Category: Questers and Other Oddballs
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Philosophy, Superman, and Richard C. Potter
I was pleased to hear from Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence this morning. He inquired: About four or five years ago you wrote about an American writer and thinker, perhaps an academic philosopher, who published, I believe, two books and seemed to disappear. You had difficulty finding information about him online. I believe you said…
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The Wild Diversity of Human Types: Zelda Kaplan and Dolores Hart
Zelda lived and died for fashion, collapsing at age 95 in the front row of a fashion show. Dolores, though starting off in the vain precincts of glitz and glamour, gave it up for God and the soul. This life is vain whether or not God and the soul are illusions. Should we conclude that to…
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A Kerouac of the Canyonlands
Long before Chris McCandless, there was Everett Ruess, Wandering Soul.
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Introverts and the Internet
Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loner’s Manifesto (New York: Marlowe and Co., 2003), pp. 106-107: The Internet is, for loners, an absolute and total miracle. It is, for us, the best invention of the last millennium. It educates. It entertains. It transforms. It facilitates a kind of dialogue in which we need not be…
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The Wild Diversity of the Solutions to the Problem of Human Existence
How wildly diverse the concrete solutions to the problem of life that each works out for himself! There was Leon Trotsky the professional revolutionary who worshipped life-long at the altar of politics. Politics was his substitute for religion. (If religion is the opiate of the masses, revolutionary politics is the opiate of the intellectuals.) And…
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Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil
Both refused to live conventionally. The Laureate of Low Life and the Red Virgin. Both said No to the bourgeois life. But their styles of refusal were diametrically opposed. Both sought a truer and realer life, one by descent, the other by ascent. For one the true life, far from the ideological sham of church…
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Charles Bukowski
October's scrounging around in used book dens for Beat arcana uncovered Barry Miles' biography of this laureate of low life. It has been holding my interest. Bukowski, though not an associate of the Beat writers, is beat in the sense of beaten down and disaffected but not in Kerouac's sense of beatific. A worthless fellow, a drunkard,…
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A Map of Bohemia
Originally published in 1896 by Gelett Burgess in The Lark, the following curiosity I found on the inside front cover of Albert Parry, Garretts and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America, 1933, rev. 1960 with a new chapter "Enter Beatniks" by Henry T. Moore (New York: Dover Publications). The Book Gallery on Mesa Arizona's 1950s-reminiscent Main…
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Kerouac October Quotation #27: Jack on Robert Lax
During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do."…
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Ned Polsky, Maverick Sociologist
Reader Ray Stahl of Port Angeles, Washington, kindly mailed me a copy of Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats, and Others. It is a work of sociology by a maverick sociologist, academically trained, but decidedly his own man. I wasn't aware of it or him until a few days ago. The preface already has me convinced that…
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Dorothy Day on Max Bodenheim
I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put…
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Douglas Hyde: From Communist to Catholic
I am now reading Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (HarperCollins 2009). Over 700 pages. The author's name is hardly donnish, but he is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University. There is a chapter entitled "The Appeals of Communism," and in it I came across a reference to Douglas Hyde: For some who joined…
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Another Strange Tale of the Superstitions
The Superstition Mountains exert a strange fascination. They attract misfits, oddballs, outcasts, outlaws, questers of various stripes, a philosopher or two, and a steady stream of 'Dutchman hunters,' those who believe in and search for the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. This nonexistent object has lured many a man to his death. More men than Alexius von Meinong's golden…
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B. Traven
The initial is not the start of a name but another false clue to throw the curious off the scent — while piquing their curiosity. B. Traven, you be one clever dude.