Word: beatness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Crimson also beat Williams at Williamstown Saturday...
Even when he is not being bitten by foam-teeth, the hipster is a chronic manic-depressive ("Crazy, man!"; "Everything drags me now"). A kind of urban waif in the asphalt jungle, he regularly tastes despair, or what Kerouac calls "the pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man." Sometimes he "flips," i.e., goes mad. Allen Ginsberg, 32, the discount-house Whitman of the Beat Generation, begins his dithyrambic poem Howl (which the New York Times's Critic J. Donald Adams has suggested should be retitled Bleat) with the lines...
...good mind is hard to find among the Beats, but the leading theoreticians of hipdom are probably Jack Kerouac and Clellon (Go) Holmes. Each insists that the Beat Generation is on a mystic search for God. To be beat, argues Holmes in a recent Esquire, is to be "at the bottom of your personality looking up." Says Kerouac: "I want God to show me His face." This might be more convincing if Kerouac's novels did not play devil's advocate by preaching, in effect, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of kicks," e.g., drink, drugs, jazz and chicks...
Eager to Belong. The Angry Young Men are scarcely beat; yet British reserve merely muffles several striking similarities in theme and attitude. When Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) virtually dismisses politics as a "mug's game," any hipster would reply "Yes, man, yes!" When one of John Wain's characters in Hurry on Down tries to avoid introducing his parents to a friend because he is ashamed of their working-class manner and appearance, there is more than an echo of Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn. When Colin Wilson proclaims that the Outsider "is the one man who knows...
...only goal. But the self-revolving life is a bore, a kind of life-in-death that requires ever intenser stimulants to create even the illusion of feeling. Stepping up the tempo, "go, go, go" becomes the rhythm of madness and self-destruction. The future of the Beat Generation can be read in its past-the James Deans and Dylan Thomases and Charlie "Yardbird" Parkers-and the morbid speed with which its romantic heroes become its martyred legends...