Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Literary Matters

  • Nirvana as Asphyxiation

    E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, tr. R. Howard (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), p. 118: In the Benares sermon, Buddha cites, among the causes of pain, the thirst to become and the thirst not to become. The first thirst we understand, but why the second? To long for nonbecoming — is that not to…

  • Gray Flannel and the Matter of Money

    Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's  On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it.  It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyperromantic and heart-felt rush of…

  • The Kerouac-Francis Sweeney, S. J. Correspondence

    Mention is made of it in Ellis Amburn, The Subterranean Kerouac  (St. Martin's, 1998), pp. 328-331.  A bit of it is online here.  You will need to scroll down to find it.

  • Kerouac October Quotation #14 and Quiz

    Describing the famous Gallery Six poetry reading in The Dharma Bums, Kerouac writes, The other poets were either hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah Goldbrook, or delicate pale handsome poets like Ike O'Shay (in a suit), or out-of-this-world genteel looking Renaissance Italians like Francis DaPavia (who looks like a young priest), or…

  • Kerouac October Quotation #10 October in the Railroad Earth

    Kerouac reads a few pages from "The Railroad Earth" in Lonesome Traveler, a collection of short pieces first published in 1960.

  • Kerouac October Quotation #9: Mexico City Blues 228th Chorus

    Kerouac reads.

  • Kerouac October Quotation #8 The Detritus of Literary Production

    Satori in Paris (Grove Press, 1966), p. 35: The whole library groaned with the accumulated debris of centures of recorded folly, as tho you had to record folly in the Old or the New World anyhow, like my closet with its incredible debris of cluttered old letters by the thousands, books, dust, magazines, childhood boxscores, the…

  • Kerouac October Quotation #7: Born to Die

    Visions of Cody, p. 12: All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile.

  • Kerouac October Quotation #6: Slim Gaillard, the Man Who Knew Time

    This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day.  From On the Road:  … one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with…

  • Kerouac October Quotation #5

    "Time is the purest and cheapest form of doom." (Visions of Cody, McGraw-Hill, 1972, p. 374)

  • Literary Kicks

    Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mailed me to say that he has a response to a recent Buddhism post of mine. Please do check it out, and if you are a Beat Generation aficionado, you will find plenty of material on the Beats at Asher's place.  In his response to me, Asher points out something…

  • Kerouac October Quotation #3: This World, the Palpable Thought of God

    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…

  • Kerouac October Quotation #2: The Void is not the Void

    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.

  • Kerouac to Whalen on Buddhism

    It's October again, Kerouac month at MavPhil.  Perhaps I will post a quotation a day throughout this wonderful month that always passes too quickly — as if bent on proving the vain and visionary nature of phenomenal existence. Jack Kerouac finished Some of the Dharma on 15 March 1956.  The Dharma Bums was published in 1958. …

  • The Two Kinds of People and the Manifold Uses of Blogging

    I once worked as a mail handler at the huge Terminal Annex postal facility in downtown Los Angeles. I was twenty or twenty one. An old black man, thinking to instruct me in the ways of the world, once said to me, "Beell, dey is basically two kahnds a people in dis world, the fuckahs…