What I'm Listening To...Ti Jean And Mr. Allen.

 

These days the slanting pink light that is generated by a blustery blanket of autumnal afternoon clouds directly overhead and a clear sky to the West always reminds me of Jack Kerouac's bit of prose bopsedy that is 'October In The Railroad Earth'. 

And, because we have a new puppy-dog in the house that loves late-in-the-day ball throws at the park, I've seen a lot of those afternoons this fall, just like I did many (many, many) falls ago while running madly up and down the red brick school house walled-in road hockey rinks of my youth.

Kerouac's prose poem about his time as a junior railway brakeman in San Francisco starts like this:

There was a little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they’ll be charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-dressed thru workingman Frisco of walkup truck drivers and even the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of lost bums even Negros so hopeless and long left East and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard...

****

When C. and I first moved to the Bay Area thirty years ago the area around Third and Howard was still shrouded in a shadow of the skiddy, operatic row that was Kerouac's South of Market San Franciso during the early '50's.

Now, whenever I return to that intersection it is to attend science geek conferences at the massive Moscone Convention Center right next door.  Of course, these days the skids, at least on the surface, are all gone, chromed over and gleaming, fueled by, presumably, prose-free ones and zeroes.

Or some such thing.

______

If you want to both hear and see Kerouac and Allen doing their thing over a passage from the road book it's...Here.

.