Marx Was A Beat Writer
Hi Dull,
As I don't consider Bukowski a "Beat" writer either, you put the article right where it belongs: the *Not* Bukowski folder.
A few comments:
I read over this man's footnote list and got through the first few pages before tossing this academic piece of contrived, theoretical, error-ridden, academic nonsense on the garbage heap.
Imagine lumping Bukowski in with the Beats primarily on the basis of Marxist theory and Bukowski's economic necessity, mostly using the dictionary meaning of the word "beat" as in "beaten down," and then concluding that Bukowski"”who was essentially obscure as any kind of writer of influence in the late 1940s and early 1950s"”generated the Beat Movement along with Neal Cassady. And I guess it doesn't matter here that Bukowski and Cassady only met a few months before Neal died in the late '60s.
The author then goes on to an imaginary time warp to justify Bukowski's seminal influence on the Beats:
"Bukowski was continuously "on the road' in the forties and fifties and was published in numerous Beat journals in San Francisco such as The Outsider, Open City and John Bryan's infamous Notes from Underground. Bukowski's "Beatness' derived from the fact that he had to be on the road in order for him to search for work in city after city."
Well, gee, doesn't anyone see a problem with regard to the writings produced by Bukowski in the 1960s as having influenced the Beat Movement of the 1950s? How does the academic mind make that kind of a serpentine leap in chronology?
More importantly, the Beats were Beats not because of economic hardship (nor was Bukowski a Beat because of economic hardship). Nor were they particularly oppressed in their lives, at least in the beginning. But they certainly were alienated by the deadening, plastic society they were surrounded with, and created their own sub-culture as a matter of spiritual and creative survival. Marxist economic theory, my ass.
Most of all, what I object to with these kinds of papers is how so very little some of these acedemics are affected by the writers they study. These researchers might as well be studying the want ads or the phone book for all the human good it does them.
After I got sufficiently fed up with this academic garbage, I experienced great satisfaction after pushing the "empty trash" button on my laptop, similar to the Bukowkian beer shit Bukowski himself used to rhapsodize about, and I thought to myself how wonderful it is to be alive.
"”Poptop.