloquently paralleled skratching music with skratching our writing to create our own literary practice. It can be done with alphabets, words, language and ideas. He encourages us to cut off our past associations and typical assumptions in writing. Cuttting up the ideas ofour papers, projects and designs in the classroom is a practical way of applying this “cool” idea.
