Ur-Texts: The Dharma Bums

A great cover: funny & poignant, like the book.

We are about to embark on a party of epic proportions, a multi-day gathering that actively resists the usual party descriptors of "extravaganza," "orgy," and "debauch." It promises to be a low-key affair, populated with friends past and present arriving from near and (not too) far in time to celebrate the New Year, but arriving early enough (tomorrow afternoon) and leaving late enough (Saturday afternoon? or later?) and in great enough numbers (edging towards 30) that it invites comparison to the Kerouacian debauches of "The Dharma Bums."

I make this comparison, perhaps, because I am re-reading "The Dharma Bums." It is the first in my re-readings of my ur-texts. I plan on reading all the books on this list (as well as a few more, depending), and commenting on their place in my personal mythology. Thus far (I haven't finished my re-read), I love "The Dharma Bums" all over again. It reminds me of all the flaws and beauties inherent in the Beat/Zen/Hippie/Stoner outlook on life, and it reminds me of those things in ways that no self-consciously Beat/Zen/Hippie/Stoner writings can. Kerouac was writing early enough in his era that he was not yet a cliche, and the earnestness that comes from that position shines through in his writing. Consider:

"See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures."

...which has great rhythm and pacing as well as great content; alongside a brief, hilarious gem like this:


"let's see, 'Lake below . . . the black holes the wells make,' no that's not a haiku goddammit, you can never be too careful about haiku."

It's that assured spirituality of the counterculture combined with that flippant and reverent need for beauty that really speak to me in this book.

Perhaps more to come as I finish this book, as well as a meditation on Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow," the book with which I finished out my new reading before embarking on this ur-text project.

Whoa

check it out.

Shelter

Nathan and I spent last night at the homeless shelter, volunteering on behalf of one of the churches in our Presbytery. This morning was rainy. Most of the men there were stoics, pulling up their hoods, putting trash bags onto their bedrolls, and walking out the door.

Two men remained just after 7AM. The older of the two had eyes rimmed with red and yellow. He swept the empty room -- officially our job as volunteers, but he'd taken the broom as his province, and we left it to him. "Yeah, thirty years ago, I never thought I'd'a been homeless," he said. "I raised a family -- three daughters, I raised. I worked. I worked hard. I worked Three Mile Island, during that time; that time, with the -- you know. I worked there. And now -- Well, my feet hit the ground this morning, and I was alive, so I thank God."

He swept up and handed over the broom. The other guy, the one who had slicked back his hair and shaved his face, picked up the Bible from the coffee table. "I like to do this in the morning," he said. "I'm not a religious guy, but I seen some spiritual stuff that most people wouldn't believe." He opened the Bible to a random page.

"What's the date today?"
"The twelfth."
"The twelfth..." he paged down to the first superscript twelve he could find, and read aloud: "And as for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and a time."

We gathered up the trash with these two, and they peered out the door. "It's not raining anymore."

They tightened up their coats. "That verse," said the shaved one, to his friend, "That sounds like some'a what you were saying this morning."

Thing People Ask For At The Store

In decreasing order of likelihood that we stock them.

1)
"I know you have books, but do you have any magazines?"
"No, sorry."

2)
"Can I get some tobacco?"
"I don't smoke."
"Do y'all sell any here?"
"Try down the street."

3)
"Hey, uh, do you have belts?"
"Excuse me?"
"Belts." [hikes up pants]
"Sir, this is a bookstore."

Link

Those Mennonites; always trying to take their clothes off. (SFW)

Ur-Text

As is the privilege  of the under-employed in winter, I've been reading a lot lately. Nathan and Frank and myself have had a conversation or two about reading -- how we do it, what we get out of it, etc.

I myself am more of a drive-by reader. I read fast, noting important passages for later review, but ultimately feeling the need to move on to other books. This strategy has its ups and downs, but one of the ups is that I always feel welcome to return to a book, feeling that I may have missed something in an earlier read-through.

So, while reading the Wendell Berry chapter in Bill Inchausti's Subversive Orthodoxy, I realized a desire to revisit The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, The Wild Geese, etc. This quickly blossomed into a desire to re-read all of my favorite, formative books; my Ur-texts, to use the German (and if you want to know more about the prefix "ur," just let me know -- it's one of my favorite German prefixes). A quick perusal of my bookshelf, my earlier post on my favorite books, and my memory yielded these results:

The Dharma Bums (Kerouac)
East of Eden (Steinbeck)
Cannery Row (Steinbeck)
For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
One Man's Meat (White)
The Practice of the Presence of God (Brother Lawrence)
The Prophet (Gibran)

and of course, the poems of Wendell Berry.

Bear in mind, the notion of the ur-text is not just "books I like a lot," but rather "books that are the basis of my founding mythology as a person." If it was the former and not the latter, the list would be much longer.

So, dear readers, I leave you with the question, to be answered in the comments or in your own blogs, facebooks, etc. :

"What are your ur-texts?"