Word: zenning
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...than The Subterraneans, but it reconfirms Kerouac's literary role as a kind of Tom Thumb Wolfe in hip clothing. Like other Kerouac novels, the book has the sound of jazzed-up autobiography, and the most fictional thing about it may well be the brand of Buddhism (ostensibly Zen) that the beat hero and his pals preach and practice...
...Paradise." He is a bug on 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...
Compounded Enigmas. Just what it is and why it is important is as much a mystery to the broad-U.S. public as to puzzled Europeans. And not without reason. U.S. abstractionists discuss what they are doing in enigmas that would win kudos from a Zen master. Painter Franz Kline, asked what he was trying to express, replied: "When I was young, I was 19. Does that answer your question?" With few exceptions, critics do little better. Art News once described one of Mark Rothko's works as "haunted, like the shining skin of an opulent eggplant...
...Zen of the old Chinese masters, says Watts, was wu-shih, which means "nothing special," or "no fuss." Bohemian affectations or monastery meditations are both forms of fuss, "and I will admit that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an article as this, is also fuss-but a little less...
Concludes Watts: "Having said that, I would like to say something for all Zen fussers, beat or square. Fuss is all right, too. If you are hung on Zen, there's no need to try to pretend that you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free country. In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;/ The flowering branches grow...