poet who lived through the beat era in Paris. Sponsored by the French Institute and assisted by the British Council, this extravaganza promises to get cultural revellers tapping to the beat of 1997.

OPENING at 6.30pm on Friday at Carfax in Johannesburg is a photo exhibition on the Beat Hotel in Paris by British photographer Harold Chapman; a profile of the poet Sinclair Beiles by film-maker Anton Kotze; poetry readings directed by Clare Stopford; a lecture by Professor Donald Moerdijk from l'Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and a multimedia exhibition about a South African poet who lived through the beat era in Paris. There's also a beat party.

THE EXHIBITION WAS ORGANISED BY THIERRY VERGON

Introduction by Laurent Deveze
Cultural attaché at the French Embassy
Director of the French Institute of South Africa

Yeoville.
In a doll’s house surrounded by an orderly and refined garden lives one of the most active authors of the Beat Generation. Sinclair Beiles has forgotten nothing of the dream machine, of William Burroughs, neither of the Beat Hotel "rue Git-le-Couer", at the heart of the Quartier Latin, where Kerouac, Ginsberg, Chapman and many others met, loved and sometimes tore at each other. The Paris of Jean Franchette and of Two Cities, Johannesburg and Paris reunited in a powerful literary creation which was to change the somewhat too rectilinear course of writing. Cut-up writing, rough appositions and repeated juxtapositions of aphorisms, irreverant sententiae, all of that took place in this Parisian space, celebrated today.Far from obsolete linguistic quarrels in the identity of creation, American, British and South African authors met Sartre and Beauvoir and danced at night to the sounds of the "heart wrencher's" trumpet. Saint-Germain-des-Pres, Tangier, the venturers of a writing of revolt, all is there at home. At Carfax, Newtown, for a few days.
Sinclair Beiles

Acknowledgments : Martha Beiles, Sinclair Beiles, Howard Belling, Bob (SE Color), Luigi, Stocki, Rolf (Carfax), Harold Chapman,Galerie Weiler (Paris), Bruce Gatland (KeyPrint), Hotel du Vieux Paris (former Beat Hotel), Anton Kotze, Francois Lagarde (Gris Banal, editeur), Donald Moerdijk, QA Photos (UK),
SABC 3, Clare Stopford, Topham Picturepoint (UK), James de Villiers, Gidi Williams, Robert Whitehead.

Sinclair Beiles and the Beat Hotel
is an exhibition produced by
the British Council, Johannesburg,
PO Box 30637 - Braamfontein 2017.
Tel (011) 403 3316 - Fax (011) 339 7806
the French Institute of South Africa
PO Box 542 - Newtown 2113.
Tel (011) 836 0561 - Fax (011) 836 5850 - e-mail : ifas@iafrica.com

The Beat Hotel
The fifties were ending  and the sixties were coming on full of beatitude. William Burroughs remembers it as the No-Name Hotel. An old boarding house for flat broke workers progressively leaving the place as they left for the suburbs, giving way to artists and writers and Mrs Rachou, managing the house more like a mother than an owner, little by little, the most artistic core of Anglo-Saxon culture of the time formed.. Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Gysin...and the South African poet, Sinclair Beiles.
The Beat Generation.
This all happened at no. 9 rue Git-le-Couer.
Paris was at that time the capital of Anglo-Saxon Literature.
The exhibition takes place in a reconstituted Beat Hotel designed by James de Villiers.
 
9 rue Git-le-Coeur (right)

BEAT. Dead beat, beat-up, yet beatific: the cryptic name concentrates the triple thrust--drop out, cut out, cut up - of perhaps the most determined 20th Century attempt to re-found Western culture. It has a familiar ring today in South Africa.
Estranged from philistine post-World-War-II America and the exclusive ivory towers of its Culture, a group of young men sought a "new vision". They dropped out: out of university, society, the family, "the whole mess", and lived on the street, on the run, in jail, in asylums--and in a state of grace. But grace was not easy to achieve. One had to break out of patterns planted like iron bars in the mind: stale models of sameness and normality. Drugs helped to open alternative worlds. Sex had to be released from the suburban family. Language had to be "lifted" from the dumb flatness of the page. Cut out. Cut up.
NOW. The best time. A party. A movable feast, again. All that one had to do was to be present, live one's own life, "do one's thing". Poetry was personal experience, and vice versa. Everybody's experience. Parties are personal, but not private.
NOWHERE. They lived in interstices, like insects, resisting sanitizing sprays. Or on the road. These cracks and crannies in its fabric (Greyhound buses, stolen cars) they made into places of their own. Places that nobody who was anybody would want to go to: Tangiers, Mexico, 9 rue Git-le-Coeur. They had to get - nowhere. And their narrow nowheres became expansive utopias. They applied themselves to living the lives that they had saved. The cracks in the wasteland opened on to poetry. Sous les paves, la page.
D-I-Y. Transfiguration entailed conversion, both religious and technical. So that everyone could do it. Methods were needed--cut-ups; and machines--the dream-machine. To produce poetry. But poetry was not an end; it was a means--of producing poets. Not poets who purveyed beauty; nor poets who sought the truth, but poets who lived truly. People alive.
Cut/Break - Out/Up. Breaking out. Breaking out of society led to cutting out and cutting up cutting out. Language: to become poetry, it has simply to be pruned. The deadwood of formal links--logical, grammatical--and conventional "poetic" diction is cut away, leaving only the quick. Poetry is densification--digting. Removal of impersonal verbiage frees thepersonal voice. Into this matrix of living everyday language, "preserved" literary expressions can then be added.
cutting up. Cut-ups on the other hand free text from the constraints of linear reading, so that it can generate experience and not merely record it. Experience is multi-dimensional: as one reads a column in a newspaper, one is subliminally aware of other material: pictures, advertisements, adjacent columns, other pages, other people and things, the time, theweather, and so on ad infinitum. Focusing on any of these excludes the rest and yet maintains them all as a mute presence and pressure, structuring the meaning of the item which they frame. e.g. divide a page into four quarters; arrange them in a different order. This changes text from a train of thought into a weaving fleet of vehicles: a space in which thoughts fragment and recompose, overlapping and tearing, their ragged edges sometimes leaving irregular gaps of silence, as in a collage. This overall weave (or texture) can generate far more meaning than any of its strands.
breaking-up? These convergent discoveries were developed in divergent directions. Burroughs explored (in a highy personal way) the impersonal virtualities of text. Ginsberg personalised and universalised voice. Corso and Beiles redeveloped classical forms on the reformed basis.

Lecture on the Beat Generation
Donald Moerdijk

Donald Moerdijk left SA at early age to study at Strasbourg and Paris (under Ricoeur, Lefebvre), and has been teaching there ever since. He has preferred perishing to publishing, producing one controversial article (Education as Colonisation) and, under some duress, a book (Anti-Development), on Bantustan