Today's paper has an article about "What America's Teens Admire Most" (possibly what all teens admire--around the globe--decade to decade): "Perseverance" and "Courage" (plain and simple?). There has to be an age (ages. . . ) wherein we can be idealistic, dreamy and undaunted. Maybe this is why we feel comfortable suspending disbelief while we imagine and accept the qualities and character of the Super Hero. (It's also useful to read between the lines, to observe how the Super Hero was empowered [SEE James Sturm's Unstable Molecules (Marvel)--in which Vapor Girl reads Peyton Place, and the Human Torch is schooled benevolently by a Beat-spouting bonfire poet who speaks Kerouac]). I mean to say there is a humanity that informs such perseverance and courage most of all. There is, too, a literacy in all this extra-exceptional experience.
Bill Morgan's new book (The Typewriter Is Holy), featuring our friend Ginsberg, is given a generous spread in the current issue of Seven Days magazine, under "State of the Arts": "The world actually needs some poets and people like the Beats to come around now, when we're becoming more conservative and scared. . . " (my emphasis). In the Bill Morgan article, I'm grateful Seven Days brings in the new: ". . . a copy of Che.: A Novella In Three Parts, by Peter Money, a former student of Allen Ginsberg. . . While the author doesn't call his work 'neo-Beat'. . . Money's novella, closer to prose poem than narrative, features the kind of continuously flowing imagery that many people associate with the more spontaneous modes of Beat writing."
Thank you, Seven Days. Here's to "independence": to courage, perseverance, and renewal--by text, and [humane, inventive] living.
