Then too I've been reading Joan Didion. Here she is (as far as I've
gotten) in the 60s witnessing the Haight Ashbery "love in":
"We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically
unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we
had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no
longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed. This
was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between
1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules
of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing
in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about
the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling." *
Lawrence
*from page 308 of the Library of America edition of /Joan Didion, the
1960s & 70s./
