Looking Back to the Beats, Looking Forward to Conceptual/Other Writing/Literature

Today in class we're going to take a quick look at selected paragraphs of some of the Beat Generation papers you submitted last week. Many of your papers were very good. Remember that you'll need to revise and edit a copy of this paper for the final day we meet,  Wed, December 11.

The names have been removed (in fact, I don't remember who wrote most of these selections). It's a normal thing for a writer to make a small mistake here and there. Everyone who writes knows how true this is. However, we need to work hard to minimize these inevitable mistakes. Any written work, for school, personal life, or employment, will be less likely to be persuasive and trustworthy if it contains multiple casual errors. You know this is true.

Also in class today...

We're also going to take a quick look at developments in the "avant-garde" movements in literature as exemplified by Kenneth Goldsmith and his remarkable archive of art & aesthetics: ubu.com. It's easy to see that Goldsmith's idea of "literature" expands far beyond traditional ideas of poetry/fiction/essay to include all manner of hard-to-classify art production using language (written, heard, visualized, performed, etc.). Also, here's a short piece about ubu.com that calls it "the youtube of the avant-garde." Remember that all of these files can be downloaded to your own hard-drive, smart phone, or wherever you keep downloaded files. Everything is always free on ubu.com.