After a couple of weeks of reading and rereading 272 pages, I am left with a choice of deciding whether I didn’t like this book, it wasn’t good, or it wasn’t for me. In the end, this one probably wasn’t for me. There is a zone where great writing and hard work meet, and in that zone the reader can fully inhabit the atmosphere or world that the writer intended to create. These works are challenging and rewarding. While I’m a casual Kerouac fan, the amount of work I would have to put in to understanding Book of Blues to get into the zone was not worth the payoff to me. I tried – I read poems over, I read them aloud, I read the foreward to better understand the context. In the end, I didn’t want put in more time comparing the Blues choruses to bop jazz.
Book of Blues, which was mostly written in the 1950s, contains eight “blues”, each of which is made up of a few to dozens of “choruses”. It’s musical in nature – sometimes profound, sometimes meticulous, and sometimes grating. (After all, not every blues and jazz jam is a winner.) They’re written in different times and places, covering New York, San Francisco, and other expected places. “Desolation Blues” was my favorite; the first chorus in particular. It’s quiet, meditative, and existential – my favorite version of Kerouac. An excerpt:
I stand on my head on Desolation Peak
And see that the world is hanging
Into an ocean of endless space
The mountains dripping rock by rock
Like bubbles in the void
And tending where they want-
That at night the shooting stars
Are swimming up to meet us
Yearning from the bottom black
But never make it, alas-
That we walk around clung
To earth
Like beetles with big brains
Ignorant of where we are, how,
What, & upside down like fools
– But Mount Hozomeen
The most beautiful mountain I ever seen,
Does nothing but sit & be a mountain