I love reading early beat journalism about the beat phenomenon. It seeks to make sentences Time can publish with yet just enough rhythmic lingo, idiomatic verve, and phrasal nihilism to certify itself as beat. Beat-written mainstream journalism is a real art, a subgenre that had to be mastered. Here are phrases pulled from an article by Clellon Holmes, then 26 years old, that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1952.
the wild boys of today are not lost
it is precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hot-rod driver meet
a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke
there is no desire to shatter the "square" society, only to elude it
the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable
their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces
A fuller excerpt is here in my 1950s site.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
