BOOK REVIEW

VANITY OF DULUOZ

by Jack Kerouac

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity"

Ecclesiastes 1:2

My, my, Jack. What have you done?

The answer, it seems, is "everything under the sun".

This book starts and ends with reference to Ecclesiates, or the "Wisdom of Solomon", from the Old Testament. It shows a Jack who, in his older years, did in fact turn back to his "little lamby Jesus", as opposed to the Buddhism heavily endorsed in the last Kerouac book I reviewed (see Dharma Bums).

It is also the prattle of old and hardened Jack, heavily hitting the sauce during this time and entrenched in the cultural viewpoint of his mother. The book was written in a tone directed towards his third "wifey", Stella Sampas, in an attempt to show her where he had been and how he got to where he is now. The story is a recap of Jack's "formative" years, covering time periods from his early years as a student and athlete in Lowell, MA, to his time in the Merchant Marine, and ending with the death of his father in 1944. It is essentially the description of the events that led him to find his calling as a writer.

It is also the most boring and tedious work I have read of his, and runs a close tie for the most difficult Kerouac book for me to finish (up there with Visions of Cody). I would not recommend this book to anyone who was not a serious Kerouac fan like myself. In truth, it was only my desire to know all about his life and read every line he has written that compelled me to finish this book. I kept wanting to put it down in place of another fiction novel.

The book is somewhat interesting in that it includes details from Kerouac's life history not found in other places. Some of the stories from the Merchant Marine days are actually fascinating, including his travel to exotic locations. It amused me to read stories about him leaving the boat when he wasn't supposed to to get drunk somewhere, sometimes losing all his money in the meantime and having complicated scenarios where he has to somehow get the money to get back to the boat. To know about what inspired him to write before he wrote anything that amounted to much was engaging, and I would love to get my hands on a copy of The Sea is My Brother, or the manuscript he lost in a taxi cab that was never recovered or published.

Another facet of the book that I found interesting as well is how he refers to his friends, or doesn't, in this book. By this time in Jack's life, his friendship with Allen Ginsberg had lasted through several decades. Ginsberg was, I believe, instrumental in getting Jack published and getting him literary attention. Even though their friendship had suffered a cooling off period due to Kerouac absorbing some of his mothers anti-sematicism, Ginsberg was still victim to phone calls in the wee hours of the morning from a drunken Jack. However, Kerouac says very little about Ginsberg in this book, even though this was a significant friendship during this time period, and what he does say is not very nice ("I never really liked him much", also a suggestion that Jack and his first wife felt Allen to be lecherous). The book does, however, wax sentimental about William Burroughs (all these people by pseudonym, of course), who by this point had put Kerouac clean out of his life for all his wine-reeking offensiveness as a friend.

Historically, this book is important in terms of understanding how Jack the boy became Jack the man, who published many novels of importance during his lifetime. However, it is written with little of Jack's usual "poetry-like prose", is missing the language that made his previous books so popular. It is a good story without the narrative and depth to support it. The style is tedious and the tone pretentious, and I would put any other Kerouac book in front of this one as more accurate examples of what I loved about his writing.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON....
To continue with my occasional riffs on Beat Generation books, and my quest to re-read all of the "Dulouz Legend", I have another book review to share with you....
DHARMA BUMS
by Jack Kerouac

Ahhhh. Very nice. I loved this book.
I actually read this the first time when I was a teenager, but I think I didn't absorb it completely. I couldn't remember many of the details, and my memories were connected with two guys I knew in school that reminded me of the main characters. Perhaps it is just that during that time, my understanding was that they WERE characters, fictional devices used to tell a story about hiking up a mountain and hitchhiking. My knowledge of Kerouac's life is much more complete now, and now, half a lifetime later and reading it again, I understand. I see the character "Ray Smith" as Kerouac himself, telling a story centering around his friend, Gary Snyder(pictured above as he was at the time of the book), known as "Japhy Ryder" in the novel.
Now, granted, Kerouac always told a version of the truth, although probably not all the truth. He certainly made free use of poetic license. He also tended to base his characters on real people, who were "true romantic heroes of the West", but distorted them and blew them up so that what you are seeing is really a caricature, not a character.
Gary Snyder himself said at one point Dharma Bums was not Kerouac's best work, and that "it was written too hastily". It is true that Kerouac was under a lot of pressure from his editors to produce a book to follow up "On the Road" that had more commercial appeal than some of the other things he was working on at the time (like "Visions of Cody", which is a tough read, even for a Neal Cassady (aka "Cody") fan).
However, I really liked this book this time around. It has some of the best descriptions of natural beauty that I have read ever in a novel. He gives detailed descriptions of hikes taken with Snyder, including a climb up Matterhorn, that took my breath away. This is Kerouac laying the groundwork for the "rucksack revolution" he visualized, and probably inspired lots of young people to pick up packs and head for the open road and undiscovered vistas.
The book ends where "Desolation Angels" picks up, with Kerouac on an isolated mountain top in Washington called Desolation Peak (here in the pic). I found it very interesting to read this description of his adventure here, with him painting it in happy tones, instead of the depressing tones of "Desolation Angels". Instead of focusing on his loneliness and inner struggles, he describes the scenery and his place in it with happiness and peace.
Snyder certainly influenced Kerouac in terms of religion. Kerouac was already intrigued by Buddhism when he met Snyder, but here in this book, you see Snyder teaching him more about this religion that they both had in common at this time. Snyder was truly and deeply Buddhist, and teased Kerouac that at the end of his life, he would be praying to his Christian God, with all his notions of "little lamby Jesus", and that teasing was right on. Here in this book, though, they introduce several notions of Buddhism that may have inspired readers to learn more about eastern religions themselves.
Overall, I decided that this was the ONE book I would ask my husband to read. We have been married for ten years and he does not read or have any interest in hearing about the books that mean so much to me, but he told me early in our marriage that he would read ONE book that I selected and talk about it with me. Ten years later, I still had not found that one book that summed up everything I liked about reading.
Well, folks, this one is it.

Book Review
Jack Kerouac
King of the Beats
A Portrait
by Barry Miles
Thank you, Barry Miles. Such a lovely portrait you drew of my Jack.
(intended sarcasm). This book, I believe, was a big reason I became depressed last month. It is a haunting, depressing sort of portrait, the kind that has some redeeming quality but you just don't want to look at.
The label "King of the Beats" had a taunting quality towards the end of Kerouac's life, when he felt misunderstood and miscast by the American public. He spent the last ten years of his life drinking it all away. He basically killed himself with alcohol over a prolonged period of his life, and it is fascinating to wonder why.
Reading this book was a sharp, hard look at Kerouac as a wandering neurotic. It does not display Kerouac in a redeeming light, especially after the 1940s. It does, however, give great insight into the relationship between Jack and his first wife, Edie Parker. The first one hundred pages out of three hundred total are devoted to Jack's life before he went "on the road", and this is a vital part of history transcribed in a detail not seen in the other two Kerouac biographies I read recently. It was interesting to learn that Jack slept around, and then she did the same to get back to him, which caused a split in the relationship. This pattern he repeated with his second wife, Joan Haverty, who bore him a daughter he never claimed.
Barry Miles is harsh in his commentary about Kerouac's relationship with his daughter. Jack later gave her permission to use his name, and she wrote two of them before dying at an early age, a death that Miles strongly pins on Kerouac's drunken chest. Twice in the book, Miles condemned him for denying his own child, for not being there for her.

"His fans claim that he had a great heart, but he cared more for his cat than for his own daughter and there is all the difference in the world between sentimentality and sensitivity."

Miles demands that Kerouac "be held responsible for his daughter's misery" and suggests his absence caused her family to be so desperate that she sold her body in the streets at a young age, while he drank away his fortune.
In the end, this book left me wondering what kind of man would Jack had been if he had ever gotten past himself and experienced a true deep personal growth, if he had allowed himself to mature. If instead of trotting all over the world looking for kicks, what if he had allowed himself to be a family man, and take care of his responsibilities, transcend his personal issues with women and God? What if Kerouac hadn't become a drunk, but instead a mature person, equipped with the right tools to handle his fame and provide for his family?
I used to hold Jack Kerouac up as this romantic figure. I even fancied I would be in love with him if I had met him in true life. It is easy to think that when reading his incredible prose that sounds like poetry. The man was a genius with words, but he was terrible with people. After reading this, I realized that had I known him, I would not have wanted to be friend or lover to him. He took, he used, he overextended, and he offended.
Once of his friends with his early days, before Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady came in his life, was Henri Cru. Miles shows us Cru ripping up Jack's last letter to him and "flushing them down the toilet with all my other memories of Jack". Even patient Ginsberg had almost had it with him towards the end, although he remained a faithful friend, despite the anti-semitic beliefs Kerouac shared with his mother. Who knew, Kerouac, a big fan of McCarthyism as well?
Basically, Miles gives a portrait of Kerouac that is not a flattering one. He even suggest some sexual trysts that I am not sure I believe. We see Kerouac as manipulative, promiscious, and full of self-aggrandizing dreams about being the best novelist in the world.
He was scornful of others work, incredibly jealous, and not above send scathing letters to his friends, then call them at two in the morning, drunk and wanting to talk. He was the kind of friend you would get rid of fast, the kind of lover who would never last. He wanted to have a spiritual faith, but not abide by its codes of conduct. He is basically someone only a mother could love, and perhaps his did, a little too much.
In the end, I had to drop Kerouac as my romantic fantasy, and that loss was staggering. I think I am going to have to go read one of his best books just to get a fix for my hurting heart.
Thank you, Barry Miles. Such a lovely portrait.
(wiping tarnish off a crown of thorns)

BOOK REVIEW

Kerouac: A Biography

by Ann Charters

The word on the beat streets is that Charters' biography is the best of the works intrepreting Jack's life and influence. This was the book to read, so when I came across it, naturally I had to buy it.

I read the preface by the author first, written in 1986, some fourteen years since the book's original publication, which was about four years after Kerouac's death.

In it, Ann Charters describes how her husband Sam, who was a poet and novelist, helped her write the book while they were living in Sweden as a protest against Vietnam. She notes that Gary Snyder and Micheal McClure gave her encouragment along the final stages, which is interesting to me. These are the two literary minds and friends of Kerouac's helping to preserve his legacy after his premature death, because they felt his story needed to be told through Charters. The book is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, who gave Charters great assistance during the writing of the book, with interviews and unlimited access to his archives and photos.

Initially, the book felt very dry to me. I was just starting to get disappointed that I wasn't reading anything I didn't already know, based on reading the "early" books of "The Duluoz Legend" - Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, and Maggie Cassidy. It seemed to be reciting facts that we all knew to be true - that Kerouac was born in Lowell, MA; was an athlete at school; lost a brother at an early age.

Around Chapter Three, the story began to broaden some, when Kerouac moves to Ozone Park and begins dating Edie Parker. This is an interesting relationship to me. He marries her, then leaves her two months later, saying later he felt himself getting too comfortable.

Depth was given to the relationship between Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac in this novel. It becomes very clear that Ginsberg was a major help in getting Kerouac published, and yet was rebuffed by never being developed into a major romantic hero in his novels, with Kerouac instead writing character study novels featuring Neal Cassady and Gary Synder. In the book is a photo Charters snapped of Allen Ginsberg, John McClellon Holmes, and Gregory Corso linking arms at Kerouac's funeral.

Jack got a little help from his friends. Ginsberg worked tirelessly to promote him among the literary set, poets and writers from New York and San Francisco. Holmes is credited with naming the Beat Generation and his novel Go was the first to be published covering this group of people, the circle of literary influence. Gregory Corso was by this time a well known Beat poet.

Through this novel, one could see how it would have aggravated people like Kenneth Rexroth, who had spent his professional life developing the San Francisco poetry scene, to see these characters - three guys from New York, and one from Lowell - become known for bringing the "Poetry Renaissance of San Francisco", where poetry was never dead.

This book comes alive with the relationships between people, and a sense of who each of them were and their place in Jack's life. To me, this is part of what I enjoy about the Beat poets - how they helped each other during different times with inspiration, editing, typing, and promoting. They influenced each others work or provided a muse. These "power friendships" amaze me.

Without Neal Cassady, without Allen Ginsberg, if made to face his responsibilities instead of having cross country adventures, what would Kerouac have been? We are all influenced by the people around us, and in this case, it led to a revolution of the mind, and the legacy of an author who transcribed the world he saw around him.

In the end, there was many details about Kerouac's life that I learned through this book, and it was an enjoyable read. I have a greater understanding of the relationships with people and places that helped Kerouac transcend his own unraveling, becoming the legend that he always thought he was meant to be.

Sketching

Over the years of being a Kerouac fan, I sometimes would try to examine what it was exactly that I liked so much about his work. Part of the appreciation I have for him as an "artist" with words lies in his ability to describe scenes in such detail that one gained a unique sense of being in the action.
This feature of Kerouac's writing he called "sketching".
Before I realized that was his label for it, which makes sense, I was doing a little sketching of my own. I was never a visual person, but I was driven with a need to explain my existence in the world through a creative medium. I have come to feel that writing is a tool for expression that has more dimensions than a visual still life.
I like my life to come alive.
I, like Kerouac, was known to my friends as always having a notebook in my backpocket, transcribing experience. I usually tended towards free verse. Here is a sample of a sketch of my own, written in 1998 in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

Sketches from a Manitou Laundromat
There's a boy,
A thinker, observer, dreamer
He sits and watches the street
Glances at the others now and then
I wonder what his meaning is
And if he finds it here
A girl pulls up in a shiny red car
Baby seat in the back
Couldn't be more than eighteen
Pensively washes her man's clothes
Twists her lip nervously
Her shorts hang low
So we can notice her navel
And its shiny adornment
Flashing above long legs

Three Mennonite women
Wearing matching silk dresses
And white bonnets
Speaking a strange tongue
Bewildered by machinery
They all wear nurses shoes
And add coins to others dryers
Just to be nice

A woman walks in
Hair a mess
She wears a nice dress
With a fanny pack
And a confused smile
Must be a nice little nut
She wears socks over her
Knee high stockings
And drools a grin your way

Another boy, loner like me
Carries all his belongings
In a duffel bag
Washes his socks and underwear
Long deep scars over his arm
Nicely dressed
He walks off down the street
To a friend's couch,
perhaps, or a welcoming girl

I pass him on the way home
He is still walking

Book review

Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac

by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee

I bought this book at City Lights bookstore when visiting San Francisco. I wanted to learn more about the life of Kerouac, the writer I adore the most. After reading about fourteen of his books since my teenage years, I feel as if I know him well already, but I still wanted to fill in the gaps. I wanted to know the reasons for his eventual unwinding in the downward spiral of his latter years. I wanted to know what became of his friendship with Cassady, and what killed his relationships with women.

In the end, the book did not offer me any answers for two of the questions I wondered about originally. I liked the author's literary device of allowing others to actually tell the story, but felt like there was not enough of that. It came across as a narrative full of holes interspiced with sections from interviews with the other players, whose stories were as difficult to follow sometimes as the narrative. Some chronology was lost in both the narrative and the interviews, and I would go back to see if I missed something often, only to realize it was just never there or fully explained.

This book was originally published in 1978, so reading what Kerouac's friends, lovers, and acquaintances had to say about him needs to be tempered by the fact that this was less than ten years after he died. It has now been almost forty years, so I think it would be interesting if these authors did another set of interviews and see how perspectives have changed.

The authors set out to let these people who knew Jack intimately tell the story of his life. In the introduction, they state their objective as "we hoped [the result] would be a big, transcontinental conversation, complete with interruptions, contradictions, old grudges, and bright memories, all of them providing a reading of the man himself through the people he chose to populate his work."

It is interesting from a psychological standpoint this choice the authors made to let people tell the stories the way they remembered them, after their personal internal "revision" of events. The authors allowed the reader to decide for themselves which version was closest to the truth. In the end, they let Kerouac's lifelong friend and fellow "Beat Generation" crony Allen Ginsberg read the uncorrected galleys before publication of the book. Ginsberg's response, Gifford says, was branded in his memory: "My God, it's just like Rashomon - everybody lies and the truth comes out!"

Just like Kerouac himself, each of the versions of the truth present contradictions and yet somehow are strains of the truth, the truth as revealed through the eyes of perception. This is apparent even in his novels. Kerouac is known for his method of prose which involved telling a story of his varied experiences, often with the same circle of friends, but many of those friends interviewed for this book expressed that the version Kerouac presented in his novels was often different from the way they remembered it. For instance, the woman who was the model for the character Mardou Fox in the Subterraneans says about reading the manuscript of the novel when it was completed that "these are not the times as I knew them and the people, with the exception of his friends, were not as I knew them." This is a common refrain, and it would suggest to some that Kerouac was adjusting the truth, or perhaps not telling the truth, but I believe it was that he applied his unique filter to the experience, like we all do, and perhaps offered a romanticized version of the truth, such like the ones we all tell ourselves.

In the end, I decided that it was John Clellon Holmes whose version of truth in this novel most likely coincided with my opinion on the truth. He, of all of Kerouac's friends, seemed the be the one who understood him the most intellectually, and Ginsberg seemed the one who understood him the most emotionally.

Holmes was a fellow writer whose book Go, (published after Kerouac's first novel and before the publication of On the Road, the book that made Jack famous) was the first written mention of "the Beat Generation", and the phrase entered American lexicon when Gillbert Millstein reviewed Go for the New York Times. In 1952, Millstein asked Holmes to write an article defining the generation for the Sunday section of the Times, and Holmes complied with "This IS the Beat Generation", and this set the stage in some respects for the movement move into media hype which in the end, became part of Jack's demise.

Holmes seemed to understand that with Kerouac, with all of us, it is not the black and white, but rather the shades of grey that define us. He understood the man behind the contradictions. Others offered varied interpretations of Kerouac's baffling religious beliefs, but like Holmes, I understand that it was possible, although it seems counterintuitive, that Kerouac could both be a practicing Catholic and a budding Buddhist. Kerouac was known in his latter years for his interest in Buddhism, and several friends recount seeing him carry A Buddhist Bible around with him, but yet he could never turn away from the idea of his "little lamby Jesus" and continued to turn to his saints and Catholic traditions to feel closer to his savior. Both the ideas of Buddhism and Catholicism are apparent in his work, and he sort of moves between them. It makes sense to me personally as a former Catholic who only truly feels closer to God through worship after a traditional Catholic Mass, but who has explored Eastern religions as well, and believes one can blend those ideas into a coherent personal philosophy about religion. This is not a popular idea among fundamentalists in either sect, and even Kerouac's friends remember being confused, or simply thought Kerouac could not let go of Catholicism because of his mother.

Naturally, Kerouac's mother is present throught the book, and several friends offer up understanding along a lifelong theme of Jack's interdependent relationship with his mother. Perhaps that relationship has to do with Kerouac's inability to maintain successful relationships with women. The authors do little to explain Kerouac's marriages, and in fact no interviews with the three women Kerouac married are present in the book except for at the end when his last wife, Stella, discusses his return to his hometown and the day he died. She had been married to him for two and a half years at the time of his death, and helped him in those years take care of both his ailing mother and himself, by this time deep into alcoholism and seclusion.

Neal Cassady, the central figure in most of Kerouac's work, was present very little in the last ten years of Kerouac's life. I think this is an interesting facet that could be explored more deeply, and may look to other sources to help me understand what happened to their friendship that inspired Jack to both develop his unique writing style and give him material with which to fill at least two of his thirty published books. At the height of Jack's fame, right after On the Road was published and and during the media storm that followed, Cassady was arrested on trumped up drug charges and spent two and a half years in San Quentin. Kerouac explains the changes in a television performance, perhaps an excerpt from something written, as saying "we are still great friends, but have moved on to different phases of our life", but Cassady expressed some bitterness in a letter to a journalist quoted in this book, "I'm not interested in Jack's book or all that phony beat stuff or kicks....Jack and I, we drifted apart over the years. He became a Buddhist and I became a Cayceite [the prophet Edgar Cayce]. Yeah, he was impressed with me. Let's see if he was impressed enough to send me a typewriter."

After Cassady's release, Kerouac still saw him occasionally, but their lives took different directions. In the latter phases, Cassady was heavily involved with Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, and Kerouac was heavily involved with alcohol and his inner demons, which mostly revolved around his inability to deal with the sudden fame that On the Road provided him. Kerouac was held up in the media eye as "The King of the Beats", a title he resisted, and his drinking seemed to result due to this inner conflict, but because of this fame, he was finally able to sell the other books he had written.

I found those latter years most intriguing. I had read Big Sur, his book that chronicled his downward spiral at his darkest moments, but never thought about the fact that this was 1960 and his despair continued until his death in 1969. I think it is sad that after all his interest in religion, he could never find that faith that would allow him to transcend his fame. His friends all talk about wanting to help him during those years, but being unable to stop the vicious cycle of binge drinking and depression.

The flavor, then, of this book at the end is bitterness and a failure to triumph over these demons. It is reminscent of the last ten years of Elvis Presley's life, and their lives both ended in a similiar aspect, with their agony being flushed away in the great toilet of life. He didn't live long enough to see the lasting effects of his legacy. If I could rewrite the story, it is the ending I would rewrite, much like Kerouac's mother requesting Jack change the ending to Pic, or Kerouac himself rewriting the ending to The Town and The City, what I think is his greatest novel, with the character most like him simply walking out into the West. That is the way I would like to remember Kerouac, simply walking out into the sunset for further adventures.

I would like to explore further how "beat" became "beatnik", and examine Kerouac's meaningful relationships more thoroughly, but that is beyond the scope of this review. For now, I will just leave the readers with the video above, to listen for themselves the scope of Kerouac's genius and develop for oneself your impressions.

THE LITERARY BEAT TRIFECTA

My beat poet based traveling adventures are over for the year, but I continue my quest to read all of the "Dulouz Legend" in the entirety. I recently finished three Kerouac books in a row and would like to share my perceptions and comparisons.

Tristessa: "Jack the Lover"

This is simply a novellette about a love gone south. It was published in 1960 and is a brief 96 page tribute to an affair that really wasn't. Over a period of a couple of years, Jack visits Mexico, and his life there was intertwined with two women and the people they knew, the life they lived there in Mexico City. One of the women is Tristessa, a junky who Jacks falls for due to beauty alone. He finds her captivating and frequently shares space in her worn adobe living quarters with her, her older female companion, a chihuahua, a flea-ridden young cat, a rooster, a chicken, and a dove. In between and sometimes during, he hangs out with "Old Bull Lee", one of Kerouac's pseudonyms for William Burroughs, a heroin addict and former junky, as well as another in the beat poet umbrella, and travels back and forth again from New York City.

The language in this one is poetic prose, and leans on the entirely sad, suffering, and sappy existence of Jack as a Lover, Jack as a Man. It speaks of the desolation of loving someone you can never really touch, and seeing the beauty that lies behind a true ugliness. It was the possibly the best of the three novels I read, although the next one is very close in quality.

Visions of Gerard: "Jack the Boy"

The most amazing thing about this book is the details related in the story of the death of Jack's older brother, an unusually beautific character in the road of life. The reason those details amaze me is that those remembrances of Gerard, told with such clarity, were memories from very early childhood. Gerard was nine when he died of rhuematic fever, and Jack was only four years old at his brother's funeral. Yet, out of this time, Jack wrote 130 pages detailing remembrances of Gerard, of his character, of specific events, some details imagined as it might have happened or as according to family legend, but some as nuggets gleamed in true reflective memory.

Kerouac's friends when he was growing up used to refer to his as "Memory Babe", because of his amazing ability to remember details. His friend and fellow beat poet Lucien Carr says of him in Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac that "He really had a memory like few men that you will meet...He had a fantastic memory". In none of his other books is that as clear as this one, where he recollects his brother, family, hometown, and family history with such specificity. He describes Gerard's relationships with the people, places, and animals around him, little facets of personality, such as the way he held his head and the way he described his experience.

This is the sweet story of a family dampened with loss, a loss young Jack doesn't percieve as so terrible. The last six months of Gerard's life, he lived with such pain that little four year old Jack ran to greet his papa to tell him excitedly of Gerard's death. Throughout this historical character study, you can almost see why Jack would be almost gleeful - in his mind, Gerard was able to leave the earth and head to Heaven, where he had wanted to go, even perhaps with his little wagon pulled by two white lambs right up to God Himself, a dream depicted often by a slowly dying Gerard.

In this story, you also get to see the town of Lowell, MA, through the eyes of the young boys. You can imagine, like a black and white movie, this small town in 1920s Massachusetts, the sister nuns who spend time talking with Gerard, whom they consider to be blessed, the Catholic school and ceremonious prayers, and the raging of the Merrimac River, also all present in differing form in the next book as well.

After reading this book, I can see how this experience in Jack's life shaped him and inspired him to be the writer he became. Perhaps the act of remembering was developed here, in trying to keep Gerard's spirit alive through memory alone, and the first stabs at darkness, a darkness in the back of Kerouac's soul that inspired him to type up the experiences of his life into novels.

Doctor Sax: "Jack the Dreamer"

This is my least favorite Kerouac book of all time, and I almost didn't even finish it. I had no interest in reading it, even coming from someone who adores hearing descriptions of Lowell and Kerouac's childhood. The only reason I decided to continue reading it was because the biography of Kerouac I am reading now talks about the meaning of the book and helped me to understand it in a different way.

I didn't like it because it was such a departure from the typical Kerouac style of retelling an experience like he was telling a friend. The story is similiar to Visions of Gerard in that it relays some of his childhood, but he intertwines it with a fantasy involving a mysterious shadowy vampiresque figure who visits the area in a final climax with his battle against a great snake. The Doctor Sax of this odd fantasy is reminiscent of The Shadow, a radio personality of the time period who seemed to be a great influence on Kerouac. The book and its final pages seem to speak of a coming of age and the transition between a man and a boy.

Next entry - Florida!

Book Review
Maggie Cassidy

by Jack Kerouac

In my old age, I intend to collect all my work and reinsert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy
- Kerouac

Among the body of works that Kerouac considers part of his "Legend of Duluoz", his collection of books all dealing with the same subject (his visceral life experience and the places, people, and ideas he had come across along the way) is this short and sweet story of teenage love, Maggie Cassidy.
This story takes place in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massuchussets in the mid to late nineteen thirties. Since Kerouac was born in this town in 1922, that would put him at the age of a teenager during the time the book spans, and his description of family events contains autobiographical information, so it is easy to believe Kerouac is telling you of a love affair in his life. The time, the setting, the family situation all matches. Therefore is this story true? Unfortunately, Kerouac has been dead for almost thirty years and we can't ask him, but it is fun to speculate about.
The main character, in fact, is named Jacky Duluoz, sometimes called Jack, or "Zagg" by his best buds, the troup of teenaged boys he hung out with. He is a football player and track star at the high school, and meets an enchanting youg girl at a school dance. They have a love affair, only Kerouac, in his youthful immaturity, doesn't really know what to do with it. He wants to love her, he doesn't know how to love her, he struggles with himself.
I'm throwing that in there for my friend JJ, who told me once a story has to have one of the classic "Man versus ___" themes. I would say that this story's theme is man vesus himself. It is also about the fragility and intensity of young love. We all know what that is like to have such powerful feelings about someone else during this age, but not knowing how to handle it.
We have also all had to walk away from our past into our future, like this main character did in the novel. Eventually, he graduated from high school and went off to college at Columbia. This we know from Kerouac's history was the place where he eventually met the other men who would also be included in the "beat generation" of writers and muses, such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs. This book, however, ends around his sophomore year of college, right before he met the men who would influence his writing and his life decisions.
I'm not going to tell you how the story ends, you'll have it to find that out. Overall, though, I think that one would find this a saccharine and sublime novel. Kerouac's writing is concise and suberb, and also manages to convey a depth of feeling and inner angst.
I was a little surprised at the content. Since Kerouac sometimes used the pseudonym "Maggie" for Carolyn Cassady, whom he supposedly had an affair with, and the last names are similiar, I thought I would find similiar aspects to the relationship in this novel. After reading the novel, though, I don't think that there is a connection at all. It sounds like something else entirely. I am a little surprised also about the writing style. Kerouac's trademark spontaneous poetic prose is missing from this novel, and so far the books I had read of his that he includes in the "Legend of Duluoz" is written in this fashion. His epic novel The Town and the City, which includes a more orderly prose and story development, is not included in that collection of books. I would not have expected that this one was, either, but it is listed as such.
In one way, though, it makes total sense that it would be in that collection, because of the strong autobiographical nature told as if he was telling a friend. The collection does have that in common, as well as the story, told over time and in different ways, of a boy turning into a man turning into a star, a star that burned out with a liquor filled heart in the end. In that respect, it makes this novel significant as a piece of his history, the story of his youthful heart.

Reflections on On The Road
by Jack Kerouac

- third time around

The first time I read On the Road, I was seventeen, and it made quite an impression. It was one of those defining books of those years, I remember, although I can't remember specifically what I liked about it. I remember thinking that Kerouac's writing style was fresh, and admiring the complete freedom of the characters in the story. The second time I read it, I was in college and found it tedious, but I suspect this was because I was reading a lot of Tom Robbins and so Kerouac's writing style lost the freshness factor to me. I had become enraptured with pop philosophy and quirky characters, which seems semi-ironic now for me to say that because these elements are present in On the Road, but it is just not as in-your-face obvious as it is in a Robbins novel.
This third time around it was neither fresh nor tedious, and perhaps more enjoyable on several levels because I understand more of the history behind the novel and in the novel. In between this reading and the last one, I have read several more Kerouac books and books on Kerouac or Neal Cassady, most notably in terms of pertinence to the story Carolyn Cassady's book Off the Road. Carolyn was romantically involved and/or married to Neal during the time period that On the Road covers, between 1947 and 1950, and between her perceptions of the events and the understanding of the history of the two men that has evolved as I have educated myself more thoroughly on their lives, I developed a totally different impression of the novel through this more recent reading.
One of the primary impressions I obtained this time around was the sense of place as vital to the story. When I was a teenager reading the book, I was most impressed with what the two main characters - "Sal Paradise" as Kerouac himself and "Dean Moriarty" as Cassady - were doing in these incredible cross country road trips, but this time around I recognized that place was the unnamed third main character, filling in the emotional and physical context of the action. On the Road is essentially a period piece that gives one a snapshot of what postwar America was like, both generally and specifically. As the travelers enter each city, drive through each state, they experience the place so deeply that it becomes them, defines them, shapes them. The concise descriptions of place and detail of person are the strengths of this novel, and the strength in Kerouac's writing, the reason for his lasting significance as a cultural American icon defining a generation.
A second realization I got this time around that somehow I didn't catch through all my studying of the character of Neal Cassady before was a strong sense of mental imbalance. My impression before, even in reading Carolyn's impressions on their life together, was that he was a fascinating man with some interesting qualities who was also self-absorbed, selfish in his dealings with others. He would have been hell on a heart, all heat and madness and pledges of undying love while chasing other women on the side and taking off at a moment's notice, disappearing for months, the frantic unreliability of his nature. This reading, though, I saw little details that caused me to think that in this day and age, Cassady would have been labeled with some mental illness or another if he had ever walked into a psych office: the manic phases (driving hundreds of miles without sleeping, the frantic speech), his physical habits such as twitching and sweating, his compulsive womanizing, the way he acted on sudden urges to move and just left, took off, without consideration for others he was involved with. I also saw that Kerouac himself recognized this fact, and was at times both frightened and intrigued by it, but drawn to it as well.
Here is an excerpt to prove my theory from Part Four, when Kerouac is preparing to leave Denver for Mexico and finds out Cassady has bought a car and is on his way down to join him, unexpectedly:

Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from under it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like a wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive.

Although I have my reasons for continuing to idolize the nature of Kerouac and Cassady, this reading gave me great feelings of discomfort in terms of the relationships these men had with women. It was reminiscent of the way I felt watching "Walk the Line", the uncomfortability I felt with Johnny's relationship with June Carter. I didn't stop liking the music of Cash, but I empathized more with his first wife, understanding her anger at his betrayal in his obsessive attraction for June. In the same respect, this time I was not comfortable with Cassady's three significant relationships, the way he fooled around with his second wife while with the first and also vice versa, the way he immediately hooked up with wife #3 in New York and immediately called home for a divorce from Carolyn, aka "Camille", while she was pregnant with their second child, only to leave the third wife right after marrying her (who also carried his child) to return to Carolyn in San Francisco, all the while trying to make girls on the side during the cross country trips (and let's not forget the bordello scene in Mexico City). When I was a teenager, I saw this as a physical manifestation of their "freedom", freedom from moral constraints being a part of it, but at this point in my life, I find I am uncomfortable walking this line. I just feel sick for the women in his life. Although Kerouac was not quite as concerned with his penis, there is still some knowledge I have about his life that makes me upset to read, at the end, what he writes about his last affair in the novel.
....So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly....
because I suspect, based on the timing, that this is Joan Haverty, his second wife, who gave birth to a daughter Jan, who only met her father twice in her life - once at a court hearing for child custody when the girl was ten, and once when she was fifteen and showed up at his doorstep in a desperate longing to connect with the father she had never known. He died two years after that meeting, while married to wife number three.
The point of all this talk is that these men, both of them, were heels on the hearts of women, who promised undying and forever love when it was only fleeting, transient, and when it suited their purposes. Both men seem to be seeking that connection, whether it is with a soulmate or the spark of the divine on earth, and their visceral experience is one of the seeker, the searcher, who is destined to be alone, but through devices of their own doing. In Kerouac's case, I think that was part of what made him such an incredible writer, this sort of melancholy searching through desperate kicks and long road trips for that which he would never find, but at the same time it speaks of the futility of love, generally, and the attitude of these men towards women specifically.
In the end, though, it is Kerouac's writing style that really makes my heart flip and my head swim. In this book, it is particularly beautiful on parts three and four, in the last half of the book. Perhaps the first part of the story Kerouac was just trying to spit out there, get the specifics down, since it had been a few years since those journeys by the time he wrote the book, but the last part, being more recent, had fresher emotional context. It was the way he phrased his words, the way he described every detail, the way he told a story that gets me, and I think gets other people as well. He was a writer, and a darn good one at that. I wanted to pull the best part out and show it to you, to prove it to everyone, to display what it is that makes him remarkable, but nothing I could do is better than this video of him reading the very last page of this book in the notably "beat" fashion. So dig it.....

The Ghost of the Susquehanna
So I am re-reading On the Road for the third time, like I mentioned, and this time I caught something that I missed before. I have the benefit this time around of knowing more about the history of this most famous of the Kerouac novels that I was not aware of before, and also having read other Kerouac books in the meantime.

One of the reasons On the Road brought Kerouac so much fame, at least in the literary circles, was due to this legend that the book was written in three weeks time. Kerouac had taped together several sheets of paper so that the paper could run continuously into his typewriter (keep in mind this was the 1950s, before the advent of personal computers), and in a benzedrine fueled craze, simply typed and typed the story of the three cross country trips he made with Neal Cassady "as if he was telling a story to a friend", which became his trademark "voice". That original manuscript, with true names and adventures intact, was rolled into a scroll and is still around today, and will be visiting Austin soon as part of the "On the Road with the Beats" traveling exhibit, which I plan to visit in the upcoming months.


After two years of revision by his publishers (including changing the names and certain situational details), the book was finally published in 1957. His adventures on the road with Cassady, however, had began in 1947, when he was in the middle of completing The Town and The City, his first published novel. In the span of those ten years, Kerouac had tried to write the story of his adventures with Cassady several different ways. He experimented with voice and character, struggling to figure out how to convey to his future audiences his experiences.


One of those attempts was published as a novella under the name of Pic after Kerouac's death, released by his estate. It tells the story of a young black child on the road with his uncle, originating on North Carolina backwoods through to New York City and then on to California. It is told with the vernacular that would be possessed by this type of person during this time period, and is written as if the child is telling the story of the journey to his grandfather. I read Pic sometime in the last year and found it unremarkable except for the pertinence to the development of Kerouac as a writer.


Last night when I was reading On the Road, though, I came to a part in the novel that sounded familiar, and knew exactly where I had heard it before. It is the story of "The Ghost of the Susquehanna", which sounds ominuous and thrilling but is simply a story of an unusual man that Kerouac encountered on his journey.

From On the Road:
It was the night of the Ghost of the Susquehanna. The Ghost was a shriveled little old man with a paper satchel who claimed he was headed for "Canady". He walked very fast, commanding me to follow, and said there was a bridge up ahead we could cross. He was about sixty years old; he talked incessantly of the meals he had had, how much butter they gave him for pancakes, how many extra slices of bread, how the old men had called to him from a porch of a charity home in Maryland and invited him to stay for the wekeend, how he took a nice warm bath before he left; how he found a brand-new hat by the side of the road in Virginia and that was it on his head, how he hit every Red Cross in town and showed them his World War I credentials; how the Harrisburg Red Cross was not worthy of the name; how he managed in this hard world. But as far as I could see he was just a semi-respectable walking hobo of some kind who covered the entire Eastern Wilderness on foot, hitting Red Cross offices and sometimes bumming on Main Street corners for a dime. We were bums together. We walked seven miles along the mournful Susquehanna.


In the novella Pic, the main character and his uncle walk these seven miles with this man, and the child describes how hungry his conversation made him, and some of the silly things the man was doing, such as looking through his paper satchel for a tie that might not have existed at all. In both stories, the walk ended with the realization that the man was headed the wrong way, and that those seven miles were a complete waste of time and energy.

This is where we leave this character in On the Road:

It began to rain hard. A man gave me a ride back to Harrisburg and told me I was on the wrong road. I suddenly saw the little hobo standing under a sad streetlamp with his thumb stuck out- poor forlorn man, poor little lost sometimeboy, now broken ghost for the penniless wilds. I told my driver the story and he stopped to tell the old man.
"Look here fella, you're on your way west, not east."
"Heh?" said the little ghost. "Can't tell me I don't know my way around here. been walking this country for years. I'm headed to Canady."
"But this ain't the road to Canada, this is the road to Pittsburgh and Chicago." The little man got disgusted with us and walked off. The last I saw of him was his bobbing little white bag dissolving in the darkness of the mournful Alleghenies.

In Pic, there is a whole chapter devoted to the story of this little man. What I thought was possibly an inside joke for Kerouac was this first line here, from Pic, and here is also where the characters in this story leave the man:

"Heh heh. I just misjudged you boys like I misjudged that young man thee years ago, that's all I done. I'm ready to go on if you ain't."
"Well, we can't walk all night," Slim said.
"Go ahead, give up. I'm all set to walk up to Canady and straight on through New York City if that's how the chips fall."
"New York City?" Slim yelled. "Did I hear you say? Ain't this the road west to Pittsburgh?"
Slim stopped, but the man hurried right along. "Say, did you hear me?"Slim yelled. That old man heard him all right but didn't care. "Keep walking," I say. "Maybe I'll be in Canady, maybe I won't. Can't wait around all night." And he kept talkin, and walkin, till all we could see was his shadow fadin in the dark and gone like a ghost.
What I find interesting about this is two fold: how it relates to what I enjoy about Kerouac and how it relates to our common experience.
To me, reading the "Dulouz Legend" (Kerouac's pet name for his library of published works) is a bit like being a detective. There are clues to what he is talking about if you read carefully, like for instance which of his famous friends is a character in the story (since they went by many pseudonyms in his books) and which experience of his is he drawing inspiration from. I liked comparing these two books side by side, the same experience written two completely different ways with different results on the reader. It was enjoyable for me to read this part and recognize it from another book.
It also makes you think of where you might have been in the same situation before, or felt the same way, and what is he saying about humanity through his individual experience.
For instance, have you ever followed someone "down a road" and found out later they had no idea what they were talking about, and felt silly for wasting the energy to go down that "road" with a person? Also, is a misperception something that makes us kinda crazy, or something we all have to deal with from time to time? You could make a case that the little ghost man was mentally ill, but perhaps he was simply misguided, simply stuck on an idea that makes no sense to anyone but him. Don't we all do this from time to time, become convinced that we are on the right path when it is clear to others around us, or is pointed out, that it might not be the way to go? And when the truth is pointed out, do we hold tight to our convictions, like the little hobo, and go off anyway to do what we are planning to do, or do we turn around, like our main characters, and find the right road?

Klamath Falls, Oregon

Moment of Fame in A Kerouac Article

Klamath Falls, Oregon's "City of Sunshine", is the hometown of my husband and his family. We spent our first three married years in and around Klamath Falls, and it is the town where one of our sons was born and another was concieved. Imagine my surprise when I was doing some research on Kerouac for my upcoming journeys this year to visit historical Beat Generation locations and exhibits and I found this little describing a journey up through Klamath! Amazing thing is, it is exactly the Klamath I remember, even though this was written fifty years ago. I know exactly where he is describing. It is hard to read, so I am going to type that part here:

Everything more joyous til at Klamath Falls in the flats of the Klamath River I realized I was in an old-fashioned snowy, joyous American town and took a walk in the winy air. Little kids leaned on the bridge rail. Mills, red-brick alleys, businessmen on affairs in the sunny morning, bell ringing, crisp homelike town that made me homesick for my New York State. Up by great Klamath Lake rolling on the bridge of timber hills leading to east Oregon craters, wastes, rangelands, and that mysteriously unkown junction of Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada.

The part preceding this describes the familiar territory of Northern California towns like Weed and Dorris (the neighboring town to the one my husband went to high school in), and the following passages describe the pass up to the Ashland area and up through the Willamette Valley, some of the most beautiful areas in all of Oregon.
There will be more beat history in this blog, be prepared. I am rereading the "Dulouz Legend" in its entirety to submerge myself in the history before heading to Austin to see, among other things, the original scroll of On the Road and then to San Francisco to visit places integral to the Beat Generation, haunts of Kerouac, including the newly named Kerouac Alley between City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvius Cafe. There will be lots of pictures posted along the way.
Currently I am re-reading On the Road for the third time, getting a third perspective on it, which I will post when I am done.
And the Beat goes on.....in infamy, that is.......

Book Review

Orpheus Emerged

by Jack Kerouac

I read in the introduction that Orpheus Emerged was published posthumously by the estate of Jack Kerouac following his death in 1969, but while looking at the copyright information, I see that it was actually published in 2000 by the "Estate of Stella Kerouac", his widow (the last unlucky wife). My feeling is that Kerouac never pushed this book to publication himself, and perhaps not even Stella, because it represents a stage in his writing career that was somewhat sophomoric. It is clear throughout the book that Kerouac has not yet found his "voice", the style of writing that would make him famous, and in some ways had not found his vision of what he was trying to relay to the world. However, even in saying that, even though this is not the Kerouac that defined the Beat Generation, this is still Kerouac, and it is still beautiful.

This work has not the physical descriptions of place, the poetic prose, the long rambling sentences that made Jack famous, but it retains quality of its own. It acts more as a flash photo, as a description of a group of people at one moment in time, that makes a statement about men, women, and relationships during the late 1940s. It captures the essence of Jack as a young man in a process of self-discovery without being utterly personal, as well as the other writers and drifters that would become an important part of his life as the core of the Beats.


One of the reasons I liked this book was precisely part of that core, because part of my interest in the Beat Generation lies in the friendships and literary ties between this group. I find it compelling that this core drew inspiration and effectively immortalized each other in their various writings. This particular book, or rather "novella", was written during the time that Kerouac first fell in with some of these people at Columbia University, and so it is our first look through Jack's eyes at some of these friends. We have "Leo" as a young Allen Ginsberg, questioning the world and humanity, we have Lucien Carr possibly as the character "Micheal", William Burroughs and his wife as "Anthony" and "Marie" -- the gang's all here.


Each of the characters are reflections of the perceptions Kerouac had of his friends during these early formative years, the years of the "New Vision" literary line, and his perceptions are with the soft glow of early infatuation and the excitement of new ideas, of sharp college minds before becoming jaded and edged with the disappointment of life, the "tired and down and out" version of beat. This early stage of the Beat Generation captured in this book is more true to Kerouac's original meaning of the term "beat", as in "beatific", as in a quest for a deeper spiritual understanding, as illustrated by the discussion of poetry written by Michael, which Leo and Paul criticize but secretly long to understand, poetry speaking of the transcendent path towards a greater connection with the Divine.


My overall impression when finishing the novel was "oh, this one might be my favorite yet," but I say that after putting down each one of his books, and I know that ultimately it would not replace The Town and The City as representative of what I love about Kerouac's writing. The Town and the City ties Jack the intellectual with Jack the hipster, the wide eyed youth looking at postwar America in all its gritty and sublime detail, all the while tying it to the universal and conversely individual experience of visceral life, in words of poetic prose.

The Void Don't Live Here

Uno
I run through my daily digest of forum threads, blogs, emails, the websites I visit, and I end up still feeling frustrated. Maybe today no one is "talking". There is nothing exciting on any of the sites. Maybe I am just not finding what I am "looking for" here. The question is, will it ever be enough? I mean, how many friends, activities, online forums and virtual friends does one need to have to really fill the void, or is it even possible?
I wonder what is wrong with me. It is not like I should be lonely. I have a husband and two little kids who keep me busy. Most of my friends who are raising their children are too busy to get online at all, or to have a social life outside the home.
I have my dog shows and classes. I have my church, where I can talk to like minded people twice a week. I can go to Sunday School, to the worship service, and to Wednesday night Bible Study, and be surrounded by positive people who are interested in my spiritual life and geniunely care for me.
I have my old friends from high school, my old friends from college (or around the age of college), my former team members from the EC, my old friends from the day practice I was at: everywhere I work, I form close friendships with other women that I can't imagine ever losing.
I have my geocaching friends, including the two women I have become close to, and many others that I see at events about once a month or so. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I am in our local forums, talking to these people, or maybe just watching the threads. I go into the main website forums and sometimes talk there, sometimes make friends with people I have never seen.
I have my enrichment forum, my human-animal bond listserve, my primate listserve, my dog show listserve. I am on the dog breeder's email list and get email from other people I have met along the way in the dog world.
I have my blog, with the links to other blogs of people interested in some of the same things. I have blogs saved on my favorites. I link to other people's blogs off my profile. I have my myspace page and my myspace friends, some I know and some I've never met, and sometimes I link to friends of friends of friends of fellow myspacers. I've had long posts back and forth with myspace people I've never met in person.
I still don't feel socially fulfilled. I have decided that this is because I am a complete freak with some emotional blackhole down inside. Sure, it could be because my husband and I have no real partnership. He pretty much ignores me and I him, or else we are fighting. Sometimes we try to do things together, but it always ends badly. Sure it could be because I don't have that special best friend anymore that I spend all my time with, like the girls of my past. Sure it could be just a temporary phase I am going through, some kind of soul stagnation before the big epiphany. Maybe I just need a soulmate.

Absence

Dos

I go to pick my friend Lara up from work. She tells me I sound sad today and asked what was going on. I told her about the above-mentioned. She says, "Nothing is wrong with you. You're fine. I totally understand what you mean, though. Sometimes I feel the same way. It's normal." We get in the car and drive off, and suddenly I don't feel the void anymore.

It hits me that it is all about presence. I feel lonely because I am not with people. The virtual world does not compare with actually being with someone. I could spend time with the friends I mentioned above, but I don't reach out to them when I am feeling alone. I don't call them when I really need to talk to someone or feel isolated from the world. Sometimes, when I am with those people, the ones who know me but don't really know me, I am not my true self.

I know I am a multi-faceted person. I have many parts to my Self, and I show just a few parts to most people. There are only a few that know all of me, see all my sides. Some friends say that maybe I am not being genuine, or I am hiding things from people, because of this, but I think they just are oversimplifying it. We all kind of do this to a degree, show only the sides of us to others that we think they will accept. Most people just can't accept all my sides because they think in black and white, and therefore my duality of being confuses them. I can't be all bad or all good, but I am little of both. Aren't we all like that?

With Lara, I am free. I am happy. I am able to show her all my sides. I know she will accept them all, because she is willing to demonstrate her duality of being, too. We are both bad and good together. We cruise down the road and my void flies out the open window, as we smoke cigarettes and talk about religion.

I have a captive audience, and I play my favorite songs for her and tell her why I love them. I am tired of telling myself, that was old and boring, but playing them who has never heard them before reawakens my senses and I am able to see what it was I loved about them.

In a way, Lara is like the friend I always wanted but never quite had, the Jack to my Neal. I have written so many entries in my real diary about my longing to have a friendship like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady's, but it didn't really happen. My friends either weren't creative enough or weren't passionate enough for me to have that aspect of a friendship that I craved: the sense of symbiotic creationism.

Lara and I are there, man. We are bouncing ideas off each other and running our sentences into each other's and it just flows between us. Unfortunately, at this point of our lives, we also have our own lives to lead and can't simply drop everything to spend all our time together. We would love to, of course, since we have so much fun and so much in common, and we make grand plans, "let's set aside during the week for creative time, for exercise time, for studying the Bible, for scrapbooking, for geocaching or hiking, for spending time with the dogs," but time is a precious commodity for both of us.

The importance, really, is the creative time, because that is THE thing, the Jack and Neal thing. I am the idea man and she is the creative force, the one who gets it done. I am running my mouth Neal-style and she says, "man, you really need a tape recorder, record some of the things you say" and I laugh at how I've heard that before, and geez what we would have done if Neal had been running a tape recorder when he was talking, only he was much faster, much wilder, much more alive than me, and here's Jack, aka Lara, figuring out how we are going to fit it all in.

And we ride down the highway, as I play my music for her, every now and then throwing in the naughty lesbian karoake version. We ramble on into the night with our spirituality and sensuality riding shotgun, and there is no room in this car for that void.

Presence