Talking ‘bout my generation
I walked past a little book store last week and caught myself slowing down, drawn to the window like the book-addict I am, eyes glowing with the reflection of shiny new book covers. I had caught the name Allen Ginsberg. Keeping him company were William S. Burroughs with his ‘so I’m a deviant, now what?’ description of heroin addiction, and Jack Kerouac was rubbing his shoulder on the other side, whispering, ‘I’ve got the wheels, let’s just ditch this mob.’
I stopped, I stared, I salivated – I want to re-read them all. I want again to feel the rip in my guts after reading Ginsberg’s poem Howl,
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…”
I was in Barcelona drinking cheap red wine that first time, in a dingy bar with football on a big screen and loud British backpackers disturbing the peace. I read those words. I looked around. Where are the best minds of my generation?
Fast forward a few days from the bookstore window and forty pages in to Joan Didion’s White Album, and I feel my footsteps becoming heavy with the disillusionment in the air. The kids aren’t dying their hair anymore. Eminem and Rammstein and Lilly Allen and Peaches have come and gone, all the feistiness and the fear and the passion and the “I don’t give a FUCK!” feels missing. Does Lady Gaga want to actually tell me anything? I struggle to see anything beneath the beats, I struggle to listen. Am just I getting old?
It’s flooding in Pakistan right now – a worse disaster than the South Asian Tsunami the aid organisations tell me. I pulled out my credit card, but I’m not glued to images or news updates. My twitter feed barely blips with mentions of the drowned. In my office, it hasn’t even come up.
I barely feel the need to mention Australia is in the midst of a federal election campaign, it’s so lacklustre. Where are the Julia t-shirts this time round? The bumper stickers and badges? That prickle in the air over coffee I felt in 2007 as people read the Sunday paper full of policies and promises and passion?
At first I thought it was me, but that was before I saw shop windows trading off the back of America’s ‘lost generation,’ and walked into pubs blasting the Sex Pistols and Patti Smith.
I check the headlines out of habit, turn down the volume of the radio, and I know – it’s time we talked about our generation.
Recommended reading for the disillusioned:
- Howl, Allen Ginsberg
- On the Road, Jack Keruoac
- Junky, William S Burroughs
- The White Album, Joan Didion
