Thursday, June 05, 2008

Can't say I agree ...

... Speaking Up For the Fifties. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Rather a misnomer, since the piece blames the '50s - or least the Beats - for the excesses and failings of the '60s. But I lived through both periods. I remember when I was in high school and On the Road came out and guys who had never thought about poetry or any music other than what they heard on Bandstand were suddenly talking about cool jazz, Zen and even Whitman. OK, we were high school kids and what we had to say wasn't deep and was adolescent. But it wasn't phony. There was no talk of literature in the '60s or '70s - and I had a house that was a magnet for hippiedom and the parties to go with it. All the serious intellectual conversation came from people who had arrived at intellectual and artistic maturity in the '50s - who had hung in Philly's coffee houses and been the city's Beats. The author of this piece forgets that Kerouac lamented how his vision of America - and On the Road is just a continuation of Whitman's Open Road - had been completely misunderstood by the hippies. To defend the '50s you don't have to pit the squares against the hipsters. Their rivalry, such as it was, provided a polar tension the '60s utterly lacked.

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