9 posts tagged “jack kerouac”

I have been dutifully doing my work to finish my incomplete. I am designing a unit of lesson plans covering the Civil War because we were allowed to choose our own subject and i couldn't think of any other subject that has so much information in print and online. Let's just say i haven't had any problems finding overheads... I am beginning to see a pattern that  i will probably grow to hate as it becomes clearer. Using the MA State frameworks means i have to plan these lessons around the test they give sophomores and seniors to pass before they can graduate. Teaching from the frameworks is the same as teaching to the test, and an awful lot of narrative gets left behind.

My best buddy Mike, his wife and two kids came in for a surprise visit yesterday, which was like a shaft of sunlight at midnight. We went to college together, Mike and I, and altho i couldn't take organized Pentecostalism any more Mike, the trooper he is, has managed to begin a ministry that has both significance and relevance. He is about the only person that could actually fan to life the embers of a fire that i thought was buried in ice, the only one that could make me a little wishful about being a minister again.

Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think)

John Leland

Otherwise the nose is to the grindstone. It has been a long time since i have experienced this  kind of stress, the kind that presses down and causes you to hunch your back when your awake and squint your eyes when your asleep. At least the weather has been cooperating, as it has been in the mid to low 70s this week. What can i say? Autumn and Spring are my two favorite seasons, and i figure in the winter, you can always put more clothes on, right? Summer is fine, but it often is accompanied by humidity, which i could do without, and you can only take off so much clothing to cool down.

I am also sitting the dogs again, till Sunday. Its kool, they have began to grow on me. Plus, these folk's TV didn't melt down, and they have NESN, the home of all the Red Sox game. The Sox gained a game on the fucking Yankees last night, and i hope we make it six tonight.... OK, time for me to get back to the lesson plans. Mike gave me a B&N gift card, which i intend to use to purchase this publication of "On the Road,"  the original manuscript Kerouac typed out on a scroll , as well as John Leland's new book -- next week sometime, maybe. Sigh

The 4th has always been one of my favorite American holidays. On of the most vivid memories i have was of a 4th of July in my early 20s, watching the sun set in the western Nebraska sky. I will never forget the vivid yellow, the bright orange, or the mood i was in watching that particular day come to an end. The basic contradiction and paradox of being self-aware hit me that evening, and i was gripped by how quickly life passes by while just how ancient the world was by the time i was sitting there, looking out the window.

Today was very different from that day. It promised rain all day, then delivered on the promise, and then some. I went to meet an old friend i hadn't seen in quite a while who was visiting the area. He had his girl friend with him, and i was impressed; she was as smart as she was pretty. We had quite the lively conversation at a local Mexican taco shop, which included The topics of orthodoxy, universalism, freewill and predestination, discipline vs punishment, and God's grace. I enjoy our time together immensely.

By the time the parade was supposed to start it was raining at a pretty good clip and i hate parades in the rain. Me and the Mrs. decided to hit a favorite Greek establishment in South Hadley. It was a very good meal, i enjoyed The Wife's company We came back to Amherst and went to the local crafts store down by the strip mall. Afterwards we went home, and i decided to hit the movies while she got ready for a party. I saw the Transformers, which was actually a better movie than it had any right to be with what it had as subject matter. It was a fun movie.

I went to the Spoke to catch a beer while the Wife was still getting ready. Some of the old regulars were there, as well as some new people drinking for the holiday. I met a very pretty and a very drunk young lady who was born way after her time; she should have been born and come of age in the post war years. She knew a lot about the Beats, especially about Jack Kerouac, had lived overseas for a time, and was into folk music. She was from the Midwest, and had lived in Detroit and Chicago. And, she loved basketball. I'll be honest: it took a lot not to hit on this kid (She was a college grad, i don't know if the word "kid" actually fits) -- i may be older, but i swear she has an old soul. It is a good thing that i love God and my wife.

I have also been able to consistently do my Offices for the last couple of days, and to meditate up the quote i gave on my last blog.

"The first gate of entry to noetic Jerusalem - that is, to attentiveness of the intellect - is the deliberate silencing of your tongue, even though the intellect itself may not yet be still. The second gate is balanced self-control in food and drink. The third is ceaseless mindfulness of death, for this purifies intellect and body."
St. Philotheos of Sinai. Forty Texts on Watchfulness.

I have a dentist appointment tomorrow morning, then work. I better get to bed...

I'm watching the furballs now and will continue to do so for the entire month of June. We will be gone five days beginning next Wednesday, but we have someone who will cover the days. The folks who live here are in France, which i hear is nice, but of course it is filled up with the French, a very big drawback. My prayers are with them.

I went to my Chiropractor on Friday and he adjusted my knee, which feels tons better, and had my feet scanned for a thingamabob to put in my shoe to change where the weight is distributed when i walk; the Doc said this might be able to push back a knee replacement anywhere between three to five years. So what do i have to lose? I told him i'd give it the old college try.

The only problem is money. It is gonna cost $275 just for the orthopedics, $40 for the visit. I need to get our car fixed as the catalytic converter seems to have rusted away. Plus, rent is due, bills are due, and we have to get to Tennessee for Bonneroo, in which we will travel there in a newly fixed '91 Toyota rust bucket with 200,000k on the odometer... I hate being poor, although not enough to try to get rich. I look at the folks in our town, which is an upper middle class whit collar college town, and try to grasp or even imagine the compromises they have had to make in order not only to achieve what they have accomplished but to maintain it all as well. As for me, the price is wayyyy to high. If responsibility causes me stress now, what would happen to me in a middle class pressure cooker?

Bonneroo is important because it means a lot for The Wife. It will be the first vacation that we have gone on together in years. It is, for her, a symbol of our renewed commitment to each other, something on which to build upon relationally. I need this trip to go well because i love her and hate to see her idealism crushed yet again. I like her idealism, as it has to serve for the both of us with mine having gone missing and all.

It rained today, a weather pattern than mostly reflected what i have been feeling emotionally. Now that i am back to facing the disease instead of a symptom, i am reminded more and more of circumstances and situations that i experienced in growing up. Coming back from the Doc's i tuned into a CT classic rock station and for most of the trip was instantly transported back in time to my High School years. Music has a strong trigger for memory, it is the mainstay of Pop music's appeal, that a particular song can move people to remember when and where and exactly what they were feeling back whenever when the song comes on in the present. It was quite a playlist they had: The Cars, Def Leopard, King's X, Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac, and Boston. And for the coup de gra? Big huge whiffs of Russian Olive trees from the side of the Interstate! Damn! My old man was a bee keeper, and that is how i spent my Summers in High School, working bees and listening to the truck radio.

Space here does not allow me to go into detail (Maybe tomorrow i can give a day in the life of description of working with my Dad), but that trip from CT put me into a bit of a talespin... its been a wierd couple of days. I'm looking forward to the sun coming out again. Getting an B+/A- on my paper didn't help either, although i suspect that the professor didn't much like me bashing her American Studies approach to history. Sigh. Tomorrow i find out what grade i was given in my writing class.

Meanwhile, i have finished Rick Atkinson's book "Army at Dawn," Kerouac's "Visions of Gerard," and have begun Kerouac's "Dr. Sax" and will be finishing "Harry potter and the Half Blood Prince" very soon. I want to statrt Halberstrom's "The Fifties" as soon as i can, and also "Freedom from Fear," a book about America in the Great Depression. And as always, my standby continues to be Footes "Civil War: A Narrative Vol. II." Maybe tomorrow i'll share my Summer '07 playlist from my ipod. Time for bed, so i can walk the furballs in the morning...

Well, the paper is almost done, and i am close to being in rejoice mode! My analysis of post WW II American culture thru the catalyist of Jack Kerouac's biography is at 35 pages. I just need to edit and double check my end notes and bibliography to make sure everything is in order, that all my "i"s are dotted and all my "t"s are crossed. I still have to arrange the whole student teaching thing online, and make up an incomplete. And write a 7 page multi book report. But its cool, i think its doable. Glory. Glory. Glory.

Just to decompress i watched "Rocky Balboa" last night, and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the movie. Every once in a while Sly reminds us, with a wink and a smirk, that he can in fact act (see "Copland"). The Wife watched "Jericho," and i kinda kept track of it. I like it as a network program, and i think its a lot like "Heroes," except "Heroes" is better written.

Today is my day off, and i'm heading for a nap. i walked the furballs (a one day gig), helped The Wife set up for her recital, ate, met up with The Mother-In-law, attended the recital, helped tear down, ate, and am in the middle of doing the laundry. All i really wanna do catch "Spiderman 3" at the local Motion Picture Theater. Anything so that i won't have to think all that much. I'm in that kinda mood.

Today i was back to work at the university. Whenever i come back on Fridays i have to do extra work, because no one ever takes up the slack when i'm gone. This does not make me happy, or make for a fun fun fun day. This usually means i have to hump a huge amount of product over to the library loading dock and come home fricking tired.

I went to Applebees last night in an attempt to get something done and pretty much completed my bibliography for the Kerouac paper. Now i gotta annotate the entries. I have way more material on Kerouac and the Beats than i thought, and this should be an interesting paper. Kerouac walked a pretty fine line between the contradictions in his life, a line between belief and atheism, between spirituality and hedonism, and between the materialism of the American middle class and identification with the fellaheen. Which fits in perfect to my thesis of Christianity, American Gnosticism, and Modernity in America in the middle of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, The Wife and i are trying to find a good time to eat a birthday dinner for me. Yup, next Wednesday i will turn the ripe old age of 43. I had no idea i'd ever live long enough to get THIS old. One of the clearest memories i have is when i was in fourth grade, and at noon i held the door open for the High School kids and thought to myself that it would take forever to get old enough to be their age. I also have a memory from grade school on my birthday when i was a 6th grader. I dug in behind a yucca plant on the slope of the sandhill behind the school on a beautiful bluesky Nebraska day and watched the world go by at recess. That was a good memory, and it was one of the clearer ones from that time in my life i possess.

I need to hit the libray at Amherst College because i need to read two books before Monday by 9:00 PM. This schedule is interesting. I still need to get in my books for the Azusa paper from B&N. That paper may well be the better paper of the two, i believe i might have an actual chance to get that one actually published, or at least read.

I'm looking forward to the fun fun fun tho, my birthday as only an excuse to spend time with an amazing and preplexing woman i call my wife. I think that i will never even begin to know her, not ever. But trying to get to the bottom of why my wife is unique as my wife is far better than what i was doing before i was married; my life sucked on a scale i flinch to think of even as i remember as i write right now. So let my birthday come. Fun fun fun!

Fricking dogs. I'm beginning to wonder just who is the domesticated animal around here, them or me. One of these damn dogs keeps pissing in the upstairs bathroom and i can't quite figure out which one's doing it. Can i just say now they are soooooo lucky they ain't my dogs, or i'd push their noses in lake urine upstairs and smack 'em so hard upside the head they'd meet themselves next Wednsday. Dixie, she with a heart condition, is just in plain luck two Northeastern BoBos with dollars owns her, because anywhere west of the Missouri and south of the Mason Dixon line would end her heart problem with a hollow point. Is premeditate murder of a canine against Jewish Law? Fricking dogs.

Finished my book on writing a college history thesis and have been developing an argument and an outline. The more i think about this idea, the more ideas that keep coming to me. I have a lot of the books i need in my own library, books like Bloom's The American Religion and O'Hatch's The Democratization of Christianity. I have May's book on the two different foundings of the American experiment in self-government, along with a primary source book that includes Washington's letter to Tripoli. I have just about every biography of Keroauc ever written along with his writing journal and a book of essays, plus most of his fiction. I even have a book of Keroauc's haikus that have just been published.

Time is slipping away. I will try to blog again tomorrow afternoon and include a bit more of the mundane, but i have to get some winks. Tomorrow morning is MercyHouse, and i work at 6 pm to 2 am. I need to finish a perusal of a book on public history, monuments, and passing on tradition in early 20th century America. If that sounds fun to you, you have my profound sympathies...

It is finally the weekend. The first week of classes are over, only fourteen left till summer. I've decided to use "the glass is half full" approach to this semester and think of each day worked as one more day closer to summer and the commencement of a genuine idle.

This is shaping up to be a bit different in that instead of dreading my next week's classes, i am excited and a little challenged about the work i may be able to produce. Both classes deal with writing and history, and i came up with a really interesting idea at work yesterday about how to examine the history of three traditional streams of American culture, orthodox Christianity, Gnostic spirituality, and secularism, by writing about their convergance in the life of jack Kerouac as he walked the American cultural landscape in the 1950s.

I've come to believe that there are really two founding myths for America, two sets of "Founding Fathers," the Puritans and the men who wrote the Constitution; orthodox Christianity and secularism have existed side by side since the formal inception of the country. With the advent of Romanticism, American Gnosticism emerged from orthodox Christianity and secularism when in the early 1800s with the Second Great Awakening and the advent of Emmerson, Whitman and Unitarianism, a dualistic spirituality denying the "superstition" of the virgin birth and the resurrection while participating in the mystic spiritualism of eastern religions (out and out athiesm has been so rare as to be insignificant, altho many individual atheists have been very influential). These three streams have twisted and wandered, sometime merging, other times flowing parallel, and often flowing against each other. Kerouac was born a pre-Vatican II Catholic and spent his life wrestling with the crucifix. He was in rebellion against the 50s culture that was primarily produced by the secular scientists of the country, in the shadow of industrial/military complex, nuclear weapons, and the mobility provided by cars pouring out of Detroit assembly lines. Lastly, Kerouac embraced  Budhism, or at least his own interpretation of Budhism, as he embraced the Gnostic dualism that has become classically American.

I have to work from noon till eight today, i'll try to blog some more this afternoon. Adios...

I've been waiting for the new Harry Potter book to be finished so I can sign up for the book release in july. I've been doing this for four years, and it's always a fun time to hit the Borders or B&N because they stay open till 1 or 2 AM and throw a release party. Its kool to watch the kids mess around the store, all dressed up and pysched about reading a book. Anyway, I was searching the net for the latest rumors on when the last and final book would be finished when I came across a web sight that turned me ice cold.

On this sight whoever ran it wrote that they thought it would be cool if the finish of the Potter series was like the finish of The Matrix, in that good, Neo, and evil, agent Smith, were reconciled at the end of the movie. They thought it would be quite the dramatic irony to have Harry commanding the Death Eaters... I figure the answer to the question of when will people quit trying to say day is night and night is day would be they never will, it is a flaw struck deeply into human nature since the failed coup attempt against God. To say black is white and white is black is the basis of the whole Hannible Lecture series by Harris, the guy who wrote Scilence of the Lambs. The whole ying and yang dualistic thing will eventually lead to some attempt at saying good and evil are just different sides of the same, exact coin.

I HATE dualism. I hate it most of all because it is not true, with a capital T. I side with CS Lewis in saying that evil is only a parasite on the good, or a perversion of the good; evil cannot exist on its own while good can and always has stood alone. There can be no synthesis of the two while retaining any type of unique individual identity or any concept of the word "justice". Religiously, dualism has always been a way to try to find a reason to explain why the potential for evil exists in everyone. real Magicians/pagans, psuedo-scientists, and Eastern religions are actually very very pragmatic in finding a way for people to accomodate for when they do not live up to their own standards, let alone anyone else's.

I believe joy is found in the good. However, happiness is almost rarely experienced by the good. I do believe in paradox! Life is often lived in a kind of sleep walk thru a nightmare, execpt you can't wake up. So many things are actually beyong our control, regardless of what we have been taught to expect, that everyone knows the feeling of being back up against a wall in some type of last stand before what is overwhemlms what we think ought to be. Life is often very uncomfortable, bright, sharp, and hard. Try living your life in pursuit of happiness and watch it slip farther and farther out of your grasp.

Life is pointless here on this crazy, spinning orb. "Vanity of vanity, all is vanity." Yep, exactly. Most people would like to lead their lives like there is no tommorrow, they want to eat drink and be merry because sooner than they think, they are six feet under. Of course, the reality is very few people are brave enough to face life without meaning, without purpose, so most people are wired so tight in an attempt to control the circumstances and people around them that if you stuck a peice of coal up their ass they would shit diamonds. Even if the say they understand its all meaningless, they are generally a bunch of posers, because they try to control life to make it meaningful by making someone or something meaningful to them.  This never works, eventually the person or object implodes under the weight of such expectations placed on them, and the person is left stranded and disillusioned  in the ruined temple of their shattered false god. The life of a control freak is never a healthy or happy one. There are those, tho, who do this defiant, existential life and live as what life gives them. People like Hemingway, Jim Morrison, Hunter S Thompson, and Jack Kerouac did it -- altho it may be prudent to point out that the mortality rate with these guys are almost 100% before their time. Hemingway blew his head off with a shot gun, Hunter S. Thompson did the same, Jim Morrison ODed, and Jack Kerouac purposely drank himself to death. These guys weren't posers because they died younger than they should've and what they thought were on their own terms.

We celebrate Christmas because it is God Who rescues us from these fates. It is God who gives us joy, and makes life a dance. Jesus said that he had come to give life, and that more abundantly. Given the context of these words, that is a pretty bold claim. How can life be a dance? Christianity is pre-modern, and it has what we think are crude elements. Anyone reading this would never look upon a human blood sacrifice without flinching just a little, whether in distaste or just plain avoidance. Yet it is the brutally short life and death of Jesus, God incarnate, that enables us to dance with some joy in this life. Yeah, I said dance. It may be amidst the ruins, but it is a dance nevertheless. Christ was raised for our justification, and the Father sent the Spirit to make us His own. It is strange that in every day life any Christian, good oneswho do their best and bad bad ones who do not live up to the tite, in some way rennact this very pattern of death, ressurrection, and life and thus live in joy.

So today I take my day off and I do my sleep walk dance of joy and thank God for the birth of the baby jesus in a rundown cave/stable because God so loved me and the rest of the world. Joy to the world...

Welcome to volume one, issue one of this new blog!