I had a detention today, but even being locked in a silent room for an hour did not incite me to pick up World of Wonders again. Last I remember, we have reached Magnus' young adulthood and he is in London, employed as a small-time actor with a troupe of callous and brilliantly-crafted personalities. The film is coming along nicely, but now everyone involved is obviously enthralled by Magnus' telling.
So, clearly I have nothing to offer today. This is just to say I have not died, or quit this blog, or suffered some awful accident. I'm just overwhelmed with problems lately (all of them vague, nettling and hard to pin down). I don't know what to do in high-school... and I'm beginning to really resent them keeping me there.
I know reading can be a comfort, at least a distraction from yourself, but when you have no strength left it's easier to get carried away by the passive little beauties of life. I've been wandering a lot. I'm still pretty miserable.
I won't talk about it here. This is not what I wanted to write.
Dec 16, 2009
Dec 5, 2009
BOOK 7: World of Wonders
It's lucky that I found this. I wanted to add a video, something more visually palatable to follow that big block of writing below, but quickly realized YouTube is not exactly Robertson Davies' most enthusiastic promoter.
This is "Liesl's Song" by Rebecca Anderson (who I've never heard of). Liesl is a character in the Deptford Trilogy. In World of Wonders, she is the romantic fascination of both Dunstan and Magnus. She's witty, charming, all of that.
BOOK 7: World of Wonders
There's my proud little copy! Is it as colorful as I said? I think it's a great stylistic improvement over that pale-hand-slate-gray modern one I posted as a supplement before.Today is the first snow of the year, so naturally I can't leave the house. It's beautiful in a sinister, silent, unwelcoming way. So from my armchair to yours, here's a great big helping of description. I can't pretend to theorize about this book yet -- I'm caught in the middle with no idea where it's going -- but I can at least describe the experience of reading it.
Things to Know (an overview of sorts):
-- Magnus was abducted by a traveling circus, leaving at home a stringent Bible-wielding father and an insane mother. He had snuck out to see the show when it came to town... and in the "World of Wonders", a tent of performers and freak-show artists, Willard the magician charms him breathless. He then leads little Magnus behind the bathroom stalls and sodomizes him. Magnus goes into complete shock, and is eventually stowed away with the circus' belongings on a train and carried off with them. He makes it clear in his recounting of all this that although most of his childhood sounds miserable, he wasn't entirely unhappy at the time. It was what he knew, and what he grew up with. He was exposed remorselessly to sex-slavery, conning and thievery, heavy drinking, and some fairly insane characters. There's a Fat Woman who is repulsively pious about vice, a hermaphrodite who can tango with himself, a drab young couple who do a knife-throwing act, a Snake Charmer who can't get a boyfriend, etc. He earns some of the roughened jaded-ness of showbiz life, but still always longs for something new of the world. He meets a kind fortune-teller, who lets him in on a little of the world's light. His whole world is unreal -- populated with characters of fantasy, degraded by their circumstances in real life.
-- The fact emerges that the narrator (Dunstan) knew Magnus for the short time in his youth that he spent in Deptford (hometown to both of them). Dunstan was the person who first showed Magnus magic tricks. Obviously they lost track of each other when one went away on a cross-country circus, but it's been hinted that they are going to meet up a few more times over their lives. The two men, at the time of the novel, are in their seventies.
-- Magnus read deeply into the Bible over his life, and still often draws from it. He says that he felt like a Jonah to the other circus-members, and they often treated him as such. His father, when he had lived with him, was on a mission to make his son memorize all of the Psalms (he was up to #79 when he left). The only book he had to read and learn out of over his years as a travelling circus-boy was a sturdy little hotel Bible. So God is an undeniable fact for him.... this sparks wildfires of debate between the intellectual types that are the audience to his story. None of them profess to believe in God at all.
-- Magnus tells his story in the evening hour of the movie-crew's work-day... they all sit by a fire, listening to him. When Magnus announces that he has ended his story for the evening, he circles around to shake everyone's hand (a strangely reverant ritual, done in complete seriousness) and then head off to bed. The rest -- the director, the camera-man, the BBC representative, Dunstan and romantic-interest Liesl -- stay and discuss everything they have just heard. And the dicussions are so incredibly clever and relentlessly entertaining -- you can imagine Davies flinging himself up against his own ideas, and then plunging along in every direction of viewpoint he can imagine. Davies is verbose, frenetic, and occasionally very funny.
-- Magnus Eisengrim is still entirely an enigma. That much is true from the conversation that follows his departure from a room. I have read up until the end of Part One, where Dunstan has ominously said that Magnus has a rare "Merlin's Laugh". "Merlin's Laugh" is an apparently misplaced laugh that is neither amused nor bitter, brought about by the irony of the present based on what will happen in the future. Merlin would laugh at a dandy carefully selecting his pair of shoes, if he knew that that man would be killed before the soles of those shoes had even touched pavement. Magnus laughs like this at the end of his evening of story-telling, with the knowledge of what happened next. It's an effect that both unnerves and enthralls his listeners -- a perfect magician's effect.
I think in the end of this book we may discover that Magnus' telling of his life-story was played out just like any other performance. It's built on lies an exaggeration, but he pulls it off dazzlingly. I've noticed that Davies seems to have a penchant for shock-value -- Willard sodomizes Magnus in the latter half of a single sentence, without pretext. So this twist may be irresistable to him. That way, there'd be no reason to end the book with a lesser Magnus Eisengrim, unloaded of his story, caught without an illusion.
-- Magnus was abducted by a traveling circus, leaving at home a stringent Bible-wielding father and an insane mother. He had snuck out to see the show when it came to town... and in the "World of Wonders", a tent of performers and freak-show artists, Willard the magician charms him breathless. He then leads little Magnus behind the bathroom stalls and sodomizes him. Magnus goes into complete shock, and is eventually stowed away with the circus' belongings on a train and carried off with them. He makes it clear in his recounting of all this that although most of his childhood sounds miserable, he wasn't entirely unhappy at the time. It was what he knew, and what he grew up with. He was exposed remorselessly to sex-slavery, conning and thievery, heavy drinking, and some fairly insane characters. There's a Fat Woman who is repulsively pious about vice, a hermaphrodite who can tango with himself, a drab young couple who do a knife-throwing act, a Snake Charmer who can't get a boyfriend, etc. He earns some of the roughened jaded-ness of showbiz life, but still always longs for something new of the world. He meets a kind fortune-teller, who lets him in on a little of the world's light. His whole world is unreal -- populated with characters of fantasy, degraded by their circumstances in real life.
-- The fact emerges that the narrator (Dunstan) knew Magnus for the short time in his youth that he spent in Deptford (hometown to both of them). Dunstan was the person who first showed Magnus magic tricks. Obviously they lost track of each other when one went away on a cross-country circus, but it's been hinted that they are going to meet up a few more times over their lives. The two men, at the time of the novel, are in their seventies.
-- Magnus read deeply into the Bible over his life, and still often draws from it. He says that he felt like a Jonah to the other circus-members, and they often treated him as such. His father, when he had lived with him, was on a mission to make his son memorize all of the Psalms (he was up to #79 when he left). The only book he had to read and learn out of over his years as a travelling circus-boy was a sturdy little hotel Bible. So God is an undeniable fact for him.... this sparks wildfires of debate between the intellectual types that are the audience to his story. None of them profess to believe in God at all.
-- Magnus tells his story in the evening hour of the movie-crew's work-day... they all sit by a fire, listening to him. When Magnus announces that he has ended his story for the evening, he circles around to shake everyone's hand (a strangely reverant ritual, done in complete seriousness) and then head off to bed. The rest -- the director, the camera-man, the BBC representative, Dunstan and romantic-interest Liesl -- stay and discuss everything they have just heard. And the dicussions are so incredibly clever and relentlessly entertaining -- you can imagine Davies flinging himself up against his own ideas, and then plunging along in every direction of viewpoint he can imagine. Davies is verbose, frenetic, and occasionally very funny.
-- Magnus Eisengrim is still entirely an enigma. That much is true from the conversation that follows his departure from a room. I have read up until the end of Part One, where Dunstan has ominously said that Magnus has a rare "Merlin's Laugh". "Merlin's Laugh" is an apparently misplaced laugh that is neither amused nor bitter, brought about by the irony of the present based on what will happen in the future. Merlin would laugh at a dandy carefully selecting his pair of shoes, if he knew that that man would be killed before the soles of those shoes had even touched pavement. Magnus laughs like this at the end of his evening of story-telling, with the knowledge of what happened next. It's an effect that both unnerves and enthralls his listeners -- a perfect magician's effect.
I think in the end of this book we may discover that Magnus' telling of his life-story was played out just like any other performance. It's built on lies an exaggeration, but he pulls it off dazzlingly. I've noticed that Davies seems to have a penchant for shock-value -- Willard sodomizes Magnus in the latter half of a single sentence, without pretext. So this twist may be irresistable to him. That way, there'd be no reason to end the book with a lesser Magnus Eisengrim, unloaded of his story, caught without an illusion.
Dec 3, 2009
I just realized...
... before I started this project, I would've said that I hate talking about books. It's strange I've never mentioned it here, but the reason for embarking on this self-fashioned suicide reading course (besides pushing myself to complete something ambitious and enjoying a whole lot of literature along the way) was to get used to writing about books.
I've had a sustained interest in literature for most of my life, but for some reason never any fondness to referring to it in any kind of analytical way. I guess reading is by demand a solitary thing, so to try and synthesize that experience into conversation always seemed demeaning and false to me. Also, I found much of what I read about inexpressible. There's absolutely no way to explain Arthur Rimbaud into words without working yourself up into a tizzy of adjectives.
But now, with the impending thought of college, I know I'll have to be eventually accustomed to talking about books I've read, writing about books I've read, and generally synthesizing everything I've read in a way I used to imagine to be unholy. I guess as long as I can do this in the spirit of enjoyment and genuine personal insight -- not culture-worshipping criticism, or a heartless re-hashing of the book's general characteristics -- it's not so bad. And I've gotten surprisingly used to it surprisingly fast!
Another thing I just realized (through some minimal calculation, that may not be entirely right -- there may have been a few more on-the-side books I didn't mention in this blog, and also some books that I dipped into but did not technically read through-and-through... anyway back to the sentence): I read 10 books in October, and 4 books in November. You know the excuses for November if you've been following this at all. Bearing in mind that December is a communal, social, wonderful sparkly holiday season where it's necessary to exist mostly in real-life... I want to see if I can at least top December's quota. Not that I'm rushing this, or running it through numbers! I just feel guilty for starting off with such a bang and then watching as it subsequently died away.
I've had a sustained interest in literature for most of my life, but for some reason never any fondness to referring to it in any kind of analytical way. I guess reading is by demand a solitary thing, so to try and synthesize that experience into conversation always seemed demeaning and false to me. Also, I found much of what I read about inexpressible. There's absolutely no way to explain Arthur Rimbaud into words without working yourself up into a tizzy of adjectives.
But now, with the impending thought of college, I know I'll have to be eventually accustomed to talking about books I've read, writing about books I've read, and generally synthesizing everything I've read in a way I used to imagine to be unholy. I guess as long as I can do this in the spirit of enjoyment and genuine personal insight -- not culture-worshipping criticism, or a heartless re-hashing of the book's general characteristics -- it's not so bad. And I've gotten surprisingly used to it surprisingly fast!
Another thing I just realized (through some minimal calculation, that may not be entirely right -- there may have been a few more on-the-side books I didn't mention in this blog, and also some books that I dipped into but did not technically read through-and-through... anyway back to the sentence): I read 10 books in October, and 4 books in November. You know the excuses for November if you've been following this at all. Bearing in mind that December is a communal, social, wonderful sparkly holiday season where it's necessary to exist mostly in real-life... I want to see if I can at least top December's quota. Not that I'm rushing this, or running it through numbers! I just feel guilty for starting off with such a bang and then watching as it subsequently died away.
BOOK 7: World of Wonders
(NOTE: this is not what my copy looks like, but it's from the same publishing company. There was no online picture of the copy I have on the Web. Mine is slightly weathered, with yellow acid pages sweetened with age. The cover design is full of folds of color.)
So, I was right in expecting this to be a magical, entwining-style story. But it's not as simple to slide into as I'd hoped... the first two chapters I had to read over three times before I felt grounded in what was happening. Already there is a cast of distinctive characters, with their distinctive anecdotal characteristics (they all have very long, interesting names -- each with their own distinctive collections of consonants), congregating around the story waiting to happen: Magnus the magician is going to tell his life-story, in enigmatically small snippets. A lifetime conjuror and illusionist is going to lend something of his own truth to the world. He's being used as an actor and marketing-attraction for a 12-part BBC documentary about Robert-Houdin (an old-time French magician, who operated in an extravaganza of props to delight and charm his audiences) -- the allure for giving his life-story is the perspective and contrast it would lend to the life-story of the other magician.
Magnus is a perfectly self-important and self-contained showman, with a clear natural intelligence but very little official "education." This makes his perceptions and reactions entirely real, unforced into some acknowledged mold (molds that are inbred with schooling.) He is surrounded by intellectuals during thi project, which creates some interesting dynamics. Each could easily turn and mock the other, but currently they're working together with comraderie, trying to get ideas down for both the documentary and the life-story of Magnus. The people involved are the director, the historian-friend (THE NARRATOR, Dunstan Ramsay), the BBC manager, and even the camera-man who one-ups Magnus in a show of vocabulary. Magnus Eisengrim is understandably the most intruiging character of the bunch -- this is setting up wonderfully. In the next chapter, I think he will begin to divulge his story.
The writing is dense, nestled with gems of phrase that make it completely rewarding. So far, this world of wonders is no easy excursion to make -- it's an energetically-sustained carnival of words (sustained by the pure will to communicate). It's relentlessly intelligent stuff... I have the feeling that I'm not going to be able to read this and concentrate just anywhere (classrooms are out, for instance... and also certainly the school-bus.)
Tonight is my first night without homework in a long time. To relax, instead of clearing my brain in a stupor of distractions and YouTube video-binges, I think I'm going to read more into the World of Wonders. I'm still mystified, on the edge, but finally transfixed -- maybe the whole thing is one big cape-swirling trick.
Incidentially, what is a great magician? "A man who can stand stark naked in the midst of a crowd and keep it gaping for an hour while he manipulates a few coins, or cards, or billiard balls."
Nov 30, 2009
BOOK 7: World of Wonders
I did it.
I'm sorry I can't be straight-forwardly-analytical about this reading process. Sometimes the books hinder my ability to communicate (if the books are almost incommunicable themselves.) This last one was quite hard to get through (as I've at least been able to make clear in these entries, if nothing else). I still feel like I haven't given Visions of Cody the trial it deserves, but I don't think I have the strength. It was only near the end of the book that I began to actually enjoy reading it, and began to appreciate the wild & infuriatingly complex person Neal Cassady was. Maybe that's because when Jack was writing the end of his book, he began to get sentimental and kind, taking time out to explain to the reader what was going on.
The book IS about America, as the dedication says, written with unadulterated adoration for everything, but mostly for America's chosen protagonist: CODY/Neal Cassady/Adonis of Denver. Jack Kerouac writes hugely sympathetic, sad, unabashedly confused and worshipping prose that I have begun to notice infiltrate my daily thinking ever since my first exposure to him in 10th grade. I don't know what to say about this book, really, at all, and I'm guilty for it. But at least I did it. I finished it stretched out on the floor on Saturday night, right up to the exhilarating final sentence: "Adios, King."
Now... I'm not sure if I feel justified beginning an entry on my new book, World of Wonders by Robertson Davies, when I haven't read a solitary word of it yet. But nevertheless, here's at least a brief layout of what I know of my subject matter so far (it's pretty scant, but anyway.)
I'm sorry I can't be straight-forwardly-analytical about this reading process. Sometimes the books hinder my ability to communicate (if the books are almost incommunicable themselves.) This last one was quite hard to get through (as I've at least been able to make clear in these entries, if nothing else). I still feel like I haven't given Visions of Cody the trial it deserves, but I don't think I have the strength. It was only near the end of the book that I began to actually enjoy reading it, and began to appreciate the wild & infuriatingly complex person Neal Cassady was. Maybe that's because when Jack was writing the end of his book, he began to get sentimental and kind, taking time out to explain to the reader what was going on.
The book IS about America, as the dedication says, written with unadulterated adoration for everything, but mostly for America's chosen protagonist: CODY/Neal Cassady/Adonis of Denver. Jack Kerouac writes hugely sympathetic, sad, unabashedly confused and worshipping prose that I have begun to notice infiltrate my daily thinking ever since my first exposure to him in 10th grade. I don't know what to say about this book, really, at all, and I'm guilty for it. But at least I did it. I finished it stretched out on the floor on Saturday night, right up to the exhilarating final sentence: "Adios, King."
Now... I'm not sure if I feel justified beginning an entry on my new book, World of Wonders by Robertson Davies, when I haven't read a solitary word of it yet. But nevertheless, here's at least a brief layout of what I know of my subject matter so far (it's pretty scant, but anyway.)
1. Robertson Davies is the crazed-genius-looking man above. He is a popular Canadian novelist who enjoyed dabbling in other intellectual pursuits (such as journalism, criticism, and functioning as a professor.) He died in 1995, and left a canon including four trilogies; the last of which is intruigingly incomplete. World of Wonders is the final book in The Deptford Trilogy.
2. The Deptford Trilogy is constructed from the simple cue-point of a snowball that missed its intended target. From this act, the lives of people are affected, in a kaleidoscopic array of possibilities.
3. World of Wonders is considered by some to be a relative failure in the prodigous efforts of Davies (but weirdly, it is the only Deptford Trilogy book with its own Wikipedia page.) The story is based around the life-story of magician Magnus Eisengrim, who is a character that apparently appeared in several carnations throughout the trilogy.
4. The book stands on its own, despite being part of a trilogy. My dad assures me of this (I snagged my copy from him, from a pile of his old books that were bagged by the door, waiting to be given away).
4. It was published in 1975.
5. According to a review from http://www.cenacle.com.au/, (and if you have an education like mine you can skip all the preliminary big-word culture references): "Quoting Spengler, Davies tells about a Magian world view, a weltanschauung where, 'a sense of unfathomable wonder of the invisible existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty of day-to-day demands of the tangible world.'"
6. A CLARIFICATION: "weltanschauung" is the German word for "world-view."
I'll write back as soon as I have something personal to say on the book -- that is, once I've actually started it. I wanted something more along the lines of a linear novel to follow my excursions into the quasi-coherent rompus that is Kerouac's elemental medium... and thankfully, this looks like it's going to be exactly what I've been looking for -- a lush, magical story that envelops you without any effort.
Nov 26, 2009
BOOK 6: Visions of Cody
Elegy for Neal Cassady
by Allen Ginsberg (Feburary 10, 1968, 5 - 5:30 AM)
OK Neal
aethereal Spirit
bright as moving air
blue as city dawn
happy as light released by the Day
over the city's new buildings --
Maya's Giant bricks rise rebuilt
in Lower East Side
windows shine in milky smog.
Appearance unnecessary now.
Peter sleeps alone in next room, sad.
Are you reincarnate? Can ya hear me talkin?
If anyone had strength to hear the invisible,
And drive thru Maya Wall
you had it --
What're you now, Spirit?
That were spirit in body --
The body's cremate
by Railroad track
San Miguel Allende Desert,
outside town,
Spirit become spirit,
or robot reduced to Ashes.
Tender Spirit, thank you for touching me with tender hands
When you were young, in a beautiful body,
Such a pure touch it was Hope beyond Maya-meat,
What you are now,
Impersonal, tender --
you showed me your muscle/warmth/over twenty years ago
when I lay trembling at your breast
put your arm around my neck,
-- we stood together in a bare room on 103d St.
Listening to a wooden Radio,
with our eyes closed
Eternal redness of Shabda
lamped in our brains
at Illinois Jacquet's Saxophone Shuddering,
prophetic Honk of Louis Jordan,
Honeydrippers, Open The Door Richard
To Christ's Apocalypse --
The buildings're insubstantial --
That's my New York Vision
outside eastern apartment offices
where telephone rang last night
and stranger's friendly Denver Voice
asked me, had I heard the news from the West?
Some gathering Bust, Eugene Oregon or Hollywood Impends
I had premonition.
"No" I said --"been away all week,"
"you havent heard the news from the West,
Neal Cassady is dead --"
Peter's dove-voic'd Oh! on the other line, listening.
Your picture stares cheerful, tearful, strain'd,
a candle burns,
green stick incense by household gods.
Military Tyranny overtakes Universities, your Prophecy
approaching its kindest sense brings us
Down
to the Great Year's awakening.
Kesey's in Oregon writing novel language
family farm alone.
Hadja no more to do? Was your work all done?
Had ya seen your first son?
Why'dja leave us all here?
Has the battle been won?
I'm a phantom skeleton with teeth, skull
resting on a pillow
calling your spirit
god echo consciousness, murmuring
sadly to myself.
Lament in dawnlight's not needed,
the world is released,
desire fulfilled, your history over,
story told, Karma resolved,
prayers completed
vision manifest, new consciousness fulfilled,
spirit returned in a circle,
world left standing empty, buses roaring through streets --
garbage scattered on pavements galore --
Grandeur solidified, phantom-familiar fate
returned to Auto-dawn,
your destiny fallen on RR track
My body breathes easy,
I lie alone
living
After friendship fades from flesh forms --
heavy happiness hangs in heart,
I could talk to you forever,
The pleasure inexhaustible,
discourse of spirit to spirit,
O Spirit.
Sir spirit, forgive me my sins,
Sir spirit give me your blessing again,
Sir Spirit forgive my phantom body's demands,
Sir Spirit thanks for your kindness past,
Sir Spirit in Heaven, What difference was yr mortal form,
What further this great show of Space?
Speedy passions generations of
Question? agonic Texas Nightrides?
psychadelic bus hejira-jazz,
Green auto poetries, inspired roads?
Sad, Jack in Lowell saw the phantom most --
lonelier than all, except your noble Self.
Sir Spirit, an' I drift alone:
Oh deep sigh.
BOOK 6: Visions of Cody
Happy Thanksgiving (optimistically cordial, to anyone who happens to be reading this). Since I'm too full to move, I thought I'd settle in front of something somewhat productive (instead of watching "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" for the fifth time) and try to finish Visions of Cody -- as hard as it's been to get through one of its sentences lately. Even that was a run-on.
I don't want to just come here to complain, though. Like a lot of writers, Jack Kerouac is obsessed with an IMAGE -- a space in time -- and his ability to immobilize it, preserved in prose. In his wandering and watching, he gathers all the details of life that he can, and gives each its own place in the picture. His books move in spasms of description, all eventually culminating into an image. With Visions of Cody, all restraints are lost. Its descriptions go twisting back through memory and anecdote, speculation and backward-glancing self-knowledge... it's all done in wild first-draft form, and sometimes you have to just crash through the trancelike warp of images to reach his point. One image onslaught that actually eventually hits home (you can feel where you are, rather than feeling alienated by the confusing language) is "Joan Rawshanks in the Fog", a long passage on a movie scene being shot on a foggy night in San Francisco. At the end, there's this paragraph (happy to get to it because it is definitely worth reading. I found footage once of Kerouac reading this to some jazz piano, and it struck me then too):
"At the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that werelike the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go thou, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly."
The section that comes after the transcribed tape-conversations is called "Imitation of the Tape", and it is nearly unreadable. Here's a sample snippet:
"Never did ask, did ya... ya damn fool, didn't you know you could get all oovered and sore from the scourge and sore of the great Natal Sore, the score is down, the moon doth rise, the frost is in the handkerchief, fufnik, and I'm ovff the of fht to verht eraces mayeslef kedkdj tin the same time that rintintin stole that wonder horse superchief the mighty oneclad pine tree with doublewords ringing in my head nowlike i was goingtoburst..."
Maybe he really was typing instead of writing here (as some obnoxiously curt critic said).. but still, I don't think "rintintin" could've been any kind of typing mistake. So maybe he got confused, and then decided to enjoy himself as long as he was confused. Or it could've honestly been an artistic decision. Writers that make up words certainly gain their share of notoriety for creativity... and I know it's an attractive idea to conquer a book like Finnegan's Wake (that is, find your way intact through the labyrinthian story), but here it feels like Kerouac is simply too frustrated with trying to communicate in a state of exultation over his reality that he's reverted to noises. Or maybe he's challenging the reader. He wants a core following, people willing to stretch their minds a bit. I'm willing to understand, I swear (I thought I was, anyway), but....
My brain feels sludgy. At least I can be in sentiment with people across the country who are all participants of the same gluttonous feast. Maybe no-one's in the mood for talking about this tonight.
I don't want to just come here to complain, though. Like a lot of writers, Jack Kerouac is obsessed with an IMAGE -- a space in time -- and his ability to immobilize it, preserved in prose. In his wandering and watching, he gathers all the details of life that he can, and gives each its own place in the picture. His books move in spasms of description, all eventually culminating into an image. With Visions of Cody, all restraints are lost. Its descriptions go twisting back through memory and anecdote, speculation and backward-glancing self-knowledge... it's all done in wild first-draft form, and sometimes you have to just crash through the trancelike warp of images to reach his point. One image onslaught that actually eventually hits home (you can feel where you are, rather than feeling alienated by the confusing language) is "Joan Rawshanks in the Fog", a long passage on a movie scene being shot on a foggy night in San Francisco. At the end, there's this paragraph (happy to get to it because it is definitely worth reading. I found footage once of Kerouac reading this to some jazz piano, and it struck me then too):
"At the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that werelike the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go thou, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly."
The section that comes after the transcribed tape-conversations is called "Imitation of the Tape", and it is nearly unreadable. Here's a sample snippet:
"Never did ask, did ya... ya damn fool, didn't you know you could get all oovered and sore from the scourge and sore of the great Natal Sore, the score is down, the moon doth rise, the frost is in the handkerchief, fufnik, and I'm ovff the of fht to verht eraces mayeslef kedkdj tin the same time that rintintin stole that wonder horse superchief the mighty oneclad pine tree with doublewords ringing in my head nowlike i was goingtoburst..."
Maybe he really was typing instead of writing here (as some obnoxiously curt critic said).. but still, I don't think "rintintin" could've been any kind of typing mistake. So maybe he got confused, and then decided to enjoy himself as long as he was confused. Or it could've honestly been an artistic decision. Writers that make up words certainly gain their share of notoriety for creativity... and I know it's an attractive idea to conquer a book like Finnegan's Wake (that is, find your way intact through the labyrinthian story), but here it feels like Kerouac is simply too frustrated with trying to communicate in a state of exultation over his reality that he's reverted to noises. Or maybe he's challenging the reader. He wants a core following, people willing to stretch their minds a bit. I'm willing to understand, I swear (I thought I was, anyway), but....
My brain feels sludgy. At least I can be in sentiment with people across the country who are all participants of the same gluttonous feast. Maybe no-one's in the mood for talking about this tonight.
Nov 23, 2009
[Interlude: Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede]
Too good to be true: a science-fiction / music lover's fantasy novel based on the simple, delightful idea of Buddy Holly broadcasting live all over the globe from one of the moons of Jupiter. Aliens are controlling him (aliens that have taken the forms of Eisenhower and Khrushchev). The plot gets weirder from there -- it's a wild road-chase between an FBI goon in a black Jaguar, a crazed sinewy woman (Gertrude), a mechanically-enhanced Doberman with an extraterrestrial mission, not to mention a slew of other Authority wranglers; all beetling after a lone light-blue '56 Ariel motorcycle carrying Oliver Vale (emboldened main character, rock 'n' roll disciple). And of course, there are the aliens. The aliens are watching.
Never get high-and-mighty over anything in a medium you love. I'll read anything, if it's really good -- and eclectism is one of the natural results of a true appreciation for any subject. As of today, I think I'm falling in love with this little book. It's on the table next to me now, smiling up with Buddy's warm Texan brown eyes, framed and trademarked in thick black glasses.
Admittedly, I need a quick-fix break from Visions of Cody. I will finish it, I have to, I'll even make sense of it... but I need to allow myself some sanity. I found this book on the school library shelf this morning, and have been carrying it around reading all day (today is an early-release day, before Thanksgiving break, so in every class I've had ample liberty to kill time on my own terms). It's another Perma-bound thing, with yellowing pages. I've found on Amazon that it's now out-of-print... making me really grateful my high-school's book selection is so out-of-date.
So that this is not a total discrepancy from my reading list, here's a sample that mentions my omnipresent subject:
"Gretchen told me that she had been born in 1967 to San Francisco flower children who became embarassingly wealthy marketing lava lamps. Unfortunately, by the time Gretchen had turned fourteen, the bottom had fallen out of the lava-lamp market, and her parents had cut off her allowance. As a result, she had rebelled against their liberal politics and had become a hard-core conservative. She had left home after graduating from high school at the age of seventeen (her parents had "gone back to the earth", which had disgusted her) and had been wandering from city to city ever since, a materialist without material, a money-lover without money. She had garnered enough grants and loans to attend college, but had dropped out of University of Illinois in her sophmore year.
'This fruit of an English professor wanted us to write a twelve-page paper on the Beat poets,' she told me. 'You know, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, that bunch?'
'I've heard of them.'
'They were a bunch of faggots and junkies,' Gretchen said vehmently. 'So I asked the prof, why should I want to write about drugged-out, left-wing, unpatriotic mental popsicles? Besides, what did any of that literary Bob Dylan crap have to do with my double major in Business Administration and Physical Education, I'd like to know?'
'It's a puzzle,' I acknowledged."
Never get high-and-mighty over anything in a medium you love. I'll read anything, if it's really good -- and eclectism is one of the natural results of a true appreciation for any subject. As of today, I think I'm falling in love with this little book. It's on the table next to me now, smiling up with Buddy's warm Texan brown eyes, framed and trademarked in thick black glasses.
Admittedly, I need a quick-fix break from Visions of Cody. I will finish it, I have to, I'll even make sense of it... but I need to allow myself some sanity. I found this book on the school library shelf this morning, and have been carrying it around reading all day (today is an early-release day, before Thanksgiving break, so in every class I've had ample liberty to kill time on my own terms). It's another Perma-bound thing, with yellowing pages. I've found on Amazon that it's now out-of-print... making me really grateful my high-school's book selection is so out-of-date.
So that this is not a total discrepancy from my reading list, here's a sample that mentions my omnipresent subject:
"Gretchen told me that she had been born in 1967 to San Francisco flower children who became embarassingly wealthy marketing lava lamps. Unfortunately, by the time Gretchen had turned fourteen, the bottom had fallen out of the lava-lamp market, and her parents had cut off her allowance. As a result, she had rebelled against their liberal politics and had become a hard-core conservative. She had left home after graduating from high school at the age of seventeen (her parents had "gone back to the earth", which had disgusted her) and had been wandering from city to city ever since, a materialist without material, a money-lover without money. She had garnered enough grants and loans to attend college, but had dropped out of University of Illinois in her sophmore year.
'This fruit of an English professor wanted us to write a twelve-page paper on the Beat poets,' she told me. 'You know, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, that bunch?'
'I've heard of them.'
'They were a bunch of faggots and junkies,' Gretchen said vehmently. 'So I asked the prof, why should I want to write about drugged-out, left-wing, unpatriotic mental popsicles? Besides, what did any of that literary Bob Dylan crap have to do with my double major in Business Administration and Physical Education, I'd like to know?'
'It's a puzzle,' I acknowledged."
More people should know about this book. But, if you don't feel like paying any money or reading for any stretch of time today, just make yourself happy and go listen to "Rave On".
"Tell Me How", "Everyday", "Ready Teddy" or "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care" are all just as good, too.
Nov 22, 2009
BOOK 6: Visions of Cody
Great footage, four parts, but certainly worth your while and finger-clicks.
Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady interviewed in City Lights Bookstore, 1965:
Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady interviewed in City Lights Bookstore, 1965:
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