“Kerouac Wore khakis” for charity, but Penguin’s in it for the money
In my Beat Generation this past fall, we spent a little time discussing the use of the Beats as ad spokesmen during their cultural resurgence in the 1990s, from the (in)famous Gap ads proclaiming “Kerouac wore khakis” (shown at left) to William S. Burroughs selling Nike running shoes (follow the link above for video), however today I encountered a new and novel approach to marketing the Beats today while getting lunch.
I’d forgotten to grab reading material on my way out the door, and begrudgingly decided to pop into the school bookstore to pick something up (or try to, anyway). Looking for their tiny sliver of a poetry section, I stumbled across this display, commemorating National Poetry Month:
Now, mind you, I’m feeling a little generationally disconnected, so I’m not exactly sure whether this is supposed to be passing off berets with the Penguin logo on them as an ironically corny accessory, or rather it’s genuinely trying to appropriate a little of the Beats’ cool detachment (or whether there’s much difference between the two). Apparently, you have to buy two Beat books from a display which included several ancillary Kerouac books, Junky, John Leland’s terrible-looking Why Kerouac Matters, a few Michael McClure books and Philip Whalen’s Overtime (one of the few worthwhile books in the bunch, and a collection I thought was long out of print, though they seemed to have four or five copies). It’s a strange way to try to push poetry over on an unsuspecting audience, particularly foregrounding novelists like Kerouac and Burroughs, not to mention gently mocking the authors and readers alike with a ridiculous enticement (seriously, is anyone going to wear this, outside of a Friday-night beer-pong game?).
Oddly enough, earlier in the day, I was chatting with my office-mate who was relating some difficulties in getting Ginsberg’s “Howl” across to his classes that morning. Perhaps if they had this beret, everything would click into place?
Of course, I wonder if you can trade up prizes as if you were at a carnival shooting gallery: would four books win you a pair of bongos? eight books earns you a nice heroin habit? twelve books a trip to Interzone?
