Prose by Zalokar (AKA David Golding) (x2), Bob Levin, Richard Meltzer, Aram Saroyan, and Theodore Putala prompted by Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur and the documentary, One Fast Move or I’m Gone, about the stretch in Kerouac’s life chronicled in that novel. You can watch One Fast Move for free online here. (H/t Theodore Putala.)
Meltzer on Big Sur (Period).
By my woozy reckoning, Big Sur is one of the two or three greatest proseworks in the English language (period). It’s also easily THE great now-I-begin-to-die first-person novel—and Kerouac’s greatest, and grandest, piece-o-prose by a country mile.
As documentaries presuming to truck in beatnik lit and/or lore go, One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur is not only not-half-bad—quite a miracle, since most beat docs are dogshit—but possibly (really, actually) one of the finest…if slightly flawed. Three MAJOR PLAYERS—Phil Whalen, Lew Welch, Lenore Kandel—are absent from the narrative, and the fantastic Michael McClure HUMILIATION SCENE (where he asks Jack for the address of his editor at Paris Review and Jack tells him FUCK! YOU!—haw, what a terrific moment!) goes totally unmentioned, but what can you expect with only 98 minutes’ screen time to work with?
One thing aggrieves me, tho, aggrieves me to my grizzled shorthairs: the fucking ending. Wherein that silly SILLY beatnik simulation Patti Smith—the quintessential fully inflated ersatz hipster saint—tells us how utterly GRRROOVY it is that Jack closes the book w/out a period….wow…no punctuation! Well, shoot, I’ve got very few Kerouac first printings (they’re expensive, eh?), but I do have a dusty, ragged first of Big Sur—which of course ends WITH a period. And 12-13 reprints in fine lurid bindings (sailboats! bathing beauties! hot cars!—which do not appear in the book NOHOW) which likewise end w/ a period. They all do!
I.e., the BOOK does.
Fuh. Patti’s in the Pantheon—sucking up to Ginsberg and Dylan and Anne Waldman got her there—and Pantheoners, like all celebrities, can say and do whatever they fucking want, even besmirch the goddam Sacred Trooth. Next thing you know, Patti’ll tell us she fucked Brian Jones (but only gave Jack a handjob).
The Pantheon—rooty toot! I know I’m still eligible, but you can fucking KEEP IT.
–By Richard Meltzer
The Voice
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t seen it in years, and this time I was struck by how the narration from Kerouac’s books was so expertly rendered by John Ventimiglia. Kerouac was a great reader of his own work—his work with Steve Allen on both the TV show and the LP they did together are my personal favorites—but Ventimiglia sometimes sounds indistinguishable from Jack himself. Amazing work.
–By Aram Saroyan
Off the Road
When I got to Berkeley, September ‘68, Adele’s crowd used to swap stories about whose trip to Big Sur had taken the longest. Drugs usually had something to do with it.
I ran into Sunshine Lefkowitz. When he had been Sheldon, a sweet-faced eleven-year-old doctor’s son from Bala Cynwyd, I’d waited on his bunk’s table at summer camp. Now he had a biker’s belly, pigtail to his ass and sold egg rolls from a cart outside Sproul Plaza. “I was lying around the house, summer after freshman year, reading Big Sur,” he said. “My folks were away, so I hopped my mom’s Buick and came out.” He shook his head. “Haven’t been there yet.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
I’d kept Kerouac at arm’s length. A 10th grade English teacher, who held me in high regard, loaned me On the Road, but I didn’t get it. When a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, a grande dame from the upper West Side, clucked approvingly at the absence of his novels from our college bookstore, I dissented not. It took me a decade to enjoy Road, Bums, and Angels; but, by then, married, working, I was past even thinking of sticking out a thumb or isolating in a shack. When I read Ann Charters’ biography, I was filled with sadness that he had been unable to save himself – and that none of his friends could. Before too long, I had my own friends dragged down rats’ holes and understood the one on the hook had to want to throw it.
Still when the discussion turns to whether we would prefer a psychologically sound Jack Kerouac or one who voiced his demons, and Tom Waits said, “Nowadays we’d give you some ritalin or something, straighten your ass right out. Send you to AA, Jack. You’ll be fine. You’ll never write another word, but you’ll be fine,” I thought, “Shit, there’s medical advice right out of Trump’s White House.” John Coltrane kicked alcohol and heroin before he wrote “Alabama” or “A Love Supreme.”
Now I’ve seen the movie. Guess I’ll read the book.
–By Bob Levin
Note from Oakland
Thanks for the Big Sur rec awhile back. Been lying around in the sun almost naked (none of k’s catholic internalized homophobia and horror of the body here) reading it all day, just before the heat and the fires come back. Just the kind of elegy for California and youth i needed. You know someone’s a good writer if he’s macho, right-wing and antisemitic (which describes a whole lot of the shitty writers in the american canon) and it doesn’t bother you, or maybe even charms you….abrazos!
—By Zalokar
Drink it In
So I crack open a Guinness, having had wine earlier with dinner, and pour that over the rocks as I sit up and watch a documentary (shared with my small bloodline of writer friends who seem to allow us getting each other) about Jack Kerouac’s famous visit to Big Sur, so chronicled, (recoiling from all the troubles of fame we all know so well now) and what else to say… I’m up ’til about 5:30 in the morning, not that I want to be, it’s just that I’m awake, just as the light is getting blue out, would that it would only stay that way, so low-key and friendly to star watchers and dreamers and dopey kids with fantasies on their minds, and I don’t like the day so much anymore, but, as it seems, have come to prefer the night, if I must be honest with you, it’s quiet, for one thing, and if the President of the United States is such an insane madman wanna be dictator fascist, if that’s what all our noise has created, holy shit, what’s so wrong with me having a little wine and musing poetically for a bit, thinking of Jack Kerouac as all the great bugs of earth that are still here breathe their song in and out, tiny whistles, tiny instruments of reed or string, and played with such a tender steadiness as if to keep all of humanity nice and calm, a symphony, from which one might deduce the weather, for if it were colder, you might just hear one of the little guys nearby going “twenty, twenty, twenty,” slowly, just that I don’t have a job and who the hell knows what’s going to happen with everything these days…
xxx
Jack, Jack, you know, being alone, even in the cabin, it’s not a good idea. It certainly sounds like a good idea, but you’re instantly going to get lonely as anything, and you’re going to have to entertain some of the old poisons, just at a level more controlled, and where is your typewriter anyway. Jack Kerouac, incredibly smart guy. A man with the music in him. The soul.
Oh, hell. What are we going to do.
But there is a theme here. My friends. Kerouac. Nature. Exposure to the elements. It’s not like they had Club Med invented for him. He was hard on himself, spartan, stoic. Could he have written ad copy? Run a bookstore? Nah. I think he would have been okay with some parts of the restaurant business, but soon he would have bowed out, bored, no, this is not for me, you have offended The Holy Spirit, and he had every right to. Mind you, an incredible athlete, bulked with muscle, built perfectly for sturdy bursts of Breton speed, and with an intelligence that just wouldn’t fit in with any boundaries but its own ones, vast, horizonal, arched to the sky, the circumspection of so much road. A sleeping bag. Sleeping on the floor. A rough driver, but one taking you somewhere, a mountain adventure, across the mighty rivers of the north and the south, shouting poetry to the moon full.
His little touches, those in his prose, gestures of politeness, of the old meanings with which humans used to speak to each other. Each one of his books, great as they are, can be tedious at points…. No, Jack, don’t go down there… But who can stop him. On The Road is difficult. Dean driving. Dharma Bums is difficult. He’s alone again, stuck in some rail yard. Desolation Angels, difficult. Big Sur…
He wrote prose. This is the way we all really want to talk to each other, before conversations get interrupted and distracted and derailed by and in the back and forth. Egos, everywhere, and ego thinking imbedded so far in us in our attempt to survive just another day or longer, we too get caught. We want to be, simply, present. Like an animal. Hello, deer. (Two bucks I saw, almost face to face, on my little walk to the river bluff…)
Oh, but who cares, really, anymore… Kerouac knew, sensed at least, his writing was a fight for survival, and so, he ran. Just like I used to run over the hills of country roads in New York State, farmland, before it got too developed, etc., but we won’t go into that now.
But oh Kerouac, he felt the big shame just like I do, and I won’t say I’m better at it than he.
If one were to have real faith, what would he do? Well, it would be hard to top Jesus at what he would do, some of us being prone to the Christ Complex, but faith would be to write, to join your own sort of a monastery, one of truth and writing and the athletic grace of prose in the mind, the stunning sprint, the long turn around the track’s curve toward the homestretch and you’re still motoring, pumping away and god it feels good.
The recipe for life is not less art, it is for more art. Art to pour into starving mouths in need of water and wine and sustenance and resurrection from the dead…
To pull something out of the dank and Celtic depressions that come naturally, like a load of shit or coal or rock one must bucket away in paining shovels, this is easier when the subject is allowed to sit down and write for a bit, I kid you not, no joke, it’s good therapy. Do not hold it against a crippled man that he needs someone of faith to come along and to simply, rather simply say, you are freed from your sins. Go write a book. Take some time off. Stop worrying. Spend time with friends.
I have to say, a Guinness, extra stout, $12.99, across the street for a six pack, tastes pretty good while crickets chirp secretly and boldly, calming our own blood flow veins with their medicines pulled out of the ground, rising a beneficial beneficent herbal and mineral dust out of the dirt, so that we too might come back after living through another winter. The Guinness, poured into a wine glass, is actually a nice thing, not just a sort of legend joke. It’s creamy. Malty. It deglazed the pan before a beef stew pretty well, I must say. (Maybe the crickets are saying, “potassium, magnesium, iron, oh, and they will need carbon and old buried iodine too, how much work, yes, we have to do.”) Mining for the sake of their old friends, and you know they watch us, and probably care for us. I followed a monarch butterfly around today in the afternoon sun, a gorgeous creature, we played, almost, hide and seek. Tell me there is no intelligence in such, a wish almost to show the glory of gliding, just get your wings up like this and you can do it, said the butterfly. And up and around, and dropping down, then resting, then rising up, so he went, very entertaining, even if I was in just about the worst mood possible with many burdens and a seeming inability to do some stupid paperwork after all that effort I put into, looking for a job.
Right now the bugs have changed slightly, their tempo. They are rolling a wheel around, quick quick quick, as if they suddenly realized, oh, shit, there is a project we must do, and they all join in. But wait, there is a maestro conductor who is now slowing things down, reminding everyone that it is 4:58 AM, and that, well, we will need to pack it up here, and disappear, us jazzmen and jazzwomen, and just by that small syncopation, if you were listening, you would hear the subtle change in tempo, just as God and the Universe and Thou Art That Which Is, wanted you, wants you, to. Idiot or not. Or maybe there’s an old Native American ghost over your shoulder, seeing that you are hungry and benevolent and need to be fed of the spirit.
All the people who are intent on doing things, maybe they too should stop and listen, to the bugs. Not that it would directly help, but for sanity’s (whatever that is) sake.
The moving world is so hard to keep track of. Try jumping back into that stream when you have fallen out, and you will see how change keeps changing and changing, and someone’s trying to get rich, or, maybe just do their job so that they have a salary… so they can eat, but it’s not great, in fact it sucks.
A children’s book can be written in about fifty good sentences, much like a Hemingway story. A good one, both count. The horse went to the water. Captain Jim saw the pirate ship in the cove. Fishing in the swamp… Huck has a new friend. I saw Dean round the corner in his moth eaten overcoat he’d saved for the frigid temperatures of the east.
“I don’t need to please anyone but myself,” I finally say, in my mild Eureka moment. No more trying to please impossible virgins and mood swung woman, bless her poor soul. Just do what I can. Sorry I won’t be away earlier like everyone else, because madmen need to sleep too, when they can.
How are you going to make it as a writer, kid, man, man child…? But that’s not exactly it. It’s the act. It’s the process. It’s the work of the exercise. It’s, yes, also about whatever beauty your mind finds in discovering a voice. That’s the thing to share. Like landscaping. Like pruned hedges. I work. You work. It’s a way to talk, across walls and over boundaries and in between, because we can never really talk to each other all that well, coming out of the surface of being and not the depth…
—Theodore Putala
A Version of Death Called Life
Friday December 4 (Trip #11)
Question: What is the secret & unconscious nature of my relationship to alcohol?
———-
Hey David, hey David, I hear. It’s the voice of Jimmy D as I drive him to school in my purple Honda Civic. I think of his astroturfed hair. All the sudden his features seem phenotypically Black to me, his lips and nose etc., though he was Irish: his racism (of course: a genealogical vision) was casual and a racist impression was one of the fastest ways to crack him up, or any mean-spirited impression, though his laughter had an almost angelic good nature to it. Hey David, which means to suggest something lazily transgressive, something he wants, either from me or just from the world, some pleasure he can cheat out of life. To be followed with an idea, in this case it’s always to smoke a bowl in the car. And to go to get breakfast at McDonald’s. Both make me sick. Alex G, the moppy-headed Jewish stoner, is also in the car. I feel ill.
The long montage of my life as a drinker “flashes before my eyes”: Neil’s party in 9th grade (Katie B walking around topless, I feel violently vertiginously out of sorts, the room is spinning, later it’s said that I am a bad drunk, I lose touch with some of these friends, or I am cast somehow differently as a psychotic drinker). Back to that time in the mall parking lot in 8th grade, in which I didn’t get drunk but had to run from the cops. The girls who got caught, but not us (Molly, I think, Molly’s dead: heroin). She never had a chance. Drinking Jameson with Drew in college, then with Marianne in the various cities we lived in, then the “bad year” with Andy in Berkeley which leads to the hospital from which I emerge Phoenix-like into Somerville, where I continue to drink but come into myself for the first time, my power, with R in various countries, the “bad years” in Oakland leading up to rehab, etc.
I think of how I would wake up in high school with that acrid taste in my mouth and with “flesh hunger.” The intense jizz of the next day, which I didn’t bother to wipe off my thighs. Cumming away my hangover and shame.
I see the bottles I’ve consumed over the years in the ocean (stereotypical image of choked maritime existence) and then I see the “sea of toxins” in my liver. The sea, I think, the sea. The spread of maritime, mercantile capitalism through alcohol in the transatlantic slave trade, in the brutality of the sugar plantations (in the colonies, I repeat). The only way you could cajole or conscript people into work, numb and libidinalize them so you can brutalize them. Later after capitalist modernity is established in the continental U.S., alcohol becomes a burden to labor discipline and to the family. Prohibition, etc.
In the colonies bleeds into Charlie, my dad’s maternal grandfather, one of the few Jewish alcoholics in the Bronx, a shonda or whatever. Charlie, I say, as he appears. I cry out to him. I’m so sorry. I start to cry [in physical existence]. It was hard for me too, I keep saying, though I’m not sure who is consoling whom, our identities bleed into each other yet remain distinct.
Drink, drink, drink, I hear chanted to the beat of the drum and realize it is the incantation of a frat game. I see a vision of those kids tortured to death with acute alcohol poisoning in frat initiations, an epidemic and a ritual. Survival of the fittest (or the elite-ist).
I see a very elegant, belle époque image of declassé women drinking on a terrace or on the balcony somewhere. Laughing. I want to be with them. In the downtown shabby capital of some Third World city, well past its glory. I feel the urge to vomit and then I think of all the alcoholic vomit on earth. I wonder if they have alcohol on Mars. I see the presumably teetotaling Elon Musk escaping the ruins of earth to his sober Martian slave colony.
I see the hills of Valparaíso on New Year’s eve, where half the population of Chile it seems comes to celebrate. I see the labyrinthine streets running downwards with urine until it all debouches in the city square the next morning, a civilizational dionysiac stink. A riot without meaning, I think, thinking of all the subversive political energies that are both actualized and defused by alcohol. I think of the phrase: the drunken mob.
I am in the basement of my first house with my nine year-old self. Help me get out of this skin, he says to me. I undress him like I’m undressing a girl after prom. Inside he’s some kind of lizard, but then he’s not really that anymore. I think he’s a formless form, a raging inchoate desire to be. Fine, I say. I’ll have a drink with you. We sit down. So what do you want?, I ask, as if to see if he really does want it. Hmmm….a long pause. A Sam Adams. No (various drinks pass through my/his mind but none seem appealing). I want to fuck, he says, mischievously. I laugh but also I’m thinking, is that really what you want? What do you really want? I want….to fly away. Fly away where? Where, he says…[long intermittent pauses fill these conversations] I want to fly away to where no one’s ever been before. He starts to do what I think of as a “psychedelic dance,” with his hydra limbs, more limbs than I can count. Do you remember that traumatized redneck, Devon B, who already drinks beer and who showed you his dad’s Playboys and who when you’re sixteen, you don’t know this yet, will threaten to shoot you at a party because you couldn’t resist making fun of him (the rumors that he’d been fucked in the ass by the other traumatized redneck, or was it the other way around: either way, an omerta sodomy)? I think about this prototype of a MAGA shithead. You should have kicked all their asses, I say, though I’m no longer talking to my nine year-old self, I’m talking more to my sixteen year-old self. All these kids were such paper tigers. Your strength, even then, was enormous. I turn back to my nine year-old self with a question that seems of deep importance. Are you violent?, I ask. He doesn’t reply, though he’s thinking hard about the question. Am I violent?, he says. I don’t know if I’m violent. I’m in search of a world…(he doesn’t finish the sentence, what kind of world?, I think). Why are you so violent, I say to him, not quite angry but disturbed. There’s a darkness in you that you know nothing about yet. One day your world will be filled with phenomena of hatred. We’re silent again for awhile. Would you do it again?, I ask him. Yes…no…I don’t know. He seems almost indifferent. I don’t know if I’m going to take you with me, I say to him. You’re free to come with me if you want, I guess. Or, I can leave you to another hell. But then I think to myself, it doesn’t work that way. Then I wonder if I’m talking about the nature of alcohol or of time. What is alcohol?, I wonder. Alcohol is…the past, it’s a river of revenge, it’s time…time repeated, time put off. It’s saying hello (to an old friend, one you may have never met, you may never meet). It’s all the things that you want in the form of this gnostic hell (the gnostic hell is all of our planetary and psychic existence). It’s not you and it’s you. It’s your bones. A vision of myself dead, in the grave. A vision of Oaxaca City’s Día de los Muertos, all those families getting fucked up by their loved ones’ graves. I see myself both dead, a skeleton, and at the same time very much alive, drinking in good spirits, in good company, by my own grave.
—By Zalokar