Word: beatness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear of rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself. Lacking this, his Zen will be either 'beat' or 'square,' either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability...
...Fuss. The Beat Generation have Zen wrong. "Because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say 'To hell with it,' nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes." Square Zen is just as far off the true beam. It is "the Zen of established tradition in Japan, with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori." Though far better than "the common-or-garden squareness of the Rotary Club or the Presbyterian Church ... it is still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual...
Concludes Watts: "Having said that, I would like to say something for all Zen fussers, beat or square. Fuss is all right, too. If you are hung on Zen, there's no need to try to pretend that you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free country. In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;/ The flowering branches grow...
...idle hour, Jazz Columnist Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle staged a tongue-in-cheek interview with a fictional hipster named Shorty Pederstein. His old friend, he reported, had deserted the beard-and-sandal set of the Beat Generation, now boasted a Nob Hill address, clean shaves and tennis togs...
Said Shorty of the new Up-Beat Generation: "We eschew the verbal shorthand popularly supposed to be the language of this ingroup, and we reject the death-wish symbolism of the dark shirt and black stockings. The square has come full circle, so to speak. The hipster today is exactly what the tourist doesn't see. What he sees are the other-directed camp followers making themselves over in the image of an in-group they never knew...