Still About Kerouac, Different Shape of Degrees of Separation

About ten years later I was living at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Philip Whalen was teaching a class in writing poetry. For an exercise he asked us to write about something beautiful.

        Michael McClure is beautiful    (I wrote)
        ten years later.
        Slightly grey
        that smile
        and still the handsomest man I've ever seen.

"Kerouac thought so too," said Phil. "Huh?" I said. "He said McClure was the handsomest man he'd ever seen," said Phil.

*****************
I suppose this needs all kinds of footnotes. That in 1977 McClure had just then been at Zen Center for a reading. That in 1967 I served him mashed potatoes, or maybe it was peas, in the serving line at the free Thanksgiving dinner in the basement of All Saint's Episcopal Church on Waller Street (or maybe it was Howard Presbyterian on Oak Street) in the Haight. That in the Instamatic Archive I (still) have a picture I took of McClure and Freewheelin' Frank the Hell's Angel making music behind the stage at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967.

That Certain Amount of Experience With Scroll Manuscripts

I went back to the Museum this evening and type type typed my story. It goes:

This is the scroll story. It's a little misty as to before and after. In 1968 I was living in a carriage house on the inside of the block bounded by Haight, Belvedere, Waller and Cole in the Haight Ashbury. My downstairs neighbor had a kind of continuous open house which ran on pills for half of every month until he ran out of money. Among the people who came to Tommy's was a poet named John Foret, who evenually connected my friend Jet with Irving Rosenthal, who had just arrived from New York with a printing press and Beat Connections. I think that's how a man named Angel got into my life and my apartment. Angel had also just arrived, from Afghanistan with a leather jacket full of hashish, and so couldn't stay in Irving's commune... anyway, Angel saw the typewriter on my kitchen table and told me that Kerouac had composed On the Road in a continuous scroll on telegraph paper. I went away for a few days and Angel stayed in my apartment. When I came home, Angel was gone and my cat Pickle was lost, and there was a long long scroll typed on yellow paper in the typewriter. I rolled it up and taped it with masking tape, and kept it a long time, but Angel never came back. I've no idea what I did with it in the end, but I can see it plainly in my memory, even now 40 years later. The paper was much heavier than Kerouac's—I was quite startled when I saw how thin the Museum's scroll is. About a year later the cat reappeared for a couple of days. He seemed to remember me, but had turned into a huge wild street cat, and didn't stay.

Not At All Easy To Read

My boss the head of reference thinks that interest in the Kerouac scroll must be a generational thing, since he doesn't care at all. Me, I have history of a sort with manuscripts typed on rolls of teletype paper, and the museum is free on Friday evenings, so I hurried over after work.

The whole west wing of the museum echoes with the clatter of typing. I thought at first it was a recording, but it was way better than that: at the entry to the exhibit there is a room with old Underwood typewriters, and visitors are encouraged to compose either haiku (a bunch of Kerouac haiku are hung on display) or road narratives, and pin them to the wall. Type type type. Type type type. There is a film on continuous loop, apparently a shortened version of "What Happened to Kerouac". There are enormous blowups of the pictures from Life Magazine of an impossibly handsome Kerouac sitting by his typewriter, holding up the scroll as if reading. There are display units with photos and books of other Beats, and a display panel about Kerouac's associates' New Mexico connections. The sound of typing from the anteroom stops, begins again. Type type type. Type type type.

There is a long long case diagonally down the middle of the room, with the first thirty-six feet of the manuscript unfurled. I don't know if it has been opened to different parts of the story in different cities, but we get the beginning. He composed it with the real names. Neal is Neal. The paper is almost transparent, and the grain of the cloth on the floor of the case shows through behind the typing. Even if one weren't bending over sideways trying to read across the lines at an angle without leaning on the case (which might set off an alarm), it would be hard to read. With or without bifocals. As presented, impossible. I went to the foot of the case where I could at least read straight on instead of sideways. It was the part where he is picking cotton for two dollars per hundred pounds. I read until I was practically standing on my head trying to puzzle out the last visible letters as the paper wrapped around the glass dumbbell holding the rest of the novel. Type type type type type type.

The museum rented a billboard, along I-25 northbound from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. The same text as the bumper sticker above. If you didn't know what it was about, you wouldn't know. Good pix in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Reading News

Two days after I returned The Concept of the Buddha: Its Evolution from Early Buddhism to the Trikaya Theory by Guang Xing to the interlibrary loan system after struggling with it for a MONTH and in such little pieces that I retained almost nothing, I find out that its topic is exactly what Roshi wants us to study up for a meeting at the end of the month. No I didn't xerox it before sending it back.

Well, then. Here I am at mom's for the weekend, lying as usual about how many books I brought. (When she asked, I said, "Three.") Actually, I brought three mysteries--Robert Parker, High Profile; Beverly Connor, Dead Past; and Jimmie Ruth Evans, Best Served Cold; two nonfictions, The grandest of lives : eye to eye with whales / Douglas H. Chadwick and The yellow-lighted bookshop : a memoir, a history / Lewis Buzbee. (The purse book is still the Allingham mystery. One or two more nibblings on it while waiting for this or that and it will be well-started and I'll have to read it. Allingham is pleasing to read.) The ones that are sitting next to me on my mom's marble coffeetable are the Buzbee and Connor. Buzbee came very highly recommended, and is nice but not a knockout. The Connor is dynamite. Things are what they are.

Modern Times and the National Library of the Czech Republic

I was struggling to write a post about Interlibrary Loan for the library's blog—the struggle being that I had to work in a couple of seriously flat paragraphs written at my request by the interlibrary loan librarian; but it goes up over my initials and I wanted to at least split the difference between what she wrote and my voice—and wandered off to watch Worldcat grow. The third title to add itself before my very eyes was being entered by

NATIONAL LIBR OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC
Book

Title Moreplavecka odysea :
Author Pavloskova, Karin,
Publisher Knizni klub,
Pub. Date 2005
Language Czech

It gave me goosebumps. Sigh. I do love this aspect of the modern world. It's too bad the cost of technology is so high in global ecological terms, and we probably can't sustain it...

I watched a while longer. Here's another

Contributed by: NATIONAL LIBR OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC
Book

Title Two Prague stories /
Author Rilke, Rainer Maria,
Publisher Vitalis,
Pub. Date c2005
Language English

As long as I'm writing about the workplace, I could tell you I found myself crying over hardware this week for the first time in about twelve years. Finally around 4 PM on Friday I received a soothing phone call from one of the city's IT guys. It almost sounded like... well no... we are still awfully likely to open the new Southside Branch Library on March 23rd either with 15 defective public use PCs or with no public use PCs at all if we have to send them back.

But the city guys who control our tech environment are maybe finally paying attention to the situation they've gotten us into. Suddenly decompressed from my misery, I floated downstairs and momentarily I loved every library patron in sight: the street guys, the trio of teenage girls walking around me, the tourists, the book addicts we see every day, stroller families, oldsters, and all.

"How Many Books Did You Bring?"

On my way to visit mom for about three days. Both my mother and my sister are in the habit of asking me how many books I brought with me when I visit, and I am in the habit of lying. They don't approve of my proclivities. Here is the truth:

I am bringing a) the two books I am already in the middle of: a mystery by Howard Engel and The Concept of the Buddha: Its Evolution from Early Buddhism to the Trikaya Theory by Guang Xing, which is nearly as unreadable as it sounds; plus b) Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn; a mystery by Theresa Schwegel; an old paperback of Edmund Crispin's last mystery; and Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night for after I decide that Guang Xing is simply not distracting enough for the circumstances of the visit. Total of six. (Just in case, you understand. Of course I won't read them all.)

Oh. I don't list or count the purse book, of which there is always one but which only ever comes into play if I am unexpectedly stuck someplace like Discount Tire, and is not of great interest by definition; if it were interesting, I'd have read it and replaced it with something else already.

Next week I'll work out how to have some sort of 'what we're reading' in the sidebar.