Word: zens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...said, kissing her, digging her, all choked up with love and Zen and a mouthful of popcorn to go with the beer. "Sam is giving me a big party, and then I got to go." Sam was my friend and he was hip and I called...
...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...
This vision helps to illustrate Author Kerouac's unhappy faculty for confusing freedom with irresponsibility, for abusing the Zen Buddhist idea of the inseparability of good and evil by using it as an excuse for self-indulgence. Kerouac's protest against the urban work life (which he once called "the midtown sillies world") and the suburban home life of the U.S. middle class ("all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen") is trenchant but scarce!" new. And Kerouac's cult of "spontaneous writing" makes his pages at least as sloppy as they are sprightly...
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...