Vernacular Baton Rouge, part 5
At the abandoned Exxon station on Highland Road. I know Seek, Seek was a student of mine.
cities at night casting halo-glows in the sky
“There were dim lights burning far off on the highway, on the river. There were lights even beyond those, stretching miles off in the night; he wanted to go there, to see what was there. There were lights like that stretching across the country, across all states and cities and places, and things happening everywhere even now. ‘Even now, even now,’ he kept thinking. There were bridges swooping across rivers and Mississippis, cities at night casting halo-glows in the sky seen from far-off, there were giant water tanks waiting by the railroad tracks in Oklahoma, there were saloons with checkercloth and sawdust and fans overhead, there were girls waiting in Colorado and Utah and Iowa towns, there were crap games in the alley and a game in the back of the lunch-cart, there was soft odorous air in New Orleans and Key West and Los Angeles, there was music at night by the sea and people laughing, and cars going by on a highway, and soft neon lights glowing, and an old shack in Nevada seen across the wastes. . . . Joe had to go see it all, even now, even now.”
—Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
Vernacular Baton Rouge 4
A sign shop, apparently, on North Boulevard.
This is the space age
“I would suggest that academies be established where young people will learn to get really high . . . high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark . . . high as the Karate master is high when he smatshes a brick with his fist . . . high . . . weightless . . . in space. This is the space age. Time to look beyond this run down radioactive cop rotten planet. Time to look beyond this animal body.”
—William Burroughs, Academy 23: A Deconditioning, The Village Voice, 1967.
why we dance
“We, all of us, have a need to identify our bodily rhythms with those of the cosmos.
The wind in a forest of fir. The spilling of grain in the fields. The migration of bird and seed. The trek of atom and star.
That is why we dance.”
—Tom Robbins, To Dance, Helix magazine, 1967.
the night of the full moon
“It was the night of the full moon. Flaring like a white-hot coin, so brilliant that it hurt one’s eyes, the moon swam rapidly upwards in a sky of smoky blue, across which drifted a few wisps of yellowish cloud. The stars were all invisible. The croton bushes, by day hideous things like jaundiced laurels, were changed by the moon into jagged black-and-white designs like fantastic woodcuts. . . .
“Look at the moon, just look at it!” Flory said. “It’s like a white sun. It’s brighter than an English winter day.”
Elizabeth looked up into the branches of the frangipani tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light, like snow. Even Elizabeth, indifferent to such things, was astonished.”
—George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.
handsome soldiers in pistachio green
“Battalions are trucked into the city to rehearse for the elaborate military parades. Security is heightened, government buildings are spruced up and repainted, and billboards promoting the army are hoisted above major intersections and roundabouts. The oversized boards look more like movie advertisements than army propaganda. Painted in soothing pastel colours, they depict handsome soldiers in pistachio green uniforms marching down pale yellow roads and cheered by crowds of onlookers. Above the parade, a fleet of pink fighter planes glides placidly through a postcard-perfect blue sky.”
—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
‘the time of the green spectacles’
“Tun Lin refers to the years under Ne Win as “the time of the green spectacles”. To look at something through green spectacles, he explained, is to look at a thing that is bad and be forced to think of it as good. The phrase has a curious history. The battles and bombs of the Second World War devastated Burma’s paddy fields and plantations, and by the time the Japanese army eventually occupied the country farmers found it hard to grow any edible produce. Even the farm animals and pack-horses refused to eat the parched grain, because of its unhealthy-looking white colour. The Japanese, fearful that the donkeys they needed to transport munitions in the mountainous terrain of Upper Burma would starve, came up with an ingenious solution. They fashioned spectacles out of green-tinted glass and wire and hooked them around the donkeys’ ears. “The donkeys saw that the grain was green and happily ate it,” explained Tun Lin. “That’s what we had to do during our years in Burma’s Animal Farm. The entire nation was forced to wear green spectacles just like those donkeys.”
—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
white ants
“All these book collections . . . had one thing in common: they were gradually disappearing. Their pages were being glued together by damp and mildew. Pull any book from a shelf in Burma and it will be followed by a sprinking of powder-like dust, the work of white ants relentlessly munching their way through thousands of texts all around the country.”
—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.
glaring white sunlight
“They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and inerminable.”
—George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.