Chad Taylor

Ghosts


The Haunted Life by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Classics, 192pp) is a novella written in 1944 and (probably) mislaid by the author in a Columbia University dorm room. The pencilled manuscript came to light in 2002 when it was auctioned at Sotheby's. Editor Todd Tietchen has collected it here with a detailed introduction as well as supporting fragments from Keruoac's work and his father's correspondence. You could skip all that and go straight to the story but the accompanying material shines a light on it.

As Tietchen notes, 1944 was a turbulent year for Kerouac. His friend Sebastian Sampras was killed in action. The author was jailed on an accessory charge (later dropped) and he made the acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

By contrast, The Haunted Life is a modest coming-of-age story about Peter Martin, a young man living in a romantically fictionalised New England town. Caught between the Great Depression and World War Two, Peter is leaning towards an intellectual, roaming life. He is deciding, in other words, whether or not to become Jack Kerouac.

"Someday, we'll sit right down in some old jalopy and drive right out to Fresno, California," says his friend, 19 year old Garabed Tourian. The author would begin On The Road six years later.

The Haunted Life is a young man's story in every sense. There is a palpable tension around rebelling against the traditional male roles of worker and soldier, and the form of the novella itself is a rebellion: less predictable than a short story but refusing to conform to the conventions of the novel.

Some of the dialogue has curdled over time. The characters' thoughts are limited to those of the author aged 21, and their declarations clunk. Rather than "say" the characters cry, choke, prompt, mumble, mutter, chide and so on. But when they shut up and let the author write, the prose takes off:

"Field smell, flower smell, and the smell of cooling black tar in the night. The air misty and drooping with its weight of odours, the river's moist gust of breeze... The radio next door, Mary Quigley and her girlfriend from Riverside St dancing to a soothing Bob Eberly ballad in the living room littered with new and old recordings."

Critics can argue about the importance of the manuscript but this is straight up good writing. It's the ardent voice of the male spectator: the Kerouac people will continue to shoplift and read and talk about.

Sunday Star Times, 13.04.2014 Pic: Kerouac in 1943 c/- Wikipedia

All things bad


The True Detective finale got it right. The series was about the relationship between Cohle and Hart (coal and heart!) and the last episode resolved it. The extent of the serial killer's murders was too expansive to depict literally so the writer and director employed metaphor -- an image Lovecraft and Philip K Dick readers would catch immediately -- and in that moment the crime story transcended its genre. Which, in my humble opinion, makes great crime/noir stories great. Think Kiss Me Deadly when the suitcase exploded.

The ritual of the Yellow King was a portal to another universe of parallel evils courted by all the characters. Rust carved the figures of victim and spectators out of beer cans. Even Marty's daughter when she played dolls arranged them in the same voodoo circle: she was toying with an opening to all things bad. It was no accident that fornication led to both Marty and Rust's downfall: Rust took Maggie from behind and the final straw for Marty's marriage was fucking a prostitute up the ass. Everyone fell into an opening, and the opening changed their lives.

Sexuality is not gender, and some critics have commented that there should have been "more" female characters in True Detective. Which is true. Instead of a triangle between a female and two male leads it could have been between three women, or a group of four female friends. Perhaps there could have been some light comedy to it, too, and better product placement. But that would have made it a different show.

To the end


My definition of an artist is someone who gives people permission to do something that they've never done before.

I don't meant the critic's fantasy of violent innovation or breaking ground or breaking the glass ceiling but the tiny shift by degrees that comes from real lovers of the form copying and mimicking their own heroes and repetition (think: the blues) and, as a by product of that, causing the machinery of creation to skip a gear and go slightly out of control.

If the work and the creator survives, everyone else working in the field sees that they can take things a little further, and from that point onwards is faced with the choice of whether or not to develop it.

(There's another very middle-class idea that what makes art great is how much work goes into it. I tend the other way: look how much hasn't.)

Alain Resnais made Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year At Marienbad and after that, film would never be the same. Ever. Ever. Ever.

Why we work

 
Pretty much everything that ever inspired me to become a writer right there. Although I don't know if I could work with that view. Opening titles from Columbo, 'Murder by the Book' (1971), c/- @columbophile.

Paris 1213





The Mythiq27 exhibition opened in Paris this week. The art by Invader and Rero and my accompanying text are shown above and there is a short movie of the exhibition in total here.

Mythiq 27 is an anthology of art and texts about 27 musicians who died aged 27. Curator and editor Yann Suty asked me to write about Kurt Cobain; I went into more detail about the project earlier here and here.

You can see more photos of the book launch and the opening night on the project's Facebook page and of course there is a Twitter feed.

Suty's project uses the tensions between obscurity and fame to meditate on the short time we all have here. Viewing its collection of dead celebrities, fragile street art and clipped transmissions from a distance lends it an even greater ephemeral quality.

Re-reading; remembering

INTERVIEWER
I read somewhere that you started writing because you wanted to be a musician.

SHEPARD
Well, I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

INTERVIEWER
Did you start right in?

SHEPARD
Not immediately. My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn't a very difficult job—all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes—but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk.

INTERVIEWER
Did you already think of yourself as a writer?

SHEPARD
I'd been messing around with it for a while, but nothing serious. That was the first time I felt writing could actually be useful.
-- Sam Shepard interviewed by Benjamin Ryder Howe, Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson for The Paris Review.

But who knew?

I thought if you were a singer and went out and performed, that’s how you made your money. Like when I would see Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra on TV, I thought of course you went in the studio and made records—that’s how the public got to like them—and then they’re going to make their money when they go out and perform. So I never thought about royalties. When we toured the UK and US, that’s when we made tons of money. But who knew? It was nothing compared to what the writers and publishers got.

But I don’t care. I’m still out there. I'm still on stage and they're not.