On The Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac

First Edition
Book: Fine, DJ: Fine
Viking, 2007
408 Pages

In Howard Cunnell's essay, which starts this publication of Kerouac's On the Road, there's a letter from Kerouac that says that he wrote "the whole thing on a strip of paper 120 feet long . . . just rolled it through the typewriter and in fact no paragraphs . . . rolled it out on the floor and it looked like a road." That's the way it was originally: no breaks, minimal punctuation. Makes Cormac McCarthy look like Henry James. OK, that's really going too far.
Point is, the effect of the original scroll is mind blowing. It's hard to put the book down at night because your reading the accounts of a young man's life without breaks, without pauses, and without anything artificial holding you from the subject. Even the names are the same; Allen Ginsberg is Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy is Neal Cassidy. The relationship between them is unedited by Viking, Scribner, or any other publishing house that's had its hand on the novel.
I'll bet their are traces of amphetamines all over that scroll.
On the Road was my Catcher in the Rye. It was the book that I read at just the right age to send me over the edge, at least until I turned twenty. I dug that book; I "grokked" that book. That book opened my mind to new ideas that were both enticing and dangerous.
I began reading books heavily during my senior year of high school. I didn't think I was going to college; I wasn't into sports, so I spent all of my academic time reading whatever I wanted. With the help of the school librarian, I was soon reading Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Gary Schneider, and of course, Kerouac. At the time, On the Road didn't seen that influential, but I think the culminating effects of all those writers changed me into a rebellious yet conscientious young man.
For a graduation present, my sister bought me a one-way ticket to Honolulu leaving from Seattle. I have no idea where she found it as this was before the internet and we both lived in Colorado. Having just finished Kerouac's book, I decided to hitch-hike to Seattle, a naive move on behalf of my then rosy-cheeked, seventeen-year-old self.
One memory from the trip (which was packed full of memories) that I'll share is as follows: On the first day of traveling I was waiting for a ride outside of Parachute, Colorado when this guy comes running down the road yelling, "I'm gonna steal your ride!" He was kidding. He was also hitch-hiking, traveling to San Francisco, having just finished a master's program at the University of Colorado. I'm not sure, but I'm going to guess he was a literature student, because not one ride into our time together he pulled out a copy of On the Road and asked if I'd read it.
He was a great guy, yelling "I have more education than you do!" at every car that passed us. We made it as far as the turn off to Moab on I-70 that night and slept in the dirt about 200 yards into the sagebrush. He kept saying he'd wake me up when a train came by and we'd hop it. I was thankful he fell asleep before I did.
We traveled together until we hit Salt Lake City. He wanted to finally jump a train and I found an on ramp heading north. I've never seen him since.
I've told stories from that trip, which include propositions for sex (I'd be getting to money), a ten-night party in some of the finest houses in Honolulu (no, they didn't involve prostitution), and the eventual highway robbery in rural Nevada. I think I owe these stories to Jack Kerouac, and had I not read his book when I did, I think I wouldn't be the person I am today.
Here's to fifty years.

Clown Girl by Monica Drake

Advanced reader's Copy
Soft cover
Near Fine but for a slight bump at the top of the spine
Hawthorne Books, 2006

When I was 19, I was living with some eccentric friends on Navajo Street in Denver. We had one of those televisions that had the thirteen channels and the second knob that got you a few more stations that broadcast Christian and Spanish-speaking shows. We also had four movies on VHS: The Exorcist, Eraserhead, Blade Runner, and Shakes the Clown.
The video that got the most playtime was Shakes the Clown. My house mates and I must have watched that movie over 50 times. It was a companion while washing dishes, and white noise while having company over. To this day, I can still nearly quote the entire movie from opening credits to close -- a talent gone unappreciated by my wife and friends.
When my wife saw an advanced readers copy of Monica Drake's Clown Girl, she knew she'd found me a gift I'd relish. here was a novel with collector's potential that concerned itself with the bizarre world of clowning. Here was a fictional world in which I could enshroud myself, like adorning a cherry-red wig, parachute pants and a Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat Vest.
To further my glee, Drake's novel has an introduction by Chuck Palahniuk, with whom she shared space at a writing workshop, long before the days of Fight Club. In the introduction, Palahniuk says that everyone waited, week after week, for Drake's sessional reading. According to the author of Rant, Drake was his rival, reading enticing tales of poverty and adventure, like how her characters would rifle through trash bins by the supermarket, searching for receipts because $200 worth of purchases got you a dozen eggs for 25 cents.
Drake's protagonist, Sniffles, is just such a character: a down-and-out party clown riding the line between selling-out and selling-art. Sniffles lives on the wrong side of the tracks with her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend and his body-building lover. She's waiting for her boyfriend Rex to come home from clown college and sweep her into a life of performance-art bliss, but has to scrape by until then, dealing with her paranoid house mates, fighting off advances from coulrophiles, and collecting urine for doctor's tests.
While all of these twists make for a really interesting main character (she is in full-clown makeup throughout the novel), most of the plot is obvious; every time the reader thinks something might happen, it does. For instance, Sniffles leaves her jug of urine in the refrigerator, unmarked. What happens next? That's right, someone drinks it. Sniffles doesn't mow the lawn for many months and it goes long and dry and then she wants to try juggling fire in the backyard. What happens? Yup, she burns up the lot. Even the main dilemma, where she's waiting for Rex but meets a cop with whom she takes a shining, is cute but typical in it's star-crossed-lovers approach.
Despite the obvious, Clown Girl had some really good themes. Like Palahniuk's Fight Club, Clown Girl is about the layers in which we hide ourselves. Where Tyler Durdon would say "You are not your furniture," (or in my case, my book collection), Drake's cop Jerrod would say, "You are not your clown uniform." Both Fight Club and Clown Girl are about identity and the societal layers in which we bury ourselves. Clown, cop, teacher, bookseller, librarian, guru, sexologist, or dog food taste-tester, we all dress and act appropriately, and when you're done saying, "You are not your big shoes/holstered gun/summer reading list/sexy hair bun/religious power-point/vibrating cock-ring/indigestion," you have to ask, "OK, so what the hell am I?" In Sniffles case, she's Nita, and Nita decides that beneath all her garb she's simply accountable for the choices she makes.
Hey, I think that's the message behind Shakes the Clown as well! Shakes is hiding behind his alcoholism and not being accountable for his messed-up life. As Owen Cheese says when picking up Shakes from jail, "That's the difference between a clown, and a really good clown."

The Disinherited by Jack Conroy

First Edition
Inscribed
Book: VG/DJ: Good+
Book has a bit of foxing, binding is very slightly cocked, but otherwise tight and clean.
Dust Jacket had five small chips, a little fading and soil, but is not price clipped.
Covici-Friede, 1933

Where do I begin with this wonderful book? Happy Labor Day.
I found this book at a living-estate sale that looked more like a garage sale than anything else. You'll hate me for my luck, but this was my first visit to an estate/garage sale with the intent to look for books (subsequent tours have proven dismally unsuccessful). I'd missed the first day of the sale and had driven out to where the classified ad directed me early Sunday afternoon.
I saw the book and nearly passed it up because of the soiling, but upon opening the book I saw the inscription, "Best wishes to my friend Joseph Singer -- Jack Conroy," so I thought I'd chance it. Furthermore, I thought I remembered seeing that striking cover before: Murray Levin's depiction of a line of hunched workers, beaten down, sans individuality.
When the woman running the sale saw me eying the book she said that it was her father-in-law's and that there was another book on the table by the same author. I rummaged through a few piles and found a 1935 first edition copy of Conroy's A World to Win, also inscribed. The woman told me that her father-in-law was a novice writer and that he had some poetry published in a few anthologies. I looked interested, but nonchalant, and bought both books for five dollars.
Upon returning home I fired up AbeBooks to see what I'd got and was flabbergasted by what I found: The Disinherited was a rare and seemingly sought-after book. There was (and still is) only one other copy on Abe that was both inscribed and had a dust jacket, and it was going for $1250. Conroy's other title, A World to Win, was being offered for $150 with no inscription. I was very happy, finally having something with which to justify my expensive hobby to my wife.
Yes, my wife was elated when I told her of my find. She went online and used her magic-Googling powers to eek out a connection between Jack Conroy and Joseph Singer. She found a few Joseph Singers in the field of socialist activism in the 1930s, but the name was common, and Jewish social activists were uber-abundant in pre-World War II America.
Finally she came across a database listing the artifacts in a collection of Jack Conroy's writings at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Among the letters listed was one from Joseph Singer addressed to Jack Conroy. She wrote the library and asked for a copy of the letter, which arrived without haste. The letter showed that Mr. Singer lived in Salem, Oregon and was not only an aspiring writer, but a bit of an activist as well. He wrote about attending meetings of the hop-yard workers and passing out copies of Conroy's publication, The Anvil. Singer' also remarked on the great use of diction that helped create terrific characters, like Hans, the machine-crippled auto-worker turned socialist.
I found a reader's copy of The Disinherited published in 1963 at the Night Library on the University of Oregon campus and read it while vacationing in Colorado. The story is of Larry Donovan's life of labor: from working at the Monkey Nest Coal Mine near Moberly, Missouri, to working in the auto factories in Detroit. Larry experiences the hardships of the American laborer, struggling to gain a foothold in a world run by bosses and investors.
Most interesting was Conroy's depiction of the Great Depression. It was disheartening watching young, able men and women have their lives cast into arrested development by a system that had exploited them from the first. Also of note was the impact of the automobile on a populace of striving, hungry people and the descriptions of the Hoovervilles across the country. Coming out in 1933, I can see The Disinherited taking it's place among other populace books like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Three Soldiers by Dos Passos. Christopher Buckley comes to mind as a modern author trying to change the world for the better through literature. I just read Boomsday, and while the scenario presented in it isn't as dire (yet) as the one posed in The Disinherited, I like the call to activism presented in it.
I've got to give it to Conroy and those like him, they saw the injustice and set out to change it. His world brings a Bob Dylan quote to mind, "A lot of people don't have much food on their tables, but they got a lot of forks and knives, and they gotta cut something."
Hmm . . . Happy labor day.