didactic poem not a poem

A more or less randomly chosen academic book from 1960: Gordon E. Bigelow's Rhetoric and American poetry of the early national period, published by the University of Florida Press - a 77-page monograph, number 4 in Florida's "Humanities" series. "During msot of Western literary history," Bigelow begins, "rhetoric and poetic [sic] have lain close together, sometimes merging so completely for centuries at a time as to be virtually indistinguishable" ... but not so in America. Although there was much rhetoric written especially for political conversation, writers of the early U.S. did not have the willingness to devote themselves to writing poetry because (primarily) British writers were their competition. Poetry that was written in the early U.S. was done mostly to excite narrowly targeted audiences specifically for political or religious events of the day. American poetry began by being "vigorous" yet "dull" and makes "dull reading today." The poet's "words fall to the ground before they reach our ears." "The urgency which gave his poetry its life" back then is "gone" now.

Bigelow is tentative about opining but (especially in his fifth section, "Propaganda and Declamation") his view is readable between the lines: partisan poetry is not poetry because it is not for the ages, it is not universal. There's a definitional problem here, and once one sees that the historical argument goes in a circle. He begins by defining poetry as not rhetoric, argues that the early U.S. poet is rhetorical, and ends by saying that the poetry produced was not poetry. There is no such thing as a didactic poem that deserves the name of "poem."

the one thing Sontag published

According to Lauren McDaniel at UCLA's special collections library, Susan Sontag's papers (so far at least) do not contain any writings dated 1960. It's possible that new batches of material coming into that collection will eventually include some stuff from our year. Her career as writer really began in '62 and she published just a few things before that. It's known among Sontagians (and perhaps less so about Rieffians) that Susan was an uncredited quasi-co-author of Philip Rieff's The Mind of the Moralist (1959).

There is a piece dated 1960: it appeared in the Supplement to the Columbia Dailiy Spectator on November 18, 1960, on pages 3, 4 & 8: "History in the Drama." Sontag was an instructor in religion at Columbia.

I procured a copy of this piece. It's a review of Tom Driver's The Sense and History of Greek and Shakespearean Drama published by Columbia University Press. This is almost fully mature Sontagian writer at the level of the sentence--without, unsurprisingly, the pure verve of the writing on camp and avant-gardism coming soon. Driver's book, she says, contributes to a number of current debates - among them "the clash between an orientation to psychology and an orientation to history. The 'linear' view is under heavy attack by contemporary psychology-minded intellectuals. It is said that we have seen 'the end of ideology,' the end of hopes for radical transformation of the human condition, and that political convulsions are precisely the fruit of th[e] misguided and presumtuous energies of Biblical messianism."

She is here referring to a major book of 1960 by Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology. And she's in part using the Rieffian approach to and critique of "contemporary psychology-minded intellectuals" to counter the centrist/post-ideological End of Ideology thesis, which in part attributes the politics of difference (ideological critique of the American suburban middle-class 1950s-style status quo, for instance) to psychological maladjustment and crazy egoistic desires.

gone words before the crazy mob

Beatnik Questionnaire, copyright 1960, Gimmix Novelties, White Plains, N.Y. (Harry Ransom Center)

Do you live like there is no tomorrow? Do you attend poetry readings? Do you write your own poetry? Cool verse? Gone verse? Do you also recite? In public? Before a crazy mob?

MORE >>>

a valentine from Marianne

Marianne Moore published more often in New Yorker than I would have guessed. Several times in '60. On February 13, we see her poem "St. Valentine," (yes the comma is in the title) and it begins with one of her patent run-ons from the title:

      St. Valentine,

permitted to assist you, let me see...

And the final stanza is this:

Verse--unabashedly bold--is appropriate;
   and always it should be as neat
as the most careful writers "8."
   Any valentine that is written
Is as the vendange to the vine.
   Might verse not best confused itself with fate?

Moore published O to Be a Dragon in '59 and it was reviewed widely in '60. She also wrote a big-splash article for Vogue called "The Plums of Curiosity," a curious piece itself. More on that another time.

opening the field

Some would argue - I might well be among them - that Robert Duncan's Grove Press book of poems, The Opening of the Field, opened the poetics field in the year 1960. Keith Newton has put together a suggestive "recovery project" web page on Duncan's book. He writes:

Written almost fifty years ago, not long after the devastations of the first half of the century and in the shadow of those to come, The Opening of the Field remains one of our most moving attempts to restore, in a world left spiritually barren, some sense of “the human greenness.” There is a sense throughout the book that an unanswerable question lies at its heart: to what purpose, to what end, does the poetry direct its energies? To “the boundaries of the field,” where the mind stops, where language stops, where our stories end? Yet what we find from the beginning of the book is that thought itself is a restorative process, that even as it is directed toward its own boundaries, it is guided by an instinct to create. “In the field of the poem,” Duncan writes in “The Propositions,” “the unexpected / must come.”

PennSound's Duncan page has just recently been expanded significantly - thanks largely to the work of Mike Hennessey. There are recordings of readings done as early as 1950 - also several of 1963. And (scroll to the bottom of the Duncan page) there's a reading of Opening - in two parts - of unknown date and setting. Listen!

2001's version of 1960's version of the '50s

Pop surrealism, a So-Cal quasi-underground movement of the current decade, looks back to the late 50s and early 60s - obsessing visually over the cathode characters of that moment. Larry Reid, writing about this art, wonders why the interest in the 1960 moment today, and offers an idea of parallels. Both eras of prosperity in which conservatives extol nebulous family values while demonizing the influence of popular culture. Both eras stand at the end of the dominance of "inaccessible conceptual art and the opaque dialogue that accompanied it." I'm not sure I see these parallels, nor do I see the diminution of conceptual art now (or then). But since the reasons for interest in the 1960 moment now are obviously relevant to this project - this one here - I suppose I have to reckon seriously with such accounts of 2001's version of 1960.

I've written a longer entry on pop surrealism here. Above at right is Tim Biskup's "The Channeler."

road of excess leads to palace of wisdom

William Styron spent a year in Rome. Took a drive with friends and beloved Rose to Anzio, had a meal at a fine ristorante recommended to them. On the drive back, Styron, at the wheel of the car, hit a motorcyclist - riding a Vespa. The man flew along the hood of the car and shattered the windshield, then was flung forward and landed on the pavement just in front of the car. The man did not die but Styron was horribly shaken. After a while, a doctor in attendance, Styron saw missing fingers and an empty eye socket. "Do not worry," said the doctor (in Italian, of course), "He lost those in the last accident."

Styron refused to drive for several weeks. And later he wrote this incident into the beginning of Set This House on Fire, the blockbuster Styron novel of 1960.

In the novel the motorcyclist goes into a coma, from which he awakes only at the very end of the book.

Thematically the novel is a condemnation of vulgar postwar American culture. The title comes from one of John Donne's epistles to the Earle of Carlile.

Formally it's odd and interesting: Styron at one point decided to compose the second half of the novel simultaneously in the first person and the third person. And he wrote on "dexies" - amphetamines. "I liked them," he said. He felt his pencil liberated and had access to surrealistic visions. He only took them for a week or so, since the main side effect was insomnia.

Norman Mailer hated the book even before it was published. People had been talking about Styron's next big novel (The Long March didn't quite count) after the great first book, Lie Down in Darkness. Preparing Advertisements for Myself, Mailer wrote that he's heard the new Styron novel is done. "If it is at all good, and I expect it is, the reception will be a study in the art of literary advancement. For Styron has spent years oiling every literary lever and power which could help him on his way, and there are medals waiting for him in the mass-media."

In the novel there's a Mailer-like character, Mason Flagg. Through Flagg (who says word for word a few things Mailer had said) Styron wanted to tell Mailer that he's been wasting his talent - especially hanging aesthetically around with the beat scene and modern jazz and free sex, which Styron deemed banal. So on page 124 of Set This House on Fire Styron has Flagg say something that was right out of a letter Mailer had written to Styron - a private signal to Mailer that Flagg had a message for him.

Paul Pickrel, reviewing the new Styron for Harper's, wrote: "Styron's great resource is excess." And: "The theme of the book was neatly summarized by William Blake long ago in his apothegm: 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.'"

review: July 1960 issue, p. 93; other sources including James West's excellent biography of Styron

weekend tourist beatniks not permitted

For the August 6 issue of the New Yorker the mag sent out one of its "Talk of the Town" writers to find out what was making Greenwich Village coffeehouse so attractive to "beatniks" - and whether there was much variation between and among the day's bohemians. The first impression the Village gave off incited a list: "motorcycles, sports cars, Cadillacs, Larks, bicycles, tricycles, little kids, bigger kids, boy gangs, man gangs, girl gangs, young couples, old couples, middle-aged couples, loners, black-garbed Italian ladies in their seventies, panhandlers, book carriers, and Beats of various shapes, sizes and natures. Paperback books, handwrought jewelry, antiques, sandals, pottery, straw objects, paintings, simmering Italian sausages, onions, and pizzas, and freshly boiled sweet corn...."

Using the "Talk" first-person plural, a coffeehouse denizen is approached:

"You Beat?" we asked.
"It's a legitimate thing to be a Beatnik, even though most of the time it's the provincial thing," he said. "It draws me. It's the power of innocence."

The destination was Cafe Figaro at the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal. Tom Ziegler owned the Figaro and said, "Our Beatniks are the real, true old-fashioned, wonderful bohemians...We don't permit weekend tourst Beatniks--a lot of them come down from the Bronx sporting day-old beards--or any would-be Beatniks who read about the press-created-image Beatniks and try to be like them, to work out their psychic difficulties here."

It was not clear how Ziegler didn't "permit" fake or superficial or part-time beatniks from his establishment. I'm having fun imagining this - and the faux beatniks' reaction to being called out as such.

"Life Line," New Yorker, Aug 6, 1960, pp. 21-23

that tell-tale negligent slouch

Late '59, and the super-famous literary journalist Malcolm Cowley (ex-expatriate, ex-radical, now household name among readers of the centrist-liberal literary weeklies such as The New Republic) was obviously working on Whitman. His three-page essay about Whitman published in the October 26, 1959 issue of TNR seems to be a chip off the workbench - something that came to him from another larger project. (That larger project was an introduction he wrote for a 1959 edition of Leaves of Grass.)

Even all those years ago, a slick literary weekly is not just going to publish an essay on Whitman's developing system of philosophy - I mean, an essay that is not a review and not hitched to some more relevant matter.

That is why, I think, Cowley adapted his piece about Whitman's philosophical ideas so that it's main point, seemingly, was that Whitman is a beatnik. Perhaps I found this interesting to read, then, only (1) in context of its original publication and (2) as a way of disclosing conventions of literary journalism.

It's a literary essay trying rather desperately and stupidly/superficially for a wider audience than one would get in 1960 by publishing in American Quarterly or American Literature. But now, for all time, we can say that people at the end of the 50s thought of Whitman as a forerunner of the beats on the basis of facts such as that both Walt and the beatnik walked with a "negligent slouch."

But it turns out that "Whitman's beatnik period...proved to be only a transitory phase of a life that had several other phases." So there's cake and eating it too. Whitman is a beat (EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!) but he's really not (we wouldn't want to be a slave to fashion).

So, follow me here: Whitman is a beatnik. Read on. But, well, no he's not. And in fact Whitman (and thus the beats) do all these extra-poetic antics to cover over the fact that the writing is bad. This is why someone like Kenneth Patchen sets his poetry to music - so that the music will drown out the poems' flaws; hence (still following?) since Whitman was like a beat, one can imagine Whitman needing a loud band to play while one hears his verse too, similarly hiding its failure as verse.

Cowley's piece was called "The Guru, the Beatnik and the Good Gray Poet." Here's a portion:

There were...literary men who described their meetings with Whitman in a tone of fascinated horror that suggests that accounts of present-day visitors to North Beach or Venice West. Indeed one cannot help feeling that the Whitman of those days was a predecessor of the beatniks. He had the beard, the untrimmed hair, the negligent slouch.... His costume...was another defiance of convention that might be regarded as the 1960 equivalent of sweatshirt and sandals.... He stayed out of the rat race, he avoided the squares, preferring the company of omnibus drivers and deckhands on the ferries; he was "real gone," he was "far out"; and he was writing poems in what Lawrence Lipton calls "the 'open,' free-swinging style that is prized in Beat Generation literature." "Whitman must have thought he was Kenneth Patchen," Lloyd Frankenberg said of those particular poems. Some of them should be read to loud music as a means of glossing over their faults and holding the listener's attention - not to the music of a jazz combo but perhaps to that of a regimental brass band.

Cowley also published on Whitman in the October 31, 1959 issue of the Saturday Review. This seems to be right out of the introduction he wrote for the above-mentioned new edition.

(anti-)school of quietude

Here's a poem I found in the Nation, submitted by George Cuomo. It has a long title (in bold below) and the body of the poem is one line.

- - -

Poem in Honor of Poets
Who Form Schools
Deliver Manifestoes
Name Generations
Chant Slogans
Praise Each Other
And Roar in Cellar Saloons

They also serve who only sit and write.

- - -

Cuomo (born 1929 and apparently still around) published eight novels, a bunch of short stories, some poetry (haven't found any yet), and at least one book of nonfiction. When he published this angry ditty in the Nation he hadn't yet published his first novel; that was Jack Be Nimble of 1963. Given that his main characters - e.g. a small-time criminal caught up in a brutal prison riot - would seem to befit the anti-establishment aesthetic of the poetry he attacks in his poem, I'm guessing that by the time was publishing in novels, real '60s fiction, he had changed his mind or tempered his view. Or perhaps what was okay in fiction wasn't in verse. Or perhaps he's really merely expressing his preference for the introverted life of writers who write rather than affiliate and proclaim themselves.

Nation May 2, 1959, p. 146.

effetism

Found in the Baltimore Evening Sun: "Therefore, says David Rosen-Jaffe, he is going to search for his bride not in Effete and urban Tel Aviv but in a rural farming area."

To which the wisecracking filler-space writing New Yorker writer quipped: "Prettiest girl we ever saw was in Effete, just the same."

New Yorker, June 6, 1959, p. 117

Gordon Parks chooses Robinson Jeffers

The February 15 issue of Life did a photo spread on modern and contemporary American poetry. To kick off National Library Week, Life commissioned Gordon Parks to celebration "the nationwide poetry boon." Parks chose some favorite poems and took photographs to go along with them, "conveying their themes with his camera." The subtitle of the spread: "Captured by the camera: haunting loveliness based on modern verse." The poets selected: John Peale Bishop, Millay, MacLeish, Frost, WCW ("The Red Wheelbarrow"), Jeffers, Richard Wilbur, Eliot, Crane. In the caption for Williams: "...writes extremely conversational verse." Eliot: "...the most influential of all contemporary poets...also one of the most complex." Crane: "...a highly neurotic genius."

Parks was the first African American to work at Life. He co-founded Essence. His semi-autobiographical The Learning Tree would come out four years later, in '64, as would his film Flavio. He was an early contributor to the blaxploitation genre, and his son, Gordon Jr., directed Superfly. Again Life's intro to this "Kaleidoscope" notes that Parks chose the poems; already a main interest was race in America, yet none of the poems even hints at race or even really gestures toward the politics to which Parks would be so devoted. Perhaps this was all thematically truly before, for instance, he created a photo essay documenting the Selma to Montgomery march for Life (1963). At right, though, is a photo of Langston Hughes Park took in 1941; he apparently did not choose a Hughes poem for this spread.

In any case, Life is ecstatic about poetry's comeback: "Recordings of poems have rung up sales of more than two million albums. Poets are barnstorming the country, to recite their works before sellout audiences. In nightclubs and coffee houses, declaiming poetry is the rage, with out without musical accompaniment."

adventures in architecture

Sandro loves Anna but Anna is unhappy and causes herself to disappear. Claudia is Anna's friend and joins Sandro in what often seems an unfocused effort to find Anna. Now Sandro makes love to Anna and Anna mostly accepts this but feels guilty about Anna and is often languid in her responses. The women can talk about feelings to each other, but since Anna leaves the film so early we don't see much of this quality; the men can't talk feelingfully to each other, nor to the women. In one scene, Claudia and Sandro are in a small village; while Sandro goes looking for Anna is a (literally) hole-in-the-wall hotel, Claudia waits for him outside that wall, as the men of the town slowly circle around her, wordlessly staring.

This is Antonioni's L'Aventura of 1960. Any extraneous plot or info-providing dialogue has been cut, or, rather, was never there. The easiest thing to say about this film is that it is about ineffability.

But Sandro is an architect and the father of the unhappy Anna is what we'd today call a developer. The landscape of the film is covered with architectural forms. Very few scenes are not framed by the shapes of the built environment. Sandro and Claudia, wandering around what I suppose is Sicily, move in and out of soft- and off-white lines and shadows cast by buildings. They are caught between the old forms and the new. Since Sandro's apartment (which we see briefly at the beginning) is gorgeously modern, in a southern clime kind of way, we assume that Sandro is in favor of the New. But Anna has been lost into the Old. They are in different universes but it doesn't seem to bother Sandro at all. That's perhaps the oddest of the many odd feelings one has watching this film.

modernism in Pittsburgh

G. David Thompson, a Pittsburgh millionaire, 61 years old in 1960, had been collecting modern art for twenty-five years by then. Klees and Giacomettis were all around the house. He owned Leger's Composition with Three Sisters. And a Juan Gris still-life: "A friend of mine owned this," he said of the Gris. "He was dying to buy a Braque but didn't have the ready cash so I bought this to help him out. No great favor--I liked the painting." At least one Mondrian. And so on.

In '59 he offered the entire collection to the city of Pittsburgh, and he threw in the house too - which the city, he said, could use as a ready-made museum.

Pittsburgh said no. Not interested. Thanks, but no thanks.

Angry and lovin' a deal, Thompson promptly sold 97 - that's 97, yes - of his Klees to a dealer for more than $1 million, and then began to buy little-known moderns. After selling the Klees, he said: "I want to enjoy once more the pleasure of bare walls waiting for new pictures."

(In '61 the Guggenheim put up a show called "One Hundred Paintings from the G. David Thompson Collection." It's easy, especially now, to gloat about the wisdom of the Guggenheim people or of the New York museum-going public: they, after all, wanted what Thompson was doing. This entry isn't meant to speak one way or the other to that. Rather, I'm thinking about what happens when a philanthropic gesture is undervalued or misunderstood. What does the philanthropist do in response? After all, he or she is typically - let's admit it - someone who is used to getting his or her way. Is pique the right reaction? Was Thompson perhaps in the wrong place? Or is it apt for him to stick it out, hoping for a better day?)

Above: Leger's "The Compass" (1926). Thompson bought this Leger from Buchholz Gallery in New York in 1953. He owned it for the rest of his life. It was sold by Parke-Bernet in '66 after Thompson's death in '65. It is now at the Art Institute of Chicago.

sources: Life May 16, 1960, with a great spread of photos from the collection; an article in Time, Jan 13, 1961.

founded after lunch

"Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art."

That's Frank O'Hara, of course, in his partly ironic and party straightforward "Personism" manifesto. It's personal and impersonal, chatty and abstract. It creates its own I-do-this-I-do-that history. "It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone...."

How much mock manifesto is personism? Could it be merely the aesthetic ideology of the artist who was a "coterie" of people being...well...human beings - being the sort who found (that grandiose term) movements (more grandiosity) after lunch (a key O'Hara I-am-just-a-person moment) on a day in which he is in love (another set-piece O'Hara mood)?

O'Hara dated it September 5, 1959, and it was published as "Personism: A Manifesto" in Yugen #7, 1961. EXCERPT>>>

Thanks to David Slarskey.

Berkeley Review, late 1950s

The folks who launched in the Berkeley Review did so with a bold new moderation, proudly calling themselves one-eyed poets. MORE>>>

many memorials but no memory

Geoffrey Hill's For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 is published by Dufour Editions, a volume of 59 pages. Our library here has two copies, both stored away in Rare Books: first, the copy that Tom Lask, then the poetry editor at NYTBR, was sent by the press.

(The very fact that Penn's Lask collection has the book means that it was never assigned by Tom; it's a tellingly interesting collection for this very fact--it's a huge archive of poetry that NYTBR chose not to review, a kind of negative collection. And yet it's full of fantastic and important books! Valuable as an archive precisely because - at least in some cases - the Times didn't thing its contents, at the time of publication, were valuable.)

The other copy Penn has is signed by Hill.

Hill was born in Worcestershire in 1932. He taught at Leeds from 1954 until 1980. After that, some years at Cambridge. In '88 he moved to the U.S., to Boston University as a professor of literature and religion. In '06 he moved back to Cambridge.

Hill was not part of the "Movement" writers of the '50s and seems uninfluenced by his contemporaries down the years. Oddly parallel and un-part. In the later work especially his poems sometimes transcribe the idioms of public life - TV lingo, political slogans, what passes for wisdom in the media.

Three of his poems are among the most powerful responses to the Holocaust: "Two Formal Elegies for the Jews in Europe," "September Song," and "Ovid in the Third Reich."

He has defended poetic difficulty on grounds of political philosophy: what's difficut is democratic (a reversal of the charge often made against "difficult" verse).

In 1959-60 Hill taught on secondment in the U.S. - at the University of Michigan. At Leeds he and Jon Silken became friends (around this time) and a little later, in '64, Silken's Northern House press issued a pamphlet of eight Hill poems under the title Preghiere. Christopher Ricks, our Dylan critic-fan, championed Hill and is in large measure responsible for Hill's fame in England.

Hill is historical, formal (often rhyming), rhetorical, "difficult" (in the sense of dense) poet. Above all, for him, historical memory is crucial:

Ingratitude
Still gets to me, the unfairness
and waste of survival; a nation
with so many memorials but no memory.

An online poetry book review site says of For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958: "Too formal, he only rarely breaks free here, and his language is also not as sledge-hammer precise as in his later work." Baffling phrase, sledge-hammer precise. But maybe it's apt after all. Here are a few lines of the finel section of "Genesis," a poem written in 1952 and published in The Unfallen in '60:

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

Oppen and Zukofsky, together again

From Mark Scroggins' new biography of Louis Zukofsky, The Poem of a Life, I read aloud a passage about 1958 reunion of Zukofsky and George Oppen. Oppen had been in Mexico for years and the once-intense friendship had dissipated. But now they threw themselves back together in a serious way. Have a listen:

the language is ours

Beat Girl, 1960. It is dated ’60 and was released in England that year – but in the U.S. in October ’61.

The “beat girl” is played by Gillian Hills, a pouty, pale blonde born in Cairo in 1944. Her father was Denis Hills, an Englishman born in 1913 and a writer: "My travels in Turkey" (1964), "The Man with a Lobelia Flute" (1969), "The white pumpkin" (1976), "Rebel people" (1978), "The Last Days of White Rhodesia" (1981). Ms. Hills was in “Lana: Queen of the Amazons” (1964), “Cabaret” on TV in ’62, and played Sonietta in “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) and was Glenda Kelly on TV’s Dallas in the mid-70s. And to think – she started out as a beat girl.

Now back to our movie. Dad’s been away for 3 months, picking up a young French wife (she’s 24) who is now, back home in London, a step-mother to Jennifer, the angry daughter. Angry about the divorce, angrier still to have this young step-mother around.

Dad’s house is modern and he – Paul – is explicitly a modernist. He’s an architect, talks incessantly about the "modern way we live." In the living room, otherwise appointed with modern furniture and cubistic paintings and a cool-looking recessed TV, is a large model of “City 2000,” which he keeps under a cover – perhaps only to keep himself from obsessively talking about it.

He and his daughter both say that he loves one thing unconditionally, and that's City 2000.

Step-mom – her name is Nichole - feels it’s time for someone to go upstairs and say goodnight to Jennifer; Modern Dad says “Oh, she’s used to taking care of herself” and would rather his new wife hear all about City 2000. His speech about the city includes statements such as these:

“It’s a city, lots of residents, and yet it’s easy for anyone to feel utterly alone in it.”

"None of this cluttered, hodge podge sort of design. This city is clean, clear lines, totally organized.”

Get the picture? Yes, the modernist is inhuman and committed to social theories to the exclusion of his own kin. His ideas about how people live have caused his daughter to "rebel." She embraces...a more human aesthetic which she finds in London spaces that are the opposite of City 2000, cafes (literally) in caves under the city.

At home Jennifer is cold, and she is cruel in responding to her new mom. She’s not much warmer to dad. The three, this new family, retire for the night - their first night together under one roof. But in an hour or so… Jennifer puts on her beatnik clothes and sneaks out to a cave club with loud lazy but strongly percussive jazz and at least one guy wearing Jack Kerouac’s plaid flannel shirt.

What are Jennifer’s politics? Well, the movies’ version of Beat politics. Here’s Jennifer on cold-war atomic one-ups-manship: “Next week - boom! - the world goes up in smoke. And what's the score? Zero!”

When Nichole comes to Jennifer’s art school to pick her up for lunch, she can’t find her. Another student, when asked, knows her as “that crazy girl who’s gone in for those beatniks.” Nichole doesn’t understand the term “beatnik” and asks. “Oh it’s an awful thing that’s come over here from America” and tells Nichole that Jenny can probably be found at “a café in SoHo called ‘The Off Beat’ – she’s always there.” Nichole finds Jenny and her friends at the cafe. The beat guys thing step-mom is pretty sexy, though uncool, but Nichole is mortified that dad's new wife has entered her separate scene.

One night, after Jenny has returned home late, she and Paul have a 3 AM argument. Jenny calls him a “square” and he’s incensed: “This language! These words! What do they mean?!” Jenny exclaims that such a language “is ours.” “It comes from us. We didn’t get it from our parents. We can express ourselves and they don’t know what we’re talking about.”

Paul: “Why do you need to feel so different?”

Jennifer: “It’s all we’ve got. People like you build cities, but you don’t know the first thing about us – we who have to live in them.”

Later the kids are in another cave club, apparently some reclaimed spot in the underground, a WW2-era bomb shelter. The London beat scene has set up their pads in the very places where their parents once cowered from nightly attacks by the Luftwaffe. They get to talking and one of the guys tells his story: he was literally born in an underground shelter during the war. “My old lady was bombed out, we had no place to live, so I was born here and we lived here.” He knows it’s an irony that England has come so far from those dark wartime days and yet here they are, choosing to be back down there. “Like a bunch of scared rats underground.” Does he mean their parents’ generation – scared of wartime enemies? It’s not clear. Then another beat boy muses. His mother was killed in the bombing of London; his father was an army general and now the boy feels somehow that his father was responsible for all this militarism even as he acknowledges he was in Italy fighting the Nazis. Then Jenny says, “I like it here. This is my home.”

One of the posters for this film, showing Jenny as a doped-up sexpot, reads, "Hop-Head UK School Girl Gets in Trouble." But Jenny's not hopped on anything (or if she is "hopped" it's caffeine, since at the Off Beat they drink coffee). Far from wanting to wander, she only wants a home...so long as it's not the home of her cold modernist father dreaming of the city of the year 2000. That city is the one that he hopes will sweep away London as it really was. Jenny feels more at "home" in the underground, back at the scene of the society's moment of greatest realness and vulnerability--and, psychologically, at the point just prior to the fragmentation of the family.

colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Noam Chomsky and his wife Carol parented three children. The first two were born during the period that interests me. Aviva (b 1957) later became an academic, like dad, but her specialty was Central American history and politics. Diane was born in 1960 and later, among other things, worked for a development agency along with her Nicaraguan companion in Managua.

Dad was made a tenured professor at MIT at the young age (for a full prof) of 33 in 1961.

B.F. Skinner, at the time of Chomsky's emergence, was the dominant theorist of language as behavior. Chomsky's repudiation of Skinner's theory came (famously) in his review of Skinner's work in 1959. (This was: "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" in the widely read linguistics journal Language.)

Readers of this blog – you're perhaps more than casually interested in what happened in 1960, at least I'm hoping – will know at least the gist of the above, particularly, I suppose, the news of Chomsky's hit on Skinner. You might not know, though, that Chomsky's father was a noted Hebrew scholar. Most people who have thought about Noam Chomsky's life and work do believe that the father's work on Hebrew as a language had a great impact on Chomsky's youthful interests. The elder Chomsky didn't just study Hebrew as a language, and of course language study and linguistics are by no means the same thing. But the old man did scholarly work on medieval and historical Hebrew grammar and young Noam knew Hebrew grammar as a child, long before he even knew that linguistics was a discipline.

Chomsky grew up with English and Hebrew. He also learned classical Arabic and some French and German a little later.

1959, at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton: Noam stood in front of a blackboard with the following two line poetic bit of didacticism behind him scrawled in his handwriting in chalk:

Colorless green ideas
sleep furiously.

There it is: syntax versus semantics, in a nutshell, in a bit of poetic synaesthesia.

The kind of linguistics Chomsky conceived in this period concerned itself with matters so utterly different from those studied by his colleagues that one could say that Chomsky invented a completely new field or that he was from the start working in a separate one. But Chomsky insisted on showing the links between what he was now saying and the ideas of others over hundreds of years. This – the effort to link his radical approach to the past – made it all the more revolutionary and disconcerting.

Skinner's 1957 book, which Chomsky reviewed in 1959, was the first large-scale effort to incorporate major aspects of linguistic behavior into the realm of behavioral psychology. The field of linguistics had to respond. That Chomsky did so clearly and dramatically – and negatively – made him instantly famous in the two fields.

What surprised Chomsky was how limited and how simplistic was the nature of the "function" producing behavior. You had to rely on knowing inputs from outside (such as they could be controlled for the purpose of study – such as reinforcements) and you had then to rely on outputs (or behaviors) and to believe you could know what the outputs are or mean or indicate. The limitation was necessary because Skinner had no access to "the internal structure of the organism" (27); he had to remain outside. His confidence was undue in general, but when he moved to linguistic behavior, the dependency on observing inputs and outputs really becomes deficient. Skinner compensates for arguing ever more adamantly (and repeatedly) that "external factors consisting of present stimulation and the history of reinforcement…are of overwhelming importance" in understanding human behavior (27-28). "The magnitude of the failure of this attempt to account for verbal behavior serves as a kind of measure of the importance of the factors omitted from consideration, and an indication of how little is really known about this remarkably complex phenomenon" (28).

Linguistic behavior – what we write, what we say, what we mean to mean – cannot be predicted by inputs, nor understood as behavior by recording outputs, especially if the latter is assumed to be understandable/translatable through conventional means (denotatively, lexicographically, etc.). Even efforts (not Skinner's – he didn't or couldn't do this, but efforts by real linguists) to create a unifying theory of language behavior from the inside, "conceal complexities" (56). Since the behavior of the speaker, listener, or learner of language constitutes the actual data for any study of language, that's where we need to go, but we also need to be skeptical of empiricist confidence of the sort Skinner evinces. "The construction of a grammar which enumerates sentences in such a way that a meaningful structural description can be determined for each sentence does not in itself provide an account of this actual behavior. It merely characterizes abstractly the ability of [a person, a regular user of the language] who has mastered the language to distinguish sentences from nonsentences, to understand new sentences (in part), to note certain ambiguities, etc. These are very remarkable abilities."

"Does not in itself provide an account…" "Very remarkable…" Grammars inevitably "conceal complexities…." Perhaps this is why Chomsky in this period so intriguingly and frustratingly chalked gnomic poems on chalkboards:

Colorless green ideas
sleep furiously.

Sources: Wolfgag Sperlich's Noam Chomsky; Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent; Chomsky's review of Skinner, Language 35, 1 (1959).