The Subterraneans

I have a problem.

I am hung on The Subterraneans.

I have just read it 2 ½ times. I read it years ago – but way-hey before I was writing myself.

Without identifiable syntax, The Subterraneans is terribly hard to read. At only 28K words, reading it is like bleeding-off compressed air – like 80K. The Subterraneans isn’t so much about Ginsberg and other “same type”s as it is a DIY of how to destroy a valued relationship – the particular relevance, for me, as I work on the current N3, which novel is about the inverse of love-destruction – namely, trying to find one’s way back to an important love which cynical observers would insist was only supposed in the first place. What? You never even kissed her?

Kerouac is no stylist. He tells The Subterraneans the only way it could be told – in sound-bites. 

And now am I and why am I writing at all? and why is just The Subterraneans and not even Kerouac himself important? Too many stories I try to read seem built from little plastic Legos - full of snapped-together phrases from a “tool kit” or sometimes whole “I-seen-the-same-exact-syntax-before” sentences repeated exactly in consecutive paragraphs and all the Publisher experts thinking they’d make money on that great-hardbound-ponderous-redundant-big-publishing-house tome but never even noticed.

So I’m a writer now and all arty-farty. I flat love beautiful work. So here’s a sample excerpt from The Subterraneans. Here’s a typical Kerouacian sublimity:

“Nights that begin so glitter clear with hope, let’s go see our friends, things, phones ring, people come and go, coats, hats, statements, bright reports, metropolitan excitements, a round of beers, another round of beers, the talk gets more beautiful, more excited, flushed, another round, the midnight hour, later, the flushed happy faces are now wild and soon there’s the swaying buddy da day oobab smash smoke drunken latenight goof leading finally to the bartender, like a seer in Eliot...TIME TO CLOSE UP.”

Seriously. Isn’t the above a beautiful, zooming, hammer-hitting blast that is three compressed pages of typical writing? Um. Of my writing? I try and try not.