Parody of Paradise?

[Terrance]

In Chapter 11 of Jack Kerouac's On The Road, our hero, Sal
Paradise, far across the great American continent from
gloomy, crazy, New York's clouds of dust and brown steam,
over the snowy roof top that is Denver, West, to Frisco, to
Remi's. 


He had fallen on the Beat and evil days that come to young
guys in their middle twenties.
I stayed in the shack in Mill City, writing furiously, at
some gloomy tale about New York that I thought would satisfy
a Hollywood director


I spent countless hours drinking coffee and scribbling.
Finally I told Remi it wouldn't do; I wanted a job; I had to
depend on them for cigarettes. 

He arranged to get me the same kind of job he had, as a
guard in the barracks. 

I wondered what Dean and Carlo and Old Bull Lee would say
about this. 

Remi gave me a flashlight and his .32 automatic. 

With the flashlight to illuminate my way, I climbed the
steep walls of the south canyon
scrambled down the other
side, almost falling, and came to the bottom of a ravine
where a little farmhouse stood near a creek



to a road like the mark of Zoro and a road like all the
roads you see in Western B movies. 

I used to take out my gun and play cowboys in the dark. 

This was a night when the schedule was so arranged that I
was all alone for six hours---the only cop on the grounds;
everybody in the barracks seemed to have gotten drunk that
night


It was like a Western movie.

I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I'd fallen down as
in a dream, clear off the precipice. Oh where is the girl I
love? I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked
everywhere in the little world below. 

		On The Road Chapter 11


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1962 & more books for our Sick Crew. 

1962, Richard Aldington died, so did E.E. Cummings, William
Faulkner, Michel de Ghelderode, Herman Hesse, and John
Robinson Jeffers. 

Edward Albee's  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was
published, so was Brian Aldiss' Hothouse, and James
Baldwin's In Another Country, Anthony Burgess'  A Clockwork
Orange, 
George Faludy's  My Happy Days in Hell, William Faulkner's 
The Reivers, Ken Kesey's  One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale
Fire, Sylvia Plath's  The Colossus and Other Poems,
Katherine Anne Porter's  Ship of Fools, Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, John
Steinbeck's  Travels with Charley in Search of America,
Barbara Tuchman's  The Guns of August, John Wain's  Strike
the Father Dead, Thornton Wilder's  Plays for Bleecker
Street, Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana. 

John Ernst Steinbeck, American writer of fiction, receives
the Nobel Prize for literature.

In 1963, P may have read these Obituaries. 

William Edward Burghardt DuBois, Robert Lee Frost, Ramon
Gomez de la Serna, Aldous Leonard Huxley, Ahmad Lufti
as-Sayyid---an Egyptian philosopher and essayist, Louis
MacNeice, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, William Carlos
Williams. 

V. was published in 63. 


"V. is  an allegory in which technological imagery shapes
religious and erotic sensations; the messiah machine serves
as the principal character, possessed of a clock heart and a
sponge brain, which he fears will become disassembled; he
represents a profane  version of Christ who moves too fast
to lose his heart or allow anyone to touch
his head; the religious allegory becomes more obvious as the
work proceeds toward its complex finish."

Wha?


No wonder Pynchon's poster is not hanging in the Big
Friendly Bookstore next to Rand, Fitzgerald, and Hemmingway. 

Also published, James Baldwin's  The Fire Next Time , Ray
Bradbury's  Something Wicked This Way Comes, Anthony
Burgess'  Inside Mr. Enderby,     Rachel Carson's  Silent
Spring, John Fowles' The Collector, Gunter Grass' 
Hunderjahre (Dog Years), Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter
(The Deputy [or, depending upon the translator, The
Representative]), Jean Ikelle-Matiba, Cette Afrique-la!
(This Particular Africa), Ismail Kadare's Gjenerali i
Ushtrise se Vdekur (The General of the Dead Army), Jack
Kerouac's  Visions of Gerard, John Le Carre's  The Spy Who
Came in from the Cold, Bernard Malamud's Idiots First,
William Modisane's  Blame Me on History,     Sylvia Plath's 
The Bell Jar, Adrienne Rich's Snapshots of a
Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962, J.D. Salinger's  Raise
High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters/Seymour: An Introduction,
Oluwole Soyinka's  The Swamp Dwellers, John Updike's The
Centaur, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.