"Gravely Concerned": a tour to the final landmarks of Southern authors

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.
(Mark Twain, 1898)

Much like the recent unpleasantness between the states from 1861-1865, the topic of death has an unshakable hold on the Southern imagination. Maybe that fascination springs from the rural tradition of long-told family stories: of ghosts and haints, lost relatives and ne'er-do-wells, and other human mysteries that make this conscious life only a pause on eternity's long road. In the South death takes on a mythical stature unparalleled elsewhere in America. People do talk about their long-gone ancestors as if those ancient folk were sitting, here today, on the porch having a glass of tea.

This embrace of the past, indeed the near-physical presence of the departed, is a romantic idea expressed in the over-use of the word Gothic when applied to the Southern sensibility. There is no mistaking the haunting tales of Edgar Allan Poe as anything but Southern, and the Gothic continues to be a part of the regional feel. As Howard Bahr, writing from Jackson, Mississippi, remarks in the book's foreword as if a plume of one of W.J. Cash's Cavaliers were still in his hat:

I believe that a walk through a cemetery is no intrusion but first, a sojourn into the past and, second, a glimpse into the future of our ephemeral selves. I see no possible harm in walking over a grave, and I think it proper that a man should sit on a tombstone, smoke his pipe, and contemplate his own mortality while the mockingbirds sing in the oaks. I believe the dead, so far as they may be aware, find such occasions enjoyable: footsteps of a visitor from the world they left behind come to acknowledge them as fellow travelers, no different from us but only gone ahead. ... This, I have found, is the artist's view as well.

Graves of Robert Penn Warren and his wife Eleanor, Stratton VT.

Which makes John Soward Bayne's new book Gravely Concerned (Clemson University Digital Press) a regional celebrity-search of the famous and infamous writers who had much to do with creating the unique Southern imagination. The book is less haunted by morbid curiosity than it is an evocative visual record of where many writers associated with the South have chosen to spend eternity.

In some cases a choice was not offered: in 1973 Alice Walker determined the resting site of Zora Neale Hurston by calling out "Zora, where are you?" in an Eatonton, Florida cemetery to locate the writer's unmarked grave -- in itself an absolutely fitting Southern tale.

In other cases these sites, some elaborate and others more simple, reflect the reputations of the writers themselves in their lifetime and (one presumes) in the life beyond. They become points of pilgrimage for fans and the curious: Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery, William Faulkner (and his brothers) in Oxford Mississippi, Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore, whose Poe Toaster tradition as of 2009 may be nevermore.

Yet there are many more -- regional writers whose legacies are less well known but whose fictions are part of the Southern fabric. Bayne began his photography project in 2003 with a mathematician's exactness and a reading fan's zeal, sometimes traveling by Greyhound overnight through Alabama and Mississippi and the Carolinas to locate a particular site.

Over the course of pages the book becomes a treasury of Southern names: John Trotwood Moore. Abbie Mandana Holmes Christiansen. Beatrice Whitte Ravenel. William Tappan Thompson. Thomas Holley Chivers. Douglas Southall Freeman. John Peale Bishop. Hubert Creekmore. Katherine Drayton Mayrant Simons.

It's understood if the casually curious may only be interested in tracking down Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, but where does one go to seek the disputed last rest of Truman Capote? That eternal gadabout may be buried in L.A.'s Westwood Memorial Park (a final cocktail party of sorts, surrounded by celebrities) -- or his ashes may be scattered at Crooked Pond near Bridgehampton, NY.

Many Southern writers are buried here, but not all. Although Mark Twain's grave is featured on the book's cover, in a recent discussion Bayne said he doesn't really consider Twain a Southern writer: born in Missouri, lived in Connecticut, he married a Yankee girl from Elmira NY and wrote several of his novels during 22 summers there. The serial bankrupt Clemens is buried in his wife's family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira. At Woodlawn, driving directions are posted Mark Twain next left, as if it were a kind of final and continuing receiving line for the humorist -- or an eternal advertisement posted by his admirers.

On the other hand, there is the resting place of James Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) marked by an large and unchiseled boulder on his farm, also in upstate NY.

Eudora Welty gravesite, Jackson, MS

Monuments with their names and dates chiseled in stone offer many writers the opportunity for a final parting shot, or piece of wisdom on view for eternity. In his preface Bayne offers these: Among the best are T.S. Stribling's 'Through this dust these hills once spoke" and Ben Robertson's "I rest in thy bosom, Carolina, thy skies over me, thine air above and around me. Among my own and in my own country I sleep.'

Not all are quite so serious; some epitaphs are examples of the special Southern wit. On April 20, 2008, a monument was unveiled on the overlooked and presumed grave of George Washington Harris, with a new epigraph from the humorist's own fictional creation, "Parson Bullen's Oration Over the Corpse of Sut Lovingood": Let us try and ricollect his virtues -- ef he had any -- and forget his vices -- ef we can. For of such air the kingdom of heaven!"

John Soward Bayne

Bayne himself was born in Lenoir City, Tennessee, grew up in Anderson, South Carolina, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Clemson University, impeccable Southern bona fides on the Gravely Concerned website. So it's no surprise that his book, in its elegiac tone, suggests a certain urgent prompting to the procrastination of aspiring Southern writers and other present-day scribblers:

So, pilgrim, pass by. Be not reluctant at your author's grave. Look at the name indited in stone: what lies beneath the name is only dust, of course, but what lies behind it is the record of the artist's suffering and the true monument that is his or her work. Remember that this person once walked the earth, felt the compulsion to create, suffered rejection and frustration, just as you will do, have done, if you have chosen the writer's craft. Ask your questions; you may be astonished at the reply.

"The Crows of Pearblossom": Aldous Huxley, seriously kidding around

First published as a children's chapter book in 1963, The Crows of Pearblossom is a story Aldous Huxley created for his niece in 1944 while she was staying with the Huxleys in the Mojave desert.

In a new Abrams picture-book edition with illustrations by Sophie Blackall, Mr. and Mrs Crow are still bedeviled by the snake who lives at the bottom of their tree and steals their eggs. The new book is meant for kids ages four to eight, and if there are any parallels to Brave New World it's that the world may not be all that it seems. As a Christmas gift to his young niece Olivia during World War II, Huxley's story has dark edges that were likely meant as an introduction to the adult world that faced very uncertain challenges ahead.

The story itself was nearly lost when fire destroyed the original manuscript. The Huxleys' California neighbors had a copy, and gave it to Olivia when her uncle died in 1963. In the book, Mrs. Crow catches the snake eating her 297th egg that year -- she does not work on Sundays, you understand -- and requests that Mr. Crow go into the hole and kill the snake.

The Rattlesnake (as snakes throughout literary history are wont to do) thoroughly enjoys his thievery:

"I cannot fly -- I have no wings;
I cannot run -- I have no legs;
But I can creep where the black bird sings
And eat her speckled eggs, ha, ha,
And eat her speckled eggs."

Instead of killing him, Mr. Crow decides to teach the snake a painful lesson and confers with his wise friend Mr. Owl. Mr. Owl bakes mud into the shape of eggs and paints them to look appealing. These dummy eggs are left in the nest to trick the Rattlesnake, who unknowingly eats them the next day.

When the eggs get to his stomach, they cause the Rattlesnake such pain that he thrashes about, tying himself in knots around the branches. Mrs. Crow goes on to hatch "four families of seventeen children each" and "uses the snake as a clothesline on which to hang the little crows' diapers."

It's a story that young readers will probably thrill to be scared by, filled with the kind of darkness that children instinctively suspect hides out in the trees and woods. The new illustrations are colorful and swirling, owning more than a bit to Huxley's history of LSD use, and fans of Tim Burton and Edward Gorey will like Brooklyn artist Sophie Blackall's artwork.

Olivia de Haulleville

And little Olivia? In 1982, Olivia de Haulleville entered Indonesia as member of the entourage of H.H. The Dalai Lama during his consecration of Borobudur. She continued her pilgrimage there by the name of "Tara" and was requested to write a history of Buddhism in Indonesia by the ethnic Javanese Buddhist teacher, pak Sumarsoeno. In 2000 she published Pilgrimage to Java, An Esoteric History of Buddhism. Her son, Michael A. Cassapidis is a Tibetan monk in the Gelugs-pa order. She now lives near Joshua Tree National Park and has a Facebook page with the following quote:

If I were given a wish

To be what I wish

I would wish to be

Who I am

—mySelf

The 100 Greatest Writers Of All Time! 100!

Alex Carnevale, at his website This Recording, makes no bones about his likes and dislikes in the cultural stew. His posts, all with Thackeray-style headlines beginning "In Which ..." (a tip-off, that one: as in, "In Which The Beat Generation Was A Good Thing If Nothing Else Was Happening") mostly find targets and tangents in popular culture he finds increasingly not to his liking. A sample from Carnevale's beat generation entry noted above, more bluntly subtitled "The Jew and The Goy":

The cultish obsession over Jack Kerouac, and to a lesser extent, Allen Ginsberg, has always been somewhat repulsive to me. Along with their revolting friend William Burroughs, the two shared an undeniable talent for writing, however unshapen and malodorous it was at times. Although Burroughs was the most talented of the three, they all wrote important but flawed works that undeniably captivated a great number of people. ...

Carnevale and co-editor Will Hubbard have plenty of help viewing culture in the fogged rear-view mirror: "I'm always mystified how rubber-faced Tim Robbins became the leading man of early '90s satires" (that's Karina Wolf, writing about Altman's 1992 film The Player), for example. On Woody Allen: "Woody is obsessed with rich people, but his obsession is still one of petty jealousy mixed with hostile admiration." That's Molly Lambert, who goes on in her review of Allen's Cassandra's Dream (2007) to write "it was really much better than I expected, perhaps because I expected so little."

The hunting of the snark -- on and on it goes. So I was interested to come across Alex's 2009 list -- to put it in its proper context, "In Which These Are The 100 Greatest Writers Of All Time." Anyone who proposes a ranking greatest list of writers (of all time!) is asking for it, whatever it may be. The guilty-pleasure-meter was high as I waded into the ranks. I won't spoil your anticipation by revealing surprises; you can read the entire ranking here. Be prepared: the jostle at the top is fierce, and may cause nervous hiccups. Yes, it was published in 2009 ... most of these greats are no longer here to throw drinks, still, and who are we to argue?

But in fairness, there are pockets of the site filled with less hyperbole and more interesting reading, as in This Recording's recent series on advice from writers to writers, mostly from interview source material. Here for example, is an excerpt of William Faulkner answering questions of students in a writing class at the University of Mississippi in 1947. The instructor of the class was not allowed in the room for the hour, so students could ask more freely.

Faulkner and Eudora Welty

... Q: Are we degenerating?

WF: No. Reading is something that is in a way necessary like heaven or a clean collar, but not important. We want culture but don't want to go to any trouble to get it. We prefer reading condensations.

Q: That sounds like a slam on our way of living.

WF: Our way of living needs slamming. Everybody's aim is to help people, turn them to heaven. You write to help people. The existence of this class in creative writing is good in that you take time off to learn to write and you are in a period where time is your most valuable possession.

Q: What is the best age for writing?

WF: For fiction the best age is from 35-45. Your fire is not all used up and you know more. Fiction is slower. For poetry the best age is from 17 to 26. Poetry writing is more like a skyrocket with all your fire condensed in one rocket.

Q: How about Shakespeare?

WF: There are exceptions. ....

Faulkner, finding time to write

Q: How do you find time to write?

WF: You can always find time to write. Anybody who says he can't is living under false pretenses. To that extent depend on inspiration. Don't wait. When you have an inspiration put it down. Don't wait until later and when you have more time and then try to recapture the mood and add flourishes. You can never recapture the mood with the vividness of its first impression.

Q: How long does it take you to write a book?

WF: A hack writer can tell. As I Lay Dying took six weeks. The Sound and The Fury took three years. ...

Q: Whom do you consider the five most important contemporary writers?

WF: 1. Thomas Wolfe. 2. Dos Passos. 3. Ernest Hemingway. 4. Willa Cather. 5. John Steinbeck.

Q: If you don't think it too personal, how do you rank yourself with contemporary writers?

WF: 1. Thomas Wolfe: he had much courage and wrote as if he didn't have long to live; 2. William Faulkner; 3. Dos Passos; 4. Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause a reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used. 5. John Steinbeck: at one time I had great hopes for him - now I don't know.

For more interviews and writing advice from James Baldwin to Anton Chekov to Gertrude Stein to Don DeLillo, the multi-part series is found here. It's worth a browse, if just for the photo of V. Nabokov afield with his butterfly net. (Photos from This Recording.)

"The Gospel of Anarchy": the missed opportunity of good intentions

Justin Taylor's first novel The Gospel of Anarchy is filled with college-age characters who discover that everyone has big ideas to talk about, and in a college town there's all the time in the world to talk about them: rock and roll, politics, religion, drugs, sex. Maybe a sensitive type will find time to write some poetry. Near a college campus the people you meet are likely to be near the same age, looking for something too, and a fuzzy sense-of-belonging is a thin bond that can make friendships and partners.

Set in 1999 at an anarchist collective called Fishgut near the University of Florida in Gainesville, The Gospel of Anarchy is a short, wobbly novel about that very fuzzy feeling. The group's insular and self-reflected belonging is almost all the emotional bond that everyone shares, beyond the late-night sessions and clouds of smoke that make things seem more real than they actually are. David, Thomas, Liz, and Katy live on the fringe of almost-adulthood but can't seem to resolve anything, much less worry about the responsibility of growing up.

These self-created outsiders are ready for something to happen, even if they're not sure exactly what it might be. The idea of communal anarchy seems like a way for these individuals to connect, although the irony is lost as their lives orbit one another. Then the long-gone Parker returns and his rediscovered journal becomes a form of resolution: a mash-up of religion, politics and philosophy that provides the residents of Fishgut with a kind of revival spirit.

This is the kind of plot that will leave readers of Ken Kesey thinking what he could do with this material; there's the potential for some real and pointed satire, a molotov cocktail heaved by "drunkpunks in the armpit of Florida" against the culture.

But the culture seems all-too smothering in The Gospel of Anarchy to fight against. Maybe it's the brightness of the Florida sunshine or the washed-out characters' own fault, but there is nothing in the book to suggest a real target. There's also enough of a college town's acceptance of young adult freakishness to offset any real anger. At Fishgut, Dave sits in a daze of computer searches and corresponding over-saturation, all "computer glass and unconsummated need":

What had been born of boredom and curiosity, then mutated into enthusiasm and honest perversion, then refined itself further into a kind of connoisseurship, now seems to have transcended all these things and become something else, which delivered neither pleasure nor its opposite. Its only truly novel aspect, at this point, was the sheer monstrosity of its breadth -- the perpetual beckon of more and more. Even to call it compulsion would be to make it seem more dire, and thus significant, than it actually was.I had a habit. That was all.

Justin Taylor

It's difficult to stir up any interest in Taylor's bored and hollowed-out characters. These unsympathetic misfits don't really care about themselves, and the reader begins to care less what happens to them. The novel doesn't follow up on some of its more interesting elements -- parts of Parker's journal are based on the real-world publications of CrimethInc, a self-described "ex-workers collective" credited in Taylor's acknowledgements but none of his characters, unfortunately, catch the movement of any sustained and serious revelations about these ideas.

As a result The Gospel of Anarchy seems a short, missed opportunity of a story, its big ideas lost in the self-satisfied apathy of Dave and the other squatters at Fishgut. In a Paris Review interview Taylor mentions that "he might have gone looking for a God and found a book instead." The book gives his characters snippets of Don DeLillo to quote ("our faith makes us crazy in the world") and in the interview Taylor describes the story as his own failed conversion attempt. A little more conviction would have gone a long way.

Early in the novel, Dave muses that he might "have myself a little revelation about doing the right thing in life." The Gospel of Anarchy itself would like to do more than it does. That's not a bad beginning, and Taylor actually has the germ of a good novel here -- not necessarily in a league with his hero Flannery O'Connor, but a start. The story ultimately runs out of energy much like one of its own characters, and the reader is left thinking not so much of the story but of Taylor's good intentions in writing it.

Akilah Oliver: "poetry extends the limit of its frame"

Akilah Oliver (1961-2011)

... Poetry like the body

extends the limit of its frame. I was just

reading over old emails between myself

and kari edwards. she says at one point

as we discuss the intentionality of entering

into an aporia, "human life is a bleep in

the evolutionary conundrum that we as

humans have applied meaning to and in

doing so, for the most part, do things that

are based on contemporary belief

systems that we attempt to maintain as a

sense of permanence or purpose."

Perhaps so, but I miss the humans.

Poet, teacher and activist Akilah Oliver died unexpectedly last week in Brooklyn. This email appeared in Poetry magazine, February 2009, in response to Charles Bernstein's "Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links," Her most recent book of poems is A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House Press, 2009).

Thomas Jefferson's library: lost books hiding in plain sight

Jefferson stamp, 1870

In the literary games of hide-and-seek that keep readers, reaearchers and historians busy, discovering the books that belonged to Presidents can be a special find. When the books themselves are discovered hiding in plain sight waiting only for a chance discovery, they form an unexpected piece of the continuing historical puzzle.

A recent article by Sam Roberts in the New York Times describes the discovery of 78 books that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson and which, through time, auction and debt, had been sold and subsequently lost to history. The books in Latin, Greek and French are described as having been acquired by Jefferson in the ten years before he died in 1826. The article reports one researcher found leads performing a simple Google search. The Times article includes a link to the complete list of book titles.

A literary detective story that began 18 months ago and was advanced through a chance reading of an 1880 edition of The Harvard Register has led researchers from the Jefferson Library at Monticello to a trove of books that were among the last ones that Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s most bibliophilic president, collected and read in the decade before he died.

The 28 titles in 74 volumes were discovered recently in the collection of Washington University in St. Louis, immediately elevating its library to the third largest repository of books belonging to Jefferson after the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia.

... The Washington University library learned of the Jefferson bonanza a few months ago from Endrina Tay, project manager for the Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries project at Monticello, the former president’s home near Charlottesville, Va., a National Historic Landmark. She has been working since 2004 to reconstruct Jefferson’s collection and make the titles and supplemental reference materials available online.

... The retirement collection is the least known of Jefferson’s libraries and one in which classics were represented in disproportionately greater numbers than politics and the law. He cataloged all 1,600 books according to “the faculties of the human mind,” like memory, reason and imagination, and then classified them further. Many were in French or Italian.

“Currently Monticello and the University of Virginia have the largest concentrations of books from the retirement library,” said Kevin J. Hayes, an English professor at the University of Central Oklahoma and the author of The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson. “This new find would put Washington University among them. The question I would like to answer is: Do they contain any marginalia? Sometimes Jefferson wrote in his books; his marginalia would enhance both the scholarly and the cultural value of the books immeasurably.”

The answer is yes. Jefferson initialed his books (to affirm his ownership), often corrected typographical errors in the texts and also occasionally wrote marginal notes or comments about the substance. Researchers are combing the newly discovered collection to find such notations.

... Ms. Tay found letters suggesting that Joseph Coolidge of Boston, who met one of Jefferson’s granddaughters at Monticello and later married her, submitted lists of the books he wanted to buy.

... Ms. Tay also found an annotated auction catalog with the letter “C” written next to a number of items, which seemed to indicate that Coolidge had bid successfully. ...

The discovery that the 3,000 books in the Coolidge collection included 74 that once belonged to Jefferson means that about half of his retirement library has been accounted for. It has also prompted a search by librarians at Washington University to determine whether any other books in the Coolidge collection had been Jefferson’s.

A new editor at "The Paris Review": re-inventing the cool

That Kentucky man-of-rare-letters Ed McClanahan once remarked of his own method of writing that sometimes he followed his nose, sometimes his muse, and sometimes his muse's nose. One of the continuing pleasures of the internet's endless hall-of-mirrors is that occasionally one is able to reflectively follow all three at the same time. The Paris Review interviews -- nearly sixty years' worth -- are now all available online, and they are a pleasure to have available at last all in a single place to discover, or discover again.

Lorin Stein, the new editor at The Paris Review, is building a reputation for rejuvenating the magazine's literary cool -- by recalling the Review's freewheeling past. Today's Style Section of the New York Times, perhaps with just a bit of hyper-cool hyperbole, describes an office only lacking Terry Southern's expected appearance: "Mr. Stein, 37, is a proud throwback. His desk has an old-fashioned Rolodex, a vintage Lucky Strike case and a neat bowl of paper clips. A small, cream-colored saucer doubled as an ashtray for his Marlboro Reds. A martini glass, mostly drained of Tanqueray, rested near a typed manuscript."

That "mostly drained" martini glass with its Tanqueray -- there's the TS ultra-detail, the put-away.

Those who have wandered bookshops and old magazine stacks and stumbled on stray volumes of The Paris Review Interviews in their multi-part book form are now free to spend leisurely hours discovering that their literary heroes (and sometimes, villains) are just as they imagined -- or not as the reader imagined them at all.

As expected, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, and Faulkner cast long shadows, while Auden, Cheever, Anthony Burgess, and Kingsley Amis best one another's observations sounding as if they had cocktails in hand. (“After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now'": that's Terry Southern's witty 1958 talk with Henry Green.) In a unexpected wistful moment, tough-guy Hemingway lets his guard down: “. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

A previously unpublished Ray Bradbury interview from the 1970s: "A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame." Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, and Woody Allen all make appearances. And here's Guy Davenport on his education, sounding a common note of many writers everywhere trying to find their voice: “I learned early on that what I wanted to know wasn’t what I was being taught.”

Aldous Huxley, Reynolds Price, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck, Seamus Heaney: for any reader, spending an hour with a great author is easy; far more difficult is stopping at a sane and necessary point amid the sheer volume of interviews. One unexpected idea sparks another and sends a reader scurrying from Shelby Foote's ruminations on dip-pens to Sam Shepard's views on the terrible price of story endings: “I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” Much the same can be said of Ted Berrigan's and Aram Saroyan's complete 1968 interview with an increasingly drunken Jack Kerouac, as the talk literally careens around served drinks and proffered drugs:

INTERVIEWER What do you think about the hippies and the LSD scene?

KEROUAC They're already changing, I shouldn't be able to make a judgment. And they're not all of the same mind. The Diggers are different . . . I don't know one hippie anyhow . . . I think they think I'm a truck-driver. And I am. As for LSD, it's bad for people with incidence of heart disease in the family [knocks microphone off footstool . . . recovers it]. Is there any reason why you can see anything good in this here mortality?

INTERVIEWER Excuse me, would you mind repeating that?

KEROUAC You said you had a little white beard in your belly. Why is there a little white beard in your mortality belly?

INTERVIEWER Let me think about it. Actually it's a little white pill.

KEROUAC A little white pill?

INTERVIEWER It's good.

KEROUAC Give me.

INTERVIEWER We should wait till the scene cools a little.

KEROUAC Right. This little white pill is a little white beard in your mortality which advises you and advertises to you that you will be growing long fingernails in the graves of Peru.

With an online collection as broad as The Paris Review interviews there are many surprises, and readers will bring their own judgements as to what can be glanced at or read in depth after a few interviewer's questions. I might have to read more of the stories of T.C. Boyle after reading his 2000 comments, and there are scores of writers whose work I'm just as eager to discover for the first time.

Other than some well-known names, the recent group of 2010 interviews is less interesting, but that's more than likely due to my own lack of reading than any fault of the writers being interviewed. Still, it may give the reader pause to consider that in the craft of writing, even Stephen King can have his moments of doubt no matter how unexpected:

"Every book is different each time you revise it. Because when you finish the book, you say to yourself, This isn’t what I meant to write at all. At some point, when you’re actually writing the book, you realize that. But if you try to steer it, you’re like a pitcher trying to steer a fastball, and you screw everything up. As the science-fiction writer Alfred Bester used to say, The book is the boss. You’ve got to let the book go where it wants to go, and you just follow along. If it doesn’t do that, it’s a bad book. And I’ve had bad books."

In the new-old era of The Paris Review, maybe that's just King's way of saying he's seeing Kerouac's white beard in his mortality belly.