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 2

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

Let’s talk about the mad ones.

Kerouac, in what is probably the book’s most famous passage, writes that he “shambled after” Marx and Moriarty
as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn, or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” (Kerouac 8)
The thrill of his writing, when he is on, is here in the passage. It’s built on a seemingly endless run of prepositional phrases that heighten the extremes of emotion with which he often is overcome. It presages the ’60s in its implicit critique of normative society, while also hinting at the shortcomings of the hedonist philosophy that drove the decade into excess and solipsism.

The cover of my 1st edition.
It’s important to keep in mind the placement of this passage, early in the book, before Sal heads out on his various adventures, finds exhilaration and disappointment, before the weight of it all settles on his shoulders. I think it’s fair to ask why this passage remains the one most people remember and quote. The answer is two-fold, I think: First, it is consistent with the mythology that surrounds the book; second, it stands, even after 300-plus pages, as Kerouac’s theme, that one must seek the extreme even as the narrator is always a step behind, always finding his thrills, his joys, to be temporary. To “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” is also to burn out spectacularly. “Live fast, die young, have a good looking corpse,” as the mobster in Knock on Any Door says.

This ethos, though, is limiting. James Dean. Janis Joplin. Kurt Cobain. All died too soon, robbing us of the kind of art they might have grown into. “Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be,” as Browning writes.

On the Road aggrandizes youth and motion, but also traffics in a kind of nostalgic mythology. It is critical both implicitly and explicitly of the adult and what might be called the square world, yet somehow viewing certain mythologized traditions as noble or worth preserving.

Consider his short stay in Cheyenne — again, early in the book. He and his crew of beatified hobos arrives in the Wyoming capital during Wild West Days, when the old town section of the city is remade into an old-fashioned western town from the movies. Sal is bemused and dismissive. He gets the economic imperative — towns using a mythologized representation of their history to attract visitors — but he finds the whole thing ridiculous and his critique is framed with a physical stereotype: “Big crowds of businessmen, fat businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats,  with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire, bustled and whooped on the wooden sidewalks of Old Cheyenne” (33). This is a kind of cartoon essentialism that robs the people he targets of depth, transforms them into the broadest of stereotypes — something he does through out the book with African Americans, Mexican, workers, the poor, etc.

It’s an attitude that animated elements of ’60s youth culture — and which was critiqued in dystopic films like Wild in the Streets and Logan’s Run, films that presented a vision of youth power run amok.

And yet, Sal is not entirely off base. The Cheyenne event glorifies the past. Its nostalgiac take on “The Wild West” is about money, first, but also about looking backward and, as such, it presages much of our political dysfunction. The Trump phenomenon is about looking backward, is built on the kind of narrative gymnastics we’ve performed in creating the story of American exceptionalism. The past offers respite from the present, seems better, and may be for some. But for others, those excluded from the mythic narrative, the past is better left in the past. Nostalgia, as a political mode, is reactionary and potentially dangerous. Sal, in Cheyenne and throughout the book, is caught between his urge to make it new, to avoid the commonplace, and his tendency to lionize certain traditions, to look backward himself.


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I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy, part 1

What follows is my initial reflections as I set out to re-read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for the first time in at least  a decade. i won’t say much now, but I’ll be posting updated entries as I go with the intention, down the road, of pulling together an essay.

My Keroauc collection.

I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy
Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s
It was probably 1981, the spring, the end of the second trimester or beginning of the third of my first year at Penn State I dropped out after two years, partly because I thought I would be the next Kerouac). I must’ve read an article in Rolling Stone, or that’s what my imagination, mining the frayed edges of memory from a distant time and place, of another me, is telling me. I can’t be sure. It could’ve been Creem. Or The Aquarian. Or Crawdaddy. I was addicted to music journalism, to music — punk and new wave, the blues, jazz. Freed from the constraints of a self imposed high school conformity, I took it all in.

Perhaps it was Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries that turned me on to Jack Kerouac, or his Living at the Movies, which contains a poem for the beat legend written upon his death, “Highway Report”:
Kerouac is dead at 47
                                      on radio
and McCartney alive

                         (we lost).           and

tragedy’s just that and what to do but keep on going all in one line (Carroll 67)
Me, circa 1981, when I was spinning records at WEHR.

I want o say that the impetus behind my reading Kerouac for the first time doesn’t matter, that I came to On the Road with the freshest of eyes, but I’ve come to realize that just isn’t possible. On the Road is an iconic text, and it has been for much of the 60 years since it’s initial publication. As much as any other book, it is credited with helping to create the 1960s counterculture — one that reveled in nonconformity, that kicked the staid ’50s to the curb in pursuit of sex, drugs and rock and roll, spiritual growth, political and personal freedom, much of which proved unsustainable.


Kerouac abhorred this connection — by the time the counterculture was in full flower, his underlying conservativism came to dominate and he spent the final years of his life railing in reaction against what he saw as a communist-inspired and morally bankrupt ethos.

I didn’t know about the reactionary Kerouac when I first picked up On the Road. At not-quite-nineteen, I had become obsessed with the ’60s. I grew my hair long, smoked dope and took acid. I skipped class. I read voraciously — music bios and periodicals, poetry, . At one point, I took to wearing a blue wool knit cap — a winter cap — like Bruce Springsteen, who’d become my idol, or Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I caromed back and forth between styles and movements — punk to hippie, beat to working-class chic. I played guitar (badly) and started fiddling with songs and poems. I took creative writing and lit classes, passed some, failed most. I was adrift, seeking an intellectual anchor. Enter Kerouac.

My copy of the book.

As I said, I don’t remember how I came upon On  the Road, but I am sure the dual 

myths surrounding book and author led me to the cheap paper pack that ended up in my possession. That copy — dog-eared after multiple readings, pages falling out, underlined with notes jotted in the margins — is long gone. I think I gave it to a writer friend when I returned to college after three years away. The trade copy of the book — $4.95 from Penguin published in the early ’80s. — has held up better, mostly because I’ve moved on. I do not return to it the way I did when I was 20 or 22. In fact, it’s probably been more than a decade since I’ve read it, and for good reason. It is a young man’s book, and I emphasize both “young” and “man.” It is, at its core, a romantic Bildungsroman, the story of a restless seeker who never really finds what he’s searching for, because he never figures out what that might be. It is romantic in that even it’s most downwardly cast or even depressing sections are presented as part of a heroic quest. Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s alter ego in On the Road, shares with Christian from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress a desire to escape, Sal from a life of boredom and the cultural sin of conformity, Christian from his hometown of Destruction and an underlying sense of permanent sinfulness. But, whereas Christian’s quest is a moral one, Sal’s remains unformed and selfish. He is seeking enlightenment, but in the form of kicks. His foils — Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx and others, all based on famous and not-so-famous Beat writers, intellectuals and hangers-on — often present different approaches and alternate narratives that Sal dabbles with, but to which he cannot commit.

And this aspect of the story, this failed commitment, the narrator’s youthful wandering — and the romanticization of this restlessness — is what makes it a young man’s read.

***
I’ll have more as I reread, but I am curious what other readers think of the book today, especially if their first reads were 20, 30, 40 years ago. Post your thoughts in the comments.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

NJ Spotlight: Patchwork of Immigration Policies Works Against Undocumented

Aracely Cantero (right) and a member of Make the Road NJ protest on behalf of Humberto Cantero, who is in ICE detention in Essex County.

I have a piece up today at NJ Spotlight on the patchwork that is New Jersey immigration policy.

There are 21 counties, 565 municipalities, and 20 county jails that have their own policies for dealing with ICE. All are subject to a state attorney general directive from 2007 that sets limits on what local law enforcement can ask of people they arrest, but not on how they should respond to requests from federal immigration officials.

This leaves too much to local discretion, say advocates. They are calling for state action to create a more uniform approach to dealing with ICE. Immigration advocates generally support legislation introduced by state Sen. Nia Gill (D-Essex) that would limit cooperation with ICE by local, county, and state officials to judicially sanctioned detainer requests. ICE currently issues voluntary orders, which are valid but lack the force of a judicial order. Advocates say the bill could go much farther by limiting interaction with ICE.

Six counties work with ICE in some way — Hudson has both an enforcement arrangement and a contract to house ICE detainees, while Monmouth, Salem and Cape May have enforcement arrangements and Essex and Bergen have what are sometimes called “bed contracts.” Two counties have policies in place that limit their interaction with ICE — Union and Middlesex — and about two dozen towns have declared themselves as sanctuary or welcoming cities.

So, while immigration is a federal matter, federal policy has an impact locally, especially when federal policy is to enlist local law enforcement in the effort.

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.