Maverick Philosopher

Beat aficionados will be interested in this. Lucien and his son Caleb Carr make an appearance. Caleb later expressed misgivings about the Beat mode of parenting. See Caleb Carr on the Beats.

From On the Road:

... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ..." He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.

Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.' More here.

Dig Slim Gaillard here, here, and here.

Aficionados of Kerouac recall the lines in On the Road devoted to pianist George Shearing. In Marc Myers' post Old God Shearing! you can read the relevant passage. The following clips will give you a taste of Shearing. Lullaby of Birdland. Shearing in 1957. Ellington Medley.

Kenneth Rexroth's essay Simone Weil first appeared in The Nation in 1957. Rexroth hits upon an image more striking than apt when he describes Weil's "tortured prowling outside the doors of the Catholic Church — like a starving wild animal." Definitely worth reading, but of little value in understanding what is of lasting value in Weil.

About Kerouac, that is. His recent blast makes me suspect he has never read anything but snatches of On the Road. I wonder if Dalrymple/Daniels knows that Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Town and the City, in a conventional way with plenty of 'craft.' And Dalrymple gives no evidence of having read any of Kerouac's other work either. Someone who hasn't read Desolation Angels, Tristessa, Some of the Dharma, Visions of Cody, Vanity of Duluoz, and the pieces collected in Lonesome Traveler doesn't know Jack.

I say this as one who appreciates Dalrymple's other work. I've just begun his Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2001). A book every liberal should read, but won't. From a review:

Dalrymple is unrelenting. Poverty isn't caused by economics, he argues, but rather by a wildly dysfunctional --- and rapidly spreading --- set of values. And a blindly forgiving welfare state in which being "nonjudgmental" is the highest objective has helped create a permanent, irredeemable caste of victims, morally adrift and ineducable.

Exactly right.

A doffing of the beret to Bryan Nowak for pointing me to this post by an English Kerouac aficionado. There are two links to audio files of Kerouac reading to the piano accompaniment of Steve Allen.

My old friend Tom Coleman e-mails:

Jack Kerouac's On the Road was published fifty years ago in September, 1957. Here Joyce Johnson remembers. Excerpts:

Here. I got the answer right off.

All is well . . . .

Whistling them on to the brink of eternity
With his Irish St Patrick betoodle stick . . . .

Charlie Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody . . . .

Here is Allen Ginsberg on Diane di Prima. Perhaps you have noticed how the Beats and their descendants, holed up in such enclaves as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, stroke each other.

I puzzle myself by my continuing avid interest in the writers of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac principally. Hew does such an interest jive with the rest of my personality? How can such a logic-chopper appreciate a poetic lush like Kerouac? Or given my politics, how could I have an interest in Ginsberg?

"I am large, I contain multitudes."

Filed under Beat Generation.

Mike Gilleland e-mailed me about a Lowell Sun article, You Don't Know Jack About Kerouac. I don't need to tell the aficionados that Lowell, Massachusetts is Jack's hometown.

Kerouac lived for his art and paid some serious dues during his brief earthly tenure, 1922-1969, leaving the monetary benefits to be reaped by his literary executors. His estate is now worth a fortune and is contested. See The Kerouac Obsession.

Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?

Jack Kerouac was a big ball of affects ever threatening to dissolve in that sovereign soul-solvent, alcohol. One day he did, and died.

A growing sense that memory is a pointless indulgence, and perhaps an obstacle on the Path. Memory Babe himself had this sense at one time (8 December 1954) before losing it again in an alcoholic fog of fame & despair. Cf. Some of the Dharma, p. 172:

Learned this Fall, 2 things, 1, there's no need to write like Proust
2, No need to remember Lowell & the Duluoz "Legend"

The following excerpt is from The Making of the Counterculture by Kenneth Rexroth. The text combines three pieces that were originally written for the BBC (1967-1969) and then printed together (under the title “The Second Post-War, the Second Interbellum, the Permanent War Generation”) in The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World (Herder & Herder, 1970).

What Rexroth has to say about Kerouac in the piece reveals more about Rexroth than about Kerouac. Hat tip: Mike Gilleland.

Kerouac’s portrayal of this [Zen Buddhist]aspect of San Francisco culture, in The Dharma Bums would be a malevolent libel if it were deliberate. It is only an expression of his own baffled ignorance in the face of human motivations and beliefs, which he was intrinsically incapable of understanding. It is this ignorant confabulation presenting itself as reality which accounts for the almost complete eclipse of Kerouac’s reputation. Young people no longer read him and consider him absurd, the apotheosis of uptight. It is not just the misrepresentation of fact but the misunderstanding of motivation, the distortion of character and the ignorance of the ideas involved which has caused him to be no longer read by people who really understand what he is talking about. The worldview of post-modern culture and of the San Francisco version of it especially has now become the common possession of millions of young people and it is backed up with a whole literature and way of life which bears no real resemblance to the disorderly conduct for its own sake of Kerouac’s characters.

How wrong Rexroth was about Kerouac in 1967-69, but especially now. Over thirty five years have passed and Kerouac continues to be read widely while Rexroth languishes in relative oblivion.

I am back on a Kerouac jag for two reasons. One is that I found a biography of Kenneth Rexroth in a local library discard bin. He was a sort of literary godfather of the Beats. A second reason is that the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley has edited and introduced the 1947-1954 journals of Jack Kerouac and put them before as Windblown World (Viking, 2004).

Reading Windblown World reminded me of John Ciardi's "Epitaph for the Dead Beats" (Saturday Review, February 6, 1960), an excellent if unsympathetic piece of culture critique which I dug out and re-read. Here is the put-down directed at Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose':

Whether or not Jack Kerouac has traces of a talent, he remains basically a high school athlete who went from Lowell, Massachusetts to Skid Row, losing his eraser en route.

In a similar vein there is the quip of Truman Capote: "That's not writing, it's typewriting!"

Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.