From the highest newspaper in the land, their highest section arguably, the book review, Sunday, August 8, 2010. Kerouac's correspondence with Ginsberg. Picking up where the letters venture into Buddhist discussions: '... there is even more of the blowhard grandiosity, too, with Ginsberg supplying the usual indiscriminate applause, the absence of which we might have been spared The Dharma Bums" (1958).

Hmm. Is it odd that two writers considering methods of transcribing moments of daily reality, maybe even, through explorations of word, thought and text and captured dialogue and events, consider that there may be some meaning behind the events and the moments of daily reality, such that might be applicable as maybe even laws of science of nature and physics are, would stop to consider the Buddha's take on consciousness?

Okay, maybe The Dharma Bums isn't the finest of Kerouac, for it's quickness from point a to point b. But, it is an historical record, the continuation of an important and meaningful event in the history of prose. It is a book worth reading. Writers have to keep on writing, after all. Spared? "You have offended the holy spirit, my friend," as he himself might have said, did say.


And then a previous Sunday, catching up with the latest interpretations of Emily Dickinson, in the same pages, the lines, 'my life had stood -- a loaded gun in corners-- till a day the owner passed --identified-- and carried me away.' An author has come along and written a fine historical book and came up with, guess what, that the Dickinson's behind their daguerrotypes, stiff collars, high and concrete social standing and puritanical heritage were flesh and blood, maybe even tempestuous, crazy, volcanoes simmering. A nifty explanation of a few lines of poetry I can't help but feel to be taken completely out of context.

Here again the artist of prose and poetry is coming to terms with capturing the essence of day to day reality. Seriously, let's give credit to her as a poet, to her poems as poetry, beautiful and high called ones at that, most of them quite beyond the scope of the normal bickering humans are involved in. Nature, seasons, great passions seen in a context that makes them beautiful in their being free of importance. "All but death is adjustable."

This is not the poetry of inflaming, as passionate as they, the poems, are.

Yes, if we have to take Emily in the context of her family, its psychology, strifes, her brother's affair, etc., we are told a story, but it doesn't bring us any closer to the poems. Okay, of course her life has something to do with it, but, is that all there is? Yes, it's true, a gun, loaded, leaned in a corner, is far less likely to fall over, and fire, then it would be leaned up against a wall. But that there is an owner beyond her, identifiable, that it carries her off to be, like 'him,' a silent assassin, the assassin of her dead eye poetics... that's the sense this reader gets, as one thinks an important poem addresses her art, her ways of making it. She has been released from the illusion of self which has kept her stuck away in a corner not doing anything productive or heaven sent.

Something transcendental came to Emily in the grace of her silence, and she was perfectly comfortable with being taken away, to find her fresh selflessness leading the way to higher poetry. She is informed, as if she had encountered something very much akin to a Buddhist examination of deeper reality.

You have to give credit to the NY Times Book Review for acknowledging the root source documents of meaningful American Literature and calling it a valid calling. But maybe one comes away with a sense that the editorial voices want to steer away from getting too weird, to drag back achieving voices from the high outlook of sought enlightenment back down into the world of people seeking happiness by going out and buying stuff, by subscribing to one side of a polemic, bringing them back to that most justifiable of illusions, that of concrete self, a self with my needs pitted against others, my achievement is greater than yours.

So are the likes of Kerouac and Dickinson obscured, their accomplishments nullified as for having any real power or 'truth,' reduced to labels we'll never find any truth in no matter how long and deeply we might gossip, sexual identity, possible afflicting ailments, stuff we'll never know, but which a reviewer, paid, and finding self-promotion in, is happy to claim ultimate knowledge of.

New York Times, this summer, in the book review, in the case of two particular New Englanders: 0 for 2. A pattern?

Come on, guys. Same old stuff. The trendy stuff the book review has fallen into for years, producing kitsch, accusing another of one's own worst faults.

What's next? Andrew Wyeth is cheesy? (Christina's World, who needs all that grass?) Lincoln expendable for carrying his family/paternal drama forward into each and every telegraph, letter and executive decision? (That Second Inaugural, why weren't we spared it, so we could go on our business.) Lincoln has the upper hand over such biographers and book reviewers for sparing them ammunition... though these days, the slightest thing will set them a'tick.

Well, artists are tricky people to put into boxes. But for every know-it-all, there needs to be an artist's response. Or else we lose the picture.