It's a deceptively masterful opening, one any writer, laboring over notebooks, would recognize. "Hateful ol' Duluoz me," he calls himself. He remembers childhood. He takes us up to where he is now. Lyrical words, riffs on Hozomeen, the mountain where he is a fire lookout. The opening is proof to me that any writer doing his scales will come up with something good, a shape that is deeply recognizable, as if out of some pattern not exactly the same but akin to the patterns found in holy writings, here more individual, human, prayerful, confessional than a laying down of the law. It's a way we wake up to many a day.
We know Kerouac did his scales. Here, as in other places, the fruits of his labor, complicated, complex, worth reading as anything.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment