Whither goest thou?

For my fellow 50-somethings with 50-something eyesight, the quote in the above image (sent me by a fellow Stumbler), is:

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"
~Jack Kerouac

This morning on Meet The Press, Tom Brokaw asked Ted Turner about starting CNN. Turner said it was like Columbus*: he didn't know where he was going when he left, didn't know where he was when he got there, and didn't know where he'd been when he got back.

Do we ever know where we're going, or what it will be like when we get there, or have a true understanding of where we've been? Perhaps not. But perhaps, too, that is one of the wonderful things about the dance of life. And perhaps it's why Buddhist author Pema Chodron wrote Comfortable With Uncertainty (recommended).

As Kerouac might put it, "Dig the ride!" No matter what, the road ahead holds surprises we can't anticipate. See it as an adventure!

We don't know when or if the economy will rebound, or if Barack Obama will construct a successful Presidency, or if it will snow hard this winter (like the last one!) or even if we'll wake up to another morning. And if we did, what a drudge life would be.

So dig this sad happy ride we're all on. Dean's drivin' and there's no tellin' exactly where we'll end up but it'll for sure be somewhere else (haw haw haw).




*Leave it to politically insensitive Captain Outrageous to use as an example a white European male native-slaughtering genocidal slave trader about whom secular schoolchildren are lied to in public schools every October.

Jack Kerouac and the diamondcutter of mercy

Today's post is a reminder - in a society where materialism runs so rampant that you can get trampled to death by shoppers crowding into a Wal-Mart - that what matters is not what you own, the job you do, where you live, what clothes you wear, or what car you drive. I'm not about to tell you what does matter. That's for you to figure out. If you can't figure it out simply by looking at the above image and pondering it for about two seconds, then my advice is to drive to the nearest Wal-Mart and the rest of us will hope for a stampede.

Sorry to be so negative, but between the absurd event at Wal-Mart yesterday and the death-dealing going on in India - not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and too many other places to mention - I just want to scream:

WAKE UP!

It doesn't have to be like this. It doesn't.

Be peace. Start right now. Show compassion in the next interaction you have with a person, animal, tree, stone, whatever. Show compassion to yourself. In fact, start there.

I need that reminder. Every day. Every second. Several paragraphs ago I let my anger turn to a violent wish. No! Choose kindness. Compassion. Mercy. It starts with you. Not Bush. Not your boss. Not your significant other. Not this or that government. It starts with YOU! Until you end violence in yourself, there will be violence in the world.*

In The Dharma Bums, Ray (Kerouac) gives Japhy (Gary Snyder) a going-away gift:

The next day I figured to give Japhy some kind of strange little going-away gift and didn’t have much money or any ideas particularly so I took a little piece of paper about as big as a thumbnail and carefully printed on it: MAY YOU USE THE DIAMONDCUTTER OF MERCY and when I said goodbye to him at the pier I handed it to him, and he read it, put it right in his pocket, and said nothing (1976, pp. 214-215).

So that's my beatific wish for myself and for every other human on this planet:

MAY YOU USE THE DIAMONDCUTTER OF MERCY



*For more on this, read anything by Jiddu Krishnamurti, but especially Beyond Violence.

Google Book Search

Did you know about Google's Book Search? At the top of the main Google screen, just above the capital G, you'll see the word "more" with a down arrow to the right of it. Click on that down arrow and a drop down menu appears. If you select "Books," it will take you to Google Book Search. Now type in the name of a book. For example, Treasure Island. You'll get many hits. The first one is the entire book, which you can read on-screen or download it as a PDF! How about Call of the Wild? Yup! Full view on-screen and PDF-able. War and Peace? It's there - full view and PDF-able. How about On The Road? Nope. Limited view only. Same with many newer books.

But still . . . pretty amazing, huh? Especially for us bibliophiles.

You can search by topic, author, or title. There are advanced search options, as well as help pages.

The Beat Handbook: 100 Days of Kerouactions is there. It required me to send a physical copy of the book to Google for them to scan because I do not have the PDF file (that's in BookSurge's possession - I suppose I could get it but it was easy enough to send Google a book). I decided to do it as a marketing effort, so I chose limited preview. But there are links next to my book to buy it, review it, or add it to your library!

Yass! You can build a library of books right on Google! If you're interested in genres, just click one on the left side of the main Book Search screen. For example, if you click on "Philosophy," you'll get 1,717 books, including Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Thoreau's Walden, and the list goes on and on.

Check out Google Book Search. It's a way beat on-line adventure. Happy reading.

Jack Kerouac, Thanksgiving Day, football

During his senior year at Lowell HS, according to Kerouac legend, Jack scored the winning touchdown against rival Lawrence in the "Turkey Day Classic" on Thanksgiving Day 1938. In researching this little tidbit of trivia, I found this website, which is a concise compilation of details about Jack: Jack Kerouac: Safe in Heaven Drunk.

That's all for today. We are giving thanks in our household for family, friends, love, health, food, warmth, shelter, and the freedom to assemble and give thanks unfettered by government interference in the first place. Not everyone on this planet can say that. My heart goes out to them.

I hope your holiday is everything you wish.

Jack Kerouac's On The Road: The Movie (finally?)

After multiple false starts dating clear back to when Jack Kerouac was alive - he frequently mentions potential movie deals in his letters* - it seems that a film version of On The Road is finally in the works. According to an article in The National, "Literary friction," screenwriter Jose Rivera and director Walter Salles, known for the Oscar-nominated The Motorcycle Diaries, "are facing Kerouac’s meandering prose head-on, transforming it into workable production pages (the film is scheduled for a 2009 release)."

To which I reply: YAIR!**

I'll be in line opening day. With low expectations, of course. That way I won't be disappointed. But Fight Club adapted pretty damn well to film. And Into The Wild. And even Peaceful Warrior wasn't unwatchably awful (I'd watch Nick Nolte in his later years in anything). Who knows? Maybe it will be a cult classic, giving birth to thousands of new Kerouac fans.

But I agonize over casting. They have to get Jack and Neal Cassady right! Who will play Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty? I'm sorry to blast other bloggers, but while Edward Norton and Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt and Thomas Jane (he'd make a great Neal) would seem to be in the running, they are too old. Kerouac was 27-ish during his "Road" travels, and Cassady was younger still. Norton is 39. Depp is 45. Pitt is 44 (almost 45 - his birthday is a few days after mine). Jane is 39.

Someone suggested Billy Crudup for Sal (Jack). Yup. I can see it.



But he's too old, too! He's 40.

One thing Jack agonized over was that by the time On The Road was published, he was no longer the svelte, vivacious, 20-something hepcat in the novel. Yet that was the Kerouac fans wanted to see, not the bloated, drunk, anxiety-ridden neurotic he'd become (sorry, Jack, for all the labels, but they're not disputable). Which, of course, drove him madder than he already was and deeper into the bottle.

So Jack and I both say: You have to cast Sal and Dean with actors who are about the same ages as Jack and Neal in the late 40's. Speaking of Into The Wild, how about Emile Hirsch? He's about the right age. Or Scott Mechlowicz of Peaceful Warrior?

There are many younger actors who would be perfect. My plea to the casting director (unless the decision's already been made) is to be very, very careful and deliberate.

Ask youself, "Who would Kerouac cast?"

No matter, though. I'll be watching it.


*In particular see Ann Charters' wonderful Kerouac: Selected Letters Volume 2.

**That's beat for an emphatic, "Yes!"

Jack Kerouac's Tristessa: A review (of sorts)

In an interview on The Lehrer Report I heard Kerouac scholar Audrey Sprenger praise Jack Kerouac for being a profoundly disciplined writer who was brave enough to write his life. In her writings about Jack, I've gleaned another important twofold insight: that Jack's writings makes us both want to live our lives as adventures, and they encourage us to see our lives as something worth writing about.

I'm glad I discovered Audrey because she put words to things I've felt about Jack for a long time and simply couldn't express. And reading about her work inspired me to finish Tristessa last night.

Not that it was a hard book to finish, being only 96 pages - making it a novella, or perhaps a novelette, depending on which egghead one wishes to believe - and epitomizing Jack's spontaneous and fluid prose that sends the reader on a flume ride, sometimes fast sometimes slow but always flowing, even to the point of not caring if comprehension suffers for fear that getting out of the boat would interrupt the total experience of digging the ride.

In Tristessa, Jack writes his life in Mexico: prostitutes, junkies, disease, poverty, chickens in the house, crime, flea-ridden cats, pimps, squalor, drug dealers, hucksters - all juxtaposed against love, beauty, friendship, lust, spirituality, big questions, even rants against god (like the Cool Hand, like Lieutenant Day-un).

By the end you understand how you could live in abject poverty and fall in love with a drug-addicted, anorexic prostitute. Maybe more than that. Maybe by the end you fall in love with Tristessa.

And the world doesn't seem so ugly anymore.

Hybrid is in

Hybrid. I like that word. Did you ever think about it? Perhaps the Toyota Prius comes to mind: a car that runs on both the evil black stuff and electricity (the latter frequently generated by burning the evil black stuff or torturing atoms and creating permanent toxic waste so what's the real difference?).

But we've had hybrids for centuries. Think mythology. Remember the minotaur? That was a hybrid creature, part-man and part-bull.

And what about biology? We've been cross-breeding plants commercially for agricultural purposes since the 1930s.

Words? I offer the hybrid word hyperactive, which combines Greek (hyper) and Latin (activus). Tangential note: Thank you Mrs. Seaman for teaching us Latin in 7th and 8th grade. We hated it then. We hated you for teaching it. And now we're thankful because we can figure out the meanings of a shitload of English words without looking them up. Docendo discimus.

Music? I give you Dancin' Knuckles, a bluegrass punk band.

People? Well, we don't use the term hybrid (for a perjorative example, watch the excellent Steve McQueen movie, Nevada Smith), but let's face it: humans are prolific in mixing ethnicities, religions, cultures, you-name-it. We even mix up gender! And no, I'm not putting a link to a pre-op tranny porn site here in my blog!

And what about books? Do some Googling and you will find many examples of the term "hybrid book" out there in cyberspace.

However, I find no examples of the kind of hybrid represented by The Beat Handbook: 100 Days of Kerouactions! It's a book (nonfiction Kerouacian advice)! It's a journal (lots of white space to write in and writing assignments to boot)!

So when you gift The Beat Handbook for the holidays (and I know you're fixing to do that), remember to point out that you were thoughtful enough to give a hybrid book.

Hybrid is in.