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EASTERN_HORN

                                             January   22, 2011
                                             September 19, 2013

All quotes below are from:

  "Palimpset" (1995) by Gore Vidal
  hardcover, ISBN 0-679-44058-0                        KEROUAC_GORED


   "... I did say [to Allen Ginsberg] that I had been
   alarmed at the sudden appearance of the Beats in
   the fifties.  'Just as I was beginning to get a
   grip on what writing could be and how best to
   examine one's life, you come along, preaching a
   fuzzy sort of Star-of-the-East mysticism.
   I wanted people to think.  You wanted them to _be_.
   Well, they _are_, anyway.  But to encourage the
   worst educated and the most resolutely
   propagandized public in the first world _not_ to
   think about why things are as they are is cruel.'
   My _On the Road_ was _The Judgement of Paris_, the
   first of the books I wrote when I moved to the
   Hudson Valley.  I tried to touch many bases in
   that book.  Our differences were polar."

        Gore Vidal, "Palimpset" (1995), p. 225



   "I confessed that I had read none of his
   'Eastern' books but that, long before Jack,
   Hinduism crops up not only in Emerson but       The British imperial
   in the author of _The Wizard of Oz_."           connection, yes.
                                                   The Beats were more
         Gore Vidal, "Palimpset" (1995), p.225     interested in Buddhism,
                                                   and Kerouac was one
                                                   of the biggest popularizers.


    "As I read my way through the various biographies
    of the Beats, I realize how much in the true
    American grain they had been.  Restless, gabby,
    artless, on the road-- the *yellow brick* road--
    to something transcendental, which turned out to
    be drugs for a time and then, for the survivors,
    there were transcendental fixes like California          "California
    Buddhism, Scientology (briefly, in the case of            Buddhism" is
    Burroughs), higher meditation, anything to                an oddly
    transcend the everyday.  As I write this, I can't         dismissive take,
    help noting that they were, perhaps without               in a set that
    knowing it, heirs to the likes of Henry Miller and        included Gary
    Anai:s and all the other naturals-- I don't think         Snyder.
    primitives is quite the word-- that go back, in
    the United States at least, to Whitman."


          Gore Vidal, "Palimpset" (1995), p. 214



            Here the wisdom of the East Coast,
            dismisses the wisdom of the East.





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