Robert R. Mitchell's Blog, page 11

Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels: Everything and Nothing

Desolation Angels is heaven and hell and the world and America and the Void and his Mom. Kerouac/Duluoz is a despicable, noble, earnest, loving, whiny, brilliant, loyal, weak, irreplaceable, insane jazz poet. As a preamble, listen to Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row and realize how he creates surprisingly linear beauty tangentially, and then crank up the random-o-meter one hundred times for Kerouac. One thousand preliminarily random images turn into a masterful Pointillist painting in prose. Bebop improvisation touching on a particular theme from a million different angles placates those of us requiring a story if we are patient. His prose is so poetic at times that it’s exhausting; infinitely compressed like a neutron star. In Desolation Angels he is Dharma Bum, addict, alcoholic, villain, criminal, poet, preacher, seer, mystic and finally Penitente and Bodhisattva having simultaneously reached the gates of Heaven/Nirvana and found himself unforgivable. From Desolation Peak and Seattle to Frisco; to Mexico City and New York; across the Atlantic to Tangiers, Paris and London; from Florida to Berkeley and back again; Desolation Angels is “ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny;” his whole rucksack (lost and found); every work, every poem, every sketch every howl. Ginsberg, Dali, Burroughs are all there, the pantheon of crazy pathetic beat angels.

Desolation Angels

Only on page 27, but if this keeps up I'll eat my words about The Dharma Bums and declare Desolation Angels the best Kerouac. Unfreakingbelievable.

Kerouac's Desolation Angels

"Meanwhile the sunsets are mad orange fools, raging in the gloom..."

Kerouac's Big Sur - Review

It’s funny reading the accolades on the cover of the 1963 Bantam paperback edition. When people realized that Kerouac could make them money, all the mainstream papers and critics elbowed each other to award the most hyperbolic, sensational, scandalous praise possible to a book that is NOT so different from his previous works, the glaring red teaser on the back notwithstanding. Take the alcoholism, psychological contortions, existential torment, Catholic guilt and hyperconsciousness of The Subterraneans and dial it up five notches. Take the yearning, desire and scatterbrained chaos of On the Road; the mystical communion with Nature of The Dharma Bums; add an interesting “King of the Beatniks tells all” Hollywood scandal vibe; throw in a heaping pile of Kurt Cobain-style horror at success (“teenage angst has paid off well”) and then kill Jack’s cat and you’ve got a pretty good feel for Big Sur. If Big Sur truly is “His most powerful novel“ (big red teaser on back cover again), it isn’t because the writing is that much better or the story is ground-breaking, it’s because we’ve been following Kerouac all over the U.S. and Mexico for years and it hurts like hell to see him tormented by the hyperconsciousness and alcoholism that in large part fueled his early works. Kerouac’s drinking killed him about 7 years after Big Sur was published and if the book is any indication of his real condition, it’s amazing he lasted that long. The shroud of his imminent death covers the work as soon as the thin veneer of fictionalized names is pulled away. Kerouac’s beat poetry fills the pages and he includes his lengthy work “Sea” at the end.

Kerouac’s Big Sur: “Woe is me, I’m successful”

Interpersonal peace depends on two things: consciousness and empathy. This is nothing new. Hardly revolutionary. There are two kinds of consciousness: self and other. If we are not self-conscious; aware of our own thoughts, emotions, actions, appearance, desires, etc.; we cannot learn, improve or understand half the things that occur around us. If we are not other-conscious; aware of the world around us, other people’s needs and reactions to our own actions; we’re what sociologists call “an oblivious idiot.” “Oblivious idiots” spend most of their waking hours driving cars. The second requirement of interpersonal peace is empathy. Empathy is feeling other people’s pain, especially when we’re responsible, and giving a shit. If we are self-conscious and other-conscious but have no empathy, we are what’s called a “sociopath.” So what the hell does any of this have to do with Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur? Big Sur was written post-fame, when Kerouac more resembled a drunk, Las Vegas, slicked hair, telethon Jerry Lewis than a young ecstatic Beatnik. Kerouac, like other “Voices of their Generation”(Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain, and even Jesus I bet), looked around at the people for whom he was supposedly “The Voice” and was disgusted. “That’s not what I meant!” “You’re doing it all wrong!” “I never said that!” So our reaction might very well be, “Look, you’re successful: stop whining and enjoy it.” The problem is that most successful people are both conscious and empathetic, which means they can’t just stop whining and enjoy it. Neither can they stop working over “The Question” (of existence, that is); the struggle to answer, dissect, or illuminate, of course, was in large part impetus for the books or songs that ended up making them famous. I’m on page 36 of Big Sur and poor ol’ Jack is about to have a breakdown of some kind. It’s been 20 years since I’ve read it (I think), so I don’t recall exactly what happens. We’ll see.

Cal Tjader

"I spent most of my time in the living room where we had Cal Tjader records on the hi-fi and a lot of girls were dancing as Bud and I and Sean and sometimes Alvah and his new buddy George played bongo drums on inverted cans."
-Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM7epx...

This is the best

The first time I've reread The Dharma Bums immediately after On The Road and The Subterraneans. It is the best. This is why we read Kerouac. He ventured up north from the eucalyptus ravines of northern California to the country of ancient gnarled mist-shrouded peaks. He ate and slept in Seattle and saw the farms in the Skagit Valley and spent the summer on Desolation Peak and he blessed it all with the peace and enthusiasm and love and enlightenment of a true Bodhisattva.

I wrote the following review back in 2010.

" Rereading the Dharma Bums after probably a ten-year hiatus, I am struck by how foreign the beatniks seem to us today and how that impression must have been magnified tenfold for the Leave It To Beaver folks whom we are told ran the country back in the fifties. Then again Ray, Kerouac's protagonist, hitchhiked back and forth across America and found a surprising degree of tolerance if not admiration from the people stopping to give him a ride. Maybe that's just the nature of people on the move or maybe America wasn't really 100% homogenous like the beats and the flower children who followed them claimed.

It would do "the kids today" good to read this book. I'll wager at least half of them won't get past the poetic language with which Kerouac writes his alleged prose. For the texting generation, Kerouac might as well be Shakespeare. A quick read fails to fully appreciate the music in his words. Slow down and enjoy.

For those willing to embrace this new language, a world governed by thought, belief, emotion, experience, appreciation for nature and attention to basic human needs is unveiled; a world plunked down in the midst of the newborn consumer-driven American society governed by brands, advertising, the lure of "convenience," and the first hesitant salvos of pop culture. Kerouac's characters are as well-versed in Buddhism as the Middle America folks they meet are fluent in Christianity. For an introduction to American Zen Buddhism as it emerged in the beat culture of the fifties and early sixties, read Alan Watt's The Way of Zen and then read The Dharma Bums, looking up and studying every reference to Buddhism you don't understand. It's on my list of things to do, along with hiking to Desolation Peak. If you ever listened to the Doors and didn't understand why Jim Morrison sang "the West is the best," read The Dharma Bums and then Steinbeck's Cannery Row and you'll begin to see, if not agree. It wouldn't have broken my heart if the last half of the book had been devoted to Ray's two months on Desolation Peak instead of just the last ten pages, but his adventures hitch-hiking, sitting in his family's woods, sleeping beneath the stars and eucalyptus trees, and riding the rails on the Midnight Ghost are worth every page devoted to them.

"Rucksack Revolution"

"I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures..."

-Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

From Sal Paradise to Heavenly Lane, a short review of Kerouac's The Subterraneans

While On the Road’s Sal Paradise bombs back and forth from coast to coast compelled largely by the infectious, manic restlessness of Dan Moriarty; The Subterraneans focuses more keenly on the “San Francisco Scene,” and the paradise Leo Percepied finds on Heavenly Lane, a paradise soon lost. The jazz prose Kerouac pioneered; a stream-of-consciousness prose with the lyricism, consonance and super-concentrated imagery and literary references usually reserved for poetry; shares center stage with the subterraneans themselves and the jazz prophets to whom they throng in smoky, stoned, drunken pilgrimages. The subterraneans are “urban Thoreaus” and Frisco is their Walden Woods. If Sal Paradise seemed a saint to Dan Moriarty’s fallen angel, Leo Percepied is a deeply flawed, juvenile, narcissistic, alcoholic writer unable to successfully process the small success he’s experienced. The novel is an uncompromising, painfully critical first-person indictment that forces readers looking for a hero to look elsewhere.

Rereading Subterraneans

Stream of consciousness Beat Kerouac....