"Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say..."

"... anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter — as indissolubly as if they were conceived together."

Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.

ADDED: For comparison: "Something that you feel will find its own form."

"In the college life of Barack Obama in 1961 and 1962, as recounted by his friends and acquaintances in Honolulu, there was no Ann; there was no baby."

Writes David Maraniss, at page 171 of "Barack Obama."

In Neil Abercrombie’s crowd, the antiestablishment group that carried on a movable conversation from the Snack Bar on campus to George’s Inn and Peter Gilpin’s apartment, only Abercrombie himself could dredge up memories of Ann Dunham in 1960. By the following year, the year he was married and had a hapa son, Obama had developed another large network of friends and acquaintances on campus....

Here's what Abercrombie remembered (pp. 157-158):

These gatherings, they weren’t necessarily formal, but we would see each other and all that. She made her appearance, but she was a girl. And what I mean by that is she was only eighteen [still seventeen, in fact, until November 29]. She had just got out of high school the year before, she was a freshman, and he met her and he brought her at different times.… She mostly observed because she was a kid, among other things. Everybody there was pretty high-powered grad student types, and the women were older. She never participated much in the discussions, but she was obviously interested and obviously interested in Barack. He always saw himself in charge of everything. And don’t forget he was also very much a man of his time. We’re talking the nineteen-fifties culture and we are just beginning to talk about patriarchy, just beginning to try to figure out what feminism is all about, just beginning. In the Beat era women were still seen as servicing men. They hadn’t gotten past that, or even in remotely understanding that dynamic. The whole Kerouac era when you read it now is almost misogynistic. As Thoreau said, you drag your cultural baggage through life with you. In any event, Barack, I expect he dominated the relationship is what I’m trying to say.

As Maraniss puts it, Dunham and Obama Sr.'s "time... together" was "a brief point of confluence with few witnesses or supporting documents." They did marry, after she became pregnant, but he already had another wife, and they don't seem to have lived together.  A friend from that period described Obama Sr.'s apartment:

“I could see no sign of other inhabitants,” [Robert] Ruenitz said. “It was monastic at best. A study table and a bed and a light. It was not a dorm. It was private. I think he had a landlord who had built a small attachment to their house. It was small, and I think he had a hot plate for coffee; not very well appointed. It was not close [to campus], but I think each day he would walk to school.”

Maraniss says — at pages 175-176 — that apartment "reflected the reality of a man who was married in name only."

Within a month of the day Barry came home from the hospital, he and his mother were long gone from Honolulu, back on the mainland, returned to the more familiar turf of Mercer Island and Seattle and the campus of the University of Washington. The question of why they left is what lingers, unresolved. This period, Washington State revisited, is missing from the memoir the son would write decades later. In his account, the family breach would not occur until 1963, when his father left the island. That version of events is inaccurate in two ways. The date: his father was gone from Hawaii by June 1962, less than a year after Barry was born, not 1963. And the order: it was his mother who left Hawaii first, a year earlier than his father. 

Maraniss surmises that Dunham left because of the apparent bigamy. He notes that there might have been physical abuse, though the only evidence is Obama Sr.'s abuse of his next wife. He doesn't mention what would seem to me to be the easiest explanation: That Obama Sr. married Stanley Ann Dunham only to make the baby "legitimate," and there was never a prospect of living together as a family. That fits the facts, including the fact that Dunham didn't want to talk about any of the details.

ADDED: There is a subsequent letter written by Obama Sr. that refers to "my wife" — not "my former wife — "in Nairobi" (p. 180). This letter makes no mention of the additional wife, Stanley Ann.

"Unless you revive it by rereading it, re-imagining it, performing it, it’s a dead thing..."

"You have to reread it to make it live again."

Except we're not rereading it. It's a movie: "On the Road," which, oddly, has never been made into a movie (despite many abortive efforts over the last 6 decades).

If you actually want to read it — would it be a reread for you? — buy it here. Amazon suggests making a triple feature out of "On the Road," "Howl," and "Naked Lunch."

"The only people for me are the mad ones..."

"... the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"

A sentence written by Jack Kerouac, submitted in a contest to pick the best sentences, chosen as one of the 3 best sentences, by Stanley Fish, who has written a book called "How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One," which I just bought, and you could buy too, using this link, causing Amazon to send 8% of the purchase price to me and making me go "Awww!"

Jack Kerouac did not text.

I need to get some blogging up, and I actually have about 5 things I've been meaning to write, that is, after the completion of various Sunday morning activities, such as transforming the corn leftover from last night into breakfast and analyzing why I didn't quite replicate my mother's corn fritters. But somehow, I'm reading the comments over on Richard's blog — not even my own blog.

(I did read some of my blog's comments on my iPhone in the middle of the night, and I'd just like to say, Lem, I'm sorry no one was in the buckets of flowers with you last night to say, yes, we're your friends and thanks for telling us that you've found comfort here.)

Anyway, over at Richard's, Penny commented:

I just noticed your new blog header. NICE! I like it a lot. I do have one comment though. Pen authors need to watch out for what I will call "texting creep".

That refers to the quote in Richard's banner:

SCRIBBLED SECRET NOTEBOOKS, AND WILD TYPEWRITTEN PAGES, FOR YR OWN JOY... SUBMISSIVE TO EVERYTHING, OPEN, LISTENING... SOMETHING THAT YOU FEEL WILL FIND ITS OWN FORM. --JACK KEROUAC, FROM "BELIEF AND TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE"

Kerouac wrote "yr," long before anybody was indulging in rampant abbreviation for texting purposes. I'd read that quote in Richard's banner many times, but this morning was the first time I was moved to Google the quote. I wanted to make sure of what I was already sure of, that the abbreviation was Kerouac's. And the cool thing about that, for which I offer a penny to Penny, is that I found the whole context, "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose," which is written — Richard elides this — as a numbered list. I love lists, especially numbered lists.

(We've been eating salads from that 101 salads list, and, for example, #2 really is — as billed — "[a]stonishing.")

There are only 30 items on Kerouac's list, so it's easier to read than not to read. Nevertheless, I'll copy a few here, with commentary:

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

And don't even yell as if u were drunk outside yr house, especially at a cop.

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

Consider it done! Since 2004.

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

I often write bottomless. Much more than topless. Because I like to write in bed.

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

K.

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

Would all the political bloggers please take a day to do exactly this? Then, if you can do it, do it all the time.

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea...
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

See? Blog!

And text, if u want 2.

Is this the one reason we need paper newspapers?

WaPo's Hank Stuever says:

Hi everyone. I just fought my way into the Post building on 15th Street -- there is a huge mob out there wanting to buy copies of today's paper as a souvenir. Somehow they are not content to stand at the window and gaze admiringly on our new flat screens in the lobby showing our WaPo Media family of web sites.

In: Newspapers!

Seriously, you could probably get a few bucks for your copy, if you're done with it, if you are cool enough to read the actual paper. Of course, some hipster who looks like Mac Guy could go out there and suggest to this crowd that they could just bookmark a web page and save it for posterity! On their 3g iPhone! If so, I hope they pummel him to death.

I don't know what Hank Stuever looks like, but I'm picturing this:



And I'm assuming he writes out letters to loved ones longhand, because if he's emailing and IM-ing, they're just going to have a digital file-folder on some cold, sad hard drive.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo writes:

Several years ago I was reading about researchers and archivists who were worried about the lack of permanence embedded in modern technology.

Things written with pencil and paper last a really long time. We auction off the original manuscript scroll for Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road' and search for copies of a first edition novel, signed.

Historians have discovered to their horror that electroinc data fades quickly, or becomes impossible to use because the hardware that created it no longer exists. Floppy discs, for example.

The tyranny of the modern affects voting in real time as well. Paper ballots can be scrutinized. Electronic ones fail to be recorded, are easily manipulated, and can be erased in a flash.

High tech communication is alot like writing in sand on the beach.

I am no luddite, but my conservative philosophy extends even here. Mocking letters to loved ones written in longhand betrays the hubris of the modern, who do not see how evanescent they have become, how easily they disappear, like so many electrons.

I have some cold, sad hard drives that died and cannot be read. What they contained is now forever lost. So, too IMs and e-mails.

Similarly, with one small error by some Google techie, this blog can disappear completely and irretrievably.

It's one thing to believe that building your house on a rock means it will last forever, but quite another to build it on sand, thinking it makes no difference at all, that the house on the rock is just for laughable squares in cheap and ill-fitting suits.