Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats

The good thing about this book is that it's neither a thick boring pedantic tome, nor a fluffy coffeetable picture book. The photographs are personal and real like a family album with a great photographer in the house. And then there's the text which I liked because even though I'm pretty familiar with the subject matter, Tytell's one of those encyclopedic professor types that can retain all these different facts at once and then weave them in together. Like that Larry Rivers lived on West 21st, and would hear Bill Cannastra's parties on West 20th and go over, and that's where Rivers joined up with Jack and Allen for the first time - in the very apt. where Jack would soon write On The Road. There are all of these interesting little details sprinkled in with a friendly big picture take, coincidently framed by all the pictures Mellon took. There's Cherry Valley in the 70's, Boulder in 82, and NYC in the mid-to-late-90's that really gives you a great perspective on the gang growing up. Yeah - perspective - that's what this has - great perspective! Read on!

The Beats are usually regarded as a back-to-the-earth clan of literary geniuses, but somehow mystically detached from mainstream humanity. Most studies of the Beats treat them as a dying species, certainly on the endangered list, in the style of a distant scientific treatise. Because he knew them as friends, John Tytell has studied the Beats and written many intriguing books that attempt to capture their inner nature, as well as their literary impact. His latest work, "Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats," continues the tradition, but his style is even more congenial that in his previous books, probably because has seen many of his friends pass on, touching a sense of nostalgia. John wife, the noted photographer Mellon, has added delightful selections from her extensive photographic portfolio of the Beats. Her photographs are as intimate and revealing of the inner human nature of the Beats as John's words, and together they portray the Beats as an unusual fraternity who relish living outside the mainstream, but who at the end of the day have their own set of simple human emotions, feelings, and drives. After reading "Paradise Outlaws," I felt I knew the Beats just a little better as tender people, not towering icons. Mellon's photographs painted real faces on those often gentle people, yet intense through their work. Her photographs, along with John's humane words, left me with fond remembrances of new friends--real people, not lifeless participants in a museum diorama.

Beat scholar John Tytell first covered the Beats in 1976's seminal "Naked Angels," one of the first books to take the Beats seriously as a literary movement. Tytell's new book, "Paradise Outlaws," continues his vibrant work on Beat words and Beat life with a Beat lesson: it is life itself which gives literature its pulsating heart. The Beats took this as a credo and they confessed their lives, loves, sins, and visions throughout their work. "Paradise Outlaws" follows in this tradition by mixing Tytell's life with his book: part literary criticism, part memoir, this vitally important additon to our thinking about the Beats weighs their impact on American culture at the same time it describes Tytell's own interation with the Beats as Beat teacher, critic, and friend. "Paradise Outlaws" is also packed with stunning photos of the Beats by Mellon, whose loving camera eye catches the Beats in frozen time as Tytell's prose thaws them out. This is a book that will prove to change how we read and think about one of the most important literary movements America has ever had.

Paradise Outlaws is a personal memoir of the Beat Generation. Elissa Schappell, in the Sept. issue of Vanity Fair, said that the book is "the original Beat scholar's Roman candle of a memoir, dosed with anecdote, lit crit, and spectacular Mellon photos of Big Daddies such as Burroughs and Ginsberg. Go ahead, pull my daisy."

Paradise Outlaws is a great introduction for people who want to know about the Beats and their legacy. John Tytell, the original Beat critic writes a lively prose that captures the spontaneous spirit of his subject. Each of the forty-five brilliant photograph is accompanied by a warm first-hand anecdotal memory.