Beat This
Reading in today's Metro a quickie interview with Joyce Johnson, former lover of Jack Kerouac just after watching the last episode of Peter Ackroyd's BBC series on The Romantics got me to thinking, which was the wilder of these two most bohemian "scenes":- the Burroughs-Kerouac Beat Posse or the Byron-Shelley Romantic Massive?
Lets see, both sets had tonnes of drugs, oceans of booze, draconian official persecution and lashings of ginger bi-promiscuity. It's the novelties of each that may set one above the other, but even then they're pretty well-matched. One gang had pet bears and burning corpses on the beach, the other ill-judged shooting-bottles-off-heads contests. So hard to choose. There's only one way to sort it out. Fight!!
I love some work from both sets, but then I also love work from the least eventful and least envied literary scene of all:- 1850s Haworth, where the mad, bad and dangerous Bronte gals would sit and stare at moors all day. The profound, insightful motto in all this? It takes all sorts.
