Still alive and kicking at age 93. Neal Cassady's Denver friend Al Hinkle lived to be 92, but he wasn't really a beatnik as he worked on the railroad most of his life but did go on that great cross country journey with Neal & Co in his '49 Hudson.
@@8176morgan I looked up what a 49 Hudson looked like and remembered a friend of mine was restoring one of those back in the eighties. A Hudson Hornet. What an iconic vehicle for Neal and Jack and the crew to travel America in. Found a vid on this server that was a guy sitting around a campfire telling the story of Neals last hours down in Mexico.
He never considered himself a Beat. Even in The Dharma Bums, the novel that exalted Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder in the book), Jack Kerouac depicts him as a singular character, disciplined and determined. At the famous Six Gallery reading Kerouac mentions how he stood out from the other poets, who seemed more more scholarly, literary and indoorsy. I guess some people consider him a wild man, but Gary actually seems to be a kind of button-down outdoorsman/poet. He's not the kind of person who would have ever burnt himself out early, as so many of the prominent Beats did. He had the self-discipline to undertake life at a Zen Monastery in Japan for the better part of a decade, and unlike most of the Beats he firmly set down roots and dug in at the home he built with his own hands in the Sierra Nevada foothills. If he can even be categorized, I would say Snyder actually belongs not with the Beats but with the few American writers who built their own homes in nature that informed their ideas about the environment, conservation, space, and time, like Thoreau and Robinson Jeffers (who Snyder admired).
@@24HeySay Thanks for that in depth analysis of who Gary Snyder was. Yeah I agree he wasn't really one of the Beats and was in his own category. He had skills and actually knew how to work and build his own home.
Possibly the greatest UA-cam video of all time
Poem starts at 2:28 sounds like a great life :)
Thanks.
Gary Snyder the sanest member of the Beats. The others all burned out and died young seeking the extreme .
funny considering how crazy he is in Dharma Bums. But looking back he does seem the healthiest lol, mentally and physically
Still alive and kicking at age 93. Neal Cassady's Denver friend Al Hinkle lived to be 92, but he wasn't really a beatnik as he worked on the railroad most of his life but did go on that great cross country journey with Neal & Co in his '49 Hudson.
@@8176morgan I looked up what a 49 Hudson looked like and remembered a friend of mine was restoring one of those back in the eighties. A Hudson Hornet. What an iconic vehicle for Neal and Jack and the crew to travel America in. Found a vid on this server that was a guy sitting around a campfire telling the story of Neals last hours down in Mexico.
He never considered himself a Beat. Even in The Dharma Bums, the novel that exalted Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder in the book), Jack Kerouac depicts him as a singular character, disciplined and determined. At the famous Six Gallery reading Kerouac mentions how he stood out from the other poets, who seemed more more scholarly, literary and indoorsy. I guess some people consider him a wild man, but Gary actually seems to be a kind of button-down outdoorsman/poet. He's not the kind of person who would have ever burnt himself out early, as so many of the prominent Beats did. He had the self-discipline to undertake life at a Zen Monastery in Japan for the better part of a decade, and unlike most of the Beats he firmly set down roots and dug in at the home he built with his own hands in the Sierra Nevada foothills. If he can even be categorized, I would say Snyder actually belongs not with the Beats but with the few American writers who built their own homes in nature that informed their ideas about the environment, conservation, space, and time, like Thoreau and Robinson Jeffers (who Snyder admired).
@@24HeySay Thanks for that in depth analysis of who Gary Snyder was. Yeah I agree he wasn't really one of the Beats and was in his own category. He had skills and actually knew how to work and build his own home.
When you get to the top of the mountain keep climbing!