VENICE WEST: The Beat Generation in Southern...

VENICE WEST: The Beat Generation in Southern California by John Arthur Maynard (Rutgers University Press: $14.95; 242 pp.). As Venice was the creation of developer Abbot Kinney, “Venice West,” the late ‘50s/early ‘60s center of rebellion in literature and the arts, was the creation of author Lawrence Lipton. Maynard’s lively text chronicles the weird mixture of messianism and self-promotion that lead Lipton to found a counter-cultural community intended to rival San Francisco’s North Beach and New York’s Greenwich Village. But that community was never more than an intellectual Potemkin Village, the product of Lipton’s carefully orchestrated hype and the equally false reactions to it in the mainstream press. Maynard simultaneously unmasks and celebrates an outrageous episode of Southern California history, noting, “There is still a fundamental raunchiness to the Venice Ocean Front that only the bulldozers will ever do away with completely.”