Pull My Daisy.
The conference Kerouac 100 takes place tomorrow at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. It aims at celebrating the centenary of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), one of the greatest writers of the Beat Generation. The program is available here. I‘m presenting a paper with the title “Beat Film: Jack Kerouac’s Writing and Reading for the Screen in Pull My Daisy (1959)”, with the following abstract:
Directed by photographer Robert Frank, author of the book The Americans (1958), and painter Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy (1959) gathers some of the most important artists of the Beat Generation and their companions — poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, painters Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, musician David Amram, art dealer Richard Bellamy, actress Delphine Seyrig, dancer Sally Gross, and Pablo Frank, Robert’s son. Jack Kerouac wrote and read the text that we hear in this short film. This literary composition was, in fact, adapted from the third act of his play, Beat Generation or The New Amaraean Church. The film’s title comes from the poem “Pull My Daisy”, written by Ginsberg, Kerouac and Neal Cassady in the late 1940s. Part of this original poem was used as a lyric in Amram’s jazz composition that opens the film. My aim in this paper is to analyse these elements and the aesthetic qualities of this work, by focusing on the film’s improvisational tone as well as the autobiographical elements of Kerouac’s text, such as his Catholic spirituality.
