Amcult Exam 1, Study Guide

Front 1

Subcultures as a surprise

Back 1

i. Subcultures, on the other hand, tend to breach the expectations of mainstream society
ii. Mainstream culture doesn’t like to be surprised because
1. It’s already on tenuous footing since its only basis is consensus
2. Most people need a sense of order to help them make sense out of an otherwise capricious universe
3. Mainstream culture believes that it is inviolable and it creates taboos to safeguard this in the form of socially acceptable codes.
a. (as noise)By making mainstream society divert its attention from normal activities and toward the actions of the subculture.

Front 2

How does mainstream society respond to subcultures

Back 2

a. Think how much time mainstream society spends in discussing, debating, arguing, writing about, criticizing subcultural movements!
b. Create so much controversy that mainstream society can’t bother making war, killing people, or worse yet…MAKING MONEY!!!
c. It really isn’t that hard for mainstream society to help squash a subcultural movements these days: all it has to do is start to commodify it.

Front 3

Why are subcultures considered such a threat (noise)

Back 3

a. Noise
i. They are an interference in the orderly sequence of society and culture
ii. They are a challenge to morés and norms
iii. They challenge traditional beliefs
iv. They act as a temporary block of the normal order of things
v. How do this? By making mainstream society divert its attention from normal activities and toward the actions of the subculture.

Front 4

lost generation and beats

Back 4

i. By the early 1920s many of America’s most promising artists, like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, cummings, John Steinbeck, and others left for Europe where they believed their art, and life-style would be better appreciated.
ii. These would be the makings of “the Lost Generation” - a generation who lived through the war, became disenchanted with the world after the war, and gave themselves over to art and living for the present.
1. They lived in hip’s present tense
2. Removed from previous certainties by the violence of war
3. Believed words like glory or honor now rang hollow
4. Reveled in what poet Hart Crane called: “dinners, soirees, poets, painters, translations, absinthe, music, pictures, Sapphic heiresses, books…”
iii. The language they were taught in school was inadequate to describe the horrors of war, and so they looked for a way to translate jazz into words, with four letter words and energy
B. Beats: Different than the Lost Generation because “it is decidedly unlike young bohemia to turn hermit or to take it upon itself the disciplined demands of self-sufficiency

Front 5

Psychic state of youth and post WWII

Back 5

A. Post WWII America was not the picture of “normalcy” that many people would have us believe:
i. It was about the bland selling out of the “good life”
ii. It was about political retrenchment
iii. It was about a conservative laisse faire attitude
iv. It was about nuclear anxiety
v. To understand these guys, need context…psychic state of youth at that time
vi. A few people thought post WWII america was a return to normalcy…try to recapture the sanity and wholesomeness that America was supposed to be about! But a lot of it was about selling out for the big man. Fit everyone with the same cookie cutter…uniform conformity. Very conservative too. Let everything be very smooth and cool. Nuclear anxiety. Never before that by pressing a button, could destroy everyone
vii. When Mainstream Culture has any breach of its norms its most primal anxieties and fears emerge and must be dealt with:
1. Guys with long hair become “gays” or if they have beards they were “dirty”
2. “Mainstream culture interprets breaking the rules as being the same as the absence of rules.”


C. What were the typical roles for women in the post World War II era?

Front 6

Who did the beats amire and want to emulate

Back 6

A. The white negro
VIII. Mailer raises, for the first time the idea that Negroes are the source of hip for beats.
IX. Norman Mailer proclaimed in ''The White Negro,'' the existence of a new kind of man:
1. The hipster
X. That under the shadow of mass annihilation one should learn what ghetto blacks already knew:
1. To give up ''the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,''
2. To live in the moment
3. To follow the body and not the mind,
4. To divorce oneself from society'' and ''follow the rebellious imperative of the self'

Front 7

New vision (3 things)

Back 7

A. Naked self-expression is the seed of creativity
VIII. Say what’s on your mind…and primitive raw nature..find this…get down to the nakedness of the spirit where there is nothing else there
B. The artist’s consciousness is expanded by a derangement of the senses
VIII. Artists senses must be expanded at all costs (like Melville)….we need to push our consciousness as far as we possibly can…only if we get to the borderline of insanity…living on the edge isn’t good enough…you gotta step off..only at this point you can be at your create zenith
C. Art eludes conventional morality
VIII. Art shouldn’t be polite…nobody has the right to say if something art or not…conventional reality is perverse

Front 8

dark knight of the soul

Back 8

A. The concept of the “Dark Night of the Soul” goes back to Roman Catholic mystic St. John of the Cross -1542-1591.
B. It means a mystic spiritual path upon which one believes he/she has lost everything, including the grace of God.
C. Psychologically, the “Dark Night” can mean the exhaustion of an old state and the growth of a new form of consciousness.

Front 9

Bedrock of consciousness

Back 9

A. THAT IS WHAT GINSBERG AND KEROUAC WERE ALL ABOUT… REACHING THE BEDROCK OF CONSCIOUSNESS, WHICH IS THE ONLY PLACE THAT TRUE ART CAN EXIST, AND THE ONLY PLACE WHERE NOTHING BUT YOUR INNER SELF EXISTS.
B. Having been used, Being raw, Finding the nakedness of mind and soul, Reduced to the bedrock of consciousness, Being pushed upon against the wall of oneself
C. Buddhist teachings
VIII. Impermanence
IX. There is no creator or savior
X. The way of the Bodhisattva: peace, love, patience, generosity

O. What was the Kammerer Affair? What impact did it have on the Beats?
A. August 14, 1944
B. Lucien Carr stabs David Kammerer,to death. Kerouac and Burroughs are arrested as materiel witnesses. The New York Times headline reads: Columbia Student Kills Friend and Sinks Body in Hudson.
C. Jack helped Carr destroy the murder weapon and other miscellaneous evidence in Manhattan’s Morningside Park.
D. Jack advised Carr to toss the knife down a storm drain, and then failed to report the crime to the authorities.
E. He also helped Carr bury Kammerer’s eyeglasses in Morningside Park making him a material witness in the murder.
F. Arrested, and held on$2,500 bail, Jack persuaded Edie Parker, an admirer of his, that he would marry her, if she helped him make bail. Edie bailed Jack out of prison, and they were married on August 22nd. They move to her home in Grosse Point.
G. Carr is sentenced to 1-20 years at Elmira Reformatory and released in 1946.

Front 10

influences that ginsburg took from his parents

Back 10

A. Louis Ginsberg is a modestly successful published poet and high school teacher and Jewish democratic Socialist
B. Naomi is a Communist and irrepressible nudist who becomes tragically insane in early adulthood.
C. Mother Naomi begins mental decline
D. 1932 - 1935
E. Naomi Ginsberg is hospitalized for the first time, leaving father Louis to care for the Ginsberg children alone.
F. In 1937 Eleven-year-old Allen Ginsberg starts capturing his thoughts in his first personal journal.
G. Naomi Ginsberg is found bleeding after father Louis breaks down the bathroom door and interrupts her suicide attempt. Naomi is returned to Greystone State Mental Hospital for a two-year absence from the family.
H. In 1939 Allen graduates from grammar school and begins attending Paterson's Central High where he joins numerous clubs, later becoming the president of the Debating Society. Ginsberg is inspired by his first exposure to Walt Whitman through his teacher,Francis Durbin, after a switch to Paterson's East Side High from Central.
I. In 1941 15-year-old Allen is pulled into his mother's mental illness as she convinces him to drag her by bus throughout rural New Jersey in search of a rest home for her, only to be retrieved the next day by father Louis.

Front 11

beat vision characteristics by Holmes

Back 11

i. Any attempt to label a generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily when it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which deserves an adjective.
1. This really is a beat generation
a. Having been used, Being raw, Finding the nakedness of mind and soul, Reduced to the bedrock of consciousness, Being pushed upon against the wall of oneself
2. They have instinctive individuality
3. They have independent minds
4. They have the lust of freedom that led them to:
ii. Black markets, bepops, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, Hucksterism (sells stuff in street), Jean Paul Satre (existentialism-a term applied to the work of a number of late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences,[1][2][3]shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual)

Front 12

influence that bebops had on beats

Back 12

i. Within the two self-marginalized groups (beats and bop musicians and their followers), was the seed for new ways for America to approach art, language, work, sex, and identity.
ii. Bebop, whose spoken-word style drew on jazz rhythms, and whose poets often employed jazz musicians to accompany them. The bebop influence also shows in rock and roll, which contains solos employing a form similar to bop solos, and hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, like the boppers had a unique, non-conformist style of dress, a vocabulary incoherent to outsiders, and a communion through music. Fans of bebop were not restricted to the United States; the music gained cult status in France and Japan.

Front 13

define cool and flipness in the beat worldview

Back 13

i. What the hipster is looking for in his coolness (withdrawal) or flipness (ecstasy) is a feeling of “somewhereness”

Front 14

female rebellion more dangerous than male rebellion

Back 14

a. “In the 50s, if you were male, you could be a rebel. But if you were female your families had you locked up.”
b. Potentially great women writers wound up dead or crazy. I think of the women on the Beat-scene with me in the early '50s, where are they now? I know Barbara Moraff is a potter and does some writing in Vermont, and that's about all I know. I know some of them ODed and some of them got nuts, and one woman that I was running around the Village with in '53 was killed by her parents putting her in a shock-treatment-place in Pennsylvania ...
c. Locked up physically and mentally

Front 15

H. Who were Hettie Jones, Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Joan Vollmer and Edie Parker?

Back 15

a. Hettie Jones
i. Yugen, for instance, was one of the most important of the early independent literary magazines, and Hettie Jones started it in her kitchen.
ii. Leroy Jones’ wife
b. Diane di Prima
i. Di Prima began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen
ii. Being some ten years younger than the male beats she would serve as a bridge between the Beats and the Hippies
iii. Di Prima is another bridge between beats and hippies
iv. The poet Diane di Prima not only decided to explore her own sexuality, but refused to include men other than for sex: she had a child and didn’t let the father know about it until after the child was more than 6 months old.
c. Joyce Johnson
i. Joyce Johnson dropped out of Barnard because she felt she was merely living out her mothers dreams.
ii. In her novel Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson describes the heroism involved in the Beat women's rejection of the status quo:
iii. “Naturally, we fell in love with men who were rebels We fell very quickly, believing they would take us along on their journeys and adventures. We did not expect to be rebels all by ourselves; we did not count on loneliness. Once we had found our male counterparts, we had too much blind faith to challenge the old male/female rules. We were very young and we were in over our heads. But we knew we had done something brave, practically historic. We were the first ones who had dared to leave home.”
d. Joan Vollmer
i. We’ve already been introduced to Joan Vollmer (who would become Burroughs’ wife and victim of the William Tell incident.) She had left suburban life in Albany, New York in order to attend Barnard College, the women’s liberal arts college associated with Columbia.
e. Edie Parker
i. Similarly, Edie Parker (Kerouac’s first wife) left Grosse Point, Michigan in favor of Columbia for the same reasons: to explore all the aspects of her life. Moving in with Joan their apartment would become the early Beat salon where many of the male Beats first met.

Front 16

in what ways were women oppressed and embraced by beat movement

Back 16

a. Beat males were really only interested in the women “part time” and didn’t consider them equals
b. Mainstream said they should be docile, safe partners for their husbands
c. Embraced:
i. But this dual marginal status allowed the women certain luxuries that would support the men and, if we are honest, might have provided at least some of the women with opportunities to transcend the men
ii. Their peripheral status allowed them the time to pursue, perhaps in greater depth, intellectual pursuits like art, Buddhism, literature
iii. They were more often than not the bread winners
iv. They also had the opportunity, given their time isolated from the adventures of the males, to start small presses