SLSL Intro "Chicago School"

[jbor]

on 9/11/02 1:50 PM, barbara100 at jps.net at barbara100 at jps.net wrote:

> If he wants to express his "disillusionment"  with the student movement of
> the '60s, he has ample opportunity.

And the disillusionment is indeed amply expressed in his fiction.

> In the very next paragraph (bottom of
> page 9) he says, "On the negative side, however..." and then goes into how
> the movement was wasted on youth.

No, he says that both movements "placed too much emphasis on youth", which
is a different thing entirely, and which I'm sure you're perfectly well
aware of. It's pretty obviously a direct criticism. In fact, he segues from
the movements back into his early stories via what he describes as the
"puerility angle". He's actually using the term "puerile" to characterise
the sensibility of both the Beat/post-Beat and hippie generations.

But I do wonder why he notes that "Youth of course was wasted on me at the
time ... " He's not quite wallowing in it, but there's a definite note of
self-pity there at least.

best



> And he being "an unpolitical 50s student"
> he knows firsthand how much it was wasted.
> 
> If he's disillusioned by anything, it's failure of the movement to progress,
> the failure of radical students and blue-collar workers uniting,
> communicating.  Clearly he wanted them to communicate.  And if they had
> communicated, they would have succeeded.
> 
> The success of the "new left" later in the '60s was to be limited by the
> failure of college kids and blue-collar workers to get together politically.
> One reason was the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way
> of communication between the two groups."
> (SLSL, 6 -7)