Capturing the Beat Moment

Capturing the Beat Moment
Author: Erik Mortenson
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2010-11-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0809386135

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Examining “the moment” as one of the primary motifs of Beat writing, Erik Mortenson offers the first book to investigate immediacy and its presence and importance in Beat writing. Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence places an expanded canon of Beat writers in an early postmodern context that highlights their importance in American poetics and provides an account of Beat practices that reveal how gender and race affect Beat politics of the moment. Mortenson argues that Beat writers focused on action, desire, and spontaneity to establish an authentic connection to the world around them and believed that “living in the moment” was the only way in which they might establish the kind of life that led to good writing. With this in mind, he explores the possibility that, far from being the antithesis of their times, the Beats actually were a product of them. Mortenson outlines the effects of gender and race on Beat writing in the postwar years, as well as the Beats’ attempts to break free of the constrictive notions of time and space prevalent during the 1950s. Mortenson discusses such topics as the importance of personal visionary experiences; the embodiment of sexuality and the moment of ecstasy in Beat writing; how the Beats used photographs to evoke the past; and the ways that Beat culture was designed to offer alternatives to existing political and social structures. Throughout the volume, Mortenson moves beyond the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs triumvirate commonly associated with Beat literature, discussing women—such as Diane di Prima, Janine Pommy Vega, and Joyce Johnson—and African American writers, including Bob Kaufman and Amiri Baraka. With the inclusion of these authors comes a richer understanding of the Beat writers’ value and influence in American literary history. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /--

Wild Girls

Wild Girls
Author: Erica Abeel
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-12-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 168003104X

Three college friends from the 50s blaze their own path in love and work, braving the stifling conventions of the age, and anticipating the social thaw that would arrive ten years later. These “wild girls” pay heavy penalties for living against the grain, but, over the years, rebound and re-set their course, drawing strength from their friendship. The novel follows them from an elite northeastern college, to Paris with Allen Ginsberg, to New York’s avant-garde scene in the early sixties, to a mansion in Newport, to the slopes of Zermatt, to Long Island’s Gold Coast, as it celebrates the nimbleness and vitality of women who defied an entire culture to forge their own journey. "It’s six A.M. in a Paris just coming awake and she's about to climb to the room of Allen Ginsberg. She pushes open the door of the Beat Hotel, its squawk denting the morning stillness. No sign of the concierge. Too early maybe? In the ancient, dank stairwell she’s driven back by odors -- from sinks on the landings doubling as pissoirs, “Turkish traps” on little rises off the steps, last night’s cooking cut with sweet ghosts of grass – all of it finished with a grandaddy note that might be rising from cisterns beneath Paris, maybe from the goddamn Romans. Breathing through her mouth, she cranes up at a nautilus of stairs spiraling to a skylight. Hard to imagine Puccini’s honey-throated Bohemians here."

Desolate Angel

Desolate Angel
Author: Dennis McNally
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2020-03-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0306875209

"A blockbuster of a biography . . . absolutely magnificent."--San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac--"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the '60s counterculture, groundbreaking author--was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism. Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend. In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression. Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and an artist set in an extraordinary social context. The metamorphosis of America from the Great Depression to the Kennedy administration is not merely the backdrop for Kerouac's life but is revealed to be an essential element of his art . . . for Kerouac was above all a witness to his exceptional times.

Seeing the Beat Generation

Seeing the Beat Generation
Author: Raj Chandarlapaty
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2019-05-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476675759

Beat generation writers dismantled mainstream America. They wrote under the influence of psychedelic drugs; they crossed and navigated multicultural boundaries and questioned the American dream; and they explored homosexuality, feminism and hyper-masculinity, redefining America's marital and familial codes. Teaching such a history can be daunting, but film adaptations of Beat literature have proven to engage students. This book looks closely at the film adaptations of works by such authors as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Carolyn Cassady, Amiri Baraka and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as they relate to American history and literary studies.

Catch Soccer's Beat

Catch Soccer's Beat
Author: Jake Maddox
Publisher: Stone Arch Books
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2020-08
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1515877612

Bianca is thrilled when her parents announce that her abuelo is coming to live with them. Bianca and Abuelo share a love of soccer, and she can't wait to share her love of drumming with her grandfather too. But when Abuelo arrives, he has his own ideas about how Bianca should practice and play. Those ideas translate into trouble on the field. Can Bianca find the beat in her feet before it costs her team the tournament?

The God Beat

The God Beat
Author: Costica Bradatan
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506465781

In the wake of the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks we, as an increasingly secular nation, were reminded that religion is, for good and bad, still significant in the modern world. Alongside this new awareness, religion reporters adopted the tools of so-called New Journalists, reporters of the 1960s and '70s like Truman Capote and Joan Didion who inserted themselves into the stories they covered while borrowing the narrative tool kit of fiction to avail themselves of a deeper truth. At the turn of the millennium, this personal, subjective, voice-driven New Religion Journalism was employed by young writers, willing to scrutinize questions of faith and doubt while taking God-talk seriously. Articles emerged from such journalists as Kelly Baker, Ann Neumann, Patrick Blanchfield, Jeff Kripal, and Meghan O'Gieblyn, characterized by their brash, innovative, daring, and stylistically sophisticated writing and an unprecedented willingness to detail their own interaction with faith (or their lack thereof). The God Beat brings together some of the finest and most representative samples of this emerging genre. By curating and presenting them as part of a meaningful trend, this compellingly edited collection helps us understand how we talk about God in public spaces--and why it matters--in a whole new way.

Beat Memories

Beat Memories
Author: Sarah Greenough
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"One of the most visionary writers of his generation, Ginsberg was also a photographer. From 1953 to 1963 he frequently had his camera close by when he was with friends in his apartment or traveling with them, ready to record 'certain moments in eternity, ' as he wrote. For years many of these photographs languished among Ginsberg's papers. When he finally recovered them in the 1980s, he reprinted them and added handwritten narrative inscriptions. Inspired by this early work, he began to photograph again, recording both long-time friends and new acquaintances. Some eighty of these photographs are collected and brilliantly reproduced in this book, which also features the first scholarly essay on Ginsberg's photographs, written by Sarah Greenough, addressing the relationship of his photographs to his poetry and to works by other photographers of the period. Ginsberg's photographs depict many of his contemporaries, including his closest friends and lovers, such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky. They capture days walking the streets of Manhattan, San Francisco, and Paris as well as grand tours of Africa and Asia."--Jacket flap.