Moving On; Kerouac, Woody Allen and Misogynistic Legacies

So, I put in my notice at work two weeks ago. That’s something that’s been kind of hanging over me for the past few months, and I feel like life can move forward a bit now that it’s out in the open. The thing is, I already work late about half the time, and we’ve recently been informed that our 야근 (overtime work) is more than likely going to spike again, to where going home on time would be the exception. Getting home past 10 would be the rule.

I’ve learned so much from this job, honestly, and it was a necessary experience. But I don’t want to spend my whole life in an office. There are so many other things I want to do, not the least of which being actually spending time with my people instead of texting them over my lunch break.

I’m nervous about it, of course, but, man, I can’t help it. I told a coworker recently that my only real goal in life is to not dread Monday morning. Part of why I left New York and came to Korea in the first place was to not end up sitting in a cubicle all day, and while this job is not all cubicles — the travel opportunities have been incredible — it eats up enough of my private time for that not to really matter, in the end.

In March, B and I will be heading to Berlin, Prague and Vienna for a couple of weeks for a vacation, but also to scope out potential future home cities. We will also be meeting up with some of my friends, which is way, way overdue. After that, we’ll have to come back home and figure out what we’re doing.

In the meantime, I’ve picked up my old hefty volume of Jack Kerouac’s letters after coming across an article last week about how a comment he made in a letter about Marilyn Monroe being “fucked to death” means his “legacy should be reexamined.” I had to laugh, because the author of the article seems to feel as though she is the first and only one to stumble upon an appalling hidden truth that has been glossed over by decades of Kerouac scholarship. If she finds that letter appalling, I would encourage her to do no further reading on the writer, because, in all of the reading I’ve done about him over the years, saying Marilyn Monroe was fucked to death doesn’t even break the top ten as far as appalling misogynistic comments and actions.

I don’t know that because I was around to see the truth for myself. I know that because Kerouac scholars do a pretty good job of documenting his issues with women.

It’s difficult to explain what makes a misogynist’s work still worth encountering, versus what, for me personally, will render it useless. A good example is Woody Allen.  I got into it with an old acquaintance when I was at the wedding in Texas a few months back — he works in the film industry and is an Allen fan, and I think for a moment he believed I was writing the man off simply because of his atrocious behavior in his personal life (which is easy enough to argue against, in my opinion — the art is not separate from the man, but the man doesn’t always render the art invalid). The trouble is for me that Allen’s films revolve so strongly around his female characters, some of whom are written brilliantly, save for Allen writing himself or an Allen-like character into the script as a totally impossible-to-buy love interest. The absurdity of it is so distracting that I find it difficult to walk away from his films with anything more than confusion about how I’m supposed to connect to the the completely unrealistic daydreams of a sad, insecure little man on a human level. I think men (obviously) view his films from the male perspective, that is the Allen or Allen-like perspective, so they don’t have the same trouble trying to piece together the character motivations involved — it’s almost impossible for me, as a woman, to put myself in his female character’s shoes and come up with an explanation for some of their choices.

Kerouac’s work, on the other hand, is a literature of men. The women are so minor that it’s almost possible to just skip over the references to them entirely. That has its own issues, but it’s not nearly as distracting, and I find it’s still possible to gain something from his work, when he’s talking about men. This New Yorker article, by the way, is possibly the best analysis I’ve ever seen of his work — it explains perfectly the value I’ve found in it over the years in a way that a lot of the positive criticism I’ve read has failed to.

That having been said, in the research I’ve been doing lately, I’ve come face to face with how hard it is to find female voices in mid- to late modern literature. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? But in specifically seeking out women as primary sources, I’ve come to understand the vacuum in a new, more tangible way. Scholars have come up with many creative ways to write in and around the vacuum (and to be sure, it is by far not the only vacuum — black voices, gay voices, immigrant voices, etc.), but you can’t help but feel the ache of what has been lost that can never be recovered.

I look forward to having more time to organize myself a bit and figure out what it is exactly that I’m looking for. The thing keeps bolting off in new directions and is slowly becoming a tangle of roots and vines. I think you have to let it keep growing before you can identify where the primary structure is and start trimming back.

I may not be back until I’m finished with this job, and I’m not really sure what this blog is or will be, but it feels good to write — I’ve been doing a lot of it offline and in private, obviously, but blogging offers a unique mix of freedom and motivation to not spin off into a completely personal, incomprehensible ramble (I hope).

Until then.