QUOTE (J m HofMarN @ Mar 31 2005, 01:35 AM)
Nonsense, I made an absurd suggestion that had a root in logic. It was designed to be an ironic statement. The fifties were, sadly enough, a time when people like McCarthy were accepted. So it might well be surprising that out of that decade there came Allen Ginsburg, Neal Cassady etc. I was... blargh nevermind I've explained this before. Would it make you feel any better if I had said "Then who do you think was the best mind of his generation, Woodrow Wilson?" Really any name would work there, so long as it was absurd.
Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856. The opening bars of "Howl" say something about "The best minds of my generation ... "
Your "ironic" conclusion had no grounding in any kind of logic, and your followup is worse. McCarthy was born in the first decade of the last century, and Wilson was older. A contemporary of Ginsburg's was Martin Lurther King, Jr. That would have been a better followup, and it would not have been absurd. In fact, just about ANY "absurd" retort would have betrayed your bias, that I must be wrong because you like Beat poets and therefore I am bad. A "Good" example would have been Fidel Castro, a contemporary of Ginsberg's and therefore of his generation.
Your "ironic" retort is akin to "You don't think the Beats were the best minds of the fifties? Then who was? Albert Einstein? (born around the time of Woodrow Wilson, but certainly active in the fifties!)
I've also explained myself quite well on this one, and I still say you called me a McCarthyist for suggesting that the best minds of Ginsberg's generation did not spring from the English department of Columbia University. It's the only reasonable conclusion, and every effort you made to refute it only cemented it more and more (see comments about filmmakers and musicians in original thread, this is all old news). You can go until you're blue in the face on this one; all you're proving is that you don't know what defines a "generation," and you may be admitting that you didn't understand "Howl," which of course I like a lot.
Anyway, for any interested, here was my original reply to your "irony:"
QUOTE
Joe McCarthy was born 20 years before the members of the Beat generation, so your use of the name in that retort can ONLY be seen as an attack on me. Sorry, Hoffmarn, but a spade is a spade. I make a crack about beat poets, and I am a Nazi. Fucking sad.
Not to mention that the sort of replacement offered "You don't believe A, therefore you must believe B" is one of the simplest argumentative fallacies (the "false dichotomy"), and also the easiest to refute.
To wit:
In my personal opinion, the "best minds of the beat generation" (arbitrarily defined by me as those born 1917-1928) include but are not limited to: Martin Luther King Jr, John Kennedy, Thomas Kuhn, Henry Kissinger, Betty Friedan, Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, James Lawson, Christiaan Barnard, both Watson AND Crick, Richard Feynman, Desmond Morris, Michel Foucault, Paul Kurtz, Noam Chomsky and Nelson Mandela.
Along with various other physicists, geneticists, theoretical mathematicians, neurobiologists, geologists, politicians, philosophers and chemists of unsung status.
And of course I'd be cheating if I also said J D Salinger, Isaac Asimov, Kubrick, Bergman, Fellini, and Orson Welles.
PS: Cassady? He never wrote a single book in his life!
A later followup read:
QUOTE
Don't get me entirely wrong: If I were to make a list of the most important and influential people born in the early 19th century, Whitman and Lincoln would both be on it. If I made a list of the most important and influential people born right after WWI, well, you saw most of it, but I'd add Alan Ginsbergh to it, for "Howl" alone. But I'd also have added all those other people, along with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Kingsley Amis. To leave fewer stones unturned, I'd have added maybe Yitzak Rabin, Alan Greenspan, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Shah Muhammed Pahlavi, Anwar Sadat, and Pierre Trudeau.
I'm not saying these people are all equals to one another, but more than many their contributions infuenced the shape of the world. Several of these folks were no good with words, some of them are arrogant thugs. But the point of the exercise, for me, was not to say "here are some people I liked from this period of history." Or worse, "these are people I thnk I would have liked had I met them in the day." Because, hell, if that's what we're doing, I'll throw in Gene Roddenberry and the entire cast of the original STAR TREK.
Ah hell, if you have the time, read the original thread. We had a hell of an argument, seemingly all of which JM has now forgotten:
Meesa Howl ... Anyway, back on topic: You're still about fifteen words to Hannibal's one on how he's dominating this forum with mean-spirited attacks and political rants. Tell me again why you're better than the rest of us, and why sometimes Nazid are ok so long as they hate people you hate.
Edit: replaced "pots" with "poets"
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 31 March 2005 - 03:28 PM
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).