3,841 words
Norman Mailer became a much-celebrated author of several novels, some quite dreadful, as well as a founder of The Village Voice. He wrote numerous essays, of which “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” became the most famous. It essentially served as an iconic manifesto for the nascent Counterculture. The following is a distillation and analysis of its ponderous sentences and floating abstractions. Read more …
Jerry Rubin’s Do It!
Jerry Rubin
Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970
Much to my surprise, Jerry Rubin has exceeded my expectations. To some, he was the voice of a generation. To others, he’s a symbol of everything that went wrong with some of the Boomers, and in particular the faults of the hippy-dippy counterculture. Read more …