Hello nature lovers, computer users and poets….you have probably seen these, but another time through can’t do any harm. It is better than the world news of the day to muse on….
Serious error. All shortcuts have disappeared. Screen. Mind. Both are blank. – Ian Hughes
Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return. – Suzie Wagner
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams. – Peter Rothman
You step in the stream, but the water has moved on. This page is not here. – Cass Whittington
THERE’S A COMIC by Robert Crumb from 1979 called “A Short History of America.” It’s 12 panels, all portraying a single spot of land. In the first, we see a bucolic field abutting a forest, birds flying overhead. In the second, there are fewer trees and a train rolling down a track, ejecting plumes of black smoke. Soon, there’s a log cabin, then telephone poles, then asphalt and cars. Then the trees disappear entirely and the house becomes a general store, the general store becomes a gas station, the gas station becomes a used-car lot and the sky, once so big, is almost completely obscured by crisscrossing electric wires. A small box in the final panel, containing the only text apart from the title, asks, “What next?!!”
This is the work of Crumb’s I keep thinking about on the summer afternoon I arrive in a medieval village in the Cévennes region of southern France. Crumb moved here in 1991 with his wife, the comics artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and their daughter, Sophie, who was 10 at the time. They found a place that feels like it’s almost protected from the march of progress. Cars aren’t allowed in town; to get to the Crumbs’ house, I have to walk across a weathered bridge that traverses a murky canal. Affixed to the front door are what appear to be Catholic prayer cards though, on closer inspection, they depict Elvis Presley in a state of religious ecstasy. Inside, we go upstairs to a dimly lit office, with shelves of 78 r.p.m. records, mostly from the 1920s and ’30s (Crumb owns 8,000 of them; he’s been collecting “old music of all kinds from all over the world” since he was 16), a bulky metal drawing board, various instruments (he’s an accomplished musician), stacks of faded newspapers and books with titles like “Because Our Fathers Lied,” “UFOs and Nukes” and “Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls.” (“I’m very interested in fringe things like that,” Crumb says.) I ask the couple, who have been together since 1971 and married in 1978, how they ended up here.
“Ask her,” Crumb tells me, gesturing to his wife. “It was all her doing. She comes from a long line of salespeople, and she just sold me on the idea of moving to France.”
In the ’80s, the couple lived in California’s Central Valley, in a small town called Winters nestled between Sacramento and San Francisco. “The fabulous ’80s,” Crumb says grimly. “Not a good decade in the United States.” (“It was like now,” says Kominsky-Crumb, “but not quite as bad.”) AIDS was killing their friends. A rising conservative Christian movement was accusing Crumb of being immoral. President Ronald Reagan had cut education funding, just as he’d done as governor, so there were no longer art or music classes at Sophie’s school. The Crumbs volunteered, teaching drawing, though at a certain point fewer students began showing up. A local preacher had been telling families that the Crumbs were “agents of the devil.”
“So we had to get out,” Kominsky-Crumb says. “And I guess I had some romantic idea about living in the south of France.”
“Some of that romance turned out to be true,” Crumb says. Then he adds, “Maybe you shouldn’t even mention the name of the town. I don’t want people showing up here.”
Crumb used to attend comic conventions and book signings, but now he makes very few public appearances. He never really picked up French (he relies on Kominsky-Crumb for that), and his social circle is small. Crumb’s followed in the long line of artists and writers who have exiled themselves from America, but his life abroad feels far more circumscribed than most. He doesn’t even have a cellphone. (At one point, he looks at his wife’s and says earnestly, “It’s listening to us right now.”) He uses email but “I worry about it,” he says. “Any email you write goes into the N.S.A. computer banks.” He’s only voted once in his life, for Barack Obama in 2008. Yet even living thousands of miles from America, disconnected from its culture by so many moats of his own making, he is, like many of his expatriate predecessors, a dedicated and unflinching observer of home. It was his ability to capture the id of America — in all its decadence, hypocrisy and lecherousness — that established him as an artist; that ability is unmatched nearly six decades later. He’s been called an “equal opportunity offender”: For his entire career, he’s angered the left, the right and everyone in between. It’s why his work remains, more than that of perhaps any other artist today, a litmus test for how much we’re willing to put up with for the sake of art.
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
Peggy
Was never a Nietzsche disciple, but always felt the quote above was appropriate and applicable much of the time especially when digging deep looking for the buddha… We’ve all had some steep uphills and somehow we’ve managed to make it near the top.
BOULDER, Colo., July 29 — Nearly 13 years after his death and 25 years after ”On the Road” became his testament for the Beat Generation, young admirers and old comrades of Jack Kerouac gathered here this week to celebrate his life and his legacy.
Hundreds joined in the celebrating, with poetry and debate and sometimes sadly affectionate recollections of the man who was called the ”King of the Beats.”
”We couldn’t have had the 60’s, the decade of social revolution, without the 50’s,” said Abbie Hoffman, who was a prominent figure in the antiwar movement of the late 1960’s. Mr. Hoffman was among the panelists invited to speak here this week on the political effect of the Beat Generation.
”The Beats gave us a choice, showed us we could let our emotions hang out, we could fight City Hall,” said Mr. Hoffman, in a speech to more than 1,000 people crowding an auditorium on the campus of the University of Colorado here. ”The Beats are alive today.”
”On the Road: the Jack Kerouac Conference,” which will continue here through Sunday, has brought together many of the elders of a movement whose followers were once popularly referred to as beatniks and for whom Mr. Kerouac has become not only a symbol but also a figure of almost cultlike proportion.
Legacy of the Beats
In a sense, the conference is not only a celebration of Mr. Kerouac, although he is clearly the central figure, but also a whole fraternity of writers, poets and musicians who rebelled against what they saw as the stifling, conformist cultural values of the 1950’s.
”As a literary generation, the legacy of the Beats seems stronger than ever,” said Allen Ginsberg, the poet and a longtime friend of Mr. Kerouac. Mr. Ginsberg’s 1956 poem, ”Howl,” also became an anthem of the Beat generation. As for ”On the Road,” Mr. Kerouac’s novel, Mr. Ginsberg said that ”it turned on an entire generation.”
In addition to Mr. Ginsberg, who is 56 years old, those here this week include William S. Burroughs, 68, the author of the novel ”Naked Lunch,” and the poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure and Peter Orlovsky.
More than 300 people pledged as much as $240 each to attend the conference and workshops, and scores more paid as much as $8 each for tickets to panel discussions that ranged from examinations of Mr. Kerouac’s relationships with women to an afternoon of personal recollections by his friends, many of which focused on his corrosive bouts with alcohol.
Carried ‘Like a Suitcase’
Allen Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes
Nanda Pivano recalled that on a visit to Naples in the 1960’s to talk about his book, Mr. Kerouac was so drunk he had to be carried around ”like a suitcase.” John Clellon Holmes, a writer and poet, remembered a telephone call that turned out to be his last conversation with Mr. Kerouac, just a month before the writer died in October 1969.
Mr. Holmes said that Mr. Kerouac, who was lonely and probably drunk when he called, reluctantly hung up the telephone at last with the plea, ”If you’re my friend, you’ll call me right back.”
”I didn’t call him back,” Mr. Holmes said, adding softly, ”I’m doing it right now.”
Memorabilia Sells Briskly
In a small room off the lobby of the University’s Memorial Center, conference sponsors were doing a brisk business selling Beat memorabilia, including old copies of Evergreen Review for $5 and brightly colored T-shirts that bear Mr. Kerouac’s visage, for $6 and $7. They sold out their first shipment of 12 dozen T-shirts, as well as all their copies of ”On the Road,” in the first three days.
In addition, there is a display of films, manuscripts and photographs at a local museum, including a photo of the original manuscript of ”On the Road,” which Mr. Kerouac wrote in 1951 on a single, 100-foot roll of yellow teletype paper.
In an interview, Mr. Ginsberg said that the work of Mr. Kerouac and others of the Beat Generation was ”at the cutting edge of a literary movement that broke the back of censorship in this country.”
”The real legacy of Kerouac and the Beats is one of literary liberation,” said Mr. Ginsberg, whose own work has been frequently decried as pornographic because of its sexual detail. ”And that literary liberation was the catalyst for Gay liberation, Black liberation, women’s liberation and now, hopefully, liberation from the threat of nuclear destruction.”
‘Notre Dame of Buddhism
The conference is sponsored by the Naropa Institute, a small, Buddhist-oriented college above some shops on the second floor of a building in downtown Boulder. The institute, which offers degree programs in the humanities, is sometimes described by its patrons as ”the Notre Dame of Buddhism,” a reference to the Catholic university in South Bend, Ind.
Mr. Ginsberg has been associated with the school since 1974 as a founder and instructor of its Jack Kerouac School of Poetics, which offers courses in creative writing, Buddhist poetry and the literary history of the Beat generation. The institute has about 100 full-time students.
”In Kerouac, there is a gentleness, a basic vulnerability, that puts him somewhere between Buddhism and Christianity,” said Mr. Ginsberg, who said that Mr. Kerouac was, like himself, a student of Buddhist meditation.
Novel Had Critics
”On the Road,” a free-flowing treatise on Mr. Kerouac’s moods, feelings and experiences as he traveled across America, was criticized by many critics as shallow and self-indulgent.
Sex and drugs play a large part in the novel, which was written as if it were one long sentence, with only dashes for punctuation. That peculiar style led Truman Capote, another author, to remark that the book was not writing, but rather ”typewriting.” ”What we are doing here is not just nostalgia,” Mr. Ginsberg said. ”We want to survey what was achieved, and make some prophesy for the future. I think both the Buddhist teaching and the Beat attitude provide us with some useful karma for the moment.”
~~~~~
.
BEAT GENERATRION ELDERS MEET TO PRAISE KEROUAC ~ NYT
By William E. Schmidt
July 30, 1982
Credit…The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from July 30, 1982, Section A, Page 8Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
Nearly 13 years after his death and 25 years after ”On the Road” became his testament for the Beat Generation, young admirers and old comrades of Jack Kerouac gathered here this week to celebrate his life and his legacy.
Hundreds joined in the celebrating, with poetry and debate and sometimes sadly affectionate recollections of the man who was called the ”King of the Beats.”
”We couldn’t have had the 60’s, the decade of social revolution, without the 50’s,” said Abbie Hoffman, who was a prominent figure in the antiwar movement of the late 1960’s. Mr. Hoffman was among the panelists invited to speak here this week on the political effect of the Beat Generation.
![The Rōbert [Cholo] Report (pron: Rō'bear Re'por)](https://robertreport.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/cropped-cropped-roberrepor-site-logo2-e1479848562926.png){kind=logo}
The Rōbert [Cholo] Report (pron: Rō'bear Re'por) 