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Sunday, March 14
JOAN-GIRL
by
Lloydville
on Sun 14 Mar 2010 11:10 AM PDT
VISIONS OF THE JOAN-GIRL
by Paul Zahl
On January 9th, 1951 Jack Kerouac had a vision in St. Patrick's
Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City. He wrote the vision down that night and sent it to Neal Cassady. It was published in 1995 in the Selected Letters 1940 - 1956, edited by
Ann Charters, and is found on pages 281-293.
The letter hit me with a wallop, because it contradicts the reputation
Kerouac has earned for misogyny. The letter is a religious vision concerning women, and also men, which
embodies a catharsis of feeling and rue, on the part of the visionary, for the feelings of contempt that
governed most of Kerouac's treatments of women in his work.
It is made even more worthy of attention by the fact that four months
later, in a letter dated May 22nd,
Kerouac told Cassady to "pay no attention" to what he had written about
women in January. He "regressed", in other words. And he never quite came back to this universal chord.
In New Testament scholarship -- to make an abrupt cross-reference -- such textual "taking back" of an earlier testimony suggests the
authenticity of the original statement. In other words, if St. James
in the New Testament writes that he has concerns about some of the
teachings he finds in the letters of St. Paul, this tells the modern
scholar that the "odd" assertions from St. Paul concerning grace and
law really did issue from the man himself. St. James wouldn't
criticize St. Paul, that is, unless there had really been something
there for him to criticize. Similarly, if Jesus enunciates something
very radical, such as "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
within the context of a work that wants to make him All-Glowing and
Tom-Terrific, then the fact that this saying of Jesus has not been
deleted means that it was so strong in the memory of witnesses that
later interpreters could not have cut it if they tried.
Similarly, Kerouac on January 9th, 1951 experienced something very
real, for him. The fact that he becomes uncomfortable with it in on
May 22nd strengthens its veracity as a real dream, a real "touching of
the foundations of his soul" (his words).
This letter, which is quite sublime in its writing in my opinion, is
worth quoting at length. I will do so with some interstitial personal commentary. A short summing-up, of this loaded,
surprising material from the "Beat" pioneer, will follow. There are two further things to mention, before you read Kerouac's
letter.
It is a vision, his letter. It bursts over and upon him, and he is not
expecting it. It is completely accidental, in fact, since he ducked
into St. Patrick's only to find a place to take shelter from the
busy-ness of Midtown. He did not know he would get caught up in a
religious service, or novena. The letter recounts his vision, linked to
a statue he sees and studies and thinks about. It is a vision which
observes; and in observing one particular woman, seated in a pew in
front of him, he begins to think about his wife, and then about his
view of women in general, and finally, about men, in general.
Secondly, Kerouac's letter is emotional. Everything begins to happen
when he starts to cry. He is not able to explain his tears. Yet he
moves thereby beyond the "aesthetic" (his word) to the sub-rational.
That's when the "work" of the vision takes place. This is to say that
the "aesthetic" carries him to the "emotional", and it is an awesome
thing.
Now, dear Reader, if you are willing and ready, Behold:
TO NEAL CASSADY
Jan. 9, 1951
(Richmond Hill, N.Y.)
Dear Neal,
To continue. A new experience has touched the foundation of my soul since I wrote you the last words last night . . .
Kerouac sets the scene:
I came into the Cathedral not only to get out of the bitter cold, but because, moments before, I had stood in Grand Central Station looking around with a futile sorrow for a place to sit and think. All there was -- marble floor, rushing crowds, dime lockers, bleak seatless spaces and bright vast corners. What a thing men have let themselves in for, in this New York!
I hurried out in the cold and cut up 5th Avenue, past the (yes) Yale Club and past Harcourt Brace (yes) and swore and cursed; and cut right by the Doubleday Book store without deigning to go in and see if they had my book [i.e., his first published novel, The Town and the City] on
display . . .
As you know, St. Patrick's is a Gothic cathedral, copied after Rheims or Chartres or whichever, with a rectory in the back, and a big department store across the street on 50th street. I . . . ducked . . . into the side entrance of the church.
Now our hero must begin to "let go" of his "renegade Catholic" baggage,
and also his heavy personal baggage:
At first I sneered as all the commonplace "renegade Catholic" thoughts came to me in regimental order but soon I was lost in real sweet contemplation of what was going on . . .
I put away all my worries of where to get a job, how to get to California next month, what to do about my poor wife whom I had been torturing in my subtle way lately, and just merely sat thinking in church . . .
Kerouac suddenly invokes Dietrich Buxtehude!
. . . so that you see . . . my first thoughts were superficial, or let's
just say "aesthetic."
Then something happens:
Frankly, Neal, I don't know when it happened; when it was I began crying . . .
It is as if the writer's ears now become opened, together with his eyes. He begins to take in what is actually going on around him.
A tall athletic young priest was cutting up to make a sermon; simultaneously I noted how much the crowd had thickened; and before I knew it I was in the middle of a fullblown church service. Since I was in the church utterly given over to pure meditation I obediently kneeled, or stood, or sat at the young priest's behest and followed everyone else in so doing. He made several cryptic remarks evidently having to do with the novena everyone was on, and then began a sermon.
Note that Kerouac has the reaction that many visitors to a church
service have when the parish "announcements" are being made. He describes them as "cryptic". And so they are! (I have always tried
to teach young ministers to make as few announcements as possible in
church. Announcements disenfranchise visitors and give the impression of the
church membership being a kind of club, with "cryptic" sharings. In
most parishes, however, announcements grow, and Grow, and GROW. For my
money, they are a sign of fading vision.)
The priest now begins to speak. At first Kerouac misunderstands what
is being said.
He began talking about how "every ambitious woman wants to see her child become successful in industry, in a profession, in some constructive field." I slapped the side of my head in despair; for by this time my meditations had carried me far from this modern competitive world into thought of a simple and medieval character. I almost sneered. Then I noticed he was starting out this way for greater punch, because then he said, "What were the thoughts of the Virgin Mother on that first Christmas night with regard to her little son? For she knew, only poverty, humiliation and suffering could save him and she knew he was come for strange reasons into the world."
And from there on this fine young priest made a beautiful sermon about the advantages of humility and piety in the invisible world that will surmount the pride and decadence of the visible. I agreed with him. I almost applauded . . .
At this point Kerouac starts to think about the Virgin Mary. His
attention is caught by a newly dedicated and consecrated statue in the
Cathedral, of the Virgin Mary with her dead son -- the pieta, in other words.
And now I must tell you of the Virgin Mary . . . I was just staring at
what I think was a brand new statue of the Virgin Mary holding her Son in her arms after the
crucifixion . . .
I was amazed to see so many young girls, shopgirls, kneeling around it at the white rail. I couldn't believe my eyes when saw first one, then another, then all of them reach out, touch the statue, touch the red flowers, and bow their heads . . .
Kerouac now associates to his wife. He begins to think concretely
about his most personal relationship, and his role in it. This is where, in my opinion, the letter gets really interesting.
Suddenly I remembered what was wrong between my wife and myself in the past days; she'd said she felt like a "frog" sometimes in the midst of sexual intercourse. I remember it had irritated me . . . Also she never considered herself worth touching when she had a period. Most of all I thought of her -- on the impetus of seeing a girl exactly like her [my emphasis] in the pew in front of me -- with head bowed, kneeling,
a shawl over her . . . humble head, and I almost cried to think of it.
I saw how all of earthly life, with its gutty sufferings, really passes
like a river through the body of a woman while the man, unknowing of these things and "clean", just cuts along arrogant. I saw how it is the woman who gives birth, and suffers, and has afterbirths dragged out of her, and navel cords snipped and knotted, and bleeds -- while the man boasts of his bloody prowesses . . .
I had even been annoyed at the poor girl lately because she conducted long secret meditations of her own in the bedroom while I "wrote". "What are you thinking about?" I'd ask slyly. What's going on in her great soul now? I'd ask myself sarcastically. Bah, bah, bah, and all that; as if, and certainly BECAUSE I was a "writer", she, a mere girl, could not possibly have a soul like mine worthy of hours and of deep contemplation.
Kerouac is recognizing the validity of someone other than himself.
If I had been a little boy of Galilee, and seen the humble women in shawls kneeling at the temple, what would I have thought of Miss Rheingold [i.e., a sexy woman on a billboard advertising beer] . . .? No,
I saw that the girl has a soul . . . For if the burden on earth... could be lifted from one woman, then it may be lifted for another, or to be more precise, the burden is already lifted because the Virgin Mary was [this is a
reference to the Assumption of Our Lady]; just as our sins are expiated by the sacrifice of the great Lord Jesus, without any of us having to be crucified on a cross.
Kerouac now sums up what he has seen, in the form of the "Joan-girl" in
front of him. Joan is the first name of his wife.
No, the tall, humble Joan-girl in front of me, kneeling with bowed head, was a woman who dearly and sincerely prayed for the deliverance of her soul.
Finally, or almost finally, Kerouac considers "men", and the vain-glory of the male. He writes through the eyes of child, "a little boy of Galilee":
I further noticed that there were no young men in the church, only old ones; and I knew they were all out making money or being hoodlums with all their might. If I had been a little boy of Galilee . . . what would I have thought of the go-getter in his Brooks Brothers suit hurling himself through a revolving door with that arrogant scowl? I would have thought he was a scribe, or a pharisee, or a thief. If I had been a little boy of Galilee, and seen the old men praying at the Star, what would I have thought of the be-spatted executive hurrying from a conference. I would have thought he was Caesar. This is our world.
A touching word comes out on prayer:
I wished that the church was not only a sanctuary but a refuge for the poor, the humiliated, and the suffering; and I would gladly join in prayer . . . everybody kneeled: I gladly joined in; no other power on this earth could make me gladly kneel, or even stand up. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in the Navy madhouse and the Admiral of the Fleet came in? -- I was the only one who didn't stand up, all the other nuts did . . .
Kerouac's letter to Neal Cassady dated January 9th, 1951 concludes with a sort of "coda", which I find personally touching, and
satisfying. He changed his behavior toward his wife! It didn't last -- as our
moments of loving inspiration seldom do -- but the vision "became flesh". For a day, at least, it became flesh. Here is how it went:
In the subway everybody was going home to rest, instead of gathering in the Final Church of Eternal Joy, and I felt bad to see it . . . But when I came home I loved my wife, and kissed her tenderly, as she kissed me . . .
Goodnight, sweet prince.
Jack
From an historical point of view, a "lit-crit" point of view, this
letter is significant because it documents a temporary change of attitude on
the part of this American legend toward women.
Kerouac's attitude toward women is sometimes summed up in his
tossed-off remark, "Pretty girls make graves". As a poet immersed later in Buddhism, he was desirous, like
Siddhartha, of avoiding re-birth. "Pretty girls", therefore, he regarded as the pathway to birth, the
birth of babies who were metaphysically understood to be reluctant reincarnations of earlier, failed lives. Kerouac's view of birth, therefore of sex, and therefore of women, was not different in principle from George Harrison's in his mid-career
lyric, "Keep me free from birth".
But the result in Kerouac's case was an artist's attraction-repulsion
to women that has damaged his critical reception. He is judged harshly for his
suspicion of one half of . . . earthkind.
Here, however, in this discursive 1951 meditation in church, his thoughts are drawn in a different direction. His observations,
through the eye and through the ear, draw him into an association with
the "Joan-girl" -- his own specific wife -- and then a judgment on men,
as "scribes, pharisees, and thieves", which exist in a different zone. I hope that your reading of the letter has offered a kinder, gentler
Kerouac.
There is something else, though.
Kerouac's vision that day came to him in connection with tears. Something "got through", but it was in connection with tears. I wonder sometimes why people cry in church. Happens all the time. People who are "normally" well- and tightly- put together, "lose it"
during the singing of a hymn, or an illustration in a sermon, or
something they see out of the corner of their eye. It's as if you go "out of your mind" for a minute, or "come to your senses", or are "touched" in a deep uncovered emotional part of you. As I say, this seems to happen all the time.
It happened to me the other night. Just like it happened to Kerouac -- but it was me and not him.
I stumbled across something I only dimly remembered. It was on
YouTube, and I stumbled over something I only dimly remembered. It was the last two minutes or so of an 'X-Files' episode entitled "The
Post-Modern Prometheus". I remembered it as a kind of visual 'send-up' of the James Whale
Universal horror movies I loved so much as a child. In "The Post-Modern Prometheus", a "Frankenstein's-Monster" is located,
by Mulder and Scully, and saved by them. The ending, however, I had not remembered.
It takes place in a crowded nightclub, and Cher takes the stage -- at
least a look-alike -- and belts out the song "Walking in Memphis". Not only does the 'Monster', who is seated at a table in the front row,
together with Scully and Mulder, jump right up and dance ecstatically
to the song -- that EXCELLENT song. But then Mulder beckons to Scully to join him on the
floor. Our frosty and usually confused "couple" get the message, of the song
and of the place. They dance together, romantically and intimately, and touchingly.
"Frankly, Neal, I began to cry."
I began to cry. Really cry. All choked up. Tears of joy, tears of feeling -- feelings actually about my own wife,
my own "Joan-Girl".
Then I decided to write this piece.
Ideas seem to come this way. You don't control them, or muster
them up, or command them to appear.
They come up through the emotions.
But it's often the eye that gets the ball rolling.
Friday, February 19
CRIME DOES NOT PAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 19 Feb 2010 12:25 AM PST
In the glory days (the 1940s and early 1950s) before the comic book industry began to censor itself, to ward off government censorship, comic books could and would show just about anything of a violent nature. Lurid, gruesome, graphic, they approached Elizabethan drama in their obsession with the bloody and the macabre.
I doubt if any of them that came into the hands of young children really rotted the kids' brains or corrupted their morals. Young children know perfectly well, from their intuitions and their dreams, that the human psyche, and thus the real world, is filled with such horror. It is only grownups who try to pretend otherwise.
A powerful art form was crippled by the state-induced censorship, though. Only today has the comic book reclaimed its right to range over the whole landscape of human experience, in the process producing some of the best fiction of our time.
[Via Golden Age Comic Book Stories, the Internet's wonder site.]
Tuesday, February 16
WALKING IN MEMPHIS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 16 Feb 2010 12:03 AM PST
Some thoughts by Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) on Jack Kerouac and his connection to Michael Curtiz's costume epic The Egyptian. Huh? Read on:
The 1954 Hollywood movie The Egyptian, a big picture, with Jean Simmons
and Michael Wilding, among many others, is hard to find -- all but impossible
to find, in fact, until the days of Internet magic. (It's available on a Korean DVD.) It was produced by
Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Michael Curtiz. Curtiz had directed
several big pictures, including Casablanca and Mildred Pierce, not to
mention The Walking Dead and Mystery of the Wax Museum.
The Egyptian tells the story of a young doctor in Ancient Egypt --
meaning Thebes, Memphis, and Luxor -- who is ensnared pitifully by a
temptress known as the "Woman of Babylon", completely loses his
self-respect, together with everything he owns as well as his post as
Physician to Pharaoh, and finally recreates himself as a
healer wandering throughout the Ancient World. He prospers, only to return home
to lose his true and loyal love, played by Jean Simmons, and to become
caught up in the failed but sublime One God movement of the Pharaoh
Akhenaten. In a touching scene that works dramatically and
cinematically, Sinuhe, the doctor, is converted to monotheism. After
all his sad experience of life, Sinuhe seeks monastic solitude in the
desert, a sadder man but much wiser.
The Egyptian is pretty good. The sets are gorgeous, the camera is
fluid and assured, the acting (with the exception of Gene Tierney, who
is miscast as Pharaoh's sister) confident if a little wooden, and the
matte paintings and miniatures convincing. Personally, I like the
religion of the film, with Akhenaten's confession of his universal faith
going down well, with pathos, at the end. Some might say that The
Egyptian is suffused with '50s-style religion in this country, but that
would be unfair. The film is so anchored in the pessimistic views --
i.e., life as an exercise in dreamy futility, with loss -- of the
author of the original best-selling book, that Akhenaten's "witness" in
the last scene but one, comes off as credible, and for me even
hopeful. The novel on which The Egyptian is based, incidentally, was
written in the Finnish language by Mika Waltari. In the days of our
fathers and mothers, Waltari's novel was an international sensation.
Waltari's father, incidentally, was a Finnish Lutheran pastor. It was the Finnish Lutherans, of course, who brought us The Flying Saucer Of Love.
Here's the thing:
Jack Kerouac saw The Egyptian in a movie theater when it first came out.
He hated it!
The vehemence of Kerouac's response to this relatively standard
Hollywood production is surprising. I read his armchair review, which occurs in Some of the Dharma (page
124), three years ago and was impressed by his very negative reaction. Here is what he wrote:
WITH 'THE EGYPTIAN' Darryl Zanuck has purveyed a teaching of
viciousness and cruelty. They present him with a gold cup at banquets for this. The
author, Mika Waltari, is also guilty of the same teaching of viciousness and
cruelty. You see a scene of a man choking a woman under water. Both these men
are rich as a consequence of the world's infatuation with the forbidden murder,
--- its daydreams of maniacal revenge by means of killing and Lust. Men kill
and women lust for men. Men die and women lust for men. Men, think in solitude;
learn how to live off your sowings of seed in the ground. Or work 2 weeks a
year and live in the hermitage the rest of the year, procuring your basic foods
at markets, and as your your garden grows work less, till you've learned to live
off your garden alone.
QUIETNESS AND REST THE ONLY ESCAPE.
The secret is in the desert.
Now, Ain't that Peculiar! The Egyptian tells the story of a man
disillusioned by romantic love -- in the first half he loses his whole
self, his deepest self, to the wily and nefarious siren of Babylon.
The Egyptian envisions his then turning aside from the world, and
becoming a kind of medical "gentleman of the road", a Sal Paradise of
the ancient Mediterranean. With Kerouacian pessimism, Sinuhe observes
the fruitlessness of human endeavor, and does so over and over again.
Finally, back home in Thebes -- I love writing those words -- he
becomes enlightened by Akhenaten, the Sun (One) worshiper, who reveals
to him that God is the whole of Reality, and that Forgiveness, of all
things, is at the core of that Reality. There is something like
pantheism here, together with absolving Christianity, and the the name
"Jesus Christ" is invoked on the end-title. How could Kerouac not have
responded positively to this, given his Christo-Buddhism, or
Buddhist-Christianity, or however you want to call his personal
synthesis?
But he didn't like the film. He focused completely on the Woman of
Babylon sequence, with its subtle, slightly-off-frame drowning of the
Siren -- she survives -- and the "lust of the eye" and lust of the body
which drives the story at that point. Biographers of Jack Kerouac
would probably observe in these comments his suspicion of entrapping
women and entrapped men, his frequent equation of greed and lust, and
his persistent failed efforts to choose celibacy on Buddhist grounds
--- "Men . . . learn how to live off your sowings of seed in the ground [my emphasis]."
I want to guess that Kerouac got stuck on the performance by Bella
Darvi as Nefer, the Woman of Babylon, and did not consider the enduring
Treue of Jean Simmons' character, nor the emphatic world-renunciation
by Sinuhe, which begins and ends The Egyptian.
What his impassioned observations do tell us, and they read as sober
and non-Benzedrined, is that Kerouac was touchy about violence. This
is the man who would brawl in bars, mad-drunk, and then write
remorseful exhortations to the whole world to Be Kind. He was also a
man who loved women, but suspected them, and their "designs", through
and through, with the exception of Gabrielle, his mother.
Take a look at The Egyptian. It's a good movie. Sure, it's too long.
And to be sure, there's not one word of humor. But the liturgical
scenes, with their ethereal religious chants praising "Beauty" (I
thought I could hear Lionel Ritchie's "You are so Beautiful") -- which
work! -- and especially the obeisances, including Jean Simmons's, on the
steps of the temple of the One (Sun) God, are sincerely reverent, and
affecting.
You could compare the scene of Pharaoh's archers breaking into the
Temple of Aten with the Roman breach of the Temple in Nicholas Ray's
The King of Kings. The latter is bloody and sensationalistic (like the "Civil War" cards little boys loved in the '60s, by the same people who
did the "Mars Attacks" cards) -- the former, sympathetic and pitiful.
My irony for today is this:
Jack Kerouac should have liked The Egyptian. The title character, take
away the toga, is the man himself.
Maybe he walked out before the end. The editor of this blog taught me never to
do that.
Friday, February 12
ME AND JERRY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 12 Feb 2010 12:10 AM PST
When my car got a flat on a country road in Vermont one chilly night back in 1997 my heart sank. I'd lent my jack to my brother-in-law three weeks before and had forgotten to get it back. I hadn't worried about it too much, because I had a new set of tires on the car, but I'd apparently picked up a nail on the road somewhere and now I was facing the consequences.
I saw the lights of a house through the trees and really had no choice but to walk up to it and ask to use a phone. An older man with gray hair, a long face and large ears opened the door, looking at me suspiciously. I described my predicament and asked if I could use his phone to call a local garage.
"What do you want from me?" he said. I figured he was hard of hearing and started my explanation over in a louder voice, but he waved me silent. "I'm not signing your copy of Catcher In the Rye," he said, almost vehemently.
"I don't have a copy of Catcher In the Rye," I said. "I had a copy in high school but I couldn't get through it so I gave it to my sister."
"What's your angle?" he said.
I started to explain about my flat tire again but again he waved me silent. "You didn't like the book?" he asked. "Not much," I said. "Why?" he asked. "Well, I like David Copperfield a lot, for one thing," I explained. "I don't think it's crap."
"I'm not answering any questions!" he shouted at me.
"Not even 'Can I use your phone?'?" I said. I realized I was dealing with a total hairpin, but he didn't look violent and it was awfully cold outside.
He showed me to the phone, gave me the number of a guy with a tow truck in Cornish, the nearest town, and hovered over me while I made the call. I asked him if I could wait inside until the tow truck arrived. "Yes," he said, "but no photographs!"
"I don't have a camera," I assured him, which should have been obvious. He fixed his gaze on me intently. "So . . ." he said finally, "you're more into the later books." "What later books?" I asked.
He seemed totally bewildered. "You can't write about this night until after I'm dead!" he said. "If you do, you will hear from my lawyers!"
"You've got yourself a deal," I said -- and it's a deal I stuck to faithfully.
Sunday, January 31
PAPA IN THE SNOW
by
Lloydville
on Sun 31 Jan 2010 12:31 AM PST
Sometime in the 1920s . . .
Wednesday, January 27
BOB DYLAN'S MICRO FICTION
by
Lloydville
on Wed 27 Jan 2010 12:55 AM PST
In his brilliant and eccentrically revealing memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan talks about a crucial inspiration in his development as a songwriter -- the first time he heard "Pirate Jenny", from Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera. The lyric is written in the voice of an oppressed young girl, who recounts her fantasy of a pirate ship which will appear in the harbor of her city and bombard it in her name, destroying all her enemies and rescuing her from a life of servitude.
It is thus a surreal fiction set within the slightly less surreal fiction of the opera itself, both modes operating here within a single song. Dylan says this expanded his notion of what a song could be. He was of course already familiar with the narrative conventions of folk songs, especially the murder ballads, and he would follow these conventions in many of his own works, telling self-contained fictional or historical tales, usually with a strong social message, but "Pirate Jenny" set him off on another strategy, involving fantastical tales within tales.
In "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", from Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan tells a tale in the voice of a crew member of the Mayflower, which is somehow commanded by Melville's Captain Ahab and lands in America for a series of comic anachronistic adventures. (Among the artifacts surrounding Dylan in the photograph on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home is the Lotte Lenya album on which he first heard "Pirate Jenny".)
"Desolation Row", from Highway 61 Revisited, offers a similar bit of jumbled-up, surreal narrative but has become less buffoonish, more poetic.
"Desolation Row" conjures up a vision of a very specific place inhabited by an improbable cast of characters, drawn from every aspect of culture. The real-life poets Pound and Eliot have a mythical fistfight, The Phantom Of the Opera shares the scene with Ophelia and Cassanova. It's a vision, on one level, of culture as it's actually experienced in the imagination. Lon Chaney and Charles Laughton and Victor Hugo are forever linked by The Hunchback of Notre Dame -- Desolation Row is that precinct of the mind where all four of them meet up and hang out together.
On the same album, in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", Dylan presents a variation on this fractured narrative strategy, this time with a series of vignettes and anecdotes about some beat characters hanging out in Mexico. Each element of the song seems to open onto a whole narrative episode which, however, is only suggested, not recounted. It's like shards of a Kerouac novel discovered at an archaeological dig and displayed in glass cases, inviting the viewer to reconstruct the whole from them. (This is, of course, just an extension, or extreme compression, of the fragmented narrative style of Kerouac himself.)
Many Dylan songs can be seen as collages of poetic images, but most are more acutely perceived as collages of story fragments, micro fictions, which suggest great narrative vistas seen fleetingly through a narrow window whose shutters open and close quickly. His song "Floater", from Love and Theft, suggests a whole cycle of Faulknerian novels glimpsed in this way. Ironically, many lines in "Floater" were lifted almost straight from a Japanese as-told-to autobiography called Confessions Of A Yakuza, yet Dylan has used them in the context of a series of interconnected micro fictions about a place and time and characters that seem indigenously, essentially American.
Here are eight lines from "Floater":
My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of them Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves
I doubt if any of this reflects actual memories from Dylan's own life, but the lines do seem to sum up the whole life of some particular person, in a kind of generational saga told through lightning flashes of imagery.
The precise details, the dragnets and ropes, the old cloth, the ring dancing, seduce us into emblematic episodes, in somewhat the same way that the brief flashbacks in A Christmas Carol seduce us into emblematic episodes from the happier early years of Scrooge. And Dylan doesn't just leave his hopes and dreams behind, he leaves them "buried under tobacco leaves". Here the detail is more symbolic, more open -- did the narrator lose his hopes and dreams in the drudgery of work, or just in wasted hours marked out by the smoke of cigarettes?
The details and episodes evoked in these lines propel the story Dylan is telling into our own imaginations, prompting us to fill in the rest, to travel back in time like Scrooge, to visit the narrator's lost world, to construct our own sense of it, our own dream of it. And this, of course, is what all good stories do. What's left out of them is what eventually belongs most securely to us, almost as if they were our own experiences, because we have collaborated in the making of them.
This was one of the secrets of storytelling that Hemingway knew well, and consciously, almost from the very beginning of his career as a writer. All of his best work uses this "strategic opacity", as Stephen Greenblatt has called it, referring to Shakespeare's method of storytelling -- this uncharted space that the hearer of the tale must fill in for herself.
Dylan is a great singer, a fine tunesmith and poet, but not least among his gifts is the gift of storytelling, in a fragmented, micro-fictional form of his own devising.
Monday, January 25
AUGUSTUS CAESAR
by
Lloydville
on Mon 25 Jan 2010 12:56 AM PST
Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he
deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to
slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still
enjoyed their ancient freedom.
-- Gibbon, The Decline and Fall Of the Roman Empire
Corporate America and its servile functionaries on the U. S. Supreme Court have learned the lessons of history well -- the American people sink into servitude in their ignorance of them. (With thanks to Tom Sutpen . . .)
Friday, January 15
THE REAL DEAL
by
Lloydville
on Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:15 AM PST
After yesterday's jeremiad about the Pat Robertson brand of Christianity, it was good to be reminded by my friend Paul Zahl of what Charles Dickens found when he looked over the shoulder of one of his characters as she gazed into "the eternal book":
Harriet complied and read -- read the eternal book for all the weary,
and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of
this earth -- read the blessed history, in which the blind, lame,
palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned
of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human pride,
indifference, or sophistry through all the ages that this world shall
last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce . . .
-- from Dombey and Son
That quote in turn made me think of these lines from Bob Dylan's "Chimes Of Freedom", whose rhythm and language are so oddly like those of Dickens, with a Beat twist to them:
Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an' cheated by pursuit
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing . . .
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Dylan may have had the eternal book in mind when he wrote this, with that "cathedral night" and that climactic image of the "hung-up person", a bit of Beat lingo which, in this context, puts one in mind of some later lines he wrote:
There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door,
You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the war
After losin' every battle.
Wednesday, January 13
WINTER DREAM
by
Lloydville
on Wed 13 Jan 2010 12:21 AM PST
An illustration by Charles Edward Hooper from a 1903 edition of Jack London's The Call Of the Wild, graciously posted at Golden Age Comic Book Stories, where every day is full of dreams.
Friday, December 25
A EULOGY FOR EBENEZER SCROOGE
by
Lloydville
on Fri 25 Dec 2009 12:15 AM PST
It's been well over a hundred years since Ebenezer Scrooge died. No one who knew him is alive today, of course, but he is remembered -- not least from this eulogy spoken at his funeral:
This week, we have lost one of our town's finest citizens. Ebenezer Scrooge passed away five days ago, on Boxing Day, at the age of 82. At his death, he was surrounded by his loving nephew Fred, Fred’s wife, and their three children. His faithful house servant, Mrs. Dilber, who nursed him in the last weeks of his life, described him as peaceful and comfortable, and dressed in his best, surrounded by family, and the beautiful bed curtains that she, and the other house servants, made him.
Many of you will remember Scrooge as a brilliant businessman. His company, Scrooge and Cratchit, gave many jobs in his warehouse to the unemployed throughout the city. He and his business partener Bob Cratchit helped many young men start up their own businesses, too.
Others of you may remember Scrooge for his good works. As the director of many of his charities, such as the Christmas Fund, the Hospital for the Poor, and his Soup Kitchen for the Hungry, I can tell you the good this man has done.
His orphanages have been a refuge for many abandoned children. And his Houses of Learning, which teach my own son and daughters, and which I attended as a young lad, have earned fine reputations.
Some of you may even be old enough to clearly remember Ebenezer Scrooge in the years before his miraculous transformation. Some say he was mean spirited, stingy, and liked it. No one knows exactly what changed him, for he never spoke of it. But many believe that it was the high spirits of Christmas.
For me, I remember Ebenezer in a different way. For he saved me. In a way, we were both crippled when we first met. I physically, and he emotionally and spiritually. If it weren’t for Scrooge, I wouldn’t have met my lovely wife, Edith. If it weren’t for Scrooge, I wouldn’t have had my dear children. If it weren’t for Scrooge, I would have died sick, as a tiny young boy. Because of Scrooge, I haven’t even touched my little crutch in nearly twenty years.
I owe Scrooge my life, and I am forever grateful to him. I think that we can all remember Scrooge not for who he was, but for who he became. And we can all honor his memory, by celebrating his life on Christmas, his favorite holiday. Thank you.
[Transcribed by my niece, Nora Rossi, from an old parish register in London]
Monday, November 16
REPORT FROM PARIS: A MOVEABLE FEAST
by
Lloydville
on Mon 16 Nov 2009 09:44 AM PST
Today, intrepid correspondent Coralie visited the Musée Grévin in Paris, a charming old 19th-Century establishment (founded in 1882) which features wax figures and other curiosities. She snapped the picture above of a Hemingway figure before heading off to the Brasserie Lipp, on the Boulevard St. Germain, to commune with Papa's spirit by having a meal he famously enjoyed there once (or twice) -- filets de hareng pommes de terre a l'huile, suivi du cervelas rémoulade avec une bière blonde Lipp . . . which is to say, herring and potatoes in oil, followed by a dish consisting of a kind of German sausage with a celery root and Dijon mustard concoction on the side, all washed down with a blonde Lipp beer.
Hemingway told two stories about having this meal at Lipp. In one, he had just cashed the check for the first story he sold to an American magazine, and went off to celebrate by himself at Lipp. In the other, Sylvia Beach, who ran the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Co., said he was looking too thin and slipped him some money for a decent lunch. In both stories, he ate cervelas rémoulade at the venerable old brasserie.
It became, in any case, symbolic of his struggling years in Paris, about which he once wrote, "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." Below, the first course of Hemingway's meal, as served to Coralie today:
I was not particularly young when I first went to Paris, nor struggling, but my memories of it follow me around all the same, and my friend Coralie has allowed me to inhabit them again vicariously but vividly, just as I once inhabited Hemingway's Paris vicariously and vividly by eating cervelas rémoulade one afternoon by myself at the Brasserie Lipp.
Saturday, November 7
DAYS OF PIZZA, AND WINE
by
Lloydville
on Sat 07 Nov 2009 07:00 AM PST
Jack Kerouac's favorite meal -- at least back in the early Fifties, when he could rarely afford anything fancier -- was pizza, salad and red wine.
Carolyn Cassady, Neal's wife, seduced Jack for the first time by serving him this meal on a night when Neal was away. Below, Carolyn with Jack and one of her children:
Eating an artist's favorite food is a way of making contact with them across the barriers of time -- a slice of banana cream pie, in the case of Elvis, for example, or some cervelas remoulade with a big glass of beer, in the case of Papa, who ate this meal at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris after cashing the check for the first story he sold to an American magazine.
I have been reading Kerouac and thinking about him a lot recently, prompted by the enthusiasm of my friend Paul Zahl (The Zahl File). So last night, I ate his favorite meal, and communed with Jack's restless spirit.
[Photo by Allen Ginsberg]
The meal remained a touchstone for Kerouac as well. When Neal Cassady (above with Timothy Leary on Ken Kesey's bus) died, towards the end of Jack's brief life, Jack called Carolyn to reminisce about the old days -- "of serious work, railroad, bubble baths, pizza, and wine."
Friday, November 6
CARLA AND RAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 06 Nov 2009 09:23 AM PST
Carla Laemmle recently celebrated her 100th birthday. She was the
niece of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, and she had a
modest career as an actress and dancer in Hollywood. She appeared
uncredited as a ballet chorine in the silent version of The Phantom Of the Opera and had a
bit part in Dracula, speaking the first words in that film as a
passenger in the coach taking Renfield to his fateful rendezvous at the
Borgo Pass. (That's her on the left above, wearing glasses.)
She is now the last surviving cast member from those two iconic horror
films, and thus an icon in her own right for horror movie fans.
She interests me for other reasons, because of her life after the
movies. She became the lifetime companion of Ray Cannon, another
Hollywood professional -- actor, writer, director -- who left the
business to pursue other ventures.
Cannon became a sports fisherman, supporting himself mainly through
writing about the subject. He was among the first to explore the
fishing possibilities of Baja California, helping to popularize the
peninsula as a fisherman's paradise and a potential tourist Mecca. He
fell in love with it in the late 1940s, before the crowds came, spending
much of each year
there on various fishing expeditions, and eventually wrote the text for
a best-selling picture book about the area, The Sea Of Cortez.
A wonderfully-illustrated collection of his other writings about Baja
California, The Unforgettable Sea Of Cortez, was published recently and
it's a fine evocation of the
peninsula in the days before the tourist boom. Outside the precincts
of Ensenada at the top of it and and Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of
it, Baja California hasn't changed all that much since the time Cannon
discovered it. Over-fishing by commercial interests has depleted the
Mar de Cortes to an alarming degree, but it's still one of the richest
sports fishing spots on earth, and the gracious old city of La Paz has
yet to be despoiled by the California duppies.
The landscapes and seascapes that Ray and Carla loved are still there
-- severe and beautiful and brimming with opportunities for adventure.
Thursday, November 5
A JOHN STUART MILL QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 05 Nov 2009 06:31 AM PST
He who knows
only his side of the case knows little of that.
Sunday, August 9
AN EMILY DICKINSON POEM FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 09 Aug 2009 02:55 AM PDT
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
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