THE SHOCK OF THE THEN

Towards a free and open society  In this Blog . . .we focus on Allen Ginsberg  1.  How to Get Famous - Quickly.  The first reading of the poem howl was a sure way to get some attention and created the notorious and much celebrated reputation Ginsberg enjoyed from this time on.   2.  "I'm with you in Rockland" Ginsberg and Carl Solomon  - Ginsberg was not really criminally minded, but he got caught in a theft when he hid stolen goods in his flat. What happened next was a major influence in his future career.  3.  Surrealism and  Antonin Artaud   - There were several European influences on the beat writers, the influence of surrealism was imported to Ginsberg through Solomon.  4. The Theatre of Cruelty  - Still with Artaud we learn about his attempt to involve the audience in the actual performance of his theatre productions.  5. The Staff of St Patrick - A truly bizarre chapter from the life of A...

A New Kind of Writing In this Blog. . . we focus on Jack Kerouac 1.  Jack's Kerouac's stream of consciousness -  A new kind of literature emerges. 2.   Jack Kerouac   - Bio on Kerouac, early days. 3. Kerouac discovered in New York, his love for Jazz - The form and freedom of Jazz music as well as the language of the musicians essential to Jacks emerging style. 1. Jack's Kerouac's stream of consciousness. . . Up until this time writing styles were limited to form and structures a bit similar in concept to classical styles in painting, nobody would have even considered writing apart from the literary conventions.  Writing had not experienced the same kind of renewal that painting had experienced towards the end of the 19th Century sparking the radical experimenting that eventually established modernism in the early 20th C. Of course there were some experimental ideas in writing for example by T. S. Eliot and Ja...