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By David Sterritt

Jack Kerouac, the novelist and poet who gave the Beat Generation its name, died 43 years ago on 21 October 1969 at the age of 47. This Friday, the long-delayed movie version of Kerouac’s autobiographical novel about crisscrossing the United States with his hipster friend Neal Cassady in the 1940s, On the Road releases. When the novel was published in 1957, six years after he finished writing it, Kerouac dreamed up his own screen adaptation, hoping to play himself (called Sal Paradise in the novel) opposite Marlon Brando as Dean Moriarty, the Cassady character. He wrote to Brando but Brando didn’t write back, so the dream production remained a dream. Now that it’s reaching the screen with Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund as Sal and Dean, we can only guess what Kerouac would have made of it.

On the Road remains Kerouac’s most widely acclaimed novel, partly for its literary merits — boundless energy, quicksilver prose, an almost mystical view of the American landscape — and partly because of the legendary way he created it, typing it on a 120-foot scroll so he wouldn’t have to interrupt the flow of words by changing paper. Kerouac wrote many other works, including several novels, a great deal of poetry, two books about Buddhism, a compendium of his nightly dreams, and a play that inspired the 1959 movie Pull My Daisy, a mostly playful glance at the mercurial Beat lifestyle. But his most prolific period was limited to the 1950s, when he wrote nearly of his significant works.

Weighed down and ultimately defeated by alcoholism and depression, Kerouac produced little of note after 1960 except the novels Big Sur and Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46, published in 1962 and 1968 respectively. He felt badly misunderstood by the American public, and although he was right, he was also to blame. His footloose characters and propulsive writing style had convinced admirers and detractors alike that being Beat meant disdaining the ordinary social rules — which was true as far as it went, but far less important to Kerouac than the need to be both “beat” and “beatific,” meaning saintly in a literal sense. Appearing on William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative TV show a year before his death, Kerouac said he rejected the “mutiny” and “insurrection” that the Beats had come to connote; instead he favored “order, tenderness and piety.” By this time, however, the Beats had given way to the flower children as the American gadflies par excellence, and few were interested in the profoundly religious sensibility — oscillating between Catholicism and Buddhism but always deeply felt — of a once-blazing rebel now seen as a soggy old complainer.

Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in On the Road. Photo © Gregory Smith. Source: ontheroad-themovie.com

Although the original Beats were a loosely knit crew, its key members were unquestionably Kerouac, fiercely committed to the spontaneous writing he pioneered; Allen Ginsberg, a modernist poet inspired by everything from 19th-century verse to late-night radio patter; and William S. Burroughs, a storyteller with a schizoid style and a hearty appetite for sex, drugs, and metaphysics. Their rebellious values have stayed in the social imagination ever since their early days as friends and fellow travelers, influencing the cyberpunks of the 2000s no less than the hippies of the 60s and the punks of the 70s.

Two ideas united them: a shared rejection of consumerism and regimentation, and a collective desire to purge their lives of spiritually deadening dross. Their rallying cry was a call for remaking consciousness on a deeply inward-looking basis — revitalizing society by revolutionizing thought, rather than the other way around, through cultivation of “the unspeakable visions of the individual,” in Kerouac’s unforgettable phrase. They had different ways of accomplishing this. Kerouac became a self-described “great rememberer redeeming life from darkness” in the many novels he wrote; Ginsberg invented a new variety of incantatory, almost shamanistic verse; Burroughs cut, folded, and shuffled his pages to bypass his ego and extract fresh, outlandish truths. The ultimate goal for them and their followers is what Kerouac called “eyeball kicks,” the jolts of cosmic energy that divide everyday diversions from visionary art.

The new movie version of On the Road was written by Jose Rivera and directed by the respected Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, who deserves an Oscar for just getting the picture finished. A number of writers, including major ones like Russell Banks and Michael Herr, have tried and failed to complete satisfactory screenplays during the 33 years that producer Francis Ford Coppola has owned the adaptation rights. Rivera’s effort finally captured the tone that Coppola was looking for, and Salles allowed the actors to improvise at times, which is very much in the Beat spirit. Reviews were mixed when the picture premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival last spring, but its American distributors, IFC Films and Sundance Selects, have expressed their optimism by scheduling its theatrical debut for December 21st, a popular timeslot for films with award possibilities. Kerouac loved movies, and one hopes he would have smiled on this big-screen reincarnation of his profoundly personal tale.

David Sterritt is a film professor at Columbia University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and professor emeritus at Long Island University. A noted critic, author, and scholar, he is chair of the National Society of Film Critics and chief book critic of Film Quarterly, and was for many years the film critic for The Christian Science Monitor. His books include The Beats: A Very Short Introduction, Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the ’50s, and Film and Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility, and he serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Beat Studies. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Journal of American History, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Beliefnet, Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications. Sterritt has appeared as a guest on CBS Morning News, Nightline, Charlie Rose, CNN Live Today, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The O’Reilly Factor, among many other television and radio shows.

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Image credit: Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in On the Road. Photo © Gregory Smith. Source: ontheroad-themovie.com. Used for the purposes of illustration.

The post Jack Kerouac: On and Off the Road appeared first on OUPblog.

Manuel Ramos

DISTANT STAR BY ROBERTO BOLAÑO
I confess my frustration when I read something by Roberto Bolaño. Last year I wrote about his collection of short stories, Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions, 2006); check out the October 6, 2006, La Bloga archives here. I thought the anthology was good, obviously worth reading, but even in that post I mentioned Bolaño’s puzzling creativity, what I now refer to as his "style" – sorry, I cannot come up with a better word although I understand that style in the context of writing does not mean all that much; but Bolaño’s writing strikes me as very stylized, even self-conscious – and the reader’s responsibility to contribute to the narrative. My latest excursion with Bolaño, Distant Star (originally published by Editorial Anagrama as Estrella distante in 1996; published in English by New Directions in 2004, translation by Chris Andrews) confirmed my first impressions and added to my level of exasperation, but did not lessen my admiration for this writer.

Distant Star is a novel centered on the unraveling of the mystery of Carlos Weider: Chilean poet, officer in Pinochet’s air force, torturer, serial killer. Weider’s first claim to fame, garnered when he was a university student using the name Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, is the assumption made by the Chilean literary scene that he will "revolutionize Chilean poetry" despite the lack of any meaningful poetry produced by Weider. Eventually, he "writes" poetry with his airplane. Here is how Bolaño describes the narrator’s first witnessing of such poetry, observed as the narrator waits in prison, a victim of the Pinochet roundups of suspected threats to the new regime:

There, high above the city, it began to write a poem in the sky. At first I thought the pilot had gone mad and I wasn’t surprised. Madness was not exceptional at the time. I thought he was looping around in a fit of desperation and would crash into a building or a square in the city. But then, suddenly, the letters appeared, as if the sky itself had secreted them. Perfectly formed letters of grey-black smoke on the sky’s enormous screen of rose-tinged blue, chilling the eyes of those who saw them.

Weider becomes the darling of the intelligentsia, that is, the darling of the academics, writers, and other artists who survive the early years of Pinochet.

The narrator is exiled from Chile as Weider’s star rises. However, that star dims drastically when Weider exhibits a collection of photographs (the "art of the future") that embarrasses the leaders. Although the photographs document the brutality and corruption of the regime, and Weider’s own insanity, nothing comes of the revelation except that he slips away, also in exile, to continue to do whatever it is that he does, including contributing poetry and articles to various neo-Nazi and fascist magazines and journals. Inevitably, the narrator becomes obsessed with finding Weider, and the novel ends with an ambiguous but symbolic closure to that search.

Bolaño’s book dares to suggest that there is a direct connection between Pinochet’s destruction of the Allende government and society, and the fascination of Chilean writers – poets in particular – with the superficial trappings of art for art’s sake, of artistic expression nurtured in a social and political vacuum. Weider’s first victims are his fellow poets, and that is no accident. They are students who fell in love with his image, with his "potential," with his mysterious attitude, but who did not really know him or his poetry. As it turns out, Weider is unknowable. His lack of humanity makes him a shadowless enigma, a deadly and terrible ghost who found himself in a society where he was tolerated, then worshiped, much to the agony of the Chilean people.

Bolaño says in a preface that he initially wrote a short piece in another book about Nazi Literature in the Americas, then he realized that he had much more to say. And, indeed, there is much more in Distant Star about far right poetics and art. But there also is considerable information about numerous poets (left and right) who were admired or ignored; and about the generation of Chileans who came of age when the Allende fairy tale ended violently. Bolaño includes several anecdotes about such people. In the same vein as the characters in Last Evenings on Earth, these exiles, for the most part, are adrift in guilt and despair. They are constantly searching but do not always know what it is they search for. The poet Soto is a good example. And the Soto chapter is a good example of why Bolaño’s writing is frustrating for me. In the middle of the Weider story, the reader is taken into Soto’s world in exile. I had to wonder, "where is Bolaño going with this?" Pero, sabes qué, I kept reading. I could not stop even though I wanted Bolaño to get back to the main story line. As I read the story of the doomed Soto I shook my head when Bolaño described Soto as "happy" and, yet, when he met his destiny, Soto’s eyes filled with tears of self-pity. That contradiction explains much about Bolaño’s writing.

The book is fiction and, as far as I know, the Weider character is not based on any one specific person. Certainly, though, the book provides revealing insight about the mind-set of the Chilean people during the Pinochet years. In the simplest terms, Weider is those people, and those people are the ones who love then revile Weider, who praise then condemn him. Near the end of the book, an elderly witness to one of Weider’s crimes gives the following testimony:

In her memory, the night of the crime was one episode in a long history of killing and injustice. Her account of the events was swept up in a cyclical, epic poem, which, as her dumbfounded listeners came to realize, was partly her story ... and partly the story of the Chilean nation. A story of terror. When she spoke of Weider, she seemed to be talking about several different people: an invader, a lover, a warrior, a demon. When she spoke of [the victims], she likened them to the air, to garden plants or puppies. Remembering the black night of the crime, she said she had heard the music of the Spanish. When asked to clarify what she meant by "the music of the Spanish," she replied, "Rage, sir, sheer, futile rage."

FIVE EASY PIECES
1. Now Appearing -- On The Road


Jack Kerouac's connection to Denver is celebrated by the Denver Public Library with an exhibition of the original rolled scroll of teletype paper on which he wrote On The Road. This book is an acknowledged American classic, written in three weeks in1951 and published in 1957, and I have to say that looking at the original manuscript was a gas. Denver is all over the book and Kerouac spent a lot of time in the city, diggin' the vibe. The 120-foot scroll is on display until March 31, 2007. I had the pleasure on opening night of the exhibit of listening to readings from the book by students and professors, as well as by Carolyn and John Cassady, wife and son of Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty, the novel's central character. Westword has a large spread in its January 4th issue on Kerouac and his ties to Denver, including excerpts from several writers who have also used Denver in their work. If you look closely you can find a quote from one of my books, Brown-on-Brown, that pays homage to Chubby's on West 38th.

2. Another Denver Classic
El Chapultepec is a 50-year old bar on Larimer in Denver, famous for live jazz and standing room only ambience. I've seen many great musicians in that bar, on the stage and in the booths. The Pec is the last real bar in downtown Denver. Now, right here in my own neighborhood (West 38th again), the historic club opens Chapultepec Too with a weekend of jazz celebrations beginning January 19. Chapultepec Too can be found at 3930 W. 38th in Denver.

3. A Land Full of Stories
The Story Circle Network, in conjunction with the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University in San Marcos, is sponsoring a writers conference with the theme A Land Full of Stories, June 8-9, 2007. The conference is now accepting workshop proposals on topics related to writing about place (January 22 deadline). Full information about the conference, including a page where workshop proposals may be submitted, is available here.

4. Klail City Death Trip Series
Giuliana Arcidiacono from the University of Catania (Italy) recently wrote to Rolando Hinjosa announcing the completion of her Ph.D. thesis on The Klail City Death Trip Series. Cool.

5. NALWA
I've seen an announcement for a "Proposal" for a National Latino Writers' Association. Could this be the beginning of something? For more info, contact Valerie Martinez: valmatz AT comcast DOT net.

Later.