What's overflow? It could be anything, but it basically means interesting stuff that I can't weave into a regular post, for whatever reason.
*Anybody see the theme in today's headlines? Answer: Song titles.
*"Torn Between Two Lovers": Perhaps the most romantic skank song of all time.
*"The tattoos and piercings of 21st century bohemia are not transgressions against Emerson's legacy but odes to it." Leland, p. 44.
*"Thoreau said the nation's promise is in loafing, not achieving or acquiring." Id.
*"Malcolm Little, a Harlem hustler known as Detroit Red, signaled the new day when he appeared at the draft board in 1943. Dressed in his flashiest zoot suit, yellow knob-toe shoes and wildly conked red hair, he confided to the shrink, 'Daddy-o, now you and me, we're from up North here, so don't you tell nobody. . . . I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!' The draft board deferred him. Years later, when he spun similar riffs under the name Malcolm X, he turned white America's paranoia into his own sport." Leland, p. 116.
*An earlier writing about the Beatniks:
Detachment took another warped form when Jack Kerouac yelled at America in On the Road, a book based on his real-life meandering. He wrote the book in 1951 and carried the manuscript around with him for years in a rucksack as he journeyed across the nation, until it was finally accepted and published in 1957.
It quickly became a bestseller and brought the beatnik phenomenon onto America’s center stage (Kerouac himself would be written about in major magazines like Life, give numerous interviews, and be a guest on The Steve Allen Show). Fellow beatnik William Burroughs aptly described the sensation surrounding On the Road:
After 1957 On the Road sold a trillion Levis and . . . sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one. . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people . . . were waiting to hear. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.
The lifestyle celebrated in On the Road is known as “Beat,” the aimless search for significant experience. The word Beat, according to Catholic-born Kerouac, is a religious word with a relation to the beatific vision.9 Though he never provided a complete or coherent explanation of the term, it is clear from the book’s protagonist, Sal Paradise, who longs for the road, his spasmodic friend Dean Moriarty (the “holy goof”), who zealously searches for “kicks,” and their intense fervor for novelties, that the Beat lifestyle required a religious-like devotion or practice.
To confirm his assertion that he was writing a religious book, Kerouac habitually sprinkled religious terms—like soul, holy, mystic, and immortal—throughout the book to describe the experiences of the road and provided short and grave sermons from the Beat’s high priest, Dean Moriarty (e.g., “‘I want you particularly to see the eyes of this little boy . . . and notice how he will come to manhood with his own particular soul bespeaking itself through the windows which are his eyes, and such lovely eyes surely do prophesy and indicate the loveliest of souls.’”10).
In their roaming, Sal and Dean thoroughly enjoy everything they encounter. They love the cars, the different airs of our country’s regions, and the girls. Many portions of the book relate nothing more than a list of things they see and how they “dig” them far more than any ordinary person would dig them.
Sal’s and Dean’s wanderings are exercises in detachment. The road detaches them from the binding conventionalities of normal society. As a result, they are able to enjoy everything and everyone, even the most disgusting, because they are able, in their unique way, to see God’s stamp of goodness on everything. At one point, for instance, they pick up an “incredibly filthy” hitchhiker at Dean’s insistence. The man is covered with scabs and is reading a muddy paperback he found in a culvert. They sit close to him and dig him the whole time, genuinely getting a kick out of talking to him, but without any hint of malice. They really like the guy and are totally absorbed by him. After dropping him off, Dean excitedly says about picking up the hitchhiker: “I told you it was kicks. Everybody’s kicks, man!”11 His attitude resembles St. Francis’s affection for lepers and Mother Teresa’s love for the diseased downtrodden in Calcutta. As all the saints realize, and as Sal and Dean experience, even the most filthy and diseased people are God’s creatures and therefore lovable—if only a person is sufficiently detached to see it.
On the Road also features holy men, men whose thorough detachment makes them willing outcasts of society. There’s the “wild, ecstatic” Rollo Greb, the Beat-saint Dean wants to imitate, a man who “didn’t give a damn about anything,” a “great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting,” whose “excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light.” Dean admires him, telling Sal: “That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all . . . that’s what I want to be. I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out. . . . Man, he’s the end!” Then Dean alludes to the beatific vision Kerouac wanted to capture: “You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.” Sal, puzzled, asks, “Get what?” Dean simply yells back: “IT! IT!”12 as though there is nothing else to add—a characteristic of mystics emerging from an intense round of meditation.
There’s also Bull Lee, the teacher of the Beat. To the Beats, he is the wise elder, a man who had read and done everything, a man who lived in the glorious pre-1914 days when narcotics were available over the counter. Bull Lee lives in an old shack in New Orleans with his wife (both Benzedrine addicts). He tinkers about the yard, reading Shakespeare and Kafka, hardly caring about anything (especially ignoring the cares of conventional society), and taking drug fixes to get him through the day (although Sal pities Bull Lee’s drug addiction, his pity resembles the novice’s pity for the abbot who has bad knees from too much kneeling).
Bull Lee’s drug use was not unique. The Beat life entailed heavy use of drugs. Kerouac in real life used Benzedrine, morphine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, opium, and massive quantities of alcohol. He was hospitalized in his twenties from excessive Benzedrine use and was a cadaver at age 47 from hemorrhaging of the esophagus, the drunkard’s classic death.
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