Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors if not my favorite... other than being based he has a sensibility that is not often found in authors from before the 60s.
Sure! i'll try my best to summarize it:
Steinbeck was ahead of other American authors of his time because to me, he always had an ecological viewpoint when it came to relationships, be it between humans, human and non-human beings, and between living and non-living beings. And i don't mean ecological in the hippy/environmentalist sense, but rather as the recognition that the individuals that make up a larger system are made of and by the relationships that they create, change and break. This kind of view came to be later codified and postulated as deep ecology and ecological thinking, and was the foundation for the (unfortunately now co-opted and gutted) environmentalist movement.
You could trace some of this influence to the fact that he was very close friends with a marine biologist, Ed Ricketts; and he even wrote a chronicle of one of his expeditions he rode along. However, I think his most Ecological work is Cannery Row, where the characters are well-defined as people, but he puts a lot of effort and care in describing them as if they were part of an ecosystem, fulfilling a role, creating a unique community, in constant local change but overall equilibrium. This kind of biological sensibility is not often found in American literature from the same time.
The foreword of the Penguin edition compares Cannery Row to a little tidal pool: where it's a little isolated ecosystem, and some living beings are resigned to surviving the best they can, others try to escape, but in the end all of them need the next tide to come and renew its resources and life, since the pool cannot live on its own.
Sorry if i got too long or technical haha, it's hard to turn dissertation brain off. I got a whole subchapter in my dissertation discussing two pre-1960s fiction authors/books that i think were foundational to, or at least exemplary of modern environmental discourse before it was even a thing, and Steinbeck is one of them. Having read a ton from him already made it much easier though.
Same, Hemingway was cool friends with Castro but tbh would have been shit to be married to or try and maintain a functional relation with (dude was a lowkey mess)
He's also not a very good writer. Last time I said that here I got some r*ddit-brained guy telling me i was a high schooler with bad taste tho lmao
Edit: found it
You might not like it, but his style of simple sentences that slowly coalesce around pretty enormous feelings was incredibly influential in American literature. While I love a complex, wrought sentence, the falling away of that kind of writing made way for a whole new literary environment.
Also sad characters who can't express their pain except by slowly circling around its source and effects resonate with me.
There's definitely some stinkers, too.
Just because something is influential doesnt mean it's good
I mean to be fair to you, Hemingway might be okay himself but he still has the same problem as Radiohead, just has the absolute worst and most pretentious stans whose first exposure to Edginess (For Men™) was through that media and who openly looks down on people who don’t care for it, and life is too short for me to ever have another conversation about music with one more Radiohead stan
Honestly the main themes I always got was just dude scared of their own mortality and aging as well as some trite diatribe about masculinity or some shit
No I'm a 30-year-old with bad taste (dislike of Hemingway is good taste tho)
Lenin
Lenin walks around the world.
Frontiers cannot bar him.
Neither barracks nor barricades impede.
Nor does barbed wire scar him.
Lenin walks around the world.
Black, brown, and white receive him.
Language is no barrier.
The strangest tongues believe him.
Lenin walks around the world.
The sun sets like a scar.
Between the darkness and the dawn
There rises a red star.
-Langston Hughes
- That sounds dumb as shit 2) The US was the first country in the americas, you get to make your denonym american if there were no other countries to distinguish from
That's fair, just in the context of this meme, both poet groups are refered to as American
Love to drunkenly play william tell with my spouse’s skull and a .38 caliber automatic pistol. Wholesome game for the whole family.
burrough was a great writer. without him we wouldn’t have, for one, pynchon (etc.). Most of his demons were caused by addictions, which means they were out of his control
Fuck off apologizing for this man. Burroughs domestically abused and then murdered his wife in front of their kid.
:caught-in-4che: “Yup, that yankee is a methed-out racist and misogynist”
maybe, but i personally wouldn't be a communist without Kerouac and Ginsberg and the like
although yeah, looking back those people really aren't anyone anybody should look up to
Yeah, Ginsberg really pushed me into being communist. She showed that liberal reformism is a dead horse and her death in 2020 was the funniest shit
Honest question: Why are you using she/her pronouns for Allen Ginsberg?
...Was Allen Ginsburg actually in NAMBLA or did I misread something somewhere?
He definitely advocated for them with ":freeze-peach:" lib bullshit. I think it was towards the end of his life. I haven't dug in more than that.
yes imo, it's a great poem and was apparently written before he got sketchy.
Yeah, I've heard that from a handful of guys I know. What about Kerouac did it for you? Didn't he wind up becoming an anti-communist who ratted people out to the feds?
Yeah probably, he was pretty conservative in his politics. I half-remember something from the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test where he got upset with the Merry Pranksters because they had fashioned the american flag into pants, and he thought it was a desecration of the flag. He was also pro-Vietnam war, voiced support for McCarthy and got mad at Ginsberg for his "pro-Castro bullshit." He was raised very Catholic and very conservative, and that upbringing influenced him especially as he got older and older.
I think the messages I got from reading those guys laid down a good foundation for becoming a communist. These guys were writing in the late 40s and 50s, and a lot of the messages I picked up were about rejecting these sort of rigid traditional values of white America in the 50s. They obviously weren't the only people who had this message, but they were privileged white dudes just sort of drifting around doing a ton of drugs, and I was also a privileged white dude, very aimless and doing a ton of drugs at the time, so I sort of related to their whole scene and was more receptive to them.
Also, I obviously had gotten this message of nonconformity and not being bound by rigid traditions, being open minded, etc. from other sources, movies, tv, etc. But with the Beats it seemed like they weren't just rejection but were also concerned with creating new ways of living, new ways of relating to one another, etc. There was more creation that was beyond just a general "don't conform to society!" message. So I think 1) they instilled this understanding of myself opposed to 1950s american values - which, when I began getting into politics, linked to terms like "white America" and "the West" and 2) I started concerning myself with the creation of new ways of living and organizing society, not just nonconformity and opposition
I have no idea what I'd think if I went back to that stuff now, and its been years since I've touched any of that stuff. But this is what I can remember getting out of it. I was not political in any sense at the time, but its I think what started me on the path that has led to Marxism
technically there’s nothing wrong with murdering your wife under buddhism,
The first precept is against taking life.
doing it to sever attachments technically makes sense
It really doesn't :wtf-am-i-reading:
I am going to post art of my fursona dropkicking a nazi... wait that's cool actually.
