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Jennifer Johnson
https://kingdomventurers.com/
“Although aesthetically nugatory, "Beat Culture and the New America" was an exhibition of considerable significance -- but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist's report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.”
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
“You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.”
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
“Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank -- or to blame.”
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
“The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and 'startling oases of creativity', Notwithstanding their recent media media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, 'Beat Culture and the New America' showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; the were -- and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain -- moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living.”
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
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Jennifer’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jennifer’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
975 books
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260 friends
2,081 books
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307 friends
26 books
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332 friends
9 books
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5,147 friends
36 books
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1,700 friends
107 books
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5,025 friends
27 books
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3,750 friends
362 books
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1,158 friends
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