Sitting in my living room here listening to Mogwai, reading On the Road a second time and watching stalactite icicles drip outside. Given enough time they will reach the ground. Nebraska is a big deep-freeze cave with all kinds of deep-frozen wonders to marvel at, and slip on. Glaciers creep and groan across campus, impelled by the force of mere shadows which give and take the gift of melting.
The Nebraska Department of Tourism should hire me. If Nebraska even has one of these that is. I'm sure I could make them a bangup brochure and attract, say, a team of arctic explorers.
Posted by Alan at February 12, 2004 12:14 PMMogwai are, I've found, pretty excellent mood inducing / stabilizing music. It seems like they figured pretty heavily in my own playlist around the time I read On the Road, a book which left me kind of underwhelmed and convinced I must be missing some things. I'm working around to making a second go at Kerouac, but after pulling a completely unnecessary all-nighter reading Linda Hamalian's brutally depressing biography of Kenneth Rexroth, I think I need to read something by someone who I can believe was sort of a decent human being.
Posted by: Brennen at February 12, 2004 05:30 PMAh yes now I know why Rexroth sounds familiar. He's Rheinhold Cacoethes in Kerouac's Dharma Bums.
If you're looking for a coherent point might as well forget Kerouac, his books are all about his own personal search for a point which is usually unsuccessful. But if you think about it that's what it's like for most of us & you gotta admire the guy for not just making up something to achieve closure. Which is what most books do. I dig Kerouac for his realness is what I'm trying to say.
Also Kerouac saw all his books as a single narrative covering his whole life, the "Duluoz Legend" he called it. People are narratives, don't ever forget that. (Hee hee, now we're cross-referenced Brennen.)
Posted by: Alan at February 12, 2004 08:00 PMAhh, what a tangled web we weave.
Posted by: Brennen at February 13, 2004 11:46 AM