Better late than never: after spending the evening on the phone with a few friends of mine working the quest to find a trumpet for my daughter (just turned 14 last month; JEEZ, how the heck did THAT happen?), today’s Substackery, Origins of the Culture Wars: who’s winning, and why, is finally live and kicking. This one discusses the American traditional nuclear family and the values it both embodies and promulgates, the origins of the Left’s ongoing campaign to destroy it utterly, and Norman Podhoretz’s early-days confrontation with the leading literary lights of the Beat Generation who did so much to get that dirty, underinflated, out-of-round old shitball a-rolling. Sample ‘graphs:
I read Kerouac’s On the Road was back when I was in college, not as part of any formal classroom assignment but on my own hook. I remember being excited about finally getting my hands on a copy, looking forward to a rowdy, rollicking road-tale full of bold adventure, take-no-prisoners iconoclasm, and devil-may-care rebelliousness and individualism. To my everlasting disappointment, I found it to be a flaccid, soggy dishrag of self-obsession, aimlessness, and…well, quite frankly, it was fucking boring, okay?
And alakazooks! Just like that, I was all done with the Beats and their drivel, as narcissistic and dull a bunch of piss-ant pedants as ever threw a bucket of cold water over a lively party just by their very presence. OTR was the first of the Beats I ever read…and the last, too. Trust me, folks: as a voracious reader all my life, I can say without fear of contradiction that anybody who can make sex, drugs, and road trips that dull simply ain’t much of a writer.
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I couldn’t agree more about Kerouac. I also read a little Ginsburg and Burroughs, as well, and came to the same conclusion. Shitty writers and pretty lame people.
What’s of real interest is that the more feeble-minded readers these writers influenced are now running our government.
Sad ain’t it.
Test…
Of note if it’s of any help. Mike. In my reply above to boron, the visual tab was the default for some reason and nothing I typed would show up. Even the cursor was not showing. Switched to text and it worked normally. I am typing this comment in the visual mode and it works fine here.
So, on reply visual ain’t working…
But on a new comment it works fine…
Don’t suppose she could be persuaded to take up the kazoo instead? It’s employable, too: Nothing says solemnity like a kazoo at a funeral.
Went to a funeral today. Woman in her 60s, cancer. The son, in his 30s or 40s, was obviously broken up and had trouble giving his part of the remembrance but all the rest of it felt … overproduced and undersincere. A kazoo orchestra would have been better than the recorded, note-perfect, excessively loud organ music.