#813 The Shiny Car in the Night- Nick Mamatas

#813 The Shiny Car in the Night- Nick Mamatas

Northport, Long Island is famous for a few figures. Jack Kerouac lived there during his later years and Ricky Kasso known as the “Acid King” once murdered someone in the summer of 1984 in a satanic ritual. Pete remembers that summer. He was the son of a connected Italian father who ran the Garbage removal business in those parts. It was a odd time to live there. 

Pete was the smart one of the family and was steered away from the family business. He gravitated towards the Kerouac side of things and wanted more than anything to go On The Road. He did, but came back to protect his father when things got hairy. Together, he hopes On The Road can become a family fairy tale, leaving all those roots behind.

Notable Passage: “I got over romanticizing poverty, and the road, but I never got over Kerouac.”

Rating: 7-7-7-8 Total= 29

#321 Tough, Tough Toys, for Tough, Tough Boys- Will Self

#321 Tough, Tough Toys, for Tough, Tough Boys- Will Self

Thoughts while driving a fast car, I guess this is supposed to be a road story (until its not). It gives a nod to Kerouac, mentioning both him and "some dharma," but this reads like the author never read Kerouac. It reads like the author thinks this is what other road stories are about.

This story lost me quickly, then slogged on for another thirty pages, containing nothing that aided to the story. Between the random thoughts dropping from the driver’s head, the story suffered from Self’s relentless attempts at cleverness, most of which fell flat.

Good sentences ruined by forced word play or shoe-horned-in metaphors. Take a look at these few clips:

“…there was the sense that as the car plunged south—switch backing over spurs, and charging down hillsides—it was taking Bill out of the unimagined world and into the world that was all too clearly conceived of, fixed in its nature, hammered into banality by mass comprehension.”

“The wands of memories interleaved themselves with the sprigs of scenery, and then the whole hedge of impressions was further shaped and molded by the music which poured from all four corners, before being flattened by the mantra of impulsion.”

I really like rich language, but this is tiresome and feels forced. Self’s writing style is not a voice that hits my ear naturally, but his story telling usually makes the read worth while. This one is a miss for me.

Rating: 6-5-3-5 Total= 19

#309- Search By Night- Jack Kerouac

#309- Search By Night- Jack Kerouac

I wish I could write about Jack Kerouac as lucidly as Jack Kerouac wrote about anything. He is both candid and artistic, striping himself of the literary norms as only one writer in hundred years can do, he captures the mind and voice of the human heart.

As most Kerouac pieces, this isn’t true short fiction, but there being no way, and myself having no desire to categorize it, here it is. It is the night of December 7^th, 1941. The paper’s boldface headlines announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and this young man walks the street of a Massachusetts milltown trying to find clarity.

“Outside the window, in the yard between my house and my neighbors, there glowed the cold crater silver of a December moon in New England…and there was silence as of death, upon the cold hard ground. Frost decorated the window, Dickens-like. I looked out upon the winter night, was silent in the presence of a stupendous hush, listening for the sigh of our slumbering hearts.”

Kerouac was famously French-Canadian, often writing about the FC community in Lowell Massachusetts. He loved the language, calling it more of a verbal language than a written one. However, this story was the first example of his using it in dialogue. The French-Canadian side of him, gave him a unique voice, and the language mixed with English gave his writing, already steeped in poetic phrasing and musical shape, a cadence not seen anywhere else.

Notable Passage: “I was not alone. Walking down the street, seeing barren crater glow along the shabby length of its bedded route, I suddenly perceive the bobbing figure of another human being. Another footstep, quicker than mine, most fretful. It is a millworker returning from the ‘night shift.’ We pass each other in the night, moving along gracefully in opposite directions. My brother, yet I do not know him, I do not speak to him. We only exchange quick suspicious glances, mine is almost belligerent in its nocturnal frown and scowl. (Ah yes, I am a fool!)”

Rating: 10-8-9-10 Total= 37

#246 God- Jack Kerouac

#246 God- Jack Kerouac

For this New Year I begin with some Jack Kerouac. Who better? It’s filled with hope, adventure, and expectation. We start with a blank page: “This page is long blank and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.”

A young writer talks with God, it’s not a prayer as much as a conversation.  He ruminates on life, survival, and his will to write original words. Not unlike many who have tried, he struggles with his voice, and sometimes must sell his talents for the mundane needs of life.

“Tonight, I wrote a short story for a fellow on this floor. I toiled with it for an hour and a half. I had to make it exciting, fill it with colorful and authentic descriptions, and pound it out into the conventional whole. That is, wholeness of what is called the common short story. Beginning, middle, end. It has to introduce, enlarge, burst, and die down. So I plunged into it and finished it. It would net me one dollar.”

This was fun to read and think about the art of short story telling, and very house of mirrors. I’m now writing about a writer writing about short story writing.

Notable Passage: “You can’ be an artist unless you’re a member of humanity. Hermits make awful poets, I think. You can’t ruminate peacefully by a little stream in the woods unless you’ve been liberated from the turmoil of civilization. Peace is a relative thing. And it always turns out to be short lived."

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

#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