The Rainy Season Begins

In California, it either rains or doesn't rain. The land was parched all summer as the sun matured the thirsty grapes, bestowing complex flavors in exchange for all their pains. Now it is winter, and the barren vines drink their fill.

I finished reading The Last Tycoon--the part the Fitzgerald actually wrote, anyway. The editors have created a summary of what they think Fitzgerald had in mind for the end of the novel, but I'm actually considering skipping it. I'm usually the sort of person who demands closure, who will not rest until knowing "how the story ends;" however, the writing style is strikingly different than Fitzgerald's , and I could never be sure if the artificially constructed ending is actually what Fitzgerald himself would have written. After all, who can emulate the man who wrote The Great Gatsby, or (one of my favorites) Tender is the Night? I'll just have to be satisfied with these rough sketches of the polished portrait he intended to paint.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. . . Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged. (Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night.)

Pilgrimage

Today I did something I've been dying to do since moving to California: I visited Ken Kesey's house at La Honda. If you haven't read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, please make tonight's post your excuse to read it at once. It's a trippy / fun introduction to the world of Gonzo Journalism, and it paints an spectacular "landscape" of the counterculture as a whole in the 1960s, as well as some exceptional "portraits" of a few of its giants like Kesey and Neal Cassady.



Preparations for the trip were minimal. After searching on the internet for, oh, 10 minutes without finding the address of the La Honda ranch, I was beginning to worry that I'd never find it. Then I saw someone's off-hand comment that Kesey's house is about a mile west of Applejack's Saloon. Go on, check out the reviews on this fine establishment. It's a fantastic dive. It looks like someone had their wedding reception there and posted pictures of it on the review site. . . let me just note that those pictures make it look a bit nicer inside than it really is. But it was unquestionably a fantastic stop, and we were very lucky to find a friendly if spaced out bartender in a tye-dye t-shirt who was more than happy to tell us that not only did he know where the Kesey house was, he had ALMOST bought it. He said once when he was talking to Kesey on the phone (presumably about the house) he asked, "How are ya, Ken?" And Kesey replied, "Feelin blue." The two words came out like poetry.

So we drove down the road about a mile, and there it was, just as the bartender said it would be, just as it was in the book. I'd post the address here since it doesn't seem to be available anywhere else, but I think that to find the house without asking directions at Applejack's would be to waste the entire experience. There were no drug-addled Pranksters, Beats, or bikers around; only a few pilgrims come to see where it all happened so many years ago.

Something Triumphantly American

I'm currently reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Because it is unfinished, there are little gaps where the editors explain that Fitzgerald meant to come back to a certain point in the story and introduce a character or something important like that. One such gap, in my opinion, makes the story even more amusing in its absurdiuty--I can't imagine how Fitzgerald was going to work in this introduction:

[Stahr (my note: a producer, the protagonist) was to have received the Danish Prince Agge. who "wanted to learn about pictures from the beginning" and who was in the author's cast of characters as an "early Fascist."]
"Mr. Marcus calling from New York," said Miss Doolan.
"What do you mean?" demanded Stahr. "Why, I saw him here last night."
"Well, he's on the phone--it's a New York call and Miss Jacobs' voice. It's his office."
Stahr laughed.
"I'm seeing him at lunch," he said. "There's no aeroplane fast enough to take him there."
Miss Doolan returned to the phone. Stahr lingered to hear the outcome.
"It's all right," said Miss Doolan presently. "It was a mistake. Mr. Marcus called East this morning to tell them about the quake and the flood on the back lot, and it seems he asked them to ask you about it. It was a new secretary who didn't understand Mr. Marcus. I think she got mixed up."
"I think she did," said Stahr grimly.
Prince Agge did not undertand either of them, but, looking for the fabulous, he felt it was somethinng triumphantly American. Mr. Marcus, whose quarters could be seen across the way, had called his New York office to ask Stahr about the flood. The Prince imagined some intricate relationship without realizing that the transaction had taken place entirely within the once brilliant steel-trap mind of Mr. Marcus, which was intermittenly slipping. (Scribner 1969 ed., p.55-6)

Pondering "The Precious"

I haven't posted in a few days, but I have been using my time wisely: I just finished watching the extended versions of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Each film is about four hours long . . .
So the film reminded me of one particular session in my Nature Writers class. We were discussing e. e. cummings' "In Just" when one of the girls in my class found that the poem took on deeper shades of meaning--and was way creepier--when she read it in the voice of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films. Imagine the desperate, schizophrenic, terrified, gritty voice of the balloonman uttering the following lines

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little lame baloonman


whistles far and wee


and eddyandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring


when the world is puddle-wonderful


the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing


from hop-scotch and jump-rope and


it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed

baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

(To illustrate her version of the poem, she drew the picture above)

This reading always made me wonder if Gollum and the baloonman are similar in some other way, since the voice of one seems to lend insight to the character of another. When the poem is read as cummings wrote it, pausing at the larger spaces and hurrying through words squashed together, it seems that the children are moving with the speed of youthful excitement, but the (lame/queer old/ goat-footed) baloonman trudges behind with the determination of a killer in a horror movie. No matter how fast the children run, he knows he will catch them. He whistles eerily as he goes, confident he will get what he is after in the end. The poem itself does not indicate that the baloonman is moving at all--I didn't get that idea until my classmate read in in Gollum's voice. Now I picture the baloonman following the children as Gollum follows his Precious. And what is the baloonman's Precious? It's dancing, laughing children in springtime. It's innocence.

and
the
goat-footed


baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt on the Colbert Report!