Word: beatnik
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most of the poetry was previously published by City Lights Books and the rest made it to print through other publishers. Classics like "Howl" and "Kaddish" adorn the pages of this volume, adorned by Buddhist-inspired drawings, pictures of Ginsberg's Beatnik buddies and supplementary essays by literati honchos like William Carlos Williams. The most novel aspect of the book is its comprehensiveness--avid Ginberg fans can view the poet's life and work in a single volume...
...initial and most important volume went on sale last month. Collected Poems 1947-1980 (Harper & Row; $27.50) is arranged chronologically, covering the author's days as a Columbia College student, a West Coast beatnik, sexual experimenter, war protester, world traveler and Buddhist. Ginsberg's style harks back to the tradition of popular speech, jazz rhythms and strong imagery. The energy never flags, but the quality is wildly uneven. There are love poems that read like high parodies of rest-room scrawl. Howl, once effective as counterculture manifesto, is now an unconvincing historical oddity: "I saw the best minds...
...Some of his word gags not only time eggs but also lay them ("bumpersnickers," for the compendium of auto-born humor that he occasionally shares with readers; "LActress," for L.A. actress). But Caen comes up with more than his share of winners. He claims to have coined the word beatnik, and his elegies on the bygone charms of San Francisco are usually models of crisp journalistic prose. He has learned to take himself a little less seriously than he used to. Describing how he will cover the convention, he cracked, "I'll be going to a lot of parties...
DIED. Carolyn Jones, 50, sultry, sinuous actress who played the ghoulamorous Morticia on television's The Addams Family; of cancer; in Beverly Hills. A promising starlet whose supporting performance as a love-starved beatnik in The Bachelor Party (1957) was nominated for an Oscar, Jones left the movies in 1964 to star for two years in the TV sitcom based on Charles Addams' offbeat New Yorker cartoons...
With his cutting, analytical commentaries on the Vietnam war, the American presidency, the beatnik generation and the boxing match between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, Mailer helped usher in a new writing style, the New Journalism, in which the reporter becomes an active participant in the story. According to Willie Morris, an editor of Harper's in 1968, Mailer was "creating the language" by his new use of words, sentences, and obscenities...