As 2018 Looms...

As 2018 looms, here I am, finishing up "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. Been freelancing for a start up in the crypto world and it's been destroying me inside out, brewing an anger towards all things with screens. I hate the digital world. JK. I work and breathe it.

ON THE ROAD (1959)

by Jack Kerouac

But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany? 

— pg. 5-6

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide oldtimer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner; you could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the whole gray world of them that day. Everybody else laughed with him. He didn’t have a care in the world and had the hugest regard for everybody. I said to myself, Wham, listen to that man laugh. That’s the West, here I am in the West. He came booming into the diner, calling Maw’s name, and she made the sweetest cherry pie in Nebraska, and I had some with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on top. 

— pg. 18-19

Carlo’s basement apartment was on Grant Street in an old redbrick rooming house near a church. You went down an alley, down some stone steps, opened an old raw door, and went through a kind of cellar till you came to his board door. It was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made. He read me his poetry.

— pg. 47

Then I went to meet Rita Bettencourt and took her back to the apartment. I got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. “What do you want out of life” I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just wait on tables and try to get along.” She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco. 

— pg. 57-58

And guess what. There was a movie, too!!! The trailer looks so awful and SO BORING.

Probably why it's got terrible reviews. This kind of storyline should never get told on film, it's just everyday life. It works as a novel, because you can turn everyday moments into something more everlasting and grandiose with magic of words.

His tone was clear as a bell, high, pure, and blew straight in our faces from two feet away. Dean stood in front of him, oblivious to everything else in the world, with his head bowed, his hands socking in together, his whole body jumping on his heels and the sweat, always the sweat, pouring and splashing down his tormented collar to lie actually in a pool at his feet. Galatea and Marie were there, and it took us five minutes to realize it. Whoo, Frisco nights, the end of the continent and the end of doubt, all dull doubt and tomfoolery, good-by.

— pg. 202

There here came a gang of young bop musicians carrying their instruments out of cars. They piled right into a saloon and we followed them. They set themselves up and started blowing. There we were! The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursy-mouthed tenorman, thin of shoulder, draped loose in a sports shirt, cool in the warm night, self-indulgence written in his eyes, who picked up his horn and frowned in it and blew cool and complex and was dainty stamping his foot to catch ideas, and ducked to miss others—and said, “Blow,” very quietly when the other boys took solos. 

— pg. 240

Anyways, all in all, great read. Great escape. It's now versed out again on a digital space. And now I have to return to my Skype chats with my Moscow developers, the Telegram messages, the graphs, the website edits, etc.

Wishing to dream about a road trip in a Caddy tonight.

This Side of Paradise (1920), F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Coming of age. A term? A noun? A genre? 

Probably my most liked theme after magic-realism. An overflowing number of such novels and movies cannot do the theme any justice as over the generations, decades, the centuries, coming-of-age is fundamental. It will always be there as a part of life, just with different kinds of youngster's vices/habits/vanity/substances. It will always involve the rickety personalities, lack of confidence, hatred on the family, comforting level of confusion, spontaneity, death, alcohol, the opposite sex, self-righteousness, education, and morbid happiness. It could focus on a span of only one year or two or three or a collection of years from pre teenage years all the way until 23? 24? 25? The beauty of our life is that we are and will always continue to be foolish throughout the breathing days and months and years until God takes us with him.

Today, I had the pleasure of finishing Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), thanks to friend Katherine who lent me the book, hooray!

A semi-autobiographical novel, features Amory Blaine from his childhood years until his early twenties -- of post-war times. Exceptionally poetic (this book again reaffirms that poems are really for the vain) and hastily, yet enchantingly written, I thoroughly enjoyed another coming-of-age novel. Why the best coming-of-age novels should feature an adolescent boy, I do not know. Is it just my own twisted fixation on the unknown of an adolescent male? Or is it a societal norm as they are prone to think through their thoughts inwardly and actually do care about a fair chunk of topics -- if and when this particular adolescent male has a sense of sophistication or introversion.

I usually seem to always have a true hate-love relationship with many authors and novels of coming-of-age. My unstable imaginations and emotions combined cannot fathom the stupidity and teenage angst of certain parts of the plot and/or characters; thus, I always find certain novels absolutely horrid. A prime example of this would be "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." Just how awful the protagonist is and why the tunnel has to even have any meaning to him growing out of his adolescent years, is unendurable. The exploitation of Stephen Chbosky's real experiences and acquaintances for the sake of writing a novel is also pretty darn intolerable. The contradictory issue here is now -- the fact that I must be some kind of a masochist when it comes to abusing my mentality -- that I enjoy detesting these novels. I enjoy that these novels that tick me off tick me off. I also have to accept what is good writing as good writing, and what is good plot a good plot, and what is a good book to make one go into an irrational fit of aggravation a good book. Right. So the point is, This Side of Paradise is quite special, as it never gave me that feeling once. In fact, at the end, I felt more of a pity for Fitzgerald, for he verified his insane level of vanity via this novel. You thought Gatsby exemplified vanity? No. Absolutely not.

Another afterthought flowered from this novel was that we complain about the lack of privacy in the online world these days, and yet, I felt like I could even make out Fitzgerald as a living person right now by reading his work. How personal one has to go into one's reality to produce a fictional work! Incredible. But this is for all sorts of art. For movies, for paintings, for song-writing, etc. If I ever write, the whole world gets to see right through me. I would become a human window. I won't even be translucent; I'd really be a window. Is this bravery? Or foolishness?

Anyways, some excerpts from This Side of Paradise where I found particular fondness: 

1. ‘I’ll never be a poet,’ said Amory as he finished. ‘I’m not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don’t catch the subtle things like “silver-snarling trumpet”. I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.’ - p.83

2. I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud. 

Don’t let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your ‘personality’, as you persist in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful — so ‘highbrow’ that I picture you living in an intellectual and emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world. An idealization of some such man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present. - p.102

3. Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in Philadelphia he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness; a latent strength, a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that she was compelled to face. She was alone in the world, with two small children, little money, and, worst of all, a host of friends. - p. 133

4. But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy, culminating in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks’ spree, that he was emotionally worn out. The people and surroundings that he remembered as being cool or delicately artificial, seemed to promise him a refuge. He wrote a cynical story which featured his father’s funeral and dispatched it to a magazine, receiving in return a cheque for sixty dollars and a request for more of the same tone. This tickled his vanity, but inspired him to no further effort. - p. 193

5. ‘Let’s hear it,’ said Amory eagerly.

‘I’ve got only the last few lines done.’

‘That’s very modern. Let’s hear ‘em, if they’re funny.’ - p. 201

6. V. THE EGOTIST BECOMES A PERSONAGE

A fathom deep in sleep I lie

   With old desires, restrained before,

To clamour life ward with a cry, 

   As dark flies out the greying door;

And so in quest of creeds to share

   I seek assertive day again…

   But old monotony is there:

   Endless avenues of rain. 

Oh, might I rise again! Might I

   Throw off the heat of that old wine, 

See the new morning mass the sky

   With fairy towers, line on line; 

Find each mirage in the high air

   A symbol, not a dream again…

But old monotony is there:

   Endless avenues of rain.   - p. 236

******************************************************************

Other novels of similar ease of reading in the coming-of-age genre:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Never Let Me Go; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; The Kite Runner; Tuck Everlasting (one of the ones on the Rachel's hate-love list); A Catcher in the Rye (one of the ones on the Rachel's hate-love list)

Coming of age movies to watch during spare time:
Kings of Summer (2013); Dead Poets Society (1989); The Virgin Suicides (1999); The Breakfast Club (1985); Moonrise Kingdom (2012); The Way, Way Back (2013); Almost Famous (2000).

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Bits of Burberry

BoF: Are millennials the customers of the future?

AA: It’s a great question. Eight years ago we targeted the millennial consumer, because that was the white space we needed to play in because our peers didn’t. We knew that was the customer coming out of these high-growth emerging markets.

There are going to be seven billion smartphones in everybody’s hands in the next five years. Now, everybody is a digital customer, so doing things digitally is no longer a niche [play]. Doing things digitally is how the entire world communicates.

That’s our language today. Digital is not an afterthought. Our design teams design for a landing page and the landing page dictates what the store windows will look like, not the other way round. In creative media, they’re shooting for digital, then we are turning it back to physical.

I talk to these outdoor companies and we get some amazing deals. They’ve invested in thousands of digital screens but everybody is still giving them still images. It drives them crazy.

Great companies need to move as fast as the consumers are moving. Look at Samsung. Look at Apple. Look at what is happening in this whole world. The brand has to look cool on every device.

BoF: How are smartphones driving your strategy?

AA: None of us go anywhere without them and organisations have to keep evolving. Sometimes what [investors] don’t like is the expense structure. Look at the number of new departments that we have had to create in the last three years alone. You can farm a lot of it out, but you’re going to pay three times the amount, or it’s going to take you three times longer.

So, if we all agree none of us are getting rid of [mobile] and it’s only going to get better and better, how do I make sure there is a team in house that can take every bit of our content and make sure it’s perfect and relevant and for where mobile is going. There are companies that still do everything for print. We were doing everything for desktop, but now let’s do everything for mobile and then take it back to desktop.

BoF: Is that is what’s happening now?

AA: That’s what is happening right now. We have a huge team, we have a mobile director, we have a mobile team in the creative department, a whole mobile team in the tech department, because we know this is where it’s going.

All you have to do is look at your own behavior and how you want to shop. How many times do you go on Google? So what’s our Google strategy? What’s our YouTube strategy? What’s our Facebook strategy? Wherever the consumer is going, we have to have a strategy, for every consumer across every one of those devices, platforms and channels.


FULL READ: http://www.businessoffashion.com/2013/09/burberry-angela-ahrendts.html

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

It wasn't an illusion. This book was short yet it was one of the sweetest and the saddest ones I've read. For me, it was the style that truly moved me. Certain words and the tone that was used. The narrative looked through what I was feeling and it directly confirmed what I was thinking; I hope you are following me.

Adolescence

Friends

Girls

Sex

Intellect

Books

Age

Lost

Life

Suicides

Reflection

Clique

Peers

Influences

Go over all of this in detail with Tony Webster, the protagonist. I had to use the dictionary several times to get through the book, and that means that Barnes's diction is pretty old-fashioned and specific.



Here are some excerpts from the book worth typing out (according to me anyways, haha):

pg 10 -- Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for? We used terms like ‘Weltanschuung’ and ‘Sturm und Drang’, enjoyed saying ‘That’s philosophically self-evident’, and assured one another that the imagination’s first duty was to be transgressive. Our parents saw things differently, picturing their children as innocents suddenly exposed to noxious influence. So Colin’s mother referred to me as his ‘dark angel’; my father blamed Alex when he found me reading The Communist Manifesto; Colin was fingered by Alex’s parents when they caught him with a hard-boiled American crime novel. And so on. It was the same with sex. Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behavior of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

Pg 103 – Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.


  Big thanks and love to Kathy who lent me the book!  

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The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections is a very American novel with paragraphs formed of only ONE sentence, yet beautifully and lengthily written by Jonathan Franzen. Recommended and highly praised by my book lender/best friend Samantha, I worked on this one book ALL SUMMER. The problem was that I had gotten stuck at a character profile thing of the father, Alfred. It was such a booooore. However, after that one "reader's block," (and quitting my job which resulted to an infinite amount of time for myself) this book was a page turner. I even had to read it when I was at the most gorgeous lake house retreat where mimosas were made at a tilt of a head.

So the novel was published and out in the world in 2001. And if it is a VERY AMERICAN novel which deals with AMERICAN ISSUES around the CURRENT TIME PERIOD/EVENTS.. oh. It's about the turn of the century. There ya go. It's also about the MIDWEST (and CLINICAL DEPRESSION) and the other sorts of gross stuff that the Midwest is known for. It's actually more about this family, an older couple, Alfred and Enid, and their three children, Gary, Chip, and Denise. So the book goes through the minds & background stories of each character.. profiling them while making the whole story happen. With more understanding of each character comes more guessing and anticipation from the readers. Additionally, more understanding of why these bleeping crazy psychotics ARE psychos!!!!!!!!!!!!! The reason cannot be that they are from the Midwest. That's too cruel. Even for a fiction.

Just some clippets I liked..

PAGE 82-83
But TV caused him such critical and political anguish that he could no longer watch even cartoons without smoking cigarettes, and he now had a lung-sized region of pain in his chest, and there was no intoxicant of any sort in his house, not even cooking sherry, not even cough syrup, and after the labor of taking his pleasure with the chaise his endorphins had gone home to the four corners of his brain like war-weary troops, so spent by the demands he’d made of them in the last five weeks that nothing, except possibly Melissa in the flesh, could marshal them again. He needed a little morale-booster, a little pick-me-up, but he had nothing better than the month-old Times, and he felt that he’d circled quite enough uppercase M’s for one day, he could circle no more.

PAGE 175
After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport. While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the museum’s exhibits, hoping the list would him a feeling of accomplishment. He couldn’t deal with the exhibits themselves, their exhausting informativeness, their cheerful prose-for-the-masses. THE GOLDEN AGE OF STEAM POWER. THE DAWN OF FLIGHT. A ENTURY OF AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY. Block after block of taxing text.

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