On The Road - Fifty Years Ago Today...

It was fifty years today
Saintly Jackie taught us how to play...

I think that's how the Beatles song goes. Yes, on this exact day in 1957, the sky turned red over my high school campus and a voice spoke from the clouds: "Hie thee to the Hillsdale Bookstore right after school, oh feeble mortal, and learn how life is to be lived."

It was kind of a screwy time (see my A Fifties Teenager pieces) , and for me, On The Road was a one way ticket out of a suburban wasteland into a thrilling new world that made some sense. I bought it all, and I still buy it. In fact I read On The Road three or four more times at different stages of my life and each time it spoke to me in a fresh way. As I got older I saw the sadness lurking behind the kicks. I saw the hurt of best friends breaking up because they didn't understand each other any more. Later on in the sixties, I met the real Dean Moriarity a few times. He wasn't a bit like in the story, although still cool and crazy. And I saw that, although Jack based his book on real people, he had recreated them and made them more than they were.

I still cringe for Jack when I remember the vituperation the literary establishment poured on his head for writing such a subversive, immoral and, worst of all, sloppily written novel. Celebrity writer Truman Capote said famously about it, "That's not writing, that's typing!"

Today On the Road is praised across the world as perhaps the dominant novel of the mid- twentieth century - (check Google News if you doubt me). They're even teaching Jack Kerouac in high school! - not that this is a good thing. For the book to work right, you can't be lectured about it. But Truman must be sulking in some infernal corner. I don't think too many people look forward to reading In Cold Blood again.

If you've never read On The Road, give it a shot. Forget all the hoopla. Just read the book, okay? See if it speaks - or still speaks - to you. And watch for the Saint of the Susquehanna.

Transcendental Old Donovan

Donovan fans have been begging for more stories about him now that he's turned 61. Is the old boy driving a garbage truck? Or singing at the Coconuts Lounge in Ely, Nevada?

I just located this interview with him in the Palm Springs newspaper, and I thought I'd better share it while it's hot.

Turns out (1) Donovan has stuck with the Maharishi all these years, (2) he believes that bringing spiritual lyrics to pop music was an intentional plan thought up by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in the Times Square Automat one evening in 1947 and that (3) Donovan and David Lynch are planning a future world government that will change everything in some interesting and perhaps groovy way. At least that's what I could get out of the interview.

My Mom and Dad used to practice transcendental meditation. Mom had her own mantra and practiced TM faithfully each day. Dad liked it too, but I think he saw it more as a chance for a little afternoon nap.

Here's the story. Your sort it out. I'm not sure I really dig Donovan that much any more.

thedesertsun.com | He's not 'mellow'

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In 1969 Jack Kerouac died...

Here's a little poem left over from my mid-life crisis. Now that I'm up to my Medicare crisis I don't need it any more. ..

In 1969,

Jack Kerouac died.

It was an ignominious death,

he puked his guts into a toilet,

moaned to Ste. Therese,

and left his mother to carry on.

After all those miles.

In 1969,

Some outlaws of art were still young -

rock desperadoes,

poets of armed robbery,

exiles on main street

But Neal Cassady was dead already

and John Lennon was fixin to die.

They met their rightful destiny.

But what happens to the outlaws who go free?

Whose sun-bleached hair grows grey?

Who have to walk the seacoast in a mothbitten overcoat

or raise a family?

What happens to bad mothers who don't get shot?

when their time runs out and they're still here?

There's all those days to fill when the Muse won't show - -

watering the geraniums

or teaching English to high-school gunmen

with slower draws than they had.

With sleeping in their cars,

answering the phone at the Institute for Parapsychology,

seeing their kids grow up,

looking into soft dead eyes forever in their dream.

Photo by Patrushka

Freshman English Papers

Looking back on my freshman college year, you what's better about today? I don't have to turn these posts in for a grade! No grim faced professor is allowed to scratch pencil marks around the edges of each little essay. Just think – I can write a whole blog full of fragmentary sentences and there's not one thing they can do about it!

And I do write them. Hither and thither. Sometimes you just have to go with the way the words sound. That's how I felt then and that's how I feel now.

On my desktop I keep a list of Jack Kerouac's thirty axioms for modern prose. They're pretty good and I recommend you immediately go over here and study them. You'll notice Number 13 suggests “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.” He doesn't say we don't need to understand grammar or syntax - but don't let them get in your way. Try to get the picture clear in your mind and go straight for it. I keep Jack's list at hand for inspiration and to remind myself that anytime I put words to paper (so to speak), I'm part of a long line of guys who struggled their whole lives to learn how to write out of the box, how to keep their idea line as free of crap as if Keith Jarrett (a piano player I like) was writing it.

The only difference is I'm a pig. It's hard for me to tell where my inspiration leaves off and the crap begins. Jack's axiom #1 is the whole key, for me anyway: "Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy." And if I make myself laugh as I type, then I figure I'm heading in the right direction.

Those professors at San Jose State in 1959 wanted me to write clean, clear prose. Like this: A plus B = C. Start with your introductory paragraph (which itself has to start with a grabber sentence), add body, then concluding paragraph. All nice and neat and when you're done your reader thinks, “Aha – I see. Cats eat rats! Very interesting.”

Sorry, Dr. Smith. I already heard all this already in high school. Next you'll want me to turn in my outline.

The more they tried to whip me into shape (of a square) the more I wriggled and jiggled and wandered off in four directions. It became a game. I was sublimely confident in my ability. I was convinced my English Comp professor wouldn't know good writing if Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti broke into the classroom with their guns leveled straight at him.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I just wasn't very good at it. Needed more practice. Still do.

I always felt when they wrote 'spelling' in the margin they really meant “Why can't you be more like a girl? They check their spelling! They're nice! They smell good! No – you're sloppy and improvisational and you should shave off that scruffy beard if you think you're going to get a decent grade in here.

“And what's this? Horrors! Slang! You've used slang in a college-level essay! And just look at this illogical and non-parallel series of clauses and phrases. How can anyone possibly understand this beatnik prose? Why don't you write like Ernest Hemingway? Mr. Pig, you are MUCH TOO SELF-INDULGENT! You must write to communicate, not for your own private pleasure...Tsk tsk tsk.."

And on and on. Next I was accused of 'rambling'. What's wrong with 'rambling' anyway? I've spent my life rambling round this country, and I've met a lot of funny men. Some robbed me with a six gun, others with a fountain pen. Woody Guthrie said that. There! I used an eminent authority to emphasize my point. Are you happy now?

Whatever I was doing in college, I was not here to learn how to write a simple, clear, direct essay. That was for sissies. Sissies, drones, English professors, and other bores. Funny, in later life I have come to admire that approach. I usually write to capture a feeling or a moment of time, or possibly make you laugh if I can, but if someone is writing to communicate an idea, and I can actually understand what they are trying to say - I love it! That's the whole idea.

Don't know quite why I rambled down this path this morning. I really meant to tell you about my beatnik-lefty-socialist seventeen year old pal Bob Gill. I guess that's what happens when you don't write out your outline ahead of time. By now, you'd be up to the demonstration and kids getting washed down the stairs with fire hoses and it would be really exciting. Instead I'm still sitting up in my attic room in the boarding house writing a paper I have to turn in in the morning. Wonder what he'll say this time! I know. “You use too many exclamation marks! This reads like a comic book!”

The Bus Ride Home

In September 1959, seventeen years old, I said goodbye to Ma and my beatnik friends back home and left San Mateo for the carefree life of an English major at San Jose State College. I was going to be a writer when I grew up. A novelist, like Jack Kerouac. My plan was to hitchhike everywhere, love all the longhaired beatnik girls, grow up, live in Greenwich Village and write about everything that happened to me. You must admit it's not a bad plan. I'd do what I wanted to do anyway and make a living from my pen.

I never wondered if I'd be happy. Happiness was impossible. Not part of the equation.

One cold night on the Greyhound heading back up the Peninsula to San Mateo for the weekend, I was thinking about my friend Way Out Willy, who was sleeping in Bear Mattson's car because he got into a shouting match with his parents and they threw him out.

I wanted to write about stuff like that too. Where is the love? What if I was on a long bus journey – like this creeping thirty miles up the El Camino to San Mateo, but I'd been on the road for weeks and weeks and I was burnt out, gone, exhausted in heart and soul. What if I was dragging my weary ass back to my home town even though my parents were dead or something, but a heartsick homesickness compelled me across the snowy continent. I knew when I got to my best friend Way Out's house (hmm, I'd have to call him something else) I would be welcomed like a son, received into the warmth of his family, be fed and a have real bed to sleep in. I'd be home again and safe to heal.

So, in my story dream the Greyhound grumbled to a stop at the little B Street bus depot on that rainy Christmas night and I limped through darkened and shuttered downtown streets. Just the odd Santa Claus statuette in a shop window illuminating my backpack and my worn beat seventeen year old face. I stumbled up through the shuttered mansions of Hillsborough and on into the redwood subdivisions high on the jolly Christmas rainy hillside. And there were the diamond pinpoints of the Peninsula below. I hobbled up Crestview Drive and just as I approached, still hidden by the night, I hear angry voices. There's Way Out's father at the front door and he's shouting at Willy and Willy is just standing there taking it. He heaves Willy's paintings and sculptures into the rain and keeps shouting and there they lie in the wet grass with little drips from the acacia tree onto his portrait of our friend Gypsy Girl. Little rain drips on her dark cheeks. The door slams shut, leaving Way Out standing in the rain in his Levis and red windbreaker. In the rain night ice night Rebel Without A Cause night star-filled air.

“Hey man.”

“Hey Walrus.”

That was the real truth. I had to tell that story. Just the kids. Lost and loose on the suburban sorrowful Crestview Drive of time. I thought I could write stories like that.

************************************************************************

The only trouble with writing was you had to sit at a typewriter for a long time every day. How fun is that? And then you had to sweat and sweat until you got an idea. And then you actually had to write sentences that communicated something more than 'cats ate rats'. And then words on the page sounded stupid when you read it to yourself out loud and you had to throw the whole thing out and start over. All that work for nothing.

I wasn't really reconciled to it. Then there was the part where you walked around and wouldn't talk to anybody and people thought you were sulking but you were just trying to get it together in your mind. The right place in my head. Where is it? It was there yesterday!

Writing is still like that. When the spirit is in me, writing is the funnest thing. I make myself laugh and I work myself up into fits and I am amazed to see little scenes come to life. Wow! And then there's the part where you groan and have to chain yourself to the seat because nothing will come. At least in the days of typewriters you had to work for your distractions. Now the whole Internet is out there to distract us hapless writers.

But you know what? For better or worse, I was made and molded and formed to do this. It's in my blood. Funny. Now I'm 64. And this is still what I want to do when I grow up. I hope I get to.

Theories, Facts and Biography

In a back corner of the Pigsty some guys have been arguing about how the character Sal Paradise in Kerouac’s novel On The Road gained his interesting name. The discussion started out as an entertaining digression but has, in my humble opinion, become tedious in the extreme. If you bother to look, you will be astounded at how many comments, even heated debate, can be generated about such a small pebble of literature.

The other day, in a futile effort to stop the beating of this poor dead horse, I suggested that Anonymous, who had written in quoting a 1947 letter from Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, had given us “the last word” on the subject.

One of our regular commenters, the.chronicler, immediately reminded me that theories, no matter how plausible, are never the “last word” about anything

He got me wondering. Can theories ever be “the last word”? A fact is a fact and a theory is a theory, yet we fight on as if theories were unshakeable truth. For instance, creationists base their reality and world view on the unproveable theory that God created the universe in seven days, while evolutionists base their reality on the equally unproveable theory that life came from mutations of some carbon molecules over hundreds of millions of years. When someone invents time travel and we can go back and see – then one or the other will be a fact. Till then…pick your worldview and good luck.

“My parents moved up to San Francisco in, I think, somewhere round 1929.” That’s about as shaky a fact as there could be, yet I’m comfortable with it – doesn’t shake up my reality one bit. Why should it?

“Hmmm, not sure when this picture was taken. Nothing written on the back. But Suzie’s still a kid – must be in the Eighties sometime.” I’m basing my understanding of time and history on a reasonable conjecture. And I’m happy and comfortable with it. Let’s go on to the next picture.

Over in the Congo, folk are beating up their children and chasing them out of their villages because they have a theory these kids are practicing magic to bring ill-fortune on the family. Pretty good plan, if their theory is a fact. The fiendish kids deserve it. Safety of the village and all that. But of course, if their theory turns out to be incorrect, then massive suffering has been laid on some little kids who just wanted to be home with their mommies and daddies. So they’d better be right!

Sometimes it matters whether or not you have your theories and your facts straight. And facts are few and far between. Useful facts are even harder to find. Theories, on the other hand, rise with the sun and drop like the dew.

I pity the poor biographers, including our recent guest commenter Paul Maher Jr. Here is a paltry pile of facts – some letters, some journals; an address in an old phone book, a bus transfer used as a bookmark, an interview with a doddering survivor – and from these they must build their airy cloud of theory and reasonable conjecture – and come up with that wondrous thing, a living biography. A story that makes sense, that gives meaning to the jumble of one life, now complete. They mustn’t give way to scholarly disputation about who started a fist fight in the schoolyard in 1928. They can’t drift too far into explaining their subject’s motivation or they’ll end up with a work of fiction. Who can ever know the deep heart?

Yet, somehow, a biography that feels like the true story of a true person – what an act of homage. To rescue a life from the night of forgetting, to entertain us and teach us and deepen our understanding of this wispy thing called life. That’s a mountain to climb that’s worth climbing.

Jack Kerouac News Alert

There's a new and very interesting stream of comments developing on Kerouac Stuff and Pig Stuff, my post of July 27. Recommend you drop by and scroll down to the new comments at the bottom - or just read it all all over again. It's all good. The Pondering Pig's Pals don't write boring comments.

Kerouac Stuff and Pig Stuff

Did you see that the "unedited original scroll version" of Kerouac's On The Road will be published by Viking Press next year? I love the way this news story describes Kerouac writing the novel "hopped up on coffee and benzedrine". Hopped up? Isn't that nineteen thirties hep talk? Hey Foghorn Leghorn, you were around in those days - any opinion as to whether the term 'hopped up' was in use in the early Fifties?

I have knots in my stomach today and I wish I didn't. Patrushka too. Our offer on the Spokane house was accepted; yesterday we played grown-up and talked to a mortgage broker. Closing costs and paydown discount points and 1% for this and .5% for that. Help! - I wanted to pack all our belongings in a red handkerchief on a stick and head for a cabin far off in the far off mountains.

But God is good. "He gives wisdom to the wise" - I read this in the Bible this morning. I hope he gives some to foolish pigs as well. Cause I need to be wise as a serpent for the next few days.

Red Cloud, Willa Cather...and Jack Kerouac.

This is Red Cloud, Nebraska, the little praire town where novelist Willa Cather grew up, and where she set many of her best stories. In those days, at the turn of the twentieth century, Red Cloud was happening. A big railroad hub for the Burlington line, eight passenger trains a day disgorged easterners going west, westerners heading east, vaudeville troupes and professors, cowboys and clowns and Shakespearean actors ready to do two nights at the opera house. The town fed and housed them as they waited to change trains. A wide-awake kid could learn a lot about life here.

Today, the railroad has gone away and Red Cloud supports three industries that I can see - a big feedlot on the edge of town which you can smell when the wind is right, a smallish grain elevator....and Willa Cather. She is the Colossus of Red Cloud, and the engine that lifted this little Nebraska town out of the ranks of hundreds and into eternity.

I wonder what those 1890s townsfolk would have thought if they had known that little kid with the short hair and the eternal questions and the dramatic flair was going to write down (and transmute) their gossip, crimes, sins and love affairs and toothaches and gardens into stories so vivid and pure that those ordinary folks would be given a sort of immortality on this earth. Scholars were going to scour the town's attics for their letters and journals - for any clue to help them understand how Willa changed them and rearranged them to create her immortal characters.

Take Annie Pavelka, for instance. She was an unschooled Czech immigrant girl whose father killed himself out on the prairie one Christmas day. Her older brother decided they had to hire her out into town as a servant girl, and she went to work for the Miner family who lived on the next block over from the Cathers. Willa got to know Annie and they became friends when they were both teenagers. And Annie transmuted into Antonia of My Antonia. Which is, in my humble piggish opinion, the best novel you will ever read about the American pioneer experience and is probably the best novel ever written about anything. (hyperbole warning) And it's about what happened to the kid on the next block over.


Today the Willa Cather foundation owns the tiny Catholic Church where Annie's "illegitimate" baby was baptized. The local Catholics moved to bigger quarters generations ago and the little church became somebody's house for more generations. In the normal American course of things it would have been torn down forty years ago. But the church of St. Juliana Falconteri is Red Cloud gold. It's one of the reasons this little lost prairie town with the feed lot hosts scholars from all over the world as they come to research at the Willa Cather archives. And why the Cather's Retreat bed and breakfast on Seward Street is full most nights.

Offhand, I can think of two other little nowhere towns that became somewhere towns because a novelist grew up there. First, Jack Kerouac's Lowell, Massachusetts. Second, D.H. Lawrence's Eastwood, Nottinghamshire.

Kerouac's work hovers out there somewhere all by himself, not quite memoirs, but not ordinary novels either. He has more in common with Walt Whitman than with Willa Cather. But his stories of Lowell in the Twenties and Thirties just nail that town.

Lawrence's Eastwood, though, is a pretty exact parallel. Used to be a coal mining town till the coal mines closed down. Now, I guess, it's a suburb of Nottingham. When I was there in the Seventies it was depressed and still looked very much like Lawrence describes it in Sons and Lovers and a lot of other books. Like Cather's, his babyhood home was owned by a foundation and set up to look like it must have looked in the 1890s. But the foundation was composed of local enthusiasts. To my knowledge, the international Lawrence scholar cartel took no interest. The folks digging in their gardens next door knew who Lawrence was but he affected their lives in no way.

Here in Red Cloud, the folks really know who Cather is. The tour guides and the receptionists and the archive workers are all Red Cloud natives. As I noted above, the bed and breakfast here is in Willa's parent’s home and is called Cather's Retreat. The Foundation is preparing to restore and revitalize an entire block of the business district to expand space for their archives. The Opera House where Willa gave her high school oration is back in business, restored thanks to her largesse, and is again a cultural center for the town.

Funny thing. Willa left Red Cloud to go to college and never lived here again. But she loved it and wrote about it and came back for visits up to 1930 when her parents died. Once she started making it as a writer - she sent money home. She always remained a member of Red Cloud's Episcopal church, and when she heard through letters that folks were going through hard financial times, a mysterious check would arrive in the mail.

And now, though Willa Cather has been dead since 1947 - she is still taking care of her hometown.

Allen Ginsberg on Love, Hatred, and Peace Marches

I've been reading Empty Phantoms: interviews and encounters with Jack Kerouac, a sad but necessary account of one of our great American writers' descent into alcoholism. It's funny and brutal.

Here's Allen Ginsberg in 1980, looking back on his seperating friendship with Jack as he dug into the anti-War movement of the Sixties while Jack stayed home and drank:

"One built-in stereotype which still exists and is poisoning the left here insists on "hatred" as a "revolutionary weapon," an old-fashioned prepsychedelic nineteenth-century hatred...which was contrary to his nature as it is contrary to mine. This hatred is at the root of most radical consciousness in America [...] when the entire left went into a completely masturbatory period of social violence, calling everybody pigs, with self-righteousness and self-isolation which finally led to the election of Nixon.

That gross element in the left repelled Kerouac, who felt it was a betrayal of what he had prophesied. He prophesied a spiritual, angelic generation that would ultimately take over with long hair and exquisite manners, you know, "wise as serpents and harmless as doves." Instead they were, like, greedy as pigs and harmful as dogs. It's still a problem, the left being poisoned by its own anger...

I always had Kerouac in mind when I got on a peace march and I always made sure it was, like really, straight, pure, surrealist, lamblike, nonviolent, magical, mantric, spiritual politics rather than just marching up and down the street screaming hatred at the president."

So what has changed in the twenty-five years since Allen spoke? The warlords won, the left is impotent, screeching and snarling but with fewer teeth than in 1980, the world seems even bleaker than it was. The dark Sixties will soon be referred to by the media as "a time of innocence" like the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, and Fifties before them. And still no revolution wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

I, wistfully and with some trepidation, still demand the revolution of love to begin today. To the barricades, you guys. No more screeching and snarling but rather touching and healing with hearts of compassion. Even for that sonuvabitch in the White House.

Church of the Dancing Pigs

I want to worship at the Church of Singing and Dancing Pigs.

I'm ready to discuss theology with Jinx the Cat.

I want to have missionary zeal like George Burns and talk it over with Gracie Allen.
I 'm ready to go to church where laughter and sorrow are welcomed with no shame.

I gotta be silly!
God wants me to be silly! I know it! It's the only thing I'm good at!
Someone's got to lighten things up around here.
I want to preach like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Those guys knew how to get a message across!
I'm ready to sing praise songs around the campfire with dirty beatniks.

I want to walk around the world and never stop while I'm alive like Johnny Appleseed throwing out joy and leaving plants behind.
I want to praise God in the snow and ice and hide from the wintry blast under the bridge in exhilaration with the Holy Spirit.

I'm not going to sit bored out of my mind in a pew ever again.
I just read that Christians ought to make Paul's pattern of thinking their own. How'm I doin' so far?

I'm a singing and dancing pig. Can't help it. My Daddy was one and his Uncle Foxy before him.
Today let's practice our stand-up routines to make each other howl with laughter with no cruelty.
Let us lock up the doors of the churches that are so proper. How can we dance and sing there?
Instead let's go to the meadow where the sky is blue straight through to heaven. Where God can see us better.
See, I'm already starting my stand-up routine.

My Winter Reading List

Here's my winter reading list: Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, all by Jack Kerouac whose prose has tasted good at all my ages so far. I started reading Kerouac at sixteen and will probably never be done. His old friend John Clellon Holmes thinks these are the books "in which his voice is most assured and his vision clearest." Yum. This is going to be a treat. Doctor Sax is my favorite American novel of the last century. No, maybe it's Visions of Gerard so gentle and kind.