Jack Adam Richard Daniel

Hot diggity dog diggity totally finished that Kerouac scroll in just a few days. YES! What fun! I got that fresh edition of Dharma Bums next up in Jackland. Prolly after I finish The Money Game (this thing is Truthcity!) by Adam Smith (the Modern). The first sentence is: The world is not what they tell you it is. And he gets on into it. A hotass economics book from 1967, totally applicable to today and beyond. A hoot of a wread, wright on! I did it on the airplane to and from Chicago. I should finish this weekend. I am learning from this mother. Also digging THE GOD DELUSION by the mighty Richard Dawkins. The triumph of wreason in my lap! This morning I was into Daniel C. Dennett, chapter 9 of his BREAKING THE SPELL book: "Toward a Buyer's Guide to Religions" ++ I adore this guy! Can't get enuff of his spirited analyzing of religion as natural (not supernatural) phenomenon.

!:::Kerouac:::Attack:::!

I had been digging a Penguin paperback edition of "On the Road" for 6 days when I saw the NYTimes booksection Kerouac cover story under my cat, on the floor of my apartment. How's about this! The original manuscript has been published! Straight on through, babydolls! 8 full rolls of tracing paper [he later taped into a 120-foot scroll!] Now done up in super-handsome paragraphs-are-for-pussies all-out as-was proper printing. I've jumped over to finishing the book like this, as Jack typed those 3 weeks in April 1951. THIS F'ING ROXX! I'm wreading it with all the original names [Neal Cassady! Grand American Champion of Life! Bill Burroughs, Allen etc] and all that scorching-hot pre-edit pummeling prose, just go man, go! Yass! Yass! As of this morning [getting low, surfing on metrorail] the boys are in Mexico. Just hadda whooping time with maryjane & senoritas, thnx 2 the great Gregor, now they're in the jungles ... south ... dark, headlights out for a spell: And now we shot in inky darkness through the scream of insects and the great rank almost rotten smell descended and we remembered and realized that the map indicated just after Victoria the beginning of the tropic of Cancer. "We're in a new tropic! Nowonder the smell! Smell it!" I stuck my head out the window; bugs smashed at my face; a great screech rose the moment I cocked my ear to the wind. Suddenly our lights were working again and they poked ahead illuminating the lonely road that ran between solid walls of great drooping snaky trees as high as a hundred feet. "Son-of-a-BITCH!" yelled Frank in the back. "Hot-DAMN!" He was still high. I am tearing through this thing! Whatta ball! Hoo-ee! Here's some video of unrolling the scroll. There's a travelling exhibit, yass. Plus this supercool, upclose hi-res shot of the glorious thing.

Chief Bromden told me a tale

Heck Yes I finished Cuckoo's Nest. Superb all over the place! I didn't think it was going to be that literate. Hugely entertaining and sad and triumphant. Our narrator gives it all to us, all senses relayed and analyzed, including drug dreams and mental blockages. Everybody's hero is of course Randle McMurphy -- whatta HUGELY American character! ++++ Now I'm back in Russialand with The Idiot, wright in the middle. Prince Myshkin roxx! Is this the Ruskies' Arthur tale, more than the Christ tale? Hmmmm ... I'm also back into Against the Day. Wrockin' thru Salonica with Cyprian and Danilo, just this morning in a bar: "At the Mavri Gata there was enough hasheesh smoke to confound an elephant. At the end of the room, as if behind an iconostasis of song, oud, baglamas, and a kind of hammered dulcimer called a santouri were being played without a break. The music was feral, Eastern in scale, flatted seconds and sixths, and a kind of fretless portamento between, instantly familiar though the words were in some slurred jailhouse Greek that Danilo confessed to picking up only about one word in ten of. In these nocturnal modalities, "roads," as the musicians called them, Cyprian heard anthems not of defined homelands but of release into lifelong exile. Roads awaiting the worn sole, the ironbound wheel, and promises of misery on a scale the military staff colleges were only beginning to contemplate."

Cuckoo

Over a 5 day vacay I finished my big Man-Thing collection > super stuff!! All kinds of metaphysical hot swamp action in there! Totally dig, dug. +++ Also blazed through a likable chunk of The Idiot, about halfway now, and I'm feelin' it. Topsy turvy, flippity flop, def givin' it up to Fyodor. I saw some Russian gals @ lunch last week, and I stopped to ask them about it. They nodded saying, "Yes, of course it is grand. But next you must wread the Brothers Karamazov." I shall come back to them to ask about the pronunciations of all the names. It can get numbing! +++ NOW I'm also just starting One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by the great Ken Kesey. It's from the [half]Indian's point of view and kicks off distinctly LITERATE. (I heart Chief Bromden!) Crisp descriptions of living characters! Makes me feel attentive and nervous. The Acutes & the Chronics! 40 pages in and it's f'ing ON! This is superior writing! Came out in '62? Wow. I've always held the Merry Pranksters stuff in high wregard. Through the years Kesey's wrocked a wrespectable career: the more I learn, the more I like. So far, this lil novel is one special lil wread.