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And the Beat Goes On . . .

MUDCAT FALLS -- Like the lone Japanese soldier who fights on to hold his island, not knowing that World War II ended decades earlier, local Beat poet, Alec Stipplefurter, emerged from his cave-like basement apartment in the Barleycorn district of downtown for the first time in over forty years.

"Ha, Ginsberg, take this," howled the elderly beatnik, who clutched a 1,542 page manuscript of his epic poem, Corpses and Cadillac Fins, the composition of which had consumed his every waking moment for the past four and a half decades, as he burst through the door of the River Lights Book Store for what was intended to be a triumphal reading of his latest tome. He was apparently unaware that Allen Ginsberg had died April 5, 1997, and that General Motors Cadillacs no longer feature oversized, non-aerodynamic rear fender fins.

Stipplefurter's rivalry with the modern American literary icon dates to 1955, when he was bumped from the line up at the infamous Six Gallery reading in favor of Ginsberg, who took the Beat literary scene by storm that evening with the debut reading of his monumental classic, Howl. The following year, while "on the road" with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, Stipplefurter was left behind in Mudcat Falls during a potty stop. The abandoned poet became a fixture at the River Lights Book Store poetry readings, absurdly claiming that he was Kerouac's inspiration for the character of Dean Moriarity instead of Cassidy. After a brief, tragically comic stint as an English professor at Mudcat Falls Community College, he withdrew from public life.

The changes in society since the senior citizen Subterranean literally went underground to write over four decades ago were apparently overwhelming. The cacophony of cell phone chatting soccer moms lapping up lattes and Oprah Book Club selections at what was once the veritable vortex of the Beat Movement in Mudcat Falls during the Fifties drove the shell shocked cultural refugee back out onto the street, either babbling incoherently or reciting lines from his latest opus -- the exact nature of his outbursts being indeterminable from eyewitness accounts.

Stipplefurter was last seen "slouching towards Barleycorn."


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