More on the Beat Hotel (9 rue Git-le-Coeur) where Burroughs and painter-restauranteur Brion Gysin "invented" the cut-up technique, where Corso wrote The Happy Birthday of Death, and so on. One walked up the stairs of this place to find a squat toilet hole, peeling walls, and a tilted landing. Rooms: bare floor, seedy furnishings, 40-watt bulbs on the ceiling. It cost $30/month to stay there. The landlady, Madame Rachou, didn't care what people did there and was highly selective about whom she rented to."It was like a Marx Brothers movie directed by Madame Blavatsky," Ted Morgan remembers.
Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 (Pantheon, 1995), p. 273. See also Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel (Grove, 2000).
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
