That strangely used word Beat was immediately arresting. For one thing, it was blatantly ungrammatical. Did it mean “beaten”? Did it mean that there was a whole generation that moved to the vibrations of a particular rhythm — some kind of new music, perhaps, like the bebop Alex sometimes went down to Birdland to hear? The people Holmes described were in fact beaten down — down to “the bedrock of consciousness,” achieving a desperate beauty that seemed to be a kind of triumph. Holmes did not take credit for coining the phrase; with great scrupulousness he attributed it to a fellow writer and
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