"'I’ll take you in a bus,' I said. 'No, the bus stops on the hiway and I have to walk across that damned prairie all by myself. I spend all afternoon looking at the damn thing and I don’t aim to walk over it tonight.' 'Ah listen, we’ll take a nice walk in the prairie flowers.' 'There ain’t no flowers there,' she said. 'I want to go to New York, I’m sick and tired of this. Ain’t no place to go but Cheyenne and ain’t nothing in Cheyenne.' 'Ain’t nothing in New York.' 'Hell there ain’t' she said with a curl of her lips."
A reading for today from "On the Road: The Original Scroll," by Jack Kerouac.
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27 comments:
We've gone from Gatsby to Kerouac?
I remember when that was the big punchline in Mad magazine.
Drunken momma's boy who died in his momma's basement.
The Beat ideology of dirty underpants, bad dispositions and dismal failure is not very interesting. The hipsters in Woodstock drag it out and flog it once or twice a year.
More interesting, and from the same era, is the philosophy and writing of Henry Miller. He had fun.
For comparison, here's the Gatsby "I" blabbing about flowers:
"This reminded me that I had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back, so I drove into West Egg Village to search for her among soggy whitewashed alleys and to buy some cups and lemons and flowers. The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o’clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby’s, with innumerable receptacles to contain it."
Quite the opposite of "There ain’t no flowers."
But how much flowers do you want?
It's feast or famine around here.
But, no one is ever happy no matter how many flowers there are or aren't.
Its 55 degrees outside... right now... like a few minutes ago.
Flowers are not getting a warm reception?
re·cep·tion
1.The action or process of receiving something sent, given, or inflicted: "the reception of the sacrament".
2.The way in which a person or group of people reacts to someone or something: "a lukewarm reception".
Is Kerouac's autobiographical account as "authentic" as Steinbeck's little trips with Charley?
Re: "For comparison, here's the Gatsby "I" blabbing about flowers..."
I probably should have peeked my head out of the sand and migrated from the "Do you remember the slang use of "the end"? post to here...
I found great joy (obvious, by the number of comments there, I know) in juxtaposing the beloved Fitzgerald "Gatsby" sentences with portions of Kerouac's writing that echoed thematically. Some of these run-ons merged in a surprisingly harmonic way:
"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes: I walked clear down to Times Square & just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost - it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.”
or
""For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing: somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything -- somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
-- for example.
The rhythms often bounced together like one car driving over different surfaces of road. Perhaps "On The Road" can be seen as a "what if" scenario wherein Gatsby gives up on Daisy and the West Egg life and heads further West in the authors' shared Haunted America -- an America "contiguous to absolutely nothing..."
Returning to harmony: Fitzgerald is Garfunkel and Kerouac is Simon.
"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"...
"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field...
"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
Simon Fitzgerald Robot says:
"When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air: Michigan seems like a dream to me now".
Simon Kerouac Robot says:
“The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water: so I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine, and the moon rose over an open field..."
"But how much flowers do you want?"
If I was going to San Francisco, just some to put in my hair.
A few years back Marquette had part/all of the scroll and had a long section - 20/30 feet - unrolled.
Pretty cool to see.
However I read something this past year that stated that Kerouac didn't really write it the way it's always been portrayed.
'Shouting Thomas said...
Drunken momma's boy who died in his momma's basement.
The Beat ideology of dirty underpants, bad dispositions and dismal failure is not very interesting. The hipsters in Woodstock drag it out and flog it once or twice a year.
More interesting, and from the same era, is the philosophy and writing of Henry Miller. He had fun.'
You really are a bit of a buffoon arnt't you?
Well, if you're looking for disappointment, Kerouac doesn't fail to disappoint. He was a deeply flawed human being -- weak, self-pitying, bitter, alcoholic, and a mean drunk.
But whatever else he was, he was a writer. I went to a museum exhibition on Kerouac where, housed under big sheets of glass, was a large tabletop displaying the relics of Kerouac the writer: his typewriter, his notebooks, photographs, memorabilia, and The Scroll.
My eye was caught by the open notebooks. His typing was immaculate. The margins perfect. And so much writing! He poured himself into the writing. That's what he did and who he was.
You can complain about his writing too -- "That's not writing; that's typing" -- blah, blah, blah. But his voice still jumps off the page and you want to know who he and his friends were and what they would do next. It was a new kind of writing and a new kind of living that was a real breath of fresh air in the fifties, when the novels and poetry were so terribly intellectual to the point of constipation.
Yeah, Kerouac drank himself to death in his mother's house -- which he paid for -- quietly hating everyone and everything it seemed. His was not an inspiring story. Fame baffled and crippled him. He had few survivor skills. He is not a model for young writers to emulate beyond his devotion to the craft.
But still I honor Kerouac as a man in the arena, who fought the good fight, however short he may have come up.
Henry Miller, on the other hand, lived a jolly life, had lots of great women lovers and wrote about how to devote your life to pleasure, travel and adventure.
No contest.
Fuck Kerouac and the boring as hell, morbid Beats.
I love Henry Miller too. So what? I don't recommend Kerouac's life, but I honor him as a writer, and still love much of his writing.
For the record, Miller admired Kerouac's writing. Upon receiving a review copy of "The Dharma Bums" Miller wrote to Viking Press that he was "intoxicated" "from the moement I began reading."
No man can write with that delicious freedom and abandonment who has not practiced severe discipline …. Kerouac could and probably will exert tremendous influence upon our contemporary writers young and old … we’re had all kinds of bums heretofore but never a Dharma bum, like this Kerouac...
I read several of Keruac's books, including OTR, Dharma bums, Dr Sax and perhaps a few more.
Because I was impressed with them and remembered them fondly, I reread OTR and Dharma Bums in the 90s.
One of us, the books or me, had not aged well. They were not bad but I was certainly not very impressed. I remember wondering what I was thinking having been so impressed with Keruac in my teens and twenties.
John Henry
Initial sentence should have read that I read OTR etc in the 60's.
John Henry
Dylan Kerouac Robot says:
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a Roman Candle
Make huarache sandals,
Try to avoid the scandals
Wanna be a Dharma Bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handles...
Kerouac died at his mother's home in St. Petersburg, FL. I lived a few miles from that house for a while and drove by it a few times.
I can assure you there was no basement. Due to the ground and water table, houses built then didn't have basements.
Btw, of all the beat writers he was probably the most conservative.
Dylan Kerouac Robot says:
'Ah listen, we’ll take a nice walk in the prairie flowers.'
'There ain’t no flowers there,' she said. 'I want to go back to New York City. I do believe I've had enough"
Kerouacke: the act of reading aloud Kerouac in a bar.
I'm reading David Dary's "Oregon Trail". There are a 100 screen plays in one book.
oh, yeah....highly recommended
Here's the link
I had just watched "Two-Lane Blacktop" again a few weeks ago. Thinking about it now, Warren Oates' character G.T.O. could be viewed as a middle-aged man who belatedly attempts to embrace the Kerouac life myth:
"Those satisfactions are permanent."
The younger (hipper) James Taylor and Dennis Wilson have adopted The Road, but any ability to seek Insight there has been lost to them.
Plus it has Harry Dean Stanton, so one of Ebert's Rules is covered.
Btw, of all the beat writers he was probably the most conservative.
This was no small part of Kerouac's alienation from his friends, and the beatnik and hippie movements, which he had influenced.
For all his love of jazz and grass, Kerouac remained a Catholic at heart, a patriotic American and an anti-communist. He didn't like what the Beat movement became and he loathed the hippies.
A wonderful documentary, "Magic Trip," came out a few years ago about Ken Kesey which shows footage from a 1964 NYC party attended by Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Casady, Jack Kerouac and Kesey's Merry Pranksters.
Kerouac sits with his back to the wall drinking a Budweiser while having nothing to do with the proto-hippie antics of the rest of the group.
@ creeley23:
I've really enjoyed your comments here.
"For all his love of jazz and grass, Kerouac remained a Catholic at heart, a patriotic American and an anti-communist. He didn't like what the Beat movement became and he loathed the hippies."
Indeed.
The quoted passage makes me wonder if Jack had picked up Mrs. Dalloway. Wouldn't that be funny if he had?
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