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e 60s brought such cultural changes as expanded consciousness, rock & roll, civil rights and strengthened democracy. So the whole society fell into a state of depresses, especially the youth who were given up, behaved with naked intuition, went all out, advanced bravely.[3]
2.2, the behavior of “The Beats”
2.2.1, In society
A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth. 'Why don't people leave us alone?' It was the face of a beat generation, also a spiritual crisis, their misery, protest, exploration and degradation… Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout.
Some extremes go as follows: Standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, this young face looked up into the camera with curious laughter and no guilt. The same face, with a more serious bent, stared from the pages of magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-GI's, and said that as it believed small business to be dead, it intended to become a comfortable cog in the largest corporation it could find. A little younger, a little more bewildered, it was this same face that the photographers caught in Illinois when the first non-virgin club was uncovered. The young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly drinking himself into relaxation, and the energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, who plays Russian Roulette with a jalopy, is separated only by a continent and a few years. They are the extremes. In between them fall the secretaries wondering whether to sleep with their boyfriends now or wait; the mechanic berring up with the guys and driving off to Detroit on a whim; the models studiously name-dropping at a cocktail party. But the face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging. "Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the hometown invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity. [4]
2.2.2, In the field of literature
The central Beat writers--William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac became nationally famous thanks to Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956) and the obscenity trial that followed its publication, then Kerouac’s On The Road , Burrough’s (1914-1997, American) Naked Lunch all became the representative work of the Beat Generation. They wrote just as they behaved, living in New York and San Francisco. Besides their enthusiasm for jazz and drugs, the group around Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac shared an interest in literary experimentation. Their work stressed spontaneous and uncensored writing, often based on their own experiences among small-time criminals and drifters. They influenced a whole generation of American youth by their crazy living style, they said: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”,[5] “I look at this roaring, crazy New York with innocent and strange eyes, millions of people are busy running about life continually, just like a nightmare ---- robbery, loss, heaving and death, only that they can strive for a grave for themselves outside the island.”[6] "There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination." "I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money." "The stone world came to me, and said Flesh gives you an hour's life." "What's your road, man? – holy boy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow." "Americans should know the universe itself as a 上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] 下一页
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