When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School [Hardcover]

Sam Kashner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2004

As a restless kid on Long Island, Sam Kashner lapped up the beauty and madness of the Beats, living vicariously through the novels, poems, and stories of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Their words were revolutionary, and they turned their very lives into art. Kashner didn't want to just study the Beats, he wanted to be one of them. So when he heard that Ginsberg had founded an unconventional writing program in Boulder, Colorado, he convinced his parents that college could wait, and became the first certificate student of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In one motion, Kashner stepped out of a sheltered suburban life and plunged into the chaotic world of his idols. What he discovered was both everything and not at all what he expected. The Beats were facing their twilight years and feeling it in their joints and in their minds. Some of them, like Ginsberg and Burroughs, had achieved international fame, while others, like Gregory Corso, had not, and were coming to the realization that they might never receive the recognition they deserved. In his new role as student, secretary, and psychiatrist, Sam Kashner was caught up in the hilarity of the hijinks and the cross fire of old arguments, finding himself in hot tubs with Ginsberg and on field trips to the marijuana ranch cultivated by Burroughs and his ill-fated son, Billy. Out of this rich material Kashner brings us a funny, touching, and irreverent portrait of the Beats never before seen: one that explodes the myths surrounding these American icons, but one that is also deeply felt and full of admiration. After reading this book, you'll never look at the Beats in quite the same way again. "When I Was Cool is also a very personal journey of a young man coming of age on the Beat slope of Mount Parnassus ("the Lower East Side" of the Rockies), a kind of Holden Caulfield for the postmodern era.

Editorial Reviews

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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (February 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060005661
• ISBN-13: 978-0060005665
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #508,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beatniks in Hot Tubs, February 23, 2004

By 

Mimi Pond (Los Angeles, Ca USA) - See all my reviews

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

I vote this FUNNIEST BOOK OF 2004. Besides Kashner thrilling us with his fly-on-the-wall memories of hanging with the Beats, it's also a window into that screwy, throw-all-the-rules-out era known as the 1970's. There's a deadpan, screamingly hilarious observation of the young and naive Sam Kashner, a Candide of the Rockies, on every single page. Beyond the laughs are incisive observations about our most famous Beatniks, their neuroses, their addictions, and the price they've paid for fame. It's the perfect book for anyone who was once a tortured high school poet who thought life could be perfect, if only they could hang out with real Beatniks. Buy this book!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I almost wanted NOT to like it, April 28, 2005

By 

Issa (Detroit, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School (P.S.) (Paperback)

When I first heard of "When I Was Cool", I thought, Great, yet another person cashing in on the Beats. But I finally picked it up for some of the same reasons Kashner went to Naropa -- I'm still interested in the Beats, if (like Kashner) no longer quite entranced.

"When I Was Cool" is funny, full of heart and candor and (somehow) not at all pretentious (no one who admits Corso scared him enough in a backwoods cabin to make him cry and run fleeing back down to Boulder could be too concerned with trying to make himself look good -- not even ironically).

Other reviewers have complained among other things about "obscure literary references." There are none. The closest we come is when Kashner himself admits to dropping one to impress Burroughs and Ginsberg -- and the point of his story seemed to have been precisely how sort of pathetic it was that he'd do such a thing. Another reviewer, complaining of inaccuracies, wrote "*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", which is pretty much exactly what Kashner had written in the first place: ". . . 'People Who Died,' a necrology of all the friends Carroll had lost, SOME to heroin" (my emphasis) [pg. 138]. And to the reviewer who suspiciously wondered how Kashner could've possibly remembered whole conversations from so long ago: he was an aspiring writer living among his gods, which is to say you know he wrote EVERYTHING down.

One thing that Kashner did get wrong, however, was referring to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as "the leader of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism" (pg. 53). Trungpa wasn't the head of Kagyu, and it's kind of a big deal to say so.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cool? No. Warm-hearted? Yes., February 7, 2006

By 

Richard Wells (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School (P.S.) (Paperback)

There are a lot of things to like about Sam Kashner's coming-of-age memoir, "When I Was Cool." First: Mr. Kashner wasn't cool and probably knows it. Second: he doesn't go through detox or recovery. Halleluia! A memoir without a recovery center or AA meeting. Third: his affection for these old lions, of whom only Peter Orlovsky is still with us. Fourth: the look at their everyday lives, from hemorrhoids to the keystone cops comedy of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Fifth: Mr. Kashner's long suffering, very cool, and funny parents. And Sixth: Mr. Kashner's teenaged, wide-eyed, intimidated, growing-up self.

Its not the last book that will be written about Naropa or any of the characters, but it's the only book written by the first (and for a long time only) student of the Kerouac school, and is sometimes lovely, often funny, and very easy - it's "a report of an intimate nature," i.e., gossip.