WE'VE MOVED!!!!!

Just in case you're ending up here, I wanted to let you know I'm mostly not here anymore. I can now be found here: http://chrislamaywest.com/ All my old archives can be found there too, so there isn't any reason for you to stay here. I don't know who you are, but come visit me!

Five Things I've Learned as a Poetry Editor

In May of last year I started working on the Mud Season Review, a new online (and soon coming out with our first print edition!) journal. The journal is an outgrowth of the Burlington Writer's Workshop, itself a fantastic community resource for writers here in my new homeland. The journal strives to bring some of the workshop's sense of writers supporting and in dialogue with each other into the literary journal format, and I'm super-proud of what we're doing.

I started out as one of two Assistant Poetry Editors, responsible for reviewing what's passed on by our readers, and then participating with the senior editors in their final decision process. Through various perambulations, I've now become a poetry Co-Editor. Having spent a lot of the past few years on the "submitting" side of the process, it's fascinating to now be on the other end, and I wanted to pass on a few key things I've learned to my fellow submitting poets out there:

1. It is such a high-volume business, rejections don't (necessarily) mean you're bad: I get discouraged by my literary rejections sometimes, for sure. And I knew, intellectually, what the numbers were like. But now, from the other side, I really appreciate it. In the six months since we started, we've had around 570 poetry submissions, usually of 3-5 poems each. And we've put out five online editions so far, with maybe 5 poems in each. Math tells me that (5*5)/(3*570)= 25/1,710= 1.47%. The numbers for Mud Season Review are not atypical-many journals publish more pieces, but they also get more submissions per issue. In other words, your poem could be in the top 2% of submissions an editor is receiving and still not make the cut-off of what they have room to publish.

2. You need to bring your best work-every detail matters: See above- given that you can be in the top 2% of what a journal receives and still miss the cutoff, what you submit needs to be your very, very best. Send your favorite poems, not your "maybe this will work". First (or even second or third) drafts probably won't get you there. That misspelling that you missed, or awkward line that you know doesn't quite work, but it probably doesn't matter? It might. Knowing this now has actually sharply re-focused me on the quality of submissions I send out.

3. Form is really important: By which I mean the physical form of the poem. Having read literally hundreds of poems every month, I've noticed that one of the primary things that can throw me off is the format of the poem. Even if I really like the poet's voice, and am intrigued by the content and appreciate the imagery, word choice, etc., a physically difficult format can keep me from connecting with it. Things like line breaks, regularity of structure (even if the structure itself is unorthodox, does it at least have internal consistency in how it's working?), and spacing or other devices to keep the flow of reading going make a big difference. Again, knowing this leaves me chastened about some of my submissions over the years, and has got me thinking about how I can improve.  

4. Your cover letter probably doesn't matter, so don't spend too much time on it: We use Submittable, which separates out the content (i.e. the poems) from the personal note or cover letter that accompanies them. So as not to prejudice my reading, I usually don't look at the letters until after I've read, ranked and made my comments for the team. Talking with the other editors, they generally do the same. This is not to say that I don't appreciate a good cover letter, but it's not going to influence my read, so it shouldn't be a major focus of your time and effort. Short and sincere will probably more than do.

5. There are a lot of really good poets out there: Since I wasn't a first-line Reader, I didn't read all of those 1,700 poems myself. But I did read a significant number of them, and it turns out there are a lot of really good poets out there. And they aren't necessarily the established poets. I won't name names, but I have often appreciated the work of new or lightly-published poets over people with impressive-looking credentials. Since it is such a numbers game (see #1 above), you may need to submit a lot to get your work out there. But don't give up- there are so many good poets whose work deserves to be read. You could be one of them!


  

My Year in Writing

Do you remember NASA's "faster, better. cheaper" venture in the 90s? It was based on the idea that by designing smaller missions that could launch more quickly, the agency might get more done, more efficiently, than if it pursued grand initiatives. Some of the missions fell down and went boom, but it did get NASA moving again after a decade of relative lethargy. Well, in that same spirit, I'm continuing on my mission of getting out at least a blog posting a week this year, even be they quick and dirty. And so on to this week's theme- my writing track record in 2014.

A few years ago, I settled on the goal of making a publishing submission per week. Short story, essay, poetry, whatever, just submit something to a journal, offline or online, once a week. That would, of course, be 52 for the year, which has never happened yet due to holidays, hectic work weeks, feeling under the weather, what not. My operating theory is that having the target probably gets me delivering more, even if I miss, then if there was no target. Turns out that 2014 was my most submittingest year ever, with 43 total submissions, as attested to by my tracking spreadsheet:

My tracking spreadsheet also informs me that I've had two acceptances so far from things I submitted in 2014. One should be coming out in the Spring, and since I have a superstitious peasant mind, I don't want to jinx by saying any more. The other was two poems that appeared in Misfit Magazine in October.

I also had several "near-misses", i.e. places that wrote back to me and said something wasn't quite right for them, and why, or that I was a semi-finalist but not a finalist. I actually find these to be nearly as motivating as acceptances. They're kind of proof-of-concept of being on-track, and provide a lot more feedback than the form "Dear [insert name here]" rejections one usually gets, or the even more unnerving whistling silence of places that never answer back in any form. 

In addition to the regular weekly submissions, I've also been submitting two larger works to presses and prizes: my unpublished poetry collection Pushing 40, and my unpublished novel Out in the Neon Night. I sent out the poetry collection ten times last year, and the novel seven. I'll keep you posted on further developments...

My other major writing focus over the last year was to get more regular and disciplined about writing time, always a challenge for me given full-time work, a full-time relationship, recovery, other interests (including serving as a Poetry Editor at Mud Season Review), etc. In other words, life. Shout-outs to Tarin Towers for telling me "shut up and do it" (it was phrased more elegantly than that, but just as firmly) and my talented and lovely wife for helping me brainstorm about the how/when. I targeted 6 hours a week. And came not even close!

Excel informs me I ended up with 65.76 hours of writing time, which works out to an average of an hour and a quarter a week. Again, though, I have to believe that aiming got me further than winging it would have, and resulted in less of a sense of anxiety and drift. So what does 65.76 hours get you? In my case:

• Completing the (hopefully) penultimate draft of my full-length screenplay
• Revising a short story to get it down to a word-limit that will work better for submissions
• Starting a new short story
• Writing a personal essay looking back on Generation-X as seen through the lyrics of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" which I'm quite pleased with and currently submitting hither and yon
• Completing a challenge to write 40 poems in 40 days
• Writing a sestina, because the idea intrigued me     

For 2015, I'm aiming for 5 hours a week, on the theory that if one wrote for an hour a day every weekday, that's what it would equal to. Because, math. We'll see how I do, but for this week I have one hour down, thanks to writing this post for you. So thank you! 

Short New Year's Post

I am told by fairly reliable sources (for example, the archive menu immediately to the right of this posting) that I didn't Blog at all in 2014. Egads!

Well, the simplest way to stop having stopped something is to start it again. And the simplest way to start something is to be okay with doing even a little pinch of it, and to give yourself permission to do it imperfectly. So I'm going to keep this short.

2014 was a good year in many ways, but one of the big ones was that I bought the house pictured above with this lady:

The house also features these resident cats:

And the following ring-necked pheasant that sometimes visits (unless the fox we've seen crossing our road several times has gotten him):

The whole process of looking for, buying, and moving in to a house dominated a lot of the year, one of the reasons there was so little blog activity. But enough excuses! I hereby am blogging again. This is the post that bear witness to that. May Odin, Zeus and Ra have mercy...

Year of Kerouac: The Subterraneans

Here we are for the latest installment of The Year of Kerouac. Which is likely now the Year-and-a-half-of-Kerouac since it's already November. Let's ignore twisted temporal tiddlywinks for the moment, though, and focus back on the mission: I have set myself the project of re-reading (and in many cases, reading for the first time) the works of Jack Kerouac in one(ish) year(s). As a quick refresher on the ground rules, I'm reading them not in the order of when they were written (the years on the left below) but rather in order of the subject matter most of them cover, Kerouac's own life (the years to the right below). For your further edification, I've highlighted what I've read thus far, and put in links to my earlier reviews. 

Visions of Gerard             1956       1922–1926

Doctor Sax          1952       1930–1936

Maggie Cassidy 1953       1938–1939

 Vanity of Duluoz               1968       1935–1946

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings    1936–1943           Various

The Town and the City   1946–1949           1935–1946

On The Road      1948–1956           1946–1950

Visions of Cody 1951–1952           1946–1952

The Subterraneans         1953       1953

·         Mexico City Blues (1955; published 1959)

Tristessa              1955–1956           1955–1956

The Dharma Bums           1957       1955–1956

·         The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1956; published 1960) 

Desolation Angels            1956–1957 

Book of Dreams   1960    1952-1960

Lonesome Traveler, short story collection (1960)

Big Sur (novel)   1961       1960

Satori in Paris     1965       1965

·         Pic, novella (1951 & 1969; published 1971)

  

Which brings us to The Subterraneans. I'd tried and failed to read this around the age of 19 or so. Which I can understand now, looking back, as it's definitely more on the experimental prose side of his works. Not Doctor Sax or Visions of Cody experimental, but certainly given to his ongoing concern for capturing the flow of thought in motion. It's a fairly straightforward narrative in a way, chronicling the beginning, middle and end of a love affair. Except that the end informs the beginning throughout, and sometimes the middle circles back on itself to reveal another layer of the same incident. So, it might have been a little advanced for literary larval me. More than that, I don't think I had the ability at the time to understand all the forces at play in Kerouac's life as portrayed here- literary disappointment, romantic disappointment  and an unsuccessful struggle with accelerating alcoholism and his conflicted views on women and relationships. As in, they are divine creatures who can transform and save your life, but you also have to not get hung up on them and know when to ignore them. It's heartbreaking to see it in motion, especially heartbreaking since you can feel the earnestness of his love interest Mardou Fox. I've seen others write about how she's portrayed as crazy, but I find her to be a damn sight more sensible and stable than he is throughout. It's also chilling, knowing his own end, to see him already, in 1953, suffering alcoholic withdrawal nightmares in the morning. One of the other things I found interesting about the book, knowing how autobiographical most of his writing is, was seeing the things he choose to fictionalize. The personages, his relationship with them, etc. is all virtually verbatim. But the story is set in San Francisco, instead of the New York where it actually happened, and he even has himself fictionally having grown up in South San Francisco instead of in Lowell, Massachusetts. Did this give him the distance he needed to get the story out? 

We will leave ourselves pondering that, and see how much further in the list I can get before the end of the year! 

I Love Vermont!

As I mentioned in my last post, my lovely bride and I have recently moved to Vermont. She hailed from Rochester, New York, before coming to San Francisco for graduate school and ensnaring me along the way, and had wanted for a while to be closer to where she grew up for access to family, friends, etc. So two years ago, we headed out to Salem, Massachusetts, which met her criteria (same time zone as family, same day drive, direct transport links, far enough from the city that we could have a little bit of space) and met mine (near a big city with major artistic resources, access to nature, and on the ocean). It was our best guess at a 2,700-mile remove about what might work for us. The thing is, it never really did.

Please don't get me wrong, Boston is a great city, with a lot to offer. Salem has quite an active arts scene for its size, especially on the literary front (shout outs to my writing group and the folks behind Salem Writers and the Mass Poetry Festival). I worked with an inspiring group of people who were doing good things in the world at the Housing Partnership Network. And I made some friends during our two years there who I will keep for life (hopefully you know who you are!). But the pace of things was just a little too hectic for both of us, and Boston, as close as it was, was hard to get to without feeling like you'd fought your way through. For both of us it seemed like everything was a little too draining, too much of a struggle, and we didn't have enough reserves left at the end of the day to get out and do the things we loved.

So, we traveled around, and kept our eyes out for places that might work for us. We found ourselves consistently drawn to the areas around Burlington, Vermont and Portland, Maine. Both had a lot of things in common- beautiful natural settings, smaller cities that were easy to get into and out of and get around in, but cultural scenes more like a big city in terms of art, music, literary happenings, events and food. Of the two, Burlington was better for access to New York, had a lot of resources around local-food and food-justice issues Abbey is passionate about, and I ka-loved the lake and mountain combination. (Ka-loving is like "loving", but with a "ka-bam!" added). So I started a Vermont-centered job search in the Spring of this year that I honestly thought might take a while- a year, maybe more. But, I've observed in life that when something is ready to happen, it can unfold in a hurry. And so a July interview resulted in being totally up and moved by the end of August.

The verdict so far? I love it here! Abbey does too, although of course she can tell you about that herself. A few examples of the why's and wherefores of my new-found love:

Mountains. One thing I realized I really missed from California while living in Massachusetts was mountains! This is the view from our driveway (and living room window, for that matter). Those are the Adirondacks in the background, over in New York across Lake Champlain. Which you could see if it wasn't behind some low rising hills. You can see these guys, and/or the Green Mountains of Vermont, from pretty much anywhere you go.

Lake Champlain. I've always thought I needed to live somewhere near the ocean. It may still prove to be the case, as I feel heart pangs every time I see pictures of crashing surf. However, in the meantime I'm certainly enjoying being near a lake that stretches for over 100 miles, touching New York, Vermont and Canada along the way. Lake Champlain (seen here from the top of Mt. Philo, a few miles north of where we live) is the 13th-largest lake in the United States. However, if you read the fine print, you'll discover that two of those are man-made lakes, two of those are saltwater lakes, and one of them is in Alaska. So I like to think of it as the eight-largest naturally occurring freshwater lake in the lower 48. And also possibly home to...

Champ. Sighted over 300 times since the 1600s, Champ is -a surviving pleisosaur? a relict zeuglodon? a giant sturgeon? a trick of the light and standing waves? Whatever. Put me near a possible cryptid, and I'm happy. Now to get a kayak and take up diving so I can find him! Her?  

Wilderness. Vermont is home to the Green Mountain National Forest (where Abbey and I found this handsome-looking fellow) as well as a wealth of State Parks, and the aforementioned Adirondack Park just across the bridge in New York. Nearly every weekend we've been tromping out somewhere. Including this weekend, when we went to North Hero State Park to take part in a beach cleanup to protect the habitat of baby turtles. I mean, come on, baby turtles is practically worth it's own entry!

My job. I'm working at Middlebury College. Which, besides meaning I get to work with really nice people and see ridiculously pretty views like this every work day, also means I'm part of a fantastic, creative and progressive community. Founded in 1800, Middlebury was the first university in America to accept African-Americans, and one of the first to admit women on a co-educational basis. It reminds me of some of the things I missed about working at the Exploratorium. There are lectures, films and performances going on all the time, and there's even a museum where I can visit Assyrian reliefs, mummies, classical statues and centuries of painting for lunch.

Vergennes. We live here. There are falls (as seen to the left). A riverside park where you can see a heron walk down the dock. A downtown that's all of 3.5 blocks, but has a row of cute little shops and several excellent restaurants. And we actually live a little outside of town, where things look like the below right. That was a scene from strolling up the road we live on earlier in the summer. Farms, cornfields, rolling hills and mountains in the distance. We even saw a deer bounding across a field one day. It's pretty ironic that someone who couldn't wait to

escape from the country as a teenager is now thrilled to be greeted by the horse across the street who eyes me suspiciously as I go out to the car each morning, and then has a commute that regularly includes cow, horse, sheep and goat sightings (with occasional turkeys, vultures and the stray llama and gratuitous extra camel (yes, camel)). But I am thrilled! And best of all, we get to live someplace as laid back as this, but still be an easy drive to Burlington and all the city has to offer. Which in the last two months has included...

Last but not lease best, in fact most vital to who I am and what I do, Burlington is home to quite a vital writing scene. The last event pictured above was co-hosted by Geek Mountain State, which is delightfully just what it sounds like, a community encouraging geeky pursuits in Vermont, and the Renegade Writer's Collective, a group that hosts readings, holds workshops and otherwise provides resources and support for local writers. I've already taken one of their workshops, and look forward to doing more.

Since getting to town, I've also started to become a regular participant in the ongoing writing feedback workshops held by the Burlington Writer's Workshop, where people get together every week to provide critical (in the helpful sense) feedback on pieces submitted by local writers. Anybody who's attended at least one session can sign up to have their work reviewed at a future one.

      
I could go on, but the point is, being here seems like it might just work out okay. I'll keep you posted on how it's going!

              

Year of Kerouac: The Town and the City, On The Road, Visions of Cody

I'm not going to lie to you. The Year of Kerouac may well become the Year-and-a-half-of-Kerouac. Especially given that this is my first post since May, which I can at least partially blame on the whole "I just moved to Vermont" thing. Which I should probably also write about some time! But in the mean time, I have been continuing my year-long project of re-reading (and in many cases, reading for the first time) the works of Jack Kerouac. As a quick refresher on the ground rules, I'm reading them not in the order of when they were written (the years on the left below) but rather in order of the subject matter most of them cover, Kerouac's own life (the years to the right below). For your further edification, I've highlighted what I've read thus far, and put in links to my earlier reviews. 

Visions of Gerard             1956       1922–1926

Doctor Sax          1952       1930–1936

Maggie Cassidy 1953       1938–1939

 Vanity of Duluoz               1968       1935–1946

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings    1936–1943           Various

The Town and the City   1946–1949           1935–1946

On The Road      1948–1956           1946–1950

Visions of Cody 1951–1952           1946–1952

The Subterraneans         1953       1953

·         Mexico City Blues (1955; published 1959)

Tristessa              1955–1956           1955–1956

The Dharma Bums           1957       1955–1956

·         The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1956; published 1960) 

Desolation Angels            1956–1957 

Book of Dreams   1960    1952-1960

Lonesome Traveler, short story collection (1960)

Big Sur (novel)   1961       1960

Satori in Paris     1965       1965

·         Pic, novella (1951 & 1969; published 1971)

I've sort of been avoiding The Town and the City throughout my whole Kerouac-inspired literary life, knowing that it was his most conventional novel. It is indeed conventional in language and structure, and feels very like "proper" 40ish-50ish American Literature. I.e., a little formal and stuffy, but with some beautiful passages along the way, places where you can almost feel his later prose style being born. And despite the formalism, I found it very engaging. It is one of his most thoroughly fictionalized works in a sense, presenting the sprawling story of the brothers and sisters in a Franco-American family from the fictional Galloway, Massachusetts. Of course, Galloway is a lot like his actual home-town of Lowell, and the parents are a lot like his real parents. And, having read the novels that covered his actual early years, and his other early writings previous to this, I was most struck by how non-fictional much of what's presented is. It's as if Kerouac has spread his own character out across the various fictional Martin brothers, and given each of them pieces of his actual biography. It made me aware of how much contradiction there was within the man himself- dreamy mystic, severe intellectual, family-bound boy, restless wanderer- here they all get to be actual separate characters. I also noticed that only here in all his writings, safely behind the veil of fiction, does he describe his father's death, and tensions between father and son. Once spotted, you can see it hanging around in the background throughout On The Road and Visions of Cody. I also found it fascinating how he has the oldest brother, Joe, end up with the life he always thought he should have lived, settled with wife and child near ancestral home, but ends the novel with the main protagonist, Peter, literally getting on the road, about to hitch across the country. Cue the segue...  

It's a popular theory in arm chair Kerouacanalysis that he became so embittered by the gap between this first success in 1950 and finally getting On The Road published in 1957 that he never really recovered despite later success. It certainly is true, as you can verify by looking at the dates above of when things were written, that his productivity dropped off markedly after 1957, and the works that were produced after that were darker in tone. The book itself, of course, was the first flowering of the breakthrough of his prose style (and, for added effect, obliquely chronicles at several points his finishing the manuscript of The Town and the City, and in its original form even began by referencing the death of his father that the earlier book chronicles towards its end). This is my third time reading it, and one of the things I observe is how what I saw in it each time depended very much on where I was in life. At 19-20 I was primarily keyed in to the adventure of the drugs, the sex, the travel, seeing it as a road map (all puns intended) for what I wanted to find in life. Much mayhem ensued from this line of thinking. Reading it again in my early 30s, as I was really seriously diving in to writing myself, I paid most attention to the prose, both in appreciation and in evaluation of the "how did he do that?" nuts and bolts aspects of the writing. Now, reading it at 42, besides noticing how I keep getting 10 years older every 10 years or so, what really stood out for me was the man behind the prose and the wandering. I have absorbed a lot of Kerouac and other Beat biographies over the years, and recently loaded up on his earlier writings, which definitely informs my sense of it. But, more than that, I myself have absorbed enough life now to really feel the internal contradictions, the restlessness, and the weariness and disappointment of the man behind the story. Not to mention that recovery has given me a whole other perspective on Kerouac as the alcoholic who still suffers. If I read it again in another 10 years or so, I'll be older than he ever lived to be. I wonder what I'll see in it then?            

Kerouac himself described Visions of Cody as a companion to On The Road, in which he covered "vertically" the heights and depths of the relationship with Neal Cassady which he had portrayed in a horizontal, chronological fashion in the earlier book. This is indeed the next batch of material he wrote after On The Road, although it was only published after his death. Even before publication, though, underground copies of it circulated, and had a profound effect on writers in the 60s. It's easy to see why, as this is some of Kerouac's writing at its most experimental. I actually found it to be a little thick reading at several points, and kept thinking of the dense and opaque prose of Proust and Joyce. Kerouac himself references them at several points, and I think was deliberately invoking this style of the plumbing of consciousness and all its contents, focused, sometimes very tangentially, through meditations on Cody Pomeray, aka Dean Moriarty from On The Road, aka Neal Cassady. As such, there are parts that are tedious, parts that invoke a cringe (especially where the inner monologue of Kerouac the misogynist "lover" of women is on full display), and parts that glow with nearly prophetic insight and absolutely amazing prose. And that in itself is the point- he's presenting all the truth of his mental life, without fear or favor. The literary feat, in a way, is as important as the content, the feat itself is its own content. An additional bonus is a 30-page end-note section in which Allen Ginsberg documents his reactions upon reading the manuscript for the first time in the early 70s in the wake of the loss of these two men that he loved.  

So now you're caught up on my literary journey of this year, and I'm caught up. Further installments to follow...        

Year of Kerouac: Vanity of Duluoz, Atop an Underwood

Presented here for your edification (and possible emancipation) is the latest installment of The Year Of Kerouac, my year-long project of re-reading (or in some cases, reading for the first time) the works of Jack Kerouac. As a quick refresher on the ground rules, I'm reading them not in the order of when they were written (the years on the left below) but rather in order of the subject matter most of them cover, Kerouac's own life (the years to the right below). I've highlighted what I've read thus far, and put in links to my earlier reviews. 

Visions of Gerard             1956       1922–1926

Doctor Sax          1952       1930–1936

Maggie Cassidy 1953       1938–1939

 Vanity of Duluoz               1968       1935–1946

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings    1936–1943           Various

The Town and the City   1946–1949           1935–1946

On The Road      1948–1956           1946–1950

Visions of Cody 1951–1952           1946–1952

The Subterraneans         1953       1953

·         Mexico City Blues (1955; published 1959)

Tristessa              1955–1956           1955–1956

The Dharma Bums           1957       1955–1956

·         The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1956; published 1960) 

Desolation Angels            1956–1957 

Book of Dreams   1960    1952-1960

Lonesome Traveler, short story collection (1960)

Big Sur (novel)   1961       1960

Satori in Paris     1965       1965

·         Pic, novella (1951 & 1969; published 1971)

Vanity of Duluoz is a book I'd actually been quite curious about. I knew it was one of the last things Kerouac wrote, finishing and publishing it the year before he died. I had also heard that it was one of his worst books, and showed the signs of having been written by a late-stage alcoholic. So what's the verdict? No. And yes. At first I actually quite liked it for perhaps exactly those qualities that others had keyed in on- a relaxed informal flow, rather like hearing a story from the guy on the bar stool next to you, asides, garrulous outbursts, and all. And it really is an interesting text in some ways- presented as an explanation of his younger days to his wife, Stella, and keeping many of the trappings of fictional narrative, but continuously aware of the author as a subject, even occasionally pausing to give the real names behind the "fictional" characters. I found it to be quite engaging much of the way through (despite the preoccupation with football stories in the author's younger life), but eventually it turns and starts to feel sloppy. This actually reminds me of my own experience of writing while drinking in days gone past- at first it loosens up the flow and actually improves things, until you hit the inflection point where impairment starts to outweigh dis-inhibition. It's especially unfortunate that the sloppiness really starts to set in around the time period I was most interested in, the formation of the proto-Beat movement in the late 40s. It does give you quite a sense, though, of the ambition and innocence of the younger man behind the bitterly burned-out older man, and the beginnings of the restless wandering that would dominate his life. Which becomes even more heartbreaking when you read...

Atop an Underwood. This is one of a few select violations on my reading list of a policy of only reading things Kerouac actually published in his lifetime. Especially as interest in Kerouac re-grew in the 90s, there have been a string of posthumous releases, some of which have a great deal of integrity as literary products. And some of which, well... In this case, we have a collection of his work as a neophyte writer before he began work on his publishing debut, The Town and the City. It seemed worthwhile, as I was interested in this phase of his development, and it is, after all, what he was actually writing while living the life covered in Vanity of Duluoz. Some of it is certainly stilted and formulaic, and shows the signs of the imitative "how do I do this?" stage that young writers often go through. It reminded me of my own teens and early 20s writing in that way. But it also shows that, even as a very young man, he was amazingly talented, and possessed of an impressive depth of mind and broadness of vision. It is also shot through with a desire to achieve great things and produce something new in the world. It makes quite a contrast with the narrator of Duluoz, embittered with life and thoroughly disenchanted with his own literary legacy. I think he could have benefited from reacquainting himself with the optimism, vision and drive of his youth. Perhaps we all could!      

Year of Kerouac: Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy

The Year Of Kerouac, my year-long project of re-reading (or in some cases, reading for the first time) the works of Jack Kerouac, continues. I'm reading them not in the order of when they were written (the years on the left below) but rather in order of the subject matter most of them cover, Kerouac's own life (the years to the right below). You can read my review of the first book at the link below...

Visions of Gerard             1956       1922–1926

Doctor Sax          1952       1930–1936

Maggie Cassidy 1953       1938–1939

·         Vanity of Duluoz               1968       1935–1946

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings    1936–1943           Various

The Town and the City   1946–1949           1935–1946

On The Road      1948–1956           1946–1950

Visions of Cody 1951–1952           1946–1952

The Subterraneans         1953       1953

·         Mexico City Blues (1955; published 1959)

Tristessa              1955–1956           1955–1956

The Dharma Bums           1957       1955–1956

·         The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1956; published 1960) 

Desolation Angels            1956–1957

Book of Dreams   1960    1952-1960

·        Lonesome Traveler, short story collection (1960)

Big Sur (novel)   1961       1960

Satori in Paris     1965       1965

·         Pic, novella (1951 & 1969; published 1971)

All caught up now? Good! On to the reviews of the next two...

Doctor Sax is a weirdly wonderful book, one of the most unusual, and best, of all of Kerouac's works. On one level, it's an account of boyhood daydreams, and a particular historical event (a great flood in his hometown). In this way, it's a natural continuation of the haunted childhood depicted in Visions of Gerard. On another, it mixes in himself as the present-day narrator, along with dreams from his contemporary life. And on a third, it's a mythic struggle between the mysterious Dr. Sax and a Great Serpent that clearly exists in the realm of fantasy and fable. Along with the subject matter, the narrative too shifts back and forth between straightforward narrative, and more fantastical sequences full of neologisms and nonsense words. It certainly shows the influence of William S. Burroughs, with whom he was staying when he wrote much of it. It's a joy to read, and definitely shows Kerouac at his most creative and most fictional, in fact creating something very like the "metafiction" that became popular in the 90s and 00s.

Maggie Cassidy is in a sense the most readable of the three books that I've covered so far, in that it is an extremely straightforward narrative and also the most grammatically "proper" of the three. Despite that (or maybe because of that) it's the one I've liked least. It may be that the writing is too prosaic for my taste, or it may be that a lot of the subject matter is about sports and adolescent boyhood, two subjects I don't much care for. The main subject of the narrative, the blossoming of his first love with the title character, also highlights one of Kerouac's least admirable points- his co-mingled mythologized idealization of the feminine with his fear and misogyny toward the same. For all that, there are some really touching passages, particularly involving his relationship with his father, and the by the end of the book I appreciated it as a bridge between Lowell and the boyhood world of Dr. Sax and Visions of Gerard, and the New York and restless wandering of the adult Kerouac.

(As a final note, I read it as an e-book, so I didn't get the 50s pulp-cover in the picture, but that is pretty damn spectacular.)      

Revisiting the 2000s: 20 albums (final thoughts)

Well, here we are! You read the intro, where I laid out the project of reviewing what a cross-section of critical opinion regards as twenty of the best albums of the decade that must not be named (or at least, never properly was), 2000-2009. You thrilled to the reviews of albums 1-5, 6-10, 11-15 and 16-20. Here, at the end of all things, what have we learned?

First off, having spent a lot of the decade distracted by other things and back-filling older artists and genres, it was a pleasant surprise to find some things I really liked. My "top" picks from among the albums I listened to were:

Arcade Fire, Funeral

Beck, Sea Change

Eminem, Marshall Mathers LP

Jay-Z, The Blueprint

Kayne West, Late Registration

Madvillian, Madvilliany

MIA, Arular

Outkast, Stankonia

Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Then there was another whole patch that, while I can't think they're the best albums of this last or any other decade, I would call "good". They don't reach "top" status for various reasons (musical or thematic inconsistency, lightness of lyrics or theme compared to the top albums, or just being a kind of good clean fun that doesn't quite rise to greatness):

Daft Punk, Discovery

Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights

LCD Soundystem, Sound of Silver

MIA, Kala

Spoon, Kill the Moonlight

Sufjan Stevens, Illinois

TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain

And, then, well...I have to respectfully disagree with the critics on the following albums. The first I found too experimental and not enough listenable, and the second was just kind of derivative and blah:

Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavillion

D'Angelo, Voodoo

We'll get back to this "good" and "great" question in a moment. First, a pair of further observations.

1. This was not Rock's decade. Of the 20 albums in this list, more than half were hip-hop, soul or dance music. Not that I don't have a lot of love for those genres, but I do hope that Rock makes a rebound sometime in the 2010-2019 decade. For which, we are currently accepting naming bids...

2. You could make a very decent case that many of the best albums of the decade were basically 90s-afterburn. I will illustrate with one of my favorite data formats, the histogram. In this case, of the year the albums came out in. As you can see, fully half come from the first three years of the decade.

Now, back to this best/great/good question. In my previous installment, I got into an interesting commentary stream with my friend Matt, who besides being generally a groovy guy and great writer is an audiophile and astute pop culture critic. One of his contentions was that I'd gone too easy on the decade by calling anything that came out of it good compared to albums of decades past. I'll let him speak for himself on this point:

"Maybe you need to shift your categories downward some more. "Good" should mean "adequate" and "adequate" should mean "terrible" and "terrible" should mean "I feel sorry for this band, I really do." 

To me, I think it comes down to this: if I met somebody who was more or less intelligent but had little familiarity with the popular music of the last 60 years, what music would I recommend to them? And what albums from the '00s would I include in my recommendation? 

Rolling Stone just recently "updated" their 500 Greatest Albums list by adding several albums from the '00s to it, which now makes me less inclined to recommend the list to people. It's just so awkward seeing Vampire Weekend, M.I.A., and Arcade Fire right next to Roxy Music, Santana, and N.W.A. I just want to shout out to a potential reader, "No! This is not the right list!" To be fair, the highest an album from the '00s ranks on the new list is at 118 (Late Registration?), but honestly, they should have just left the damn list alone.

Hey, if writers and musicians genuinely believe that LCD Soundsystem and Wilco deserve to be lumped together with Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder, then I guess I just have some lint stuck in my ears. But I really believe that recorded music in the album format simply will not have the cultural and emotional impact it did up until the '00s.

All these people are in denial!"

He has a point about where the music on this list fits in the grand scheme. There are specific entries I might argue with him on, and time of course is the great arbiter. But none of these albums are epochal. I don't think it was that kind of decade, I think it was largely a decade of reflection and remixing that lacked the galvanizing new musical movements of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 90s. I'm hopeful that it was one of those periods of consolidation and musical drift that have preceded a "next big thing" in the past. Then again, thanks to technological change, maybe pop culture is too atomized now to have a "next big thing". I wouldn't bet on it, but there is an interesting neo-Marxian argument to be had about how the technological shift in the means of production may preclude this. It may certainly, as Matt contends, diminish the importance of the album as a form. Music lived before the album as we currently know it arose in the 60s, though, and I think it will live just fine in its next phase as well.

In the meantime, I haven't given up on the album as an art form. And while this project has given me some new albums to like, I happen to think there were plenty of great albums in the 2000s. My own personal list of the top 20 albums of the decade (only three of which appeared on the nine critics lists I perused, again proving that, if nothing else, this was a very idiosyncratic decade) is (in alphabetical order):  

Bangs  Call and Response  (2002)
There's a kind of female-powered punky and yet poppy band that I really, really like, and hope will hit it big, but they break up and vanish after producing one or two great albums. The 2000s had a lot of bands like this, and there is another on this very same list. But my first sadly gone girl-group love of the decade was the Bangs. 10 years later, this still sounds fresh, fun and eminently listenable.  

Breeders  Title TK  (2002)
As documented above, there's a good case to be made that some of the best music of the 2000s was actually 90s afterburn. This is true on my list as well, witness this fine outing by one of the best bands of the 90s, the Breeders, headed by one of the driving forces behind another of the best bands of the late 80s/early 90s (and, in my opinion, of the entire history of Rock) the Pixies. It's dark moodiness was one of the things that carried me through post-divorce early 2000s, and I love it still today.

Bruce Springsteen  Magic  (2007)
While I like Bruce Springsteen a lot in general, I tend to like best the dark Springsteen albums that he comes out with every other album or so. Magic is that, and is also a kind of perfect distillation of the mid-decade despair of the Bush years, delivered by a Springsteen that has aged into the world-weariness and mythic presence that he sometimes had to pose at in younger days.   

Death Cab For Cutie  Narrow Stairs  (2008)
I'm not sure the last decade had a better lyricist than Ben Gibbard, the lead of Death Cab for Cutie. Structurally, the songs are often simplistic, but what I've observed about them is that they linger. And the mellow, seemingly straightforward package in this album delivers things like a haunting wrestle with Jack Kerouac's legacy, seeing smoke from the grapevine turned into a timeless struggle against the elements, and one of the most chilling "love" songs ever recorded, laying bare yet again how many of our favorite "romantic" songs are actually creepy obsession when you think about them.     

Deerhoof   Reveille  (2002)
If somebody took perfect pop rock, exploded it, and reassembled the pieces out of sequence but in a way that strangely still works, it would sound like this album. I don't just love Deerhoof because they're a Bay Area band. I love them because (and particularly on this album) they show just how creatively lazy every other band this last decade was, and that surprising, idiosyncratically beautiful things can still be done in Rock.

Drive-By Truckers  Brighter Than Creation's Dark  (2008)
I said in the intro piece to this series that nobody in any pop genre had really had a great decade in the 2000s. In fact, that isn't entirely true, and this album would be one of my prime exhibits in the contention that some of the best music of the 2000s was in fact Country music. Granted, it wasn't by people you were going to hear on any Country station, but that doesn't make it any less true. This is an amazing band, and an amazing album by them. Whether they're writing about the rise and fall of Grunge (yes, really), a lament to a friend's downfall through crystal meth, a sympathetic portrait of a soldier's regret at having to kill, or just good old fashioned country themes, they are superb throughout, and adept at mixing Country and Rock together in way that you can't really say which is which.     

Gillian Welch   Time (the Revelator)  (2001)
Some of the best music of the 2000s was Country music, but you won't hear it on any Country station Exhibit II. I guess technically she might be Bluegrass, but let's not split hairs. The point is Gillian Welch is a living encyclopedia of American roots music, channeling decades of influences to make her own outstanding contribution on this album.  

Hank William III  Straight to Hell  (2006)
Some of the best music of the 2000s was Country music, but you won't hear it on any Country station Exhibit III. They just happened to all end up in a row alphabetically, but it still makes for a nice exhibit. They didn't quite make my top 20, but you could add the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash and Lucinda Williams to the list as well. As for this album, the way Deerhoof should make everybody working in Rock ashamed of how little they've strived for, Hank III should make everybody working in Country ashamed of how lame they are.

Kristin Hersh  Sunny Border Blue  (2001)
And I suppose this might be Exhibit II in my "90s afterburn" theorem. Nee of Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh is an amazing songwriter and a powerful musician. The songs here are spare, confessional and harrowing. This was another album that helped me burn through post-divorce darkness early in the decade, and it's taken on whole new meaning to me as we both (the album and I) have aged.   

Martha Wainwright  Martha Wainwright  (2005)
Martha Wainwright is one of the lushest, most true to herself voices of the decade. Here is a woman not worried about being popular or likable, laying it all out, good, bad and ugly. Which, of course, ends up lending the proceedings a vulnerability that wins through the darkness. Loudon Wainwright is great, Rufus has his many fans, but give me Martha any day!    

Northern State   Dying in Stereo  (2003)
Hip hop can be great. Feminism too. Political records sometimes. Empowered women creating something, always. Put them all together, and you get one of the best albums of the past decade. 

Raveonettes  Whip It On  (2002)
Rock is dead, they say. Pretty regularly. And there are long stretches of certain decades (80s, 2000s) that you think they might have a point. Then something like this comes along, and you realize that there's plenty of life left in the old beast. Not to mention all in Bminor! It took a Danish band to do it, which would make me sad as an American, except we had the White Stripes in the same decade. So go Danes, go!  

Red Hot Chilli Peppers  By The Way  (2002)
There's something wise and melodically bittersweet about this album. Which makes sense, since it comes almost two decades in for the group, and after lead singer Anthony Kiedis got into recovery. Which maybe is part of the reason it works for me. I think it suits the decade too- a moment to pause and reflect in a rough era that's seen a lot go by.   

Rilo Kiley  Under the Blacklight  (2007)
If there is anything to not like about this album (or indeed the band in general) I don't know what it would be.  Between Jenny Lewis' lush and precisely delivered vocals, the intelligent and more than occasionally emotionally chilling lyrics and the inventive and skillful musical craftsmanship on display here, this album is a delight.    

Sleater Kinney  One Beat  (2002)
I used to think of this album as a kind of predecessor to American Idiot, full of a similar disquiet over post-9/11 America that the later album delivered even more thunderously. As the years wear on, what impresses me is how Sleater Kinney's effort is more perennial than Greenday's, which started to sound dated to me a two or three years after it was released. I find it to be an excellent illustration of my general theory that to produce political art that lasts, you have to prioritize the personal over the polemical.    

Soviettes  LP III  (2005)
Remember in the opening entry above about the Bangs, how I described that certain kind of female-powered punky yet poppy band that I'm always hoping will make it big and instead collapses? Meet my mid-decade heartbreak, Minnesota's the Soviettes, on the third and best of three excellent albums they put out before breaking up.  

Tanya Donelly  beautysleep  (2002)
Picture me in 2002, post-divorce, starting to re-connect to who I am as a person and artistically. I'm alone in the dark, sitting next to the stereo with the first new music I've bought in years. On comes Tanya Donelly, 80s co-founder of the Throwing Muses and 90s veteran of the Breeders and Belly. Through moody billowing music and shimmering vocals she's celebrating the birth of her first child, and the renewal this represents after decades of wandering. And I'm right there with her... 

Tanya Donelly  Whiskey Tango Ghosts  (2004)
Or, you know, here with her two years later. She's now in a more acoustic vein, looking back over the years and through the complexity and ambiguity of marriage with well-worn wisdom and tenderness. I lvoed it from first listen, but this album has played better and better for me as I've gone through the same journey myself.  

The White Stripes  De Stijl  (2000)
Other White Stripes albums made the best of the decade lists I compiled my twenty albums from, and indeed one of my sources, Paste, made the following pretty excellent case that Jack White owned the whole damn decade musically:
2000: The White Stripes, De Stijl 
2001: The White Stripes, White Blood Cells; White founds Third Man Records
2003: The White Stripes, Elephant; White contributes to Cold Mountain soundtrack and appears in the film
2004: White produces and performs on Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose
2005: The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan
2006: The Raconteurs, Broken Boy Soldiers
2007: The White Stripes, _Icky Thump _
2008: The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely; White records “Another Way to Die” with Alicia Keys for Bond flick Quantum of Solace
2009: The Dead Weather, Horehound; White Stripes tour film Under the Great White Northern Lightspremieres at Toronto Film Festival; White stars in guitar love-note doc It Might Get Loud with Jimmy Page and U2’s The Edge
While White Blood Cells and Elephant deservedly draw a lot of praise, De Stijl is my favorite. It starts rocking the second you put it on, and pretty much never stops. 

U2  All That You Can't Leave Behind   (2000)

I recall reading some music critic (I'm sure someone can remind me who) describing the Clash's London Calling as the album that perfectly personified the 70s collapsing into the 80s. I feel like this album is the same thing for the liminal knife-edge of the 90s becoming the 00s. Here are U2 as world weary veterans producing an album that almost crystallizes the transition from the hopefulness of 90s globalism to the post-9/11 global unease of the 00s. Yes, it was a little before that. But the artist as prophet can do that, call the coming zeitgeist before it comes.  


So there you go. We've seen me reviewing the critics call on the best albums of the last decade  and now you've seen my picks for the 20 best albums of the decade. What do you think? The next move is your's...