{"id":735,"date":"2008-10-25T11:08:43","date_gmt":"2008-10-25T19:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=735"},"modified":"2008-10-25T11:25:06","modified_gmt":"2008-10-25T19:25:06","slug":"beatnik-sf-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/25\/beatnik-sf-writer\/","title":{"rendered":"Beatnik SF Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

[My blog posts these days are largely drawn from my current writing project, the first draft of my memoir: Nested Scrolls<\/em>.]<\/p>\n

1960 was my brother Embry\u2019s last summer at home before college. To be further from my parents\u2019 scrutiny, he\u2019d moved his dwelling into the basement of our house. He had shelves of hot-rod magazines, copies of Dig magazine, a set of bongo drums, and dozens of back issues of Evergreen Review. My friend Niles and I began spending time in Embry\u2019s lair, even when he was there.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Niles thought the hot-rod magazines were absurd. \u201cLook at this ramshackle jalopy,\u201d\u009d he said, dismissively tapping the picture of a championship dragster. \u201cWhat a piece of crap.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat car goes a hundred and sixty miles an hour,\u201d\u009d Embry testily responded.<\/p>\n

\u201cSure,\u201d\u009d jeered Niles. \u201cOff a cliff.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I realized that the Evergreen Review <\/em>magazines had curse words in them, I began combing through them when I was home alone\u2014looking for pornography. But that wasn\u2019t exactly what I found. Instead I found a career.<\/p>\n

One particular excerpt of William Burroughs\u2019s Naked Lunch <\/em>utterly blew my mind, it was about junkies and hangings and weird sex, written in a hilariously in-your-face dead-pan tone, utterly contemptuous of any notion of bourgeois propriety. Burroughs was a banner to salute, an anthem to march to, a master to emulate.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Embry\u2019s Evergreen Review <\/em>stash was a treasure trove\u2014I found poems by Allen Ginsberg, writings by Kerouac and, somehow the most heartening, story after story by beat unknowns. Men and women writing about their daily routines as if life itself were strange and ecstatic.<\/p>\n

Niles and I found an anthology in the library called The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men<\/em>, and this was where we first saw Ginsberg\u2019s Howl<\/em>. We read that amazing poem out loud to each other, reveling in the bad language and bad attitude, staggered by the sense of liberation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And from here it was a short hop to Jack Kerouac\u2019s On the Road<\/em>. This book spoke to me like none I\u2019d read before. To be out in the world, free as a bird, drinking, smoking, meeting women and yakking all night about God\u2014yes!<\/p>\n

At the same time, Niles found a book on Zen Buddhism by Allan Watts and, in a slightly different vein, he discovered Edwin Abbott\u2019s Flatland<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s this weird flat world where the people are lines and triangles and other shapes. The main character is this guy called A Square.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow does it rain?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rain is like a band of water that slides across the world. Never mind that. The neat part is that A Square travels up into our space. And then he comes back and tries to teach the Flatlanders about the mysterious third dimension, and the High Priest throws him in jail.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t see how to fit all my new literary influences together until, when I was in the hospital after rupturing my spleen, my mother brought me a paperback copy of Untouched By Human Hands<\/em>, a collection of science-fiction tales by Robert Sheckley.<\/p>\n

Somewhere Vladimir Nabokov writes about the \u201cinitial push that sets the heavy ball rolling down the corridors of years,\u201d\u009d and for me the push was Sheckley\u2019s book. I thought it was the coolest thing I\u2019d ever seen. Not only was Sheckley\u2019s work masterful in terms of plot and form, and it had a jokey edge that\u2014to my mind\u2014set it above the more straightforward work of the other SF writers. There was something about his style that gave me a sense that I could do it myself. He wrote like I thought.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

From then on, I knew in my heart of hearts that my greatest ambition was to become a beatnik science fiction writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[My blog posts these days are largely drawn from my current writing project, the first draft of my memoir: Nested Scrolls.] 1960 was my brother Embry\u2019s last summer at home before college. To be further from my parents\u2019 scrutiny, he\u2019d moved his dwelling into the basement of our house. He had shelves of hot-rod magazines, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":739,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735\/revisions\/739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}