Word: beatland
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...Fantasy Records is preparing a disk of Ginsberg reading Ginsberg, including some passages too naughty to print. Jack Kerouac's soapless saga, The Subterraneans, is doing so well (over 40,000 sold, not counting paperbound reprints) that M-G-M advance agents are prowling San Francisco's Beatland for material for a film. Latest beatnik hit, published last month: a murky outpouring called Second April ("O man, thee is onion-constructed in hot gabardine"), by a scraggly bard named Bob Kaufman-2,500 copies already in print. Why the popularity? The beat blather certainly is not literature...
...going to see the thing through, complete with wiring diagrams and interviews with little green men. The case of the beatniks is similar; the unwashed T shirts are tangible enough, but is there anything new, socio-religio-artistically speaking, inside them? The author of this Baedeker to Beatland says, naturally, that there is. The barbarians, he reports, are within the gates of U.S. civilization, armed "not with the weapons of war but with the songs and ikons of peace...
Zane's novel is not particularly outstanding; but its deficiencies are less his than those of the movement and the life which he writes about. The paucity of thought and craftsmanship which mark the novels of Beatland (On The Road is the bible of this pagan country) betray the trivial superstructure which American beats have errected upon a set of basic and simple propositions about the society they reject and the values they seek to transcend. In short, the beat generation is a barren subject-matter, and the more one has to say about it, the more one becomes repetitious...
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