#(I'm furious with this alcoholic culture)
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yes agreed Kerouac fucking sucks...but I also don't like any beat literature. It's telling that the best author among his contemporaries was an amphetamine-addled trust-fund kid that murdered his wife.
Yeah Burroughs was a fun case lmao. I'm pretty sure he tried to tell the cops that they were pretending to be William Tell when he killed her. Seriously, all those guys were stoned out of their minds. Probably why their books are amazing if you're a 16-22 year old boy but utterly unrelatable if you aren't; there are tons of accounts online of dudes who read the Beats as teens and loved them but revisited them as adults and were like "wow these guys are losers."
Reading that one chapter of Dharma Bums where Kerouac's self-insert and his inserts of Snyder and Ginsberg do three-day-long alcoholic naked ritual fake-Buddhism sex with a shy local teenager was one of the most uncomfortable experiences I've ever had. I was like, wait, this book is based on his life, these characters are based off him and his friends, and he writes THIS??? And PUBLISHES IT???
The only Beat scribbles that I can somewhat tolerate are some of Ginsberg's poetry. "Howl" is pretty damn good, even if Ginsberg was kind of a weirdo. (sidenote: one of Kerouac's worst transgressions in my opinion was the section of Dharma Bums when he has his self-insert go to the San Francisco "Howl" reading and changed the poem's title to "Wail." Fucking Wail??? Really Jack? That word just doesn't have even a sliver of the impact and tone of the word 'howl'. A howl is something raw and primal, a hoarse, furious refrain. A wail is like a fucking baby that needs a nap or something.)
Something that always amused me about the Beats is that many of them are super aware that they're all self-destructive, miserable hedonists, but none of them do anything about it. All of Kerouac's self-inserts go through this weird nature detox where they swear off alcohol and become functioning human beings, but Kerouac died of liver failure in his mom's basement or some shit. The way Ginsberg describes the effects of substance use on his friends in "Howl" is graphic and objectively brutal (if I wasn't already convinced to never do drugs, that poem would've done it), but then he goes and makes street drugs out to be a religious imbibement akin to the blood and body of Christ. Hypocrisy about matters of self-care is everywhere in Beat literature when you start looking for it. Kinda wild.
Honestly, the more I think about it the more I think the best modern-day analogue for Kerouac in particular is fucking Ernest Cline. The Ready Player One guy. They're the same dude. They both have this fixation with the trappings of their youth (drugs for Kerouac, shitty arcade games for Cline), they both write books about self-insert characters obsessed with said trappings, both books portray the said characters as utterly despondent and in a downward spiral that they come out of while the authors are on that same downward spiral but show no signs of recovery. Obviously Cline hasn't died of whatever the '80s-pop-culture equivalent of cirrhosis is, but if you look at the way he completely half-assed RP2, character-assassinating Wade and Halliday in the process, and how he's reacted to criticism of his books, I think it's not an awful stretch to say that Cline is to RP1 Wade as Kerouac is to Ray Smith or whatever that guy's name was just in terms of how their characters can overcome their flaws but the men themselves just can't.
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I'm furious with that Callum from the Snuts...why is he trying to represent Louis as a raging alcoholic? It just plays into what haters say.
"And Louis can party, like, he can proper, I’m not joking, like. See, before they go on, they’ll just be in the dressing room and they’ve got all these mad drinking games. So there’ll just be a queue of people just going in, smashing like 10 shots before they go on. Everybody absolutely wrecked. Then afterwards we kind of went back and partied with him at his hotel. And he’s just constant just like, shot, shot, shot, shot.” - Callum Wilson
Oh anon - this is from a while back, but your response has really stuck with me, because it carries so much anxiety. So rather rudely and asked for - I'm going to offer some advice.
First of all - you sound very distressed at what Callum said. But turning your fury towards the person who told you something true that you found distressing is not a very good way of dealing with distress.
Second, you seem caught up with black and white thinking. People who hate Louis say he's an alcoholic and therefore you must deny it and buy into their ideas that it's shameful. That's a really damaging way of looking at the world - that gives people who hate Louis far too much power.
Here's an alternative way of looking at it - drinking a lot while touring and performing is a well known part of touring culture. Touring is a dangerous industry, and substances are part of that, but it's also true that people use substances to deal with some of the stresses of the industry and also because they're fun. It may be that Louis has addiction issues, it wouldn't be surprising given his family history or the industry that he's in, but if so addiction shouldn't be treated as shameful matter.
#Or to be very brief#people can do 10 shots before a gig#and not be an alcoholic#and there's no shame in alcoholism
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Okay so I no very little about discworld... What is today? Why is it special? Feel free to rant Bobbie, I'm willing to listen ^_^
Today is the Glorious 25th of May!
Honestly, everybody’s got their own favorite set of Discworld characters, and mine has always been the City Watch and Sam Vimes -- to the point that I feel like Vimes has a lot to do with who I’ve become as a person as I got older. And the sixth book in the Watch series, Night Watch, is I think something really special for a few reasons. It’s really the culmination of Sam’s personal character arc, for one thing, and as fits a character who I think is so excellently written, and who grows in such a fascinating way, it’s an incredibly powerful place to arrive to having followed Sam all along that journey.
His introductory scene in Guards! Guards! is of him passing out drunk in a gutter, a bitter alcoholic with a meaningless job whose philosophy is always to walk towards cries for help, not run, because running might mean you’d get there in time for a fight. By Night Watch, Sam Vimes is a person who has ground the drive to help others into the fabric of himself so thoroughly that it’s not even a choice for him anymore -- the choice has already been made. It’s a fundamental part of who he is, that even knowing he will lose everything he loves, even knowing he cannot succeed, even not wanting to, it is impossible for him not to try to do the right thing. And he wasn’t that person when you first met him. He became who he is, hard-won inch by inch, through deliberate and difficult work to be better, to understand others, to help. That’s a choice you can make, this book says. It’s a choice you can make.
And Night Watch stands out in other ways in the context of its fellow Discworld books, too. It’s the least comedic book in a comedy series. It’s about failed revolutions, about profound suffering on both an individual and communal level, about injustice and death and loss and survivor’s trauma and sacrifice. It’s about the way that government and that police forces enable and benefit from people who enjoy the suffering of others. It’s about Sam Vimes, happy soon-to-be father, with his hard-won sobriety and equally hard-won confidence in his own ability to make a difference if he’s just bullheadedly fucking stubborn enough, being yanked back in time thirty years to the events of the totalitarian government and failed revolution that made him Sam Vimes the embittered pessimistic drunk, and asked what he thinks he’s going to do about it. There are still jokes, to be sure, but there are fewer of them, and they hit differently.
It’s dark, without question. It’s Terry’s very clear take on Les Miserables, another story that’s had a huge effect on me as a person, and in particular I think on the popular culture idea of Les Mis -- the glorious failed revolution, with its young idealists and hopeful conclusion that does not clarify where the presumed better future is going to come from, or how it comes out of the suffering that’s just been shown. It’s even bitter, at times. But it’s never hopeless. It’s never gritty or pessimistic or hateful.
I saw someone say once that Terry Pratchett was a very angry man, and I think that shines through every Discworld book but is clearest in Night Watch -- it’s an anger at suffering, at injustice, at those who profit from the suffering of others, and it’s anger expressed in a kind of bright furious love, and a refusal that suffuses every bit of those books -- a refusal to just stand there and say that nothing can be done. A refusal to do anything, ever, except stand up and say no, this is not right, simply because it is the only thing to be done, the only thing that can be done. Night Watch is very, very clear on the fact that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about this, nothing to be adulated or mythologized. It’s something that hurts to do. It’s something that comes with a profound cost. You do it anyway.
It’s an incredibly powerful book, I think, especially with the context of its fellows. (Night Watch is one of the few Discworld books I caution people against starting with, just because I think it gains so, so much from the specific place it occupies and from how different it is once you’ve grown used to other books in the series.) The power of its central character and his fellows, the power of the ideas at the heart of it, the simple effectiveness of the images it chooses to center around -- the blooming lilacs, a little soldier’s ditty about angels, a barricade, an egg.
In one scene a few of those youthful idealist revolutionaries sit around and discuss what they want from the bright new world they plan to make -- Truth, Justice, Freedom, and Reasonably Priced Love, is what they settle on (reasonably priced, as opposed to free love, because several of those fighting and working on their barricade are sex workers, and they had opinions on that). When they ask Sam Vimes what he wants from the future, he says he’d like a hard-boiled egg, because unlike everything else on the list, he’s pretty sure he’ll be able to get it, no problem.
So, every year, we break out our egg cups and wear our sprigs of lilac and commemmorate the short life of the People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road, of the revolution of the Glorious 25th of May. We honor Terry Pratchett, whose books gave us all so much, and raise awareness for Alzheimer’s. I think about people I’ve lost. I think about what there is out there that I can do. I think about rereading the Watch books yet again.
It’s a good thing to celebrate, I think.
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*****
I imagine the Teen Years are a bit of a struggle for anyone in any Culture and throughout History. Raging Hormones quickly cascade over every decision. Peer Group Pressure plays a huge part in the desire to belong. Being shunned at any age is crushing, but in the Teen Years may be particularly devastating.
Addiction is CRUSHING.
Did I change the subject?
Read on...
*****
From an ADDICTION Stunted Youth to Living in RECOVERY and Finding Truth
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Adolescence: That fast and furious plunge from childhood to adulthood. Growth spurts, knee-jerk reactions, hormonal changes, expectations, fears. The body, brain and spirit surge forward almost too fast to assimilate.
I did not fully know then how much wanting to fit in with my peer group was to me. No jigsaw puzzle comes with an extra piece. I felt like I was that extra piece, perhaps from a different puzzle altogether. Every game I played as a kid had rules. Even when I lost, at least I knew the rules and how to play.
Drinking seemed to have no such rules except don't get caught until you've reached the legal drinking age. Drinking fit me, made me feel like I did fit in, whether I understood what the puzzle was or not.
That's how it started. Warmth, freedom, protection. An aid for human connection until someone might come along to find me and rescue me from myself. Juvenile thinking. I know. Not even thinking. Face it. Feelings. Juvenile feelings. Alcohol eventually became more and more a convenient substitute for self-discovery and human connection. Short term, a quick fix.
It fixed me alright. The more alcohol I swallowed, the more it swallowed me.
A Tall, Dark Stranger is what I wanted alcohol to be for me. Deep down, beneath it all, that's what alcohol was for me. A solution outside myself. The anything that was anything but me. It worked until it didn't work. And it didn't work for decades.
Alcohol was my Tall, Dark Stranger until it wasn't. It slowly morphed in the most gigantic ways possible. Warmth, freedom, connection... Gone. Alcohol became "my poison, my prison. A brick wall, a trap door, a cancer, a bad joke, an empty bottle, an excuse, a leaky faucet, a loan shark, a broken promise, a cracked mirror, an earthquake, an avalanche, a train wreck, a recurring nightmare."
Alcohol became my insanity.... And I never grew up.
I did not drink today. Or yesterday. Or for the last 16 some years or so. Now I'm in the Terrible Teens of Recovery!
So it's "Look Out World! I did not drink today!"
Now anything is possible so long as I abstain. My juvenile obsession for a quick fix has been replaced by long, slow years of joyous recovery. Eventually outgrowing my peer group, many, many, many years later, I have at last rejoined the human race.
Truly in my Second Teenage Years, maybe I'll grow up to be an adult this time. When asked "What Should I do?," I've heard some demurely murmur, "Ask yourself... What Would an Adult Do?"
Sober, I'm finding out now what I'll be when I grow up.
*****
Passages in quotes are excerpted from ALL DRINKING ASIDE: The Destruction, Deconstruction & Reconstruction of an Alcoholic Animal
On Amazon. Book it here: http://amzn.to/1bX6JyO
6,600+ Recovery Tweets here: http://twitter.com/JimAnders4
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