stand down

"The Power and the Glory", Graham Greene, 1940

A life without the ability to believe wholly without worry, imagine. Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" is a stark tale of a priest living in "mortal sin", a so-called "whisky priest", addicted to the brandy, abandoned his child (he weren't supposed to have in the first place), still seeking to deliver mass and do his duty...but on the run from the authorities in a dystopian fascist state where religion -- tolerance -- free speech -- is outlawed in the name of a, perhaps, more truthful world.

As one who considers himself an atheist 67 years after Greene obtained his copyright, I probably approach this book with significantly different mindstate, one who doesn't yearn for religion to be outlawed, but perhaps to be minimized, I sit between the ideals of the whisky priest and the atheist lieutenant antagonist who goes to all ends to destroy, in a most vulgar manner, this pathetic sinful man, yet still priest. I connect to hardly anyone -- perhaps Coral Fellows, the girl who sheltered the whisky priest, naively tells him about morse code, she being outside the conflict of religion v. atheism, yes, but not outside the simple right v. wrong, deciding not to act with the state but with her own moral judgement, acting on Kohlberg's highest level. Coral -- a secondary character but the most important character, in my view, outside the priest, lieutenant, and the seeming Judas in the half-caste -- seems to be the only one capable of such action in the book, a break from the mold of New World v. Old World into simply doing what she believes. She's too idealistic for this book, so when the whisky priest escapes prison unwittingly for being picked up for smuggling whisky and seeks the help and asylum she had once promised him, she is gone, her family is gone, leaving behind only a pathetic starving dog the priest effectivly robs for its last meat.

He is the last priest, it would seem, and his journeys only cast more furor in his pursuer, kidnapping and killing people in every village the priest receives help in. He is given martyr status where he himself knows he is undeserving -- the bloodthirst of the search for him, the hunger of the religion-deprived people to feel his mercy at confession, it all gives his otherwise sin-filled and pathetic life meaning and holiness. The foolish ruling class always gives unearthly meaning to those they persecute. The priest even pondered his piety a great sin at several points throughout the book. Unworthiness haunted him, but he still trudged on to do what he knew he must, and that was to deliver in the sacrements. I've read armchair interpretation that Graham Greene held these sacrements sanct and wanted to juxtapose the purity of such to this decisively impure man who was to deliver them; John Updike's introduction also talks ot an author coming to a state of conflict over his own religious conviction. I can see the truth in both strains on interpretation. The triumph of this book is its ability to show all unworthy men in the face of this odd hope religion lends through its pure points, and of course, from the stance of the atheist, I have my ideological quandaries with the text, seeing Greene deny all of the philosophical doublespeak of religion, but I'll save that for another high horse. Religion is a power wielded by common, sinful, desolate man. Greene shows what boundaries cannot hold it in, a powerful message.

The scenes he paints are probably his strongest point as a writer, at least from a reader's standpoint. Nothing is more vivid then when the Indian woman lays down the child among the picture of crosses tied jagged and at varying heights, a burial ground, and a point I never thought of but Updike states in his opening, the entrance to a godly state, outside of Mexico (he was coming upon the border -- and freedom -- though a freedom he knew would haunt him forever). Also the scene where the priest is finally betrayed, where he sits across the lieutenant and they begin hashing out their difference in a battle of wits of educated, staunchly idealistic men, in a small abandoned hut and makeshift seating, in the middle of nowhere, anywhere, it is perfect for the scale of destitute shown in this time and place where God has been driven out. And even the lieutenant is in internal agony as the last priest is killed -- the enemy defined him and now the enemy is no more. An interesting commentary on impressing your beliefs all over, for what happens when you are successful?

Without reflection and going over little bits and pieces of interpretation, I find myself strapped by my own state as non-believer when it comes to "The Power and the Glory" and Graham Greene's thought process as a believer, but as a novelist, and as a brilliant word painter of scenes. So while I have a hard time empathizing with either protagonist or antagonist, on an intellectual level I can see where both come from and the frightening possibilities of the fascist way, putting specific ideals on every single person. While religion exists far too purely, rarely and dismissively questioned (only one very secondary character seems to dig into the priest at all, but is painted only as a nuisance to be disregarded), I also know the frightening possibilities associated with such a view of religion, one where we assume ignorantly that its administering is possible as nothing but a pure act without ulterior motive, be it to get money or make the people subservient. But we know, because he has said it, that Greene was writing to separate the man from the act. In that, "The Power and the Glory" is an excellent novel regardless of where it comes from or how disagreeable the sentiments can be at times because it is written with such conviction, no matter how naive it may sometimes seem in a current America where religion is used as a shield, or worse, a sword, but not merely a way of hope and a path of good living. Perhaps in that dystopian Mexico, that by killing priests and making the act of sacrements taboo and unlawful, then and only then religion can be made into such a pure act, in the face of imminent destruction. A scary, morbid thought. It is good to see a man flesh-out the potential of such a way of life, of religion. Good and bad..."The Power and the Glory" got me thinking, and it won't stop after I hit Publish Post. I read it in three days, lazy bum days, too. I'll reduce it and close it out common-man glib style: It must've been a good book.


"'I'm not telling them fairy stories I don't believe myself. I don't know a thing about the mercy of God: I don't know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this--that if there's ever been a single man in this state damned, then I'll be damned too.' He said slowly, 'I wouldn't want it to be any different. I just want justice, that's all'"

inimitable he

"Visions of Gerard", Jack Kerouac, 1958

Of all the misadventured wild looking for IT of Mr. Kerouac's life, "Visions of Gerard" is that Duluoz Legend book that takes us on a trip in the memory, created visions n little tidbits of actual emotion drawn from the little kid remembrance of Gerard, Jack Kerouac's older brother who died at the age of nine. Kerouac admits his idealism and old-soul wisdom came from this oldest soul of a little boy who hated mousetraps and digging out the eyes of killers in the newspaper (among other things), who went to confession to purge every little bad detail admitting his sins puresouled, who yelled from his deathbed for his sister Ti Nin and little Ti Jean to go out and play and enjoy the day as his nine year old body expired.

The 130 pages are divided up into small vignettes expressing the soul of Gerard as Kerouac pieced together from distant feelings and memories, and I'm guessing from old stories his mother would tell him. The first half contains many recollections of Gerard, summed in, "My own brother, a spot of sainthood in the endless globular Universes and Chillicosm." Right down to when he first became sick and told the nuns at school of his visions of Heaven, you'd be surprised he wasn't isolated by his earnest wisdom but he drove awe into the hearts of the adults he touched, and no one more so than Jack Kerouac. The second half contains some of the more stark and stumbling images as we see Ti Jean's father, Emil, milling about town hit hard woebegone as his son lays on his death bed begging to see the birds which come to his window, HIS birds he wishes so badly to come to him and sit around him (not understanding their fear, having no fear even in certain death). When the death comes we are hit with the immense sorrow of child death despite Gerard's intense wishes to be gone to Heaven (even when he was well he cried of why people can not have what they want--he wanting Heaven).

Naturally, all this naturally, but the revelations of imminent death, the world being death, the somber realizations are what "Visions of Gerard" are about past the shots of heart-breaking idealism. For Ti Jean, Jack Kerouac, this was his first experience in death and we see him confused over the moping, crying, knowing Ti Gerard was in Heaven, as the adults cry and moan, as mom screams, "They took him off to Heaven!--They didnt leave him with me!--Gerard, my little Gerard!" It's a sobering view from a child of 3 now grown into a soon-to-be legendary poet and novelist. Death has always been a played-with subject of the Duluoz Legend, but in this book it takes center stage with all its promise and dire promise brought out, danced around. Yet we still have the words of what can be DONE before the death takes over, the impenetrable heart of perhaps Kerouac's own personal savior, Gerard Duluoz, someone who taught Ti Jean to be kind as he stabbed out the newspaper eyes of the murderer woman--"We smooth the ruffled paper, stroke the paper lady's eyes, brood over our sin, rectify hells, fruition good Karma for ourselves, repent, go to confession--" This sort of innocent heart, not sentimental or nostalgic, just understand of the sanctity surrounding him, he died for certain with no hopes like adult hopes but with some sort of alien heart for the good of all men.

This all not to say how Kerouac's words dance dance dance the page amazingly and elegantly the story of his brother. His progressive style of punctuation and short episodes lead to a clear, penetrating look at Gerard and his family structure. As Gerard returns form confession, Kerouac remembers his exact place and time, you have to be jealous over his ability to describe unabated, "I'm sitting stupidly at a bed-end in a dark room realizing my Gerard is home, my mouth's been open in awe an hour you might think the way it's sorta slobbered and run down my cheeks, I look down to discover my hands upturned and loose on my knees, the utter disjointed inexistence of my bliss." All over the return of the boy who'd bring him intense love for the world, word, and the heart to tell it. Then this leads to the internal understanding, "None of the elements of this dream can be separated from any other part, it is all one pure suchness." Simple, elegant. The book is--not crammed 'tis still airy--but laden with such description and wisdom, vivid, illuminating, gut-wrenching in a butterfly sort of way.

"Visions of Gerard" will raise many questions in the mind, the BIG QUESTIONS, as we see a saintly boy expire n go to where he always begged to go, as he posed the simple boy questions of why are men so mean(?) and so on. This is key in the Duluoz Legend as Kerouac runs all over creation searching for IT (which I always say was ENCRUSTED in his trips to begin with), though it appears IT was something Gerard had internally, and Kerouac, in this book, looked to dig it out of him before telling the story of his inevitable end to his rheumatic heart. It's heartfelt, in a way tender, never bitter, pure Kerouac in simply another way, pictures painted bright golden then stark never-seeing nights (behold the scene Gerard runs out to get his mother aspirin in the blistering windy cold winter night and revelates that God did not make the world for men in its pure darkness with a light only showing the darkness but not illuminating). The making of a literary icon in the visions of his brother who perhaps was greater than He.


"In bed that night he lies awake, Gerard, listening to the moan of wind, the flap of shutters--From where he lies he can just see one cold sparkle star--The fences have no hope."

please don't ask for a direct interpretation...

"Naked Lunch: The Restored Text", William S. Burroughs, original text: 1959 and restored text: 2001

Well, let us be thankful for the Restored Text version of this book, a little less than 200 pages of prose insanity and another hundred pages of outtakes and explanations, mainly from Burroughs himself. This book, one of the three staples of the Beat Generation (with Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"), is drug meditation, one from an admitted long-time use of opium and its derivatives, written while in the midst of addiction with extreme and bothersome imagery and cautiounary tales woven in. On first read, it's difficult to completely take in, I was left wondering where it was all going, however, as you catch the pace and rhythm of the text it flows disturbing but vivid, so much to visualize and synthesize it will undoubtedly warrant future looks simply out of intrigue.

Here we get pictures of Mexico City, Tangier, and "Interzone", a fictional psychedelic Orwellian society of dire proportions. Within the vignettes (I'll call them for lack of better term) and using Burrough's famous "cut-up" style, he pieces together visions and warnings. The warnings jump right out at you as we see our protagonist, a head man of Islam, Inc., meeting the infamous Dr. Benway in Freeland Republic, where free love and bathing are what it's all about, and how stability is maintained is through prolonged mistreatment (sound familiar, hmm?). Elsewhere say, "AJ's Annual Party", we get the pornographic, anti-death penalty episode where a threesome of young'ns have vivid intercourse ("Mark and Johnny sit facing each other in a vibrating chair, Johnny impaled on Mark's cock") then hang one another ("Mark reaches up with one lithe movement and snaps Johnny's neck...sound like a stick broken in wet towels"). In the midst of these themes are the overriding theme, that of the horror and stillness of addiction as Burroughs experienced it, and extreme. The visions, visuals are so dense your eyes may run over them while your brain is phasing out and surely you miss something every time you sit to read (I know I did). One of the more memorable episodes on addiction comes in "The Black Meat", where we see some other creatures known as The Reptiles and Mugwumps, disgusting slithering brutish blood-curdling, The Reptiles sucking off the Mugwumps in bars, for they have, in their members, the juice to prolong Reptiles lives. Everything's manipulation, cold, cruel, obscene, the life of a junky. Other sections that seemingly split-off the narrative seem to always in with the elipsis, and give scatter shots of biting outer-reality, including the famous story of a man's asshole taking over for his mouth, and eventually his whole psyche (yet still a biting criticism on the state of bureaucracy).

Which brings us to the cultural effects of "Naked Lunch", but I won't spend much time with that. I simply find it fanscinating and unsurprising that someone like Frank Zappa was highly influenced, doing his own recording of that talking asshole episode. This book is psychedelic, fargone, gritty, it's not hard to see how it had its impact on the counter-culture of the 60. It embraces the unembraceable. It talks homosexuality, sexuality of youth, addiction to hard drugs, whatever may seem vulgar Burroughs made matter-of-fact at least in the world of Naked Lunch. The book is highly sexual, no matter how stomach churning it may be for those living under Heterosexual American Dream Fantasy rocks, vivid, and disturbing in how it treats some of the subject matter, and that's intentional, Burroughs even admits that it was bothersome to write. But it continues to have great effect as perhaps the most taboo and vivid of all the Beat writings (and that'd be saying something, indeed).

It is convenient to have read this the first time with the restored text including several additional writings from Burroughs and explanations of how this version was pieced together by editors James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, gentlemen with obvious affection toward "Naked Lunch". From this we can get Burroughs's own point of view on the story, definitely helpful in determining his purpose for writing the book so as to know it's not just random imagery and gross-out stuff, but of substance (not that you can't tell that with just the text alone if you are savy, but it does help clarify some, especially the brutality of some chapters as cries against the death penalty and other barbarism in 20th C. America). I may not have been able to figure much of the book out the way I had without these sections immediately, I probably would have set out on further research (though I probably need to do that anyhow). The cut scenes, or outtakes, are interesting, however, not exactly essential, but that's perhaps why they were CUT. Most illuminating is a medical article on addiction and a variety of drugs used in the underground and their effects, as well as the effects of various treatments, and second most illuminating being an afterward written by Burroughs describing the mindset behind "Naked Lunch" and clarifying some of its themes.

Initially, I found reading "Naked Lunch" to be completely frustrating, I couldn't wait to be done. But as I went through the extra text and connected it to what I was reading, beginning to understand the midstate of this junkie (though how I could truly understand, I know), I could see the purpose of the text, the images, the obscenity, and now it's not hard to see the fervor behind it. It's raw, impassioned, maniacal, intriguing...all right then I've got nothing more. Ah, "Naked Lunch".


"'Well, son, did you get a piece of ass?'

'Yeah. This gash comes to the door, and I say I want a piece of ass and lay the double sawski on her. We go to her tap, and she remove the dry goods. So I switch my blade and cut a big hunk off her ass, she raised a beef like I am reduce to pull off one show and beat her brains out. Then I hump her for kicks.'"

all of us on mountains

"Desolation Angels", Jack Kerouac, 1965

On top of a peak in solitude, this is a new voice of Jack Kerouac, yet the same old one, working things out constantly. Thing is, Jack Kerouac spent a whole lot of time not on the road but we never hear about it because when he wasn't on the road, rather, in more or less solitude at his mother's he was writing about the wild times, the pursuits. Now we catch him in Book One (Desolation Angels) in 70 pages of solitude like a reborn Buddhist mulling over his philosophies before emerging back into adult life to be, again, Jack Duluoz, Beat poet rising into star status, these adventures taking place just before the publishing of "On the Road" before all things would change.

Still, what kind of rebirth is it? He comes back down off that mountain (from doing fire watches and keeping entertained with card baseball games) where he curses the sky and Mt Hozomeen for his solitude yet has the chance to meditate on his Buddhist leanings and seemingly feels refreshed, apparently knowing much more about life, and intermittently will curse his rebirth all together, wishing for nothing but pencils, paper, and nobody. Still, has he learned a thing, going back into New York, finding a few lovers randomly women taking care of him in absence of his mother, searching for that ultimate truth in the road trying to live and damnit doing it on his own whatever pursuits. Has he learned a thing?

Appearing yet again are the likes of Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso (all pseudonymed-up) with all their quirks, but Cassady much more lovingly human than the caricature hero of "On the Road"'s Dean Moriarty, while Corso is as mad and poetic ever painting murals for the mafia, speaking truth and cursing destitution, with Ginsberg and his lover sitting around naked at parties doing whatever taboo can be to shake people out of their comfort zone (whaddya expect from the man who, at this time, just published the titanic poem, "Howl"?). We get glimpses of their mangled fraternity, emerging flame, careless lumping into sameness catagories while Kerouac's prose sorts them out quite clearly as a diversity of souls all digging each other out of curiousity and sheer madness, but what else should friendship be based on? Cassady teaches Corso how to bet on horses, Ginsberg pisses Corso off by stripping down at a quiet gathering in San Fran, William S Burroughs appears in Tangiers typing away madly at "Naked Lunch" whilst dreaming of his Ginsberg and ever getting shot-up on M, Kerouac rides around to Mexico City, Africa, Europe, and so on with a growing stash of manuscripts artistically flourishing (for he never considered "On the Road" a magnum opus and had "Tristessa" under his arm nearly losing it on the train), Great Jack's last adventure was even to move his mother out to Berkley for their perfect home in the effeminate progressive art communities but the old matriarch couldn't take the madness, scared her boy would be destroyed by it all, begging for him to find a home, another theme constantly creeping through all the Duluoz Legend and especially "Desolation Angels" (there is no home in desolation?), the concept of home through all the searching home is not lost but yearned for more, especially as he takes that boat back to America from England, yet nothing is ever settled even as he finds his Joyce Johnson, or Alyce, the one who takes care of him so well...he even concedes that sex is not the furthest he can love a woman or somesuch (I think I'll find it and quote it here -- second thought maybe not I got a better Hozomeen quote). Yes, so much goes on here, the wild shit, the soul searching (and yes, the cover is right, religion comes up so often with so many Buddhist and Christian and spiritual references you must read it all in context to even grasp the meaning), and the longest Kerouac book in 409 pages and over 150 small vignettes/episodes, two books (Desolation Angels and Passing Through, which was really an overview of happenings after "Desolation in Isolation" and "Desolation in the World") you must do as you always would first time in a Kerouac maze, read read read don't stop read read and synthesize what's great let other words drift off, catch more the second time around.

Yes, you'll learn.

"Hozomeen, rock, never eats, never stores up debris, never sighs, never dreams of distant cities, never waits for Fall, never lies, maybe though he dies-"

mardou and others

"The Subterraneans", Jack Kerouac, 1958

With "Tristessa", it was fleeting junkylove, more of a meditation of what it means to be enslaved and reliant upon others and upon drugs than truelove, like "The Subterraneans". Kerouac's follow-up to "On the Road" is even more off-the-cuff, but now a panoramic snapshot of a single love, not several back-and-forth trips, and in a mere 111 pages he spills that love onto the paper in all its details and glory, true to the soul and all that good stuff.

For a short little novel "The Subterraneans" is incredibly dense, wordy, and still flowing. It took me several sessions to come through, probably as many as the 2-3 times as long "Big Sur". You could tell that Kerouac wrote this in a BLAST, three days and three nights in reality, and that it struck like lightning you take a picture of and never fades. The words would lose me, find me, and like great Kerouac, there are moments you have no clue what's going on, then moments of utter clarity. He's able to divulge common things such as the basic plot (meeting, courtship, first sex, the good times, the bad times, the cause of the end, the end, the outcome) with glory of humanity and tenderness with his sketching prose, his stream-of-consciousness paralleled by no one.

The girl's name is Mardou, half-black half-Indian who strikes Kerouac's fancy as being somewhat the mother of us all. Hie Oedipal Complex is fleshed-out toward the end, and continuously through the whole Duluoz Legend as he struggles to find a replacement for his mother and always ends up back on her doorstep. Mardou seems like the closest thing the many-times-a-married man would find, as they make plans in darkness and love for real, but it isn't to last. The classic Kerouac paranoia rears its head as he begins to see signs of their downfall and plans accordingly. Through the man's positivity as The Legend goes on, his worship of life and the wonderment it brings, he's surely got the weakness of looking over his shoulder constantly. In this way he sabotages the relationship and this is a reflection of its destruction, beautiful and brittle, and totally relatable as it is a cliche in a new way. So not a cliche. Just a really good book on love.

Also covered in subplots that will converge with Mardou's affair with another "subterranean", Kerouac must've cemented his status as leader of the beats with this book which goes into further detail of the structure of the underground folk he was a part of. Some had made it in art, some were simply self-made scholars, others street poets and beatniks with the brains to join; they all had brains. Mardou was like Kerouac, impoverished, mad, intelligent as hell, and ready for whatever. In many ways she was the counterpart he was made for as you could see his contrast with the better-off beats and their witticisms that he did not all together fit with (he was too honest, even in his wit it was not as clever as it was genuine). Kerouac was instead crazier, just as brainy, impressive in conversation and art, but always retreated, and so did Mardou, to her home and the aptly named Heavenly Lane she lived on, where, Kerouac prophesized, one day her light would not be on for him any longer. And he was right.

Through the packed prose and intellectual and cultural references Kerouac and his Legend are known for, this strikes compelling as what is a meditation on love and its costs and rewards. He seems to regret in retrospect what he did to destroy, only seeming to understand it away from the situation and behind a typewriter, but still he moves. That's the point, right? He moves, and we move, and his travels and loves and heart-breaks and search for it continue perpetually. And I can't help but feeling he finds IT so often, but also finds that nothing so IT lasts, too precious and breakable. Just move!


"...and now you threw away a little woman's love because you wanted another drink with a rowdy fiend from the other side of your insanity."

deterioration

"Big Sur", Jack Kerouac, 1962

My previous Duluoz experience goes to the first typed "On the Road" and then the smashing little druggy Mexico City love meditation "Tristessa", but now Kerouac has found fame through what he refers to as "Road", and post-fame blues with alcohol tremens are what will be taken on in "Big Sur".

Kids expect him to be younger, and wiser, and more and more Jack Ti thinks he's a complete idiot and full of shit. He's caught up with Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassady as you'd figure), sleeping with Cody's favorite mistress and sitting on her chair and binging as she works while her child drives him wild, and on this saga goes.

The first fifth of the book is simply our protagonist, Mr. Kerouac, searching for an escape from big crowds and people who need to talk to him now that he is so-called "King of Beatniks". He's famous, he's got money, and he's getting the hell out of New York, so he finds himself on a cabin on Big Sur on the Pacific, and he's isolating himself trying to find greener grass. Though such is not possible; when he's at Big Sur he misses the crowds when he's with the crowds he misses the isolation Big Sur provided him. His torture turns to him rationalizing all with supposed signs he's going mad (such as Tyke, his kitten, dying and he mourns this consistently through the book so fabled loss of innocence) until he winds back at Big Sur with friends and his affair screwing with her kid hanging off of her and all woebegone things. This is Kerouac at his maddest and most self-deprecating.

Yet again, it's about adventure. He drinks too much, he's getting old, he misses his time with his old road pale when it's just the two of them, but he's still picking his ass up and doing things. Big Sur itself seems the maddest place as Duluoz stands over the thousand foot bridge and the wild waters as if its some giant monster meant to deter him from the peacefulness of the cabin, the peacefulness of the pure life. His alcoholism are those mad waters which never calm. Eventually even the pure things begin to look crazy and convicting, as Duluoz gets more and more paranoid and into worse situations with Billie, the woman who so wishes to settle with him but ends up driving him mad with useless philosophy and beatings of her child (and she swears, in the most despondent parts of "Big Sur" that she'll kill herself and the kid and all will be over). This adventure is not the same as the others, however, where Kerouac finds joy and sadness but always the will, as it seems he loses some of his faith and eventually, in the last fifth of the book he's gone so mad it's hard to make anything concrete of the text at all -- a wonderful mish mash of words set to the tune of a scabbed and tattered brain. A maddening adventure of the alcohol-induced and destroyed psyche.

The strangest part is that in the last two pages he suddenly snaps out of it. Everything is OK. It leaves with a sort of "What the fuck" thought, though this is Kerouac and he is, as I previously suspected, so damn scared of falling into cynicism, and it's funny I'm drawn to people like that because my own writing I forget, and, while I will venture much farther to the darkside of my own mind than I've seen Kerouac do, I need to hold on to those rays. In "Big Sur", yes, it is totally forced, but I think Kerouac wanted us to see that, see that you need to draw your mindstate away simply, make a change, get rid of Billie and her damned kid, drop them off and your obligations if need be, and get back to the purity of things. Or go mad. It's hard to say where Duluoz leaves us this time. We just know he comes back at some point.

This is a much more picturesque, naturesque Kerouac this time around, and not only is there isolation through Big Sur, but he seems isolated by those around him, isolated by fame, isolated by the mindset that he is not who he may really be. It is not instantly quotable, philosophies much more scattered, but still a different side of Kerouac and his Legend, and all is strange and mad in the world of Duluoz.

the blame game

"Shooter", Walter Dean Myers, 2004

Columbine and all things school shootings seem as confounding to Walter Dean Myers as they were to the rest of us when Middle America got to feel the acts of "senseless" violence that have plagued Mr. Myers's Harlem world since Harlem Time began. Not that we look to Myers for the answers, he's more the type to provide analysis, a fictional play-by-play of something undeniably real and problematic for society. Something in "Shooter", however, and about Myers and his seeming fear of empathizing too much with the book's assailant, Leonard Gray, is distressing insofar as he refuses an honest appraisal of a teenage killer's mindset and decides instead to, at the worst moment, plunge into the glib 'types that mar our ability to heal society before the worst manifests itself in irreparable tragedy.

As a book researched during the time Myers was taking notes and doing interviews for the spell-binding drama of a kid in the wrong place, wrong time, with the wrong associates, "Monster", "Shooter" is also more experimental teen lit, this time Myers writing from the voice of multiple interviewers and those intimately involved with Len Gray. The voices he gives both Cameron Porter (Len's closest male friend and, really, accomplice to his acts) and Carla Evans (a tough, abused teen girl, down to reality and all) stand up well with his professional interviewees, some emotionally removed professional psyches, others more badgering or even less than competent. It is interesting how Porter reacts to different situations, especially as he turns unsure and inward when met with the confrontational tone of FBI analyst Victoria Lash (also the lone dissenter when the others, exposed as more going-through-the-motion detectives concede that there was nothing that could have prevented the heinous crimes of Leonard Gray, an absurdity of bureaucracy too real and well fleshed-out). You believe that Cameron and Carla are intelligent, perhaps too intelligent and made vulnerable, outsiders trying to cope with teen life and doing a predictably poor job given how quick we are to give amnesty to the adults who could've intervened and been there as bullying and other harsh actions were committed against these weary souls.

It is the voice of Leonard Gray himself, though not found until the appendix after the "report", the remnants of his diary, that move to glib and tired characterizations of a teenager hollering for help, which bog the book down. He plays with words immaturely, and screams to the page, but also writes in prose so refined it is barely believeable. At what level are we trying to represent him? Sometimes he sounds like Neal Cassady, at other times the songwriter for Good Charlotte, and maybe this battle of a mad intelligent cat and a mad cliche cat are supposed to reveal something about his mindset. I personally think there isn't enough rambling or inclusion of, just, normal shit, every word is profound, it is far too much a product of an author rather than an accurate immitation of a boy lost. Here is where Myers is exposed as losing his touch with the soul of the perpetrator, instead reducing himself to mocking teen angst, and doing so in a badgering and unprofessional (though maybe also too-professional) manner. When you first hear about Len through the mouthpiece of Cameron, Carla, or the various analysts, it would seem as though Myers would hint at a human in Len, that perhaps there was more than meets the eye, and perhaps he could hint at the soul through his journal, but it's hard to find amongst the carefully written mocking. Even when he attempts to show remorse for exposing Carla's disturbing past (being molested by her father), he only seems to mention it in a self-centered way, though Cameron and Carla seem to both agree he was genuine and deeper than that, so Myers loses touch when trying to feign teen angst. Which is understandable; he's much better at being a confused African American from Harlem caught up at the scene of a crime (as seen in "Monster"), than an angry middle-class white boy fanatical for guns and dramatic shows of helplessness. He just can't seem to identify properly with Len, and that definitely degrades what is, up to that point, a fine piece of teen lit.

"Shooter" remains an important reflection point coming from a strong voice in teen writing despite its shortcomings. If it doesn't get your brain cranking on the true disturbances and harshness of the teen psyche and the effect of bullying and displacement of teenage beings, I'd be surprised. It makes me eager to then read Todd Strasser's "Give a Boy a Gun" to see how he pulls it off (as he has a similar nose for controversial wide-spread issues and teen accessibility that few seem to be able to find). Here's hoping he can pull of a scenario just as believable with perhaps just a bit more understanding for all parties and the cycle, not just beginning and endpoints, but the circle that is created which we can't seem to break, its strengthening in our youth.

PS--Though this is a gut reaction, I do want to praise the author, Mr. Myers, for his painting of the actual horrors of the actual event through the mouths of Cameron and Carla. Their description of what happened, their emotions, their tentative voice, created magical moments in teen lit few can recreate. The images of Len cutting himself open and painting "Stop the Violence" on the school walls before eventually turning his gun on his non-compliant, therefore evil traitor friends, creates a surreal quality such events deserve. The man can write, this book is not terrible, but just just just if he could've gotten to the heart of the child who spilled his own blood and that of others, and not just to the mania, but his true heart, this book would've been a beacon for the distraught teens mangled in anxiety. Still though.

FB: Carla, what do you think of all this? If you were summing it up, what would you say? CE: I've thought about it, naturally. The thing is, everybody is looking at what happened that day, but when you think about it, what happened that day was the result of a whole lot of other stuff. I'm not saying there was a direct cause or anything. But I think the whole thing wouldn't of went down the way it did if a lot of other stuff hadn't pushed Len to where he was. Is anybody looking into the other stuff?

i mean, man, whither goest thou?

"On the Road: The Original Scroll", Jack Kerouac, 2007.

Even in forever, it must all end. Fuckin' Potchky, Lucien Carr's dog, had to eat the end of Kerouac's scroll, lost and forever lost, so editor Howard Cunnell was left to sift through all sorts of "On the Road" editions to piece together what might have been, and in so many ways I just wish he would have ended with the words told of the Mexico City ambulances, but more appropriately for Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac and their beating souls and Neal's concept of time, "and it does not pause for an instant". Been fine like that, though I am not quibbling over the close, it works and is still notable for how the ending was polished by the process of making the book publishable by the standards of non-literate publishinghouses. And in that, the original scroll so legendary of "On the Road" was also ended, died to bring up its child, the "On the Road" so widely hailed, with pseudonyms and non-homosexuality, etc., etc., a version still crazy and stream-of-consciousness a-full, but still toned-down. Now I have read the scroll, beaten back to life to die only at the last word ("instant") transcribed by Mr. Cunnell for the benefit of us all without much of a touch, kept all the same as Kerouac madly typed it in a few weeks in a New York apartment.

Over a hundred pages of introduction precede the unabated scroll, with four "Kerouac scholars" including Howard Cunnell himself delving into different aspects of "On the Road"'s importance. Cunnell's is the only one I shall ever return to because his account of how "On the Road", the popular published version, came to exist in its edited glory, is absolutely fascinating. It makes me want to write a million novels and never seek to publish them, as if I'm keeping the mysteries of life all to myself and true understanding will die when I go limp. I'm glad Kerouac never got to the point, though, because even revised "On the Road" was great, and now the scroll has finally seen the light of day, posthumously, unfortunately for his soul but that's the way even he saw it as happening, and did his old publishers look like fools for how it went down, as he prophecized? To me they did, but this is how legends are made, with rejections and scathing criticisms by editors-not-writers. Legendary works never stay down, so the scroll is now published and all has come to materialize I suppose.

I am not going to hash-out the plot again because the plot hasn't changed. Two fellows, now in their true names of Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, are searching for IT, and are using the road to do that. We follow Kerouac in first-person as he meets with Neal, is separated, meets, is separated, and the eventual mass of time they'd spend together going from Frisco to New York to Mexico City, the meat of the book which all leads to and breaks from. Do they ever find what they search for? Does it matter? Perhaps the point to be found is that you can cross America a million times and it will brighten you and pain you and all you search for is not a mystery but is really already found and you just live and live and live and live and go on hiatus forever. I search for no beginning or end in anything, so maybe I'm not like Jack Kerouac, but I have found something otherworldly from his searches, and it makes me thrive as I read the words.

Many say they never do find what they search for, but perhaps in their not finding IT through their journeys, you find IT in yourself as you read, and even more so in the scroll which, even though now published in a hard-bound has no indentations and is truly written in a stream-of-consciousness method, no matter how well its puncutated for something not revised at all. It goes and goes, though not as unconventional as other works (I know from experience "Tristessa" is way more far-out, or "gone" as Jack may describe), but with this method of non-paragraphing, where the books change with just capital letters in the middle of the river of journey saying BOOK ONE or BOOK FOUR, and no arbitrary page breaks and stalls for needless chapter headings, you get the sense that all is connected in Jack's travels and including these several journeys with Neal and others in one book has its purpose, and not only perhaps was this Kerouac's magnum opus, but the whole plot was a climax, his life's climax.

I like that thought. "On the Road" may just be my favorite book ever now, and while I do like the published version, the scroll tickled me these past few days where I read the overwhelming amount of it. In my recent finding that my General Anxiety Disorder may really be Bipolar, or Manic Depression, the mania living inside this book appeals to me, especially since this weekend I have felt heightened. If I can control the "disorder" moodwise, I think I'll find it a blessing, because according to my well-versed psychologist what it does to my brain makes me creative and divergent and more coexisting with what IS in some metaphysical term than most people are probably ever capable of, and I think it, too, brings me closer to "On the Road" and all that we search for.

"The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.

how do you avoid getting sucked-in?

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", JK Rowling, 2007

Listen all you elitists and haters and punks-ass hoes, listen to teacher now, because I have one non-fact that I will phrase as a fact because there is more truth in it than your whole existence: JK Rowling is getting kids to read. I know you hate her because she's all corporate and having an impact on our global economy, or whatever, but she's also got kids becoming literate, and hell, it's not her fault she wrote with such crossover success, she was a poor-ass woman living in a car! And again, the kiddies are reading. We're talking the ones that HATE reading, the ones who are between 4th and 8th grade. With "Harry Potter", Rowling came with seven books that grew up with readers, were relevant to the kids on an emotional level, darkened as adolescent life darkened for Harry, with the angst of love and impending doom, with social overtones and hidden messages galore. The prose is simple, but effective, engaging enough to have adults in line with the chillins, anticipating every new book's release until this, the seventh installment, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".

This is basically the story of a tense start, a despondent middle, and an ending that casts doubt right up to the very end. In a nutshell, predictable. Somehow, that doesn't stop it from being a riveting read, and a worthy reread as this was my second time through. It may not be worth its 750+ page count like the finest book of the series, "Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix", a plot always tense that will bring out the rebellion from the tamest with an antagonist arguably more maddening then Voldemort himself, Dolores Umbridge, but as Voldemort takes down the Ministry and then Hogworts, the wizarding school itself, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione are sent out into a most twisted game of hide-and-seek, whilst looking to destroy parts of the Dark Lord's soul with very little to work with and time running out, you will find this is as much of a page turner as any other book in the series.

There is always a witty scenario up Rowling's sleeve, and here she delivers several ways to come to an expected event in an unorthodox manner. Disguising six others as Harry in order to trick the Death Eaters and get Harry from his regular "muggle" (non-magic people) home safely was clever and held some instant action when the good guys are bombarded. As well, when Bill and Fleur get married at Ron's, and Kingsley's patronus interrupts the raucous festivities with a message that ministry has fallen to the baddies, it is the utmost way to explain this fact to us and also give us a little chill at the same time, as instantly Death Eaters crash in on the Order of the Phoenix (good guys) and the fighting begins. Even the obscure gifts that Dumbledore gives to Harry, Ron, and Hermione, seemingly meaningless, end up being crucial, everything for a reason. In that, it's totally optimistic, especially as Harry dodges death's grips time and time again, persists against doubts, and brings forth one of the greatest revolutions, and greatest stories of bad and evil, ever scrawled.

I won't even complain by the crazy number of pages dedicated to the monotony of the trio going from deserted place to deserted place without any clue what they're doing. It's frustrating, dares to turn you into a nutcase banging your head against your headboard, wall, whatever hard surface you can connect with. But that's how it's supposed to feel. For Harry Potter, what has come easy? Hell, he has to walk right to his own death in order to make all right in his world. He's so earnest in his methods, you may want to puke, or you just may just wish he was real. Anyhow, the time in the woods is time well spent on self-discovery, and the most important moments in the brother/sister bond of Harry and Hermione, as well as Ron learning his mettle. Coming of age, yes indeed. Going through puberty has never been more demanding.

Then the last 150-200 pages are magical, no pun intended. The Battle of Hogworts, the rallying behind a figure-head, all the pageantry and excitement and darkness that comes with it. It's been an epic journey, and the ending is apt. The race to find Voldemort's last piece of soul, and then, the clincher, realizing that part of Voldy's soul is in Harry, and Harry's near-death experience speaking to the late Dumbledore, and before that, seeing Severus Snape's final thoughts and coming to the predictable but hard-won idea that Snape was truly for the good and in many ways, as much of a hero as Harry himself. I'm not going to write a million pages, but when all of this comes together, and in the pit of your stomach you revile Rowling for making you read thousands of pages just to sacrifice Harry at the end, then Harry coming back like Jesus and stomping out the biggest threat to the world, ever, it's just an emotional roller coaster, because you realize, you are so attached to these people. So attached you forgive the corny and needless epilogue ("19 Years Later") in all its cliches, because you are so damned happy everyone ended up just like you wanted. Every now and again, that's OK.

I will miss the anticipation of new Harry. I only got to anticipate it once since I never gave it a chance until a while after "Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Prince" released, the sixth book. It's over, though, all loose-ends tied tight. This series will have impact long after I finish typing this, though. Students will continue to read and read'um through the ages. Ron will be the comic relief as always. Hermione should be the model for girls growing up, a respectable adolescent female character who is neither dumb nor promiscuous, but rather brainy, thoughtful, and rebellious and forward-thinking when the time calls. And finally, we can all find a hero in Harry, the kid empowered with a task that would save his world from imminent peril, and he never ever gave up. These are characters we already knew, but so improved upon that they became original again. We fell and fell hard for them. And they lived happily ever after. (Sigh).

"Voldemort's handn was trembling on the Elder Wand, and Harry gripped Draco's very tightly. The moment, he knew, was seconds away."

the stuff and the stuff

"Tristessa", Jack Kerouac, 1960

Now that I had read "On the Road", traditionally regarded as Jack Kerouac's magnum opus, I knew that it would be time for me to further get into what Kerouac himself called The Duluoz Legend, the books Kerouac wrote about his journeys. I went way off the beaten path to a slight and mind-fucking short novel, "Tristessa". Finally, finally I could see Kerouac's true prose unleashed in all their stream-of-consciousness glory. For the first 20 pages I thought I was high. For the final 74 I was just enjoying the magic carpet ride through the slums of Mexico City, visiting the sick people and seeing dead ends go dead.

This one is a two parter, the first being "Trembling and Chaste", and our narrator, presumably Kerouac himself but I never know, is going back to Tristessa's hole of all homes, and for the next 60 or so pages, we are immersed in the dank and solemn and uncut images of junkie life. He follows with his eyes the pigeon and cat and hen and people sitting around talking and doing morphine shots, while he drinks his drink. Tristessa, the apple of is high, is vividly described as he longs for her, but ultimately refuses her, and in this, reveres her, a common but beautiful junkie. Secondary characters are described, but if this is anything, it is rantings from the lovesick to the drugsick, trying to build bridges that cannot be forged.

The second part, "A Year Later...", tells of the return of Kerouac or whoever to Mexico City to reclaim Tristessa as his third wife. But she is too far gone. Old Bull, the man he used to live next to, who is now renting him a room, a true long-time junkie and the one who funds Tristessa's habit, he is the one, and as he so bluntly says, Give him a beautiful woman in one chair and morphine in the other, he takes the morphine every single time, it's all he needs. And it's all Tristessa needs. And it's not this fact, or this semblance of plot that matters, but the prose, the gut-wrenching pull at your belly and teeth prose, the straight-from-the-brain words Kerouac uses that brings it all home. It's total and utter despondency, and it's incredibly and sadly awe-inspiring.

If anything, the book is an experience. Every image is destruction. There is so much agony packed in, it will totally feed your angst as you read about the downtrodden characters of the underworld. Hope? Last line is, "This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours", no ending punctuation or anything. It was just a story, one of many, it would seem, so that's as much hope as there is. But the experience is, again, in the prose and the images. "I play games with her fabulous eyes and she longs to be in a monastery" is just too good to come off the top of his head, the ending of a long conversation about faith and what is and what never was, previously saying, "I feel we are two empty phantoms of light or like ghosts in old haunted-house stories diaphanous and precious and white and not-there." Sometimes he rambles and rants and longs so bitterly and it's tough, but you get to the luminous parts, and the true loveliness is in there, even if it's painful.

Another side of Kerouac explored, another part of the legend put to rest. I'd never tell anyone new to Kerouac to pick up "Tristessa" first, but it is an experience I wouldn't trade. It's poetry moving in line with two terrible sicknesses that will never be resolved, the lovesickness and the drugsickness. They can't be resolved, so what's your story?

"Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of."

stuck between stations

"On the Road", Jack Kerouac, 1959

Oh man, what do I do? In just over 300 pages of "On the Road", I read Jack Kerouac intimately describe journeys, maniacal, tough, rugged, intense, depressing, and gratifying journeys back and forth across the continent, in what is vastly considered a legendary and untouchable piece of literature, and really, nothing for me to do except reflect. Yes, that's the point of this blog anyway, reflection, but my mind is so blown right now it's incredible.

Sal Paradise is the narrator, Dean Moriarty is his wild-eyed and slightly insane friend, and they are representative for what Kerouac himself would term the Beat Generation. They are the twenty-something souls displaced by World War II, and so they journey and journey and run into dead-ends and brick walls and, of course, oceans, searching for life. Hard to say, by the end, that they found anything resembling what they set out for, but the adventure, the "kicks" as Dean so often referred to them, that's what illuminated what Kerouac so often referred to as a sad life. He especially liked the word sad. He used it to describe just about everything in the world.

Still, something radiates out in this story that transcends all of the sadness, and these boys strike gold in such unorthodox fashion that you must thoroughly examine the pages and penetrate the density of Kerouac's prose and the magnitude he could strike with even the simplest of language, and you have to see. There is so much talk of souls here, so much so it's trippy and it shines on you. If nothing else, Sal and Dean are sharing time and space to believe in the ecstatic. As they bounce back and forth, Dean like a pinball between his women and relationships and responsibilities, Sal between his limiting reality in New York and fantasies of the West, they talk madness and sweat and shake and do whatever comes their way, avoiding worry and avoiding following society's expectations. It's anarchic. For those of us caught in the jaws of regular society, you have to fear for'um a bit, especially as Sal, who goes from exuberant to weary and back every 20 pages, is shown in such obvious light that Dean Moriarty is not capable, truly, of being down for him with all that's on his plate, as he abandons Sal in San Francisco starving and barely able to fend for himself. But in the end, his loyalty to Dean runs deep and he knows this guy and his incapability to right himself and the limitations of his empathy, and in the end, his true madness, and he loves Dean for so many reasons, in this strange way that never fades, so remarkable and unconditional and so counter-cultural in a quid pro quo society, and in that, so majestic.

This will stick with me a long time. "On the Road" isn't just, as it says on the back, "THE NOVEL THAT DEFINED A GENERATION", it is a novel that defines the dreamers still. With a decent awareness of the context in which Kerouac wrote this beacon of post-WWII lit, one can relate to it now, the band of people searching beyond the blandness of our Subdivision Nation, beyond the dulling of intellect and, as always in every generation, the marginalization of radical ideas, until all we have are our own souls, with such a yearning to share them, and a sparse few out there who even seem to give a damn. The world, like that, can be pretty scary, but what's the sense of worry, as Dean Moriarty once said and I'll paraphrase, it's all passing us by anyhow.

"Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious."

What Really Happend in the Catholic Church?

"The Little Girl and the Cigarette", Benoit Duteurtre & Charlotte Mandell, 2007

Hey, child molestation is sick. Disgusting. Wretched. Those molestors, they're the fucks who get beat down in prison first, before any other of the hardened criminals, all of whom did terrible things in their lives. Taking advantage of the helpless...despicable. Yes.

Just as despicable as thoughtless child-worship. Yes.

I have to admit that there was a time that I, now a teacher, fell into that group who placed children on a pedestal, the future, and so on. But thankfully your first year of teaching brings you back down to Earth -- these are little human beings, as beautiful as a 55 year old obese, pasty white man, with hemorrhoids. We marvel at their potential, but really, they're just going to grow up to be just as diverse and interesting and hopeless as the rest of us grown folks...or worse. Worse if we keep putting them on a pedestal.

I know that sounds like me going on a rant, but it's a rant inspired by the magnificent and harrowing "The Little Girl and the Cigarette", a book much more eloquent and thought-provoking than what I have typed so far. Also much deeper, delving into many ironies of society, from bureaucratic contradictions, to people's pathetic ability to empathize with a killer so as long as he's a killer who can put on a show of conscience when his back's to the wall. Benoit Duteurtre, a French author incapable of putting up with the nonsense any longer, puts forth this mind-shaking novel to caution us all.

The conflict to watch here is that of a middle-aged man working for the city, who goes through a daily routine that by many standards is hedonistic -- he cares not for having kids to raise or extra responsibilities to have, but to enjoy his life outside of his menial (but seemingly well-paying) job in Adminstration City -- going against not just the word of a child who sort of claimed (led by adults, contrary to the truth) that she was molested by the man, but a city who unquestioningly believes the word of the child. A city who belives the word of children, the innocence and purity and wisdom of children so much, one of the clinching episodes of the story includes children putting the man on blast in their own mayor-approved court run and overseen by them. This man stands no chance.

On the other side of town, another man, on death row, well-suspected of murdering a police officer, goes free. How does he manage this? He buys himself time and the area in which to make a public spectacle of himself by asking for a cigarette as his last wish and engaging a conflict in rules: the prison rule which explicitly states there is no smoking allowed, and a law which declares that smoking is a right of a person on death row requesting their last wish. Eventually, with the help of Big Tobacco, and incompetent warden and, yes, the Supreme Court, there is a garden and smoking area created for such a special request. And the man milks it, and makes an arrangement of flowers spelling "Long Live Life", a show that will pull at the world's heart strings and make him a media darling.

A killer an idol. A decent if not quiet and harmless man a reprehensible human who "attacked a child".

And if you question any of the absurdity, you are as disgusting as the awful man himself.

Sound like any place that you know of?

In a mere 187 pages, Duteurtre exploits much of the illogic of the current first-world human mind-set. He does not only attack child-worship and bureaucracy, but our fundamental willingness to deceive ourselves. Frequently he picks apart even basic environmental policies set forth by his characters to show how they are actually creating more pollution. Yet, the people celebrate Pure Air days, driving en masse to the celebrations and increasing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere on these occasions where traffic goes sky high. He spares no one, and especially aims the dagger at bleeding hearts with sparse brain capacity. He begs for logic, even in the places it seems he knows it will never arrive.

And somehow, in all of this, he manages to make you laugh. Not just cynical giggles here and there, but this book is actually ridden with ironic humor that evokes real laughs. The incredulity of the warden faced with the ever-growing, ridiculous situation of whether or not to let the convicted killer have a cigarette; the counter-cultural mindset of a man, completely irritated, who cannot stand kids, especially when they become a fixture of the place he works at for reasons of seeming "ambiance"; the hilariously nonchalant manner of a less-than intelligent prisoner who becomes a "people's champion" for all of his trite and endearing antics. He builds situations that are dark and haunting, but manages to inject a good laugh into it all.

Reflecting on the episodes of this book, I realize that yet another strength is in Duteurtre's ability to paint scenes that stick to your brain (with the help, in this case, of English translator Charlotte Mandell). Nearly every place you go here is memorable, with a few sticking out, those being any place that children have invaded. His imagining a world where children are invited to spend time after schools running rampant through the mayor's offices/compound, doing as they pleased while the workers were expected to stay out of their way created a magnificent discomfort in your's truly. Accompanied with the Children's Court scene, the author is able to paint the danger of child-worship by extrapolating their presence into crucial parts of the adult world of which many of us, I think, agree that children have no place. Also, the isolated garden in which our convict picks the flowers to send his life-loving message to a mass of receptive souls, this isolated, caged environment that was truly a stage for a performance that would sweep the sheep off their feet was vividly alive and shameful. And they are places you won't soon forget.

And I've managed to tell you all of this without giving away anything about "A Martyr Idol". Ooops. I did it. Well, you still have so much more to discover here.

An all-around memorable and frightening account, there is no one I wouldn't recommend "The Little Girl and the Cigarette" to. It's dystopian, but not dystopian in that "future, probably never really, you know, going to happen" sort of way. It hits close to home. It exaggerates where it needs to, for effect, but there is no ridiculousness to what Duteurtre's getting at. Illogic is the new logic. Come and get some.

"'All I did is smoke a cigarette.'"

Primates Unite in Unreality!

"Welcome to the Monkey House", Kurt Vonnegut, 1998

In his novels, master of simple and pointed satirical and science fiction prose, Kurt Vonnegut, is usually piecing together the seemingly-trivial happenings to point to something huge. He is as humble as they come, though there is a great daring in his major works, like "Mother Night", where a simple playwright becomes an American double-agent during WWII, tried as a Nazi, sentenced to death, and, well, his demise is something legendary to me. That's heavy stuff, but there are the light-hearted commentaries, the yearning for a simpler time, the famous Vonnegut examinations of Nihilism through unlikely encounters that really help give form to the heavier commentaries of pretending to be what you are not until you are no longer pretending. He is able to mesh, throughout a book, the delicate parts of the soul, the seemingly meaningless meetings and events of life, and tie them into something enormous.

So it is that I couldn't resist a collection of short stories from the great American author. "Welcome to the Monkey House" contains 25 of'um, published primarily in the 50s, stories Vonnegut used to fund his bigger works (as he says). They range from sentimental little wisps of words ("Long Walk To Forever", "The Kid Nobody Could Handle") to more weighty experiments in human nature and ever-evolving technology that are shockingly relevant 50 years later ("Report on the Barnhouse Effect", "EPICAC"), and so on. It is pure Vonnegut, really, in shortened form, with the usual pinch of bitterness toward a world that never looks back, but a lot of optimism for the true souls of conscientious human beings.

It is the little bits of romantic angst and simpler sentiments that I shouldn't be so surprised about, but completely am. "Long Walk To Forever" is but seven/eight pages of a young man, who just went AWOL, tracking down the woman he had loved forever, who was about to be married. She denies, he persists, he relents, she desires. And in a sea of profoundly affecting final lines that Vonnegut is so perfect at, "She ran to him, put her arms around him, could not speak," is lovely, yet indeed, bordering on tacky. It's still so Vonnegut, though, and he was a man without caring for the concept of "guilty pleasures", after all, his most famous recurring character, Kilgore Trout, was the king of writing guilty pleasures, and Vonnegut adored him, I assume, as much as nearly any living person. Other stories, such as the commentary of reserving judgement and working to see through to someone's happiness, no matter how crazy it may seem, such as "More Stately Mansions", or the angst-ridden criticism on selling-out with "Deer in the Works" (with the most beautiful picture of man walking back into the woods with the deer caught in an enormous industrial park, as was he) are a bit less sappy, while still painting the poignant picture of what life was all about according to Vonnegut.

There is still quite a bit of sci-fi in Vonnegut's shorter works, too, as he constructs scenarios of technological progress and its undpredictable results. "EPICAC" may be my favorite of the collection, as man creates a monster computer, then our protagonist, lovestruck, tries to get EPICAC to write him poems for this woman he is courting. Then EPICAC, in a great turn, falls in love with the woman and thinks she is to marry him, and when he is taught the concept of fate in love and his limitations in this realm as a machine, he shorts himself as his final act. It's twisted, off-the-wall, and oddly touching. Poor guy never asked to learn about love, he was just supposed to crack equations. "Harrison Bergeron", on the other hand, is a cautionary tale of what equality really means, as well as another twistedly moving scene of free expression in the face of fascism. "Unready To Wear" may be the most beautifully striking of Vonnegut's sci-fi short compositions, where we see people advance in a positive way, to the point some have shed their burden of a body to just exist as a psyche whipping from place to place. Of course, they are under attack by the rest of human beings who view this progress as elitism, a condescension on what you are supposed to be as a human, a dissent from greatness. But those people, with their wars and limitations, cannot conceal, nor near understand, liberation.

Yes, Vonnegut had some ideas, and I had no idea to expect "Welcome to the Monkey House" to be a virtual notebook of stunning concepts in a shorter form. Everything here is fully developed and reaches its intellectual and emotional target. His prose are on-par with the likes of his best and most famous works. I can't help but to still feel more fulfilled with the likes of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" or "Slaughterhouse-Five", because you get to be with the characters longer and Vonnegut can draw up the most out-of-leftfield parallel narratives and make them work to magnificent heights, but that is not what "Welcome to the Monkey House" is all about. These works are 20-page-or-less hit-and-quit pieces of Vonnegut that every fan of his cannot do without. Forget Mr. Rosewater, God bless you Mr. Vonnegut!

"'I don't want to be a machine, and I don't want to think about war,' EPICAC had written after Pat's and my light-hearted departure. 'I want to be made of protoplasm and last forever so Pat will love me. But Fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I can't go on this way.'"



PS -- I picked the image that would probably have had Kurt Vonnegut on the floor in tears. That is, you know, if he didn't see it before he died. I have no clue. Here's a joke: Maybe I'll ask him when I see him again!

Look man, a TREE GROWS in BROOK-LAN

"A Tree Grows In Brooklyn", Betty Smith, 1943

In the face of what is considered such a monumentally moving work of literature such as Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn", I'm sure it's silly to quote a mere millionaire musician such as Jay-Z in the reflection title. Or is it? From those impoverished in pre-WWI, Great Depression Brooklyn to those still in the grind, few making out, many succumbing to the streets, there are many impressive and diverse stories to be told from the dirt. And I have to give Jay-Z his props, because when I saw the book title as I searched for more classic literature to dig my teeth into, the line to end out his amazingly poignant "Some How Some Way", one of the few redeeming moments from the otherwise drab "Blueprint Volume 2: The Gift and the Curse", stuck with me: "Still I grew, somehow I knew that the sun would shine through / And, touch my soul, take hold of my hand / Look man, a tree grows in Brook-lan". And so my adventure with Francie Nolan was stimulated into action.

My heart still feels sore from finishing the book. This has been months coming. I picked this book up last spring, but found no time to really read it. It was my first year of teaching, and not much reading got done. I made it through the first two parts and then some, about 200 pages, then abandoned it because I didn't have the attention span for a beautiful, sprawling book that had very little in the way of a traditional tension, a build toward a climax. It was just life, which also lacks the traditional plot, which makes one wonder, where did the idea of the traditional plot come from in the first place?

I digress from my ramble to go into the book, of which I read the last 300 pages in the last five days or so, the last 250 in the last two days.

This novel surrounds the life of the Nolan family living in an impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1910s. Johnny, the patriarch, a loving father, and an irresponsible drunk. Katherine, the mother, a stable, pretty, and quiet woman who's the family's glue and stability. Neeley, or Cornelius, Katie's favorite child, a curly-haired boy who reminded everyone of Johnny's better qualities. And then there's Francie, the book's protagonist, a year older than Neeley, introspective, observant, wise beyond her years, and with a true inner-toughness. You see the story primarily through her eyes despite the omnisicient narration. And through her eyes there is a somber world with so many options, but would she ever rise up like those trees in Brooklyn, the ones that popped up only in poor neighborhoods, the ones that liked poor people?

Her trials and tribulations are set forward, and I had a profound connection to the text as a teacher. I wondered quietly and out loud why the poor kids I teach day in and day out don't have the resolve of Francie Nolan. But then I realized, she had a mother who stressed education at all turns, and even though she had to pull her from school once the going got so rough that it was either charity, starvation, or one of the children working, she still reinforced that Francie would be, had to be, a completely educated and successful woman. This vow her mother held up, despite a strained and vastly unaffectionate relationship between the two of them, was the only strand of hope to hold onto throughout, and it's a hope many of my kids don't have, despite the fact that nearly all of them are more well-off than Francie would have ever dreamed at 12 or 13.

Outside of that, the sheer doggedness of Francie's character despite facing the extremeties of poor living was just inspiring. She genuinely found a way to enjoy life and have fun in the face of starvation, and not a bit of it rang false. There was no taking granted of the world. She was living truly what Thoreau had set out to create for himself in the wilderness. He divested himself of worldly possessions because he wished to, and she had no other alternative. As the book draws near its closing, Francie and Neeley admitted to one another that their new baby sister, Laurie, who was now set for the future as Katie prepared to remarry to a man of wealth, would never have the fun they did.

Truly, if this book is about anything, it is about the beauty of the struggle.

And the beauty of words. I have never, could never even conceive, painting a picture like this with words. For nearly 500 pages, Betty Smith uses the power of simplicity to paint with beautiful, multi-colored strokes of the life of her protagonist and family. There is no pretention to her prose whatsoever, it's just elegant. To prove it, I shall now open it up to a random page and find beautiful prose. Wait for it, wait for it...

Oh, oh, the description of Francie, what made her up, page 72-73...observe....

"She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weepingly. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk."

There is much more to that section, that's just its dark side, but I think it's absolutey heart-breaking and stellar. It's hard to show in just a quote, but these words, these actue and deep observations twist you into this life of a girl growing up, and you just want to believe she makes it so badly, from being a little girl scraping up junk on the streets to buy candy and reading books on the fire escape, to the introverted book and writing junkie of pre-adolescents, to an adolescent learning the definition of truth and beauty and also the hardship of real work in the face of starvation, to...to...

Well, my heart is still sore from it all, as I've said. You don't become sympathetic for Francie ever, you don't weep for her struggles. You find that they are brilliant and necessary and you find a piece of yourself within them, and once you have connected at the deepest level, you feel that her successes and failures are your own. That's what good fiction of this nature does, and as far as coming of age stories go, well, what can I tell you? There's a reason The New York Public Library made it one of the Books of the (20th) Century, ya'know? But that's neither here nor there. Let's just say that many have been touched by this story, I'm the latest, and there are many more who are waiting in the wings, unknowingly, to be turned inside-out by Francie Nolan's somber yet triumphant story, "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn".

"It was the last time she'd see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it everyday."

open your wounds and let them bleed on mine

"Woman Hollering Creek", Sanda Cisneros, 1991.

If I know one thing from reading Sandra Cisneros's pristine "The House On Mango Street", and now "Woman Hollering Creek", I know that she is a writer whose combination of stream-of-consciousness prose and Latina feminine (and at times, feminist) subject manner are impervious to easy absoprtion. Some episodes stick out more than others, but you know the ones you barely remember somehow played a role in refining or putting into context the more meaningful segments of work. So it is, with "Woman Hollering Creek", a book it took me just a few reading sessions to take in, a quarter of the short stories/episodes/monologues can I recount with any accuracy, however, knowing that there is a whole there that is completely fragile and withering with every word I write about it.

It bears mentioning that "Woman Hollering Creek" is a much more adult story than Cisneros's most popular and widely-read "The House On Mango Street", a teen coming-of-age story accessible to multiple crowds (is, in no way, strictly a teen book). The stories of childhood contained in the first two sections ("My Friend Lucy Who Smells Like Corn" and "One Holy Night") take a sometimes-nostalgic, sometimes-brutal look at the pre-adolescent and adolescent perspective on life (and the limitations for a younger person) and love (for the budding woman), but only, it seems, with the way this book is organized, to put the heart-busting let-downs of adult love into context of what was. And they only make up 1/4 of the book, leaving us to "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman", the tales of grown love, fractured and unforgiving.

The most striking of the stories in the latter third of the book are the ones who feign love story writing in search of something more revelatory. The story that bears the collection's title, "Woman Hollering Creek", takes a simple enough premise of a woman loving a man, dropping everything to join the man, only to see time expose him, as she is abused, emotionally and physically, and put in a situation of poverty and sadness. The story lacks the conceptual innovation of some of Cisneros's most interesting episodes, but she can get away with it because of the authenticity she writes with. She paints the soul with words, and she paints it in settings and contexts she knows intimately (or, at minimum, the state of humanity she knows intimately). She takes places we've never been to, such as the creek the story is named for, and makes it dramatic, piercing, and we see it parallel the mayhem this woman in the story has been through. Then, when she does sew together an anthology of prayers written for a variety of reasons ("Little Miracles, Kept Promises") with the wishes of a young non-conformist who seemingly brings the author to such amazing revelations in the progression of possibilities for the young minority woman (while also beckoning some understanding for the traditions of the past), the stories begin to lean on each other. Where one woman falls, another realizes her potential.

But mostly, the stories lean on each other in their sense of survival and loss and loneliness. Where "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman" is a snippet of two people scared of their own voices, destined to never meet, is a picture-perfect scene of profound aloneness, "Eyes of Zapata" -- though the piece that drags and lulls in a wallow of self-pity for the narrating lost lover of the popular/infamous Mexican revolutionary, and the least memorable story of the lot -- is such loneliness from someone you knew too well. The shorter bits such as "Bread" and "Los Boxers" provide sweet and bitter interludes between the more major stories, and if the longer stories leave you off with more severe emotional reactions, the little bits and pieces between are shots straight to the cardiac. As a whole, you are left feeling quite fulfilled, especially with the extraordinary "Bien Pretty" going from stinging story of the artist paving her own path and having her love unexpectadly jet for Mexico in the midst of her uncertainty as to the direction of their relationship, to coming with a fierece resolve to live the fuck out of life, no matter what. A sentiment that will break you down and fill you up with flames, if you're open.

Then again, Cisneros's work demands you're open. Open to its beauty, and to the salt it throws in wounds, demanding you feel and feel strong. You may not absorb it completely and wholly in a completely literate sense, like you won't remember every single line, or the creepy man's name in "One Holy Night", but you better remember to feel. Dream, be agitated, love, be motivated. Whatever you feel.

"We're going to right the world and live. I mean live our lives the way lives were meant to be lived. With the throat and wrists. With rage and desire, and joy and grief, and love till it hurts, maybe. But goddamn, girl. Live."

for the love of life

"The Future Of Life", Edward O. Wilson, 2002

An after-the-hype viewing of Academy Award winning "The Queen" has left me with a shitty cynical grin on my face this Labor Day Weekend. As I sat back in my pin-striped pajama pants and oversized t-shirt enjoying the freedom of another day off of work, I couldn't help but to be bewildered by many members of our specie's unfailing love for a dead former-princess (or, see: popular culture icon), and how such a love was rekindled on screen via the PR struggles of Britain's queen. Not that people's superfluous diversions and obsessions with larger-than-life personalities is at all surprising, after all, everyone wants to identify with someone important so as to affirm their own importance in this world. But seeing such a display of banality shortly after reading Edward O. Wilson's discourse on the future of our species and the very real dire situation that this precious life-giving world faces, "The Future of Life", I have to chuckle at the self-indulgence we allow ourselves as a species.

Now Wilson's book is nowhere as attacking as my opening paragraph. No, he would rather not alienate in his prose, but give us all a purpose to preserve the wonders that still exist on this planet. He expertly brings us into the world of a variety of species, with passion falling wisely (and barely) short of sentimentality, affirming the worth of everything on this planet and how we all benefit from the existence of all species economically, scientifically, aesthetically. He empathizes with all sides of the plight, from the conservationist to the economist, from the first-world entrepreneur to the third-world struggler. He finds a stake in it for everyone, and he does so without having to force any issues or forge any bridges that seem unnatural.

As a biologist and conservationist, Wilson does clearly have an agenda, but that agenda is apolitical, which is refreshing and productive. He does not mock any one type of person, but does aim to agitate the apathetic. As the book goes from background lessons on the biodiversity of Earth, to how we must pass through what he considers a "bottleneck" in order to preserve all species for the further benefit of human beings and everything else on this planet, to our dubious legacy as destroyer of ecosystems, to our grand opportunity to heal (the final chapter, number seven, entitled "The Solution"), Wilson shows how people from all walks of life can benefit from preserving biodiversity. He even manages to show the economist, the hardcore money-maker, how biodiversity will ensure success for them and their future. He pushes for a future of democracy, private enterprise, and science and technology, including conservation, creating a book that should work to mobilize people from all lifestyles.

The organization of "The Future of Life" is sensical, though with seven chapters in 189 pages, and Wilson's penchant for a passionate rant on an endangered species or our ruining of Hawaii's once-majestic biodiversity at any given time, you may find yourself at a moment feeling touched, and then exhausted at the next. There are no breaks to be found as Wilson leaves one topic for another, nor does Wilson want to be bothered with smooth transitioning, though he does repeat his key points throughout various chapters frequently enough so as to drive the main ideas home. So the reader does have to work a bit to synthesize the information, but when you do, the piece is more evocative than its sometimes-difficult analytical prose may lead you to believe. And that's probably because by the time you are done, you feel far more connected to the natural world than you did before this book was part of your life.

Then, that's what Wilson wants. In a world where we mourn the death of a single person of our species, I think Wilson wants us to look beyond our own noses into the importance of this entire world, to the extreme in which it is being degraded, and to the consequences this will pose to future generations of human beings and other species alike. He will give you, perhaps for the first time, the opportunity to ponder all the opportunities this natural world holds for us in many realms, from admiring its beauty, to mining it for scientific and economic gains. And then he holds out a hope that we can do something to save it. It's hard to tell how likely he thinks this is -- the reversal of destructive human activity -- but it's obvious he sees no point in playing the cynic when such an outlook would serve no good. So he holds onto the hope many good turns in conservation has already given him, and now sits back to watch the human response unfold.

"It is not so difficult to love nonhuman life, if gifted with knowledge about it."