Beat-CounterBeat.

Turtle Island by Gary Snyder

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


One of many, many under-mentioned, under-appreciated texts of the Beat generation's impact on writing. Burroughs, be he successful, enigmatic and insanely smart, had too much self-destruction and hatred in him to consciously benefit anybody besides himself. I read some of his novels and just didn't appreciate the sarcasm, irony, cynicism, anger, spite, whatever you want to call it...Burroughs shot his own wife. As a bar trick. The fact that he got away with it, I think, is what makes a lot of people respect and fear his writing.
Here I am, writing about Burroughs in my Snyder review...weird. I should have read Gary Snyder a long, long time before reading Ginsberg, Bukowski, Burroughs, Kerouac, Tom Wolfe...I'd guess there were a lot of other writers working during that time. I'd recommend almost anyone besides the names you most commonly hear in association with the Beat movement, in order to study the beats- it helps to know what they were writing against.

Fresh air has a value you can not quantify.
Sunlight has a warmth you can not explain.
wind has a strength you can not identify.

Snyder knows all of these things...Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg...I don't know.

I thought, after re-reading this, I would add a rebuttal to my rebuttal, from Wikipedia:

Several literary critics treated Burroughs's work harshly. For example Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled "A Review of the Reviewers", Burroughs answers his critics in this way:

Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. (...) such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (...) 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion (...) Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don't know than for any other reason.
—William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers

Zing!







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