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BEAT_PATROL
January 28, 2011
Originally a post to usenet,
quoted verbatim this time:
From: Joseph Brenner <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.gothic
Subject: Re: wiki-peeing
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:25:19 -0800
"Peter H. Coffin" writes:
> Joseph Brenner wrote:
>
>> I find myself thinking about wikipedia issues in general a lot lately,
>> and in particular I'm having some trouble with a troll, and I'm
>> feeling the need to talk through some of this stuff.
> Just babble away. Maybe it'll haul RDD out of the weeds.
Okay, okay. Let me get started and see where this goes. The playing
field for this particular game is the "Beat Generation" wikipedia page
and it's associated Talk page (you jump into the Talk page with a tab
labeled "Discussion" these days... that one of those logical
improvements that an experienced user often hates, and I expect causes
more confusion that it alleviates)... one of the minor ironies about
doing the wikip/bg thing is the need to write about these guys who
were into loose spontaneous babble in a way that's as stodgy and
tedious as possible, so I think just for the hell of it, I might play
Kerouac Jr here and roll through this on run-ons without edits--
actually that means I should start em-dashing, much like the Kerouac
of the Subterraneans-- the nice thing about dashes is you never need
balanced sets of them, and in a pinch they can function as a stand-in
for any other bit of punctuation--
But perhaps digressions about digressions are a bit much.
Anyway, the BG page is a magnet for freaks and weirdos of various
stripes-- what this says about me is left as an exercise-- which means
with every new contributor wandering through you can expect another set
of strange problems. A long-time contributor F. Simon Grant might be
taken as a case in point-- his writing was definitely a little on the
scattered side, and for awhile there he wasn't citing sources enough,
but we'd gotten to a point where we could work together easily enough:
rather than just Boldly hacking on the page, he tended to raise issues
on the Talk page, where we could hash them out reasonably peacfully, and
unlike most contributors to the page he really was willing to do some
research to turn up usable references that could help settle questions.
Grant's big issue, I would say, our biggest fundamental disagreement is
that he's inclinced to take Kerouac and Holmes coinage of the term "Beat
Generation" more seriously than I am. You see, there are roughly two
ways of looking at term "Beat Generation": one is that it was this
handful of writers and freaks hanging around in New York in the
late-40s, who gradually attracted other writers/freaks and expanded by
merging with other little "scenes" that were developing here and there
("San Francisco Rennaissance", "Black Mountain Poets", etc); they pulled
off some big coups publishing scandalous successes (I'll spare you my
french) that ultimately corrupted/converted much of the Youth of
America, turning into a Beatnik phenomena, which then mutated into the
Hippie phenomena--
That's the way I've been inclined to look at it. From that point of
view, you might say that Kerouac and Holmes pulled off a slick piece
of press agentry, putting over their friends as a New Scene as a trend
with a name they invented. The other way of looking at this though,
is that Kerouac and Holmes were *smart social critics*, they were
observers who identified a genuine trend for which they mainly
supplied a name, and perhaps (later) supplied some guidance as they
dove in and swam with the stream they'd spotted.
The issue then, is was the act of naming the Beat Generation an
observation of something that was happening, or was it the point of
creation of something new?
(Let us take a moment to consider how absolutely ridiculous this whole
thing was... a couple of twenty-something writers are bullshitting in
a bar -- remember, this is around the end of WWII, and at the end WWI
Gertrude Stein and friends put over the term "Lost Generation", so now
here we are at the end of WWII, and these two kids want to have a
Generation of their *own* damn it, they want to make it clear that
they're going to get out from under the shadow of those Lost-types.
They consider calling themselves "The Found Generation", they kick
around a few other different terms, like "Furtive", and Kerouac comes
up with Beat, a piece of times-square-showbiz-carnie-junkie slang
("Not now, man, I'm beat...") and Holmes gets an article about their
great insight published in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (!?) and
that puts it over. The Holmes article, by the way, was at great pains
to distinguish the Beat from the Lost, and didn't do so terribly
successfully, though he made an interesting claim-- in retrospect it
looks prescient, so perhaps they weren't such complete fools at social
observation-- that where the Losties were fanatic materialists, the
Beats were convinced that the spiritual was part of the solution (he
says no more about it than that, and it was nearly ten years before
Kerouac picked up on Buddhism and such). 'Tis interesting to note
that the Beats were apparently at pains to have nothing to do with
those damn Lostniks they were sick of hearing about-- barely a mention
of folks like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, nothing about Stein, nothing
about Sartre, not even a line or two about what they objected to in
existentialism, which you might think would be right up their alley.
Isn't it amazing that these obsessive readers, searching hither and
yon for big ideas, were gobbling down Spengler and Korzybski and
Wilhelm Reich and Blake and Whitman and such... but Sartre? An
absolute blank, a resounding silence. But there I go, making
observations myself, and that is a no-no where wikipedia writing is
concerned: one is supposed to shut off one's brain and carefully avoid
original thought, we instead substitute a respect for a Family
Feud-style of consensus truth....
Oh, and here's a closing paren: ). Yes, I'm backsliding.
So, what's the difference between these two views of Beat? What does it
matter when you're writing up a summary of the subject? The problem is
a matter of scope: if you take the narrow view (the stone dropped in a
water, spreading outwards) you're justified in talking mainly about a
group of writers. If you're really talking about the character of an
entire generation, all bets are off. Marlon Brando? James Dean?
Aren't they even more central figures than Kerouac and Ginsberg?
The edge case that was causing some controversy in the talk page is
artists (i.e. painters-- the ambiguity in the word artist is a continual
annoyance, but lets leave some digressions for another day). Are there
any Beat artists at all? Is there perhaps a much later phenomena you
might call The Beatnik Painter? Were there any on the scene in the
late-40s, early-50s, like, oh say, Jackson Pollock?
Free jazz; abstract expressionism; and spontaneous prose:
all one phenomena? Why not?
(If I can keep this up I might score in the most-bytes-posted category
for this week with a single post...)
Anyway, the stage is almost set. You got me (aka Doom) as one of the
main authors of the BG page since 2003, then there's the fellow Grant
I mentioned, and there are a few other incidental players who've come
and gone over the years, whose precise handles I will skip for reasons
of google stealth and because I can never spell them right anyway.
There's an ArtSomething guy who I think wanted to add a section on
painters or something, a Raddish (or something) who I remember was
concerned a long time ago about how the Shooting of Joan was
presented... and there's this Tao1148 guy (or something like that) who
hasn't been around much, but all of a sudden ducked-in around the end
of the year, and started being a major troll, or an amazing facsimile.
Just so you know where this is going, Tao1148 was being weirdly
abusive, and then acting all officious (threatening to have
people banned, etc) if they responded in kind. I concluded he
was playing Sandbox (which is not described in the wikpedia
pages on Eric Berne's "Games People Play") and I decided to
walk away for awhile and ignore him. I left a message on
Grant's user page, recommending he not take the bait, and went
away for some time. Grant ignored me, but not Tao1148, who he
engaged with in a manner beloved by trolls everywhere. He got
Grant banned, and then proceeded to do a happy-dance on Grant's
corpse, and started copy-editing with a battle axe, chopping
the BG page down to about half it's former size (admittedly,
much of it arguably *did* need trimming at this
stage... myself, I dislike unceremoniously deleting someone
else's work, though...). Interestingly enough, Raddish jumped
in and helped him with the copyediting, leading me to wonder if
Troll1148 was running a sock-puppet (I still can't make up my
mind about that).
BORDER_TROLL
And so, I'm left feeling locked in a little room with this
deranged character whose clearly skilled at gaming the system
(or what system there is, because by design there ain't much),
pondering my options.
So, that's the overview. Maybe I'll go into a little detail later.
BEAT_BREAK
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