ustxtxb_obs_2008_07_11_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

Historic Native Peoples of Texas BY WILLIAM C. FOSTER FOREWORD BY ALSTON V. THOMS 10 maps $24.95 mei; 6′ 6 . 0 cloth 800.259.:39,06 \\\\–\\\\wItte\\a ,;prcss.coril Early Texas Schools A Photographic History TEXT BY MARY S. BLACK PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRUCE F. JORDAN 171 duotone photos $39.95 cloth Far from engaging the world, and despite all their world travel, the Beats remained largely cluelessnot simply incurious and insensitive, but insensible: blind to the variety and complexity of lives other than their own. despite all their world travel, the Beats remained largely cluelessnot simply incurious and insensitive, but insensible: blind to the variety and complexity of lives other than their own. In an instant judgment that was really a prejudgment, Kerouac saw, and admired, Mexicans as “Fellahin … the essential strain of the basic primitive,” brown toilers in the brown earth, “pure and ancient” earth figures, with “slanted eyes and soft ways.” Even Mexico City was “one vast Bohemian camp. … This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road.” In a missive to Cassady in 1957, Kerouac wrote of the locals in Tangier: “They are all hi, all wild, hep, cool, great kids, they talk like spitting from inside the throat Arabic arguments.” This is sheer projection, of course, sweeping generalization that all but obliterates the individuals standing before him, professed admiration bordering on contempt. A similar incomprehension is found in the Beats’ treatment of women. Women are perks of the road, ripe for the picking, thrilling for the moment, but afterward all too often bitter or clinging. Marriages are contracted, children conceived, and the boys in the club are off to their next great adventure. Escape from the complexities and responsibilities of the adult world, as much as anything else, seems to be the animating force of On the Road. Here are a few of many tip-offs: “Bitterness, recrimination, advice, morality, sadness, it was all behind him..:’ “Goodbye, goodbye. We roared off…” “Nothing behind, everything ahead…” To which Cassady characteristically added: “Wow! Damn! Whoopee! … Less go, lessgo!” At one point, even Burroughs was moved to write Ginsberg and explain why he had advised Kerouac against leaving on another jaunt with Cassady. His letter is cited in Jack Kerouac’s American Journey: “Obviously the ‘purpose’ of the trip is carefully selected to symbolize the basic fact of purposelessness. … To cross the continent for the purpose of transporting Jack to Frisco where he intends to remain for 3 days before starting back to N.Y. [is] a voyage which for sheer compulsive pointlessness compares favorably with the mass migrations of the Mayans … [a] voyage into pure, abstract, meaningless motion …” Kerouac had a dream, and it surfaced from time to time, of having a home and a stable marriage. “I want to marry a girl,” he wrote, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time … all the franticness and jumping around:’ Instead, his marriages quickly dissolved, and he returned repeatedly to his mother’s house \(which he disguised Big Thicket People Larry Jene Fisher’s Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier BY THAD SUTTON AND C. E. HUNT FOREWORD BY MAXINE JOHNSTON BRIDWELL TEXAS HISTORY SERIES 88 B&W photos $29.95 cloth. Mavericks A Gallery of Texas Characters BY GENE FOWLER 50 BEM photos $19.95 paper $50.00 cloth 12 THE TEXAS OBSERVER JULY 11, 2008