Literary Chicago: Jack Kerouac - "The Subterraneans"

" - returning to the Red Drum for sets, to hear Bird, whom I saw distinctly digging Mardou several times also myself directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from other night clubs and other coasts, other Chicagos - " 

This is the third work of Kerouac that I've read and the third that has a Chicago reference (previously: On the Road / The Dharma Bums). Although this is a peculiar inclusion in the literary Chicago encyclopedia, as it doesn't say much about Chicago itself, rather the narrator is reminiscing back to other nights, other clubs, other cities, and picks Chicago in particular to call out.

The Bird in question of course is Charlie Parker, who while he played here, isn't as assoicated with Chicago as he is with other cities, particularly New York City. And the story itself, inspired by Kerouac's nights in NYC, is fictionalized to take place in San Francisco.

I'm reminded of Sarah Ruhl's play "The Clean House" which takes place in a "metaphysical Connecticut." I think Kerouac uses this phrase in a similar vein, that maybe Bird noticed the narrator from a night club in another city, and perhaps that city was Chicago, and perhaps it was another Chicago. Is Chicago ever the same place twice or even to two different people? Consider Heraclitus.

Or maybe I'm overthinking a speed-induced ramble of one of America's great writer's lesser works. (Not to mention that cover; it wasn't enough to put one photo of the author on the cover but we need to get his good side too?)

The most interesting thing of this novella overall is the character of Mardou, inspired by Kerouac's real life girlfriend, Alene Lee, who protected her privacy. I stumbled across her biography, written by her daughter and posted in 2010. Certainly worth the read to learn more about the inspiration for one of the period's more complex and entirely underwritten characters.

Did You Like That Picture?

Did you like that picture? I sent it to you not to show off. I sent it to you to remind you of the god-damned man-made majestic beauty of our world. Of this perfectly primary-colored edge of our world, edge of our country. The perfect golden-red; the cocksure azure water, crisp as the air that breathes ocean mist onto my skin; the typical colored sand: because we no longer need to describe what color sand is (unless it's atypical), because I think about how much sharper writers of the past had to be with their words. But now, we all experience everything from the seats of our desks, and what we used to seek at the top of the world, we seek at the top of our laps. So: typical is what this sand remains. 

I remember being impressed by Kerouac for painting the entirety of America in one simple pamphlet-tome. Now I am the one, within a span of a few months, who has ventured from statues of freedom, arches of note, and finally this bridge, the summation of this country, the end and the beginning of this country, our country, our world. I've heard the blues in Memphis, I've heard the blues in Chicago, I've heard the blues in Austin. And I've seen the blues in all these cities and I see the blues before me: the sky, the waves, my shoes. And I hope this picture finds you back home to help you escape your blues. 

I am wearing a shirt that portrays a sketch of a sewer, a Chicago manhole cover. Our art is about the dirt, the filth, the overlooked, the dispirited, the dispossessed, the disposed, the disks that cover up our dirt, our filth, our waste. Our city works. Our workers make it work. Our civic pride is tied into the fabric of where we deposit our waste, our filth. We recognize the beauty of the sewer system and we're not ashamed to put our names on it. 

Jack Kerouac - 'The Dharma Bums'

I read this book even though I had no intention of doing so. It was sitting at my girlfriend's apartment. I'd just finished reading Italo Calvino's munchkin sized yarn Marcovaldo and needed something new. I started reading and just couldn't stop. The only other book I've read by Kerouac was On The Road, and that one is truly a masterpiece. To cover so much ground, the descriptions of so many settings in one narrative is quite impressive, and even though its primary focus on drugs and woman are certainly more appealing to an adolescent andhertz, they'd probably still resonate with a slightly older / still not fully matured andhertz. So maybe that's why I haven't read anything else by Kerouac, because I knew I would like it even though I didn't want to. Oh well. Pigeonholes be damned. I flew through this thing and found some great segments for Literary Chicago along the way. 

"That's Rhonda, my sister, I grew up with her in the woods in Oregon. She's gonna marry this rich jerk from Chicago, a real square."

"Japhy and I were sitting around in the shack in a drowsy afternoon and suddenly she was in the door, slim and blond and pretty, with her well-dressed Chicago fiance, a very handsome man."

Richard Hell - "I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp"

I was more than excited to finally read Richard Hell's autobiography. If you're not familiar with Hell, hit play on this video first before reading.

Blank Generation has been one of my favorite albums since I first listened to it sophomore year of high school. I thought it was better than anything else his contemporaries were doing at CBGBs, and even better than the Velvets and Stooges before him. It combined a feral physical nature with intellectual wit and humor, in the lyrics and in the compositions. It's the perfect album for a hormone-addled teenager: music about sex and art made by drug addicts.

Somehow, the Glenview Public Library had a copy of Go Now, a novel Hell wrote in 1996, briefly mentioned in his autobiography. I remember being underwhelmed, and feeling like it was an On the Road ripoff (though I also devoured it). Unfortunately, I feel the same way here. Looking at reviews on Goodreads, a lot of people feel the same. He spends too much time on describing apartments he lived in only briefly, that it was a 3.5 star book, that moments of brilliance are overshadowed by half-baked prose, unnessecary tangents, and not expanding on stuff that he could have shed more insight on.

In high school, I read Please Kill Me three times. It remains one of my favorite books, and is an amazing oral history of the punk scene. So it was sorta disappointing to read a lot of the same stuff again and even some things that are almost line-for-line the same. I had hoped for more of Hell's post punk rock life when he was writing more, but he addresses his reasons for not doing this as the life of a writer isn't that interesting, difficutly in describing present day situations frankly blah blah blah. We want to read you, Hell, because we know you are fearless! Give that to us again.

And yet, I can't hate this book entirely. There are in fact some great anecdotes from the CBGBs days, and he has great descriptions of people like Lester Bangs, Dee Dee Ramone, Anya Phillips, and more, and when his poetry sticks out, it sticks out ("Everything that happened to her was weather," describing a girlfriend), but too often it feels like Hell is cashing in; the book is double spaced with blank pages between chapters, like he was just trying to get to a specified length and then call it a day.

It's not all bad. If nothing else, it's got me excited about that scene again, and what's come out of it. I'm rediscovering some LPs, like Robert Quine (Hell's guitarist) and Fred Maher's album Basic. Quine was a great and underrated guitarist, as angry as they come and with a unique style all his own. Check out 'Summer Storm' from that album:

For those interested in CBGBs scene, I'd recommend going with Please Kill Me. For those that want more of a personal account, read Patti Smith's Just Kids. For those that can't get enough (like me), go for I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp.

Literary Chicago: Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"

Literary Chicago is series where I try to capture the essence of the city by how it is described in fiction, primarily from books that don't take place in Chicago.  

via Calumet 412

"Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys. "Wup! wup! look sharp for old Dean Moriarty there, he may be in Chicago by accident this year." We let out the hobos on this street and proceeded to downtown Chicago. Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food and beer in the air, neons winking - "We're in the big town, Sal! Whooee!""

pg. 239, On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1955)