scholarly journals The Beat Generation Meets the Hungry Generation: U.S.—Calcutta Networks and the 1960s “Revolt of the Personal”

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Belletto

This essay explores the relationship between the U.S.-based Beat literary movement and the Hungry Generation literary movement centered in and around Calcutta, India, in the early 1960s. It discusses a trip Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky took to India in 1962, where they met writers associated with the Hungry Generation. It further explains how Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco, was inspired to start a new literary magazine, City Lights Journal, by Ginsberg’s letters from India, which included work by Hungry Generation writers. The essay shows how City Lights Journal packaged the Hungry Generation writers as the Indian wing of the Beat movement, and focuses in particular on the work of Malay Roy Choudhury, the founder of the Hungry Generation who had been prosecuted for obscenity for his poem “Stark Electric Jesus”. The essay emphasizes in particular the close relationship between aesthetics and politics in Hungry Generation writing, and suggests that Ginsberg’s own mid-1960s turn to political activism via the imagination is reminiscent of strategies employed by Hungry Generation writers.

Author(s):  
Matt Theado

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926–d. 1997) was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Both her sympathy for the labor class and her gradual mental decay deeply affected Ginsberg in his youth. Intending to study law, Ginsberg enrolled at Columbia University in 1943, but he soon turned to literature, taking classes from Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. During his Columbia years, Ginsberg met Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, and Neal Cassady, artistic influences and principal constituents of what came to be known as the Beat Generation. In 1948 Ginsberg claimed to have heard William Blake’s voice, and from then on Ginsberg emphasized the visionary aspects of his poetry. He experimented with drugs, sexuality, and meditation throughout his life. In 1949 he was arrested in connection with a series of robberies, though he did not take part. In lieu of jail, he was sent to a psychiatric institute, where he met Carl Solomon, a key figure in Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” Ginsberg’s public breakthrough came in San Francisco, in 1955, when he read the first part of “Howl” before an audience as part of an event that launched the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. The City Lights publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, published Howl and Other Poems (1956), for which he was arrested by San Francisco police on charges of selling obscene material; the following trial, which resulted in an acquittal, catapulted Ginsberg to international notoriety. Although Howl and Other Poems remains Ginsberg’s best-known book, many readers consider Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958–1960 (1961), dedicated to the memory of his mother, to be his best work. His Collected Poems, 1947–1997 (2006) displays the scope of his writing career and exhibits the traits for which he is known: lines often based on breath rather than on metric forms, subject matter that ranges from intensely personal to overtly political, forthright candor, and a sometimes shocking frankness.


2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-109
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Sterba

Andrew Furuseth and Olaf Tveitmoe, both immigrants from Norway, were two of the most powerful labor leaders on the West Coast in the early twentieth century. Their perspectives and experiences as Scandinavians, as immigrants, and as San Franciscans helped to forge an approach to political activism that has long been overshadowed by the far more famous events of the 1960s and 1970s. Working with innovative methods in the field of transcultural biography, this article argues that the contradictory, transcultural nature of each man’s career, which included both anti-Asian racism and a profound opposition to war and militarism, had a major impact on San Francisco’s political consciousness that is still felt today.


First Monday ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko A Rodriguez ◽  
Vadas Gintautas ◽  
Alberto Pepe

The Grateful Dead was an American band born out of the 1960s San Francisco, California psychedelic movement, that played music together from 1965 to 1995. Despite relatively little popular radio airtime, while on tour the Grateful Dead enjoyed a cult-like following from a fan base that numbered in the millions. Still today, some ten years after dissolution, the band remains popular according to online music services, such as last.fm. This article presents a comparative analysis between 1,590 of the Grateful Dead's live concert set lists from 1972 to 1995 and 2,616,990 Grateful Dead listening events by last.fm users from August 2005 to October 2007. While there is a strong correlation between how songs were played in concert and how they were listened to by last.fm members, the outlying songs in this trend identify interesting aspects of the band and their present-day fans.


1991 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Prothero

For the beat generation of the 1940s and 1950s, dissertation time is here. Magazine and newspaper critics have gotten in their jabs. Now scholars are starting to analyze the literature and legacy of the beat writers. In the last few years biographers have lined up to interpret the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, and publishers have rushed into print a host of beat journals, letters, memoirs, and anthologies. The most recent Dictionary of Literary Biography devotes two large volumes to sixty-seven beat writers, including Neal Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, Peter Orlovsky, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 300-305
Author(s):  
Sarah Hill

The politically-oriented Anglo-American popular music of the 1960s was notable for its ability to inspire activism in cultures around the globe. In this paper I focus on the relationship between popular music and political activism in Wales, and suggest that 1968 was but one brief point on a much longer timeline: an arbitrary marker in local political terms, but part of a larger global motion toward radical social change.


1982 ◽  
Vol 47 (03) ◽  
pp. 230-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
N K Sharma ◽  
P A Routledge ◽  
M D Rawlins ◽  
D M Davies

SummaryThe validity of a previously described technique for predicting warfarin requirements based on the anticoagulant response to a fixed loading dose was assessed prospectively in 57 patients. There was a close relationship between the predicted and initially observed daily warfarin dose required to maintain the patient within the therapeutic range for anticoagulation. The significant relationship between predicted and observed maintenance dose persisted at 4 and 12 weeks although it decreased with increasing time.The relationship between observed and predicted maintenance requirement of warfarin was not affected by the concomitant use of intermittent intravenous injections of heparin when 9 hr was allowed to elapse between the previous dose of heparin and the thrombotest estimation on which the prediction was based.It is concluded that the method is valuable in predicting an individual’s warfarin requirement, although it does not obviate the need for regular monitoring of anticoagulant control.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-361
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Grau-Pérez ◽  
J. Guillermo Milán

In Uruguay, Lacanian ideas arrived in the 1960s, into a context of Kleinian hegemony. Adopting a discursive approach, this study researched the initial reception of these ideas and its effects on clinical practices. We gathered a corpus of discursive data from clinical cases and theoretical-doctrinal articles (from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s). In order to examine the effects of Lacanian ideas, we analysed the difference in the way of interpreting the clinical material before and after Lacan's reception. The results of this research illuminate some epistemological problems of psychoanalysis, especially the relationship between theory and clinical practice.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-144
Author(s):  
Ina Edwina ◽  
Rista D Soetikno ◽  
Irma H Hikmat

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) and diabetes mellitus (DM) prevalence rates are increasing rapidly, especially in developing countries like Indonesia. There is a relationship between TB and DM that are very prominent, which is the prevalence of pulmonary TB with DM increased by 20 times compared with pulmonary TB without diabetes. Chest X-ray picture of TB patients with DM is atypical lesion. However, there are contradictories of pulmonary TB lesion on chest radiograph of DM patients. Nutritional status has a close relationship with the morbidity of DM, as well as TB.Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the lesions of TB on the chest radiograph of patients who su?er from DM with their Body Mass Index (BMI) in Hasan Sadikin Hospital Bandung.Material and Methods: The study was conducted in Department of Radiology RSHS Bandung between October 2014 - February 2015. We did a consecutive sampling of chest radiograph and IMT of DM patients with clinical diagnosis of TB, then the data was analysed by Chi Square test to determine the relationship between degree of lesions on chest radiograph of pulmonary TB on patients who have DM with their BMI.Results: The results showed that adult patients with active pulmonary TB with DM mostly in the range of age 51-70 years old, equal to 62.22%, with the highest gender in men, equal to 60%. Chest radiograph of TB in patients with DM are mostly seen in people who are obese, which is 40% and the vast majority of lesions are minimal lesions that is equal to 40%.Conclusions: There is a signifcant association between pulmonary TB lesion degree with BMI, with p = 0.03


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.


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