Word: hobohemians
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Dates: during 1958-1958
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...prayer, and some of his meditations are beguiling, as when he contemplates "David 0. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha." A hip peg in a square world, Ray meets his oddball twin in Japhy Ryder, a twinkly-eyed Zen Buddhist hobohemian who lives in a shack at Berkeley, Calif. Japhy's remedy for a "sick civilization" is mountain climbing. But before the two buddies hit the trail, Japhy initiates Ray in a nonascetic pastime he calls "yabyum,"*and it makes such fictional standbys as nude mixed bathing seem mid-Victorian. A yabyummy blonde compliantly...
...Hobohemian Thoreaus. The Subterraneans celebrates that "systematic derangement of the senses" from which Rimbaud concocted his visions of hell. The difference is that Jack Kerouac, ex-merchant seaman, ex-railroad brakeman, is not Rimbaud but a kind of latrine laureate of Hobohemia. The story line of The Subterraneans is simple and stark: it concerns a short, manic-depressive love affair between a "big paranoic bum" and occasional writer named Leo Percepied and a near-insane Negro girl named Mardou Fox. Says Kerouac: "I wrote this book in three full-moon nights," and it reads that way. The details...