The Best Minds of My Generation

di Allen Ginsberg (Autore)

Grove Press, 2017

In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem “Howl,” and Jack Kerouac’s seminal book On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present the history of Beat Literature in his own inimitable way. Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Bill Morgan, and with an introduction by Anne Waldman, The Best Minds of My Generation presents the lectures in edited form, complete with notes, and paints a portrait of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors, and fellow revolutionaries. Ginsberg was seminal to the creation of a public perception of Beat writers and knew all of the major figures personally, making him uniquely qualified to be the historian of the movement. In The Best Minds of My Generation, Ginsberg shares anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs, and other writers for the first time, explains his own poetics, elucidates the importance of music to Beat writing, discusses visual influences and the cut-up method, and paints a portrait of a group who were leading a literary revolution. For Beat aficionados and neophytes alike, The Best Minds of My Generation is a personal yet critical look at one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century. Other additions came later, as did the Beat’s broad influence on film, visual art and other media. Ginsberg ends the chapter explaining that the essence of the phrase “Beat Generation” can be found in a celebrated phrase of On the Road: “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.” The book is digressive and very conversational and often intimate in tone – that much is clear from the first two sentences of the first full chapter, which give a good taste for the humorous tone of salaciousness the book sometimes takes: “One thing I’ll try to do is talk sequentially in such a way that it will make sense for scholars as well as for ourselves and record what I’m doing because I’m getting senile and I don’t remember very much any more. I can’t remember who fucked who, when, or who wrote what anymore, and this may be one of the last times I’ll actually be able to remember that and get it straight.” Early in the book, Ginsberg spends quite a bit of time discussing the influence of music, particularly jazz, on the emerging Beat writers, something that is very interesting and under-referenced in the critical literature. He provides almost a Beat playlist for the reader: “Listen to Brahms’s Trio No. 1 and Brahms’s Sextet, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 with the “Frère Jacques theme”, some forties music, Thelonius Monk’s “Round About Midnight” . . . some of the forties Dizzy Gillespie, like “Salt Peanuts”, “Opp Bob Sh’bam . . . “The Chase” by Dexter Gordron, and Wardell Gray . . . Lester Young . . . Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain . . .” (and the list goes on). He mentions the rhythm of bebop directly influencing the rhythm of Beat poetry and prosody. Indeed, he says that the phrase “salt peanuts, salt peanuts” marks the accenting of a lot of Keroauc’s prose in its noniambic accenting. And it wasn’t just the music, it was the whole zeitgeist in New York that profoundly marked the Beat movement – Ginsberg describes the Times Square scene in the 1940s, the mix of hustlers, drug pushers,

• Autore: Allen Ginsberg
• Curatore: Bill Morgan
• Anno edizione: 2017
• Editore: Grove Press
• Formato: EPUB2 con Adobe DRM
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9780802189486

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