Lazy reading day. It was nice.

The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 (Repr of 1995 ed) by Steven Watson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is impeccably researched and packed to the gills with information. It's full of photographs and drawings; the margins of the pages contain quotes from the Beats' letters and conversations as well as quotes about them. They also contain a glossary of slang vocabulary from the time period. Contains several fascinating charts of the relationships among the major players and a multi-page timeline of Beat events and world events at the end.

I started rereading this because I'm trying to reread the collected Ginsberg (all one hundred and million pages of it) and got bogged down; I don't really like Ginsberg, so this is a purgative activity. Once I reread his poetry, then I can shuffle it off to elsewhere. LOL Anyway, this provides a great deal of important context for those poems, and I wish I'd read it first before even attempting to slog through the Ginsburg.

I have almost no patience for the Beats. I didn't like them when I first encountered them in the undergraduate course that required me to buy this book (and Ginsberg's collected poems and two books of Corso and a book about the women of the movement), and I don't like them now. I have no patience for the glorification of addiction and the insistence that narcotics and alcohol open some kind of conduit to Truth and Genius and Spirituality. I have zero patience with their inability to hold down jobs and their glorification of criminality. I loathe the way they treat the women in their lives, and I shudder to think how messed up their kids must have been to grow up in houses where people were always drunk and shooting up (I really feel for Burroughs's kids; the oldest, Julie, was 8-10 when he killed their mom accidentally; they were not present at the time which is a small mercy).

Yet there is something undeniably compelling about their writing and their lives, something in their yearning for something different that speaks to me. There is a power in the poetry that resonates despite my antipathy to a lot of their message.

I mostly don't like Ginsburg's poetry (although admittedly, I'm only about 200 pages into an almost 800 page collection), I like a fair amount of Corso's poetry, and I've never read the other major Beat writers (Kerouac, Burroughs).

Anyway, if you are at all interested in learning about the men (and this book focuses exclusively on the men with the exception of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs's wife, and a smidge about Carolyn Cassady) of the movement and the literary, political, and social context of the time period, this is a really good place to find what you're looking for.



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