For my 1960 blog (no, not the 1960s - the year 1960) I've been reading dozens and dozens of newspaper articles and magazine pieces about "beatniks." By then the phenomenon was four or five years old, in the public consciousness, at least, and yet 1960 seems to be the year when it really hit Time and Newsweek and began to receive the usual scoffing afforded such trends in the New Yorker. Legit beat hangouts were invaded by journalists asking regulars and proprietors to make distinctions between real beatniks, part-time beatniks, tourist beatniks, and gawkers at beats who happened themselves to be bearded or carrying bongos for non-beat purposes. My most recent blog entry quotes from a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece that resulted from a visit to Cafe Figaro in the Village. Click here to see it.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
journalists follow beatnik invasion
For my 1960 blog (no, not the 1960s - the year 1960) I've been reading dozens and dozens of newspaper articles and magazine pieces about "beatniks." By then the phenomenon was four or five years old, in the public consciousness, at least, and yet 1960 seems to be the year when it really hit Time and Newsweek and began to receive the usual scoffing afforded such trends in the New Yorker. Legit beat hangouts were invaded by journalists asking regulars and proprietors to make distinctions between real beatniks, part-time beatniks, tourist beatniks, and gawkers at beats who happened themselves to be bearded or carrying bongos for non-beat purposes. My most recent blog entry quotes from a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece that resulted from a visit to Cafe Figaro in the Village. Click here to see it.
"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 
