Monday, June 28, 2004
Jack Kerouac’s been good to me. Whenever I need some cash I do a painting of him and sell it and get some much-needed moolah. Jack “I’m just a bum, a dharma bum.” would appreciate my efforts.
To do a portrait I need to look at a picture of the person. So I grabbed a book, “Door Wide Open” out of my to-read stack and used the picture on the cover as my model. It turned out okay. Half of his face is in shadow; the other half in the brilliant fluorescent light of an all-night café.
Later in the week when I finished the painting, the book was still lying on the couch so it was a choice of teevee or book. I chose the book.
I liked it very much because it is an exchange of letters between Jack and Joyce Glassman his part-time year-and-a-half girlfriend 1957-58. She was a New Yorker, 21, who worked as a secretary at a publishing house. Her curious streak lead her to the all-night cafes and what would become called The Beat Generation. She met him right before “On the Road” was published and functioned as “my little secretary in black stockings.”
Allen Ginsberg, a lover of her friend Elise Gowen, introduced her to Jack out of more of a need to find a place to crash than a romantic liaison although it did become that…she swooned at the thought of meeting this mythic figure named Jack Kerouac, a literary badboy, with dark skin, black hair and the bluest of eyes.
I like private correspondence (have a site on just that subject myself although I never put up the lover’s letters as a sort of protection) and through the letters you really get a feel for the constrictiveness of the conservative 50s. Men had a defined role to play out and woman had a much more corseted path.
Jack wrote like he talked (if you like an author try to get some of their spoken-word stuff,, you will be able to reproduce the rhythm and cadence and inflections when you read and heighten your experience.) using lots of dashes and spelling things phonetically and getting the beat in there.
When I finished I was telling a friend about the book and he handed me a 1980 copy of “Minor Characters” by the same author. This was the same territory covered in-depth as a coming-of-age novel. It blew my mind. It was about New York (the Village), the 50s, Mexico (dysentery & no money), San Francisco (“Howl” was just banned), beats & fake beatniks and beatnik parties, and the action art movement, and about drugs and road trips and Memere (Jack’s mother) all in a very detailed way.
Here are some things I found interesting or profound or just goofy:
“Self-destruction can be viewed as the opposite of apathy, the final proof that one can function.”
“Real Life was sexual. Or rather it seemed to take the form of sex. This was the area of ultimate adventure, where you would dare or not dare. It was much less a question of desire.”
Jack Kerouac did not drive. He didn’t know how and was afraid to do it. He took buses and planes. Crazy!
108847411331426686">6:55:00 PM
Scientists have studied children to see why they are entering puberty earlier than normal. It seems that they lack the required amount of melatonin. You get melatonin from the sun, so if you stay indoors all of the time strapped to a 1984-monitor doing video games or watching teevee you don't get the sunshine that caveman did.
It appears that living by the sun, rising at dawn, hunting and gathering, then going to sleep when the sun set was a good idea.
I wonder if this correlates to why cubesters look and act old? Ghostskin is scary.
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