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When I Was Cool: My Life At The Jack Kerouac School [Hardcover]

Sam Kashner (Author)

3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Harper; New title edition (Jan 22 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060005661
ISBN-13: 978-0060005665
Product Dimensions: 23.7 x 15.9 x 2.8 cm
Shipping Weight: 581 g

Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,118,204 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

With characteristic modesty, writer Kashner opens his memoir with a caveat to readers: this isn't an encyclopedic history of the beat generation. Rather, it's his own story of how it felt to leave home and learn to be a poet by hanging out with the great beat poets, albeit in their more gentled phase (past their road-tripping days, but still full of "crazy wisdom"). It was 1976 when Kashner, a fresh college dropout, decided to follow his dream and apply to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a yet-to-be-accredited division of the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo. As their first (and for a while only) student, Kashner's assignments included finishing and typing Allen Ginsberg's poems; preventing Gregory Corso from scoring heroin; cleaning the home of their guru, Rinpoche; and mediating between William Burroughs Sr. and Jr., not to mention attending the odd lecture. Kashner undertook all this weirdness with fretful earnestness-e.g., forever worrying that Ginsberg would attempt to seduce him, that Corso would shoot up and he'd be branded a failure, that the school wouldn't get accredited and his parents would regret letting him go there, and that his lack of poetry expertise would be discovered by his teachers. Were this just the saga of an innocent in beat bohemia, Kashner's chronicle would be merely amusing, but his genuine love for his crazy-wise mentors makes this a curiously affecting coming-of-age story. 8-page b&w photo insert not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Novelist and poet-at-heart Kashner has produced a kind of Almost Famous coming-of-age story both about the beginning of his life as a writer and about the end of the Beat generation of writers. As the first student in Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets, Kashner unwittingly walks into an environment of "crazy wisdom" (the extreme following of desires) as promulgated by Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (as if Ginsberg and the other Beat leftovers needed a reason to explore all things sensual). A young Jewish boy without much life experience, Kashner is the perfect witness, simultaneously in awe and aghast. This memoir retraces Kashner's awakening to the very human flaws within his mentors and himself. Kashner is no Beat apostle or name-dropping "I knew them when" so-and-so. Instead, he's an honest, sensitive, and funny storyteller, a perceptive observer who sheds light and shares discovery with his readers. His memoir is about enlightenment, the kind that comes from looking back with compassion but with eyes wide open. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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I wanted to be in the picture. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

9 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

3.3 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)

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2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but not necessarily accurate, July 18 2004

christopher (Kobe, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When I Was Cool: My Life At The Jack Kerouac School (Hardcover)

I have no way of knowing how much Sam Kashner remembers about what happened to him thirty yars ago. What I can say is that almost every statement he makes about music in this book is wrong:

*Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" isn't about his friends who died of heroin overdoses, it's about friends who died in a variety of ways.
*Graham Parker's record is called "Squeezing Out Sparks," not "Sparks Fly Upward." But Kashner couldn't have heard it when he says he did because it wasn't released until 1979.
*If we're to believe the chronology in the book, Kashner's girlfriend has a poster of Johnny Rotten in her house in 1976 and the Go-Gos came to Boulder in early 1977. The fact is, very few Americans would have known who Johnny Rotten was at the time, since the Sex Pistols didn't put out their first single in the U.K. until November of that year. And the Go-Gos, of course, hadn't even been formed yet.
*The band that Kashner remembers as Loud Fast Rules was surely the New York punk-pop band, the Stimulators, whose first single was a song called "Loud Fast Rules" and who were friendly with Ginsberg, but they didn't exist in 1977 either.
*Ginsberg played live and recorded with the Clash in the early 80s, but the band didn't tour America until 1979. And Ginsberg never appeared in a Clash video called "Combat Rock" (or any other Clash video) because that was the name of an album not a song. He did appear on a song on that album, however.
*Ginsberg did record a new wave-inspired single called "Birdbrain," but again it wasn't released until 1981.

Yes, these are minor quibbles, but it only takes a few basic factual errors, which surely could have been checked by either the writer or his editor, to throw the accuracy of the whole book into doubt and to make the reader wonder how much of what Kashner says happened actually did.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Memoir About an Alternative Academy, July 11 2004

Charles J. Rector (Woodstock, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: When I Was Cool: My Life At The Jack Kerouac School (Hardcover)

When I Was Cool by Sam Kashner is one of the best books ever written about the so-called Beat poets, or as they were more commonly called, the beatniks. This is in large part due to the fact that he was in an ideal place to witness several of the leading writers in this movement do their thing for a prolonged period of time.

Kashner was the first ever, and for a time the one and only, student at the Jack Kerouac School for aspiring writers at Boulder, Colorado. This was an attempt at an alternative school that went unaccredited throughout its existence.

The Jack Kerouac School was both founded and lead by Allen Ginsberg. Among its alumni were such luminaries as William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Ann Waldman as well as Ginsberg himself.

Kashner kept copious notes and a diary in which he recorded the various goings on at the school. That being the case, When I Was Cool offers readers a portrait of a time and place and people that has since gone by the wayside. It is well worth the reading time of anyone with an interest in the 1970's scene.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Well Spoken, Jun 19 2004

Fun (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When I Was Cool: My Life At The Jack Kerouac School (Hardcover)

Sam Kashner is a writer of flawless virtue but noticible simplicity. He did an audacious deed by creating a book that helps merely a bit to understanding the complex beauty of the idols of our nation; the beats. Sam Kashner gave life to the literal meaning of America's swelled and drunken past that wove itself into a fine threaded combination of poetry and writing. He did a wonderful job and showed merciless compassion for the people that mattered most to him. The book is a true wonder and was made to be read to unravel some truth to the loved era of the beatnik generation.

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Most recent customer reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Not cool
I set out to read this book because I am very interested in the school itself, which I still maintain, but I was sorely disappointed with the book itself. Read more

Published on May 24 2004 by pasalice

3.0 out of 5 stars Boulder was Cool once !
Kashner writes with a humility that grows on the reader. The first half of the book was a sort of get acquainted period and the second half was frequently a gutbuster laugh. Read more

Published on May 21 2004 by Hamlin Endicott