The Cool School: Writings from America's Hip Underground edited by Glenn O'Brien
Following the uneventful Kerouac biopic On the Road and Joyce Johnson’s weak critical biography The Voice Is All, a new anthology, The Cool School, offers a far more vital and inclusive representation of the Beats and others on the margins of literary society: beboppers, rockers, hippies, punks, standup comedians, and spoken-word and performance artists.
Walter Salles’s Kerouac biopic On the Road had an uneventful drive-by this year, along with Joyce Johnson’s The Voice Is All: the Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, a stab at critical biography by the author of several memoirs of the Beat writer, with whom she was romantically involved a half century ago. Lamenting these two weak offerings on the Kerouac aftermarket, Andrew O’Hagan opined recently how real life—not just Kerouac’s but seemingly everyone’s around him—has “spoiled the magic” of On the Road.” He spares neither the deadbeat dads and wife-pimping husbands of the Beat Generation (more