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
In addition to being the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, this year also marks the 75th anniversary of the most wildly successful, poisonously syrupy and all-around trashiest justification for slavery produced in the U.S.: Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone With the Wind. The continued popularity of such racist “entertainment” as this book and movie counters the myth, touted by President Barack Obama, that he has ushered in a “post-racial” society. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, countering the “smug insistence that race is no longer a factor in our society,” pointed out recently that the result of the histories written in the war’s aftermath “has been to blur the reality that slavery was at the heart of the matter, ignore the baser realities of the brutal fighting, romanticize our own home-grown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, and distort the consequences of the Civil War that still intrude on our national life” (“A Conflict’s Acoustic Shadows,” New York Times, 12 April).
Atlanta will host Gone With the Wind celebrations once again this summer, billed as “a global pilgrimage to Atlanta.” On the occasion of the book’s 50th anniversary, the Atlanta area saw “Tara balls” ad nauseam, one of which was attended by then mayor Andrew Young and his wife, the only black people present amid the plethora of Confederate army uniforms. On that occasion, we wrote “‘Gone With the Wind’—50 Years of Racist Trash” (WV No. 407, 4 July 1986), excerpts from which are printed below.
* * *
This book and the hugely successful movie based on it sprinkle “moonlight and magnolias” on one of the most brutal slave systems the world has ever known. The life of a slave meant backbreaking work from dawn to dusk; a slave’s child or spouse could be sold at any time; hunger was ever-present. The antebellum South was a totalitarian police state ever in fear of slave uprisings. This is the society Margaret Mitchell referred to as “glamorous,” writing at length about the happiness of the “childlike” slave and his devotion to his master. At one point, the novel’s heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, muses that “Negroes were provoking sometimes and stupid and lazy, but there was loyalty in them that money couldn’t buy, a feeling of oneness with their white folks.”…
Gone With the Wind, the novel, appeared in the mid-1930s in a period of unremittent lynch terror in the South, symbolized by the prolonged struggle to save the Scottsboro Boys from the hangman’s noose—while “liberals” like Franklin D. Roosevelt and the editor of the Atlanta Constitution opposed the anti-lynching law in Congress. The movie came out on the eve of World War II. The heritage of slavery and police-state oppression of blacks in the Jim Crow South belied American imperialism’s fraudulent claim to be fighting for “democracy” against Nazi racism. Gone With the Wind shined up the tarnished image of racist America and in this way furthered Washington’s mobilization for war. Attacks on the struggle for black rights have always accompanied the U.S. rulers’ preparations for war.
Margaret Mitchell worshipped slave society. She grew up in a period that saw the rebirth of the Klan with the hanging of the innocent Jewish businessman Leo Frank, framed for the murder of a white girl, a period when the Klan off and on ran the Georgia state government for years. Mitchell was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution in an era when Georgia was trying to crush the life out of courageous black Communist Angelo Herndon. It says a lot about Mitchell that she was ten years old by the time her family broke the news to her that the South had lost the war!
Gone With the Wind is not just another trashy Harlequin romance, a piece of escapist fluff. It is about as politically innocent as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which openly glorified the Klan. It will take a third American revolution to truly finish the Civil War, set the record straight and relegate Gone With the Wind to the scrap heap of history. The cultural record of human emancipation will record this debunking with great relish.
Click on title to link to a site that gives a thumbnail sketch of the biography of the be-bop writer Jack Kerouac
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that
had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or
some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a
name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet
Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a
junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in
flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on
every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first
used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane
journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will
crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)
Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax
player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest
brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have
known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat
exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China
seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard
achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on
money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for
the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you
will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at
home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being,
hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid
stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man
caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the
world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings.
Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out
on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North
Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the
fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy
junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs
and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’
coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well
and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers,
connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to
trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on came calling looking for the “word.” So even
Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave
that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan
Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel
book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel
brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his
crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place
like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).
Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves
generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the
creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally
settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and
anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want
to yell about here).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories
of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex
and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si,
Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary
corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled
park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a
tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright
event, just mentioned. Markin was the
vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack
call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs, who
got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there
was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of
years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or
dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the
local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural
days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of
Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran
wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major
towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very
different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of
a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book
which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail
since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which
would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking
to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early
1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that
book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and
hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best
part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by
hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going
high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying
unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and
other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that
was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not
always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first
back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into
the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more
years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty
Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from
today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly
bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and
pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex,
Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin
included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung
around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money
fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants any way they could as
anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s
goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger”
takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not
the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when
the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or
Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack
when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was
what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on
forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from
the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and
that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was
as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and
poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the
“midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would
have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk
Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense
was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous
lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against
him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would
confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the
social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise.
That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about
ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked
him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and
his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956
which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road.
They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about
some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a
mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my
brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper
scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got
the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the
bug to you.
Frank Jackman comment: Every year, in October, in Jack Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts a Jack Kerouac Festival is presented to keep his be-bop working class fellaheen memory alive. The link is http://www.lowellcelebrateskerouac.org/lck-2010 ******** Book Review
Maggie Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Books, New York, 1993 As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD,The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on one of Jack Kerouac’s lesser works under review here, Maggie Cassidy, where the action takes place in his hometown, that this fade back to be-bop-ness all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old-time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting granitic memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of Jack Kerouac's better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, On The Road, his classic modern physical and literary "search" for the meaning of America for his generation, the generation which came of age in the post-World War II period, readily comes to mind. No so well known is the fact that that famous youthful Kerouac novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition in many volumes, starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Maggie Cassidy focuses on the trials and tribulations of growing up absurd in the 1930s, the inevitable schoolboy quests and missteps of sorting out what love is, teen love, Jack's desire to excel at sports which has driven young men for ages, and, off-handedly, the “meaning of the universe” of his high school days in Lowell and a little about his prep school days down in New York City in the late 1930s in the series that bears the general title The Legend Of Duluoz. So that is why we today, in the year of the forty-second anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign, no the spell, of Maggie Cassidy. I have mentioned in a note to a review of On The Road after a recent re-reading of that master work that Kerouac's worldview, not unexpectedly for a novelist of the immediate post- World War II generation, was dominated by what today would be regarded as deeply, if not consciously, sexist impulses. Moreover, the whole “beat” experience of which he was “king” was, with a few exceptions, a man’s trip, hetero and/or homosexual. All of the books that I have read of his have that flavor. They may be, some of them, great literature but they are certainly men’s books. Also, not unexpectedly, for a shy, sly, French-Canadian (with a little Native-American thrown in) working-class athletic youth from Lowell, Kerouac’s escapades center in this book on his high school male-bonding experiences with his “corner” boys. And being, from all reports and a quick glance at his youthful photographs, a handsome-looking man his exploits with young women. And here enters the sultry Maggie Cassidy, to the lace curtain born, the Irish colleen dream of every heterosexual young man. Although the dramatic tension of this book is not exactly gripping, after all despite some very grand, descriptive narration about Lowell, about the neighborhood, about the beauties of the Merrimack River, and above all, about young women, the episodes here clearly fall under the category of high school hi-jinks which have already had a long and honored literary exposition. Still, this is a nice little trip down memory lane and I can visualize some of the same streets around the "Acre and Pawtucketville, and some of those frosty mill-driven buildings that he refers in this book from those long ago connections that I mentioned above. Note to Jack Kerouac wherever you are: Damn, you should have ‘talked’ to me about Maggie before you got involved with that vixen. I grew up in a part of a town in Massachusetts that while not “Little Dublin” was close enough to bear that title here in America. I knew a million Maggies (and Moe Coles too) and I could have warned you that chandelier, lace curtain, or shanty these nice Irish Catholic girls will break your heart, or something else, every time. Now that I think about it though I never listened to any well-intentioned advise on the subject either. Farewell grand working-class fellaheen.
The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir-Dan Duryea’s “Terror Street” (1953)
DVD Review
By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell
Terror Street, starring Dan Duryea, Hammer Productions, 1953
Long time readers of this space know, or should be presumed to know, of my long-standing love affair with film noir. The classic age of film noir in this country in the age of black and white film in the 1940s and 1950s when I would sneak over to the now long gone and replaced by condos Strand Theater in growing up town North Adamsville and spent a long double feature Saturday afternoon watching some then current production from Hollywood or some throwback from the 1940s which Mister Cadger would show in retrospective to cut down on expenses in tough times by avoiding having to pay for first –run movies all the time. I also on infrequent occasions would attend a nighttime showing with my parents if my strict Irish Catholic mother (strict on the mortal sin punishment for what turned out to have been minor or venial sins) thought the film passed the Legion of Decency standard that we had to stand up and take a yearly vow to uphold and I could under the plotline without fainting (or getting “aroused” by the fetching femmes). But mainly with me and five siblings they went to one of the three, count them three, movie theaters in small town North Adamsville by themselves to get away from our madness while Grandmother Riley tended to us with her no-nonsense regimen.
Yes, who could forget up on that big screen for all the candid world to see a sadder but wiser seen it all, heard it all Humphrey Bogart at the end of the Maltese Falcon telling all who would listen that he, he Sam Spade no stranger to the seamy side and cutting corners had had to send femme fatale Mary Astor his snow white flame over once she spilled too much blood for the stuff of dreams. Or cleft-chinned barrel-chested Robert Mitchum knowing he was doomed and out of luck taking a few odd bullets from his former femme fatale trigger –happy girlfriend Jane Greer once she knew he had double-crossed her to the coppers in Out Of The Past. Ditto watching the horror on smart guy gangster Eddie Mars face after being outsmarted after sending a small time grafter to his doom prime private detective Phillip Marlowe ordered him out the door to face the rooty-toot-toot of his own gunsels who expect Marlowe to be coming out in The Big Sleep. Those were some of the beautiful and still beautiful classics whose lines you can almost hear anytime you mention the words film noir.
But there were other lesser films that were produced in this country starring the likes of the queen bee of the B-film noir night Gloria Grahame and he-man Glenn Ford. And not just this country but in Great Britain (if that term still applies after empire lost and Scotland and Wales clamoring to go their own ways) where in the 1950s many minor Hollywood stars like Dan Duryea in this film under review Terror Street (in merry olde England released as 36 Hours got work when benighted England took on the film noir world. When an outfit called Hammer Productions produced a tonof such small epics none with the cinematography mood play, diologue or plotline of those classics mentioned above and among the best of them only running neck and neck with those quickly produced Hollywood B classics.
In the old days before I retired I always liked to sketch out a film’s plotline to give the reader the “skinny” on what the action was so that he or she could see where I was leading them. I will continue that old tradition here (and in future Hammer Production vehicles to be reviewed over the coming period) to make my point about the lesser production values of the Hammer products. Thoughtful American military pilot Bill Rogers, the role played by minor Hollywood star Duryea, snuck out of America by a friendly fugitive military plane on a mission to find out why his good-looking Norwegian-born wife met during the war (you know what war if the film was made in 1953) in holding out against the Nazi scum in England hasn’t written, has flown the coop.
No question war-time romances were not made in heaven and so that wife, Katie, after seeing Bill off for a long term flight school assignment in America got lonely, got antsy and struck up a bad relationship with a guy who promised her adventure and some much needed dough. Dough earned by being part of an international smuggling operation, mostly diamond. So once she had some serious dough and some serious wanting habits fulfilled like minks and high-end clothes she blew Bill off-headed uptown with the Mayfair swells. Leaving no forwarding address. Yeah, the vagaries of war. But intrepid Bill wasn’t buying that story and through musing up her girlfriend found out where she was hanging her hat. That is when all hell broke loose and maybe Bill should have just shaken it off and moved on.
But not intrepid Bill. He confronted Katie at those new digs but before he could either make his case or find out why she had cold-shouldered him he got conked on the head by a party or parties unknown. And Katie well Katie got dead, got very dead by a gun found in Katie’s old apartment by Bill but which wound up in his conked-out head hand. The frame is on and Mister Bill is made to fit it. Fit to take the big step-off, to meet his maker (via the bloody hangman) unless he can work out who the hell killed his beloved wife, and why, within 36 hours when he has to catch that fugitive plane back to America-or else.
Of course the thing he needed to do immediately was flee that uptown swell apartment so he could avoid the bloody coppers who wanted to make sure he met that maker. Of course as well not being English he needed some help once he made his getaway. In his dashing getaway he found himself in an apartment of a young woman, some Judy who had a heart of gold since she worked the mission racket down on cheap street. He charmed his way into her good graces and she got knee- deep into his plot. Things seem to begin to make sense once Bill got information that dear Katie was shilling for this con artist who was working the international smuggling racket and with a nefarious fence who didn’t care if school kept or not as long as the dough kept rolling in.
Naturally that Salvation Annie had to be put in danger by Bill’s plan to smoke out this dastardly con man posing as a treasury inspector. But the thing about Salvation Annies is that they don’t wilt so easy and ours doesn’t either. When the deal went down Bill put the rooty-toot-toot to the con man and the fence took some heat from the cops. Our Bill made the 36 hour connection no swear as Annie left him off at the base nice as could be. So you can see no femme like Jane Greer, no smart guy like Eddie Mars with gunsels at his disposal and no dark scenes to make you hope old Bill doesn’t face that hangman’s noose. Now if a fox like Katie had been highlighted well maybe after she led Bill a merry chase we could have had a plotline worth talking about. Sorry Hammer.
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-Tristessa
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that
had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or
some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a
name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet
Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a
junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in
flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on
every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first
used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane
journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will
crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)
Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax
player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest
brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have
known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat
exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China
seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard
achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on
money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for
the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you
will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at
home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being,
hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid
stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man
caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the
world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings.
Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out
on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North
Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the
fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy
junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs
and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’
coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well
and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers,
connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to
trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on came calling looking for the “word.” So even
Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave
that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan
Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel
book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel
brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his
crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place
like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).
Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves
generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the
creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally
settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and
anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want
to yell about here).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories
of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex
and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si,
Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary
corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled
park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a
tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright
event, just mentioned. Markin was the
vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack
call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs, who
got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there
was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of
years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or
dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the
local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural
days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of
Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran
wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major
towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very
different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of
a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book
which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail
since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which
would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking
to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early
1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that
book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and
hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best
part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by
hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going
high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying
unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and
other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that
was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not
always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first
back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into
the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more
years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty
Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from
today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly
bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and
pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex,
Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin
included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung
around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money
fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants any way they could as
anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s
goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger”
takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not
the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when
the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or
Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack
when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was
what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on
forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from
the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and
that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was
as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and
poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the
“midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would
have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk
Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense
was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous
lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against
him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would
confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the
social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise.
That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about
ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked
him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and
his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956
which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road.
They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about
some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a
mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my
brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper
scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got
the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the
bug to you.
Book Review
Tristessa, Jack Kerouac,Avon Press, New York, 1960
…sure she was a whore, a small buxom brown-skinned with dancing eyes mex whore with nice sex hips, sex thighs and sex legs, with the blood of about six civilizations, mex, gringo, atzec, spain, carib, injun who knows what else got mixed in, maybe more, all mixed together, but a whore nevertheless, she never said otherwise, and he, Jack Deval, never believed otherwise, and that was her attraction, that and her ability to drive him up a wall with her little bag of whore tricks passed down from older sisters, and who knows maybe going back to some Eve whore bag. Still he dug her, dug her fire, dug her desire, often expressed, to be the best whore in Mexico (expressed in a desire to graduate to some big Mexico City bordello and show the gringos that flocked to those establishments what a mex whore could do, and not do, if he was generous enough, and to give each man she serviced not what he wanted, but what he needed). She studied sex books and sexy literature, some of it kind of high-brow, and not all only modern either, for a while in order to prep herself for the move up.
Yah, he dug, her, her and even, for a while, her sister habit that was keeping her in Sonora and away from Mexico City mex whore dreams (and around him as long as he dug her). He dug too, that while she was a whore, she had something else, something white, pure white, saving white, in that fellahin dusty Sonora world not saint, not church saint (although she confessed to him that she liked to do her anointed work in church sometimes and then confess to a priest right after thus saving steps, time, and the hypocrisy of staring old peasant women eyes. Sometimes she could hear the priest’s breathe quicken and she would add a couple of extra details, usually how she took it in her mouth or up her bum, to get him going even more to cut down on the penance.), when after making love, or after she met sister (and he bonged the weed or hash pipe) they talked about dreams, about the other world (not heaven or hell but some state where things were cool, cool when all the craziness of the world passed them by)
Her name, her whore name? Hope, you know but in mex hope. Her real name, her sanctified name, Happy but in mex happy. Where did they meet? Where the hell do you think they met, in church ? Nah, not him , although the thought turned him on sometimes, he could never get up the nerve to break with his boyhood awe of the incense, the wine (he had been an altar boy),the high holy day choir, the plainsong of the church, the search for meaning in this wicked old worldthat he still craved and was trying to get a handle on down in the fellahin Sonora nights. They met in the bar at the Durango Hotel when he blew into town from Juarez , she, off duty just then, sized him up as a long gone daddy from Estados Unidos, maybe had some dough, or some wisdom (at least that is what she said later, although that could have been a con, she was always conning him and everybody that she knew, except her pimp, Felipe, who had given her a few too many welts to con), came over and offered to buy him a drink, he said scotch, she said okay and what else. That night she had on her tight dress that showed all the boys what she had without showing them all she had, the one that was split down one side so that all those hungry boys could see a little silky brown thigh and imagine, well, just imagine whatever guys imagine when they see that much skin, and inflame that much desire.
Before long they were talking the spiritual talk that he mentioned before and she told him, in the same tone she would use if she were a librarian, that she was a whore (she didn’t go into the details of her expected career path that night), but that she was off the clock and kind of man hungry, and he looking kind of fellaheen beat, beatified beat, gringo beat, and not some texas cowboy beat that usually came into the Durango, or hell no, some mex fellaheen beat that was all around her, drew her eye. They finished their drinks and hustled off to her room (her own room, not her whore room a couple of streets over, that would come later), a room in the pobre mex part of town, all crazy and million people, kin, not kin, ninos, hermanos, whatever, and some barnyard animals floating around the lobby ofthe building. She said not a word, nor did he, but both as if in a trance blazed through the craziness, their first mex adventure.
As they climbed the stairs to her third floor room she stopped on the second floor, knocked on the door, and an old geezer beat gringo daddy, later he would be introduced as Sunshine Sam, came to the door. Nothing was said but Sam went away and came back a couple of minutes later with small wrapped package and some cigarettes that had the distinct smell of weed. Okay, it was going to be that kind of party.That night was the first time in his presence where she met sister, although it would not be the last, not by a long shot. And he smoked that righteous mex gold weed.
What did Jack say she said before, oh yah, she didn’t care about what a man wanted but what he needed. That night, sister high which seemed counter-intuitive to him from what he had seen in ‘Frisco and the Village where those sister adapts tended to go coma-like, she displayed all her arts, or as much as he could handle before crying no mas early the next morning. She just smiled and started playing with herself with a little sex toy she took out of her bureau drawer. After she aroused herselfand let out an immense murmur she too cried no mas and they both fell asleep, both sweaty in the mex night. Next day she resolved and he put up no argument that he would move in, do his writing thereand they would talk, world talk,have sex, world sex, and let the craziness of dusty mex streets, the world craziness, float past.
Of course like all thing, all Jack Devalthings, the routine of mex living, mex whore living, the thing could not, would not, last forever, or even six months.Hope was getting deeper in the sister trenches, making less dough since her pimp was taking a bigger cut sensing maybe that her days as a meal ticket were getting shorter and since she had lost her place at the Durango pick-up and was working the desperado streets against some just off the farm peasant whores, and was frankly less sexy, and less interested in sex as they progressed. Jack, for his part, came to recognize that his secular beat saint program was not going to work, not compared to what Sunshine Sam had to offer. One night, one rainy night, mud puddles forming in the dirt-encrusted streets he walked down those three flights of stairs while Happy was out working a texas cowboy trick, walked toward the bus station and headed for El Paso, and world sorrows. He never did hear from other guys who headed to Sonora later what happened to her (although he could guess) but he always remembered those nights when she gave him what he needed, and he would tip his fingers to his hatless head and whisper her name, happy.
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty"
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
PASTURES OF PLENTY by Woody Guthrie
It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold
I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes I slept on the ground in the light of the moon On the edge of the city you'll see us and then We come with the dust and we go with the wind
California, Arizona, I harvest your crops Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine To set on your table your light sparkling wine
Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down Every state in the Union us migrants have been We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win
It's always we rambled, that river and I All along your green valley, I will work till I die My land I'll defend with my life if need be Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free
Copyright Ludlow Music, Inc. @America @patriotic @work recorded on Woody's Greatest Songs
The Answer My Friend Is Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times
They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort
Link to NPR Morning Edition 'The Times They Are A-Changin" Still Speaks To Our Changing Times https://www.npr.org/2018/09/24/650548856/american-anthem-the-times-they-are-a-changin
By Seth Garth
No question this
publication both in its former hard copy editions and now more so in the
on-line editions as the, ouch, 50th anniversary of many signature
events for the “Generation of ‘68” have come and gone that the whole period of
the 1950s and 1960s had gotten a full airing. Has been dissected, deflected,
inspected, reflected and even rejected beyond compare. That is not to say that
this trend won’t continue if for no other reason that the demographics and
actual readership response indicate that people still have a desire to not
forget their pasts, their youth.
(Under the new site manager
Greg Green, despite what I consider all good sense having worked under taskmaster
Allan Jackson, we are encouraged to give this blessed readership some inside
dope, no, no that kind, about how things are run these days in an on-line
publication. With that okay in mind there was a huge controversy that put the
last sentence in the above paragraph in some perspective recently when Greg for
whatever ill-begotten reason thought that he would try to draw in younger
audiences by catering to their predilections-for comic book character movies,
video games, graphic novels and trendy music and got nothing but serious
blow-back from those who have supported this publication financially and
otherwise both in hard copy times and now on-line. What that means as the target
demographic fades is another question and maybe one for a future generation who
might take over the operation. Or perhaps like many operations this one will
not outlast its creators- and their purposes.)
Today’s 1960s question, a
question that I have asked over the years and so I drew the assignment to
address the issue-who was the voice of the 1960s. Who or what. Was it the
lunchroom sit-inners and Freedom Riders, what it the hippies, was it SDS, the
various Weather configurations, acid, rock, folk rock, folk, Tom Hayden, Jane
Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Grace Slick, hell the Three Js-Joplin, Jimi, Jim as in Morrison
and the like. Or maybe it was a mood, a mood of disenchantment about a world
that seemed out of our control, which seemed to be running without any input
from us, without us even being asked. My candidate, and not my only candidate
but a recent NPR Morning Edition
segment brought the question to mind (see above link), is a song, a song
created by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s which was really a clarion call to
action on our part, or the best part of our generation-The Times They Are A-Changin’.
I am not sure if Bob Dylan
started out with some oversized desire to be the “voice” of his generation. He
certainly blew the whole thing off later after his motorcycle accident and
still later when he became a recluse even if he did 200 shows a year, maybe
sullen introvert is better, actually maybe his own press agent giving out
dribbles is even better but that song, that “anthem” sticks in memory as a
decisive summing up of what I was feeling at the time. (And apparently has
found resonance with a new generation of activists via the March for Our Lives
movement and other youth-driven movements.) As a kid I was antsy to do
something, especially once I saw graphic footage on commercial television of
young black kids being water-hosed, beaten and bitten by dogs down in the South
simply for looking for some rough justice in this wicked old world. Those
images, and those of the brave lunch-room sitters and Freedom bus riders were
stark and compelling. They and my disquiet over nuclear bombs which were a lot
scarier then when there were serious confrontations which put them in play and
concern that what bothered me about having no say, about things not being
addressed galvanized me.
The song “spoke to me” as
it might not have earlier or later. It had the hopeful ring of a promise of a
newer world. That didn’t happen or happen in ways that would have helped the
mass of humanity but for that moment I flipped out every time I heard it played
on the radio or on my old vinyl records record-player. Other songs, events,
moods, later would overtake this song’s sentiment but I was there at the
creation. Remember that, please.
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that
had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or
some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a
name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet
Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a
junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in
flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on
every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first
used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane
journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will
crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)
Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax
player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest
brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have
known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat
exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China
seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard
achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on
money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for
the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you
will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at
home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being,
hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid
stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man
caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the
world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings.
Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out
on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North
Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the
fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy
junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs
and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’
coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well
and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers,
connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to
trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on came calling looking for the “word.” So even
Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave
that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan
Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel
book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel
brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his
crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place
like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).
Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves
generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the
creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally
settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and
anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want
to yell about here).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories
of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex
and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si,
Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary
corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled
park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a
tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright
event, just mentioned. Markin was the
vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack
call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs, who
got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there
was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of
years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or
dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the
local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural
days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of
Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran
wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major
towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very
different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of
a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book
which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail
since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which
would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking
to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early
1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that
book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and
hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best
part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by
hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going
high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying
unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and
other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that
was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not
always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first
back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into
the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more
years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty
Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from
today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly
bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and
pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex,
Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin
included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung
around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money
fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants any way they could as
anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s
goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger”
takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not
the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when
the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or
Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack
when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was
what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on
forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from
the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and
that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was
as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and
poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the
“midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would
have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk
Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense
was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous
lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against
him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would
confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the
social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise.
That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about
ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked
him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and
his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956
which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road.
They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about
some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a
mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my
brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper
scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got
the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the
bug to you.
Book Review
Vanity Of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946, Jack Kerouac, Coward-McCann, New York, 1967
Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.
“As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s lesser work, essentially a fictionalized memoir of his teenage and young adult years, under review here, “Vanity Of Duluoz”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.
And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, “On The Road”, his classic modern physical and literary ‘search’ for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of his last work “Vanity Of Duluoz”.
As mentioned above this ‘novel’ reads more like a thinly, very thinly fictionalized memoir , ostensibly directed toward telling his third wife, Stella, the sister of a long dead boyhood admirer from the old neighborhood in Lowell killed in World War II, about this decisive period in his life for his literary development. This period from 1935 to 1946 spans his high school days, partially detailed in another volume in the series “Maggie Cassidy”, is filled with acts of athletic prowess, some literary disappointments and a general longing to get out of town and ends just prior to the physical and literary “search” for America of “On The Road”. In between we are told about the budding college athletic career gone sour, the breaks, friendly and unfriendly, with his parents, his various ways, civilian and military, of serving in World War II and his stumbling onto a number of characters in wartime New York City who would form the basic of many later novels, and incidentally the core of “the beat generation”.
In many ways this is the least satisfactory of the dozen or so novels in the “Visions” compilation in that it is basically (and consciously) written as a direct narrative of events with a certain hard edge of a writer who has essentially lost his moorings (in 1967 just prior to his death), retired from the world and is feeling sorry about it. Sorry enough to basically rehash the past, a past that while not without conflict, represented his golden youth and the beginning of his serious literary ambitions. Almost jarringly, especially for those of us aficionados who have read most of the other Kerouac works, there is little reflection, not much of that be-bop word play that animated so many of the earlier works, and no little philosophical tidbits to think about. The easiest way to show the lose of literary spark is by comparison- take the early hard-bitten, almost boringly presented chapters here that deal with his high school and early college career and compare with the lyric quality of some of the prose in describing those same events in “Maggie Cassidy”. Has anyone ever written better about the dramatic tensions of a ...Track meet? Case closed.
Note: I have not mentioned this previously but do so here because it is a greater issue. On occasion Kerouac, rather simplistically and ritualistically, railed against Communists and the Communist threat. On more than one occasion I have noted that in dealing with the political pronouncement of great writers and poets, or for that matter not so great writers and poets, that I have always been indulgent. Except when those literary lights take up the political battles. Then all bets are off. Kerouac, with the exception of some bizarre remarks against “hippies” in the 1960s who after all were just following the prescripts of “On The Road”, was not a political person. For the most part the denizens of the “beat” generation were, like Kerouac, apolitical and withdrew in horror from confronting authority, any authority. That was part of their charm, but, eventually, a serious shortcoming. For the part that the “beat” generation played in helping those of us who came later challenge the status quo, thanks. For the part that the “beat” generation played in not leading a “children’s crusade” against bourgeois society, you should have done better by us your offspring.
