Last post I felt like I wasn't mentioning something. That thing? The Oscars! Colin Firth won best actor and King's Speech won best picture! I was actually so excited about Colin winning, when they did their stay tuned bit I was kind of like, "Oh yeah... There's more, huh?" It's not like I watched that far last year. My disappointment in the fact that Colin didn't get best actor and the lack of blood in my system sent me to bed during the commercial break. (This year I didn't suffer a mortal wound during the Oscars, believe it or not.) But yeah, King's Speech deserved its award, Colin Firth deserved his award, let's all hang out sometime? Yes? Please?
Let's see, what else is up? Speaking of Colin Firth, my research paper in College Writing is on A Single Man, it's comparing the film to the book. My paper for Intro to Lit is on Oscar Wilde, specifically his poem Panthea. And speaking of Intro to Lit, I've been joking about it for a while I know, but it is official--Mrs Clermont-Ferrand is me in the future. I don't know why I would have decided to go back in time to this point in my life (after a while the opium dens of the Victorian era must get boring, I guess), but at least I know that I will have succeeded in becoming as cool as Fabrizzles. Anyways, what was the straw that finally made me sure that this is the case? I asked her if doing my paper on that poem was okay, even if it meant that I was bending the rules a little. She said it was fine, and I told her that Wilde was my favourite author. She responded with "I know--we love him! He's great!" I know? We? Oh snap.
So, Pic: the back of this volume refers to Pic as "unusual"--I don't think it's that odd at all. Sure, maybe the persona Jack chose to adopt is odd (a ten-year-old black boy) but I actually think it's more like his original works than... Well, that sentence actually doesn't make much sense. But it is so ridiculously reminiscent of On the Road. It's the ten-year-old back version of On the Road! Is that... is that politically correct? Whatever. I'm not here to be politically correct, I'm here to kick ass! And I guess obsess about Oscar Wilde and Colin Firth and stuff. Yay. But--uh--the book. It starts out with Pic (short for Pictorial Review, nope, that they do not explain, and I can't imagine the significance of it or why Kerouac would have chosen that of all things--it was the title of a woman's magazine in the Depression...) living with his grandfather. His grandfather dies, and he moves in with his aunt (it's hard for me to even really judge if Pic really gets if his grandfather has deceased) who is one of those women who just keep on breeding. So he's feeling all stifled in her home when all out of the blue Pic's brother who just up and left several years ago comes back and takes Pic with him to his home (and wife) in New York City.
Oh, and I should also note that it's written in dialect. This sort of thing usually makes a work absolutely impenetrable for me (unless if it's written in a New England-y dialect a la Stephen King, but of course I'd understand that with no problem), and at first I did have a lot of trouble with it, but I pressed on--more inclined to because I like the author, you understand--and I'm glad I did. It's actually pretty enjoyable once you get used to the infuriating Southern dialect auuuuuuuugh. Note number two is that this is in a two-book, eh, book, so keep in mind the page numbers are going to be very skewed.
First of all, I think even Pic himself is pretty darned important. Kerouac--a lot of white people in this circle--thought black folks were the coolest of cool. Everybody wanted to be black. (In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I believe, Tom Wolfe illustrates how much times have changed by saying black people aren't 'cool' anymore.) Kerouac definitely had that seemingly odd desire, so I'd imagine that making his persona Pic he's kind of acting out a wistful desire. You know? As for making Pic a ten-year-old, I'd imagine it would be a want to have childlike innocence again, or something like that.
"Ain't nobody never loved me like I love myself, cept my mother and she's dead" (125). Pretty strong opening lines, no?
"'While's all this the Gospel word and true, little Pictorial Review Jackson... must go to school to learn and read and write,' and grandpa looked at [my aunt] plum in the eye like if'n to spit tobacco juice in it, and answered, 'Thass awright wif me,' jess like that, 'but that ain't the Lawd's school he's goin' to and he shall never mend his fences'" (126).
So--there's a big break for about thirty pages, nothing over the part where Pic's grandfather dies. Actually, I don't have another note till the beginning of chapter seven, at this point Pic is with his brother Slim--but they've only just snuck out of the aunt's house. (Is snuck not a word? Really? Wait--for real!?)
"'Po little boy,' [Slim] say, and give a sigh, and hitch me up higher on his back. 'I guess you're as much scared of ever'thing like a grown man is'" (158). Just a little statement that seems like a paradox but is actually a truism.
On the Road, too, which definitely did more to get me into it than anything else.
"And I look over to brother, and he's still sleepin and's got the whole back sofa to hisself and's all stretched out loose and peaceful, and I'se pleased to see him sleep so 'case I know he must be tired. And I look out the window. And you know, I never seed anything so pow'ful grand and big, and I seed pow'fuller and grander things since then, all the way to Californy. What I seed then was jess like when the first time I see the world I tell you" (167-168). / "'Do you know there's a road that goest down Mexico and all the way to Panama?--and maybe all the way to the bottom of South America... Yes! You and I, Jack, we'd dig the whole world with a car like this because man the road must eventually lead to the whole world"--Jack Kerouac, On the Road (The original scroll.) / "He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open, and the pearl was there, the pearl was there"--Jack Kerouac, On the Road (The original scroll.)
The opposite page, there's a scene where the two brothers switch buses and the new bus is stuffed, and they're all sweating like pigs. So Slim can't open the window, and neither can another man on the bus, until finally the busdriver notices what's going on, and he stops the bus and goes back there: "'Please leave the windows alone, this happens to be an air-conditioned bus' and he turn on a button up front when he start the bus, and I tell you the finest cool air began to blow all over that bus, only thing is, ever'body got cold in a minute and the sweat turns on me like ice water. So Slim, he tugged at that window again to get some hot air back in, but couldn't do it, and we look thu the window at them beautiful green fields, and Slim said they was MARYLAND, and wished he was settin in the sunny grass. I reckon ever'body felt the same way too" (170). First of all, it reminds me of this section of On the Road: "How could I ever sleep? Thousands of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out flat on my back. Still there was no breeze, but the steel had an element of coolness in it and dried my back of sweat, clotting up thousands of dead bugs into cakes on my skin, and I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it. Lying on the top of the car with my face to the black sky was like lying in a closed trunk on a summer night." (This version is from the... not original scroll.) Secondly, I think to some extent Kerouac made it a point to trap Pic in the bus. I always feel mildly uncomfortable attaching metaphorical or symbolic meanings to Kerouac's books since they're autobiographical (well, to some extent) but since this isn't--well, isn't exactly--written about him, I'm a little more okay with it. He was staring at beauty, but he couldn't quite get there (at least not at the time that he wrote this) or he felt like he was watching everything beautiful happen while he was trapped to freeze--and again, that would go with a not-so-unusual portrayal of himself. In On the Road, before his famous "Roman Candles" quote, he says he followed Neal and everybody, he shambled after them. He was watching but he didn't feel quite a part of it. Saying he wished he could be out on the grass could also just be a desire to be able to bum around again, you know, just kind of loll around and enjoy himself. Just literally be out in a nice warm field. Which makes it superfluous to go on in an explanation, as who wouldn't want to loll around in a nice big warm field somewhere?
So while they're driving, Slim and Pic get to move up front because they pass the Mason Dixie line. Pic is unaware of Jim Crow laws or anything of the sort, and his brother attempts to explain it to him, but at the time he didn't quite get it: "'I ain't seed no such a line.' 'What?' he say. 'Why, we just crossed it back there in Maryland. Didn't you see Mason and Dixie holdin that line across the road?' 'Well,' I says, 'did we run over it or underneath it?' and I'se tryin to recollect such a thing but jess cain't. 'Well,' I say, 'I guess I musta been sleepin then.' And Slim laugh, and push my hair, and slap his knee. 'Jim, you kill me!' 'What did that line look like?' I axed him, 'case I wasn't old enough to know it was a joke yet, you see. Well, Slim said he didn't know what such a line looked like neither on account he never seed it any more than I did. 'But there is such a line, only thing is, it ain't on the ground, and it ain't in the air neither, it's jess in the head of Mason and Dixie, jess like all other lines, border lines, state lines, parallel thirty-eight lines and iron Europe curtain lines is all jess 'maginary lines in people's heads and don't have nothin to do with the ground.' Granpa, Slim said that jess as quiet, and didn't call me Jim no more, and said to hisself, 'Yes sir, that's all it is'" (172).
So they get to New York City, and they go to see Slim's wife, Sheila. They desperately need money, but Slim just goes ahead and puts on a jazz record and dances along: "Seem like the folk up in the city wants to have fun and ain't got no time for worry exceptin when worry catches up with them, that's when they ain't busy about worryin'" (181).
So Slim, lamenting their situation, asks if they're going to "'be beat all the time or ever make a livin around here?'" (182). I think the wording should be paid attention to--One hand, be beat down, beat as in defeated. On the other hand, be beat--living without money, bumming. As in, the beats. Are we going to be Beat, or are we going to actually do something? I read it as a sort of frustration against what he was--eh--let me just continue it: "'When will our troubles end? I'm tired of bein poor. My wife's tired of bein poor. I guess the world is tired of bein poor, because I'm tired of bein poor. Lord a mercy who's got some money? I know I ain't got some money and that's for sure, now look' and showed his empty pocket. 'You shouldn't of bought that record,' Sheila said. 'Well,' he said, 'I didn't know then. Now so where'd this money go that folks is supposed to live on? I'd jess be satisfied if I had a field of my own I could jess grow things in and wouldn't need no money, and wouldn't worry what folks had it. not records neither. But I ain't got a field and I need money to eat. Well where am I goin to get this money? I gotsa get a job. Yes, a job, gotsa get, I-got-a-git-a-job'" (183).
First of all, that uncapitalized (making up words, like a boss) 'not' is supposed to be there. It drives me nuts too. But! The point--I feel like this monologue is coming straight from Kerouac. He's sick of being poor... Was sick of it, but perhaps he's making an admission that it could have been avoided? (It drives me nuts that he bought that record and used the last of their cash. Dammit, Slim! You spent the last of the food money AND you're making me make a Star Trek reference!) Then again, the bit about the fields throws me off a little. He seemed to prefer seclusion, especially after his sudden burst of popularity. Depending on the time, it might even be a comment on the hippie movement. Kerouac hated hippies. Repeating it over and over, and drawing it out the way you'd draw out your speech if trying to explain something to a child--trying to drill it into their heads? (Or that could be incorrect, maybe he's trying to drill it into his own head.) But if you were successful and living in your own communes out of the public eye and in your own self-contained system--okay. But hippies of the time really weren't doing that. And they didn't even deserve to lament because they had put themselves right in that situation. Does that... Could that make sense? I just kind of kept on writing without checking myself. Ohhhh well.
"Granpa, ain't nothin better in the world like eggs and breakfast in the mornin because your taster ain't worked all night and ever'thing comes so chawy and smells so fryin good it makes a body wish he could eat ever'body's breakfast all up and down the street seven times, ain't it the truth? When we come down on the street and I seed all them men eatin more eggs and breakfast in the corner store I wished I could eat all the breakfasts in New York City" (187). I just thought this was really, really cute. It kind of makes me wish I ate eggs, too...
Slim loves playing jazz himself, and he gets offered a job as a trumpet player for the night. (Maybe I should mention that the man who offers Slim the job is named Charley? More wish fulfillment?) "'Yes, thass right, a job, and not only that I got a horn for you.' 'A horn? A horn? My kingdom for a horn!'" (194). Of course, that's a parody of "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" from William Shankspeare's Richard III. Honestly, I haven't read the play myself--so I couldn't tell you if he's saying he lost his kingdom because of a horse (there is a nursery rhyme of that flavour, and Wikipedia seems to agree with me in that respect), or if he's asking for a horse so that he may go into battle himself (Richard III was apparently the last king to die in battle). Most everything that comes up aside from that Wikipedia page when I search the quote seems to favour the latter... Well... My point was, if it was like the nursery rhyme, then it could be that the horn--the love of jazz--was his downfall. If it's not like the nursery rhyme, then he's saying that the horn will save them all (although he loses the job that very night, he was only filling in for somebody).
"Well now Slim was starting to sweat because nobody wanted to stop, and he didn't wantsa stop neither and blew right on till the sweat began pourin down his face jess like it did over the shovel in the mornin. Oh, he jess watered that bandstand from sweat. He didn't ever run out of anything to play ever'time he crossed from one end of the song to th'other, and had a hunnerd years in him of it. Oh, he was grand. That song lasted twenty minutes and the folks at that bar got out in front of the bandstand and clapped in time for Slim... with his face all black and wet and like he was cryin and laughin all at the same time, only his eyes was closed and he didn't see them but jess plain knew they was there. He was holdin, and pushin that horn in front of him like it was his life he was rasslin with... Oh, he talked and talked with that thing and told his story all over again, to me, to Sheila and ever'body. He jess had it in his heart what ever'body wanted in their hearts and they listened to him... That crowd rocked under him, it was like the waves and he looked like a man makin a storm in that ocean with his horn" (199-200). / "[Rollo Greb] played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn’t give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life. Dean stood before him with his head bowed, repeating over and over again, 'Yes... Yes... Yes.' He took me into a corner. 'That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all. That's what I was trying to tell you--that's what I want to be. I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all time you'll finally get it.' 'Get what?' 'IT! IT! I'll tell you--now no time, we have no more time now.' Dean rushed back to watch Rollo Greb some more'"--Jack Kerouac, On the Road (the... not-original scroll), page 127. He's describing how Rollo Greb is playing, just an FYI.
So, after losing this job, Slim decides to just take Pic and Sheila and head out to California, convinced that their problems will disappear--and even if they don't exactly, that things will get better: "'All that sun, and all that land, and all that fruit, and cheap wine, and crazy people, it don't scare you so much when you can't get a job because then you can always live some way if you even just eat the grapes that fall off the wine trucks on the road. You can't pick no grapes off the ground in New York, nor walnuts either.' 'Now who's talkin about eatin grapes and walnuts?' yelled Sheila's mother. 'I'm talkin about a roof over your head.' She was a woman of some level sense" (204-205). 1. The grass is always greener on the other side. 2. I can't remember Kerouac's feelings about going to California in On the Road, other than that he was probably pretty excited about it. 3. This is pretty much what Kerouac did in California when he was having a tryst with a young Mexican girl--well, I say young but she was probably in her early twenties. I think she had a two- or three-year-old son. I don't think that tryst is in... I keep on wanting to say the version we read in Rebels, but the likeliness of a random googler coming across this site and being an alumni of that class is probably something like 1 in a bunnerjillion. It's the not-original scroll version. I think maybe he mentions her, but she gets pages and pages in the original scroll and I feel like she only gets a few paragraphs worth in the other version. 4. I can't help but notice that Pic refers to Sheila's mother as someone of "some level sense". What is Kerouac trying to say here? (This isn't rhetorical. Help, please.)
"The last night ever'thing was packed and ready to go in the mornin and we had coffee in the kitchen and house looked so bare Slim seemed most gloomy about it. 'Look at this place we've been livin in. We leave it, someone else comes in, and life is jess a dream. Don't it remind you of old cold cruel world to look at it? Those floors and bare walls. Seemed we never lived here, and I never loved you inside of it'" (207). So, I was going to compare this to a quote about someone dying is really like someone just moving out of a tenement house or an apartment building, with someone there who will take their place and eventually overtake their memory, but I don't remember the exact quote, and I don't remember where it comes from. I thought it was from A Single Man, but I guess not...? Maybe Burroughs...?
The end of this book is really, really beautiful. It also is hard to appreciate if you're not reading it yourself (and not listening to Peter Gabriel while doing so). But guess what? It's happening right here and now. So they're hitching to California, and they stop in a church...
""So Father McGillicuddy took me up to the attic LOFT, and sat me by the man with his hands on the keys of the ORGAN. Grandpa, I even whistled and I wished I had my harmonica, and the priest man sang up and said I sung like an angel. By the by, Slim was present down at the cellar moppin up the floor, he said he sure wisht he had his horn, but said he found a horn in his little brother's voice. So we told Father McGillicuddy soon's we pick up one hunnerd dollars pay we would fetch for Oakland on the Greyhound Bus, but Father McGillucuddy said it was comin up close to Sunday mornin, as it was Adventist or adventurous night now, and Saturday too, and wanted me to song before the intire congregation the Lord's prayer, which I done, up in the LOFT, like best I could. Father McGillicuddy was s'tickled he was sunrise all over. Then Irish mans is so tickled they's pink as a shoat all over, but I feasable say they got troubles of their own, so we had our hunnerd dollars and took the road bus with the picture of the blue hound dog on the side of it, Greyhound it's called, and we peewetted across Ohio and clear inta Nebraskar, Slim was asleep in the back seat all alone stretched out legs all over, and I was sittin in a reg'lar seat near-up with a ninety-year-old white man, and when we come to a stop just before Kearney, Nebraskar, the old man said to me: 'I gotta go to the toilet.' So I led him out of the bus holdin his hand, 'case he was about to fall in the snow, and ask the gas man where was the men's room. Finished, I took the old man back in the bus, and the bus driver yelled out: 'Somebody's drinkin around here!' And the bus driver was wearin black gloves. Two men was in the front seat next to him holdin hands together. Slim was still snorin on the back-seat bed. Then he got up said to me: 'Hi, baby.' First thing you know, no more snow. Heard another old man behind me say 'I'm goin back to Oroville and bank my dust,' We then was now in the Sacramenty Valley, granpa, and quick we saw Sheila's ropelines with wash on hooks of wood hung dryin, flappety-flap. Slim, he put his two hands on his back, limpied around the yard, and said, 'I got Arthur-itis, Bus-itis, Road-itis, Pic-itis, and ever' other It-is in the world.' And Sheila run up, kissed him hungarianly, and we went in eat the steak she saved up for us, with mashy potatoes, pole beans, and cheery banana spoon ice cream split" (235-236).
See? Beautiful.
Also, I have to say, I am completely of the mind that there's specific importance of the two men holding hands (Ginsberg and his partner, whose name I can never remember?) and the man in the black gloves (otherwise why bother mentioning that he's wearing them?) and maybe even the old man. According to IMDB (apparently Jack Kerouac was in a film, because he's got an IMDB profile), Kerouac originally intended for Pic to meet other Beats and travel with them... His mother, however, suggested that Pic just settle down. So I guess Sheila's mother is just reflecting his mother, maybe he's not necessarily regretting things he did, just admitting that maybe they weren't the best choices he could have made. But still, I wonder about who those four men could be. Of course, there's practically nothing available on it, so there's nothing to do but settle for speculations.
So--I warmed up to this book. It's pretty good, more like his earlier works. It's gotten criticism for being written in a "stereotypical" way, what with the dialect and all, but in Jack's defense, the kid comes from the South. I think it's more of a Southern thing than anything else. The only issue I really see is the usual "black people are cool" thing. Wait--keep on reading!--it's not what it sounds like. Kerouac always talks about how cool they are, but he doesn't really see black people as individuals. Like--he doesn't get that they're people, maybe. (I wish I had my response to this question from Rebels. I thought I did a pretty good job on that one, and now I can't seem to articulate a damned thing.) He likes them for what they seem to be, not what they actually are--he's still stereotyping, just... not as negatively as he could be. Does that make sense?
MLA Citation Information: Kerouac, Jack. Pic. Grove Press: New York, 1985.
I just made some intense life decisions that I'll probably forget in a few hours, too. After getting my teaching certificate here, I'm heading over to England for grad school, getting a certificate or doing whatever needs to be done there to make me able to teach, and then staying there except maybe on Christmas holidays. I should probably discuss this with someone, like my mom... Sometime. (She said I should go to grad school in England. I'm only taking her up on this.)
Also, my Stumbleupon took me to this site: http://www.librarything.com/topic/61828 I've read thirty-six of them! (Somewhere in the forties or early fifties if you count Harry Potter and Narnia by series volumes, not just as one number. Also, The Chronicles of Narnia is separate from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe...?) Anyways. Guess which ones they are! Hoo-ray?
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Hangin' Around by The Edgar Winter Group
This post's cryptic song lyrics: All around the world, you've got to spread the world, tell them what you've heard, we're gonna make a better day--All around the world, you've got to spread the word, tell them what you've heard, you know it's gonna be okay
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