“If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live than it is…” - John F. Kennedy
highwayscribery
politics, poetry, and prose
Monday, April 15, 2024
NEW BOOK BY THE hIGHWAY sCRIBE
“If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live than it is…” - John F. Kennedy
Sunday, March 24, 2024
Adventures of the highway scribe (or Tales of Nettlesome Journalist).
Friday, April 01, 2022
With "Tuffy." (L.A. Downtown News) |
Charters was right, the two volumes are of a piece and must-read for Kerouac scholars and fans. I was managing editor with 17 years as a journalist behind me and, rather than ask questions, I prompted Charters into conversations that fit around quotes from Kerouac's letters I had added to both arrange for Jack's presence and to shape the piece.
Her talk at the L.A. Central Library was packed; a clear demonstration of the writer’s enduring popularity, the academic drubbing he had been taking, notwithstanding. The audience was hip to every Beat anecdote. There were plenty of people there who knew "Bill," "Al," "Jack," "Larry," and Charters was at the top of her game running things.
Charters, who met Kerouac, is still around, having participated in a big Centennial event a few weeks ago.
MEMORY BABE
Ann Charters to Remember Kerouac at Central Library.
By Stephen Siciliano
He was the original American original. A hitchhiking, booze-guzzling roustabout who lived fast and died relatively young. But before doing that, Jack Kerouac would produce a Proustian remembrance of his own things past in a series of novels that would map out mid-century marginal America for all-time and a legend for himself. His On the Road is part of our cultural canon, a classic about a new breed of American youth “out for kicks,” a how-to for living life intensely and for the moment.
Ann Charters has been a student of Kerouac and his Beat Generation cohorts for years now, has written a book about them, edited the Viking Press Kerouac Reader as well as two volumes of letters. The second has just been released by Viking. She will be discussing Selected Letters 1957-1969 at the Central Library on December 9, 7 p.m. Charters met Kerouac while compiling the first bibliography of his work.
“I like it, I like it, I tell you I like it literature. What a hell of a better way to do it than apply paint squares and oblongs and pop out designs and worry about color or design. Have you ever noticed how the letters of famous painters and great painters were never so cherished as the letters of authors?” (Letter to John Clellon Holmes, Dec. 8, 1964)
Downtown News: Selected Letters II is very much a book about writing. All this business about Viking or Grove Press putting commas and dashes in the wrong places; each grammatical mark was a pitched battle. He didn’t seem to care for the rules of writing so much as for the music of it.
Charters: Looking at the vast body of correspondence, I thought it would make things interesting to focus on his development as a writer, starting from his time at Columbia [University] up until the day he died. I chose those that had to do with writing and it wasn’t difficult to find two volumes of his letters to different people that traced his concerns. Central to it was his discovery of what he called “spontaneous prose.” Volume Two entails the extraordinary attacks he suffered and the way he ultimately caved into them.
Very few people understood what he was trying to do. He had [Allen] Ginsberg, Holmes, [Gary] Snyder who he could write to and really unload.
He was delighted to hear that Malcolm Cowley at Viking was to be his editor. Cowley had a reputation for working well with experimental writers, but his experimentalism didn’t go beyond the ‘20s. Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were people of similar standing. With Kerouac we have a working class writer who is belligerent and makes things difficult by not making concessions. Cowley edited On the Road without involving Jack in the process - a terrible thing to do to a writer.
Ann Charters (about 30 years ago). |
“Dean and I embarked on a tremendous journey through post-Whitman American to FIND that American and FIND the inherent goodness in American man. American man and Child.” (to Carol Brown, May 9, 1969)
Downtown News: The selection spins a lesson about personal freedom and how the demands of a literary career launch one onto a permanent quest for it. Kerouac hurt people, abandoned a daughter and did somersaults to stay unattached.
Charters: It demonstrates how difficult it is to be a professional writer, to make it your only business. It’s an unrelenting demand for you to produce, produce, produce. For a decade of his life he was writing as prolifically as John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates - two who have been doing it for decades. Kerouac inadvertently realized that his autobiographical style demanded a lifetime of excitement. The adventures are few and far between because he spends his life at a typewriter. That’s one reason why he felt so much pressure to keep time for writing. He never came to terms with the fact he had to keep up with the pace for years and years of his life. Sadly enough, when On the Road was not made into a movie, and without good paperback advances, Kerouac never managed to stay atop his financial world, If [Marlon] Brando, who was very hot at the time, had played Dean Moriarity, he could have been financially free.
“By God WILL end up 2 old bums in the alley! It’s coming closer all the time! Silverplated garbage cans! Tuxedo bums! with velvet hoods and a moat!” (to Neal Cassady, September 1960.)
Downtown News: These letters chronicle a man’s downfall. It begins with On the Road and success and then he starts the dive.
Charters: That’s true. Volume One is a very happy book. He’s best friends with his most extraordinary character, Neal Cassady and he’s Kerouac’s inspiration. He writes letters to Neal that are most astonishing. Letters from just before the three weeks it took him to write On the Road. He never had a friendship with anyone like he did with Neal. None of his later friends gave him the perfect audience Cassady gave him.
“We had an interesting banquet, a Pekingese banquet (Imperial Cooking) with the Chinese Teacher who later brought a lovely 15 year old Japanese high school girl to interview me and I said, ‘Okay, but only if you ask me something interesting,’ and she said, ‘How are you?’” (to Gary Snyder, December 5, 1959).
Downtown New: Critics of the time said he couldn’t grow up. He was 40 years old and out drinking and getting into fights. He behaved like a hooligan.
Charters: Kerouac was a hooligan. A working class writer. I was astonished when I met him. He was 44 years old and living like no one I had ever met. He and his mother were really from the old country, uninhibited, scatological, getting drunk in public, throwing knives… they felt free in allowing themselves behavior most of us are not willing to. He wasn’t a violent man in that he picked fights, but he got into them because he did dumb things and his judgment was often impaired. He hung out with people in bars with very little understanding of what he did. Gravitated down rather than up, if you will.
“Yes, me and Memere are most comfortably moved into our new home, which is really such a great pad I can’t believe it and just sit in a more or less drunk stupor staring at it - fireplace, etc. It just goes to show that when you get what you always wanted, it’s maybe too late.” (to Philip Whalen, Jan. 14, 1963).
Downtown News: Here’s this prototypical rebel, a man capable of setting the publishing world on its ear with his writing and gruff habits, living with his mother.
Charters: A lot of writers lived with their moms. Flaubert and Whitman did. Today we’re living in such independent enclaves that anyone who stays with his or her mom their whole life seems like an eccentric. It was much closer to the norm up until the ‘70s. Kerouac describes very openly the fact he lives with his mom. In Desolation Angels he has chapters about riding the bus with his mom. What’s getting you there is the sense of excitement of being with your mom. He has an extraordinary joy and muscularity of description so that he makes being with his mother a great adventure.
"Try to rent a house near or in Sanlando Springs so you’ll be near the construction projects (and remember a quiet place so that cat won’t get run over.)” (to Caroline Kerouac Blake, June 18, 1959).
Downtown News: She was on the road in her own way, dragging him to over 20 different dwellings from the time of his birth in 1922.
Charters: She wanted to stay in Florida to be with his sister Caroline and her grandchild. He liked it, but only for short periods of time. They would bounce back and forth on these horrible moves (to New York and back) which meant, not only that his writing would be interrupted, but it was expensive. It was terribly inappropriate for a writer not making a lot of money to be living that way. He was faithful to his pledge to take care of her.
“I am hopeless paralyzed drunken mess and I don’t know how long I’m going to live, if I keep on like this. It’s not my liver or anything like that, it’s my brain getting soft and paralyzed. Yet I have such a good time when I’m drunk. I feel such ecstasy, for people, for books, for animals for everything. It’s a shame there’s a string tied to everything, huh?” (to Robert Giroux, March 31, 1962).
Downtown News: In the book you quote Timothy Leary characterizing Kerouac as “an old-style Bohemian without a hippy bone is his body.” What separated the old-style from the new Bohemianism?
Charters: Kerouac really does come out of the ‘20s ‘30s older style. Simply put, it’s an alcohol versus marijuana versus LSD question. Kerouac wants the joy, not so much the altered perception. Kerouac is also Catholic and feels as an older-style bohemian that you have to work to get there whereas the new style gives it to you in pill form, right away.
“There is a dream of cold mountain ranges on a gray day with clouds that I always get when I’ve been home 2 days sleeping with an open window. Cities and poets are repetitious. It’s time for the world to change. Nobody believes in enlightenment, i.e. kind tranquility, kind silence.” (to Allen Ginsberg, Nov. 2, 1959).
Downtown News: He manifested a genuine disdain for modern conceptual thinkers and comes across as a roll-up-your-sleeves, common sense kind of guy.
Because he lived with his mother, this aspect of himself never left him. This is what William Burroughs also protested against. He said it kept Kerouac socially retarded. He never had to seek out any friends who were anything but wild since his mother provided him safe harbor at the end of a wild night. She’s an old-fashioned, conservative housewife. She is also very intelligent and has him whipped into line. I didn’t spend but two days with her, but in her letters she’s a troublemaker and full of malice. A real piece of work.
“I recently had horrible visions of the too-muchness of the world which requires really too much of our attention, our mind essence is completely blasted by music, people, books, papers, movies, games, sex, talk, business, taxes, cars, asses, gasses, yack ack et….and let us hope that the great calm hearts of Melville, Whiteman and Thoreau do sustain us in the coming hectic years of overcommunicating Americas and Telstars and other Galaxies.” (to Allen Ginsberg, June 29, 1963).
Downtown News: When reading Kerouac’s Zen wordy passages, it is easy to conclude he’s choosing them more for sound than meaning, but he really was serious about religion.
Charters: He was a very religious person. He was on a religious quest to find spiritual meaning in the horror of everyday life. He had seen his father die and there is an underlying sadness to his chasing joy all the time. He was living his life very intensely. He never finds release, the center. To me the saddest letter is the final one which he writes to his nephew, Little Paul, saying he’s leaving his estate to him so that his wife’s “Greek family” doesn’t get it. At the end of Kerouac’s life he seems to finally understand that family is central, that you can’t be a family of one. He had chances to be a father to his daughter and with his wives and he blew it.
“Love to Yam Shirley
And Marshmallows
And Nunnery Stew
And Ecstacy Pie.”
(to John Clellon Holmes, June 8, 1962.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
When It Was Still a Hill (John Fante's Downtown Los Angeles)
John Fante |
Chuck Bukowski |
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Send in the Clowns
Cicciolina |
Toni Negri |
Saturday, March 05, 2016
The Poetri in Jimi
"I see we meet again.." |
After all the Jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on Down Street
Footsteps dressed in red
And the wind whispers “Mary”....
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries “Mary..”
The traffic lights they turn a-blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags down stream
‘cause the life that lived is,
is dead
And the wind screams, “Mary”...
Will the wind ever remember
the names it has blown in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age,
and its wisdom
It whispers “no, this will be the last”
And the wind cries “Mary”...
The talk about rock poets was worn out as early as the late 1970s, but the scribe proposes that the above is pretty damn good stuff.
After all the Jacks are in their boxes
and the clowns have all gone to bed...
What an opener. Easy to understand, and taking you nowhere. The second makes certain the witching hour, before dropping that double meaning. Are the “clowns” like the “jacks”; make believe and metaphorical? Or are the clowns the people without painted faces who make you laugh or cry depending? For that matter, are the Jacks real people, too? Their boxes merely their drafty apartments?
You can hear happiness staggering on Down Street,
footprints dressed in red.
Does happiness stagger? All things reaching the end stagger and what better place than Down Street? Dressed in red. The red of blood? Red crepe from the last party? It is up to you and maybe its yo mama’s Friday night red party panties. That would be your problem, or pleasure, depending.
And the wind whispers “Mary”...
“Oh, boo” you say, “the wind is ‘whispering’. How whispery!” But hey, hardly any knowledge is new and a poet returns to the box and reuses tools.
And besides, the wind whispers, “Mary”... and the scribe has always thought that, on the track, Jimi misses a great interpretative opportunity by not actually whispering “Mary” in his inimitable Hendrix way: “Mahray”
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life.
Yeah. We sweep drearily, all of us. But the broom itself? Why not when you’re talking about gathering up “the broken pieces of yesterday’s life”? You’ve left them behind right? Or maybe you just can’t face up to doing the job on your own. And you leave it to the broom.
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
The high-point of the piece. So much silliness, so much desperation, so many sixes crossing with sevens, all the madness and lunacy of the great push spread out in this simple dilemma of loose ends.
And the wind it cries “Mary.”
Whispered one time, crying the second. The wind is going someplace and we’re invited to follow its utterances, its voice.
The traffic lights they turn a-blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
And that’s him, Jimi Hendrix of Seattle, Washington, electric guitar god shedding the evening’s radioactivity on a mattress where he grinds his teeth and shakes his leg and lets the lights of the city color him green, yellow, red, Jimi, red – not blue.
The tiny island sags down stream
‘cause the life that lived is,
Is dead
As far as the tiny island, your guess is good as mine. Not that it matters because the poet is painting here and the primary colors are “down” and “dead”. Goes nice with that empty bed.
And the wind screams “Mary...”
Again. Imagine Jimi having worked his way (on the record) from whispering, to crying, to screaming. “Maaahraaay!”
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
Surely the wind has memory. That’s what we hear when it arrives, recollection and message from where it has been. Will it remember the names from the past? There must be so many, yet the wind is so vast, if inconstant.
And with this crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers “no, this will be the last.”
And the wind cries “Mary...”
Mary is last. Maybe you’ve met her.
Friday, September 26, 2014
"Hillbilly Bikini Bottom" (a short story) by Stephen Siciliano
Jefferson Davis was in a fix.
It was towards the end of the fourth quarter already and the natives were getting restless. Bugs swarmed in the high and bright lights and the players' pads were soaked in Indian summer sweat.
Jeff saw Brenda Lee Underwood over by the south end bleachers, just above where they liked to drink beers and nip at each other most nights when football wasn't on.
The Little Honey was there with that prick who owned the Camaro from up north of county line and didn't she just love anything with pants on?
"Should've listened to Danny Joe Dean, the Highsteppers' bass player," he told himself, "when we was up at the Collection House and he said she wasn't worth the cheap dress she was burstin' out of."
Darnell Hampton was loping back to the huddle. He saw his mother standing in the north end, hands clenched in prayer, old before her time. There were others from the family and neighborhood standing frozen around her. Aunts and uncles come to see Darnell the Wonder Boy. He didn't need to look to know they'd all be praying, too. Or passed out already from delirium at the Jaguars' pending defeat.
The football religion was strong on both sides of the tracks and both sides of the tracks were simmering in disappointment.
This was no homecoming crosstown rivalry. It was a little 'ol Catholic school you couldn't even find in the Arkansas state high school football rankings. And here were the Jaguars sputtering toward the final gun, ready to blow a shot at the perfect season for 1979 in the first warm-up game.
Whitman High took a last time out. Coach called Jeff Davis to the sideline so he could draw up a play. As Jeff jogged in he scanned the bleachers and saw Danny Joe Dean giving him the finger.
Damn he loved that 'ol boy!
Coach whipped up Xs and Os that had a shotgun, a pulling guard, and a wildcat something or other. He sent his quarterback out to hunt with those words, but Jefferson Davis hadn't heard any of it.
He just nodded and jogged to the huddle.
His left guard, Ralph Mazzanti, looked like something come out of the meat grinder and Henderson, the right side tackle, was useless out of habit.
Jeff Davis looked at Darnell. "You hear that farm boy call you a nigger?"
Darnell looked out at the north bleachers and his praying people again. They kept all the stories, the terrible dark stories he had heard. Held them close and whispered to themselves.
Uncle LeRoy was gone, because somebody had to get the chicken and ribs for after the game. That's when they would all rush back to the other side of the railroad tracks to eat and sing and be apart from everything else happening in town.
Darnell was always invited across the track on football Friday nights, but before the clock clanged twelve he was back in the low shacks, a speedy Brougham turned brown pumpkin again.
"Ain't nobody called me a nigger all night 'cause they know I will kick a lot of serious ass if that was the case."
"Like Hayl," Jeff spit. "Number 77 called you a fast country nigger."
Darnell looked into the Maria Regina huddle for a Number 77. "He's black you fool."
"So he's cool?" Jeff asked. "He can say it?"
"Mostly," Darnell practically whispered.
"It's true anyway," Mazzanti said. "The bit about bein' a fast country nigger."
"D'jou just call me a country nigger Ralph?"
"Um, not direct-like. Not like, 'You, Darnell Hampton, are one very fast country nigger as per my words, Ralph Mazzanti.' No. I was paraphrasing."
Jeff knew Ralph picked up "paraphrasing" in Miss Keating's English class, because she wore patch pocket bellbottoms and they kept him focused.
Henderson knew none of those boys cared if one was green and the other blue so long as they could get a miracle touchdown, and avoid facing up to family and friends with so great a debacle. There were girlfriends on the line, scholarships...girlfriends!
So he put it out there: "Hayl Darnell, Jeff's just a little hot-and-bothered about Brenda Lee Underwood and her being with that ol' boy from Paragould."
"Henderson you are a useless piece of crap," Jeff Davis shot back.
"Maybe, but it don't change the veracity of what I said none."
Jeff knew Henderson picked up that word from Doc Hotstetler's dairy cattle judging class where he talked about the "veracity of a heifer's udder."
He looked over at the south bleachers again and saw Brenda Lee kiss her new beaux.
Jeff would like to get a gun and kill her straightaway after the game. He thought he'd do it. Get a pistol, shoot all her friends, too. End her world, the little bitch.
And he was drifted back to that night in July down by the river when Tiffany James come up and told Jeff all about how sweet Brenda Lee was on him, and how she was over by the swimming hole swinging around on the rope hanging down from a tree.
"You know the place," she tilted her head at him and pulled on a Busch beer. He almost didn't want to leave.
Jeff Davis went up river and he saw Brenda Lee hanging down from the rope, swinging, her cut-off blue jeans getting pulled up her butt like a hillbilly bikini and this about drove him wild. He watched her swoop out over the water and let loose, landing in the black oily splash. He licked his lips as she hit the surface.
Then, like a kinda swamp rat, this guy's head popped up laughing. Brenda Lee squealed and made like she was trying to get out of his arms and that's when she saw him, Jeff, standing there.
"Why Jefferson Davis!" and Brenda Lee looked at him with a kind of challenge in her face, before she turned and kissed that 'ol boy that was in the river with her.
The ref came over. "Break it up," and blew the whistle, waving his right arm around like a whirlybird.
This was the moment. Jeff Davis had never given his troops the play, because he'd never heard it, and because of Tiffany James and Brenda Lee and that night down by the river. Same kinda night. Summer night. Bugs and gnats in the air, in your lungs.
He looked over at the bleachers. Again. Brenda Lee pulled herself out of a kiss with the Camaro Kid and stared straight at him. Her face had the same challenge in it as that July night by the river. Her little piglet-button nose pointing skyward.
And he was sparked. Hard. Not by the challenge of a Camaro, or a perfect season, but by the memory of that hillbilly bikini bottom.
Jefferson Davis turned to Darnell Hampton and looked at him across generations of blackness and whiteness and railroad track and said...
..."Go deep. I'll hit ya!"
Monday, May 26, 2014
The Origin of Vedette's Truth
In this musical spoken-word duet with the marvelous Omar Torrez, I recount how Vedette's father traumatizes her into becoming a truth-teller for life.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
"Ineffable" a poem
Saturday, March 08, 2014
highwayscribery book Report: "All the Birds, Singing," by Evie Wyld
Whether it's a cigarette with a still-lit butt being run under a faucet, a ewe getting her throat slit, or the little pink penis of her protagonist's captor, Wyld employs her marvelous prose to drive bile from one's gut into the bottom of the throat.
There is a place for this in literature: the youth with jaundiced eye, the angry take on a world that has disappointed too early, and the newly minted among us can be particularly rabid about the letdown.
So prepare to be bit.
"All the Birds, Singing," is the story of a woman whose first steps along the path of life are the wrong ones. Very wrong. The device, employed across a number of issues affecting Jake's life, is to let on that something is amiss and keep the reader guessing until the end, which limits the breadth of review so as not to spoil the story.
In any case, the narrative will take you from Australia to England, though it may take time to sort out where you are at first, because the second device employed is the presentation of chapters with no relation to chronology, except for the stacking of issue-resolving revelations at yarn's end.
The publisher, Pantheon Books, is very excited about Wyld, "All the Birds Singing" and the advance reviews ("completely and utterly monumental") focus on the author's crisp and textured prose.
There is, floating about the Internet, a "Ten Things Writers Shouldn't Do" list crafted by American author Elmore Leonard, whose specialty was the noir/thriller mystery.
Among Leonard's scripting sins is the use of adverbs, avoiding anything but saying the subject "said" during bouts of dialogue, and eschewing long descriptions of weather, places or people that a reader can jump over without losing the narrative thread.
"I'll bet you never skip over dialogue," said Leonard, whose big idea was that novelists should avoid "self-conscious writing."
Wyld would probably disagree, because she breaks all of Leonard's rules.
And that's because there is is good storytelling and there is good "writing" with carefully crafted crevices, rises, flatlands and, yes, adverbs. Wyld has chosen this type of scribery over the keep-em-turning-those-pages approach, which is fine, with all due respect to Mr. Leonard. Readers find joy in the revelry of language, too.
Jake has got scars nasty enough to send one of her johns (semi-spoiler) heading for the exits without paying what's owed and, by golly, you will wait good and long before the writer decides to let you in on how they got there.
"Dark," "guttural," "raw": Pick your descriptive for this rural rant that does not offer up a boulevard of broken dreams so much as a gallery of damaged souls; emotional runts who make an art of barely coping.