Thursday, July 14, 2005

Bureau of Public Secrets



Bureau of Public Secrets is an interesting American Website publishing texts from the Situationists and like-minded thinkers, such as the late Kenneth Rexroth, Ken Knabb, et al. Here's the latest posting from BOP Secrets:


Kenneth Rexroth's "THE MAKING OF THE COUNTERCULTURE"
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/counterculture.htm

Writing at the height of the counterculture in the late 1960s, Rexroth looks back at its origins and development, stressing the radical aspects underlying its more visible and superficial features.

"Although all the literary editors and the academicians were busy telling the world in the early fifties that the age of experiment and revolt was over, a very few critics, myself amongst them, had begun to point out that this slogan alone showed how complete was the breakdown of communications between the generations. Under the very eyes of the pre-war generation a new age of experiment and revolt far more drastic in its departures, far more absolute in its rejections, was already coming into being..."

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Texts of related interest at the same website:

"Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation" (Rexroth)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/beats.htm

"Beginnings of a New Revolt" (Rexroth)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/newrevolt.htm

"Subversive Aspects of Popular Songs" (Rexroth)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/songs.htm

"Rexroth's San Francisco" (series of articles on the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, Haight-Ashbury, and the new rock music)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sf/1975.htm

"On the Poverty of Student Life" (situationist critical examination of sixties youth rebellions)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/poverty.htm

"On the Poverty of Hip Life" (Ken Knabb et al.)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/PH/hippies.htm

"Critique of the New Left" (Knabb et al.)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/PH/newleft.htm

"Berkeley in the Sixties" (chapter from Knabb's autobiography)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/autobio1.htm

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