Don't know whether I can write anything interesting now that I'm back in the USA but I intend to keep trying until I get back to Oakland on August 20.
The trip to the airport on the new, modern Gau Line rail system (it links Pretoria to Johannesburg with a shunt to the airport) was fun and instructive. The line (which was finished only two weeks ago) is already a political football as the Left decries it as serving only the rich, generally White, patrons. I can confirm that 90% of the passengers on my trip were White suburbanites. It was a little eerie to see all those Black employees catering to the White riders.
The plane to NYC was uneventful. I tried to beat the jet lag blues by taking a sleeping pill eight hours before we arrived in North America but it didn't entirely work--or maybe I was just fatigued from the long (15 hour) flight. I was able to get to my New York home-away-from-home, the Gershwin Hotel on East 27th Street, but couldn't check in so early in the morning. So I headed off to The Strand bookstore and got a copy of Janet Malcolm's tome about Gertrude Stein. Odd that one of my favorite writers was interested in a subject that has fascinated me for over ten years: how did Gertrude and her lesbian lover, Alice Toklas, survive in Nazi-occupied France for nearly five years? Remember that both ladies were Jewish. I can't wait to see what Janet has learned.
It was hot in New York so I looked for an air-conditioned movie theater to wait out the time till hotel check in. The nearest theater had a review in its window of a movie about Ken Kesey. The type was too small to read, and I had no reviews to warn me off, so I too that one on.
The movie was someone's attempt to patch together all the miscellaneous film that Kesey and the Pranksters had produced during their bus trip that Tom Wolfe made so famous. I loved Wolfe's book and I'm sure that colored my view of the movie, which I found mildly interesting. There were, however, a couple of interesting moments.
They used a clip from the radio program "Fresh Air" to capture Kesey's view of the movie made from One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest. Predictably he disliked the transformation to the screen.What I liked was his reasoning: to Kesey the demonization of the nurse was misguided, that she was merely the handmaiden of "The Combine". I really should reread The Koolaid Acid Test, a great work of journalism.
Later in the movie that showed some film of Kesey and the Pranksters in New York at a party celebrating their arrival. What I didn't know--or had forgotten--was that Kerouac attended that party. There he was, quaffing a Budweiser, while all the young crazies cavorted around him. It was clear that he disdained the whole lot of them including Kesey, I'm sure. Another question that I wish I knew the answer to: how did the man of On The Road become a misanthropic drunk in his middle years (he never lived to be a misanthropic old man)? I remember that Bill Buckley's National Review magazine had a cover story/obit of Kerouac. The magazine cover showed Jack sprawled in an easy chair with a brew in his hand and several empties on the floor if I remember it correctly.
I should also add that the film featured some poignant remarks from the woman on the bus about Neal Cassidy/Moriarity. I didn't know that he, too, died a mysteriously pathetic death beside the railroad tracks in Mexico.
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