Beat Generation

What's your opinion on the Beats?
You think they're up there with the rest of the greats (the best works by the Beats compared to the best of (modern) literature, I mean)?

I can't help but shake the feeling they were just Westerners taking some ideas from the East (and drugs), using those things as a crutch and a fuel to write, as opposed to having something insightful worth writing (apart from maybe the usual political sentiments of the left wing during that period), but I haven't read a lot of Beats to being with, so hey, that impression doesn't count for much.

>You think they're up there with the rest of the greats (the best works by the Beats compared to the best of (modern) literature, I mean)?
literally no one thinks that except the slobbering faggots who write books about them and gush over how bohemian and CRAZZZZZY they were like teenage girls

>I can't help but shake the feeling they were just Westerners taking some ideas from the East

No but they sure took a lot of ideas from the talmud considering how jewish, homosexual and degenerate they all were.

Early beat work has some interesting aspects to it, and it is clearly socially important, but much of it has dated very badly and to me it feels very much that these interesting aspects were an early promise that wasn't delivered on because the beatniks dissolved into their fame and their drugs and their social experimentation fueled by the hubris brought on by both of these things.

I think in the distant future they will be flattened out into maybe one or two books and otherwise forgotten like the early American naturalists. They will be eclipsed by their less outre cousins (people like Elizabeth Bishop) as well as their predecessors and successors.

I strongly suggest you read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test if you haven't, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas can also be read as a critique.

still not sure Burroughs counts as a Beat. he never advocated putting on tea shades and a beret and playing the bongos in a coffee shop while reciting free verse.

> that's not what being a Beat means!

you know it is, Maynard.

NAMBLA

Some of them had something like talent, all of them at least tried to do something new with the stilted and dying art forms left over from America's pre-WWII culture.

I think they are faggots but this is great

>Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas can also be read as a critique.
Fear and Loathing is a more direct critique of the Beats' intellectual descendants, but insofar as it's a critique of American counterculture in the second half of the 20th century it's probably the best non-academic work on the subject.

Stopped being edgy or interesting 50 years ago.

beats were the last peak of the desire for free spirit pattern. Society is exactly like weather or other chaotic dynamic systems, you have various states/regimes the system can take on in certain cultural regions. Free spirit is one of them, it combines with other patterns to form movements. You can see it in the hipster movement, except it's more corrupted with materialism. It's certainly come up before the beats as well. Note that it's always present to some extent, it's just not prominent compared to other forcings.

>Naked Lunch and Howl aren't still edgy

Not when we have Palahniuk and Veeky Forums, no.

Burroughs was great, but I can't say I'm interested in the others

>Implying Veeky Forums wasn't defanged years ago
>Implying Palahniuk is as edgy as Burroughs
The first chapter of Naked Lunch is edgier than anything Palahnicuck has ever written

Daily reminder that Burroughs murdered his wife
Daily reminder that Ginsberg was an unironic member of NAMBLA

...

70s art rock was so peng

They're like the Weird Tales trio only more pathetic
Burroughs=Lovecraft
Kerouac=Robert E Howard
Ginsberg=Clark Ashton Smith

Was it Peng You though?

Nah just peng

I generally like Kerouac and Burroughs. Ginsberg wrote two great poems but is otherwise pretty creepy and forgettable.

In many ways, there's very little similarity between the three central figures' worldviews. (burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac). Ginsberg was a proto-hippy who was a tireless liberal/agitator throughout his life. Burroughs was a drink-sodden, drug-chasing, thrill riding, gun-loving libertarian. And Kerouac was a alcoholic young Catholic conservative who supported the Vietnam War and was an avid fan of William F. Buckley.

One could make an argument that many of the Beats shared certain characteristics, such as hedonistic predilections, a disdain for middle-class, bourgeois life (when it suited them), and various antecedents such as Rimbaud &c; but in the ways that made each of them memorable even today, they couldn't be further apart.

I've told this story before on Veeky Forums, but I used to live near Burroughs when I was a kid. He was a huge asshole. One Halloween my friend (who was braver than I, Burroughs was a scary old man to me) ran up and took a shit on his porch just to spite him. It was the best, and having since grown up and learned more about him, I do not feel guilty one bit.

He probably filmed his hairless young teenage boy ass pooping from behind one the curtains while jacking off

burroughs did it in the fifties, when you could be put in prison for homosexuality in england, or hanged from a tree in the southern states of the US.

Chuck did it when it was safe.

there's a difference.

was he an asshole before or after your friend took a shit on his porch?

besides, Burroughs lived in Marrakech for several years, and people shitting on his doorstep was nothing new.

Thompson had an opinion on the beats though
>I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood.

degenerate, nihilists, depressed drug addicts and pedophiles

i really like Kerouac and kinda like Burroughs, couldnt give a fuck about the rest though.Read Lonesome Traveller

Degenerates and/or Jews.

I associate Ginsberg with blue, Burroughs with green, and Kerouac with red (or orange-red).

Am I insane? Or is that just the color of their prominent book covers or something?