The Beats

1
The Beats

• U.S.A.
• 1950s

2
The decade of the 50s

• The politics of fear
• The homogenization of America
• Resistance to conformity

3
The Cold War

• Korean War the spread of Communism
• The Space Race
• Sputniks 1 2
• The Arms Race
• Los Alamos
• A- H-Bomb testing

4
Major faces of the Cold War
5
The Cold War
6
Homogenization of Culture

• TV, advertising, censorship
• The first suburbia
• Levittown, Long Island
• McCarthyism and the thought police

7
TV advertising
8
Sex Censorship
9
Joseph McCarthy HUAC
10
Resistance

• Desegregation
• Brown vs the Board of Education (1954)
• Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)
• Desegregation of Central High, Little Rock,
  Arkansas (1957

11
More resistance

• James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause
• The Rise of a teenage subculture
• The Beat Poets

12
The Beats
13
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
14
in Goyas greatest scenes . . .

• In Goyas greatest scenes we seem to see
• the people of the world
• exactly at the moment when
• they first attained the title of
• suffering humanity
• They writhe upon the page
• in a
  veritable rage
• of adversity
• Heaped up
• groaning with babies and bayonets
• under cement skies
• in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
• bent statues bats wings and beaks
• slippery gibbets
• cadavers and carnivorous cocks
• and all the final hollering monsters
• of the
• imagination of disaster

15
Goya contd

• And they do
• Only the landscape is changed
• They still are ranged along the roads
• plagued by legionnaires
• false windmills and demented roosters
• They are the same people
• only further from home
• on freeways fifty lanes wide
• on a concrete continent
• spaced with bland billboards
• illustrating imbecile
  illusions of happiness
• The scene shows fewer tumbrils
• but more maimed citizens
• in painted cars
• and they have strange license plates
• and engines
• that devour America
• 1958

16
A Coney Island of the Mind

• See
• it was like this when
• we waltz into this place
• a couple of Papish cats
• is doing an Aztec two-step
• And I says
• Dad lets cut
• but then this dame
• comes up behind me see
• and says
• You and me could really exist
• Wow I says
• Only the next day
• she has bad teeth
• and really hates
• poetry
• 1958

17
Kerouac Burroughs
18
Allen Ginsberg

• I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
  by madness, starving, hysterical,
• naked . . .

19
Basic Principles

• Existentialism
• Mysticism
• A return to 19th Century Romanticism
• Society every where is in conspiracy against the
  manhood of everyone of its members
• Ralph W. Emerson, Self-Reliance

20
Artistic principles

• Break with European standards and formal
  aesthetics
• Search for American rhythms, forms language (in
  jazz and blues)

21
Social Principles

• Champions of individual freedom and expression
• Opposed to any social control
• Government
• Business
• Parental
• Religious
• Psychological

22
Radical principles

• Evil defined as any force that fragments reality,
  making unity difficult
• Redemption through immersing oneself in all
  experience

23
The path to transcendence

• Through jazz
• Through drugs
• Through eastern religions

24
From the Beats to the Hippiesa short step
25
From Pranksters to Protest
26
The end