Old notes, pipelayin, runnin'

Scattered and rambling
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Monday, September 3, 2007 at 11:41pm | Edit Note | Delete
I was on the periphery of sleep, dreams mingling with conscious thought when my boy crawled into my bed. I'd been reading before I drifted off, a book called Pan by Knut Hamsun (Henry Miller's favorite author at one point), and in the novel the main character had fallen asleep in the forest where he embarked on a strange dream. In the dream a goddess/lover called him out into the woods to tell him about her first time making love, and the chapter was written in a really strange, enchanted style. It was with this strange surreal and enchanted feeling that I had been falling asleep, and it was with that same feeling that I awoke. Half asleep, body numb, mind somnambulently intoxicated I had a giddy urge to go for a run, and to do so before I awoke any further. I was sleeping in my running shorts already, so I stumbled downstairs, slipped barefoot into my runners and was out the door and jogging into the night with my vision still blurry and cobwebs still clearing. I live downtown where the oaks and the elms grow tall and form arching canopies that form long green tunnels over the streets. It's quiet at night and when you run you can hear your heartbeating and your feet hitting the pavement and the sound ricocheting back off of the silent buildings and the wind rustles in the trees and leaves fall and everything is colored gold and green. With the state of mind I was in the streets themselves seemed a little enchanted and I might just make a habit of this going for a run whenever I wake up semi-conscious in the middle of the night. It was nice :)
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Bah!
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Sunday, September 2, 2007 at 9:30pm | Edit Note | Delete
Just noticed the story I put on Red Light Lit is full of typos and missing commas and shit! Got to excited about getting the technical side down and forgot all about basic proofreading.
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In honor of the 50th Anniversary of Kerouac's On the Road...
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Sunday, September 2, 2007 at 9:25pm | Edit Note | Delete
I've decided to put up the website I've been working on. Red Light Lit is live and on the air. Well, sort of. I don't have my own domain name as of yet so I'm running it off of my Shaw webspace, and so far there are no contributors other than myself, but otherwise, it's up and running at http://members.shaw.ca/redlightlit/ I'll post the URL in my posted items too. I know a lot of you dabble in writing, and your stuff is more than welcome provided it fits in with the theme of Red Light Lit.
Check it out, I'd love to hear your feedback.
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Kerouac's still On the Road 50 years later
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Sunday, September 2, 2007 at 2:02pm | Edit Note | Delete
On the Road, Jack Kerouac's ode to youth, freedom and infinite possibility, turns 50 this week, but it gives no sign of shuffling off into obscure middle-age. Jack's back and ubiquitous.

Viking, which published the 1957 novel to immediate acclaim and best-sellerdom, has released a spanking-new hardcover edition. For serious Kerouac junkies the publisher offers a companion volume, On the Road: The Original Scroll, which reproduces the book as Kerouac famously composed it in a three-week frenzy of writing — one unbroken paragraph on eight sheets of tracing paper he later taped together to make a 120-foot scroll. Fresh commentary may be found in Why Kerouac Matters by New York Times reporter John Leland, also from Viking.

Finally, Library of America, publisher of "America's best and most significant writing," on Thursday releases Kerouac: Road Novels, 1957-1960, which brings together On the Road, The Dharma Bums and three lesser-known books, plus selections from Kerouac's journals. The Library of America series is the literary equivalent of Cooperstown.

So what is it about On the Road? What grabbed the public imagination in 1957? Does it speak to readers today? What does it say to them?

Whatever it says has little to do with On the Road's plot, which meanders like a Hill Country deer track. The book has the aimlessness of real life because it springs from real life. In 1946 in New York, Kerouac, the 24-year-old son of French-Canadian immigrants and an aspiring novelist, met 20-year-old Neil Cassady. Kerouac, a Columbia University dropout, already knew Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the three forming the nucleus of what came to be known as the Beat Generation writers.

Cassady was something else. A westerner, he'd grown up on Denver's mean streets. His mother was dead, his father a drunk. Cassady had spent time in reform school for car theft. But he wasn't simply a handsome bad boy, although he was that. He had energy, charisma, and an autodidact's insatiable curiosity. Kerouac, like others, found himself smitten.

Between 1947 and 1950 Kerouac made a series of road trips across the United States, by bus, car and thumb, sometimes in Cassady's company, sometimes not, passing through Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, San Francisco, Houston and Mexico City, among other places. These trips form the basis for On the Road. In the novel Kerouac morphs into Sal Paradise, the narrator, while Cassady becomes Dean Moriarty. Ginsberg and Burroughs appear under transparent pseudonyms.

Besides moving, moving, moving, Sal, Dean and friends don't do a lot in On the Road. When they finally get someplace and stop, they tend to sit around, drink and engage in directionless conversation. Don't look for charged drama here. The motion is the message.

Above all, On the Road is a book for the young. The characters are young and obsess over things young people obsess over — breaking free of adult society, living for the moment, finding themselves, learning about life. Make that Life.

"It's a liberating book," says Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited the Library of America volume and is writing a biography of Kerouac.

"Kerouac said every day can be Saturday night. Every day can be one of revelry and highs. You can live a subsistence, Thoreauvian kind of way and have a richer life."

On the Road tapped into something nascent in its historical moment and gave it voice and power. Which makes the book maybe not great but certainly important.

"What the book grabbed was an America that was already moving out of what we think of as the '50s, out of a settled, fortresslike home life ensconced in the pieties and conventionalities," says Steven Watson, author of The Birth of the Beat Generation.

Below the surface of conformist America a spirit of youthful rebellion percolated. In smoky dives young people listened to jazz. They played the hipster, dabbled in drugs, despised the organization man, the man in the gray flannel suit.

The book captured this restless new America, high on its own energy. And it did so by celebrating Cassady, the outsider. Kerouac puts marginalized people at the center of his fiction, "making saints out of outlaws and misanthropes," Brinkley says. For Kerouac, Cassady was simultaneously angel, con man, and "holy goof."

Kerouac sends his characters shooting across the map like pinballs, and his prose style, much influenced by improvisational jazz, riffs with them. "First thought best thought" became Kerouac's compositional mantra (although it's a myth that On the Road was published exactly as Kerouac first composed it).

To get a flavor of the novel's kinetic style, consider this description of Dean, Sal and their friend Stan barreling across the Texas Panhandle.


Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I'd crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquite and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, till the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows — and still we rolled. After Dalhart — empty crackerbox town — we bowled for Amarillo, and reached it in the morning among windy panhandle grasses that only a few years ago waved around a collection of buffalo tents. Now there were gas stations and new 1950 jukeboxes with immense ornate snouts and ten-cent slots and awful songs. All the way from Amarillo and Childress, Dean and I pounded plot after plot of books we'd read into Stan, who asked for it because he wanted to know. At Childress in the hot sun we turned directly south on a lesser road and highballed across abysmal wastes to Paducah, Guthrie, and Abilene, Texas. . . .


David Mikics, an English professor at the University of Houston, says the formlessness and linguistic exuberance of On the Road came like a blast of freedom for writers. It represented an alternative to the tightly wound, hardboiled style of the Ernest Hemingways and John O'Haras. John Updike, of all people, remarked on how Kerouac and J.D. Salinger licensed writers of his generation to be emotional, vulnerable, Mikics says.

Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey and Bob Dylan are among the cultural worthies who have acknowledged Kerouac's influence, Brinkley says.

But what about young people today? Do they read the book?

Three graduate students in University of Houston's Creative Writing Program deliver a somewhat mixed picture.

Edward Mullany, who's 30, has read the book twice, the first time when he was 21.

"I don't know how you can be seriously interested in being an American writer without having read a lot of Kerouac and seeing how good it is," he says flatly.

Students still relate to the book, he says. Undergraduates in a short-story class he taught asked if they'd be reading Kerouac. As Kerouac didn't write many short stories, he had to say no.

Twenty-four-year-old Andrew Brininstool came across the book at 16 and read it straight through, sitting for hours in a Barnes & Noble store.

"I think the reason On the Road grabs young readers is that in high school they usually get a heavy dose of Melville and Hawthorne and Twain. These are great books, but when you're 15 or 16 they're lost on you. On the Road is written in a more modern idiom; it's about friends, about people that interest you in ways that maybe Moby Dick doesn't."

For would-be writers the book proves "you don't have to have killed a sperm whale or fought in a war or married your cousin" to have something to say, Brininstool says.

Sophie Rosenblum, 27, is cooler toward the book. She read it in high school when she was feeling "particularly rebellious," she says. "That was the moment to listen to Nirvana and read On the Road and feel very deep about myself." But she hasn't picked it up since and doesn't expect to.

Mikics sees contemporary figures like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers — youngish writers who have turned away from minimalist, small-bore realism — as stylistic sons-of-Kerouac. Brininstool agrees. He thinks the "maximalistic," exuberant, chance-taking prose of his generation owes a debt to On the Road.

How good are Kerouac and his book?

Brinkley gives an unqualified thumbs-up. He calls Kerouac "a great original American writer" and says the man absolutely rates a place in the literary canon.

"I don't think he's as great a writer as say, Faulkner and Hemingway," Brinkley says, "but like Hemingway, who inspired generations to go to Europe to run with the bulls or hike the Alps or drink in Paris, Kerouac inspired people to go out and see the great wide open in America."

Mikics sites On the Road lower on the greatness scale.

"If we're going to think of the great American novels of the '50s, the novels people return to again and again, we would name books like Lolita or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man," he says.

"Lolita is a particularly interesting comparison because it's also a road novel, about traveling through America. It, too, is a kind of love story about America. But Nabokov had a highly developed sense of irony about this country and its indulgence in teenager dreams and wistfulness. Kerouac injects that stuff with an energy it didn't have before. That's what people went for."

Went for it they certainly did. The book made Kerouac famous.

It got a rave review from Gilbert Millstein in the New York Times (Viking reproduces the review in its 50th Anniversary Edition). "Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the 'Lost Generation,' so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the 'Beat Generation,' " Millstein wrote.

The book spent five weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, eventually rising to No. 11. Kerouac appeared on Steve Allen's TV show, people recognized him on the street, motorcycle gangs asked to meet him.

This was a guy who spent much of his life living with his mother. He didn't handle celebrity well. To muster confidence to face his admirers he loaded up on booze, with ultimately disastrous consequences.

People confused Kerouac with the outgoing outlaw Cassady. That was part of the problem. Any reader of On the Road will find the relationship between the two men curious, to say the least. A homoerotic subtext pervades the whole. We know Cassady was bisexual — he carried on a 20-year intermittent relationship with Ginsberg. And Kerouac's editors at Viking excised from the original manuscript passages suggesting Dean Moriarty's bisexuality.

But as far as personality goes, the two men differed. Kerouac never felt comfortable entertaining the crowd, playing "king of the Beats." Brinkley, who emphasizes how hard Kerouac worked to make himself a writer, denies he should even be described as a "Beat writer."

"He didn't want to be lumped with all these people," Brinkley says. "It was Allen Ginsberg who pushed this lumping and was marketing the Beat Generation for political purposes in the 1960s."

By the 1960s Kerouac had descended into alcoholism. He had also embraced political conservatism, a development that disconcerted many of his fans. He appeared on William Buckley's talk show, apparently drunk. He expressed support for the Vietnam War.

But Brinkley says religion rather than politics formed the wellspring of Kerouac's being.

"Catholicism was the steadiness in his life. He used his journals as a confession booth. Virtually every page is begging God for forgiveness and quoting Catholic hymns. He was quite taken over by the mystical aura of Catholicism."

Kerouac died in 1969 of internal bleeding caused by acute alcoholism. He was 47. Cassady, having driven the bus for Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters in 1964 and been immortalized a second time in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, had died the year before, after collapsing in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

"[Dean] and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open," Sal Paradise exults about midway through the book. "And the pearl was there; the pearl was there." Kerouac and Cassady are gone, but you can join them On the Road anytime, if you're feeling young and hopeful. You just have to believe in the pearl.
Now this guy could write!
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Updated about 12 months ago

deathmatch
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Saturday, September 1, 2007 at 3:32pm | Edit Note | Delete
Prominent sports icon Michael Vick has been getting a lot of media attention for the legal troubles he's had as a result of sponsoring, organizing and participating in pitbull fighting. He's been charged with killing 6 dogs and a whole lot of other stuff branching off of that. Personally I wouldn't pay to see pitbulls fighting. To me, all pitbulls look the same. They're ugly looking dogs, and they all fight in generally the same manner. I expect violence from a pitbull, and thus there is no drama or excitement in it for me. It's as predictable as a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks joint effort. However I would pay to see purse dogs fight to the death. You know what I mean by purse dogs; the little tiny things like Paris Hilton et all tote around in little designer bags. These breeds include chihuahuas, pomeranians, bichon frises, papillons, yorkshire terriers, etc. I would probably pay damn good money to watch a pomeranian and a bichon frise in a snarling fur flying bloodfest to the death. I told Cooper about my idea for such a UPD (Ultimate Purse Dog) Deathmatch, and he said his money would be on the Bichon Frise, because his friend had one named Fabio and it would bite and attack him daily. (Most construction workers do NOT have friends with Bichon Frise's named Fabio by the way.) Anyway, I think it's a money maker, and I think I might try to get one going. Sorge and I are going to Petsmart today to see if we can get a volume deal on Cockapoos. We're also going to see if we can get a deal on about 12 weeks worth of high protein dog food (can't see the dogs lasting any longer than 12 weeks). Sorge says his aunt has some weird kind of purse dog that has googly eyes set on opposite sides of it's head, and he's thinking that unique field of vision could be an advantage in the ring if it was developed and trained accordingly. We'll have to wait and see.
The premiere event of the UPD circuit
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Top 10 reasons I'll never do construction work again.
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007 at 10:15pm | Edit Note | Delete
10. It's dirty. And that in turn makes your hands dirty, and your clothes too generally. Not very playalistic.

9. It's louder than most things. I have a beautiful voice and I love to hear myself talk and sing, and I can't do that around big loud machines.

8. Construction guys beat up guys with beautiful voices, even if they're construction guys too.

7. No Bullshit! I like bullshit. I'm all about bullshit. There is no room for bullshit in construction.

6. Tractor discussions. Even though I can now drive a tractor, and even get enthusiastically involved in the odd tractor discussion, it's not a subject I'm comfortable with.

5. Smelly co-workers. Most of the guys are actually pretty good about this, making sure to shower and deodorize and change frequently, but there are a few that bask in their own filth and odor and force the rest of us to endure it.

4. Everything is big and heavy and steel. Seriously, just about everything. Nobody ever says 'Go grab me that feather duster' or 'toss me a pillow', it's always "run to the truck and grab me an anvil and 2 sledgehammers.'

3. 14 hours. WTF is that?!!

2. "Git 'er done!" attitudes. For example; 'I'm going to work through lunch today and cut my supper break short so I can git 'er done!" I'm more of "She'll git done eventually anyway." kind of guy.

1. And the number 1 reason I'm never working in construction again; hats.
Not a hat that is becoming of a tru playa.
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Updated over a year ago

Circus chicks.
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Tuesday, August 28, 2007 at 12:00am | Edit Note | Delete
I took my kids to the circus this weekend so that they could watch animals being made fools of. It was a lot of fun. I put all 3 of them up on an elephant and let them ride around one of the rings. The elephant didn't seem very happy with his lot in life. He looked a lot like I probably look like at work. The look in his eye reminded me of a line from a Walt Whitman poem..."What is it that your eyes seem to express, it seems to me more than all the words I've read in my life."
However the plight of the elephant only got me down for a few minutes, because soon after that well endowed women in sequins and nylon and lace and heels and tiaras were dangling above me doing all kinds of crazy gymnastic type things. And a sudden realization brought me great sadness. Apparently I have a fetish for chicks in circus outfits, and I'm pretty sure there is no way in Hell I'll ever be able to satisfy that.
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Rod Stewart and 300 miles of rain.
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Monday, August 27, 2007 at 10:12pm | Edit Note | Delete
So we're driving to work today, and it's raining hard all through Saskatchewan and all through alberta too. My MP3 player gave up the ghost on me last week and so we were stuck listening to cassette tapes (okay here's the background on the tapes; I bought this stupid little car specifically for the purpose of driving back and forth to Alberta for work and I have no desire to make any aesthetic improvements on it such as a cd player...then one day at a garage sale I came across a case of tapes for $5 and I bought them for laughs) For reasons that I feel no need or desire to explain, I decided I wanted to listen to Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits. I put it in and to my surprise, there was a song on there that I'd never heard before called The Killing of Georgie. It's about a young homosexual boy (or "cornholin' faggot" as Calvin would say), who leaves home for New York, where he first encounters success and acceptance then tragedy. Anyway I'd never heard it before and it really is ahead of it's time and I said to Sorge (who had been gritting his teeth and wincing through nearly the entire Rod Stewart collection up to this point), I said to Sorge "Hey, this is a gay song.
And without missing even a beat Sorge replied "I thought all Rod Stewart songs were gay songs."
Anyway we had 300 miles of rain and Sorge slept a lot and I listened to a lot of Rod Stewart. The good news is that I didn't have to work, so I bought a new digital camera and a printer. Peace out yo, keep it real, know wud I'msayn?



Cocaine Sky
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Saturday, August 25, 2007 at 1:38pm | Edit Note | Delete
Last night the highway was dark and the moon was bright. I had all the lights down in the car and Sorge was asleep in the passenger seat. I was all meditative and contemplative but jacked up on taurine and caffeine and my mind was tired and in overdrive and thoughts would explode out with a bright supernova quality then fizzle like sparks in the trail of a fireworks flare. I was watching the road and the sky above the road and the moon had the highway painted all shining and silver. The dark night clouds lay heavy and still, outlined in black against the midnight blue and between the breaks in the clouds the stars and the Milky Way glinted like crystals of cocaine residue on the glass of one of those cheap framed pictures you can win at the fair with the ghost biker riding his ghost Harley across a living and turbulent nighttime prairie highway sky.
this is the closest pic I could find to the one I had in mind. But y'all know what I'm talkin' 'bout.
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Work ethic.
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at 10:21pm | Edit Note | Delete
Let me tell you about a man I know. I know this guy, and he's 72 years old. Let's call him...Nguyen. Nguyen works like a son of a bitch. In his younger days he gained a reputation as a serious, reliable and hard working man. I have it on good authority that while many of his young peers were going to dances and parties and sporting events, Nguyen would be off somewhere working. His hard work paid off for him. In his 40s he founded a construction company. He's now an employee (and I believe off the record owner) of said company. This company receives millions of dollars in municipal contracts every year. And every year they operate for 14 hours/day all season long.
And at 72 years old Nguyen is still one of the first people on the site in the morning, and one of the last to leave. While most people work 14 hours, Nguyen is working 15 or more. Often times he'll work through lunch, and he takes shortened coffee and supper breaks. Nguyen leads by example. While he's made more than enough to be an absentee owner, he prefers to come out and put in more than his share of the workload. Nguyen can swing a sledgehammer like John Henry, an axe like Paul Bunyan, he can climb up and down cliff faces like a mountain goat (like a freakin' mountain goat!). He doesn't have to come into work like you and me, but there he is, every day (and sometimes weekends).
Now some of you probably admire Nguyen by this point.
Nguyen is a fool.
If I ever even begin to resemble Nguyen, PLEASE...shoot me! This man is SICK people! I mean seriously, he must have 8 figures worth of assets if not more, and family that are willing and capable of running the business. This man is NOT a success in my opinion. On our coffee breaks and lunch breaks he looks like a fish out of water. If he speaks, it's to discuss some element of the job to come. He is incapable of existing in the moment. He is incapable of quiet reflection. He is addicted to work like any Hasting's Street junkie is to heroine. It's terrifying! His grandchildren come out and their parents lift them up into whatever piece of equipment he happens to be running for a moment of contact. There is some part of his psyche that must be so overpoweringly horrific for him to face that he is constantly running from it. He works when he's sick, he works when he's injured. One day he interjected at a staff meeting when someone was complaining about something.
He said "Boy if you could harrow what I've ploughed you'd be doing pretty good." I thought that was a comment that really shed some light on his character. He didn't talk about what he'd earned, or the freedom he'd gained, or his wisdom...he spoke solely and exclusively of the quantity of work that he'd done, as if that justified or validated in some way what nothing else could. This man has a work sickness, and it's a sickness that I'm sure receives a hell of a lot of positive re-inforcement from society at large. It's insane if you ask me. Absolutely freaking nuts.
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