Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy, part 14

I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy 

Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s Part  14

 

On the Road, because of its underlying formlessness, resists easy interpretations into other media. It took 55 years for the book to make it to screen, after several failed attempts, and the 2012 film has its charms — mostly the portrayals of its female characters — but ultimately the film fails because it had to fail.

On the Road is too big and too much inside Sal Paradise’s head to easily turn it into a coherent film. Too much has to be left out, too much has to be compressed, to squeeze the travels of its main characters into a two-hour narrative.

Other Beat Generation works faced similar hurdles. Naked Lunch, William Burrough’s classic heroin dystopia, for instance, needed to be smashed to pieces and put back together before it could make sense as a film. Howl, Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem, became a canvas on which to tell the story of its writing and the obscenity trial that followed its publication. Both films were impressionistic re-imaginings that only used the source material as jumping off points. And because of this, both films work well and stand alone as art in their own rights.

On the Road, directed by Walter Salles, suffers because of its source material, both because too much of an effort is made to stay true to the novel and because it deviates from the novel in several strategic ways. The events have been re-ordered, several of the characters changed, and several important scenes have been compressed so much that they almost fail to register (his brief love affair with Terry).

This is not unusual when adapting a book to film, and it’s why it can be dangerous to compare film and source material. Salles’ changes are worth discussing, however, because the cast fresh light on some of the book’s themes — and offer a reminder of what the book is not.

Salles’ cuts and compressions narrow the film’s scope — a thematic shift underscored by the film’s shooting style. Salles keeps much of the film in close-up, often extreme close-up, creating a cramped sense of space. The film is claustrophobic, and the sense of space and openness created by the book has been sacrificed to keep the Sal-Dean friendship front and center.

Dean is played by Garrett Hedlund as a laconic western cowboy, a ’50/s film cliche. He is muted, laconic, almost bored. He is introspective, admits to considering suicide, and attempts to explain his mania and his inability to escape his urges. This personalizes the narrative, shrinks it — it is Dean’s very human failings and his somewhat cliched past that matter, his personal demons rule the film.

The film opens with Dean at a New York City parking garage, showing off his handling of the cars he parks, and then a shot of him stealing a car. This is Dean Moriarty, a quick visual snapshot of something that Sal finds attractive and authentic. Dean is the mad driver, the car thief, the thrill seeker who commits crimes because he is bored and the boredom remains an underlying flaw in Dean’s character. He can’t sit still, which causes him to hurt others, to abandon his lovers, his closest friends.

Here is how the novel opens: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.”

The film, after giving us a glimpse of Dean as car-park attendant, moves to Sal’s dark and claustrophobic bedroom. Sal is played a bit nebishly by Sam Riley. Sal sits at the typewriter as the voice-over bridges the image of Dean stealing a car into Sal writing. “I first met Dean,” Sal says, “not long after my father died. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead.”

The change from failed marriage to dead father is underscored two scenes later, after a drunken party, when Sal and Dean have their first heart-to-heart discussion. They are huddled close. The camera is in their faces, an extreme close-up.

“The day before my father died,” Sal tells Dean, his expression pained, “he took hold of my hand. He looked at it and he said ‘you got no callouses, Sal. You don’t do any real fucking work, boy.'”

Dean, equally mournful, tells Sal that Old Man Moriarty was rarely around, a drunken wanderer who left Dean to his own devices. This, in the film and the book, is designed as a building block for Dean’s character, the essential cause of Dean’s breathlessness and wanderlust. But novel Dean lacks the introspection implied here with film Dean. Novel Dean is chaotic, a whirlwind. He’s about escaping the dull impositions of post-war American culture and it’s gray flannel suits and middle-management jobs. Finding his father is important, but as an adventure, a chance to discuss the old man’s adventures on the Denver streets and through out the Southwest. It is consistent with the book’s ethos of adventure and pure kicks, and it is part of a hip-v.-square dynamic that is buried in the film. This frame is present, but it’s muted, shunted to the side, as the film narrows its focus — one of the reasons for the constant use of close-up shots. Film Dean also seeks kicks, and he shares the wanderlust and allergy to responsibility with novel Dean. But film Dean has been transmuted. His tragicness is connected to his missing father, to a desire for some sort of approval, a desire he shares with film Sal.
“To the old men,” Dean says, lifting his beer as their heart-to-heart closes.

“To the good old dead demented men we love,” Sal says.

“And the west,” Dean says, a nod to the trips that are to follow.
Later, Dean is lost in morose thought, focused on his failure to find his father. Sal comforts him:
“Here’s what’s going to happen. Right when you think you’re never going to see him again, someone’s going to come and tap you on the shoulder looking for a dime or a light. You’re going to turn around and you’ll be face to face with him.”

“That’ll be real nice, brother.”
The sadness of the scene makes Dean seem small, fragile, and hints at the final scene when Dean returns to New York after abandoning Sal in Mexico. Dean is apologetic, wants to talk, but Sal is heading out to a concert.  He’s dressed in evening wear, his friend Remi (who plays a crucial early role in the book, but is excised from the film) waiting with two girls and a cab. Sal doesn’t have time for his best friend, who is in obvious pain and needs Sal’s approval and forgiveness. Sal’s clothing tells part of the tail, the flannel shirt swapped for the attire of the elites. Dean is dressed as he always is, in t-shirt and jacket. Something has changed. Something is broken.

This final encounter in the book is more drawn out, with Dean arriving earlier than anticipated and now set apart from the New York crew. It is unclear in the book how much Dean’s abandonment has damaged his relationship with Sal, as Sal is drawn away by his previous commitment to Remi. Dean asks to share a cab to spend as much time as he can with Sal, but Sal demurs — Remi, who Sal screwed over earlier in the novel, dislikes Sal’s friends, and especially Dean.

The similarities here are outweighed by the differences — the film implies this is the first time Sal and Dean have been in contact, while the book makes it clear that they have been writing each other and that Dean had been in New York for a few days before this final scene. The book doesn’t so much as end as it pauses, takes a breath. This is not the last we’ll see of Dean, it seems to say.

These differences highlight the core themes of the book, which is the thrill of nonconformity, the desire for authenticity, and a the ultimate failure of an unthinking hedonism that proves to be selfish and damaging to personal relationships. Mexico is more than just a trip to a whorehouse; and the larger quest made by Sal is about more than just kicks, which often get in the way of his personal growth and understanding.

Dean is the symbol of these currents in the book, a mix of raw sex and desire. His quest at all times is for kicks, and he leaves shattered lives in his wake. He is raging id, a massive and intrusive presence, who like a category 5 storm leaves destruction in its wake. He looks like Henry Fonda and act like the Tasmanian Devil. He should jump with energy, eat up the screen. Dean is kinetic, the brightest star in the constellation, and when he crashes he takes everyone with him.

It is important to remember that the book is about Sal and his quest, his exploration of a changing America, and an attempt to find something essential on the road. Dean, like Jay Gatsby, is a conduit through which we can understand the changes in Sal’s life and the changes in post-war America.

This is not meant as a criticism of the film — though, I did find it shockingly dull and difficult to watch — as much as it is an argument that On the Road’s structural anarchy and the bigness of its vision are not easily translated to the screen.
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I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy, part 13

I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy 
Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s Part  12

When I started this project, I wasn’t thinking about anniversaries. On the Road turns 60 in September, which would seem to give my most recent re-reading a bit of urgency — a news peg, we’d call it in the newspaper business. But this anniversary had nothing to do with my decision to return to the book after a good decade away. I’ve read this book probably a dozen or more times, and each reading has offered different pleasures and different view points. When I was 19, it was fresh and new, and my own intellectual journey was still in its infancy. I read it in a single sitting and thought I’d take off across the country. I was at Penn State; the bus station wasn’t far, and I imagined buying a ticket with the little money I had, going as far west as the fare would allow, and then hitch hiking the rest of the way.

I didn’t, and I don’t have any regrets. But that memory has always acted as a foundation in my reading and rereading of On the Road and Kerouac’s other books. Desolation Angels made me want to drop everything and become a fire look out. The Subterraneans had me chasing the artistic ones, thinking that the kicks were the thing, while The Dharma Bums pointed me toward a (superficial) exploration of Eastern religion.

Kerouac remained a touchstone, of sorts, but started to recede, to seem less a part of my own writing history as my own work grew more complicated, as I attempted to integrate my journalism into my poetry and I began to fully consider the personal essay as something worth pursuing. (I had been afraid of the format, or perhaps the honesty it requires to do it well.)

So, a reread of Kerouac was not necessarily on my radar. I had an extensive summer book list that included philosophy, poetry and Samuel Becket, and I was working on a long poem on race and America, writing a play, and reporting an immigration story. The last thing I needed was another project.

But Kerouac is always in the air, which is important. He’s not just a personal touchstone, but a cultural one, and On the Road is in many ways the book that signaled much of what was to come in the 1960s and beyond.

Roger Ebert sums up the book’s allure in a 2013 review of the film adaptation. He and his friends “talked idly of pointing them west and not stopping until we reached the Pacific..”

As a teenager, I snatched up the book in its first paperback edition and chose it above any other to display on my desk at the News-Gazette, sometimes underlining trenchant passages. Still in high school, I slipped away to the Turk’s Head, a campus coffee shop, which played Miles Davis and Monk, and Beats were rumored by the townspeople to stand on the tables and recite their poetry, although table-standing seems to run counter to the Beat ethos.

Vin Scelsa, the legendary New York disc jockey (and a personal hero), name drops Kerouac in a 2015 podcast interview with his daughter, describing his movement away from his Roman Catholicism, and his decision not to attend NYU — because, as his daughter Kate says, Scelsa was a rebel.

“It was my Jack Kerouac phase,” Scelsa says. “I was going to go out west and be a fire watcher on a mountain and get in touch with my Desolation Angels, and that whole thing. I was into the whole Beat world, Allen Ginsberg and all that.”

He didn’t. Instead, he found himself at the Upsala College radio station WFMU, where his rebellious streak and innate creativity found it’s outlet in free-form musical programming. I discovered Scelsa probably in 1978 or 1979 when he ruled the late night airwaves and spun records no one else on commercial radio dared play. The timing was propitious — I was growing tired of the commercial stuffed began listening to more punk and early New Wave, and Scelsa’s imprimatur was important. He showed that this new music was important and that it was part of a much larger mosaic of sound that could include both the popular and the underground.

So, I was prepared for what Kerouac had to offer, not realizing how much Kerouac actually paved the way for someone like Scelsa — or how much Kerouac had and would continue to seep into the larger culture.

The 10,000 Maniacs capture this on their 1987 album In My Tribe, with the song “Hey, Jack Kerouac”: Kerouac, Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the song posits, allowed the “Hip flask slinging madmen, steaming cafe flirts,” and “Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls,” to speak through them. Or to believe this lonely alcoholic writer lost in a changing America spoke for them.

This is why his influence extends beyond literature and into the broader culture. As Kerouac describes in Big Sur — his novelized take on the aftermath of On the Road‘s success — he couldn’t go anywhere without some 20-something wanting to join the party that had happened 10 years earlier. Big Sur is a difficult book, especially for readers still caught up in the romance of On the Road. It describes Kerouac’s descent into alcoholism and his growing alienation from the new youth culture, an alienation that ultimately would push the so called “King of the Beats” in a few years to outright disgust with the hippies.

But Big Sur describes the cultural moment and his influence on it surprisingly well. His book offered this new generation born during and after World War II liberation. And they took it and ran with it.

Which is why Ebert. says the novel “grew not into a movement but into a brand,” one pushed hard by the new advertising industry, and that ultimately turned the novel into something it wasn’t — a buddy-road story and unapologetic exploration of hedonism.

The novel was always more and less than that, but disentangling its core from the myth has long been shunted aside by its fans, who focus on the freedom and not on the book’s darker elements.

This has made the book far more influential than it might have been, given what William Plummer calls its lack of “literary style in the sense that Hemingway, say, or Faulkner did: a controlled and nuanced voice.” This, Plummer says in a 1979 essay in The New York Times, is why Kerouac’s literary progeny are more likely to be found among adherents of the “New Journalism” — writers engaged in deeply reported, long-form forays in which the journalist became a central character.

The pop and fizz of Tom Wolfe’s prose are surely Wolfe’s own, but his and George Plimpton’s buddying-up with outsize characters like Ken Kesey and Alex Karas owes much to Kerouac’s worshipful relation to Cassady. Then, too, Hunter Thompson’s doped-up madcap forays across the continent are almost unthinkable without his Beat predecessor’s model.

His influence extended to poetry, as well, he writes, though the influence filters through Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti. His then asks an important question: “who reads Kerouac these days?”

Easy: the same kind of kids, mostly young males, who have been reading him since the fanfare died down in the early 60’s. Bob Dylan read him, and so did future novelists Thomas McGuane and Ken Kesey; all three were extremely impressed. Actor Nick Nolte read On the Road while still in high school in Omaha. His statement in a recent interview is eloquent testimony to Kerouac’s effect on American adolescents: “I remember thinking, ‘You mean you can just do that? Pick up and go?’ It seemed incredible to me.” (Plummer)

Nolte played Neal Cassidy in Heartbeat opposite the late John Heard, as Kerouac. Others as various as S.E. Hinton, Sam Shepherd, Patti Smith, Robert Hunter, Donal Logue, and Amber Tamblyn — all interviewed in One Fast Move or I’m Gone, the documentary on the writing of Big Sur — cite his influence. Tamblyn’s presence in the film, which caught critics by surprise, is evidence of the film’s lasting reach. Tamblyn was 25 when the documentary was released in 2008, but talks about her connection to Kerouac like he was an old friend, romanticize grandson the Beats like so many have before.

This isn’t a criticism. It is nearly impossible to read the book for the first time today without succumbing to the same mythology that has made the book the cultural touchstone it has been, and that drew me in 36 years ago. The struggle, for both the new reader and the long-time admirer, is to disentangle what we’ve come to think about the novel from what really takes place.

On the Road, if it is anything, is an elegy for Dean and for an America on the cusp of change written by a writer in thrall to the apocryphal stories created in dime-store novels and cowboy films, in the culture of the day. Dean’s unraveling in the book’s final act — symbolized by the enormous bandage on his thumb, by his increasingly incoherent proclamations — too often is left out of our conversations about the book. Nolte’s comment — “You mean you can just do that? Pick up and go?” — still represents the consensus of assumptions about the book. Sal’s disconnection, his alienation from his moment in time as his friend, who he builds up as a true American archetype, falls into madness is the book’s true thesis.

I don’t think I got that when I was younger, not for a while, at least. But at nearly 55, I do. This, I think, says as much about me as it does about the book, about how my perspective has changed as I’ve grown older. I see things now I didn’t or couldn’t earlier on — such as the dismissiveness the book has toward women, its casual homophobia, its disturbing condescension on race.

All of this was there the first time I read it; I was just incapable of seeing it.

“There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and girls in America / They have such a sad time together,” sings Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, as he makes his case that the kicks have consequences. “Stuck Between Stations,” the opening cut of Boys and Girls in America, is anthemic and bold, but sad and painful — like the album it leads off and the novel from which it borrows its opening line.

What we have is never enough, Finn sings, so we chase what we don’t have and do not need, thinking it will make us whole. In the end, it can’t, and we are left to struggle and pick up the pieces.

My point is that everyone remembers the party, but no one remembers the clean-up. We remember the excitement, the kicks — the breathless adventures, the drinks, the music. But parties end. People go home, or crawl up in a ball in the corner and sleep. What follows are he recriminations — smoking the butts of cigarettes, drinking stale beer from plastic cups. And the clean-up. No one remembers the clean-up.

On the Road is both party and clean-up. We remember Sal and Dean rushing west and east and west in a crazy buddy movie; we remember the jazz clubs and blow-outs, the Benzedrine-fueled gabfests that took all night. We romanticize these elements, but rarely consider the book for what it is — a romance in the sense of the Romantic-era, of Byron, Shelley and Keats. The English romantics of this second generation were tragic figures, rebels against the contemporary order who created mournful elegies that looked both forward and backward.

On the Road is in that tradition, and is one of the saddest books to be published in America.

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Another war president

addressed the nation on Monday from Fort Myer military base in Arlington, Va.
― Full Transcript and Video: Trump’s Speech on Afghanistan – The New York Times

President Donald Trump anounced his new old strategy for Afghanistan last night, in a speech before active solddiers that lacked specifics but was full of the kind of bromides he has offered in the past when forced to offer a scripted speech.

The speech essentially offered a Fox News approach to military engagement — take off the gloves, let the military do what they want — but had some on the populist right a bit miffed.

Breitbart, for instance, which has been Trump’s biggest media backer, was critical, calling Trump’s plan a “flip-flop.”

There are questions coming from some Marines:

To some of the Marines, though, optimism, no matter how cautious, rings hollow after nearly 16 years of war and new approaches that sound a lot like the old ones.

“You know, it’s like everyone forgot,” said one Marine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue frankly. “Like someone hit the reset button and now we’re out here again saying, ‘We can do this, we can win this thing.’”

The speech was in many ways a typical presidential address on military matters, which should explode the notion that some on the left had that Trump was set to change course militarily. He was never a peace candidate, never someone who would keep up out of military adventures. In fact, as his rhetoric on North Korea shows, he may be more reckless than even George W. Bush because he lacks the background to stand up to the generals with which he’s surrounded himself.

I’ve annotated the speech (see above).

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Cafe envy

#CafeEnvy // Every corner a strip mall. Every strip mall a pizza place. Dry cleaners. Chinese food. Maybe bagels. I long for a cafe, a coffeehouse, a place with soft chairs and low tables, where I can sit with a black coffee and write. A place with small tables outside overlooking the street. A place where artists hang their work. // Princeton has Small World and its strong biting coffee, best in the region by far. But I don’t want to drive the 7 miles into town and park; Thomas Sweet, the famed ice cream place, has a coffee house in Montgomery. I sat there this morning, having stopped on the way back from the doctor. Coffee. Turkey sausage, egg and cheese on a croissant. I wrote in my small black notebook, a poem about Glen Campbell, my mom, and Alzheimer’s. The coffee was good, not as strong as I usually like, and the sandwich was large and flavorful, but expensive. There are better cafes and worse, and yet I find myself envious of the patrons who came and went. // We have a diner, and another coming, and a great family restaurant. But no coffee house. No cafe, nothing like the small bistro in Paris Hemingway would frequent, where he’d sit and draft out stories long hand in a small notebook. Or that’s what I remember from A Moveable Feast. He drank rum while he wrote, I just want a place with coffee and wifi, soft chairs and breakfast. Someplace to sit and work. #instagramessay @newspoet41
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