Kerouac and Friends – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Route 66

Jack Kerouac in a letter from 17 January 1962: "Everybody is making money off my ideas, like those "Route 66" TV producers, everybody except me . . . ." (Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed. Charters, Viking 1999, p. 326; see also p. 461 and pp. 301-302.)

Here is the Nelson Riddle theme music from the TV series. And here is part of an episode from the series which ran from 1960-1964. George Maharis bears a striking resemblance to Jack, wouldn't you say? And notice Maharis is riding shotgun. Kerouac wasn't a driver. Neal Cassady was the driver.

Now dig Bobby Troup. Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Dr. Feelgood, and others have covered the tune. The version by Asleep at the Wheel is especially good.

A Couple of Venice Characters I Met While Working for Manpower

Bill Keezer e-mails re: my Manpower post:

I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure. I worked hard at a variety of jobs, learned a number of things I might not have, and felt like I earned my money. That’s not all bad.

I agree entirely, Bill, though your "with pleasure" I would qualify. It is not pleasant to be bossed around by inferior specimens of humanity, but that can and does happen when you are at the bottom of the labor pool. But working Manpower grunt jobs was well worth it, if not for the money, then for the experiences and the characters I met.

One cat, Larry Setnosky, was a failed academic, known in the seedy bars we'd hit after work as 'The Professor.' A doctoral student in history, he never finished his Ph. D. He lived in Venice, California, with a couple of other marginal characters, rode a motorcycle, wore a vest with no shirt underneath. He'd write articles and then file them away. He was just too wild and crazy to submit to the academic discipline necessary to crank out a thesis and get the degree. Booze and dope didn't help either. I still recall his "Nary a stem nor a seed, Acapulco Gold is bad ass weed!"

Ernie Fletcher was one of Setnosky's housemates. A law school dropout, he was convinced that the system was a "rigged wheel." When I met him he was in his mid-thirties, an ex-boozer, and warmly in praise of sobriety. He had sworn off what he called 'tune-ups" but was not averse to watching me "dissipate" as he told me once, not that I did much dissipating. In point of dissipation I was closer to the Buddha than to the Bukowski end of the spectrum.

Fletcher was from the Pacific Northwest and had worked as a logger there. Observing me during Manpower gigs he thought I was a good worker and not "lame" or "light in the ass" as he put it. So he suggested we head up to Washington State and get logging jobs. And so we drove 1200 miles up the beautiful Pacific Coast along Highway 1 from Los Angeles to Forks, Washington in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible. Amazing as it is to my present cautious self, we took off the very next day after Ernie suggested the trip to me. We probably had little more than a hundred bucks between us, but gas in those days was 25 cents a gallon. On the way we stopped to see Kerouac's friend John Montgomery, who was also a friend of Ernie. John Montgomery was the Henry Morley of The Dharma Bums and the Alex Fairbrother of Desolation Angels. (For more on Montgomery see here.) Unfortunately, when we located Montgomery's house, he wasn't at home. I've regretted that non-meeting ever since. Now I hand off to my Journal, volume 5, p. 32:

Saturday Midday 10 February 1973

Last Monday left L. A. about 12:00 PM. Saw [brother] Philip in Santa Barbara, made Santa Cruz that night, stayed in motel after checking out [folk/rock venue] "The Catalyst" and local flophouse. While passing Saratoga, CA decided to look up John Montgomery, friend of Ernie's who knew Kerouac and the Beats. We couldn't get in touch with him. So on to Frisco, entered the city, became involved in intricate traffic tangles, visited [Lawrence Ferlinghetti's] City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste where I had a cup of espresso. By the way, in Big Sur visited Ernie's friend Gary Koeppel. [He was bemused to hear from Ernie that I was a Kerouac aficionado. In those days, Kerouac was pretty much in eclipse. The first of the Kerouac biographies, Ann Charters' was not yet out and Kerouac's 'rehabilitation' was still in the future.]

Spent Tuesday night in Dave Burn's trailer in Arcata, CA. [Dave was the drummer of a couple of bands I was in back in L. A. 1968-1971] Gave him the two tabs of acid I had in my attache case. Wednesday morning fixed the headlight (highbeam) which was malfunctioning and for which I received a citation the night before. Then went to the nearest CHP office and had the citation cleared. Breakfast at Ramada Inn and then on to Eugene, Oregon. Dug Taylor's, The New World Coffee House,and Ernie and Larry's old haunt, Maxie's. Arrived at Ernie's brother-in-law's house at 11:30 PM. Thursday spent in Eugene. I bought Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests. Friday morning left early for Forks, Washington, arriving around 6:00 PM. Presently lodged in Woodland Hotel. Drinks last night with Ernie and legendary logger, Jim Huntsman. Arranged to start working Monday morning. So far, so good.

October Ends . . .

. . . and we say farewell once again to Jack Kerouac, cat man and mama's boy, as he prepares to "leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America" proving once again to his romantic predecessor Thomas Wolfe that one can go back home again where

it'll all be like it was in the beginning — Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad — the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow — On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars — Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There's no need to say another word. (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)

It's a good last word: something good will come of it all: of all of the wandering, all of the searching, all of the pain, and misery, and drunken folly, and lonely nights, and broken dreams. The vanity will give way to vision. The beat will taste beatitude. The road will end and the restless will rest.

Kerouac in Scollay Square

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again and it is time for me to stop the hyper-romantic Jacking off. From On the Road:

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 49 years ago tomorrow, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969. "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic." "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man. He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert — Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

"Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums)

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult — and praise be You for showing me how You did it — Lord now I'm ready for more — And this time I won't whine — This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

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.

Henry Mancini, Moon River. Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song. Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road!!

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, Safe in Heaven, Dead. Good sound quality. "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead."

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker. "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

Cactus Ed on Sweet Gone Jack

Here:

Some of Abbey's most entertaining letters involve skirmishes over literary reputation, one of his enduring obsessions. In a letter to the Nation, he contrasted Kurt Vonnegut's "concern for justice, love, honesty and hope" with "novels about the ethnic introspection project (Roth, Bellow)" and "the miseries of suburban hanky-panky (Updike, Cheever, Irving)."

He disparaged Jack Kerouac as "that creepy adolescent bisexual who dabbled in Orientalism and all the other fads of his time, wrote stacks of complacently self-indulgent, onanastic [sic] books and then drank himself to death while sitting on his mother's lap, down in Florida." He called Tom Wolfe a "faggoty fascist little fop" but later defended "Bonfire of the Vanities" as a "novel that reminds us, in the end, that defiance and resistance, manhood and honor, are still possible."

The Canticle of Jack Kerouac

BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

Far from the sea far from the sea

of Breton fishermen

the white clouds scudding

over Lowell

and the white birches the

bare white birches

along the blear night roads

flashing by in darkness

(where once he rode

in Pop’s old Plymouth)

And the birch-white face

of a Merrimac madonna

shadowed in streetlight

by Merrimac’s shroudy waters

—a leaf blown

upon sea wind

out of Brittany

over endless oceans

There is a garden in the memory of America

There is a nightbird in its memory

There is an andante cantabile

in a garden in the memory

of America

In a secret garden

in a private place

a song a melody

a nightsong echoing

in the memory of America

In the sound of a nightbird

outside a Lowell window

In the cry of kids

in tenement yards at night

In the deep sound

of a woman murmuring

a woman singing broken melody

in a shuttered room

in an old wood house

in Lowell

As the world cracks by

thundering

like a lost lumber truck

on a steep grade

in Kerouac America

The woman sits silent now

rocking backward

to Whistler’s Mother in Lowell

and all the tough old

Canuck mothers

and Jack’s Mémère

And they continue rocking

And may still on stormy nights show through

as a phantom after-image

on silent TV screens

a flickered after-image

that will not go away

in Moody Street

in Beaulieu Street

in ‘dirtstreet Sarah Avenue’

in Pawtucketville

And in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste

Continue reading “The Canticle of Jack Kerouac”

Kerouac Alley

A Northern California reader sends this photo of a street scene in the vicinity of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco. I made a 'pilgrimage' to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's famous bookstore in the early '70s. That was before the Kerouac street sign was up.

Some of Ferlinghetti's poetry can be read here. To my surprise, Ferlinghetti is still alive at 99. By contrast, old Kerouac quit the mortal coil and "the slaving meat wheel" at age 47. He is, we hope, "safe in heaven, dead."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin’ Elliot Charles Adnopoz

David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion, 2012, p. 65:

As Dave van Ronk pointed out in his autobiography, many of the people involved in the first folk revival of the 1930s and '40s were Jewish — as were the folkies of the '60s. Van Ronk reasoned that for Jews, belonging to a movement centered on American traditional music was a form of belonging and assimilation.

[. . .]

"The revelation that Jack [Elliot] was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro," Van Ronk recalled. "We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Parkway and was named Elliot Adnopoz. Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again. Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word 'Adnopoz' and back he went under the table."

Lacking as it does the proper American cowboy resonance, 'Elliot Charles Adnopoz' was ditched by its bearer who came to call himself 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot.' Born in 1931 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who wanted him to become a doctor, young Adnopoz rebelled, ran away, and became a protege of Woody Guthrie. If it weren't for Ramblin' Jack, Guthrie would be nowhere near as well-known as he is today.

Pretty Boy Floyd. "As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam/You'll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home." No? An example of the tendency of lefties invariably to take the side of the underdog regardless of whether right or wrong.

Ramblin' Jack does a haunting version of Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. It grows on you. Give it a chance. Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Woman. Soul of a Man. Dylan's unforgettable, Don't Think Twice. Here he is with Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte Marie singing the beautiful, Passing Through.

Lyrics below the fold.

Continue reading “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin’ Elliot Charles Adnopoz”

The Beats’ Holy Grail

The Joan Anderson letter. Not to be missed by Kerouac aficionados. (HT: the indefatigable and ever-helpful Dave Lull)

Related: Who is Dave Lull?

Neal Cassady (on the right) as brakeman for Southern Pacific Railroad:

Vanitas Vanitatum. Omnia Vanitas

But, wifey, I did it all, I wrote the book, I stalked the streets of life, of Manhattan, of Long Island, stalked thru 1,183 pages of my first novel, sold the book, got an advance, whooped, hallelujah’d, went on, did everything you’re supposed to do in life.

But nothing ever came of it.

No ‘generation’ is ‘new’. There’s ‘nothing new under the sun’. ‘All is vanity.’ (268).

LIfe is for Living

BEATific October Again

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy. And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack' reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix. New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2. It was there that Lonesome Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack.

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries. Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was.

Here is a long excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses. The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

Kerouac: Religious Writer?

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, its latest product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.

From Scott Beauchamp's review:

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer, a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am. And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature? I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves. That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them. But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them. Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue. They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline. They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It's true that grace is the free gift of God but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial. I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost. As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything but false mystics. A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets. The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.

This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such. But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life.

See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac.

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993) Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful title, apt, witty, and pithy!

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.

_____________________

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage' and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!"

October Ends . . .

it'll all be like it was in the beginning — Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad — the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow — On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars — Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There's no need to say another word. (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)