The Subterraneans

Finally finished reading that last night. Okay, I know it's only 106 pages. And I started reading it 6 years ago. But I found it and started fresh from the begining and read it in about a day. What poetry! If you've ever read Mexico City Blues you'll know why Kerouac was always more thought of for his prose, but in The Subterraneans, he finds an exhilerating crevase between the two to squeeze into fill up, growing to percolate through the sylables until with wild abandon.

I was talking to my friend Neil last night, and he was telling me that he didn't really enjoy the book, nothing happens, but I don't think that's the point. Here he discovers a third way! Hybrid prose-poetry. Remember high school English class, these two estranged twins could only be defined in the negative. Poetry was whatever was not prose. Okay, so what is prose? Whatever is not poetry. But this book, perhaps more than any other in the english language (and lets remember that Kerouac was French-Canadian, and you have to wonder if, when he read Rimbaud and Baudelaire in their original french, where they experimented with inter-breeding the two). This wasn't just free-form, train of thought, this was a kind of extended literary ejaculation. 6-page spurts, at time not even words.

(and Charles Bernard, the vastness of the name in the cosmogony of my brain, a hero of the Proustian past in the scheme as I knew it, in the Frisco-alone branch of it, Charles Bernanard, who'd been Janes's lover, Jane who'd ben shot by Frank, Jane whom I'd lived with, Marie's best friend, the cold winter rainy nights when Charles would be crossing the campus saying something witty, the great epics almost here sounding phantom like and uninteresting if at all believable but the true position and bigburn importance of not only charles but a good dozen others in the light rack of my brain, so Mardou seen in thsi light, is alittle brown body in a gray sheet bed in the slums of Telegraph Hill, huge figure in the history of the night yes but only one among many, the asexuality of the WORK-- also the sudden gut joy of beer when the visions of great words in the rhythmic order all in one giant archangel book go roaring thru my brain, so I like in the dark also seeing also hearing the jargon of the future worlds - damajehe eleout ekeke dhdkdk dldoud, ----d, ekeoeu dhdhdkehgyt -- better not a more than lther ehe the macmurphy out of the dgardent that which strangely he doth mdodudltkdip --baseeaatra-- poor examples because of mechanical needs of typing, of the flow of river sounds, words, dark, leading to the future, and attesting to the madness, hollowness, right and roar of my mind which blessed or unblessed is where trees sing -- in a funny wind-- well-being believes he'll go to heaven-- a word to the wise is enough -- "Smart went Crazy," wrote Allen Ginsberg.)

Reason why I didn't go home at 3 A.M. -- and example.