If Jack Kerouac were alive today, it seems quite likely that since he liked to be in the avant-garde contingent of contemporary writers, he would be blogging, but what sort of items would he deem worthy of his attention? Would he point out the fact that after serving seven years as President, George W. Bush’s apologists were stoutly advocating the idea that some problems were the result of Bill Clinton’s policies but a mere 8 months after President Barack Obama was sworn in, those same Republican folks were firmly maintaining that now all of America’s current problems are the results of the new President’s agenda?
Perhaps Jack Kerouac would point out that the fact that Clinton had a long lasting effect and that the new President had quickly taken control might be a subtle indication that Bush’s interim period had been ineffective and impotent. Do Republicans’ really want to imply that the USA’s first Negro President was a virile buck who has put his mark on world affairs that quickly and that Bush never managed to achieve that in seven years?
After reading “Why Kerouac Matters,” by John Leland, this columnist realizes that a misperception had formed. This reader had leaped to the assumption that Kerouac would sympathize with the political views of writers like Paul Krasner, Art Kunkin (of Los Angeles Free Press fame), or Hunter S. Thompson. Such a surmise is very wrong. Leland asserts that millions of Kerouac’s readers have misunderstood what Kerouac was saying.
Leland postulates that the father of the Beatnik movement actually held strong conservative convictions as far as political philosophy was concerned. The literary critic then doles out the evidence to back up his contention. (See page 28 in particular.)
Kerouac did not inject many (if any) references to the Korean War in his novels.
Who will win the Series? Although Kerouac’s name was synonymous with New York City, he didn’t seem to care much about pro sports let alone root for the Dodgers, Giants, or Yankees.
For as much traveling as Kerouac did, he hardly ever extols tourist attractions. He seemed to concentrate on jazz, drinking, and sex. That and his spiritual visions endeared him to the hippies and they assumed that his mystical moments constituted permission to experiment with mind altering drugs.
Would Kerouac have blogged about topics which were not to be found on the Internet, such as the hypothetical “Bloggers’ Hall of Fame,” or would he have extolled patriotic approval of all of George W. Bush’s war crimes? What would you expect of someone whose hero was William F. Buckley?
If someone doesn’t start the Blogger’s Hall of Fame, what good is blogging?
How can a blogger compare the Golden Gate Bridge to the Sydney Harbor Bridge if he doesn’t make the effort to see and walk across both of them? Why state a conclusion if there is no chance that the results won’t take the blogger a step closer to just getting nominated for a place in such a hypothetical institution?
Kerouac said “Why must I always travel from here to there as if it mattered where one is?”
Isn’t the answer the same as the one to the question about why did that guy climb Mount Everest; “Because it’s there!”?
Kerouac did rewrites and polished his work and presented one draft of “On the Road” on one long continuous sheet of paper as if it were a product of a spontaneous burst of creative energy. He gave encouragement to bloggers who tends to write fast and post in haste by saying: “Why let your internalized high school English teacher edit what God gave you?”
Speaking of putting a roll of teletype paper into your typewriter and starting a marathon of keystroking, the folks at National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) are about to start their annual November typa-thon competiton. Kerouac wannabes, you have been given ample notification.
Can you just imagine a talk show chat featuring Jack Kerouac and fellow conservative Ann Coulter?
Just before the posting process for this column was started, a quick bit of fact checking shows that the site for the annual blog awards (http://2009.bloggies.com/) contains a notation for repeat winners that they are considered to be at the Hall of Fame level of achievement.
Who would get a link on a Kerouac Blog? How about the teacher going around the world on a bicycle? (http://teacherontwowheels.com/) Talk about a road trip.
Why did this columnist and so many others leap to assumptions about Kerouac if the ideas weren’t in the words? Leland leaves the questions about the possibility that those messages were present on the subconscious level and thereby more effectively communicated, to other future critics-analysts.
After reading Leland’s book, a re-read of “On the Road” seems quite likely.
“Why Kerouac Matters” doesn’t have an Index. (Boooo!) Somewhere in the book, didn’t Leland mention a jazz composition titled “Kerouac”? Without an Index, that fact slips through the existentialist’s time warp and disappears into the either. An Index would also help to determine which of George Shearing’s tracks Kerouac liked and which he didn’t because he thought they showed a new attitude of cool and commercial.
In “On the Raod,” Kerouac wrote: “He said we were a band of Arabs coming to blow up New York.”
Now, the disk jockey will play Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray’s “The Hunt,” Prez Prado’s “Mambo Jambo,” and Slim Gaillard’s “C-Jam Blues.” It’s time for us to bop out of here. Have a “Go moan for man” type week.
One for the Conspiracy Theory Hall of Fame?
[Note: Conspiracy theories, like astrological forecasts, should be read only for their entertainment value. They belong in the file labeled: “fictionalized speculation.”]
When the Ayatollah Khomeini shot to the top of the current events chart for his shenanigans in Iran, it seemed to this columnist, like we had seen him before. One day while plowing through our massive collection of totally irrelevant cultural events file, we stumbled upon a photo of
Howard Hughes.
Voila! It wasn’t just one of those identical twins separated at birth things; it was a “same guy, different photos at different ages” type deal (IMHO). Just compare a photo of the Ayatollah and one of Hughes. Note the similarity of the folds in the ears, the nostrils, and the eyes. Eliminatory, my dear Watson, it’s obviously the same guy in different stages in his life.
We asked around. No one had ever seen Howie (we used to live in Marina del Rey, which has Hughes Aircraft as an adjacent neighbor) and the Ayatollah in the same room at the same time.
“Lois, have you ever noticed how Clark Kent always misses being able to write an eyewitness account of Superman’s greatest feats?” Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. If you know what we mean.
We tried our best to pedal our theory to the mavens of contemporary American culture but alas we garnered as much attention as a voice crying in the wilderness would.
If a conspiracy theory (CT) is to flourish, it has to be theoretically possible. You can’t go for stories about the captain of the Titanic being found 60 years later with his pipe still lit. You have to cook up something that just might squeak by on a level of marginal feasibility.
We went back to the drawing board.
James Dean and Elvis were rumored to be still alive long after their deaths had been reported in the news media. So we asked our self: How much documentation was there for the death of Che Guevara?
What if he had promised to turn states evidence and rat out his amigos in the Cuban Revolution in return for amnesty? Could he have been taken in to the “Witness Protection Program” and given some phony ID and a few bucks to start life over after allegedly being “shot down in an attempt to flee”?
We came up with a mental image of Che being on a city council in a small University somewhere in California and fighting with the college kids. (Gosh now that we live in such a city, maybe one of these Tueday nights, we should skip Qi Gong class and attend a city council meeting?)
We ran this bit of unsubstantiated speculation past a high school buddy, several years ago, and he did his best to refute our theory. He reassured us that he personally had seen a photo on the desk of the guy who worked next to his that showed Che dead on the ground. Our good buddy mumbled some esoteric exotica about JM/Wave, Ted Shackley, Phat City, and the like as his evidence to substantiate his claim that Che was buried in Bolivia.
We countered that this guy, whom he called Felix Rodriguez, was most likely in on the ruse and had agreed to pose with Che’s prone figure for the photographic proof that the revolutionary had been mortally wounded while attempting to flee. (Didja know that in the days of B&W movies Hershey’s chocolate syrup was often used to simulate blood?) In return, we asserted, Che spilled the beans about such things as the kidnapping of Juan Manuel Fangio and other historic Cuban events which preceded Fidel’s putsch.
Now that photoshopping changes are readily available to any photographer with the bucks to buy the program and a lap top where he can run it, photographs are (to the best of our knowledge) no longer accepted as evidence in any court proceedings.
We used to work with an ad sales rep who, we adamantly asserted, used an assumed identity that had been provided by the witness protection program folks. They had assisted her in the efforts to erase all traces of her life as “Eva Braun.” She did a Dr. Strangelove-like denial of the idea.
Our efforts to dabble in a one man plot to concoct something that would be described as a cutting edge conspiracy theory that belongs in the Conspiracy Theory Hall of Fame pale in comparison to what we have recently found on online. We were Googling around with things like “Blond Ghost” and “Dealey Plaza” when we stumbled on the most outrageous conspiracy theory we’ve ever encountered in a lifelong fascination with conspiracy theories for fun and profit.
If we couch the views in the form of a question that means that this columnist doesn’t personally substantiate their wild assertions. We just want to bring some new theories to the attention of the people who are connoisseurs of concocted conjecture.
Cub reporters are always urged, for legal reasons, to pepper their stories with words like “allegedly,” “reportedly,” “assert,” and to inundate the readers with phrases like “according to a police spokesman,” and “unsubstantiated conjecture.”
So we were sure that we found the next candidate for the Conspiracy Theory Hall of Fame when we found folks asking: “Was George W. Bush’s real father JFK?” They follow that up by asking “Did George H. W. Bush, play the role of jealous husband, and hire killers to rub him out in Dallas?”
Their wild assertions do seem to tie up loose ends and nagging question concerning JFK’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, in an Occam’s razor sort of way.
Folks (not just the good ole boys in Texas) can readily comprehend the “jealous husband” rational for using a gun.
According to this new way of explaining the Dallas Assassination, the common connecting thread is the CIA. Here are some links for readers who want to do their own play-along-at-home sleuthing and fact checking about this wild bit of speculation. (Embedded links seem so Tyler Durdin-ish.)
http://www.aviationbanter.com/showthread.php?t=4080
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://bottleofbits.info/econ/faces/Lf-Ts.jpg&imgrefurl=http://bottleofbits.info/econ/faces/familiar_faces.htm&usg=__ZsOYgQppbwST7wF9SI28FdzQSPQ=&h=64&w=243&sz=9&hl=en&start=19&itbs=1&tbnid=gF8fVyuzydd8bM:&tbnh=29&tbnw=110&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dblond%2Bghost%2Bdealy%2Bplaza%26hl%3Den%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26tbs%3Disch:1
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/custom/JFKsealgoss.jpg
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rumormillnews.com/pix5/bush_kennedy_assassination_dallas_11.22.63.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi%3Fnoframes%3Bread%3D161548&usg=__uQ0GAzNWQj3DAUbA6WOQ6_uQ6i0=&h=510&w=372&sz=42&hl=en&start=15&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=jB5qGponYyUeBM:&tbnh=131&tbnw=96&prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddealey%2Bplaza%2Bbarbara%2Bpierce%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26tbs%3Disch:1
If a columnist writes about a new dance craze sweeping the discos, that doesn’t mean he has to be the fellow who “invented” the dance. It doesn’t mean that he has to be able to do the dance. It just means that, as a reporter and critic of the contemporary culture, he wants to point out what the latest development in that sphere of culture is. For those who are fascinated by conspiracy theories, this columnist just wants to bring their wild, intriguing question to the attention conspiracy theory fans. When it comes to drawing conclusions; you are on your own.
Herb Caen, who has his own room in the (imaginary) Columnists’ Hall of Fame, defended his columnistic style thus (From “Don’t Call it Frisco” Doubleday hardback pages 25 – 26): “That brings us to the third type – the “scattershot” column, crammed with short items on a variety of subjects. This kind of column is, obviously, a lot more work, but it attracts a wider audience, at least theoretically. As that great practitioner of the art, Walter Winchell, once expressed it: ‘People don’t get bored if you change the subject often enough.’”
Now, our disk jockey will play: Jimmy Dean’s song “Big, Bad John,” Dion’s song “Abraham, Martin, and John,” and Tom Clay’s overdubbed version of “What the World Needs Now.” (It is on Youtube and guaranteed to make surviving hippies weep.) Now, we gotta skedaddle. Have a “you’re not gonna believe this . . .” type of week.