Catch-18?

Check it out, "Catch-22" was not Joseph Heller's first choice.

Writers in Drag

Here's a cartoon I just did for the NMU Graduate Writers Association. For the second time their November meeting is scheduled at the same time as the NMU Drag Show, so they wanted me to do something with that theme.

50 Years On the Road

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's On the Road. It's hard for me to talk about this without getting over-indulgent so bear with me. I read most of it for the first time sitting in my car, parked on the shore of Lake Superior by the ore dock. I guess I was there because my roommate, my friend's cousin, was officially crazy... and I needed an honest, quiet place to experience it. Well, it consumed me. There was something so transcendent about the beat, hobo lifestyle of the late forties, early fifties. Jazz and friends and constantly, constantly... the road.

Two years ago I traveled west to see some friends, and when I got to Nebraska I jumped off the freeway onto old Route 6, the same road that these guys took from the East Coast to Denver, onto San Fran, and back again. It was a hell of a feeling and I listened to Charlie Parker and tried to draw myself back to that other time. Unlike Dean Moriarty, however, I kept it under 80mph.

Needless to say I continue to peruse it on a regular basis. Since then I've become aware of it's shaky foothold in the world of literature, scoffed at by John Updike and the like. But to me its simplicity adds a necessary pureness to this chronicle of the Beats.

All right, I'll go back to poking fun at Mark Trail.

Arthur C. Armageddon

Great book. Amazing book. Blew my mind when I read it ten years ago. What's it about? Who knows. The only thing I can remember is at the end the last man on Earth has some sorta existential dilemma. Or not. Wikipedia would know. But it has aliens, and not to ruin it, but the Earth goes bye-bye. Armageddon Wednesday in a nutshell.

Pre-Harry Potter

Just a reminder, in these days Harry Potter craziness, that Tim Hunter came first. His creator, Neil Gaiman, has graciously conceded that the concept of the young, burgeoning magician is simply an archetype. But everyone should read The Books of Magic miniseries, regardless, if only for the fourth book, which blew my mind.

Anyway, go on with your Potter mania. I honestly respect obsessions of any sort. I've got way too many myself.

Are You On the Bus?

So I'm halfway through The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, his new-journalism chronicle of writer Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and the Merry Pranksters. It's very engrossing. Here we have the birth of the LSD movement through refugees of the Beat movement, including Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty of On the Road) and with appearances by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Hunter S. Thompson, The Hell's Angels and The Grateful Dead.

An important point is that this doesn't seem to be a celebration of the movement. In fact, the book starts with Kesey's plans to finally move beyond LSD before going into the backstory of how it all happened, a smart move by Wolfe. Wolfe's writing in general is very subjective and literary, the hallmarks of the new-journalism also pioneered by Thompson, and it's remarkable that Wolfe apparently never took acid because it feels as though he is writing with a very personal awareness of that vantage point. I guess that's where high intellect and meticulous investigation come into play. Anyway, it's exactly what I needed to read right now, and it'll be interesting to read Wolfe's conclusions.

Oh, Those Sirens

When I was digging around for Vonnegut images the other day I found this book cover of Sirens of Titan from his early, less-renown days. The artwork is less about the actual story and more about sexed up aliens and probey things. This is one of those instances where I love something for it's visual style and vintage '60's flavor, and hate it because Dell is manipulating the buyer at the expense of the author. Of course, if you as the author are trying to break out, I'm sure you'd favor anything that got the books off the shelves. But the same thing goes for some of Kerouac's early printings. I'll post more when I find them.

Vonnegut, RIP

I first read on Boing Boing that Kurt Vonnegut passed away. The web is being loaded down with remembrances, so I thought I would add mine. I had read several of his novels before I got to Sirens of Titan, which was the second he wrote. But this is the one that really spoke to me, for reasons that are a little vague to me now. I suppose I should read it again, but the part of the story that always comes back to me is when they are marooned in the bowels of Mercury and they discover the little blue creatures. I can't begin to give it justice, but it was just so perfectly odd and poignant and sad to me. But Vonnegut was good at that, giving us the ridiculous but making it sound perfectly natural while leaving us subtly and profoundly affected.

He came to NMU about eight to ten years ago, and for some reason I didn't go. I'll always regret that.