CLICK HERE TO READ "Drought as Re-Invention"
Again, Greg nails it with this soon-to-be song written in the awful temperatures of a Sacramento summer heat wave. JG Going to Die in Idaho: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLG3FBa_ulU Shameful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjddN8Vfj3I Line So Thin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyYXb_AhOAw Thank you for giving a damn. JG New song finally finished.
To be recorded soon. Can you say "slash chords"? Click here to see the bones. JG In a similar vein to Bodie...  Just published...the very recent trip to Bodie and surrounding hills.
More to come. As always a work in progress... Click here or click image and you will be magically transported there now. JG Jack Kerouac: Essentials of Spontaneous Prose
The below Essentials of Spontaneous Prose via Beat idol Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, Tristessa, Pomes all Sizes, Dharma Bums, Town & the City, Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Subterraneans…oughta hang on the wall in front of every writer’s desk. Mine hangs about five feet away from where my laptop lives. It’s a framed photocopy from Ann Charters’ bio on Jack Kerouac, with awkward slapdash black scribbling all over it from when I took a class, at Karme Choling in Vermont somewhere around 1990, with Allen Ginsberg, famous Beat poet, Buddhist, political activist and all around sweet troublemaker. A lot of ‘em are fun, silly, wild…and many are straightforward and helpful: “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1958)SET-UP The object is set before the mind, either in reality, as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.PROCEDURE Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.METHOD No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases) “measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech” “divisions of the sounds we hear” “time and how to note it down.” (William Carlos Williams)SCOPING Not “selectivity” of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)Blow as deep as you wantwrite as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.LAG IN PROCEDURE No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.TIMING Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time Shakespearian stress of dramatic need to speak now in own unalterable way or forever hold tongue no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting).CENTER OF INTEREST Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion Do not afterthink except for poetic or P. S. reasons. Never afterthink to “improve” or defray impressions, as. the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung out tossed from cradle warm protective mind tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow! now! your way is your only way “good” or “bad always honest, (“ludicrous”), spontaneous,“confessional” interesting, because not “crafted.” Craft is craft.STRUCTURE OF WORK Modern bizarre structures (science fiction, etc.) arise from language being dead, “different” themes give illusion of “new” life. Follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at pivot, where what was dim-formed “beginning” becomes sharp—necessitating “ending” and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle Night is The End.MENTAL STATE If possible write “without consciousness” in semitrance (as Yeats’ later “trance writing”) allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so “modern” language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or- typing-cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich’s “beclouding of consciousness.” Come from within, out to relaxed and said.Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” in Ann Charters, ed., The Portable Beat Reader (New York: Viking, 1992). As the resources fueling the Great Sprawl move towards as sure a depletion as did the gold in Bodie, we find the growth of poverty to be following on in what one might be forgiven for mistaking for a Punch & Judy Show.
Here is a list of the Top Ten suburban regions experiencing the most pronounced increases in material poverty: http://247wallst.com/2013/05/28/cities-where-suburban-poverty-is-skyrocketing/2/ To quote from the "mission statement" found on page one of this article.... "The number of poor people in U.S. suburbs rose by 63.6% between 2000 and 2011, from 10 million to well over 16 million people. For the first time, there are now more people living in poverty in the suburbs than in cities. In some metro areas, the number of poor people living outside the city proper has jumped even more rapidly. In the Atlanta, Georgia, suburbs there are roughly 480,000 more people living below the poverty line than there were in 2000, an extraordinary 158% increase in the number of the suburban poor." It may be worth noting that the Wasatch Front region occupies two of the ten positions where material poverty has posted substantial increases in the 2000-2011 time period covered in the above link. A very strong economic argument might be made that the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan region is little more than an extension of the "New South Miracle" of Atlanta. A considerably more substantive argument may be made that the Charlotte, North Carolina-Rock Hill, South Carolina metropolitan region is but an extension of the above noted Atlanta economic zone. The key to ALL of these areas is the decline in the resource base vital to the functioning of those regions. That the Detroit-Warren, Michigan region would be on the list of regions where suburban material poverty has experienced rapid growth in the 2000-2011 period is scarcely surprising. There, in the Detroit-Warren region, resides a deeper lesson, one that is NOT for coarse laughter. It is best to leave crude humor about this once vibrant area of southeastern Michigan to those who delight in their own juvenile, scatological cruelties. One of the lessons is that all technological platforms, finally, function not only on so-called "human resources" to be exploited after a cheap imitation of mineral extraction, but of mineral extraction itself. to some, this may be stating the obvious. That stated, how else do we fully comprehend our mythologies than by taking the obvious away from oblivion, re-stating what has become drowned out in the din of fantastical cants in that presumed adventure known as "win-win situations". Tell the good people falling into poverty in the new suburban reality about that one...the same way mining promoters told the same story about the endless veins of gold to be found in the hills around Bodie as late as 1918. Ours are mythologies in song. We're not titans, like Robert Burns. We know that no matter how much sprawl gets built, there is no way back to that home. No clicking of the heels, no. Both "Bodie" and "Salt/Wake" are tools, however feeble, in the greater scope of just about everything, as are mythologies, as are the stories represented in long-vanished cave painting, of stories vanished into the dusk and dust of ephemera, like that of the grave of a young soldier on a hillside without known surviving family to tend his final site. Greg |
RSS Feed