Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are.
Michael Herr, Dispatches
Time and information, rock and roll, life itself… that string of words has been bouncing around in my head since I first read it back in 1999. I was a college graduate taking an undergraduate class for reasons that had partly to do with health insurance and partly to do with a friend of the family saying I should take it and partly to do with my desire, having read the course description, to tell the professor that Dharma Bums was a terrible book and why in God’s name was it on the syllabus?
We read a lot of things that semester, some of which (On the Road1) I’d read before and loved; some of which (Dharma Girl) I read for the first time and made me want want to write my own book about my hometown, but only one of which—Michael Herr’s Dispatches—is still bouncing around my head to the extent that I stole his title for this newsletter. In 1999 I was twenty-three years old and still stunned that you could put rock and roll in a work of literature. Nearly twenty-four years later I’m less stunned but still awestruck by the whole passage: you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later. As my last post made clear, a lot of it has just stayed stored there in my eyes, and in my brain.
A semester before that class, when I’d just finished college and was living in that basement apartment, working strange part time jobs and reading stacks of books, more or less at random, from the public library, I sat down one night and wrote a sanctimonious email essay to a bunch of people (including, God help them, some of my college professors) and called it The New Rambler No. 1, in honor of Samuel Johnson.
It occurred to me just now that I have not in fact changed a bit in the intervening decades, other than moving up a few centuries in terms of the dead white guy I stole a title from. I still have too much going on in my head; I still want to get it out; I still often feel frozen in the onslaught of words and ideas, data and information—rock and roll, life itself.
In the genre of Photographs I Wish I’d Taken is one of two college friends of mine leaning against the campus patrol shuttle, cigarettes in hand, looking for all the world like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on the cover of this edition of On the Road, which is of course the only edition you should ever read, solely because of the cover photo. If you haven’t read On the Road I’m not sure you should, except perhaps for the last sentence, which I had memorized for years—but I’ll let you look it up.