23
March
2006
|
16:58 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Let it roll: A celebration of beat and blog literature; shoot-from-the-hip-one-take-journalism

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher


For a long while I've felt a strong connection between the culture of the Beat generation and the Blogging generation. Both celebrate a raw and passionate expression and a use of language that is both novel , and designed to snag your social sensibilities.


Both cultures have found themselves at the forefront of major changes in their societies. And both cultures have taken advantage of the momentary freedom in the controls that society's interests usually place on ideas and personal expression.


In October 1955 Allen Ginsberg performed his "Howl" poem for the first time in public, an event commemorated tonight (March 24) at the Beat Museum in North Beach, a recreation of the "6poets at 6 Gallery" performance.


The original performance was in a dilapidated storefront on Fillmore street in San Francisco. Yet this small event eventually led to a show trial on obscenity charges and propelled the small writers colony of New York and San Francisco writers, dubbed by SF columnist Herb Caen as the "Beatnicks" into media superstars.


This period of the late 1950s was a tumultuous one. The Beatnick writers were ahead of their time, they were developing their ideas and their works in the late 1940s and now their seed fell on fertile ground--the rest of society was ready.


These were mostly white middle and upper class kids but completely out of odds with the confined culture that limited expression in those times.


The long second world war had created an oppressive government propaganda machine that seemed necessary during the time of war--but it kept on going after the war finished. It quickly became the Cold War and ideas of any political kind were punished in show trials such as the McCarthy hearings.


The writers of the Beat generation were initially apolitical, amoral ,and hedonistic. It was all they had to rebel with. They couldn't rebel politically in those times--but they could rebel in the classic way youth has always rebelled: in the pursuit of intellectual juice, the joys of physical attraction, and the exploration of the edges of our mortal beings.


In the mid to late 1950s there was a thaw in the Cold war. It showed itself in the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and its brutal suppression brought with it a momentary lifting of the Cold War hostilities. It was as if the ruling powers on both the US and Russian sides felt guilty or realized their populations needed to let off some steam and there was something of a cultural renaissance.


This is exactly the time when my parents managed to leave Poland. This momentary and minute raising of the Iron Curtain meant that for the first time some Poles could take vacations abroad in Austria. My parents lined up for three days to get on a package trip to Vienna, Austria. None of the people on that trip of 60 some persons came back to Poland.


During the night my parents skipped out of Vienna, took a train to Salzburg and were housed in one of the refugee camps still in place from the war. Six months later I was born in Salzburg and six months later we were in London, where my grandfather was living.


This period of my parents escape and my birth was when the Beat Generation and their ideas hit fertile ground because in the US there was also a thawing of the oppressive culture of the 1940s to the mid-1950s. Despite being black-listed by McCarthysm or prosecuted for obscenity, here was a culture and an intelligentsia that felt able and confident to challenge the rules of the day--and win.


Today Blogging challenges the rules of today--is it journalism? Is it rubbish? Is it a new literature? It is all those things...it is all other things too. I used to think blogging might be a subset of literature, a cousin to journalism. Now, I sometimes wonder if it is a superset of all other forms of writing because all other forms of writing can fit into its format.


We are entering another period of big changes, just as in in the mid-to late 1950s and blogging is the most revolutionary and most exciting literate art form to emerge since the Beat generation, imho.

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Written in one take :-) Try it . Just put this Technorati Tag in your post:

and it'll be easier to cross-link.

Please also see: The Beats: Celebrating the obscenity of literature




The Beat Museum

1345 Grant, San Francisco

Please also see SVW: The new and old Beatnicks celebrate Neal Cassady's birthday


The Beat Generation influence on blogging


Please also see Evelyn Rodriguez:


How Bloggers Ate the World


Salons, Primal Howl and Satisfying Yourself First