Beat and Beaten

[meikle at mail.utexas.edu]

Jody asks:

>The Beats! Why does it seem so long ago? Were they a cause or an effect?

Both, like most things.  I recall in about 1975 seeing a beatup psychedelic
dayglo out-of-state hippy VW bus with sleeping bags and gear tumbling out
the back door, parked on the main drag of my college town, with a battered
paperback of "On the Road" prominently displayed on the dashboard (cause).
But in Kerouac's first book "The Town and the City," the Ginsberg character
blames it all on a strange new miasma of radiation sickness seeping out
across the land (effect).  One could do worse than a surface description of
"beat" as part of a wider cultural movement emanating from Hiroshima and
leading to such (apparently) incongruous phenomena as Woodstock.  (That
passage near the end of "The Town and the City," by the way, describing a
wild conversation during a subway ride, is almost as powerful as Mailer's
"The White Negro" in suggesting just what 1945 (Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
opening of Nazi death camps) meant for postmodernity).

Jeff Meikle