Big Sur Transformation Quotes Page 2
Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
| Quote #4 (but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me her poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)... (6.1) |
Jack's frustration with the superficiality of Hollywood is similar to his frustration with the way the "Beat generation" has been changed. It, too, has become popular, superficial – "for sale" even.
| Quote #5 Looking up occasionally to see rare cars crossing the high bridge and wondering what they'd see on this drear foggy night if they knew a madman was down there a thousand feet below in all that windy fury sitting in the dark writing in the dark -- Some sort of sea beatnik, tho anybody wants to call me a beatnik for THIS better try it if they dare. (7.2) |
Jack resents the fame he's earned as a writer and so-called "King of the Beat Generation." Dissatisfied with the popularized, commercial image of the beats, he seeks to carve out a new identity for himself.
| Quote #6 This is the first time I've hitch hiked in years and I soon begin to see things have changed in America, you cant get a ride any more […]. Sleek long stationwagon after wagon comes sleering by smoothly […], the husband is in the driver's seat with a long ridiculous vacationist hat with a long baseball visor making him look witless and idiot -- Besides him sits wifey, the boss of America, wearing dark glasses and sneering, even if he wanted to pick me up or anybody up she wouldn't let him -- But in the two deep backseats are children, children, millions of children, all ages, they're fighting and screaming over ice cream, they're spilling vanilla all over the Tartan seatcovers -- There's no room anymore anyway for a hitch hiker. (10.3) |
Yet another transformation explored in Big Sur – the changes in America from the 1940s and 50s to the 1960s. Jack certainly takes a critical – perhaps even cynical – view of his country.
