Glossary

The glossary begins with a few terms and will have more words and phrases as time goes on. And eventually some pictures.
- 2006 March 20 Monday

  • anthology - a "literary collection" - per Webster
  • antislam - a cultural movement or type of poetry activity that rejects poetry slams and their competitive nature.
  • art bum - someone who has stepped back from the traditional levels of career and consumerism to focus on creative life in the art world or any of its genres. These genres may include painting, photography, film, theater, literature or poetics. The art bum recognizes that the expense of a consumer lifestyle - buying needless new clothes, eating in restaurants excessively, etcetera - is an all-consuming and largely meaningless enslavement that tends to domineer over creative ability. The art bum therefore tries to minimize one's own consumer lifestyle and even art patronage as the central focus of life and life quality. Instead, the art bum creates art. Generally, the art bum either is, or long was, a "starving artist" who came to see membership in consumer-driven society as the ultimate proof of failure. The hardcore art bum is often a jobless or meagerly self employed or moonlighting worker whose greater time is spent toward art, to the detriment of any economic progress. Time-hardened art bums often develop a significant momentum only after decades of hardship. Art bums are not to be confused with that other category known as lazy bums. The typical art bum has an incessant and obsessively self-driven work ethic in the context of art. Some art bums even suffer physical or mental problems from lack of rest. Eventually, the works of an exquisite few victorious art bums are traded in upscale Manhattan art galleries where they attract wealthy patrons whose empty lives need to show visible symbolic attachment to hipness. Often, at this point, the art bum, must respectfully treat such patrons as valuable tricks but not become a whore to their visions outside of commissioned work done to a spec. Artists in all genres, inlcuding writers, are generally very possessive about their works and how they choose to create them. The art bum has often been a primary source of cutting edge material on the fringes of underground culture since time immemorial. Like pearls before swine, the works of most art bums are tossed into the trash by landlords upon death of the creator. Death brings glorious recognition to a few others here and there. Long live the art bum!
  • beat condition - The beats have defined a beat condition central to their core. The beat condition means to find one's own timeless inner identity as a result of being beaten down by the suffocating or endangering circumstances particular to outsiders of many description and perspective. It is commonplace for losers to pick up the pieces while hyping their own virtue. But the beat condition is different in degree and value. It typically has involved heroin addicts, criminals and outsiders who knew and witnessed epic struggles to survive. It has involved social outcasts of every type. These conditions may beat up the body and soul. But conditions alone do not make the beat condition. The beat condition is one where ego has been shattered many times and the subject has survivied by sheer determination, blessings and oneness with others of similar condition and aspirational value. Moreover, the subject will come through with his/her truthful identity and refuse conformity to those identities and values particular to social order that typically strips away the inner identity. Many of the political detainees and writer dissidents in gulags could be called authentic beats. It is important to note that the beat condition does not involve scavenging what is left of a bad life situation at the low rungs of life. But rather, every true veteran of the beat condition knows that the beaten condition is where all the glorious realities of civilized order are betrayed by truths having an illuminance of divine proportion. The beat condition and the beat experience are thus exquisite and precious. It is easy to suggest that the beat condition is available only to particular types of "insiders" who may have suffered drug addiction, imprisonment, sexual persecution, alcoholism or other seeming depravities. But many who suffer these things never touch the beat expereience in the slightest. Some people in the beaten experience simply digress to dehumanizing souls as a result of being dehumanized by others. Conversely, there are many invisible beat conditions suffered on rare occasions even by people of comfortable class circumstances. The beat condition may arise, for instance, in someone who came from a rich family but was subjected to a horrendous life of bad treatment because of mental illness or physical disfigurement, regardless that they may be creative geniuses. Or in my case, just poor and ugly. The beat condition does not prioritize selfish advancement of self recognition without dharma or social contribution often in the form of beat writing. But a small amount of ego can be a valuable aspect of beat identity so long as it remains humble to the deeper truth that all of humanity is in fact deeply vulnerable and naked at the level of the soul. This "nudity" if you will, is the reason that beats aspire to scrape up the deepest truths from the darkest experience. And true beats are egalitarian to every practical degree.
  • beat transcendalism - I coined this phrase to suggest that the classic beat condition (above), in the beat sense of the phrase, can be a grand bridge to a spiritual inner awakening. Hence the reason that many beats have associated with Bhuddists. The Randle P. McMurphy character played by Jack Nicholson in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest based on the novel by beat writer Ken Kesey, would be a human example of beat transcendalism. He did crazy things to challenge the suffocating establishment. His pranks and love for his peers brought joy to the parched lives of many drug-oppressed inmates in a dark and forlorn mental institution. In that sense, he unwittingly found his highest life purpose as a genuine archangel of a greater Light. And thus, the institution had to destroy his challenge to their control. The institutional response to McMurphy and other patients, especially by the likes of Nurse Ratched, would reveal the deeper truth as to the origins of mental illness in the first place. Life is full of merry pranksters who, by sheer rebel karma, defiantly redefine the common beaten condition as a window to the divine.
  • copyright -
  • cut-up technique - A method of writing that involves deliberate and oft random juxtaposition of words to create something nonetheless meaningful to an audience. Beyond that, I have little knowledge of how it originated. Writer William Burroughs was a practitioner of the method. Rock superstar David Bowie has long been known as a cut-up practioner, apparently inspired by Burroughs and any number of other influences. The cut-up method has a quite surrealist effect since it renders the intended orderly work of a writer into something far outside the writer's original direction. And presumably, it may even involve using somone else's material to create something new. I sense that the cut up method was evident in Burrough's book Naked Lunch. The book took many liberties with creative phraseology to an astounding effect. As a songwriter, I have juxtapozed so many odd phrases of my own for decades, that I began to care a lot less about formality in creating a clear message. But I was not specifically trying to use the cut-up method in most cases. We often write our best poems by allowing phrases to wander where they will and only then, subjecting them to polishing if any or delivering them raw. I think the cut up recognizes that we humans are buried in so much language that it all sounds like drivel anyway. And cut-up works, ala Naked Lunch, look so much more nudely arousing. But for a better definition, please cut this up and reassemble it. Or look up "cut-up technique" on Wikipedia.com.
  • gonzo journalism -
  • new journalism -
  • outsider art -
  • poetry slam -
  • prose -
  • refrain - a verse in a song that is recurrs regularly. - Webster
  • repertoire -
  • repertory -
  • surrealsm - a realm of mental awareness whereby ordinary random and oft incongruous thoughts are allowed to conspire, as they often do in many artistic minds, to suggest a more valuable vantage point to reality. Surrealism is dreamlike in the sense that it is largely experienced in a passive way before it results in the active distillation of something precious by creatively preserving an inspiration. Traditionally and by instinct and experience, the true surrealist writer, film maker or artist will usually feel an awareness that creative ideas are not born in the individual. But rather they are received in a most pure modality of inspiration from an ambiguous ethereal or divine source. The surrealist in this sense, hears the muse. This, of course, can get you a free ticket to the looney bin since shrinks tend to think that the universe has no intelligence. But the surrealist is more prone to find vast treasures of intelligent nuance where formal thinking has failed deplorably. True poetry, by and large, is often a hint of surrealism because it juxtaposes incongruities of language while delivering dreamlike thoughts. Surrealist literature and films tend to be characterized by the lack of a hard logical plot and may end without a clear conclusion or may simply not end. And so the dream lives on, even in the daytime. Dreams are potentially fantastic, and so are surrealist arts in every genre. Surrealism is indeed perpetually alive and vital, despite some views that it was a temporary movement born in Paris after World War One. For more information about surrealism and its history, I would suggest consulting the excellent reference found as Wikipedia.com.
  • verse -
  • writer's block -

© Vincent B. Rain

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