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I know you'll probably catch flak for not finishing On The Road, but I'll give you my support. I couldn't finish Dharma Bums. I'm not to into Western Buddhists, so it really wasn't my thing. ? ? ? ?
It really just bored the shit out of me. Seems like he was trying to convince himself that his story was worth telling. Maybe it was just his "spontaneous" style of writing. Like one long facebook post for lack of a better description.
I understand that the Beat era writers did a lot for defying traditional American values and battling censorship, but I think a lot of the books are pretty overrated.
the beats are interesting. so many come up thinking that their works, especially in poetics, are liberating through defying or redefining ideas of form and i suppose cultural acceptance. kerouac and ginsberg attended columbia. Olson attended Wesleyan. they emulated the form and ideas of the modernist era as exemplified by EzPound, Eliot, and really as she is being studied more, Mina Loy. Modernists were concerned with with redefining the world through eyes that had been subjected to the flash of WWI and the psychological upheaval presented by Freud and Nietzsche. Bring into the scope educated Harlem writers like Hughes with the Bukka White blues train back beat or McKay with Jamaican patois developing poetry in response to the lynchings, popular Jazz, blues recordings, shit, Birth of a Nation was the most popular film in the US until 1930 or so, and you've got something that has never before been attempted in the literary world- call it cohesion through reconstruction of the world. Shelley said "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
so following this modernity the Beats were just a natural response to the modernist era- look at the world, the US in particular during the early post modern era as a recent creation built of rubble. 25 monarchies had been overthrown during WWI, there's no way stability can come about, anywhere, in 40 year time frame. So of course the ideas of "Western Buddhism" are attractive- with the world a disastrous place, living through nothingness is the grand scheme. Nothingness, however, cannot be achieved without the right knowledge- understanding the rudiments of form, literature, history, and culture.
So to say that many of their books are overrated, you're probably right but should try to wrap around the idea that Beat works aren't weren't written for everybody. The idea of a rating of a piece of work comes about when a writer isn't trying to gain a particular audience and it is read as though it should be something... It's like attempting to define "nothingness."
Anyhow, if you're interested, Charles Olson wrote poetry and coined the term "Beats." there are some interesting collections of letters too.
I'm reading a collection of letters written by Pound while he was in an open air cage at the end of WWII on charges of treason called Letters of Captivity.
The Sun Also Rises is a good one by Hemingway.
If you're at all interested in Modern literature check out Stravinsky's Rites of Spring on Youtube. It's a strange play- when released such confusion was aroused in the audience that they erupted in fist fights and tore the theater apart.
Whoever was writing about Ulysses, Frank Delaney does a podcast breaking it down at
http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/
Topic: books to read (Read 507967 times)