Skip to main content

Taking the Beats for a Walk

By


I've only recently come to enjoy the prose of Iain Sinclair, and so find myself very tempted by this latest set of adventures, American Smoke.    Sinclair had to content himself with the Beats from afar, occasionally brushing shoulders, as he did with Allen Ginsberg in 1967.  He recalls the moment,

When I drove Ginsberg across town in my battered red Mini, the youthful tribes, having no clear sense of who he was – a bearded face from TV screens in other people’s houses, from tabloid Hyde Park dope-rally headlines – rapped on the roof, leant in at the side window, with daffodils and peace signs. Celebrity as a shattered crystal. William Blake our contemporary. London relents, in cycles of mesmerised communality: free concert, royal wedding or royal funeral, riot. Break the glass. Loot, trash. Ding dong! The witch is dead. Burn down shops and warehouses. Episodes of euphoria alternate with long-suppressed rage. Before the Swiss banks resume normal service.

 Sinclair has ambled the streets of London for many years, picking up on its movements and rhythms and now tries his hand at the American scene, as he contrasts the world of the Beats among the ruins they left behind.  It seems like an archeological journey in many ways, but in the clipped voice he has become famous for, poking fun at himself and his conceits along the way.

Comments

  1. James FergusonJanuary 14, 2014 at 2:54 PM

    My copy arrived surprisingly quickly and am looking forward to reading it soon.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

The People Debate the Constitution

By
As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified.  After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution.  Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through.  But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 .  The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others.  Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified.  A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.
166 comments
Read more