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! 

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.)      

Year of Kerouac: Visions of Gerard

Do you know what a New Year calls for? A new literary resolution! For this year, mine is to read the full works of someone who's long been one of my muses, Jack Kerouac. I remember late nights up in my parent's living room while home on college break, reading his works, and biographies of him and the other Beats. Sneaking vodka from the bottle I had hidden in my suitcase, mixing it with kool-aid at 1 AM and reading, my head aswirl with the words (and the vodka), dreaming of literary greatness.

That, of course, was an adolescent dream, and not coincidentally a preview of bottoming out myself nearly two decades hence. But it was also significant in awakening my literary ambitions and poetic vision, and he and the Beats remain a touchstone for me to this day. It is impossible to overestimate the influence they've had on creative output in all genres since the 50s, the way they made space in American literary life for subjects and points of view that had been ignored and/or forbidden. And personally, I've found that the depths of their vision, and meaning and warnings of their lives, keep revealing new facets to me as I get older.

So here I am at 42, only a few younger than Kerouac when he died, and at the perfect age to discover the secret of Life, the Universe and Everything. It seemed like an opportune time to look back. In brief, what I plan to do is read all the works he meant to publish (as opposed to the flood of sometimes questionable posthumous editions), plus a select one or two more. Furthermore, I'm going to read them in the order of the main subject he himself choose, the chronicle of his life. That is, I'll read them by the period in his life they cover, rather than when they were written.

In more depth, the works I'm going to try to complete are (with the year they were written, and the period of his life they cover, listed after):  

Visions of Gerard             1956       1922–1926

Doctor Sax          1952       1930–1936

Maggie Cassidy 1953       1938–1939

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

The Town and the City   1946–1949           1935–1946

Vanity of Duluoz               1968       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

·        Lonesome Traveler, short story collection (1960)

Big Sur (novel)   1961       1960

Satori in Paris     1965       1965

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

I've just completed the first of these, Visions of Gerard. Though written in the mid-period of his career, during his mid-50s peak of output, it actually covers events in the earliest period of his life, the death of his older brother Gerard when he was four. It is a profoundly melancholy little book, just 130 pages. I actually had trouble getting in to the reading at first, since it comes from one of his most experimental periods, but once I was in, it had amazing depths. It is equal parts nostalgic childhood reminiscence, exposition on the ephemeral nature of life, and exploration of the birth of his own psyche. He presents his dying young brother as a sensitive youth prone to mystical vision. But of course, he's also presenting himself in this portrait, as he even says, "At that age I was Gerard." I'm realizing reading it that Kerouac's sense of the bleakness of this life,  mystical superposition of this realm and realms beyond, and desire to let everyone know about how close liberation lies began at a very young age. Of course some of this is written on to events after, but he's clearly getting at the root of how he saw the world here too. A special additional pleasure for me, now that I've been living on the North Shore of the Boston Area for a year and a half, is the portrait of Lowell in the 20s. I can feel, smell and taste things in his descriptions that might have escaped me before.

Next, I'll continue his portrayal of early life in Lowell with Doctor Sax.        

And the Goodreads Challenge score is...

31 out of 52! Well, I've learned that these things can be very valuable once you let go of self-flagellation if you don't make it. Because the thing is, you end up achieving more with an ambitious goal, even if you fall short of it, than if you aim low. I'll keep it brief here, since I haven't done an update in a while. The final books were:

When The Past Is Present  (David Richo, 2008, 224 pp.)
A friend recommended this to me two years ago or so, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. David Richo uses conventional psychology, Jungian psychology and Buddhist concepts to explore how issues from childhood and past relationships can cloud our present relationships, and how we can learn to recognize and process them so we can be truly present. If I hadn't already done A LOT of this kind of work in the past few years, this book would have landed on me like a thunderbolt. It strongly affected and challenged me as it was. Recommended for anyone who has had issues with unresolved issues from the past affecting the present. In other words, everyone.     

Sliver  (Dave Morrison, 2008, 108 pp.)
Here's the deal: If you're a 40ish former rock musician from New York & Boston who currently lives with your wife in my dreaming-of-living-there state Maine, and I run across your book during a trip to Portland, Maine just as I'm ready for a new volume of poetry, I'm going to get it. As it turns out, in subject matter and sensibility, Morrison is my kind of poet even if the form of his poetry doesn't always work for me.   

Foundation Trilogy  (Isaac Asimov, 1961, 678 pp.)
We'd read several things by Asimov in my late great Sci-fi Book Club, but we never got around to this, widely considered to be one of his masterworks. About the only thing I can say about it that isn't superlative is that the dialogue ends up sounding a little dated (1950sish, in fact) at times. Otherwise, you have an epic sweep of future history, political intrigue, twists and surprises, and, as always, Asimov's shrewd and compassionate understanding of how people are.    

Powers: Roleplay  (Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming, 2001, 110 pp.)
If you have a fondness for superhero comics and you haven't read Powers yet, I highly recommend it. The series centers upon a pair of cops (one of them with an intriguing secret past) who investigate crimes involving super-powered individuals. In this volume, they're investigating the murders of a group of college kids who were role-playing superheroes. Bendis is a superb writer, Oeming is a superb (though highly stylized) artist, and the whole thing is just fun. Get on board!      

Ultimate Spider-man Ultimate Collection II  (Brian Michael Bendis & Mark Bagley, 2009, 308 pp.)
And here have Brian Michael Bendis' second appearance on this list, in a volume that brings together issues 14-27 of Ultimate Spider-man. Marvel's used-to-be-great "Ultimate" line took characters from Marvel's mainstream Universe and retold their tales in a setting stripped of the main continuity's decades of story-line, giving things a chance to be fresh and new again. So here we get Peter Parker back to his roots, a teenager learning the ropes as Spider-man while also dealing with crushes, bullies and high school, and in a more modernized setting. Good clean fun all around, including the most realistic portrayal ever of what would really happen if the totally-human Kraven fought the strongly super-powered Spider-man. My only complaint is that the teen love melodrama got a little needlessly thick at the end. Ah well, kids. What can you do?      

JLA Vol. 1: New World Order  (Grant Morrison, Howard Porter & John Dell, 1997, 93 pp.)
Let's not dodge the truth: for a lot of the 70s and 80s, DC sucked. Then, starting in the 90s, several creators stepped in, remembered that they were dealing with the world's greatest heroes, and started to have fun with them again. Grant Morrison's work with the JLA was one of the signposts of this, and here we have the first volume of his run as writer for the group. The artists, well, let's just say they haven't quite caught up yet (that will come later in the series), but the tale is solid good old-fashioned fun.   

Superman/Batman Vol 6: Torment  (Alan Burnett, Dustin Nguyen & Derek Fridolfs, 2009, 160 pp.)
I do love my Superman/Batman. They're both such icons, and there's so much that somebody who understands how to bring out the contrast between them can do, purely in terms of characterization, to make a great story. Throw in some cosmic shenanigans and great artists, and you get a grand tale here. It's marred a little bit by tie-ins to the most recent grand Universe-shaking hullabaloo that DC was doing at the time, but otherwise is a rollicking good time.    

So there we are for 2012. And what's on the docket for 2013? (But first, let's pause here for a second to say, "Holy crap! It's going to be 2013! How did that happen? And are there flying cars yet?") I don't think I'll be doing the Goodreads challenge again, instead I'll be challenging myself to read the collected works of two of my muses, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. To whit, Ginsberg's collected poems 1947-1997, and all the works Kerouac published in his lifetime, plus two published after. More description to follow...

And Happy New Year! See you in 2013!

Book Reviews: The Gambler, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, The Song of Eve, At The Drive-In Volcano

All right, so, on the downside, I haven't updated my Goodreads 2012 reading challenge progress in a while (currently 26 out of the 52 goal by the way). On the plus side, though, my delay has given this review some range. For a couple of years now I've had the practice of rotating my reading between fiction, nonfiction and spiritual. I also am reading at least one poetry collection at any given time. Today's review will have examples of all four!

The Gambler  (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1867, 100 pp.)
Some years ago, I was taking a writing workshop. When it became my turn to present excerpts of a novel I was working on that involved sexual and romantic addiction, one of the other participants commented that she almost stopped reading, because it seemed too prurient. But then she continued, and said it reminded her of The Gambler. That was both one of the most gratifying things I ever heard in a writing workshop, and the source of a mental footnote to check out Dostoyevsky's- Really long short story? Rather short novel? Novella? -one day. And what a great day it has turned out to be! I always marvel at his ability to write from the point of view of a thoroughly un-admirable character and yet remain sympathetic and compelling. That is in fine display here, and in fact the whole piece seems to be devoid of any admirable characters at all. And yet the descent into obsession (and one could argue that a love addiction precedes any gambling addiction for him) of the young Russian tutor and the tangled fortunes of the Russian aristocrats he works for as they vacation at a German resort is so tenderly and accurately rendered that it works. Nobody presents the darkness of the human heart with as much love and forgiveness as Dostoyevsky. There is obsidian humor and twisted beauty throughout this small masterpiece, and I thoroughly recommend it.        

The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects  (Edward J. Ruppelt, 1956/1960, 260 pp.)
When I saw that I could download this classic of Ufology for a pittance on my Nook, I was very excited. Edward Ruppelt was the head of the Air Force's UFO investigation, Project Blue Book, from 1951-1953. After leaving that post and retiring from the Air Force, he wrote a book reviewing his tenure. And it makes for very fine reading- I was particularly impressed by his fluid conversational style, it kind of makes we wish he'd written more before his untimely death from heart attack at age 37. Or, you know, lived more. Throughout the book he maintains a great balance between irresponsible credulity and knee-jerk skepticism, and in fact derides both. What one comes away with principally is three things. 1. Because of bureaucracy and miscommunication, the Air Force's attitude toward the investigation, and the resources devoted toward it would often lurch in different directions. This produced a lot of the behavior that outside observers attributed to "cover-up". 2. When the investigation was taken seriously and conducted thoroughly, a lot of seeming mysteries could be identified, but a significant portion of unidentifieds remained. 3. These undientifieds never produced the kind of "proof" that could definitively settle the question of what they were (you can sense his frustration with this intangibility growing throughout his tenure with Blue Book), but many unknowns had excellent, multiple witnesses, and were clearly things outside of any conventional explanation. This is where his original analysis in 1956 more or less ends up. The 1960 edition includes an additional three chapters that have always been controversial since they A) are much more skeptical and B) came out just before his death. Reading them here, I have to say, it is notable how they not only strike a totally different tone than his original ending, they actually put forward multiple statements directly contradicting positions he took earlier, with little explanation of the change in his thinking. I'd be curious to see the last three chapters put through some kind of word-choice/sentence structure analysis to see if the same person even wrote them. And on that note, I will leave you with the mystery!      

The Song of Eve: Mythology And Symbols of The Goddess  (Manuela Dunn-Mascetti, Simon & Schuster, 1990, 239 pp.)
As documented in earlier reviews, in the last few years I've become increasingly interested in exploring the feminine side of the divine.  So when I came across this book at a Friends of the Library used book sale in San Francisco a few years back, I eagerly snatched it up (especially eagerly at the price of $3!). Well worth it-the book itself is lushly beautiful, full of color illustrations drawn from classical and contemporary works of art. These are used to visually highlight the text, which utilizes the structure of Jungian archetypes and examples from throughout world mythology to explore aspects of the feminine, and relate them back to passages and stages in life. While I did feel a little gender excluded from the party at times since it is explicitly written to address women navigating the stages of a woman's life, I found a lot that was moving and meaningful to anybody leading a human life. And one can hardly begrudge making women the focus here as a counter-point to a few millennia of male-dominated spiritual institutions. A beautiful book, inside and out.              

At The Drive-In Volcano  (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Tupelo Press, 2007, 85 pp.)
As I said, I'm always reading at least one volume of poetry. Sometimes I have a pipeline built up, but in this case, I was without follow-up when my previous volume wound down. Browsing at a bookstore, I was drawn to this volume by the candy heart on the cover and the poetry of the poet's name. It also had a plug on the back by Naomi Shihab Nye, who I've become a fan of lately. I was not misled- the 57 poems in this volume beguile with their mix of travelogue, journey through a personal past and present, and unashamed mixture of pop culture and more mythic sources into the trip. Aimee Nezhukumatathil has pulled off a mixture that I myself often aim for in my poetry. Which is not just inspiring, but also moving, and really darn pretty to read. 

And there we are! It seems unlikely to me that I'm going to hit 52 books, with only two months to go. But hey, I'm not giving up, and you always get further with an ambitious aim than with no aim at all...

      

Review: The Typewriter Is Holy

18 0f 52! That's what Goodreads says my progress is vis-a-vis my 52-book self-challenge so far this year. The latest progress coming courtesy of...

The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of  the Beat Generation  (Bill Morgan, Free Press, 2010, 352 pp.)
If you've read the tagline of this blog, you know I am aficionado of the Beats. As such, I have read a lot of material related to the Beat Generation and its writers- all of Allen Ginsberg's poems, many of Jack Kerouac's and William Burroughs' novels and other writings, The First Third by Neal Cassady, multiple biographies of all four, and poetry by Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Diane DiPrima, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, and John Wieners. I even have one of Bill Morgan's other books, a literary walking guide to Beat sites in San Francisco. Given all this, I'm naturally going to be attracted to a history of the Beat Generation. I'm equally naturally going to be skeptical of whether there's really much new for me in such a history, especially one that clocks in at less than 300 pages before footnotes, bibliography, etc. But, when I found this book for $2 at a music and arts festival at the North Carolina Music Factory during a work trip to my new favorite city, Charlotte, the intersection between subject matter and price was pretty irresistible. So how did it hold up? It was necessarily very broad, almost a historical outline really. And there wasn't a lot in it that I didn't know. But it was useful and interesting to see all the players' (including many of the more "minor" poets, and the often overlooked women) lives laid out in parallel. Bill Morgan, as an excellent archivist, also alerted me to several biographies and critical overviews I'd like to check out, including his own biography of Ginsberg, and forthcoming collection of letters between Ginsberg and Kerouac. I'd certainly recommend this book for anyone just getting in to the Beats and in need of a quick historical overview, and there are still treasures to be had in it even for Beaten-down oldies like me.