It looks like I will be starting a reading group with some graduate students on the Beat Generation. This was my idea, not theirs. I’ve been looking to do something a little more intellectually stimulating than the current class load–which consists of four oral English classes and three culture classes, all with sophomores–allows. Working with graduate students in some unofficial capacity seemed to be about my best bet. Truth be told, only one of the four or five students who will be joining had heard of the Beats, and several thought the Beats and the Hippies were the same thing. I wanted to find something to read that they might find culturally significant and that I thought I could say something interesting about. And the Beats seem to be the thing that interested them the most of all the options I gave them, although truth be told I would have preferred to do Emerson.

It will be interesting to see how the Beats will play over here. They may just be seen as crazy, destructive anarchists. They certainly were perceived like that in their own days, so it would not be surprising. But it may be that the vision of the world they offer may have a particular relevance to this place and time. For just as the Beats were seen as rising up against the conformity of the nineteen fifties, and setting forth an alternative vision of how one ought to live different than that prevalent in the Ozzie and Harriet society, so there may be a level at which the prevailing values here have become equally stultified, although I am not sure quite how to explain who Ozzie and Harriet were over here.

I have been told that there was one scholar of the Beat Generation in Chengdu, a very famous scholar as a matter of fact, and that he taught at Sichuan University (not my university) and recently died. Indeed, one of the members is a teacher here and is actually hoping to do some scholarship on the Beats. The others are graduate students who are anxious to learn anything at all about American society from an American. And I think they will definitely get something about America out of studying the Beats, for I think there is something quintessentially American about the Beats, especially about Kerouac, with whom we will begin. One of the article I assigned described On the Road as a love poem to America, and I think that is right.

It also looks like the film group will be continuing. Next week's offering is "Good Night and Good Luck," the George Clooney film about Senator Joe McCarthey (from my home state of Wisconsin) who went after Communists in the U.S. government in the 1950s and the reporter, Edward Murrow, who stood up to his bullying tactics.