3 posts tagged “perversity”

No, look, I have to shout my little shout, and then I'll bury my little snout back in my 50 books.  I hate writing papers.  Why?  Because I have nothing paper-length to say about any appropriate topic.  I find the form impossible.  What I consider serious intellectual work is fragmentary, catenary, open-ended, allusive, recursive, not MLA-formatted, not 16-25 pages in length, not spelled out in plain terms for the idle reader.  You're picturing a monstrosity, and I understand this, I do.  Work must get done.  But nothing deserves these intellectual subdivisions, these pleasant little tracts of Times New Roman 12-point real estate with their 1.25" white picket margins, their aluminum siding hiding Gothic levels of philosophical decay.  Oh let us excavate a grotto or renovate a warehouse and there build a new way of living with arts and histories and literatures and sweet heady unfinished symphonies; let us leave these New Developments in Literary Studies to those who work close by.  Let the forms live and die!

There.  There may be more of that left in my system.  I'll keep you... all... posted...

The TLS reviews the newly-released original manuscript of On the Road, a book I have never read and expect never to read — but I must now say that if I had to read it, I'd much rather have the "original scroll."  Is this kind of thing really still happening? — I mean, can you really still suppress the unbowdlerized version of a widely-read novel for 50 years?

The most striking feature is that the scroll uses the real names of characters who were lightly disguised in On the Road.  The real-life Neal Cassady returns to usurp the legendary Dean Moriarty, as if by right.  Where On the Road begins, "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.  I had just gotten over a serious illness . . .", the scroll opens, "I first met met [sic] Neal not long after my father died . . . I had just gotten over a serious illness". On the Road's Carlo Marx is the scroll's Allen Ginsberg; Dean's three wives, Marylou, Camille and Inez, feature in the scroll under their real names, Carolyn Robinson, Luanne Henderson and Diane Hansen, whom Neal married in New York while still husband to Carolyn (the legality of his marriage to Luanne is likewise questionable, since she was underage at the time). . . . On the Road is a non-fiction novel, predating In Cold Blood by nine years. [. . .]  [Malcolm] Cowley had worked hard to persuade an increasingly disorganized Kerouac that Viking could not publish a "novel" in which living people were depicted stealing, committing adultery and indulging in illegal sexual acts.

So the buggery is excised, names are changed, fig leaves are applied where needed and, as the reviewer puts it: "It might have been paternal feeling towards his young author that led Cowley to excise many mentions of women as 'whores'.  Now they are back, and the rampant misogyny of the early Beat Generation is as plain as can be."  What sense would a book, "improvised" over three weeks, that contains all these elements make without them?  What strange confusion it must have sown in the minds of young readers.  Nothing can make your skin crawl like a shoddy cover-up.  But on the other hand, it's easy to underestimate the strength of taboos, or their auras, even when they're utterly absurd: the absurdity is the last thing you encounter when you break them, like hope creeping out of Pandora's box.

Still: sounds like a marvelously ugly, hateful all-American text.  Tasty, like Rocky Mountain oysters dipped in ketchup.  I never made it past Kesey and Ferlinghetti as a teenager: I don't think Kerouac or Cassady ever seemed much like kindred spirits; they seemed more antsy than zany.  On the road with a bunch of semi-closeted misogynists?  Sounds pretty boring to me.  I think I'll read popular science books and Camus instead.

From the BBC: "doctor to pay for unwanted baby."  They quote from Die Welt:

'...the whole idea of damages being paid for the birth of a child was "perverse": "In addition to the highly private inkling that he was not wanted by his parents, he now has official confirmation that he was born by mistake," it said.'

What we want is state non-interference: for the delicate, infinitely and infernally complex dynamics of family life to develop privately and harmoniously.  The kid grows up knowing that the gynecologist who was supposed to prevent his birth is providing for his well-being: at 15 he runs away from home, shaves his head, acts out with girls, kicks an Arab in the shins, and at 19 he writes his book about the cynicism and betrayal of common human values embedded in the story of his life.  His ambivalence towards his mother tips mostly towards loathing.  He goes looking for his father.  He tries, tries to find some path towards self-determination, to write screeds against the determinants of law and technology.  The book will become a best-seller.  Even better if I can ghostwrite it now: agents, do you read?

But seriously, this is the conflict: we much prefer spiritual patriarchy to economic patriarchy, and in our anomie we dream of community.  Let this boy, before he learns to hate, be provided fresh vegetables and vitamins and cuddly stuffed birds of prey and amoxycillin; let him crawl across the floor to the shelf of Nietzsche while his mother cooks said vegetables with his plush eagle under one tightly-crooked arm.  Let him move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs towards misogyny, with all due haste.  It's the least one can do for the boy.

Oh, shit, I just saw the last line of the article: the father gets to weasel out of paying maintenance?  Sick.  So now, what, he can quit his job?  Better stop before I set off the smoke detector.