MOVING

If anyone cares this blog has moved over to tumblr. I'm not super-thrilled about this but blogspot is kind've a ghost town. Sort of a relic from a different age on the internet, but as it is approaching 2014 I find myself wanting to move on to a different age. One has to go where the action is, get with the times, etc.. This move is something like the jump we all made from myspace to facebook. So, you can find me at tumblr now. See you there.

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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Alan Sillitoe (1959)

Running had always been made much of in our family, especially running from the police.

            Been in some kind of awfully British mood recently; it feels as though I have endured week after week of bad skies and dreary food, and in some of my more desperate and pitiful moments I have even listened to the Smiths. I haven’t ever been to England, and I never will, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call this mood “British”. And the cherry is I have begun to occasionally drink tea, a couple times a week, like somebody’s desiccated old grandmother. This Brythonic attitude of mine can be traced back, I believe, to a documentary about the Beatles I recently watched in a “History of Rock and Roll” class I am taking at a Community College because I failed it years ago when I was a shifty, miserable teenager prone to taking out his relationship with his mother on himself and the world. Obstinate ol’ me may be the only person on the planet who isn’t totally jazzed and fully erect over the Beatles, though I have mellowed on that front a little bit. I was struck at the footage used in the beginning of the documentary, during the earliest part of their career, in Munich and Liverpool. It was very grimy and romantic, and I think it infected me somehow. Mostly I just zoned out though, because of the indecipherable Liverpudlian accents of many of the interviewees. One could hardly call it English at all. Also because skiffle is terrible music.

The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño (1998)

I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists.

            Hard for me to imagine what my life was like before I took up my position as America’s preeminent Bolaño scholar. I don’t know what I was doing then, probably something sleazy and forgettable. But the minute I sat down for the first of many long interrogations of a Bolaño text I knew that my life would never be the same. The scales fell from my eyes and, now sighted for the first time, I was called to spread the message of Bob Bolaño. Reading Bolaño is like hearing the voice of a friend I never knew I had.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth

A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Jules Verne (1864)

            I don’t think I’ll be blowing any minds by saying that our world is hostile to adventure and individuality. It’s a square universe, where the one rule is square up or die. There’s no end to the pressures of conformity, the orders to stay put, to never leave the city, and constantly buy things. Even if one day the doors to adventure were thrown open neither myself nor any of my slug-countrymen would have a clue what to do. Conformity is drilled into us. All the maps are filled in, the species named and classified, and after several successful trips to the moon our leaders have decided that was good enough for them. The one institution that Americans believe can provide the adventure they crave is the military, which of course means that to a broad swath of America adventure involves shooting poor people, throwing hand grenades at poor people, launching guided missiles at poor people, spraying poor people with napalm, humiliating poor people, raping poor people, torturing poor people, desecrating cultural treasures, getting bad religious tattoos, starting barfights, beating people up for being different, and leaving a horde of crippled, mutilated orphans and widows wherever they go and then laughing about it. Rather than striking off towards the horizon adventure in our War Culture--where you are not a Real Man unless you have killed--involves thrill-killing one’s way across the third world.

The Decay of the Angel

 The Decay of the Angel (1972)

Yukio Mishima

Perhaps, he sometimes thought, he was a hydrogen bomb equipped with consciousness. It was clear in any case that he was not a human being.

            On November 25^th, 1970, Yukio Mishima, after inking the final word of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, drove with a select few members of his private army/boy’s club to the Japan’s Eastern Army Headquarters. There they kidnapped a general, bound him to a chair, and standing on a balcony before the gathered crowd Mishima delivered a speech about duty and honor and purity. The crowd, not understanding what they were witness to, jeered him and he retreated inside. As he unbuttoned his coat Mishima turned to one of his acolytes and said: “I don’t think they even heard me.” And then, in the grand culmination of his life and his art, he committed suicide by ritual disembowelment.

The Temple of Dawn

The Temple of Dawn (1970)

Yukio Mishima

            Or: in which Shigekuni Honda, the bourgeois lawyer creep, masturbates to the memory of his dead childhood friend. I can tell already that this is going to be a difficult blog post for me to write. I’m running out of things to say about Yukio Mishima!

Runaway Horses

Runaway Horses (1969)

Yukio Mishima

We can only rely on our swords, and on bombs made from our flesh.

           

            For the second installment of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy Mishima moves the calendar forward almost two decades, to 1932. Shigekuni Honda, the earnest and intelligent school friend of Kiyoaki Matsugae, is now a respected judge in Kansai, which I gather is sort of out in the sticks, far from civilization. He is sagacious and sturdy and known for his legal wisdom. One day while attending a kendo tournament at a shrine he encounters a young man whom he believes is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki: they share a similar set of birthmarks, and the circumstances of their meeting mirror the final words spoken by Kiyoaki while he lay wracked by a feverish delirium. The young man, Isao Iinuma, is the son of Kiyoaki’s childhood tutor, who was expelled from the Matsugae household for impregnating a maid. In the intervening years the elder Iinuma has founded a school, the so-called “Academy of Patriotism”, a far-right enclave where his son is a star student and captain of the kendo team.

            Honda only shows up at the beginning and the end and for most of the book we follow Isao, who couldn’t possibly be less like Kiyoaki. Kiyoaki was all emotions and no will. Isao is the opposite; his is a ruthless, disciplined willpower. Isao embodies the concept of “purity” but it’s wholly alien to a Western conception. For Isao (and Mishima) purity involves making a statement to the Emperor and then committing an artistic suicide while facing the rising sun. In order to facilitate his grand gesture he has enlisted several of his school comrades in a plot to up end the social order by murdering several wealthy capitalists and then committing seppuku on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They try to involve an army Lieutenant and Prince Harunori, the same Prince who was betrothed to Satoko Ayakura. Someone rats them out and they are arrested and tried. The group is broken apart but after his trial Isao escapes his father’s house and murders the industrialist Kurahara and then disembowels himself.

            Isao and his group of fanatics draw their inspiration from a pamphlet concerning the Shinpuren Rebellion, a 19^th Century revolt of dissatisfied samurai and Shinto fundamentalists. They called themselves the League of the Divine Wind, which you might better recognize as the kamikaze. The rebellion failed and most of its members disemboweled themselves, which to Isao and his compatriots just about the best thing a human being could do. I guess it’s sort of admirable in a way, if you’re a pervert or an ultranationalist or someone impressed by ostentatious displays of obedience. Something like 4,000 kamikaze pilots gave their lives during the Second World War, which seems to me to be a gratuitous loss of life that stands out in even against a tapestry of senseless violence, genocide, grisly meat-grinders and black holes of human suffering. It’s not as if they were destroyed by bombs or famine or other things over which they had no control. They were convinced to sacrifice themselves meaninglessly for the sake of an Emperor who presided over some of the most horrific crimes in the history of mankind and was never once held accountable. Hirohito lived until 1989! Personally I could never imagine being suicidally devoted to a cause or an idea, and especially not a feudalistic anachronism like the Emperor of Japan.

            Of all the Mishima novels I’ve read this is the one that I have enjoyed the least. Mishima writes beautifully but there is one flaw that towers above everything: perfect characters are boring. Isao is perfect. Everyone he encounters is entranced by the intensity of his gaze, at his clarity, drive, and the purity of his obsession. He is intelligent, healthy, and untarnished. There is no conflict, no doubt. It’s an intriguing idea but it doesn’t come off the way I think Mishima wanted it to. I would think that a writer of Mishima’s caliber would know that. That was kind of disappointing. Otherwise it was more of the usual Mishima: very sensual, emotionally rich, and luxurious. Very surreal and internal and full of vivid beauty. And like other Mishima novels it is homoerotic as all heck! It made Spring Snow look like Big Tit Blondes #3. Isao is a champion in kendo, a form of fencing fought using very stiff, erect wooden staves that smash and crack together while hot sunlight reflects off sweaty, gleaming musculature. Young men, with their muscles coiled like vipers, pant in the hot darkness. And so on.

            One thing that I always appreciate about a Mishima book is that he is all about defeating hypocrisy and destroying the parent-world. As the product of two wildly hypocritical people that sentiment appeals to me.

In fact, it is Isao’s father who informs on him to the police, because his father is ultimately envious of the purity of youth. Much of the book concerns the contrast between purity and corruption. The old men, capitalists and landowners, are trapped in their weak, corrupt flesh while the pure, like Isao, die young and leave beautiful corpses. Mishima was somewhat obsessed with flesh, muscle, and skin. He was a bodybuilder, after all, which takes no small amount of hatred towards your material form.

I guess that’s all I have to say about that. I don’t want to run out things to write about before I finish The Sea of Fertility. Just started The Temple of Dawn. That book, and the next, are both shorter than Runaway Horses, so I should be done with this cycle pretty quickly. I’m not used to reading novels in a series one after the other and part of me wants to set it aside and move on to something else, but I’m going to power through them. I think Mishima’s dedication to beauty and his completely unique worldview make such a task very worthwhile. 

Also, I should note that the 80s biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, is very, very good. Highly recommend that. Excellent Phillip Glass soundtrack, insane set design. A worthwhile viewing!

Spring Snow

Spring Snow

Yukio Mishima, 1966

We live in an age without heroic death.

            Nobody in the world would be happier to know that his life was nearly inseparable from his art than the bodybuilding Japanese power bottom Yukio Mishima, who spent his entire artistic career trying to reconcile the two. Some folks will tell you that you shouldn’t judge a work of art based upon the life of the artist but I’m not one of them. For example, I think it’s really useful to know that Fitzgerald was a hysterical alcoholic. I am of the opinion that context is important to enjoying or understanding anything, and that knowing more about an artist will always make a work of art deeper and richer. I can think of few artists whose lives loom more monolithically over their work than Yukio Mishima. That might be one of the reasons I like him so much, he was so dramatic and over-the-top compared to your average sweater-clad author. Mishima painted on a different, larger canvas than the one upon which some MFA-toting writer might work. His life was his bibliography. What you should know: Mishima was Japan’s most famous writer, and a multiple Nobel nominee, before he and four members of his private army (of a sort, I think of it as more of a boy’s club, like the Boy Scouts mixed with a martial arts organization, where Mishima could watch athletic young men march around in designer uniforms) stormed a Japanese Defense Force base, kidnapped a general, and before the assembled soldiers delivered a speech about power, glory, action, the Emperor, the shape of contemporary Japan, and Westernization, a speech that no one listened to, and then, finally, Mishima committed ritual suicide by disembowelment. Having read many of his books, and read much about him, it’s hard not to think of this all as being planned, manufactured, as some sort of fatal performance art. Harmony of pen and sword. Other things you should know: Mishima was a bodybuilder, and a homosexual, though he had a wife and children. He was a singular, contradictory, individual human being. There’s probably never been a cat quite like Mishima, which is an achievement in and of itself. 

The Rings of Saturn

The Rings of Saturn (1995)

W.G. Sebald

            It’s rare to read a novel that is unlike any other book one has read before. Few things are completely new, and most novels have the elements one would consider essential to fiction: story, plot, voice, characters, plot, plot, plot. Such an ugly word, ‘plot’. Onomatopoetic: a turd dropping into an empty toilet bowl. The Rings of Saturn has none of those things, especially not a plot. It’s part travelogue, part memoir, part (global) history, part fiction and while it is all of those things it is also none of them. Rather, it’s something new, but whether it’s a new form of fiction or a new form of history, I can’t decide. I do know, however, that it is one of the most stunningly beautiful books I’ve ever read. Completely unique and singular. Sebald is a masterful writer, and if history textbooks were this moving and this poetically beautiful maybe the masses would not be so ignorant of their past and fearful regarding their future. At the very least I don't think it would hurt.

The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974)

Heinrich Böll

            There are two kinds of news media on this planet: the kind that soberly reports the news, unbiased, with a nose for the truth, and the vicious, sensationalist kind, that cares only for ratings and money and will sacrifice and mutilate anyone just to stir up trouble. Here in America if the former ever existed then it is a dinosaur, on his way out, but the latter is alive and well, the most well known manifestation being FOX News. I think every one in America has had the misfortune of knowing someone writhing in the grip of FOX: a bigoted relative, a rabidly anti-union boss, someone who really hates “Socialism” or immigrants, a guy who wants to get a business degree, a cop, etc. This kind of “journalism” is like an agent provocateur in the service of the the new robber baron aristocracy, an agent who utilizes the sensationalist and confrontational language designed to appeal to a generally uneducated proletariat (a proletariat that has been hobbled from birth and views the world in simple us-versus-them terms), an agent who comes to the working class bar in the middle of the night and incites stupidity so the pigs can burst in, make some arrests and flex their muscle. Now, FOX did not invent this sort of reporting, it has been around as long as there have been people and their reptile brains, and, of course, a cowed and obedient media is one of the cornerstones of fascism.

Neuromancer

 

Neuromancer, 1984

William Gibson

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

           

            One of the most important aspects of science fiction as an art form is the genre’s interest in extrapolating our self-knowledge into the possible worlds of the future; that is, to hypothesize on our inevitable encounters with new technologies, social structures, and paradigms. We know how we act and we expand on it; and in the way that I, as an individual, might fret over an upcoming party and the potential embarrassments I might find when mingling, the science fiction writer frets over how we, as a species, might embarrass ourselves when we encounter new ideas and new things. While I stumble with a girl, we stumble with the atom bomb. Part of this extrapolation is prediction, and of all the genres of science fiction the one I believe most likely to come true is the cyberpunk genre. There’s an improbably remote chance that we’ll ever meet alien life, invent time travel, or build space stations around the gas giants, but I guarantee you that in the future the plutocrats that rule our planet will use newer and more efficient technologies to suppress and pacify the masses. Seems like so obviously a given that it hardly qualifies as a prediction; like prognosticating that the sun will rise.

Woes of the True Policeman

Woes of the True Policeman (2012)

Roberto Bolaño

            There was an exceptionally pathetic period in my life, which I now recall with great regret, when I, for painfully unsound teenaged reasons, fancied myself some sort of record collector. Somehow, beyond all reason, I was convinced music was really interesting and that I was really into it. Yawn. I’d rather have the money and the time back. Being really into music is a waste of both. Basically what I’m trying to say is that I had a notion that I was a teenaged punk and rock and roller and now I’m kind of embarrassed by it. The effort I put into finding old hardcore records would have been better spent on college. I haven’t purchased a record in years (thank god) but I remember that the riskiest wager was the B-Sides album, the B-Sides and Outtakes album. You could end up with a bunch of hidden gems or a bunch of garbage that went unreleased for a reason. I guess I’ve sold a lot of my records now, but I still have a decent collection of 80s/90s punk, hardcore, screamo, and indie records. They’re in my closet. I’ll probably unload them eventually.

The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher (1983)

Elfriede Jelinek

A child has no secrets from her mother.

           

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a better and more effective horror movie than something like Paranormal Activity 17 for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is completely plausible: somewhere out in the darkest corners of the world someone is locking shut a freezer door in their basement charnel house. It’s certainly happened in the past. It’s probably happening right now. The Piano Teacher is also a horror story, but of a different sort. It’s not a gory slasher flick; instead it is a twisted, uncomfortable sort of psychological abuse porn. Unlike The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, however, The Piano Teacher is not very good. But it’s plausible! To be honest comparing the two is insulting to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Suitcase

  
 

The Suitcase (1986)

Sergei Dovlatov

            What a strange, capricious animal memory is. It comes to you unbidden and unexpected: when your nostrils fill with a half-forgotten scent, when your fingers touch an old fabric, when you stub your toe in the middle of the night. Memory is like a distant relative who occasionally drops by your apartment, without phoning beforehand, and sits on your couch like he owns the place, tells you conflicting and confusing things, and drinks up the beer you were saving for yourself. Sergei Dovlatov’s The Suitcase is all about the power of memory: a brief second of autohypnosis while neurons firing at the speed of sound drag us into the crystallized world that exists in the throne of our unconsciousness. Perhaps a smarter man than myself (an actual expert: a neuroscientist or a philosopher, say) could answer this question but are we much more than our memories? Excluding the influences of purely material components that vary wildly between individuals (brain damage, mental retardation, alcoholism, depression, psychopathy) but our personalities are built on our experiences, right?  Have you ever seen a baby? They haven’t had much experience at anything and they’re all the fucking same, but an adult is a nuanced accretion of memory, a mental stalactite. Like your brain is the hardware and your mind is the operating system, that’s the analogy, right? I obviously don’t know anything about how the brain or the mind or our personalities work but, like most things that are probably wrong, that seems like a reasonable assumption. I don’t even know why I brought this up. It has little to do with the topic at hand. Ah, a question for people who have been to college!

Why I Write / Books v. Cigarettes

Why I Write

Books v. Cigarettes

George Orwell    

        

         I thought I might do something a little different for the new year so instead of a work of fiction the first two books I’m going to review are both collections of essays by George Orwell, the absolute, unchallenged master of the political novel. So this entry is both a change of pace and a double whammy. Two shocking surprise blows to the gut. I never really plan these things out in advance so I don’t know if this is going to work very well but I’m down for a ride if you are.

Moby-Dick, or The Whale

Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851)

Herman Melville

            For the first time in my life I’m at a loss for words, unsure, for once, of what exactly my fumbling little pretensions could add to anything. Moby-Dick is arguably the greatest novel of all time and I hadn’t read it until just now, which makes me feel as though I’ve been wasting my time as a booklover. As if reading anything else has merely been dicking around. This book is usually assigned in high school but it wasn’t assigned to me for some reason. My class read something different. The Scarlet Letter, maybe. Probably the first and third period senior English classes got Moby-Dick and the second and fourth period classes got I don’t know, Pride and Prejudice or some other nonsense. Whatever it was I’m sure I hated it. What a rip-off. My teachers could have been inducting me into the mystery cults of knowledge and misanthropy and struggle and freedom and death and ART but instead they helped me waste my youth by boring me to tears with stories about the privileged and their insipid feelings. I almost feel like it’s too late for me now, like this book could have and should have come to me at a young age like a meteorite from the dark cosmos landing aflame in my lap but now I’m too old and too calloused to really appreciate or understand it. Took me a long time to get through it, too, and if anyone cares I’m sorry about that. Mr. Melville is not at fault here: I was harpooned from the first sentence. Rather I’m a very slow reader and at my ten page per day pace a 630 page book is practically Mt. Everest.

Last Evenings on Earth

Last Evenings on Earth (1997)

Roberto Bolaño

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

            I think I first heard about Bolaño on NPR, there was maybe a little piece on 2666, and something about the Pinochet dictatorship, or about Ciudad Juarez and her murders, maybe they talked about Bolaño’s life, a little inadequate biography of sorts, in between reports on the economy (generally poor) and violence burning somewhere. I was probably driving to work when I heard it, angry about having to work, and something about the radio story must have enticed me because I soon went out and bought a copy of 2666 and probably took it to a coffee shop somewhere (I was single at the time, barely employed, and my friends all moved away a long time before and so I had little or nothing better to do) and was crucified from the first page on. I think I read it faster than I’ve read any other book of that magnitude. Though there aren’t many books the same magnitude as 2666. I remember soon after I finished it I recommended it to a coworker and one afternoon at work he had it in his hand as he was leaving for his break, and this other coworker, this real creepy guy who used to work there, who was obsessed with antediluvian lifeforms and government conspiracies, who had a lot of really bad religious tattoos (ex: a gargoyle bleeding for Christ) and who once said he preferred Asian girls because they “have bodies like twelve-year-olds”, asked what it was about, not directed at me, and I blurted “what isn’t it about?"

Man's Fate

Man’s Fate (1932)

André Malraux

Man’s Fate is the sort of book that, on paper, I should adore whole-heartedly, with every bit of my soul, but, unfortunately, that paper is not the paper this book was actually printed on. That’s some imaginary paper, some head paper. It presses all my buttons: socialist violence in a foreign country, urban guerilla warfare, state repression, proletariat control of industry, the strange aromas of somewhere I’ll never go highlighted by the tang of gunpowder, executions in the dust, and so on. I should have loved this book but something about it was so lacking. A definite case of “so close yet so far.” I’ll try to discover why I was so disappointed in this novel, and hopefully I can articulate that.

I came into it with really high expectations: I was anticipating basically The Battle of Algiers in book form but instead got a really boring political novel which isn’t what I wanted at all. The former would be amazing. The latter already clog our bookshelves. The Earth is deforested for boring political novels. Malraux managed to take a really fascinating and electric event (in this case the Shanghai Massacre, a particularly violent and nauseating episode in the Chinese Civil War) and totally suck the life out of it through an excess of adornments and a general bloat. A book like this needs to be lean, hard, and taut. It needs to run towards the entrenchments of the State with its head down and its finger on the detonator. Instead Malraux piles on extraneous characters and scenes that do little except confuse and muddle. Right after the table of contents there is a list of the principal characters. There are seventeen names, and you could easily cut out fourteen of those and the book wouldn’t be any worse for it. Ferral, the French business magnate and sexual glutton and the dissolute and affected social changeling and grifter Baron de Clappique both stand out as being completely frivolous. Only Ch’en the terrorist, Kyo the organizer, and Katov the Russian have any sense of purpose in terms of the story, and even then they are weak and undeveloped characters. I have no stake in them or their struggle, a struggle Malraux doesn’t make very clear. He either gives too much or too little information. I’m not sure which. These are characters who do things but aren’t things, if that makes any sense. Man’s Fate reads like someone explaining the plot to a violent video game, one with lots of gun violence and grenade tossing, that is punctuated by really long scenes of boring, pointless dialogue during which anyone who’s played a video game before would set the controller down and go to pee. Call of Duty: The Chinese Revolution. I hate to bring up Roberto Bolaño for the umpteenth time, but he’s my favorite writer so I compare everyone to him, but one thing I admire and adore about a Bob Bolaño story is that they are populated by people and not by characters. I think it’s a good rule to follow.

This was one of the most frustratingly uneven and amateurish novels I’ve ever read. Neither of these are death sentences for a novel, and there are plenty of great things out there that are “amateurish” that I love but Man’s Fate is not one of them. Malraux’s problem as a writer is that he doesn’t know where to focus his attention. He wastes time. He wastes words. He’ll try to shoot a target and hit one he wasn’t aiming at. He’ll move around some little stick figure of a character for several dozen pages and then knock you dead with a couple paragraphs explaining the inner turmoil of a character that is so unimportant he may as well not be there.  Maybe that’s the point (most people on this planet are so unimportant that they may as well not be there) and I’m just not getting it, but if it was it didn’t do thing one for me. I wanted this book to be so much better than it was, I wanted to love it and it just kept on letting me down. Malraux’s heart is definitely with the Communists but every word he devotes to the banal activities of some French womanizer is a word that could be better spent in the basement fixing Molotov cocktails. The imperialist fascist plutocrats of this world don’t need to be humanized, they’ve already got everything on their side. I guess what really irked me about this book is that fifty percent of it is a misapplication of energy.

Not everything about this book is bad. Malraux can do some writing, some of it stands out (but it is tragically infrequent). He can definitely turn it on but I don’t think he knew when he should. One of the things that I noticed, that must have been a part of Malraux’s plan is that the characters, the revolutionaries, really only seem to come alive when death is at hand. They wake up during conflict and violence. I think Malraux was trying to make a point about revolution, about how it asks men to sacrifice themselves for a cause, and that this sacrifice may be the most important and noteworthy thing they’ve ever done in their lives (which are miserable, tragic and short) and it’s at this point of sacrifice that they truly become men, but, unfortunately, there’s two hundred pages of boring political dialogue preceding. If it were focused on just that one point Man’s Fate would have been the flick of a switchblade behind me in an alleyway. Instead large sections of this book weren’t much more immediate than C-SPAN. Maybe I’m misreading it, or I didn’t understand Malraux’s intentions, but like I said, a good chunk of this book comes off as completely extraneous. And, since I want to spend some time on the bright side I’ll add that the book isn’t racist, which is a lot more than I expected from a novel about foreign conflict written by a Frenchman in 1932. Shit, it sometimes seems like a lot to ask from books printed today. It wasn’t even misogynistic! That was a pleasant surprise.

I’ve never had this exact feeling before but when I finished this book I immediately wished for a time machine so I could go back in time and tell Malraux how to shape this book into being what it wants to be. The skeleton is there, but the flesh is horribly mismatched. Listen, chief, I’ll say to an astonished Malraux, as I materialize in his study. I’m from 2012 and I know about books. Lemme tell you what the score is… I’ll dazzle him with future slang (chief, dude, broseph) and show him my telephone. A guy like me spends a lot of time daydreaming about time machines (at least forty-five minutes a day) but usually one daydreams about travelling to 1984 and battling cyborgs or seducing future babes on a space station, get Mary Jane 147X on the space couch, unzip her space jumpsuit... this is the first time I’ve wanted a time machine to fix a book that disappointed me. It didn’t just bore me, and it wasn’t a bad book that I can shrug off and dismiss. You know what this book was, and it just came to me, but this book was such a fucking cocktease. You take her out for dinner, she points her tits at you all night long, and then when you take her home she leaves you standing in the cold on her porch without a friend in the world besides your aching stiff lizard. The literary equivalent of blue balls.

On a personal note: I’ve read a long string of books that either didn’t really do much for me or weren’t very good. The low point was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which was the most godawfully pretentious and privileged book I’ve ever read in my life. It made Pride and Prejudice look like Grapes of Wrath. But it seems like this whole summer I haven’t read a book that I would call a life-changer. Nothing that will stick with me forever. The Story of the Eye was good, and The Time Machine was good, but they weren’t books that I worshipped and adored. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older now and the romance is gone but it seems like those are getting fewer and further between. Maybe I’m having some kind of mid-career slump? I don’t know, but I do know that I want to hear the warm and comforting voice of a friend. I need some Bobby Bolaño in my life is what I’m saying. Next up is one of his books of short stories, Last Evenings on Earth, and I’m very excited about it. I could say a billion words about Roberto Bolaño and I won’t stop until I do.

The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums (1958)

Jack Kerouac

            Ah, old Jack Kerouac: the man, the myth, the legend. When I think about Jean Louis Kerouac I almost feel like I’m trying to describe some mythological figure, like Odin or Hercules or something, an alien non-human from an ancient prehistoric time, who was subject to our own mortal failings (like the old gods of myth were) but somehow untouched by the reality of the world. Yeah, you could just go out on the long lonesome highway and live like a hobo bum and then write some books about it, get a jug of wine for a quarter and go down to the train tracks and make yourself a little camp, with a fire, roast some franks, heat up a tin of beans, anyone could do that. Sure. It’s both romantic and repulsive, which is sort of how Kerouac’s books read. He presents himself as a guy just out there to experience life, to live it more fully than any of the squares in squaresville do but who is also, at times, a monumental loser. He fails, he fucks up. He gets drunk and does stupid things.

             

As a teenager I had a deep obsession with the Beats for a good couple years running. I blame my junior year English teacher: we had to write an essay about an American poet, a fairly long essay for a high school assignment, it was like a whole research project sort of deal, she gave us a long list of poets to chose from, each with a little blurb describing the poet, and the one that described Allen Ginsberg really had my number so I chose it. She called us out one by one to announce our selections, and we weren’t allowed to chose the same poet as anyone else, so that everyone had a different topic (she was probably tired of reading thirty essays about Robert Frost) and I remember being so nervous that someone was going to pick Allen Ginsberg before me. I really wanted Allen Ginsberg to be mine. If you’ve ever played Fantasy Football you know what I’m talking about: say you’ve got a pick towards the end of the first round so you sit there nervously hoping that no one will disrupt your strategy by picking Tom Brady or Adrian Peterson ahead of you and then when your turn comes you leap up and yell (or lower your voice for suspense), “Tom Brady!” So we had a month or two to do this project and on weekends I rode the trolley to the downtown library (which is an hour and a half trolley ride from where I grew up, I was dedicated or, more likely, didn’t have anything better to do) and looked up books on the Beats, on poetry, on anything relevant. Me in the library with my dorky little canvas book bag and my dorky, awkward, shuffling walk checking out those iconic City Lights editions of Howl and Kaddish and sitting at one of the tables taking notes from some lame Critique of 20^th Century American Poetry, while the homeless men jacked off at the computers. Afterwards I’d go to this vegan punk rock Mexican restaurant that was a block up from the library and eat a burrito and read. Actually that place reminds me a lot of how I feel about the Beats now, as a grown man: I was enamored as a teen but I don’t know if I’ll ever need to go back. Last time I went, probably four or five years ago, the place had a B rating from the health department and the service was awful. Maybe my tastes changed or now I’m just seeing things as an adult. I guess back to the point: that was probably the best thing I’ve ever written in my stupid life (sucks for me) and it sparked a long-term fascination with the Beats. There’s something about the Beats, and Jack Kerouac especially, that if they catch you in the right time and place they can really hit you where you live. A real punch in the gut. It caters to or preys upon the same sort of awkward romantic teenaged impulse that would inspire one to listen to Morrissey or own a dorky little canvas book bag, full of dorky little books, that slaps against your scrawny ass when you shuffle around your deeply lame and culturally dead hometown and wish you could just get out and go somewhere else.

             

So, when I was a young adult I read several of Kerouac’s books (On the Road, Tristessa, The Subterraneans, and I think that’s about it) but this was my first time reading one as a grown man, with grown-up ideas of my own and life experiences and all that crap, and I was shocked at how different my opinion on Jack Kerouac was this time around. I still think he’s a great writer but he is definitely a very flawed one, and his flaws are the sort of things I would have ignored (or not caught at all) or romanticized earlier in my reading career but now seem quite noisy and unavoidable to me. He can expertly describe the feeling of being in one place at one time, that’s really his strength as a writer, but he fails to string all these impressions into a coherent whole. He creates something that is less than the sum of its parts. His prose is at times quite nice, very sloppy and enthusiastic, very loose, easy and free. Kerouac is sort of like a really excited guy at a party who is very into something and wants to share it with you and wants you to be into it as well. He has this sort of washed-out and faded sentimental Polaroid tone that is cloying in other writers but not so much with Kerouac. It’s very uniquely American. I don’t think he’s avante-garde or anything like that. He’s solidly American, very sentimentally American. Quite conservative in a lot of ways.  He’s basically a romantic, which is the most conservative breed of writer.

             

Unfortunately the problem with this book is that it’s basically two books, one great and the other horrible. The great parts are the beginning and the end, when he’s doing cool things and telling you about them because he wants you to hear and he wants you to do something cool with your time too, and the awful part is the very long tedious middle section when he’s hitchhiking across the country, going to parties, and droning on and on about Buddhism. Now, if you know anything about anything you know that there isn’t anything on this planet more boring than white people talking about “Eastern Spirituality”. I know next to nothing about Buddhism--which is already more knowledge than I want or need--but word on the street is that Kerouac was a very bad Buddhist, in that he completely misunderstood very basic teachings of the religion. I’m not qualified to comment on his interpretations of religious dogma except to say that I don’t give a flying fuck. It was some of the least enjoyable, most repetitive and shallowest writing I’ve ever read. That’s the part where Kerouac the character comes off the worst: he sounds like an obnoxious flake, lamely wading in a very shallow pool of spirituality where the only thing that’s deep about him is his misogyny (women are sex objects to him), just a creepy drunken lecher. But those good sections are really good. The first part of the book concerns a weekend climb up Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra Nevadas in the company of a poet and a crazy guy. What I loved about this part is that one, the prose is beautiful, and two, how wide-eyed and emotionally naked Kerouac is. Sometimes in moments of existential despair I feel the loss of childlike wide-eyed idealism in my own life and it’s invigorating to see it still thriving in another man. He doesn’t even get to the top of the mountain. He chickens out and fully admits to being a wiener, which isn’t something that most writers, as self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing a species as they are, would ever own up to.  The second good part, the end of the book, he goes up to the Cascades and works as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak for a summer. Desolation Peak! What a name. The other nearby peaks have names like Terror, Fury, Challenger, Despair. Sounds like a hell of a place for a fellow to be alone for three months with some books and clouds for company, and an old skillet to fry your morning bacon in and in the cool morning air sitting out on the steps in your old ratty sweater, smoking a cigarette and watching a deer in the meadow surrounding your cabin… you’d really have to twist my arm. He just goes up there and reads and thinks. What a lucky duck.

            

 Kerouac’s books kind of have this real retrospective sadness to them that I’m sure is just a product of their vintage. They come across now as in a way eulogizing an America that doesn’t really exist anymore, if it ever did. Kerouac exerts a lot of effort in making hitchhiking sound like the best and only mode of travel, and maybe it was in 1954 but I don’t think anybody seriously does it now. Maybe homeless teenage runaways do, but not intellectuals and poets. One, no one would ever pick you up. Two, if someone did pick me up I know that I’d end up dead. Some truck driver would chain me up back with the broccoli, rape me from Kansas City to Buffalo, and then chop me up into little pieces, stuff ‘em in a garbage bag, and leave the bag on the side of the road. My remains would never be found or identified. Not to mention the homeless teenage runaways stealing all my stuff and beating me up and whatever methods of torture angry and bored cops can imagine dishing out to some poor guy with no fixed address who may as well be nameless and nonexistent. It’s hard to move around, especially if you’re poor. Poverty keeps you in one place, roots you, it’s an anchor, a millstone, no matter how much one wants to romanticize it. There’s no dignity or poetry in poverty and it doesn’t free one from the bonds of materialism except through an early and lonely death after a lifetime of bone grinding misery. I suspect it was much the same in the 1950s, and for every Jack Kerouac there’s a million Tom Joads trapped in the merciless teeth of their circumstances. And there’s no hope of being a fire lookout. It costs an arm and a leg to rent the cabin Kerouac stayed at for a summer, and they use satellites to monitor for fires now. Nobody needs a guy in a cabin anymore.

             

I dunno if I could say I actually liked the book or not. I guess I’m mostly negative on it. It’s very gauzy and sentimental and a bit shallow at times. Kerouac isn’t a very deep thinker so he doesn’t have much to say about his times except that they happened, but he does have a way of making those times real and inviting you to sit around the fire and share with him. He’s very friendly and conversational. It’s kind of a unique approach even if it isn’t the most intellectual one, and Kerouac definitely does deserve a place in the American canon, in our cultural memory, though probably not ranked as highly as he often is. He’s not good, but he’s great, and he embodies something about the American automobile zeitgeist that few others really nail down; he’s the architect of a kind of Manifest Destiny of the soul. He's great for most of the reasons people already believe and I suppose the most damning thing I could say is that if he were still alive today, and was still writing, or was just beginning his writing career, then he wouldn't be a great writer, if he became one at all. Most of his greatness is in the fact that he helped shape his times and was fully a product of them, and had the foresight to write some of his experiences down and could sometimes turn a nice phrase, but not because he was a deep or original thinker. He's a describer and not an explainer, and in my mind that makes him a lesser writer.  I think he'd be particularly ill-suited to describing or explaining the 21st Century, totally lacking the tools or imagination to deal with it. Too emotional, too scattershot and inconsistent, too self-absorbed and totally guided by some lesser organ, the heart or the gut or the penis, with little to no moderation from the organ that actually has things to say: the brain. The sad fact is he'd probably just end up some tattooed hipster burnout with a substance abuse problem waiting tables at an avante-garde tapas bar. Or a yuppie or something awful like that. 

Listen, I’ll tell you honestly as I can what I felt like when I read this book. I felt like a trip to San Francisco. Have you ever been to San Francisco? You drive eight, nine hours excited about your weekend up there walking around the Wharf eating crab in your dorky little peacoat in one of the most culturally important cities in the history of America, and when you get there it’s completely disappointing, a phony tourist trap. It’s not at all what you wanted it to be and probably it never was.