Contents – The Beat and the Hungry generation: When losing became hip (Issue 26)
Contents - The Beat and the Hungry generation: When losing became hip (Issue 26)
Posts tagged ‘Beat Poets’
Jun 16
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Guest-Editorial – The Beat and the Hungry generation: When losing became hip
By Abhimanyu Kumar & Goirick Brahmachari
It was indeed an enriching experience to go through the pieces, to learn about the new areas that have remained unexplored, to acquaint ourselves with some critical questions that require attention within the scope of the Beat and the Hungryalist literature, and to trace the mutual connections and differences between the two schools, their triumphs and follies.
Project Ginsberg & Me: Ruminations on Freedom
By Anuj Gupta, Yatin Dawra, and Dhairya Gupta
They present an audio-visual montage that juxtaposes social commentary with electronica, while paying homage to the work of Beats, especially Ginsberg’s poetry.
Spring and Oblivion: Howl Revisited
By Indran Amirthanayagam
Allen Ginsberg read ‘Howl’ on that Honolulu visit in 1977 before a crowd at the East West Center. He shared the stage with Ediriweera Sarachchandra, a great playwright in Sinhala, also a guest of my father’s. Sarachchandra played the veena, Ginsberg the harmonium, and together they welcomed the audience to their seats with an improvised – first thought, best thought – raga.
Jun 16
The Ginsberg-Dylan Express: Tangled Up in Vomit and Blues
By Brinda Bose
Was Allen Ginsberg a singer-songwriter? Is Bob Dylan a poet? Could each have been both when they met and made poems and songs together – capricious, frenzied – across two decades in the 1960s and ’70s?
Talking Poetry, Ginsberg and the Hungryalists: Samir Roychoudhury, a retrospective
By Maitreyee B Chowdhury
It is difficult to look at the soft-spoken Samir today and conceptualize the firebrand young man he must have been, a man whose poetry has over the years fired the imagination of many. So how did his family react to his poetry, I ask in jest. All around the world poets are considered crazy, it’s no different here, he concludes laughingly.
In the Shadow of Famine
By Priyabrata Das
My school days, a part of it, was spent in this neighborhood. It was 1944. The shadow of famine, destitution, the Second World War, sandbagged baffle wall, overwhelming black-out nights, etc. were in a deep embrace with Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) life. In the midst of this came the world’s most devastating famine. Five million perished within less than two years.
Reading Hungryalists as One Who Came After: A Feminist Critique
By Nandini Dhar
In other words, I am asking, what place has been accorded to women within the Hungryalist texts. I will begin with a generalization. Women appear in Hungryalist poems as bodies – sexual bodies – and nothing but bodies on which desire is projected.
A Sojourn in Tangier
By Marc Goldin
Kerouac and Corso, extending the New York manic road-trip sensibility probably never stopped moving long enough to truly get a sense of the inner life of Tangier, one kick after another, pausing to sleep here and there. But one figures that the Tangier sea-air had to have permeated their young American psyches, even while they slept.
Performing the hobo in Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’
By Uttaran Das Gupta
So, if Kerouac is not building an alternative nation-state or a utopian society, what is he doing as a hobo? I would like to argue that although Kerouac empathises deeply with underclass characters in his novel, he never quite becomes one of them: he is never a hobo; he is just playing one.
Mind Breaths: Learning Buddhism from Allen Ginsberg
By Marc Olmsted
The comforts and implications of a creator god and an eternal self would not survive in Ginsberg’s metaphysics. Nor would the notion of a permanent high experienced by that eternal self. Buddhism’s Second Noble Truth is the source of suffering is a grasping selfhood, disembodied or otherwise.
Jun 16
Art, the Hungryalists, and the Beats
By Juliet Reynolds
Like Robert LaVigne, Anil Karanjai painted nudes, without legal repercussions. But, as may be remarked in his romantic canvas ‘Clouds in the Moonlight’ (1970), the Hungryalist was more of a visionary than the Beat painter.
Biting more than they could chew? Problems of being too Hungry
By Titas De Sarkar
There was a constant desperation to prove that they were different from the rest, and that they were better. A possible reaction to the judgmental society, they countered it by examining their colleagues in turn and found them wanting, according to their set standards.
Resurgence of the Subterranean Celebration: The Beat and the New-Age
By Sagorika Singha
These filmic representations of the Beat ideology seem to raise some new questions. Should one be simply allowed to look at them as films about the Beats or is it necessary for one to be already aware of their history to truly appreciate them? If not, how should they let the imagination be affected?
The Women of the Beat Generation
By Pamela Twining
The ‘Road’ mythology inspired by the Beat insurgency spoke to youth in general, and female characters like MaryLou and Romana Swartz spoke to young women, in particular, of women free-spirited and adventurous, of the excitement of being in the middle of the erotic and creative energy of the Beat scene, possibilities unknown in conventional society.
Café Dissensus 