A Time Gone By

I've slowly been making my way through the pile of books on the nightstand and have gotten to Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), which I bought in Portland 2½ years ago. Jack Kerouac's writing is consistent with the language and style of half a century ago, and one easily gets a sense of how rapidly cultural references are changing. It's unlikely that younger, educated readers will understand all four of the highlighted terms below (I didn't know "pulled wrists").

I went to the cold-water flat with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen, probably to make coffee, while he proceeded with his love-problems, for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on.

You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand “Yeses” and “That’s rights.” My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West. In fact he’d just been working on a ranch, Ed Wall’s in Colorado, before marrying Marylou and coming East. Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things. That night we all drank beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking, and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor. “In other words we’ve got to get on the ball, darling, what I’m saying, otherwise it’ll be fluctuating and lack of true knowledge or crystallization of our plans.” Then I went away.

cold-water flat: early-to-mid 20th-century apartments had running water, but real luxury was having water heaters and separate pipes for hot water. Perhaps the last cold-water flat in New York City was being rented for $28 per month in 2018.

Gene Autry (1907-1998): popular Oklahoma singer, movie star, TV actor and producer, and owner of the California Angels, Gene Autry "is the only entertainer to have all five stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one each for Radio, Recording, Motion Pictures, Television, and Live Theatre/performance."

Seated Nude (1918)

longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman: Amedeo Modigliani was "a painter and sculptor known for his simplified and elongated forms." Like Vincent Van Gogh, Modigliani (1884-1920) died destitute and was not highly regarded in his lifetime; one of his paintings sold for $157 million in 2018.

pulled wrists: arm-wrestling.

His prose has a kinetic energy, and I do admire his descriptions, so I'll read a few pages of Jack Kerouac every day.