BAKERSFIELD, CA-
I’m wondering if writers in my Generation X age group who contribute their talents to various sites and newspapers, and yet don’t feel like they’re a part of a literary movement, might feel a kinship to this particular piece that I have never shared publicly until now. The Dead Generation is an excerpt from chapter 9 of Citrus Girl, about a third of that chapter, and was written sometime between 1996 and 1998. Could all be drivel. It’s up to you to decide…
It’s 1996 and I’m thinking about Malcolm Cowley, one of the ‘lost’. There he was back in America and in the early 1930s writing of ‘mansions in the air’ and ‘blue juniata’, you know, contemplating future generations. Because back in America he realized an entire lost generation would eventually come back home to the cities, hillsides, countrysides to where innocence escaped them, to where in America, “somewhere the turn of a dirt road or the unexpected crest of a hill reveals your own childhood.” Those literary enclaves—the lost generation—the beat generation—any generation, generations inspiring non-writers and non-literary minded to become just as lost, or just as beat. After a while someone probably said, “You don’t have to be a beat writer or bop musician, or to have known any of the famous beats to be one” —and soon a generation having already took root, expanded, appeared in pop culture, subculture, counterculture, mainstream culture until all they had to do was just look like a beatnik, act like what they thought was a beatnik…
And now today’s dead generation—lost, but never forever lost and never completely forgotten—where are their slacker rebel origins? (more…)
