Isola di Rifiuti's reading Kerouac:--
Beyond the joys of pure rhythmic clatter and shift, isn’t there in Kerouac a breeze willingness to come spoutingly close to nonsense, as if the present American vernacular simply cannot contain what he’s saying. I love the moments—kin to a blues guitarist stretching a string, pulling out a long blue grace note, or air-thrashing amp-tight in full-feedback, making the electronic overload do the talking—where Kerouac simply makes up the words, little splurges of talking in tongues. Phrases like “spluttrous inheld explosions of dont-laugh” or “lamplit oil house flimmered in a glub of night trees” or “incarnate dirt behung in drapes of grain by level deep doop dung” or “spermatazoing in all directions” or “a rosecovered cottage flat on the dreaming lurps and purls of the Merrimac” or (swimming in that Thoreauvian stream now bedung’d):
—where regularly you saw lumps of human shit floating—I have nightmares of swallowing a cud of crap when I get up on my half rock and point hands to dive, by God I learned to dive by myself by half submerging to my waist—but there’s these turds floating in the river of time and I‘m ready to sprowf myself one up, flubadegud—
Think how precise “half rock” is, and “point hands to dive” and how “sprowf” rejects the thing it ingests, a visceral gag-reflex of a word: it’s the all-assault precision of Kerouac that allows in things like “river of time”—just another springboard (abstract) cantilever’d out over the all, another dive into it. Does it—Kerouac’s racing pulse, picking up whatever sound-confab comes along the ear-ways—fit in against Clark Coolidge’s sense of Free Jazz—“these guys made a time where there was no strong or weak beat. It was all like one-one-one-one-one-one-one to infinity. In other words you could play anything at all over that time, you could go anywhere and not worry about how to come back”?
