Word: prose
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...there are lots of parodies. (Satire used to seek its own form.) There is a parody on Jack Kerouac--one of the few prose works written in the past two years worse than Kerouac's own. And an allegory for modern children. And a lamentation on income taxes in the form of a Wasteland lampoon (shattering and scattering the newly mended dissociation with a series of rhyming couplets...
...fragments and mixed blood and coffee grounds for ink. By pooling their memories, they produced portions of Ovid, Catullus, Vergil, Shakespeare and Whitman in the original Latin and English, then translated them into Hungarian. In the end, the Vac prisoners produced a handwritten, hand-bound, four-volume anthology of prose and verse...
Little magazine post-war prose suffers the same division, except it's a gap between old and new. The old: the grand-children of Twain and illegitimate sons of Hemingway who have come to confuse the simple sentence with literature and the monosyllable with wisdom--the crude words and rugged realism of men's magazines and college sophomores. This species of literature is dying along with the subconscious-childhood reverie. The new: Jack Kerouac's bastardization of the picar-esque tradition, the hipster vocabulary, the mystic meaningless words attached to a generation, where motion is meaning and stasis is death...
...prose fails to redeem things. There is only one decent piece of fiction--"Mademoiselle Champignon", By Frederick Wakeman, a Harvard junior. Wakeman is sandwiched between two long short stories, the first a pallid Hemingway without irony, called "The Leedhes." It begins with twenty-one simple sentences, stumbles along under a clock of belabored symbolism, and never quite gets on its feet again. C. C. Abt returns in the other effort to tell a long tale inadequately...
...rest of the issue consists of J. A. Rose's turgid prose on electronic music and a three-part centerpiece portfolio of excellent line-drawings...