I Think of Your Mother

March 12, 2022 2:38 PM

Safe in Heaven Dead - Thinking about Jack Kerouac on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Previously

posted by chavenet (6 comments total)

I tried many times in my teens to get into Kerouac because a girl I had a crush on wouldn't shut up about On the Road. I just couldn't get it.

In the late eighties I stumbled upon audio of him reading his own stuff, with Steve Allen on piano, and it all clicked. Once I could read the way his books the way he spoke, I got it.

So, if you don't get what's up with Kerouac, give him a listen.

If you like that, I'd recommend the audiobook of On the Road read by John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco from Sopranos). He does a pretty good job with it. Will Patton does a good one, too (that one can be found on Audible).
posted by dobbs at 3:11 PM on March 12, 2022 [11 favorites]

Great post!

Safe in Heaven Dead is also the title of the Kerouac volume put out by Hanuman Books. Thanks to a copyright loophole regarding interviews, they managed to publish excerpts from some of Kerouac's interviews in lieu of other material. I keep my copy next to a statue of Vairocana Buddha that sits in a wooden shrine box made by a friend's dad. The shrine, more likely meant to house a Catholic saint than a Japanese Buddha, also contains a Chinese cigarette that's been there for 11 years now. I imagine Kerouac would love or hate the whole setup. Maybe both.
posted by heteronym at 6:38 PM on March 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've been reading Louis Menand's book The Free World, which is an endlessly digressive, variously interesting and tedious history of art and philosophy in the mid-20th century, and he has some insightful things to say about Kerouac and the Beats. So I'm gonna copy a bit here because people reading this thread are probably receptive.

"Howl" and On the Road are about things that happened in the 1940s; by the time they came out, the United States was a different place. When Kerouac began his travels, for example, there were 37 million registered vehicles in the United States. When On the Road came out ten years later, there were 67 million. The increase in car ownership reflected the growth in middle-class prosperity, and for many people this made the "beatness" that Ginsberg and Kerouac represented, which had been appropriate in the immediate postwar years, a period of social and economic uncertainty, seem an affectation, a lifestyle choice rather than a social condition.

Kinda thought that was reminiscent of the Generation X Slacker stereotype: the slacker pose in the mid-90s derived from the real listlessness in the early-90s George Bush recession.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:05 PM on March 12, 2022 [10 favorites]

Adjacent: Desolation Peak in the Cascades (where Kerouac spent two 1956 months as a fire-watcher) features in the 2019 book Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth by Tim Richards where he gets to hang with Jim Henterley the warden of the shrine. Also “Ode to Desolation” Lindsey Hagen's 13m homage.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:59 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Gary Snyder, speaking in 1969, described On the Road as a tale of what happens to the cowboys when there’s nowhere left to roam: “What was intended to be done was that you should step forth into wild space; what you end up doing a hundred years later is driving back and forth in cars as fast as you can.”

Gary also said something like "the job of the artist is not to destroy himself." Not coincidentally, all the other original beats are gone, and Gary is still going at age 92.
posted by Joan Rivers of Babylon at 7:10 PM on March 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

I read On the Road when I was a teen. I remember enjoying it, but not much stuck with me. I realized some years ago that the only part that I remembered anything about was the part with “Terry, the Mexican girl”. She was the only character that had seemed like she had any kind of life outside the text.

Since then, the real-life identity of the person who served as the basis for the character has been discovered. She was born as Beatrice Renteria, and was Beatrice Franco by the time she met Kerouac, and by the time she was found she was Beatrice Kozera.

One annoying thing about most write-ups about her is that novelist Tim Z. Hernandez is given credit for finding her, but actually it was his mother. I’ll give Nina Porzucki of The World partial credit for laying that out:

In fact, it hadn't ocurred to Hernandez that she might be living. Still, after an exhaustive two-year search, he gave up and began writing a novel from the facts that he had pieced together from his research. His mother, however, had become interested in his quest to find Bea Franco and decided to continue the search.

"Twenty-four hours later, she called me and said, 'I have an address for you,'" said Hernandez.

I say partial credit because she doesn’t actually name her, she’s only identified Hernandez’ mother. And I know Porzucki isn’t responsible for headlines on her pieces, but it’s falling that the headline is: A novelist finds 'the Mexican girl' from Jack Kerouac's book On the Road.

Anyway… erasing women’s names in articles about finding women erased by history is just too apt.

Diana Marcum wrote a good article about Kozera for The L. A. Times, and she did name Hernandez’ mother, Lydia, though she’s only credited as helping her son, but you can’t have everything, I suppose. The article is worth a read: Bea Kozera dies at 92; ‘On the Road’ character was based on her
posted by Kattullus at 1:10 AM on March 15, 2022