This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Between now and November 8th, the Nation will be caught up in a frenzy of debates, campaign ads and political commentary. Raising the visibility of veterans working for peace is more important than ever. In what has become a polarizing global climate, Veterans For Peace has a unique opportunity to highlight that #PeaceIsPossible. We can and MUST use every venue to share our experiences and help people understand that war is not the answer.
Every week, from now until the election, Veterans For Peace will release a list of questions for the presidential candidates, and we want YOUR help
Sign Up for the #ReclaimArmisticeDay Thunderclap, which will go out on November 11th at 11am with a message "#PeaceIsPossible - Celebrating peace, not war, is the best way to honor veterans"
Chuck Searcy Featured in "Defusing War's Perfect Soldiers"
Chuck Searcy, VFP member and Project Renew Coordinator is featured in a new documentary! "Defusing War's Perfect Soldiers" is a new documentary that focuses on unexploded ordnances, which is a worldwide concern. By some estimates, 100 million or more antipersonnel land mines remain strewn across the globe, lurking as menaces.Since 1975, more than 40,000 Vietnamese are believed to have been killed and about 60,000 others maimed by what is known as unexploded ordnance — land mines, artillery shells, cluster bombs and the like that failed to detonate decades ago.
VFP members, Tarak Kauff and Ken Ash, are headed to Standing Rock to deliver a truckload of supplies.
We know members will be traveling to the camp in the upcoming weeks. VFP's presence is important but also critical that we follow the guidelines set out by the indigenous activism already taking place. A new amazing resource has been created for allies traveling to Standing Rock.
If you are planning on traveling to Standing Rock, please contact the new Standing Rock VFP Committee:
Brian Trautman: trautman@veteransforpeace Tom Palumbo: tpeacenik@gmail.com Tarak Kauff: takauff@gmail.com Martin Bates: learn7peace@yahoo.com Veterans For Peace stands in solidarity with the historic resistance at Standing Rock. We join our Indigenous sisters and brothers in opposing the construction of an oil pipeline by the Dakota Access company that threatens drinking water and sacred burial grounds. <Full Statement Here>
Have you started thinking about what you're doing for Armistice Day?
Veterans For Peace is calling on all our members to, once again, take a stand for peace this Armistice Day. We call for the observance of Veterans Day to be in keeping with the holiday’s original intent, to be “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day’." After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to re-brand November 11 as Veterans Day. Honoring the warrior quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
If you need tabling materials or VFP promo items for Armistice Day, please e-mailcasey@veteransforpeace.org! No matter what action you decide to take, please let us know so we can promote the work that you're doing.
This election cycle, with its abysmal political dialogue, is overwhelming. We know that our work continues, regardless of the political outcome. The world and indeed our planet are facing a deep and challenging emergency, with perpetual wars, 65 million refugees of war and violence, the growing climate crisis, economic inequality and continuing social and racial injustice.
Arguably one of the most respected voices of the Peace and Justice movement, Noam Chomsky, is "delighted to register [his] strong support" for the Peace Pledge! Check out this video on why Chomsky tells us why he is endorsing the Peace Pledge!
She, Julie Lawton she, was fearful, preternaturally fearful, of the events ahead that evening. The cause for that concern was the Freshman Mixer to be held that early October 1960 night in the chandelier-bedecked central ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown Boston for the incoming freshmen at Boston University, the school that had awarded her a scholarship that had been gratefully accepted in the strapped-for-cash Lawton household. Part of her concern was that she had already lied, or half lied, to her parents about the event. The official title of the event, reflecting some old-time Jazz Age 1920s F. Scott Fitzgerald prejudice, was the Freshman Smoker. Since her parents (and she and her four brothers and sisters) were strict Lord’s Witness Pentecostal Baptists who abhorred, absolutely abhorred, smoking and drinking alcohol if she had tried to “sell” them their permission to go under that signature she would be spending the night in her lonely dorm room.
Another part of her concern was that she had lied, or half lied, to them as well that this “mixer” was simply an event to introduce the far-fling members of the Class of 1964 to each other in an informal way rather than its well-deserved reputation as a dance that would serve as the prelude to the first of many wild parties that would be an iron-clad part of most undergraduates’ experience. See, the parental Lawtons (and her siblings) also abhorred dancing, and of late, particularly dancing to the devil’s music, rock and roll.
Finally, Miss Julie Lawton had lied, or half lied to her parents about the formalities of the event. It had been billed as a semi-formal meaning that she would have to get a dress, a dress that would show more than modesty, family Lawton would dictate. Would show her shoulders, would show her legs a little higher than right for a Lord’s Witness girl of eighteen. Julie Lawton had reasons to be fearful of the events ahead in that evening’s next few hours.
But Julie wanted to go, first casually and off-handedly wanted to go just because back home up in Lincoln, Maine, under the watchful eyes of parents and siblings she had no occasion, or frankly then, no desire, to go to dances or other school social events. As the day came nearer though, she began to desperately want to go, desperately want to go, because her three dorm roommates created such a whirlwind around the event that she was ready, willing and able to lie, well half lie, to go. It was her roommates, Rebecca, Sandy, and Leah, all from New York City or Long Island and about ten thousand years ahead of Julie on the social wisdom calendar who called the shots throughout as she could hear them bubbling up all day over this and that thing that needed, just needed to be done in preparation. She reflected, as she made her own final preparation, how it had been Sandy who had told her to “sell” the thing as an innocent mixer, and to practically declare to her parents that if she didn’t go dire consequences would result around her scholarship. Yes, they, those three charming (and they were) New York girls, put on the full court press. But the biggest part of all was played by Leah who agreed, actually, practically begged Julie to borrow her red, velvety crimson red, semi-formal dress for the occasion. And so she was ready, ready to face the fearful night knowing she had sinned, but thinking that as long as she just attended the dance and didn’t dance things would be all right.
What she didn’t count on, or didn’t expect to count on, was her effect on everybody, male or female, but especially male, as she made her way into first the hotel lobby and then the ballroom dance floor that night. Even guys, older guys, maybe dreaming of past conquests, who were escorting older women, maybe their wives, turned to get a second look as she entered the lobby walking toward the entrance to the central ballroom. And who could blame them. A Botticelli beauty, Botticelli out of the Renaissance is what her classmate in Introduction to English Literature, Frankie Larkin, called her while explaining to her, candidly, why every non-Irish English writer was nothing but a heathen, a style-less heathen and why she should go out with him, as a friend, of course one Friday night back when school had just started. (She refused, dating boys un-chaperoned, dating strange boys, strange heathen Roman Catholic Irish boys her parents would say, was also abhorred among the Lord’s Witness crowd). She, not knowing who Botticelli was, snuck over to the school library one afternoon to see for herself and saw on the cover of a book of art on the subject herself staring back at her from the cover. (She had also blushed, blushed as crimson as the dress she would wear, when she found out from reading the summary under picture that the model was Botticelli’s mistress. A whore who under Lord’s Witness doctrine, and despite Jesus’ view of the possible salvation of fallen women, a woman to be shunned. At least that was her first reaction.)
Yes, long blond hair, kind of curled, and very real, pale white skin reflecting not absence of manual outdoor work like in the 15th century but many hours in the librarystriving to get ahead, get ahead in this world for her parents who sacrificed much for her, and, of course, getting ahead for the Lord. Pale blue eyes, pale like the Pacific Ocean blue, on days when it is acting up to its name, small breasts, a little tall for the times, an interesting figure, not full, not Marilyn- full like the times desire, but enough bone to warrant another peek, and no make-up when Frankie Larkin made his pitch back in September . (Yes, frowned upon by the brethren). But tonight a little sinful blush on her cheeks (courtesy of Leah) and some more sinful light touch of lipstick, very red. Oh yes, and that red dress, that red dress which showed almost perfect shoulders, and spoke of some gallant putting his tired weary head against it to shelter him from life’s storms, and just enough showing above the knee to set other dreams in motion. The whole effect, to give a more modern example, like some blonde (real blonde) Lauren Bacall as she put Humphrey Bogart through his paces in To Have Or Have Not.
And all to sit, or rather stand, by some forlorn wall (lucky wall) and looking around as she spent the first half of the night just talking to her roommates (when they were not occupied with being run at by every Bill, Harry, and Sam with eyes, and no hopes, forlorn nor otherwise, to get close to Julie), talking to some boy classmates, or refusing about twenty-six invitations to dance. She seemed happy, if others weren’t, just to take in the sights of the night. Not knowing that she couldn’t dance, or dance well, the guys turned down went away glum but a little suspicious that they had not made the cut and moved on to other things.
This Lord’s Witness thing was a big obstacle when Julie first met her roommates. They could not understand why she kept saying no to everything they suggested that smacked of fun and giving her patented answer of it’s a sin. They knew of sin, but they also had come from the secular city, not the city of god, and so as the weeks passed by they, almost unconsciously, had developed a campaign to bring Julie into the 20thcentury. Tonight was a glowing result, or almost glowing. One thing that had perked Julie’s interest during their campaign was the records (and record player) each girl had to keep her company on those lonely Thursday nights when they were resting from social engagements. As one would already suspect she had no records and no record player for the now well-worn reason that she abhorred such devil’s work.
One Thursday night though Rebecca had put on Chubby Checker’s The Twist and she and Leah had done their gyrations to this number while Julie watched. Julie was intrigued as the girls well noticed. Leah called for her to try it. Naturally she deferred, deferred in ancient father wisdom, especially after Leah had told her that Chubby Checker was black and she shot back that black music, like rock and roll, was the devil’s music and everybody knew that. Still she was intrigued and succumbed after Leah suggested that dancing in a dorm room was not really dancing. While she wasn’t very good at it technically, although the gyrations are easily self-taught, she did cut a very nice figure against that dorm room wall shadow. But enough of campaign talk and Julie war stories.
At dance intermission she ran across Frankie Larkin with his date and found that she was a little disappointed with herself that she had not gone out on a date with him, now that she thought about it a little. But more disappointed just then that he had not asked her to dance, although she would have declined. All she could think of though was that too bad he was a heathen because he had some nice qualities, and especially nice to talk to, even if he was a little full of himself.
The cover band started playing signaling the beginning of the second half of dance and while Julie had had her share of fun she was a little tired of standing against that forlorn wall and decided to take the Green Line trolley back to her Commonwealth Avenue dorm after a few more songs. A couple of songs later though the band started to do a blast cover of The Twist and the crowded room jumped. Julie became a little flush. She spied Frankie standing by himself for a minute (his date had gone to the ladies’ room), ran over to him, grabbed his arm, and pulled him to the dance floor. And then to everybody’s amazement did the twist, did the twist in public. Guys, and a few girls too, kind of looked over and wondered, and the guys wondered why they had not been picked, had not made the cut. But mainly they looked, the look of some forlorn dream.
Now Julie did not perform a masterful twist, and she didn’t have to. Put those sensual gyrations together with that blonde hair, those red lips, that slim figure, those well-formed legs, and that dazzling red dress and you have, well, you had the stuff of dreams, man-sized dreams. After the song was over Julie thanked the bedazzled and smiling Frankie, went over and grabbed her coat, and headed for the train. Walking to the stop she knew two things, she had been the queen of the dance that night even if some other girl would wear the official crown. And she had, finally, come of age. Why? She was wishing, she was sinfully wishing, that one Frankie Larkin would spend that night feverishly tossing and turning in his sleep.
*****Yes, You Had Better Shake, Rattle And Roll That Thing-With Big Joe Turner In
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
In
the old days, the old days meaning around the turn of the century, the 20th
century let’s make it clear, when the songs of the people, of Mister’s
plantation miseries and his kindred sharecropper rip-off woes were just
starting to be weaned off of the old time religion gospel high heaven Jehovah
savior be with us poor and despised hymn book provided by Master’s so-called
good wishes a man could speak of more mundane things and not be damned (or a
woman either but that would come later when the female blues-belters came to
prominence in the small towns of the South, you know the infinite number of
Smith’s including Queen bee Bessie).
Yes
it took a while to undo that wretched thing dropped down on the planation by
Master’s devious methods way back when, when he took the forbears from out of
Africa, pushed the Middle Passage and then robbed man, woman and child by placing
you know the damn Christian yoke around every neck to add insult to injury,
slavery times injury as if Master’s whip was not enough. You know got the precious
brethren of the light to get behind that compulsion to testify, to call yourself
own truth self a sinner against some forlorn god who was not listening as the
more savvy of the brethren figured out, figured out fast come rebellion time,
come time to stand up and cross the lines to the Union side with what you had
on your back or what you could grab from Master’s ill-provisioned shack. That
damn music that accompanied the psalms to consider yourself "saved." We
know how hard it was to not see the new dispensation, the new secular worldview
as some of the devil’s work, the devil’s work, the devil’s music in some households
all the way up to rock and roll and not just
in some Baptist-tinged folks but hardy white dirt poor Catholic believers too.
The
music of the folk had come down from the muddy swamps, down from Mister’s sweated
plantation field, down from the stinking turpentine factories and bloody
sawmills and in place of praise the lord, lord save us, lord lead us to the promise
land began to speak of some rascal like Mister Joe Turner (not the Joe Turner
of the title above but mentioned below but a ne’er-do-well who came and stole whatever
could be stolen) began of speaking of hard, hard drinking, hard lovin’ maybe
with your best gal's friend if it came right down to the core, maybe flipping
the bird on you and running around all flouncy with your best
friend, maybe some hard-hearted "do this do that" woman on
your mind, yeah, the old birth of the blues days, the blue being
nothing but a good woman or man on your mind anyway, around the turn of the 20th
century and you can check this out if you want to and not take my word for it a
black guy, a rascally black guy of no known home, a drifter, maybe a hobo for
all I know, and who knows what else named Joe Turner held forth among the folk.
Old Joe would come around the share-cropper down South neighborhoods and
steal whatever was not nailed down, including your woman, which depending on
how you were feeling might be a blessing and if you in a spooning mood might be
a curse on that bastard's head. Then Joe Turner would leave and move on to
the next settlement and go about his plundering ways. Oh sure like lots of
blues and old country music as it got passed on in the oral traditions there
were as many versions of the saga as there were singers everybody adding their
own touch. But it was always old Joe Turner doing the sinning and scratching
for whatever he could scratch for.
But for the most part the story line
about old ne’er-do-well Joe Turner rang very similar over time. So Joe Turner
got his grizzly old self put into song out in the Saturday juke joints, out in
the back woods sneak cabin with no electricity, maybe no instruments worthy of the
name either, some old beat to perdition Sears catalogue order guitar, hell, maybe
just some wire between two nails if times were tough or that Sears model was in
hock at some Mister’s pawnshop, out in places like the Mississippi Delta where
more legends were formed than you could shake a stick, got sanctified (the once
church gospel holy amen kind just didn’t do the job when a man had the thirst)
on old Willie’s liquor, white lightning home-made liquor got to
working, and some guy, maybe not the best singer if you asked around but a guy
who could put words together to tell a story, a blues story, and that guy with
a scratch guitar would put some verses together and the crowd would egg him on.
Make the tale taller as the night went until everybody petered out and that
song was left for the next guy to embellish.
By
most accounts old Joe was bad man, a very bad man, bad mojo man, bad medicine
as the folk call what ails but can't be fixed just short of as bad as Mister’s
plantation foremen where those juke joint listeners worked sunup to sundown six
days a week or just short of as bad as the enforcers of Mister James
Crow’s go here, not there, do this not that, move here not there laws
seven days a week. Yeah, Joe was bad alright once he got his wanting habits on,
although I have heard at least one recording from the Lomaxes who went all over
the South in the 1930s and 1940s trying to record everything they could out in
the back country where Joe Turner was something like a combination Santa Claus
and Robin Hood. Hell, maybe he was and some guy who lost his woman to wily Joe
just got sore and bad mouthed him. Passed that bad mouth on and the next
guy who lost his woman to somebody pinned the rap on Joe, Joe Turner, yeah it
was that old rascal that did her in, turned her against her hard-working ever-loving
man. Stranger things have happened.
In any case the Joe Turner, make that
Big Joe, Turner I want to mention here as far as I know only stole the show
when he got up on the bandstand and played the role of “godfather” of rock and
roll. Yeah, that is what I want to talk about, about how one song, and
specifically the place of Big Joe and one song, Shake Rattle and Roll in
the rock pantheon. No question Big Joe and his snapping beat has a place in the
history of rhythm and blues which is one of the musical forbear strands of rock
and roll. The question is whether Shake is also the first serious effort
to define rock and roll. If you look at the YouTube version of Big Joe
be-bopping away with his guitar player doing some flinty stuff and that sax player
searching for that high white note and Big Joe snapping away being very
suggestive about who should shake and what she should shake you can make a very
strong case for that place. Add in that Bill Haley, Jerry Lee, and Elvis among
others in the rock pantheon covered the song successfully and that would seem
to clinch the matter.
In 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of
the debut of Shake by Big Joe, there had been considerable talk and
writing again as there is on such occasions by some knowledgeable rock
critics about whether Shake was the foundational song of rock. That
controversy brought back to my mind the arguments that me and my corner boys
who hung out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner in Carver, a town about thirty
miles south of Boston, had on some nothing better to do Friday nights during
high school (meaning girl-less, dough-less or both nights). I was the primary
guy who argued for Big Joe and Shake giving that be-bop guitar and that
wailing sexy sax work as my reasoning while Jimmy Jenkins swore that Ike
Turner’s frantic piano-driven and screeching sax Rocket 88 (done under
an alias of the Delta Cats apparently for contract reasons a not uncommon
practice when something good came up but you would not have been able to do it
under the label you were contracted to) was the be-bop beginning and Sam
Lowell, odd-ball Sam Lowell dug deep into his record collection, really his
parents' record collection which was filled mainly with folk music and the
blues edge played off that to find Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall.
And the other corner boys like our leader Frankie Riley lined up accordingly
(nobody else came up with any others so it was those three).
Funny thing Frankie and most everybody
else except I think Fritz Taylor who sided with Jimmy Jenkins sided with me and
Big Joe. The funny part being that several years ago with the advent of YouTube
I started to listen to the old stuff as it became available on-line and now I
firmly believe that Ike’s Rocket 88 beats out Shake for the honor
of the be-bop daddy of rock and roll. As for the old time Joe Turner, done come
and gone, well, he will have to wait in line like the rest of us if he wants
his say. What do you think of that?
*****Once Again The Life Of The Dharma-Jack Kerouac-A Biography By Tom Clark
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Sam Lowell has of later liked to review books, movies, musical CDs for various citizen journalist blogs and other such cyberspace outlets as relaxation writing from the drear of his professional writing, writing legal briefs, memoranda and motions for himself and other lawyers. Usually he does such avocational writing as a wisp-of-willow affair depending on some prompt that would get him going like happened recently after hearing a song on YouTube by Bob Dylan from his prime days, Like a Rolling Stone. While listening to that song he noticed on the sidebar which gives other performances that one might wish to look at a segment from the D.A. Pennebaker documentary, Don’t Look Back, where Dylan, his then shortly to be abandoned flame and great folksinger in her own right, Joan Baez, and his then road manager and folksinger Bob Neuwirth were sitting in some English hotel singing bits of Hank Williams’ Lost Highway. That got him interested in seeing the whole documentary which had just been rereleased in the Criterion films series and which he ordered on Netflix and later reviewed. Such helter-skelter choices are the norm for his selection process.
Not so on the subject of the “beats,” those cool cats and kittens (I guess that is the way it would have been put by hipsters in North Beach and the Village when beat was pure before the movement became just another commodity to be sold on television like cars or soap) who came shortly before our coming of age time down in working-class Carver where we grew up and were slightly singed by the beat flame. That “working-class” before Carver was not accidental, not for Sam anyway since his “max daddy,” “be-bop daddy,” or any way you want to say it literary hero from that period was the hipster mad monk novelist Jack Kerouac who had grown up about sixty miles north of Carver in working-class mill town getting ready to move south for cheaper labor Lowell. So in Sam’s eyes that designation was important then although maybe not quite as deeply thought through as recently when he had been on a tear re-reading most of Jack’s work.
Here again chance plays a part in what he would review. After having read a few of the more important novels, the iconic classic (we must use the word “iconic” these days to keep up with the professional users of that word which is now something of a flavor of the month term for any event or person who had had at least fifteen minutes of fame along the way) On The Road, Desolation Angels, and Big Sur he had picked up the Ann Charter-edited Portable Jack Kerouac which led him to her early informative biography. But Sam was looking for something more than a literary appraisal of Kerouac’s work, important as that is, than the Charter biography provided. He was looking for tidbits, pieces of information about Kerouac’s time in Lowell, the effect that growing up working poor had on him growing up in that city by the Merrimac. In short Sam wanted to expand on that idea of why Kerouac had, even if at a remove, on him, us as kids growing up in working poor Carver, then the cranberry capital of the world. So he went through some other later biographies which blossomed especially around the time in 2007 of the 50th anniversary of the publication of On The Road.
One of the books that satisfied his desire for biographical information was Tom Clark’s Jack Kerouac: A Biography (Paragon House, 1990) which he told us about one night, us being Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Sam Eaton, Ralph Morris and me, when we gathered together for our periodic night out at the Rusty Nail in downtown Boston and which he wrote a review of later.Here’s what Sam had to say about Jack Kerouac, warts and all:
“I have been on a Jack Kerouac tear of late (if you do not know who he is at this point either think On The Road, the famous alternate hitchhike road to life from the white picket fence norm book he wrote putting flesh and blood to the “beat” movement of the 1950s, think of the guy who the media proclaimed as the “king of the beats” after writing that novel which he wore kicking and screaming or if those suggestions fail ask your parents, or ouch, grandparents for they will know of him, probably headed out on the road themselves if only for a minute after reading the book). I have been reading not so much his works, although I have been doing some of that too but reading biographies, essays, and other sketches to get a better grasp on my fascination about this working class guy from Lowell not so far from where I grew up, about a guy who grew up from hunger as I did, and a guy who for a minute anyway gave the literary set a run for its money with a new way of writing novels.
He called it, maybe disingenuously “spontaneous writing” since he was an incredible re-writer and reviser of everything he wrote as well as a meticulously organized keeper of his own archives but probably better is a take from a Norman Mailer title-“advertisements for myself” since the vast majority of his work was an on-going saga of his life and times spread out from the 1930s with Maggy Cassidy to just before his death in 1969 Vanities of Duclouz. (Allen Ginsberg, the poet, his early friend and road companion, and no mean hand as a rememberer himself called Jack “the great rememberer” of their generation and that is probably right.)
That said, I have gained a lot of information not previously known by looking into the life of the man who probably with the exceptions of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway (yeah, Hemingway is always in the mix somewhere when you talk guys, guy writers in the 20th century, guys who influenced “modern” writing) has influenced me more than all others in a lifetime of reading. This is a little bit ironic since I was a shade bit too young to appreciate as a child of the generation of ’68 (you know those of us who raised hell with the government, with society, hell, with Jack who disowned us when the deal went down although we, I, did not disown him, or his influence in the 1960s).
Now there are several ways to approach doing a biography about a writer. The two ways that come to mind most readily in the case of Jack Kerouac are, one, to do a close analysis of his writings like his first real biographer, Ann Charters did (the one whom almost all those have written something about Jack afterward own a debt to, acknowledged or not), who had the advantage of actually working with the man on his bibliography before he passed (and the disadvantage of knowing him too well so that on the personal stuff she did a great deal of sliding over as later biographers have felt no need to do). The other is to do like the writer/poet Tom Clark did in the book under review, Jack Kerouac: A Biography, and give us the more nitty-gritty details of Jack’s life, his terrible struggles to get published and his awful time with success when he became the “once and future king of the “beats”
In a recent review of the Ann Charters biography which I think bears repeating here I noted the following:
“It is probably hard for today’s youthful generation (the so-called millennials) to grasp how important the jail break-out of the 1960s, of breaking free from old time Cold War red scare golden age dream, of creating our own sense of space was to my generation, my generation of ’68 (so-called). That “generation of ’68” designation picked up from the hard fact that that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States government) was winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King, to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.
But we did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando and above all the “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from.
Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers like myself only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.”
Here the odd thing, as Tom Clark’s biography insightfully brings out better than Ann Charters who as I said perhaps was too close to the scene , Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. He spent after some modest success with the semi-autobiographical Town And City writing about six versions of Road, other unpublished material and lots of frustration although not much self-doubt trying to break through the arcane New York publishing scene. He said when fame did come he was no longer physically, mentally or philosophically the same man who sought out the mid-20th century version of the great American West dream of his youth even though his admirers thought he still had those inclinations. As is fairly well known, and if not you can google YouTube for the famous debate Kerouac was part of in 1968 on William Buckley’s PBS show Firing Line where he lays it, by those who lived through the 1960s, Kerouac would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” is worthy of investigation along with his obvious literary merits as a member in good standing of the American literary pantheon.
On the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of the generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.” Add to those factors his being a “jock,” a corner boy (at least that is the feel from a read his antics with his boys and his forlorn love in Maggie Cassidy), and a guy who liked to goof off and that only adds to the confusion about who and what Jack Kerouac was about.
But here is the secret, the secret thread that runs through the Clark biography (and Charters too as well as Jack’s friend and rival John Holmes in his remembrances of Jack), he was a mad man to write, to write and to write about himself and his times. And had enough of an ego to think that his writing would carry out his task of making a legend of his own life. Yeah, a million word guy (probably much more than that and without a word processor to keep count, to make editing easier, despite his theory of spontaneous writing to the contrary, and to easily store his output).
So the value of this biography is the material presented about his rough-hewn upbringing in down and out Lowell, the dramatic effect that the death of his older brother at a young age had on his psyche, his football prowess and disappointments, his coming of age problems with girls, his going off to New York to prep school and college, his eventual decision to “dig” the scene in the Village, his checkered military record during the war, the shock of the death of his father, his inability to deal with women, and marriage, his extreme sense of male bonding, his early and often drinking problems and other personal anecdotes offered by a host of people who knew, loved and hated him do not play second fiddle to this literary strand here.
Mister Clark does his best work when he goes by the numbers and discusses Kerouac’s various troubles trying to be a published paid serious writer, and to be taken seriously by the literary establishment. The fate of On The Road which after all is about his and Neal Cassady’s various cross-country trips, drug and alcohol highs, partying, women grabbed in the late 1940s and not published until 1957 is indicative of the gap between what Kerouac thought was his due and what the finicky publishing world thought about him. Of course after he became a best-seller, had his “fifteen minutes of fame plus fifty plus years” getting his work published was the least of his problems.
While he was to write some more things after he became famous there is a real sense that he ran out of steam. And as Clark’s last chapters summarily detailed beginning with the 1960 events which made up the short novel Big Sur about his increasing alcohol and drug problems and breakdowns highlight those problems and how the problem of fame itself got the better of him. Although no way can you consider Jack Kerouac a one-note literary Johnny. However if he had only written On The Road his niche in the pantheon would be assured.
At the end of my review of the Charters biography I made a suggestion to the millennials who need to read Kerouac -after you read On The Road - read Charter’s something of an early definitive biography (with lots of good notes at the end about her sources for various opinions and questions of fact) to get a feel for what it was like to be there at the creation of the big jail-break “beat” minute which spawned your parents, or ouch, grandparents “hippie” minute. I can now make another addition. Read this one too. While other later biographies have been produced, especially around the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On The Road in 2007, this is the one to check out next.
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Sam Lowell has of later liked to review books, movies, musical CDs for various citizen journalist blogs and other such cyberspace outlets as relaxation writing from the drear of his professional writing, writing legal briefs, memoranda and motions for himself and other lawyers. Usually he does such avocational writing as a wisp-of-willow affair depending on some prompt that would get him going like happened recently after hearing a song on YouTube by Bob Dylan from his prime days, Like a Rolling Stone. While listening to that song he noticed on the sidebar which gives other performances that one might wish to look at a segment from the D.A. Pennebaker documentary, Don’t Look Back, where Dylan, his then shortly to be abandoned flame and great folksinger in her own right, Joan Baez, and his then road manager and folksinger Bob Neuwirth were sitting in some English hotel singing bits of Hank Williams’ Lost Highway. That got him interested in seeing the whole documentary which had just been rereleased in the Criterion films series and which he ordered on Netflix and later reviewed. Such helter-skelter choices are the norm for his selection process.
Not so on the subject of the “beats,” those cool cats and kittens (I guess that is the way it would have been put by hipsters in North Beach and the Village when beat was pure before the movement became just another commodity to be sold on television like cars or soap) who came shortly before our coming of age time down in working-class Carver where we grew up and were slightly singed by the beat flame. That “working-class” before Carver was not accidental, not for Sam anyway since his “max daddy,” “be-bop daddy,” or any way you want to say it literary hero from that period was the hipster mad monk novelist Jack Kerouac who had grown up about sixty miles north of Carver in working-class mill town getting ready to move south for cheaper labor Lowell. So in Sam’s eyes that designation was important then although maybe not quite as deeply thought through as recently when he had been on a tear re-reading most of Jack’s work.
Here again chance plays a part in what he would review. After having read a few of the more important novels, the iconic classic (we must use the word “iconic” these days to keep up with the professional users of that word which is now something of a flavor of the month term for any event or person who had had at least fifteen minutes of fame along the way) On The Road, Desolation Angels, and Big Sur he had picked up the Ann Charter-edited Portable Jack Kerouac which led him to her early informative biography. But Sam was looking for something more than a literary appraisal of Kerouac’s work, important as that is, than the Charter biography provided. He was looking for tidbits, pieces of information about Kerouac’s time in Lowell, the effect that growing up working poor had on him growing up in that city by the Merrimac. In short Sam wanted to expand on that idea of why Kerouac had, even if at a remove, on him, us as kids growing up in working poor Carver, then the cranberry capital of the world. So he went through some other later biographies which blossomed especially around the time in 2007 of the 50th anniversary of the publication of On The Road.
One of the books that satisfied his desire for biographical information was Tom Clark’s Jack Kerouac: A Biography (Paragon House, 1990) which he told us about one night, us being Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Sam Eaton, Ralph Morris and me, when we gathered together for our periodic night out at the Rusty Nail in downtown Boston and which he wrote a review of later.Here’s what Sam had to say about Jack Kerouac, warts and all:
“I have been on a Jack Kerouac tear of late (if you do not know who he is at this point either think On The Road, the famous alternate hitchhike road to life from the white picket fence norm book he wrote putting flesh and blood to the “beat” movement of the 1950s, think of the guy who the media proclaimed as the “king of the beats” after writing that novel which he wore kicking and screaming or if those suggestions fail ask your parents, or ouch, grandparents for they will know of him, probably headed out on the road themselves if only for a minute after reading the book). I have been reading not so much his works, although I have been doing some of that too but reading biographies, essays, and other sketches to get a better grasp on my fascination about this working class guy from Lowell not so far from where I grew up, about a guy who grew up from hunger as I did, and a guy who for a minute anyway gave the literary set a run for its money with a new way of writing novels.
He called it, maybe disingenuously “spontaneous writing” since he was an incredible re-writer and reviser of everything he wrote as well as a meticulously organized keeper of his own archives but probably better is a take from a Norman Mailer title-“advertisements for myself” since the vast majority of his work was an on-going saga of his life and times spread out from the 1930s with Maggy Cassidy to just before his death in 1969 Vanities of Duclouz. (Allen Ginsberg, the poet, his early friend and road companion, and no mean hand as a rememberer himself called Jack “the great rememberer” of their generation and that is probably right.)
That said, I have gained a lot of information not previously known by looking into the life of the man who probably with the exceptions of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway (yeah, Hemingway is always in the mix somewhere when you talk guys, guy writers in the 20th century, guys who influenced “modern” writing) has influenced me more than all others in a lifetime of reading. This is a little bit ironic since I was a shade bit too young to appreciate as a child of the generation of ’68 (you know those of us who raised hell with the government, with society, hell, with Jack who disowned us when the deal went down although we, I, did not disown him, or his influence in the 1960s).
Now there are several ways to approach doing a biography about a writer. The two ways that come to mind most readily in the case of Jack Kerouac are, one, to do a close analysis of his writings like his first real biographer, Ann Charters did (the one whom almost all those have written something about Jack afterward own a debt to, acknowledged or not), who had the advantage of actually working with the man on his bibliography before he passed (and the disadvantage of knowing him too well so that on the personal stuff she did a great deal of sliding over as later biographers have felt no need to do). The other is to do like the writer/poet Tom Clark did in the book under review, Jack Kerouac: A Biography, and give us the more nitty-gritty details of Jack’s life, his terrible struggles to get published and his awful time with success when he became the “once and future king of the “beats”
In a recent review of the Ann Charters biography which I think bears repeating here I noted the following:
“It is probably hard for today’s youthful generation (the so-called millennials) to grasp how important the jail break-out of the 1960s, of breaking free from old time Cold War red scare golden age dream, of creating our own sense of space was to my generation, my generation of ’68 (so-called). That “generation of ’68” designation picked up from the hard fact that that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States government) was winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King, to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.
But we did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part, the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, of our capacity to wonder. No question that elements of the generation before us, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders, the perfect wave surfers, the teen-alienated rebel James Dean and wild one Marlon Brando and above all the “beats” helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who wrote to the high heavens about what they did, how they did it and what the hell it was they were running from.
Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers like myself only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that threatened to get out of hand. So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem, Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which thrilled even those who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night.”
Here the odd thing, as Tom Clark’s biography insightfully brings out better than Ann Charters who as I said perhaps was too close to the scene , Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. He spent after some modest success with the semi-autobiographical Town And City writing about six versions of Road, other unpublished material and lots of frustration although not much self-doubt trying to break through the arcane New York publishing scene. He said when fame did come he was no longer physically, mentally or philosophically the same man who sought out the mid-20th century version of the great American West dream of his youth even though his admirers thought he still had those inclinations. As is fairly well known, and if not you can google YouTube for the famous debate Kerouac was part of in 1968 on William Buckley’s PBS show Firing Line where he lays it, by those who lived through the 1960s, Kerouac would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” is worthy of investigation along with his obvious literary merits as a member in good standing of the American literary pantheon.
On the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of the generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.” Add to those factors his being a “jock,” a corner boy (at least that is the feel from a read his antics with his boys and his forlorn love in Maggie Cassidy), and a guy who liked to goof off and that only adds to the confusion about who and what Jack Kerouac was about.
But here is the secret, the secret thread that runs through the Clark biography (and Charters too as well as Jack’s friend and rival John Holmes in his remembrances of Jack), he was a mad man to write, to write and to write about himself and his times. And had enough of an ego to think that his writing would carry out his task of making a legend of his own life. Yeah, a million word guy (probably much more than that and without a word processor to keep count, to make editing easier, despite his theory of spontaneous writing to the contrary, and to easily store his output).
So the value of this biography is the material presented about his rough-hewn upbringing in down and out Lowell, the dramatic effect that the death of his older brother at a young age had on his psyche, his football prowess and disappointments, his coming of age problems with girls, his going off to New York to prep school and college, his eventual decision to “dig” the scene in the Village, his checkered military record during the war, the shock of the death of his father, his inability to deal with women, and marriage, his extreme sense of male bonding, his early and often drinking problems and other personal anecdotes offered by a host of people who knew, loved and hated him do not play second fiddle to this literary strand here.
Mister Clark does his best work when he goes by the numbers and discusses Kerouac’s various troubles trying to be a published paid serious writer, and to be taken seriously by the literary establishment. The fate of On The Road which after all is about his and Neal Cassady’s various cross-country trips, drug and alcohol highs, partying, women grabbed in the late 1940s and not published until 1957 is indicative of the gap between what Kerouac thought was his due and what the finicky publishing world thought about him. Of course after he became a best-seller, had his “fifteen minutes of fame plus fifty plus years” getting his work published was the least of his problems.
While he was to write some more things after he became famous there is a real sense that he ran out of steam. And as Clark’s last chapters summarily detailed beginning with the 1960 events which made up the short novel Big Sur about his increasing alcohol and drug problems and breakdowns highlight those problems and how the problem of fame itself got the better of him. Although no way can you consider Jack Kerouac a one-note literary Johnny. However if he had only written On The Road his niche in the pantheon would be assured.
At the end of my review of the Charters biography I made a suggestion to the millennials who need to read Kerouac -after you read On The Road - read Charter’s something of an early definitive biography (with lots of good notes at the end about her sources for various opinions and questions of fact) to get a feel for what it was like to be there at the creation of the big jail-break “beat” minute which spawned your parents, or ouch, grandparents “hippie” minute. I can now make another addition. Read this one too. While other later biographies have been produced, especially around the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On The Road in 2007, this is the one to check out next.
