Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (Editors), �The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men�
After I wrote about Henry Miller in my review of Tropic of Capricorn my former communication professor wrote to protest, which ended up in the message center.
His major beef was that while I had the right to not like the book, I should take into consideration that Miller paved the way through his pushing the envelope of obscenity, which allowed other authors to write what they felt like without fear of recrimination.
I don�t necessarily agree with that. My rebuttal was that just because someone was first, it doesn�t make it any good. I�m pretty certain somebody would have got around to obsessing over their sexual escapades with the same result of censorship court cases. Whether or not it would have been any good remains to be seen.
I feel the same way about this book for the most part. This collection, featuring many of the heralded writers such as Kerouac, Kingsley Amis, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg was produced, as explained in the introduction, because they were some of the first of the �Beat Style.� A style that seems to consist, for the most part, of rambling meandering self-obsessed rubbish, and of course, these ramblings set hordes of other rambling, self-obsessed rambling imitators who now had the courage to try and publish themselves. Many succeeded.
Woe for us.
Not totally fair, I suppose, for not everything here follows the nonsensical Ginsberg �I do a lot of drugs and meditate� style of writing, or the Kerouac, �I drink a lot and deconstruct the rhythm of language, writing �dodedodee doo doo doo� for pages at a time.�
But some people really shouldn�t be encouraged, and romanticizing the era just because they were first does nothing but spawn hordes of imitators. Besides, doesn�t attaching a style or genre rob it of what made it unique in the first place?
