bloody hell, I think I've found my definition in the diccionary
"If the US today is really the biggest, sweetest and most succulent casaba ever produced by the melon patch of civilization, it would seem only reasonable to find its surface profaned--as indeed it is-- by a few fruit flies. But reason would also anticipate contented fruit flies, blissful fruit flies--fruit flies raised by happy environment to the highest stages of fruit fly development. Such is not the case. The grandest casaba of all, in disconcerting fact, has incubated some of the hairiest, scrawniest, and most discontented specimens of all time: the improbable rebels of the Beat Generation, who not only refuse to sample the seeping juices of American plenty and American social advance but scrape their feelers in discordant scorn of any and all who do."
Beginning to an Article entitled "The Only Rebellion Around," by Paul O'Niel.
That is without question THE greatest introduction I've ever read. The. Greatest. I have to share it... it's amazing. Fuck all! A casaba, for christsake.
"This penetrating threnody has been going on ever since the Korean War, but it is astonishing how seldom the noise has been understood. The wide public belief that the Beats are simply dirty peoeple in sandals is only a small if repellent part of the truth. Any attempt to list the collective attitudes of Beatdom, it must be admitted, would be foolhardy in the extreme. Most of its members are against collectiveness of any description, a great many of them even refuse to admit there is any such thing as a Beat Generation, and most of them spend hours differing vehemently with their own kind. Individual Beats, however, in the course of what might be described as the Six Year War Against the Squares, have raised their voices against virtually every aspect of current American society: Mom, Dad, Politics, Marriage, the Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, the Ivy League Suit and Higher Education, to say nothing of the Automatic Dishwasher, the Cellophane-wrapped Soda Cracker, the SPlit-Level House and the clean, or peace-provoking, H-bomb. [[you can't be serious. OMG, I love this]]
"Beat philosophy seems calculated to offend the whole population, civil, military and ecclesiastic--particularly and ironically those radicals of only yesterday who demanded a better world for the ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed of the Great Depression and who still breathe heavily from proclaiming man's right to work and organize. Hard-core Beats watnt freedom to disorganize and thus to ensure full flowering of their remarkable individualities. They are against work and they are often ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed by preference. [[insert a bit of racist nonsense here, which I've deleted because it wasn't particularly eloquent or interesting]] ...But the Beat Generation can be much more accurately described as a cult of the Pariah. It yearns for the roach-guarded mores of the skid road, the flophouse, the hobo jungle and the slum, primarily to escape regimentation. It shares these with Negroes, when it does, only by coincidence.
"...the Beats find society too hideous to contemplate and so withdraws from it. He does not go quietly, however, nor so far that his voice is inaudible, and his rout of retreat is littered with old beer cans and marijuana butts. The industrious square, he cries, is a tragic sap who spends all the juices and energies of life in stultifying submission to the 'rat race' and does so, furthermore, with no more reward than sexual enslavement by a matriarchy of stern and grasping wives and the certainty of atomic death for his children. Thus, say the Beats, the only way man can call his soul his own is by becoming an outcast(...)"
And so forth.
I LOVE IT! The rest of the article is pretty astute, despite some (currently) radical social generalizations. I guess they were mostly normal for the late fifties, which is when this thing was published in "life" magazine.
My point, if there was any, other than my utter love for this horrible yet interesting article, is that I'm a beat. There's no way around it... "They went further and created an impenetrable community that turned the well-adjusted member of suburbia into a frustrated outsider." Uhm, that's me. That, and I'm the bloody spitting image of the Beat philosophers and (aspiring) writers. This is so cool. Life is good, in spite of everything.
Ressurect Beat!