The Times' Beatniks Rock On

This Sunday it was Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Coming on the heels of the worst albums either of them has ever made, fiftysomething former Rolling Stone duffer and now Times third-string cultural commentator Stephen Holden not only waxed preposterously hagiographic about the two of them, but managed to conflate their canonization with startlingly foolish drivel about the Beats while advancing one of those extremely suspect historical constructs alluded to above. For those Sunday Times fans who skipped the article while waiting in line in the rain yesterday for a brunch table at Friend of a Farmer, we quote here the opening two paragraphs in toto. They represent a veritable Nibelung's treasure hoard of cliche, generalization, stereotype, ugly metaphor and baseless assertion. See how many times your nonsense detector goes off when reading this:

"When Allen Ginsberg, the last surviving member of the Beat trinity that included Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, died three years ago, it was entirely appropriate that Lou Reed and Patti Smith be prominent among those participating in the ceremonies honoring Walt Whitman's greatest poetic descendant. Four decades earlier, Ginsberg had emerged on the literary scene like a bardic John the Baptist. This raving, shaggy-haired voice from the urban wilderness arrived strewing incantatory broadsides whose blunt evocations of homosexuality, drug delirium and political paranoia wafted a pungent body odor into the genteel tea party of American letters.

"The shock waves of Ginsberg's 'Howl,' Kerouac's 'On the Road' and Burroughs's 'Naked Lunch' radiated far beyond the academy. It's clear today that as much as the Beats helped loosen the academic straitjacket constricting American literature, they had a far more profound impact on rock culture. They set the fervent, iconoclastic tone for rock's prophetic strain and enticed a younger generation of aspiring poets to inflate folk and rock music with oracular utterance. To make some crude analogies: Bob Dylan, in his early wandering-minstrel period, became the movement's Kerouac; Mr. Reed, with his urban gallows humor and fascination with drugs and outlaw sexuality, its Burroughs, and Ms. Smith, with her shamanistic fervor, its Ginsberg."

By the pungent body odor of the bardic John the Baptist, we swear we've never read a more hysterically silly or intellectually crapulous thesis in all our years of scanning the Times' pop-culture coverage. We'll withhold our thoughts on how many decades it's been since either Reed or Smith produced significant work, and merely suggest that the Times restrain Holden from embarrassing himself, or the paper, in this way again.