#830 Two People- Cookie Mueller

#830 Two People- Cookie Mueller

Stories that are edgy and try to push envelopes don’t age that well. The archetypes that are dark and titillating often become cliché years later. However, if you know that going in, you can appreciate what that kind of story must have felt like when it was written.

Cookie Mueller was an off-beat writer pushing boundaries or at least having fun in the shadows. Her collection Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black is a look at her work. By the time it was printed in 1990, many of the references she wrote about were already past their shock value. But they are fun none-the-less. 

The narrator is a teenage bisexual thriving in the drugs, sex, and violence of her youth. In 1964 this would not exactly be mainstream literature, but 50 years later a passage like the following sounds like a teenage writing student trying to copy Jack Kerouac:

“When Jack was in the hospital, we picked up guys together, smoked a lot of cigarettes, sniffed glue, and drank codeine terpenhydrate cough syrup for the buzz.”

Then again if you were reading this in 1964 you probably already knew Kerouac and this already might have felt derisive. Good writers can be both timeless and edgy. It’s a hard line to walk. This doesn’t get there, but it is fun to read.

Notable Passage: “He was sick, quite contagious, and looked ill, but sexy, like pictures of Proust on his deathbed. I was in love, and we were teenagers going steady.”

Rating: 7-5-6-5 Total= 23

#237 Where the Road Begins- Jack Kerouac

#237 Where the Road Begins- Jack Kerouac

Nobody writes discovery better than Kerouac; discovery, adventure, wonder, and the enlightenment of youth. This is not a true short story, but it’s worthy of a look. Like a lot of what Kerouac writes, this is part fiction, part memoir, part manifesto.

“You embark upon the Voyage, face eager, eyes aflame with the passion of traveling, spirits brimming with gaiety, levity, and a flamboyant carelessness that tries to conceal the wild delight with which this mad venture fills you. You sit in the train, and you begin to feel yourself eased away, away, away…and the gray home town is left behind, the prosaic existence of 18 years is now being discarded into the receptacle of time.”

What could be more romantic a notion than traveling away from home at eighteen? The excitement and kinetic mind of Kerouac makes you want to immediately drop your things and hit the road, anyway…just go, man, go. Reading Kerouac always reminds me how much I love reading, traveling, living. There will never be another like him.

Rating: 7-8-8-10 Total=33

#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac

#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac

Although Kerouac really didn’t write traditional short fiction, he was prolific in pouring his thoughts on paper. Besides his novels and books of poetry, recently published collections of his notes and jottings have uncovered a few great clippets of planned novellas. Go Back is one of these short pieces written before his first novel, The Town and the City, was published.  Go Back, written in 1940, shows even this early where Kerouac was to take the form. He had a keen sense of the ethereal nature in all of us, but only wrote for himself, of himself, and from his own eyes, wide open, and sensing emotion everywhere.

His language was always poetic and rhythmic like the jazz and bop he got inspiration from. It’s hard not to stand up and read this aloud to the people on the bus next to me with their face buried in their phones or being deafened by over-produced music coming through their ears plugs drowning out the sights and sounds of real life right in front of them.

“Zounds, I say. Zounds! You hurry while I stand here, trying to recapture the past. And here you are., brushing it aside, the past of tomorrow, which is the present of today, you are brushing it aside as you stride along, intent on your cheap present practical and physical desires and comfort. You fool! Wait, don’t hurry.”

“I tried to sigh like they do in plays, but it was a fake one. I didn’t want to sigh, but I tried. The thing I really wanted to do was weep, but I couldn’t do that either.”

Has any group of writers—Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs—ever been so open, vulnerable, and emotive than these? It’s a shame that Kerouac remains misunderstood by so many, that in the eyes of too many, he seems more like a James Dean caricature of a rebel instead of what he was: a big ball of energy and wonder, gulping life by the ocean-full.  Even these tossed aside pages of his notebooks have genius not seen since.

Rating: 8-8-9-10 Total=35