"He was so arrestingly good-looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who couldn’t be contained within the walls of a New York apartment."

"No one else looks like that, I thought. I was twenty-one. On a shelf at the literary agency where I was working as a secretary, I’d recently found a copy of Jack’s first novel, 'The Town and the City.' I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me, that I could have been one of the characters trying out some new, free way to live after leaving home."

Writes Joyce Johnson, in "What Gets Kept/More than half a century after 'On the Road,' Jack Kerouac is still a literary celebrity. But fame undid the man I knew" (The New Yorker).

I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me.... that killed me. I read the line out of context to Meade and he laughed.

When do you ever say, I thought I was reading that book, but, really, that book was reading me?

More generally, when do you ever speak of interacting with an inanimate object and reverse the usual directionality of actor and acted upon?

I can only think of one example, something I considered the funniest thing in "A Hard Day's Night" when saw it the first time:

 

"[His wife] might have knitted it"/"She knitted him."

I asked Grok to help me think of other examples, and it gave me the highbrow answer: "When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

"She works as a cocktail waitress, a go-go dancer, a racetrack stable hand and, for a long stint in Phoenix, a sex worker..."

"... sometimes out of a trailer. Drink and drugs soften life’s jagged edges and get her through the day: 'I found the perfect formula to work on was a mixture of Spañada wine, Cold Duck and Squirt poured over crushed ice. That and bennies, or as Jenny called them, whaaat crawses. The drink, though quite potent, went down like cherry soda, and when coupled with the speed, produced a loose capable vigor just made to order for the job. During a normal day I would make about three trips across the lot through the quivering airwaves to the Circle K in my pink halter to hoard ingredients for the precious punch.'"

From "Her Father Wrote ‘On the Road.’ She Lived Her Own Version. Jan Kerouac’s 1981 novel 'Baby Driver' chronicles a fearless and windblown life entirely distinct from her famous parent’s" (NYT).

That's a review, by Dwight Garner, of "Baby Driver" — which is getting reissued.

"It might seem strange that a gigantic, staggeringly good new Cecily Brown work has emerged in a former flophouse where Jack Kerouac hacked out his scrolls..."

"... on the same block as Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios—though it’s been established that Hendrix is very much a Cecily Brown muse. The work usually comes to, say, Paula Cooper Gallery, where there’s a long line of buyers, collectors who otherwise have to shell out millions for her paintings at auction. And yet Brown herself could not be more pleased. She’s a scholar of the restaurant mural: paintings that enhance the space without completely overwhelming it, and seem like they’ve been there forever. Her favorites: the Maxfield Parrish at the St. Regis’s King Cole Bar, where Dalí and Duchamp used to carouse. The Howard Chandler Christy series in the restaurant at Hotel des Artistes, where Norman Rockwell lived. And, of course, the murals of Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel...."

From "Cecily Brown on the 'Unsexy' Art Market and Her New Restaurant Mural: 'It Can’t be Moved. It’s Not for Sale'/Chez Nous at the Marlton Hotel has a new mural by one of the world’s great painters—whose works sell for millions at auction—and it’s already in a league with the famous wall paintings at Bemelmans Bar" (Vanity Fair)(click through to see the busy, cheerful mural).

The article has a link on Jack Kerouac that goes to another Vanity Fair article, one that begins with this Jack Kerouac quote: "As far as I’m concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk."

Was Jack talking about rooms like that fancy-schmancy Chez Nous at the Marlton Hotel? And was he really an indoorsy guy? Challenged, I sought out the context of that quote, which appears on a lot of "famous quotes" page. But it's in something from 1960 called "The Vanishing American Hobo." No hobos Chez Nous, I suppose. Here's Jack:

There's something strange going on, you cant even be alone any more in the primitive wilderness... there's always a helicopter comes and snoops around, you need camouflage. -- Then they begin to demand that you observe strange aircraft for Civil Defense as though you knew the difference between regular strange aircraft and any kind of strange aircraft. -- As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk and give up your hoboing and your camping ambitions because there aint a sheriff or fire warden in any of the new fifty states who will let you cook a little meal over some burning sticks in the tule brake or the hidden valley or anyplace any more because he has nothing to do but pick on what he sees out there on the landscape moving independently of the gasoline power army police station. -- I have no ax to grind: I'm simply going to another world.

Ray Rademacher, a fellow staying at the Mission in the Bowery, said recently, "I wish things was like they was when my father was known as Johnny the Walker of the White Mountains. -- He once straightened out a young boy's bones after an accident, for a meal, and left. The French people around there called him 'Le Passant' (He who passes through.)

The hobos of America who can still travel in a healthy way are still in good shape, they can go hide in cemeteries and drink wine under cemetery groves of trees and micturate and sleep on cardboards and smash bottles on the tombstones and not care and not be scared of the dead but serious and humorous in the cop-avoiding night and even amused and leave litters of their picnic between the grizzled slabs of Imagined Death, cussing what they think are real days, but Oh the poor bum of the skid row! There he sleeps in the doorway, back to wall, head down, with his right hand palm-up as if to receive from the night, the other hand hanging, strong, firm, like Joe Louis hands, pathetic, made tragic by unavoidable circumstance -- the hand like a beggar's upheld with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching finger tips, as though on the tip of the tongue he's about to say in sleep and with that gesture what he couldnt say awake: "Why have you taken this away from me, that I cant draw my breath in the peace and sweetness of my own bed but here in these dull and nameless rags on this humbling stoop I have to sit waiting for the wheels of the city to roll," and further, "I dont want to show my hand but in sleep I'm helpless to straighten it, yet take this opportunity to see my plea, I'm alone, I'm sick, I'm dying -- see my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart, give me the thing, give me your hand, take me to the emerald mountains beyond the city, take me to the safe place, be kind, be nice, smile -- I'm too tired now of everything else, I've had enough, I give up, I quit, I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night -- take me home, lock me in safe, take me to where all is peace and amity, to the family of life, my mother, my father, my sister, my wife and you my brother and you my friend -- but no hope, no hope, no hope, I wake up and I'd give a million dollars to be in my own bed -- O Lord save me --" In evil roads behind gas tanks where murderous dogs snarl from behind wire fences cruisers suddenly leap out like getaway cars but from a crime more secret, more baneful than words can tell.

The woods are full of wardens.

"A famous economist once remarked: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.'"

"That epigram, issued by Robert Solow in 1987, became the subject of a lot of debate among economists in the 1990s.... A decade later, another famous economist made a similar observation about the internet — actually, a prediction: 'By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.' That was Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.... We’re now hearing similar questions about artificial intelligence...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Are we in an AI bubble that’s getting ready to pop? The promised AI revolution isn’t here yet. But it’s a smart bet that productivity gains will follow" (WaPo).

And this caught my eye: "A friend who is a lawyer... asked a chatbot to draft a document, and though the draft needed work, he estimated it had saved him two to four hours of typing. I asked him what he did with the extra time. He pleaded the fifth." Pleaded the Fifth, eh? That makes it sound as though he billed the client for the 2 to 4 hours it would have taken to do the work traditionally!

It's not just the "typing" that the AI did for him. It also composed material into solid standard English, wrote the citations in the required form, put the substance in some sort of order, and probably much more. It wasn't just "typing" he'd have been doing during those hours. 

McArdle is using the word "typing" in a way that reminds me of Truman Capote's famous insult to Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." Oh, Jack wasn't just typing typing. He was typing typing. 

"Through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the pope is related to... Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac and Madonna."

The NYT informs in an article that seems mostly concerned with whether the Pope is — in some sense — black.

We're told the article is written "by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami."

The article contains an amazing — and amazingly wrong — assertion: "Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears."

As if the 32,766 positions on the family tree are always — and for everyone — going to be 32,766 different individuals! I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents.

The terms for this very well known issue is "pedigree collapse."

"A bothy is a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge."

"It was also a term for basic accommodation, usually for gardeners or other workers on an estate. Bothies are found in remote mountainous areas of Scotland, Northern England, Ulster and Wales. They are particularly common in the Scottish Highlands, but related buildings can be found around the world...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Bothy," after encountering this word, which I don't remember ever seeing before, in the London Times article "Have William and Kate fallen for ‘west coast bothy frenzy’?It’s never been more fashionable to hole up in the Scottish isles like the Waleses, says Victoria Brzezinski."

Ben Pentreath, head of the architectural and interior design studio of the same name, is widely reported to have assisted the Prince and Princess of Wales... has had a connection with the Scottish west coast since he was a teen.... In 2018 Pentreath and his gardener husband, Charlie McCormick, bought a teeny pair of buildings (a Victorian two-roomed cottage and a much earlier stone bothy) on a sea pink-covered estuary in the far west coast of Scotland. “It really does feel a long way away,” Pentreath says. “Bothies really can’t be more than one or two rooms. And I think we all find romance in living in small places — for a while!”

"Walking is a way to slow oneself down, to cultivate attentiveness and to return to the elements, as the roundabout entrances to the museums on the islands..."

"... of Naoshima and Teshima encourage visitors to do. A country that lacks Western-style addresses, where simply extricating yourself from a train station can take 10,000 steps, is made for the flâneur who recalls the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation that not finding your way is very different from getting lost...."

From "Why Japan Is Best Experienced By Foot/In Japan, the simple act of walking has long been connected to working toward enlightenment" (NYT).

Every place worth living in or traveling to is best experienced by foot. That's what I say. If you want to feel that you are on a path toward enlightenment through walking, it's a bit insane to begin by flying half way around the word — racking up a massive regression — and needing to extricate yourself from or into complicated buildings.

I remember something about walking meditation from "Dharma Bums," the Jack Kerouac book I listened to — while walking — recently. I was searching the text for "walking," thinking I'd find the exactly right text, but I found this: "Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence."

"August finally came in with a blast that shook my house and augured little augusticity. I made raspberry Jello the color of rubies in the setting sun."

"Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the east, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist...."

So begins the last chapter of "Dharma Bums," by Jack Kerouac. Full text at the link. Now, I've finished it. I read it because it came up in the context of notes that people leave at the top of mountains, blogged here.

No, I don't know what "groomian" means, but somehow the Jello made me feel grounded. The word "groom" does appear elsewhere in the book. Maybe that's a clue. It's in this description of colleges as "nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity

"Totally Drunk Guy Is A Famous American Novelist Who Viewed Hippies With Disgust On National TV."

An incredibly stupid YouTube title for what is a fantastic episode of "Firing Line," from 1968, with William F. Buckley interacting with Jack Kerouac (and a sociology professor and Ed Sanders of The Fugs):

Kerouac died 7 months later. He may be drunk but every word he says has more value than anything that comes from the sociology professor. And nobody on the stage has much of a good word to say about hippies.

Speaking of death, Buckley opens the show with: "The topic tonight is the hippies an understanding of whom we must I guess acquire or die painfully...."

"'I just felt like I lost my inner compass,' said [Isabel] Falls, 27, who was working as a design researcher at the time and missed being closer to nature."

"'I wanted to feel a bit more like I was alive and living,' she said. She turned her attention to building up her savings and quit her job in May 2023 to take a year off. 'It’s a huge privilege to have been able to do it, and I really recognize that'....  Almost two years later, Ms. Falls is in Mexico... and working on a freelance basis for a travel agency. The flexibility of the job was enticing...  Most of her belongings are still in a shed at her mother’s house in Washington State.... 'I’m not in the mind-set of, "Let me grind as hard as I can right now so that I can retire at 55," or whatever... I can work and I can make money and I can save, and I can also live my life now.... I’m still trying to do what makes me happy rather than being in the grind of it all."

I'm reading "To Escape the Grind, Young People Turn to ‘Mini-Retirements’Some young people are spending their savings on an extended break earlier in their careers rather than waiting until retirement" (NYT).

I've also been reading Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel "Dharma Bums" — full text at link — and I've been looking for a place to quote this paragraph:

"I learned... what people write. Cultural references, jokes, weather conditions, or the difficulty of an ascent. Sarcastic comments..."

"... about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned. A lot of humorous begging for a helicopter ride down. Catalogs of wildlife spotted or lamentably not. A lot of misspellings (which I’ve retained). A lot of thanks to God."

From "Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal/For centuries, people have left all sorts of notes in summit registers. I looked through 100 years of love letters and spontaneous exaltation, including my own family's, to find out why." (Outside).

You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.

One register entry found by the author: "If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"

And — this isn't in the article, but — here's a quote from "The Dharma Bums": "Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."

"You’re not actually finished until you do read poetry on the weekends for fun."

Someone says in response to someone who said "I vividly remember discovering Dylan’s whole catalogue in college and consequently falling entirely out of touch with everything else music-related for a solid year, I also grew my curls out and you best believe I was wearing scarves and dressing like someone who liked to read poetry on weekends for fun."

All of that was in an r/bobdylan discussion of this new clip of Timothée Chalamet, getting (too far?) into his impersonation of Bob Dylan:

Welcome to the Church of Bob, Timmy. 🙏🏻🎶❤️
pic.twitter.com/g7N7S9DfBk

— Melanie Young 🔧 (@FreewheelinMY) December 18, 2024

What poetry does Bob read?

"When you finally get to the phrase that needs improving, you have to rotate the platen downward in order to squeeze fresh words above it...."

"Because of this awkwardness, the tendency of the typer, as opposed to the writer (in Truman Capote’s famous distinction), is to move ever forward, ever faster. Why waste thirty seconds revising an obscure clause, when you can tack on an explanatory sentence in five? Hence paragraphs come out longer than they should be, and an accretion of verbal debris weighs the typescript down. Such debris, of course, can be cleared away in revision. But the tolerance that permitted it in the first place tends to lower critical standards the second time around. The pen, on the other hand, is an instrument of thrilling mobility. Its ink flows as readily as the writer’s imagination. Its nib flickers back and forth with the speed of a snake’s tongue, deleting a cliché here, an adjective there, then rearing up suddenly into white space and emitting a spray of new words.... Unlike the electric typewriter, it does not buzz irritatedly when motionless, as if to say, Hurry up, I’m overheating. It sits quietly in the hand, comforting the fingers with acquired warmth, assuring you that the sentence you are searching for lies somewhere in its liquid reservoir...."

From the essay "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Smith-Corona" — written in 1981, before writers used word processors.

The essay, by Edmund Morris, is collected in "This Living Hand: And Other Essays" (commission earned). 

I added the link on "Truman Capote's famous distinction." My link goes to Quote Investigator, which looks into whether Capote really said — about "On the Road" — "That’s not writing, that’s typing."

"Could the governor who is battling to turn a progressive state college into a 'Hillsdale of the South' really be a tedious Establishment Republican who wants to cut the Social Security checks of righteous churchgoing Republican retirees?"

Asks Ed Kilgore in "Could Trump Run to DeSantis’s Left in 2024?" (New York Magazine).

He's reacting to the Rolling Stone article "Trump Is Plotting How to Kick DeSantis ‘In the Nuts.’ Here’s His Playbook, So Far/Team Trump is preparing to paint the Florida governor as an establishment hawk who'll put Social Security on the chopping block." Excerpt:

On a host of issues, Trump and his lieutenants are itching to portray DeSantis as the “establishment” figure — the one who is preferred by the supposedly squishy party bigwigs like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. One of Trump’s biggest impacts on the GOP was largely shelving the budget-slashing austerity economics of former Speaker Ryan and ushering in a free-spending, debt-ballooning era that combined tax cuts for the rich, with a rhetorical cease-fire on threats to the bennies of the masses — ranging from Social Security to Medicare.

I'm interested in that phrase "bennies of the masses." It's like "opium of the masses." That's got to be intentional — using "bennies" to mean benefits when "bennies" has been slang for benzedrine — i.e., amphetamine — since the 1950s.

From Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" (1957): "There’s another photo of Joan simpering over a cookpot; her hair is long and unkempt; she’s high on benny and God knows what she’s saying as the camera is snapped…'Don’t point that nasty old thing at me.'"

"Opium of the people" — also translated as "opium of the masses" — has its own Wikipedia article:

The full sentence from Marx translates (including italics) as: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."... 

In [Marx's] view, religion... reduced people's immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions which gave them the strength to carry on.... [B]y focusing on the eternal rather than the temporal, religion turns the attention of the oppressed away from the exploitation and class structure that encompasses their everyday lives.... In Marx’s view, once workers finally overthrow capitalism, unequal social relations will no longer need legitimating and people’s alienation will dissolve, along with any need for religion. 

Assuming Rolling Stone intended to refer to Marx's analogy of religion to opium, we're prodded to think about whether government benefits are like amphetamine. Do things like Social Security and Medicare give us "euphoria, change in desire for sex, increased wakefulness, and improved cognitive control"? If we get too much, do we experience "psychosis (e.g., delusions and paranoia)"?

If they cut our "bennies," what do we do? Without "opium," in Marx's view, we'd have more clarity and energy, and maybe we'd revolt, but without "bennies," we have less energy and are less excited about crazy things.

In which case, what? What would we do in that newly dulled, enervated condition? Choose DeSantis over Trump? 

"It has often been suggested that as [Bob] Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak..."

"... from [Bob] Neuwirth. 'The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,' Bob Spitz wrote in 'Dylan: A Biography' (1989). 'So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.' Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame. 'Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,' he wrote, 'a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.' Mr. Dylan, in his book 'Chronicles: Volume One' (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth: 'Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.'"

From "Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82/He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin" (NYT). 

Neuwirth, we're told, taught Janis Joplin the Kris Kristofferson song "Me & Bobby McGee," and he co-wrote "Mercedes Benz" with her. 

ADDED: Spitz's use of the words "hipster shuck and jive" undercuts the argument that Neuwirth created this style of personal presentation. This obituary shows the New York Times carrying on the long tradition of making black people invisible.

From the Wikipedia article "Shuckin' and jivin'":

Shuckin' and jivin' (or shucking and jiving) is African-American slang for joking and acting evasively in the presence of an authoritative figure. It usually involves clever lies and impromptu storytelling, to one-up an opponent or avoid punishment.... 

According to the linguist Barbara Ann Kipfer, the origins of the phrase may be traced to when "black slaves sang and shouted gleefully during corn-shucking season, and this behavior, along with lying and teasing, became a part of the protective and evasive behavior normally adopted toward white people."... 

In 2008, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo said of the Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama, who was running against Hillary Clinton, the candidate Cuomo supported: "You can't shuck and jive at a press conference." Cuomo received criticism from some for his use of the phrase. Roland Martin of CNN said that "'Shucking and jiving' have long been words used as a negative assessment of African Americans, along the lines of a 'foot-shufflin' Negro.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Hipster (1940s subculture)": 

In 1938, the word hepster was used by bandleader Cab Calloway in the title of his dictionary, Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, which defines hep cat as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive"... 

In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat to hipster in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk".... Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class European American youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely African-American jazz musicians they followed....

In The Jazz Scene (1959), the British historian and social theorist Eric Hobsbawm... described hipster language—i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk"—as "an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders"....

The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it. In 1957, the American writer and adventurer Jack Kerouac described hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality." Toward the beginning of his poem Howl, the Jewish-American Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his 1957 essay The White Negro, the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by the atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".

"Since this time last year, New York City rents have risen 33 percent, nearly double the national average...."

"In affluent neighborhoods, it’s worse: at the height of the pandemic, in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for example, the median asking rent fell about 20 percent. Since January 2021 it has charged upward by about 40 percent in both places, according to StreetEasy. In SoHo the median rent jumped 58 percent in the fourth quarter — from $3,800 to $6,002... Behind the extreme hikes in rent is a rental market crunch driven in part by Covid expats flooding back, attracted once again to a revitalized city or recalled by office jobs." 

From "The New York Dream of Cheap Rent and No Roommates? It’s Over. The city is thriving, but many who scored a deal now face rent-renewal sticker shock. Rents rose 33 percent between January of 2021 and January this year, according to an online listing site" (NYT).

I found the first sentence of this article really alienating: "The hallmarks of feeling like you’ve made it in New York City are often as follows: navigating the subway sans map, a maitre d’ who knows you by name and living alone, at last, in your own apartment." 

I lived in NYC from 1973 to 1984 (and in the Fall 2007/Spring 2008 academic year) and I can say with certainty that I never gave a damn about a maitre d’ knowing me — by name or otherwise. And I've also never thought in terms of whether I'd "made it." Are young people not young anymore? I'm old now, and I can't identify with the oldness of the purported youngness expressed in that sentence. What an incredible drag! 

ADDED: I was inspired to research "make it" in the OED. The original meaning of this phrase is nautical. To "make it" is to cover the intended distance. Then it got figurative:

 

I'd have to check the text, but I think when "They went to a parking lot in broad daylight..and there, he claims, he made it with her in nothing flat," she was not the maitre d’.

"The next morning, I return to Viroqua for a stroll through the town’s vaunted bookstore, Driftless Books, housed in another massive tobacco warehouse."

"The walls are covered floor to ceiling in secondhand books. Framed custom portraits hang from the rafters. A moose head. A rusting sousaphone... 'So yeah, one thing led to another, and a guy gave me this building,' says owner Eddy Nix, a community fixture in Viroqua. He is wearing a loose sweater and patched denim, and he wraps used books in donated paper bags as I pepper him with questions about the store. 'Literally just gave it to you?' I ask. 'He was like some guerrilla philanthropist,' he says. They met when Nix was running the first iteration of his shop in nearby Viola. A stranger walked in one day looking for Richard Brautigan’s 'Trout Fishing in America.' Nix sold him a copy, along with a preorder for 'Wake Up,' Jack Kerouac’s posthumously published biography of the Buddha. And that was that — until a year later, when Nix grew obsessed with this empty old warehouse in Viroqua and finally contacted the owner, who asked whether the Kerouac book had arrived yet. 'It was the same dude!' he says. 'And then like five months later, after forcing me to read the complete commentaries of Gurdjieff and all this metaphysical hoodoo, he gives me the building, like out of the blue.'"

Oh, no! The Washington Post has discovered Wisconsin! 

I'm reading "In southwestern Wisconsin, the bucolic Driftless Area is an overlooked gem."

My favorite comment over there is from Owen Caterwall:

Please, please don't come here. Don't bring your crappy coffee shops, your whiney tourists, your behemoth vehicles, your brassy loud voices, your unsolicited opinions, and your bored witless kids. People live here. It's not quaint, or cute, or charming, or fey. It's where we live and conduct our lives. It's not a museum or gawkers' paradise. Go to Disneyland. You'll have more fun.

At the Real Matter Café...

... you can write like Jack Kerouac... or anyone else.

"I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them..."

"... as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."

From "Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies ‘aren’t cinema,’ they’re ‘theme parks.'"

Of course, literally, these things are cinema. Scorsese is making a witticism in the tradition of Truman Capote's "That’s not writing, that’s typing" (disrespecting Jack Kerouac's "On the Road").

Did Capote actually say that? Here's Quote Investigator on the subject. Truman Capote used various versions of the witticism — against Kerouac and others:

The OED "word of the day" is "Nowheresville."

I can't link to the OED, so I'll just tell you it's "colloquial and humorous (orig. and chiefly U.S.)" and it's "A largely unknown or uninteresting place, esp. a small, rural town; (also figurative) obscurity, insignificance, limbo." The oldest in-print use was from 1917 T. H. Litster, "Songs your Heart & Mine": "I came from back of Nowheresville, From Concession number three,.. It's the place where I was born, you see."

I like this 1959 use in The Washington Post: "Legally speaking, the Coffee and Confusion Club, the beat generation's contribution to Foggy Bottom, was in Nowheresville yesterday." I couldn't find that text in the WaPo archive (or elsewhere) but I did find this picture:



The etymology of "Nowheresville" is easy: "nowheres" + "-ville."

But is "nowheres" really a word? Well, yeah, "regional and nonstandard." Dickens has a character say it in "Bleak House" (1853): "Don't let me ever see you nowheres within forty mile of London, or you'll repent it." And Mark Twain has somebody say it in "The Adventures Huckleberry Finn" (1884): "I hain't been nowheres."

The "-ville" ending is interesting. What else do you think of besides "nowheresville"? I think of "dullsville." The ending makes a word into "a fictitious place" or "a particular quality suggested by the word to which it is appended." Among the examples in the OED are "Meatville" (from a sign in a butcher shop in an 1843 comic), "Sluggersville" ("a slugger from Sluggersville," 1891), "Winnersville" ("That girl is a winner from Winnersville," 1906), "Boneheadville" ("you're the biggest bonehead from Boneheadville," 1932).

So that's one way to do it: X from Xville (or Xsville). Looks like repeating the root word felt funny in the first half of the 20th century.

Later you get "Squaresville" ("This guy is from Squaresville, fellas, I'm telling you. He wouldn't know a ·45 from a cement mixer" — Ed McBain, "Cop Hater," 1956). Similarly: "Cubesville." And "Hicksville." Also: "Deathville" and "dragsville" — for boring.

Seems like the "-ville" ending took on a negative feeling. And after such a bright beginning with Meatville, Sluggersville, and Winnersville.