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what's that, kerouac?
apparently it's the 50th anniversary of on the road. maybe i should finally get around to reading it.
i have always felt ambivalent about the beats. even before i had much knowledge of feminism beyond a few bumper-sticker slogans, i found the beats a bit too misogynistic for my taste. i still feel that way. but i've read them anyway...and will continue to do so... i think it's kinda fucked to denounce something without reading it, and i never shelter myself from things i disagree with. hell, i sat through the entirety of dw griffith's birth of a nation, after seeing brief clips from it in a seminar a few years ago. i also think literary works (like the people who write them) are complex, multi-faceted, deeply layered, and at least potentially rewarding of my time and effort. (birth of a nation wasn't rewarding as a work of art...it was interesting as a historical artifact, though, even while deeply repellent.)
heh. i just mentioned this whole 50th anniversary thing to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
glaucon, and said that maybe it's time for me to read it. he said just one word: "sucks." i said, "well...he wrote it in 3 weeks." to which he replied, "it shows." yeah, probably. but i'll check it out anyway.
i have always felt ambivalent about the beats. even before i had much knowledge of feminism beyond a few bumper-sticker slogans, i found the beats a bit too misogynistic for my taste. i still feel that way. but i've read them anyway...and will continue to do so... i think it's kinda fucked to denounce something without reading it, and i never shelter myself from things i disagree with. hell, i sat through the entirety of dw griffith's birth of a nation, after seeing brief clips from it in a seminar a few years ago. i also think literary works (like the people who write them) are complex, multi-faceted, deeply layered, and at least potentially rewarding of my time and effort. (birth of a nation wasn't rewarding as a work of art...it was interesting as a historical artifact, though, even while deeply repellent.)
heh. i just mentioned this whole 50th anniversary thing to
glaucon, and said that maybe it's time for me to read it. he said just one word: "sucks." i said, "well...he wrote it in 3 weeks." to which he replied, "it shows." yeah, probably. but i'll check it out anyway.
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Those guys were my big literary mancrush replacement for Hemingway and F. Scott.
I probably screwed it up by lapping up too much biographical info on them, and this colors/kills any love I had. "When I Was Cool" by Sam Kashner did Ginsberg in for me. Shooting his own wife did Burroughs in for me.
If you haven't seen it before, there's a book called Women of the Beat Generation by Brenda Knight. Really only remember the Joyce Johnson and Elise Cowen parts. Poor Elise.
no subject
Didn't really care too much about the book, really. Admittedly, I'm not much of a reader... I think I was expecting to have my doors blown off because of its popularity.
*shrug*