/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6094935]

What exactly is /lit/'s beef with the Beats? I always hear them referred to as hacks, but I never hear any legitimate criticism thrown at them. Howl is my favorite poem and I'm enamoured by Beat literature in general. What, exactly, is wrong with it that makes /lit/ so hostile to it?

[Anonymous No.6094943]

Beats me.

[Anonymous No.6094945]

/lit/ is hostile to everything. 4chan is a place for people to vent anger.

[Anonymous No.6094951]

>>6094935
60 years out it's aged poorly, seems goofy as hell. It's probably mostly some odd way our current language rubs up against theirs, but it sounds so desperately to me like old people trying to sound cool.

My guess is that it'll have aged better in 50 more years, when the way we talk isn't close enough to them to feel silly, like the language version of the uncanny valley.

[Anonymous No.6094955]

Dad liked them.

[Anonymous No.6094962]

I like 'em.

Howl is gr8 and I've read 5 or so Kerouac books. Never done me wrong

[Anonymous No.6094963]

>>6094935
I'm so whimsical and free. My buddies are real deep with the shit they say to each other. Nothin' feels better than being on the road. I'm ashamed of what I started by romanticizing a life of travel, drugs, sex, and nonconformity. I'm a republican that prays to Jesus. Did you read my book that explores Buddhism?

[Anonymous No.6094976]

In Kerouac's 'On The Road' the characters frequently waltz into a new town and pick up a half decent job on the spot that requires no qualification and allows them to support themselves.
The characters then bail with confidence that they can find something similar in the next town.

I think this jars with today's youth. For even an entry level job we need X qualification, X years experience and X connections.

I personally feel jealous of that element that the beat generation enjoyed.

[Anonymous No.6097169]

>>6094976
have you ever tried going on the road? i had a friend who just took off and was able to pick up shit jobs with ease

[Anonymous No.6097711]

Looking solely at Kerouac:
- /lit/ associates On the Road with highschool reading, which they're generally hostile to.
- Despite all the "anti-establishment" stuff, he seems to be describing a fundamentally normie lifestyle, getting jobs and girls with ease.

/lit/ does seem to have more tolerance for Burroughs.

[Anonymous No.6099512]

courteous bump

[Anonymous No.6099520]

Burroughs is the only decent writer to come out of that 'movement' if you even want to call it that. I don't hate the Beats, I just feel like they're very overrated because they came out of a very socially chaotic era.

[Anonymous No.6099522]

Beats are associated with leftist politics, which makes the pseudo-neoreactionaries on /lit/ irate

[Anonymous No.6099532]

These "writers" were all drug-addled scribblers. That they are considered artists at all, much less great artists, is further evidence that a society without God is worthless.

[Anonymous No.6099543]

I like the beats, but I didn't pay dick for attention in high school, save for math and history of film, so reading the classics is still a new experience for me.

[Anonymous No.6099544]

Howl was a fine poem even if ginsberg was a degenerate

I would have respected Kerouac more if he'd acknowledged that he and dean moriarty were parasites and users, even if his attitude was "yeah, so what? Fuck you" about it. Pretending that he was on some holy ecstatic transcendental quest while marrying chicks for $$$ and ditching them in iowa, shows he doesn't respect the reader more than anyone else in On the Road.

Also, i'm jelly i can't take off on an adventure and be confident i won't die in poverty as a result. Fuck you jack

[Anonymous No.6099548]

>>6099532
Ahem. H.S.T? Most authors drank/drink did/do drugs

[Anonymous No.6099549]

>>6099520
this. although burroughs wasn't really a beatnik.

the beatniks were pretty much the quiet autistic arm of the hippy dippy sixties and what lead up to it.

[Anonymous No.6099555]

>>6094935
If we remove ourselves from the works they actually created, cant we respect the Beats for creating one of America's first literary counter cultures? 1950's America seemed a very rigid, conservative society. The beats were the first to be like "Fuck that, im doing drugs, im dropping out of College, im fucking dudes, im on the road, IDGAF", they did a pretty good job of saying Fuck you to the system and actually having the authenticity of following through.

They were the precursor to the Hippy movement of the 1960's as well, so they had a pretty big effect on USA on a whole.

>>6094951
I think this is a really good point, its like when you watch Hitchcock movies which were so ground breaking for their day and you just sit there like, this is exactly the same as everything else. They were the first to use that hip sort of slang, everything off shot from there, therefore a lot of the stuff you hear from them sounds really cringe and played out, the thing is it wasn't back then, it was fresh

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6099556]

Naked Lunch is generally praised here. As for Kerouac, the issue with him is that he that he glamorizes delinquency and irresponsible behavior, even though his message is ultimately dissatisfaction; Burroughs is quite the opposite, there is nothing glamorous about it for him, it is moral squalor and he wants us to feel that dirtiness.

Ginsberg is something of a synthesis of the two. His major limitation is that his themes are temporal. His poetry has artistic value for what it conveyed, but at the same time he contributed to the decline of poetry because people appropriated his (carefully crafted to appear) half-ass style which was perfectly suited to convey his subject, to explore other subjects that just turn to drivel when you write about them that way.

Ferlinghetti is just a fucking hack with bland poetry which is outrageously overpriced, and his philosophical outlook is just as bland ("I'm a philosophical anarchist but it's only good on paper, so I support 'Scandinavian Socialism'")

[Anonymous No.6099566]

>>6099549
Yea Burroughs is the only good writer to be associated with the movement and he wasn't even really IN it per se.

I also find it nuts that that guy shot up heroin with so many people who probably had AIDs and never got it himself. What a lucky fuck.

[Anonymous No.6099600]

>>6099522
Kerouac turned out to be an actual reactionary though.

[Anonymous No.6099608]

>>6099600
Reading Satori in Paris is hilarious. He keeps wondering if all the people he's meeting are Jews. It's like he was proto-/pol/ by that point.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.6099610]

>>6099600
Yeah, that's what he said after a life and literary career of glorifying drugs, free love, stealing, and minorities. Yeah, he said he was a serious Catholic after devoting far more ink to Buddhism.