Word: 60s
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...elegiac tone of Sontag’s retrospective is characteristic of most modern reflections on the 60s. By now, the decade has become the locus of an intense cultural nostalgia, a yearning to recapture the youthful enthusiasm that inspired such diverse movements as Beat and Psychedelic “Happenings,” New Wave cinema, and the political dissidence that exploded in May 1968. Part of this longing has to do with the sense of a missed moment: failing to generate a coherent intellectual program, the spontaneous activism of the American Left eventually dissolved into stagflation and Vietnam...
...zar’s novel “Hopscotch,” one of the most beautiful, complex portraits we have of the idealism and subsequent disillusionment of that decade. Cortázar—a literary heavyweight in Latin America, associated with the prolific Boom period of the 60s and 70s—wrote “Hopscotch” in 1963, after his move to France to escape dictator Juan Domingo Perón, and its Left Bank influences are clear. In stunningly tactile prose, the novel follows pseudo-autobiographical protagonist Horacio Oliveira, also an Argentinean expatriate, through...
...missing seems to be forgotten by everyone in the scenes that follow; similarly, La Maga’s absence doesn’t give rise to the conventional narrative arc. Oliveira half-heartedly looks for her, but his restlessness has much deeper roots. Like so much literature of the 60s, “Hopscotch” is—at its core—about a more metaphysical search. “It was about that time I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives...
...novel’—and leaves it far behind. In a way, these first lines do more to circumscribe the western genre than they do the boxing genre. Almost instantly, Gardener crystallizes the already-swelling malaise taking hold of the national consciousness in the decline of the 60s counterculture, mediated through the lens of its physical analogy: the American Frontier. It’s at this very moment, in 1969, when America is faced with the choice of acknowledging its limits, be they the shores of the Pacific, the streets of Chicago or the defoliated landscape of Vietnam...
...President Obama can’t be LBJ. For one, the new sheriff in town does not benefit from the widespread commitment to New Deal philosophy and economic prosperity of the ’60s...