“Good sense, innocence …”
San Joaquin Valley As a young person coming of age in the 1960’s, I thoroughly absorbed the beat ethos which suggested that beneath the antiseptic mainstream culture was the living indigenous excitement of jazz, hyperbolic literature and kinds of consciousness known only to those who had the guts to step outside the typical treadmill of school, work, and family. I recall, at 22, lying on the living room floor of my parents’ home, enthralled by an audiobook of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans , set in San Francisco. That year, the ulcerated cornea in one of my eyes prevented me from working. I was not very happy about it, living in the basement of my parents’ house, and wearing dark glasses to shield my younger brother and sisters from my pain and tears. My Dad helped me get audiobooks, and I took to studying literature, as I have ever since. A cornea transplant fixed my eye after a year, and I headed to San Francisco, where my sister was living. By that time, beat culture had b...
