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.

Bustin' June Moves

Oh boy!!! This is the most handsomely packaged paperback I've ever owned. Chris Ware is the artist, and he's done up the story on the front and back covers. Even the jacket flaps got some hot VOLTAIRE action. YES! One of my all-time favorite books! The smart-ass triumph of Reason! I am grinning, laffing, raising my fist. Candide! Cunegonde! Pangloss (Leibniz)! Cacambo! The Anabaptist! The Jesuits! All the action! I wread this when I was a teenager, with the French on one side, and the English on the other. This second go is even more wrewarding!


The Iliad got me going ... then on into The Odyssey ... then into the different studies of Homer, which brought me to this, one of the essential takes on the Greek mindset: The Discovery of the Mind by the mighty Bruno Snell. This is a monument of Greek studies. Every chapter roxx ass and makes me say, "Damn!" out loud. I'm learning so much here. All of Western thought began with the GREEKS. :) Yay!


YES! And YES again! Our boy Greg Palast has put together a modern masterwork of research and presentation. This level of horror and frustration shouldn't be this funny, but it is! And how! This book is important. We'll be going back to this one years from now. Of course, we aaaall should be reading it NOW. Here's Howard Zinn's quote: "One of the best tomes on politics written in modern days." It is too! It is!

Bradbury Plus

Wrolled on through The Martian Chronicles ~ whatta gas! Every chapter is a different point of view along the general continuum of our settling on Mars. It was begun as short stories in the early 50's and each tale carries right through and beyond the 00's. Soooo good. I read the first half on a transatlantic flight from Philadelphia Pennsylvania to Manchester England. The second half was clocked on the way home. This is thoughtful stuff.

Now wreading hot comic from the mid-80's: D.R. & QUINCH. From Alan Moore and Alan Davis comes ... smartass abandon! I love this! YES! Big thnx to the mighty Schmame for passing it on ... In between, I still dive in for a good 6-10 pages of getting fired up with Sam Harris: End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation are both killer attax. I keep 'em both with me all the time now. Dig! I still haven't finished The Iliad or my Man-Thing collection. And now I want more. There always seems to be more and more.

Gotta New Pile

Still reading ILIAD. I'm in Book 16. Fuggin' Righteous. But today I've been reading Cell by Stephen King. Whatta hoot! The thing takes off immediately. Hot action, on page 88 before I even looked up. Also, last night I read the first bit of Fahrenheit 451. I LOVE THIS BOOK! I picked up the 50th Anniversary paperback, so attractive, so hot! It really is one of my all-time hall-of-fame awesome books. And one of the few which SCORES as a movie too. To Kill a Mockingbird and Lolita spring quickly to mind, although there are others of course ... yeah that 451 movie is a SCORCHER! I should watch that once a month ... so yeah, it's a sunny Sunday and after I've come back from my run through Rock Creek Park over to Arlington Cemetery I've been reading paperbacks. Cell, 451, and The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I've been wanting to hit this for years. Killer stuff. I've peeked through the first bit and it's kickin' off with some mind-bendingly lovely verbage. Give it up to the acclaimed translators of this edition, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Right on. I finally also picked up the Red, the White, and the Blue copies of Average American Male. Yes. I'm knee-deep in awesome paperbacknesses ... yum.