On the Road: Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation

[I originally posted this five years ago today, in 2006]:  

Today is Jack Kerouac's birthday (1922-1969). His reputation has survived quips like Truman Capote's clever if evil line, "that's not writing, that's typing." While he was alive, academia (for the most part) dismissed him as a joke. Now whole courses are taught on the Beats; their books can be found in major bookstores or easily obtained online. They have been absorbed into mainstream culture, and even the originally derisive Cold War term "beatnik" has a nostalgiac ring.

But Beat writing is more about unconventional freedom of movement and alternative lifestyles than it is about nostalgia. There is no uniform philosophy. Some of the Beats embraced Zen Buddhism, some launched cultural and political critiques and jeremiads (Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Gregory Corso's "Bomb"); Kerouac mostly told stories and chronicled his own life and the comings and goings of key friends. William S. Burroughs started with a variation of crime noir (Junky) and moved through experimentation, drugs, voluntary exile, and the cut-up method (in collaboration with the artist Brion Gysin) to create such controversial works as Naked Lunch. The collective impact on interested parties in the 1960s was enormous, from Bob Dylan straight to the present. So happy birthday, Jack! Today your books live alongside Truman's and everybody be happy.

My sister Vickie told me Jack Kerouac's story when I was a teenager straight out of VMI. The first thing I read was an annotated copy of On the Road from the library, which was perfect because the "critical section" set the novel within an understandable context. The novel itself inspired me in many ways, but perhaps most imporantly it opened up possibilities for striking out on the road and living in unconventional ways. Between that and miraculously surviving a dramatic car wreck completely unscathed (the car flipped over and spun around a few times before landing in a watery ditch), I was ready to GO!

And away I went over the span of just four or five blindingly short years -- to New England with my friend Kenny Randall where we met Baba and Louise Toumajan; to Europe on a college trip where I got to know my friend Bill Caughlin; around the country by car with my sister Linda Stine, visiting relatives and Beat shrines along the way in Denver, San Francsico, New Orleans and elsewhere; to Mardi Gras with Bill; to Europe again, with Suzanne DePalma; to Manhattan and the Beat hangouts there; to Boulder, Colorado, with my friend Evan Farris to visit his sister Amy Farris (now Amy Kilbride) -- I'm talking thirty to forty hour car rides, hallucinatory experiences, for sure --then driving with my sister Vickie Charabati [now Stavish] to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she was moving. And in the middle of all these travels, I got a job at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and plugged into the literary world via publishing, as well. Certainly, it all makes more sense now than it did at the time! And certainly no regrets. I still get the travel bug, though I've come to appreciate (and can better afford) airplanes to get from place to place!
 

Kerouac married Edie Parker of Grosse Pointe; he stayed in the area from time to time, frequenting the still-functioning Rustic Cabins bar in Grosse Pointe Park, and the temporarily defunct Wooden Nickel (on Mack Avenue) in an earlier incarnation [now a sushi joint]. "There's no tragedy in Grosse Pointe," Jack proclaimed then, but if he had lived to see it, he'd come to know that on the contrary, there's plenty of tragedy in Grosse Pointe -- just like everywhere else.

A vast storehouse of Kerouac's papers are now owned by the New York Public Library; pleasingly, the same institution recently acquired William S. Burroughs' papers, too. Burroughs' importance will be better understood in due time.

On the road, adieu for now. . . . .

Today's Rune: Wholeness.  

Walker Percy: The Moviegoer

I'm rereading Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1962) and enjoying the epxperience immensely. The first time I read it was for Mrs. Lois Vick's Southern Writers class in the late 1970s; I'm reading the same copy I read then. The cover price is listed at $2.95, which reveals a basic link between time and inflation. Can you even get a used book for $2.95 now?

The Moviegoer is largely set in and around New Orleans and also Chicago; it's hard not think of Katrina interloping between my first read and second, and also of the massive earthquake that struck Japan today. All of which underscores the existential themes in Percy, not just in The Moviegoer but in his Lost in the Cosmos (1983), too, which I also recently reread.

On the good side of linear time, I've stuck with an essentially existential outlook without feeling stuck; on the down side, Mrs. Vick's son Mark died recently of a long debilitating disease, and was just a couple years older than I am. Mrs. Vick is now in her eighties. Time and mortality make an all-too-good fit. Yet -- perhaps illogically or non-rationally or just primally and absurdly -- I'm very happy to be alive and kicking. How about you?  

Today's Rune: Harvest.  

Michael Angelo Tata Interview, Part II

Part II of the Erik's Choice interview with Michael Angelo Tata. Photo: MAT with his Mom and Sunni, a stuffed chicken, on Christmas Day 2010 (Courtesy MAT).

EC: What have you been into lately, textually?

MAT: I’ve been on a Wittgenstein binge lately—I think what got me into it was that I was writing a piece about poet Charles Bernstein for the forthcoming Salt Companion to his work, and coming back into contact with his love of Wittgenstein inspired me to give Ludwig another go, now that all the poets have forgotten about him.  To be specific, I’m reading The Blue and Brown Notebooks.  Their style is so anti-philosophical, even diaristic: rambly, anecdotal and immediate.  I’m hooked.  They also provide many crucial insights into his published writings and into the divergence of his thought from Logic and Analytic Philosophy and its embracing of the problems of ordinary language in all its gorgeous cacophonousness.

EC: What types of texts do you like to read and who are some of your fave, most inspiration-inducing writers?

MAT: I love reading poetry, philosophy and psychoanalysis--Ted Berrigan, James Schuyler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, all the stuff that gives you a migraine.  Then of course there’s physics and evolutionary bio—Brian Greene, Albert Einstein, Michio Kaku, Lynn Margulis, Humberto Maturana.  Within fiction, which has influenced my structural choices immeasurably, even outside the realm of the prosodic, there’s Jane Austen and Marcel Proust, bitches on wheels if ever there were bitches on wheels.  They both taught me so much about syntax, especially about how to encode attitude into it, how to put it to the service of triple entendre and keep it coiled tightly, every word spring-loaded and overdetermined.  Proust especially fired me up: who would have thought a sentence could go on for so long, and still be respectable?  After Marcel, I was ruined for sure.   

EC: Are you working on new texts or other works?

MAT: As usual, I have a few projects going.  Poetically, I have been working on a series of numbered zeroes: the series is tentatively called Sweet Nothings, and it focuses on the little pools of nothingness that perforate the everyday.  The poems are elaborately lyrical, even to the point of absurdity, and in many ways use what Keats called the Egotistical Sublime as counterpoint to the impersonality and cold procedurality of so much Language School poetry.  I’ve also completed my first novel, Scattering Brightly.  It’s pretty much a pomo picaresque about the tangled life of a dumpster baby left outside Studio 54.  Lastly, I’m nearly done with the sequel to my Warhol book.  It’s called Andy Warhol II: Inescapable Da_sein, with Da-sein’s hyphen becoming the cursor’s underscore.  It’s a little grammatical trick I’m using to reinforce the notion that Warhol’s work redefines the ‘thereness’ of Heidegger’s ‘being-there’ in terms of mechanism and virtuality.  Oh—and I promised Black Camera a piece about Sapphire’s use of the word ‘cuntbucket’ in her Push.  That is gonna be loads of fun to develop. 

EC:  The hardest part of writing is . . .

MAT: The hardest part of writing is not-writing. Stopping.  Putting the words away.  Being-silent.

EC: Can you give us some kind words of advice about writing and publishing?

MAT: Just keep on going, no matter what.  Keep track of who inspires you, and follow their work relentlessly.  Reading is as important as writing: you have to consume to produce, as biological gaucherie would have it.  Try your stuff out on friends and family.  And don’t take rejection personally—use it as an occasion to learn what about your work people actually do like, and then capitalize upon it. 

EC:  What’s your approach to promoting Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality?

MAT: Because smaller presses do not have the widest net of distribution, you have to be inventive.  Make lists of all the people you’d like to read what you wrote, and if they’re alive, have your publisher get them a copy.  That’s what I did with Danto, and I was shocked to learn that he not only read the book, but loved it, and wanted to help promote it.  He was kind enough to put out a call on Facebook, which was quite surreal, and he got it reviewed by the Journal of Aesthetics at Temple by his colleague David Carrier.  I was also fortunate enough to have a literary PR guru from Sizzle, San Diego give me loads of advice about how to build up my Amazon author profile, develop some guerrilla marketing concepts,  and other helpful tidbits.  My friend who dances at the Penthouse Club in NYC is actually supposed to YouTube herself reading my book while up on the pole—I am so praying this happens!  I’m hoping to involve Krystal Something Something and Ultra Violet in the campaign, if I can lure them in.

EC: How can interested folks acquire a copy of Andy Warhol?

MAT: The best place to go is www.intertheory.org: just look for the image of the Empire State Building, and click away.  You can also check out my profile at Amazon.com by typing my name into the search engine.  Or, you can go to my company page, www.ipublishingllc.com, where there’s links to my work, as well as to all the advertising stuff I do to bring home the bacon, as Andy liked to say.  Only now it’s turkey bacon—European denim is not exactly roomy! 

Today's Rune: Defense.

http://intertheory.org/warhol.htm

Michael Angelo Tata Interview, Part I

Dear Readers: what follows is Part I of the Erik's Choice interview with Michael Angelo Tata. We'll continue with Part II tomorrow.

EC:  What’s your latest full-length work?

MAT: My most recent book is Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality, published by Nick Ruiz’s Intertheory Press in Florida.  It’s the first of a two-part look at Warhol’s art, personality and philosophy.  It takes aesthetician Arthur Danto’s idea about the Brillo Box as the last art object the world can ever know at its word, tracing it back to its roots in German Idealism and international Romanticism.  Along the way, it unearths a surprising core of sublimity within Danto’s thought, and of course I exploit this archaeological revelation to the max.

EC: Can you tell us a little about your background?  

MAT: I’m originally from New England—Bristol, Connecticut, to be exact, although I always say “Hartford,” because at least that conjures up images of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  The first book I ever wrote was called Michael Angelo and the Big Apple.  My grandmother Lucy helped me make a cover for it out of those fab paper grocery bags that today survive only in landfills.  It was pretty much a rip-off of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, but my teachers liked it enough to begin inviting me to read my stories to the younger kids at my school.  And that was that: I was a writer, with my own little battalion of fans.  

EC: Was their a particular inspiration that led you to write Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality?

MAT: A long time ago, I borrowed my Mom’s car and went over to Trinity College in Hartford, where they had a special screening of Chuck Workman’s film Superstar.  That movie enraptured me, and I realized that I had to figure out why it captivated me so.  Superstar seemed to show me a new way of making and interpreting art, and I fell completely beneath its spell immediately, the way one succumbs to a virus, or succubus.

EC: Can you tell us a little about how Andy Warhol came to be published?

MAT: I shopped the book around to sites of edginess, like Verso and Zone, and the cooler university presses, like MIT and Duke.  I could tell that most of the editors I forwarded it to liked it, because the rejection letters were atypically sweet.  Mostly the editors would say that they wished they could publish it, and were regretful they couldn’t, because it was far too outré.  Nicholas Ruiz III put out a call for manuscripts thru U Penn’s listserv, and I responded.  He loved it, and snatched it right up as his fourth title.

EC: What inspired you early on in your writer’s trajectory?

MAT: Words always held a special power for me.  When I was a kid, my Aunt Angie would have me take the “Increase Your Word Power” quiz in Reader’s Digest whenever I was over for one of her famous Saturday night filet mignon dinners, and I was hooked.  She was also my first editor—and what a harsh critic she was!  No nepotism there.  If she hated a something I produced, she always let me know for sure.  The one poem she loved the most was all about a word I learned about in one of her quizzes, Haggis.  That one went right on her refrigerator!  I so wish I had saved a copy. 

EC: What kind of “background” research do you do?

MAT: I sort of just float along and let the ideas lead me: negative capability meets chaos theory.  A kind of epistemological drifting fit for a cerebral hobo.  I think rhizomically, like a good Deleuzian, and spread my roots across every inhospitable surface I find.  The Internet is an amazing tool—you just have to triple-check everything you find, since you never know who’s posting the info you come across, especially with the trendier Wikis.  Google Books can be particularly helpful;.  With the Warhol, I was fortunate enough to have been given a Cohen grant to go to Pittsburgh and rummage through the Time Capsules.  My other favorite place to conduct research is the Met’s Costume Institute.  You can sign up to see an old Tiger Morse dress from the 60s, and before you know it, you’re in a room with surgical gloves pawing pink PVC.    

EC: What did you learn from your work on Andy Warhol?

MAT: I learned that although my ideas are fundamentally philosophical, my method is more literary, which makes me something of a rarity: at least this is what Arthur Danto told me after he read the book, and I figured he would know.  My training in Poetics at Temple University taught me a lot about how to phrase things, how to regard them, how to take their surface features seriously and in many ways literally.  Most philosophers are horrible writers, and most writers are horrible philosophers.  But poets get philosophy intuitively: and what could be more poetic than the philosopher’s sense of puzzlement?

Michael Angelo Tata with New York City DJ and personality Glamourpuss. (Photo courtesy of MAT). 

Today's Rune: Harvest.

http://intertheory.org/warhol.htm

Ali-Frazier: The Fight of the Century Plus Forty

[Orginally posted on November 6, 2008 -- now it's forty years later . . .]

Taking a break from the present, I found a ticket dated March 8, 1971, saved from when my Dad took little-kid-me over to Raleigh, North Carolina, to see "THE BATTLE OF CHAMPIONS" on large closed circuit TV at Reynolds Coliseum on the North Carolina State University Campus. The champions in question were Muhammad Ali and Smokin' Joe Frazier. What I remember: the palpable excitement, my Dad favoring Frazier because of his Philadelphia connections, and Frazier winning after fifteen tough rounds of mutual Frazier-Ali bashing. It was amazing to experience, and both men came off memorably well (hell -- here I am fondly writing about it thirty-seven -- yes, thirty-seven -- years later . . .)

What I didn't know then was that Ali had to fight in order to regain the championship -- he'd had his title taken away for protesting Vietnam. Good God, the more things
change . . . I also had no idea at the time that several of my favorite artistes were at the actual ringside in Madison Square Garden, wild cats as widely ranged as Woody Allen and Frank Sinatra (gee, was Mia Farrow there?), Norman Mailer and Burt Lancaster.

Glad that both Ali and Frazier are still alive and in their mid-sixties, about the same age as many of my favorite rock stars from the 1960s and 70s . . .

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert

If you like history, war movies, action movies, and maybe something a little different, you might want to check out Moustapha Akkad's Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert (1980/1981). First, overall it's excellent. Second, it's set in Libya during Italy's fascist period, with Mussolini aiming to expand his "New Roman Empire" in Africa, focusing on the struggle between Libyan guerillas vs. Italian occupation and shot with meticulous detail. Third, none other than Colonel Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi / Qaddafi invested heavily in the film. Fourth, director Moustapha Akkad, who also produced the Halloween series of films, was, along with his daughter, assassinated by an al-Qaeda bomb in Jordan in 2005. Fifth, Lion of the Desert was not shown on Italian TV until 2009 -- nearly thirty years after its theatrical release. 

I have only minor issues with Lion of the Desert: early on there's a little bit of hokiness, some melodramtic music and a crazy affinity for zoom shots, sort of like a 70s TV movie. But once it kicks into gear, this film becomes mesmerizingly more effective. It's as if the director and crew settled down and really got to work after some initial adjusting. The cast is strong, especially Anthony Quinn as Omar Mukhtar, the guerilla leader, and Oliver Reed as Rodolfo Graziani, the relentless, brutal and merciless Italian commander. Having earlier played Napoleon, Rod Steiger also does a pretty good impression of Mussolini. Let's not forget Irene Papas.

The conflict itself seems as old as humankind itself, though in the modern style, the Italians are fully mechanized and the guerillas move around on foot and horseback with light weaponry and explosives. One of the most impressively dramatic -- and horrific -- scenes is the 1931 Italian blitzkrieg assault on Kufra, starting with aerial bombardment (a prototype of Guernica, Spain, 1937), next ground artillery, then small Whippet-like tanks and machine-gun mounted armored cars followed by infantry. Other horrors include the creation of concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire and flanked with guard towers, public hangings, poison gas, and a massive barbed wire "Hadrian's Wall" running north-south in Eastern Libya, cutting the rebels off from Egypt. It's nasty stuff, like so much of war is, made more nightmarish through use of modern weapons churned out by the 20th century's Satanic mills. Finally, there is also human decency in the film, epitomized by individuals on both sides of the conflict, an important touch.

Today's Rune: Defense.   

Food, Inc.

Robert Kenner's FOOD, INC. (2008) takes a trenchant look at agribusinesses and their impact on the average person's living conditions. As with Business, Banking, and Energy, so it is with Agriculture: Bigger is Not Better for anyone except those who hold and consolidate the reins of power and those who make the quarterly profits. Underscoring the importance of seeing this film, everyone has to eat to survive. 

FOOD, INC. doesn't come out and say it directly much, but people can choose to bypass the dominant system, or at least subvert it to a degree. Even while others are trying to change it from within.  

Support a victory garden (try planting without Monsanto-owned seeds), local organic producers and farmers, local vegan/vegetarian/organic co-ops and eateries, and so on. Reduce visits to fast food joints, cut down on superfluous driving, try some of the energy savings ideas Jimmy Carter put forth in the late 1970s -- they are still valid on this side of Ronald Reagan's diminishing shadow.   

In Fort Worth, there is an increasing buildup of certified organic food supply. For hamburger-lovers, Kincaid's cows "are vegetarian so you don't have to be."  Spiral Diner offers nicely-prepared and tasty vegan meals; the same owners will soon open an independent movie theater, The Citizen.  These foods are slightly more expensive than typical fast-food, but not by much -- and you can get them at most grocery stores to a surprising degree, and at mixed retailers like Target.

I am hopeful, actually, and predict that by 2060, organic vegetarian and vegan meals will comprise the majority of choices by the majority of the (mostly urban) population out of pure common sense, if nothing else.

Today's Rune:  Fertility.