Journal Entries
Journal Entries
Posted Mar 25, 2000
...are kinda in a bad format, IMHO. It's sort of annoying to read a long entry in a one-column space. As you can clearly see below {eye roll}. Therefore some of my more interesting (to me anyway) experiences have been turned into Guide Entries, including the times I heard Stephen Batchelor, Charlton Heston, and Lama Surya Das speak. So check them out below under "Guide Entries."
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Latest reply: Mar 25, 2000
Charlton Heston: The Head with a Mouth
Posted Mar 22, 2000
Well, I saw Charlton Heston speak today. The school paid $30,000 to get Heston here in Boulder, and what with the nouveau-hippie atmosphere here, I expected the crowd to be pretty unforgiving. Shocked, I saw as soon as we took our seats that we were in a sea of radical conservative gun advocates. Terrifying. The audience was (ironically) frisked at the door, but I still felt nervous. Well, I needn't have worried because any tension was dissolved; everyone was in a great mood, the gun advocates because their god was talking and the gun-control advocates because he was hilarious. A real blemish on the face of American politics, which is saying a lot. The hilarity started when the UCSU rep introducing Heston. I forget the guy's name, but it was something like Matthew Hutner, so I'll call him that. "Thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "My name is UCSU Representative Matthew Hutner." I wonder if we could just call him "UCSU" for short. Sadly, my friend and I were the only people in the room who found that amusing. Heston himself was great. I bet there's a sitcom role out there with his name on it, and God knows he needs some scriptwriters. One of my favorite moments was when he said that he'd been "looking through some papers in my office last night wondering what I might say to you all" when he suddenly chanced upon a "stack of quotations," which makes me wonder how exactly he's got his office organized. He said that he was pleasantly surprised at how nicely they fit together in a paragraph. I didn't hope for much, since he'd misquoted one of my favorite quotes of all time (George Santayana's "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it") and actually had the nerve to quote Andy Warhol, who is reportedly rolling in his grave even as I type this. Even Martin Luther King Jr. was contained in this paragraph, although I lost the rest of it because some woman in the audience started yelling the words along with Heston...apparently when he said "last night" and "you all" he meant "a while ago" and "generic audiences everywhere." Heston promptly had the woman removed from the audience but was later advised that "if you want to avoid people yelling at you in the future, get a new speech because I've heard this one several times." Heston simply replied to THAT audience member that he should stop wasting "our" time. But by far the most amusing part of Heston's speech was his American egotism, as in the part where he said something along the lines of "the terror in China and Cuba where we still glimpse the bloody ravaged face of the bear" or moreover said that here in America, the country where we've "participated in two major wars in the last century and won them both," we are the "only nation in the world where we believe in doing right and good." Yow! So the NRA is holding that the Vietnam failure wasn't a war, which of course we all believe. Either that or his memory was all plugged up with his fond recollections of his movie roles, which was Reaganesque in its hilarity. "Playing Moses really let me know what it was like to be an oppressed Jew," he said. Well, of course there are a few small differences, in that Moses was a holy leader of the populace and Heston was paid millions to play him for a movie. I loved his talk of the film world; sure it was off-topic, but it was sooo impressive! His first little memory started like this: "Let me tell you about something that happened to a friend of mine, Mr. Kirk Douglas, while my movie Ben Hur was still playing." Wow! A real live...um...name dropper! By far the best question came from a woman who said, "Mr. Heston, the school is paying you $30,000 to be here. Would you consider giving that money to Save CU or the Columbine Memorial Fund?" He stuttered for awhile before replying that he gave money to many funds and individual candidates who he approved of, so he would talk the issue over with his wife before deciding how to spend it (really, he couldn't say anything else). The newscasts tonight said that Heston throughout the speech skirted the issue of gun legistlation. More than that; the forty-minute ($30k) speech had not one mention of the word "gun," EVER. The closest he got was "bayonet," when talking about the States' glorious military history {gag}. In short, I could sum the entire speech up in three minutes, and I would probably forget it. It was that pointless.
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Latest reply: Mar 22, 2000
Hmph
Posted Mar 17, 2000
I just hate how you can't delete journal entries. The Guide says that soon we will be able to, but I'm not so sure.
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Latest reply: Mar 17, 2000
{sigh}
Posted Mar 2, 2000
Had a hard couple months...lots of deaths around me. Bad karma...
Busy weekend ahead of me, though, maybe that'll keep my mind off of things. I'm doing the Denver Zen Center's seminar to take my status as "public" away, so I can practice at the Zen center whenever I want instead of being restricted to "open to the public" events.
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Latest reply: Mar 2, 2000
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Posted Nov 17, 1999
When Beat writer Jack Kerouac was staying with the Neal Cassady's in mid-1950, he was in the middle of writing a novel. It was a book that he would attempt to write three times before being satisfied with the effort. Although Neal loved the work in progress, which was an account of their adventures traveling cross country, his wife Carolyn was less enthusiastic; the memory of how angry she had been when Neal departed for these trips was still an open wound, and she feared that the book would become “an interminable highway.” Ironically, when it was finally published, Jack gave it a name suggestive of that and the subject content: On the Road.
On the Road was a book that gave Neal’s character, whom Kerouac labeled “Dean Moriarty,” as the consummate American man; the new generation of youth in America. Jack himself was called “Sal Paradise,” who was the narrator and observer of Moriarty’s mad tactics. “The only people for me,” he wrote, “are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…” and he hooked up with Dean accordingly. Neal had fascinated Jack from the get-go and the book was a tribute to him as well as the lifestyle of the day. Reading On the Road was, for Jack’s friends, sometimes too close for comfort as he wrote about almost all of them with little departure from the sometimes painful truth.
If On the Road was a labor of love, then the love of the pen must have been real to Jack. He worked for this novel, and when one looks at the process toward its completion, it shows.
The first attempt at the book was in 1949, fresh from the adventure itself. Jack wrote anything and everything in it, and the chronicle became more and more complex. 500 words a day (which was Kerouac’s average rate) added thoroughness, but the details and extra abstracted words muddied up his thoughts. Soon, the account had become so heavy with prose and literary devices that it no longer made sense.
Dejected and recognizing the weight that had sunk the novel, Jack set it aside and thought little about it until 1951. The inspiration to take it up again came in the form of John Clellon Holmes, a writer and sometime friend of the group. Although he had watched from a distance to record the goings-on of Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, and Herbert Hunke, Holmes had managed to capture their lives with clarity and faithful truth in his new, and as yet unpublished novel, The Beat Generation (published in 1952 as Go). Kerouac’s mind drifted to On the Road, and he told Holmes that he was going to write it as it occurred; that is, as fast as he could. “The hell with these phony architectures,” he said to Holmes.
It was during that brief period in Jack’s life when he was married to Joan Volmer that he began the “scroll version” of the book. True to his word, he wrote without interruption, dosed out on Benzedrine and living on a diet of coffee, pea soup, and cigarettes. He taped together tracing paper (rumored to have originated in the press room where Lucien Carr worked) so he could write without having to stop to replace the paper in the typewriter. He didn’t stop to sleep, shower, or go out, and his wife slept behind a screen to avoid the light of the desk lamp. On April 20th he had a nearly finished 120-yard novel that contained 186,000 words and three weeks of his life. With a feeling of shock and relief, he rolled the scroll out on the floor. “It looks like a road,” he remarked in a letter to Neal.
Immediately upon starting the novel, Jack ran into the problem of the protagonist. He was wavering between a character based on himself, to be named Ray Smith, and a character based on Neal, called “Red” Moultrie. But as Jack wrote, the truth of the situation came through the writing, and the characters put themselves into their proper places: Red Moultrie was the main character, the frantic, excitable young man from the west, settled into the forefront, and Ray Smith, like the reality of Jack’s self, was the beholder, following Red around the country as he searched for the truth.
On the Road was actually a story of four different trips, each more outrageous than the last. The major areas in the book are Denver (where Cassady was from), New York (the center of the Beat universe), San Francisco (perpetually the bohemian headquarters of the country), and Mexico, whose lazy manner and casual, accepting pace called often to Jack and Neal.
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Latest reply: Nov 17, 1999
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