Thoughts on "Beat Generation" writers?

>>24522736 (OP)
They had merit and they still have some value.
Their main contribution to literature was freeing things up. The idea that you can hitch hike back and forth across America and that's valid material for a novel was new. The idea that being a junkie and writing about it was valid was new. Because of the beats we are able to write about anything, they dethroned the dusty old men of the academy.

>>24522761
>The idea that you can hitch hike back and forth across America and that's valid material for a novel was new.
eh I wouldn't say that

I like Kerouac but I thought On The Road a bit overrated, and it actually gave me the wish not to wander around but to get a nine to five job

>>24522736 (OP)
I've yet to read Burroughs or Orlovsky, and I don't like Ginsberg as a writer and a person.
Kerouac I feel extremely close to.

>>24522768
The little man from the draft board?

On the Road was deeply disappointing to me. I was expecting something like a more sprawling Cannery Row, but it felt very stilted and sparse.

>>24522761
>and writing about it was valid
what does that mean

>>24522736 (OP)
Ive said it before but Big Sur was his best up until the other fags join him and drag him back into their pseudo faggot lifestyle.
Tijean would seem to me more at peace if he was just a caricature living in the semi wildnerness to enjoy nature away from it all, both society and anti society, he certainly wouldnt have died that miserable death.

>>24522736 (OP)
I've read Naked Lunch and Dharma Bums and I found very little worth in either of them, mostly words strung together without much merit or ultimately hollow prose with just the husk of something more interesting, a growing pain towards postmodernism

>will I spend my time on 4chan defending On the Road again
No. Check the archives

>>24522736 (OP)
Kerouac's description of apple pie and ice cream as "nutritious and delicious" will never not be comically awful.

>>24523332
You said this exact thing yesterday and it wasn't funny then

>>24522736 (OP)
Kerouac and Burroughs are the only worthwhile Beat writers. Burroughs is in a league of his own, though, as a visionary above all else. Ginsberg has one good poem.
On The Road is a terrible and dull novel. The only part I liked is when they met up with Burroughs in New Orleans. I'd honestly recommend Desolation Angels instead which is just a better, more introspective, On The Road and still has Burroughs kino included.

>>24522761
20th century fags worshipping literal boomerslop thinking it’s new and original. There is nothing worth reading after the victorian era, it’s all free verse slop and modernism and post modernism

i think it was funny how Kerouac and Burroughs were right wing libertarian types but they ended up influencing leftoid hippies

if social media like twitter were around back then they probably would have been ignored or canceled

>>24523404
Burroughs particuarly. He was a race realist as well and wrote some pretty controversial things. Leftoids just laud him as one of their own because he wrote about fucking kids and doing drugs.
Kerouac disavowed the hippie movements as he grew older. He became more of a trad catholic and iirc he was ashamed at his part in popularising such leftist movements.

>>24523404
Burroughs was also a raging sexist and wrote in an essay about his resentment towards women as he saw them as authoritarian agents. Which is pretty based.

>>24523404
Both were degenerate deviants so it makes sense.

>>24522736 (OP)
The most overrated chapter in American literature. All of them but Burroughs (who's not really part of them) suck massively.

>>24523411
Kerouac always felt a bit like a fratboy on a roadtrip, especially when fucking with others.

>>24522736 (OP)
Reading On the Road on amphetamine was harmonious. Writers should be required by divine law to list what substances were used in the writing process in the acknowledgments.

>>24523421
Burroughs actively went out of his way to avoid being paired with the movement. He was more of a mentor to Kerouac and Ginsberg and during the heights of the Beat movement became the leading American counter-culture figures. Nothing Burroughs wrote is Beat-coded except for Junky which predates the Beat movement.
It annoys me how Bukowski is often grouped in with the Beats just because he wrote about getting drunk the same time as the movement was around.

>>24523425
Kerouac was a chad but even a chad like him was sodomized and orally fucked by a jew like Ginsberg. Sad!

>>24523429
Kinda fucked how ginsberg was just a gay predator.

>>24523434
I don't know how these guys felt comfortable around him. The guy was a massive pervert.

>>24523437
They probably just used him for his literary connections. They had to pay the troll toll though.

>>24523437
Apparently they were and he would force others to stay awake at night so they could do thought exercises together, even when they were too tired.
I think the druggie lifestyle just made them unsure of how to proceed.

>>24523445
Still, its rare to have chemically propelled bohemians spend their late nights for anything other than endless spiralling conversations that inevitably end in friction, these days. It would be oddly charming to have an ashkenazi homunculi to go on a bender with and meet sunrise the next day with fifty pages of something

>>24523454
I think you would just want to fall asleep, which they often did. He probably was a bore, and I cant blame them.

>>24523445
>thought exercises
do we know what kind of thought exercises?

Unrelated but has anyone seen the movie Kill Your Darlings? I got it on DVD and want to watch it but I'm sure it'll be RC Waldun-tier cringe. Harry Potter plays Ginsberg.

>>24523466
I think they would tell eachother honest truths all night long. Doesnt even need to be about the other, could also be "The sun goes down in the west". Stream of consciousness stuff. I think even Kerouac mentioned something like that but apparently he did it a lot with cowboy neal.

>>24523466
There is an account in On The Road of Neil Cassady and Ginsberg taking Benzedrine and spending the entire night sitting cross legged on Ginsberg's bed face to face and trying to break through some outer limit of verbal communication. I think I remember Kerouac writing that he worried that it would drive them insane.

>>24523461
I imagine he was the cognitive counterweight to Neil's physical mania and recklessness.

Redpill me on Neal Cassady.

>>24523480
I imagine he was just very attracted to him like every other woman at that time. Even his wife said it about Neal, that every woman wanted him and that he was very good if he was good and despicable if he was bad.

Think what people miss about Kerouac is that its actually very depressing. Love Dharma Bums, but I read it very differently at 30 then I did at 18. From about 18-25, it seems all super romantic--the freedom of escape, hitchhiking as a form of spiritual soul searching--but at 30 it's more you recognize Kerouac's soul searching as his lapsed Catholicism, and all of his flirtation with Buddhism were just him trying to find something that gave him the same spiritual drive as being catholic, and it's awfully sad when he kind of just finds his way back to his faith, having realized a faithless life didnt do much for him.

Burroughs is underrated as a great writer of warfare. He takes this idea of war and applies to everyday life, the human mind, and language itself. His stories are always about people being manipulated, controlled, or fighting back through esoteric psychic warfare. Very influenced by us propaganda, mk ultra, shit like that. The cut up method is interesting when read as a weapon to break people from control. Its deep engagement with writing as geurilla tactics, a method of sabotage and disruption of ideological structures.

On a theoretical level, I think his work is best understood within the cold war context, where the real warfare is the struggle for control over human consciousness and perception.

>>24523486
A fag.

>>24523468
It's a great movie.

>>24523418
this, please leave right wing left wing behind

has anyone completed the doulouz legend, ive only read on the road and atop an underwood

>>24523404
This episode of firing line is great. Kerouac is hammered and has nothing but contempt for everyone on stage. I don’t particularly like what he wrote but I like his attitude here because he’s dishing it out to people that deserve it.

https://youtu.be/BYgv7ur8ipg?feature=shared

>>24523396
/thread

Kerouac seems like a solid guy but the entire movement is just watered down Henry Miller, who was already just Journey to the End of the Night era Céline but watered down and americanized.

>>24522736 (OP)
Their dads should have beat them harder lmao

soundcloud rappers for boomers

>>24522736 (OP)
doomed, rightly, to be utterly forgotten within a generation

>>24526232
>just one more generation bro I swear

>>24526073
truth nuke

naked lunch was one of my first "real" reads a couple years ago, but i don't think i'd like it much now. the prose is okay, the poetry is underwhelming at best

>>24526374
Nta but it seems to me a case could be made for their being a minor curiosity among zoomers after having been a pronounced curiosity among millennials after having been a notable substrata among gen x after having been a major cultural force among boomers.

>>24522736 (OP)
i like burroughs

>>24523404
Burroughs saw a lot of common ground with the left wingers on things like free expression, gay rights, anti-Vietnam, etc. Kerouac had a lot of carefree and eccentric ideas that allowed him to rub shoulders with many of the proto-hippy/newage groups, but became more conservative as he got older and more disillusioned with the beats.

They were beatn’ off

>>24523133
It means the CIA said it was okay.

>>24523157
If you like these parts of Big Sur, you will REALLY enjoy Vanity of Duluoz, Maggie Cassidy, and Visions of Gerard - in that order.

Vanity of Duluoz might be his best work. He disavows the pseudo faggotry, and writes about where his life went wrong.

>>24526073
>who was already just Journey to the End of the Night era Céline but watered down and americanized.
I don't understand this sentiment because Tropic of Cancer is nothing like Journey. You could comprare it to Celine later schizo works but Journey is actually a novel and framed as such. Tropic of Cancer is not, and reads like a surrealist manifesto more than an actual novel.

>>24522736 (OP)
Just about every single one of them was a massive piece of shit, among them were rapists, pedophiles, and those who pushed heroine on the future generations of artists who looked up on them. All this to ignore that they were massive retards.

If only for the sake of justice, I would prefer for their entire literary canon to be destroyed and forgotten.

>>24522761
woaaah you can wrote about travelling? so freeing, fuck those stodgy academics, this is the FUTURE and we do what we want!

>>24528725
>you can wrote about

>>24528898
>missing "that"
>hitch hike instead of hitchhike or hitch-hike
>, they
ESL ESL ESL!
aren't I cool? surely anons can see this passive-aggressive pedantry distuingishes me as part of the literati