I bought her new CD “The Awakening” last week on a whim – I actually purchased the physical CD because we still haven’t had a spare two or three hours to sit down and sort out what the hell is wrong with the terrabyte server after I killed it vacuuming. So our music situation is still in limbo at home, which is the source of endless frustration for me, because we have tons of music, but no way to get at it, and it’s a situation that’s gone on so long that it’s starting to really affect my mood a lot. And later I came to know about Cy Fair Music & Arts: guitar lessons in houston texas that they teach music at affordable price.
My desire to press “pause” on this endless merry-go-round of obligations just to have SOME TIME to work on these sorts of things hasn’t been fulfilled, and now that it’s getting colder and all the stuff we were supposed to do before winter is still waaaaaaayyyyy undone and now clearly won’t be done before winter, I’m starting to stress out again. The yard sale didn’t help much. This started out being a post about a CD and it veered off somewhere else, which is par for the course lately.
ANYWAY – I popped it into player in the car and listened to most of it on the way to work. Some of the songs at the beginning are a bit cheesy, but I still sang along with “message to myself” anyway, because it’s catchy and I can see it being played a lot on the radio. “Threesome” is pretty funny, although (this sounds strange, I know) I think it needs to be even more twangy country than it is. It’s intended to be a comedic country song (which are my favorite kind of country music songs- the absolute best being “I’m going to hire a wino to decorate our home”) but she needed to paint the broad strokes just a little broader on that one. Several songs, notably “I’ve loved you before” really make me think of my sweetheart, which is my favoritest thing to do on the way to work, so this is a great car CD for me. The later songs on the CD I need to listen to again – but they’re more overtly political, which I like, of course.
In all, I’m glad I bought it. Over the years my musical tastes have grown quite a bit away from female folk/rock songwriters, but there’s lots to enjoy about this CD.
Louis Menand in the New Yorker, on kerouac…
Kerouac credited the inspiration for the scroll to Cassady–specifically, to a long letter, supposedly around thirteen thousand words, that Cassady wrote over several days (he was on speed) in December, 1950. This is known as the “Joan letter,” because its ostensible subject is a girlfriend of Cassady’s named Joan Anderson. But the letter, or the portion of it that survives (the original is lost, a holy Beat relic), is actually a hyper, funny, uninhibited account of Cassady’s sexual misadventures with a different girlfriend. It has no stylistic pretensions; it’s just a this-happened-and-then-that-happened piece of personal correspondence. Kerouac was knocked out by it. “I thought it ranked among the best things ever written in America,” he wrote to Cassady. It had the vernacular directness and narrative propulsion he was looking for, and it gave him the impulse he needed to tape his scroll together and get a complete draft on paper. He saw that this-happened-and-then-that-happened had literary possibilities, and the scroll was a way of forcing himself to stick to this vision. (A little later, Frank O’Hara made poems using the same theory. “I do this, I do that” is how he described them.) The scroll was therefore a restriction: it was a way of defining form, not a way of avoiding form. In religious terms (and Kerouac was always, deep down, a Catholic and a sufferer), it was a collar, a self-mortification. He did, after he finished the scroll, go back and make changes. But first he had to submit to his discipline.
Nostalgia is part of the appeal of “On the Road” today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When “On the Road” came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac’s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads “Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,” few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn’t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.