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lurkch · 8 years ago

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The Hoverbike Incident, Part 2

Fandom: Star Trek AOS Pairing: Spock x OC Summary: The adventures of teenage Spock, episode 1. Word Count: 2851 Warnings: I can’t think of any, but one person’s plot point is another person’s warning, potentially, so I can’t say for sure. Rating: ? Note: This has been sitting on my hard drive for several years, so now’s as good a time as any. Unbeta’d.

Tag List (Likes & Reblogs): @star-trekkin-across-theuniverse @auduna-druitt @kingarthurscat @trekkietrekkielovelove @room-with-a-cat @castiels-ass-butt-1967 @clumsy-writing-rdb @fezesmakeseverythingbetter @storiesfromstarfleet @deadlockedsculptures Anyone else?

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Over the next few days, Jules became more the person Spock was used to—that is to say loud, nosy, irritating and arousing. According to his mother, this was typical of Human teens. Not that she commented on the arousing part (Spock kept that particular complaint to himself).

Once his mother's flitter was out of sight, Spock began packing what he referred to as provisions and what Jules repeatedly called a picnic. He sent her back to her room twice before he was satisfied that she was suitably dressed for an excursion into the desert. The exercise would have been more satisfying if he had not had the distinct impression—garnered mostly from repeated eye rolling on her part—that she was simply humouring him because he was doing his 'Vulcan-thing.’

"Uh-uh. This bike," she said, leaning against Sarek's new beast as Spock headed to his own, somewhat battered and very ancient, hoverbike.

"That is my father's,” he said flatly. "This is mine."

"Don’t care,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “I want to ride this one." She ran her hand over the sleek chassis as she circled it admiringly.

The bike was aesthetically pleasing in its aerodynamics and unmarred paint.

"You did not specify a particular hoverbike when we made our agreement and I do not agree to this amendment."

"Oooh, amendment," she said drawing out the word. "Practising to be a lawyer when you grow up?"

Spock took a deep breath and engaged in the Vulcan equivalent of counting to ten. He counted to twelve. "No. And we are taking my hoverbike or none at all."

"Oh c'mon. Wouldn't you rather ride this one? We'll be back before your mom. And your dad's not back for a week or something." She fluttered her lashes in what was meant to be a suggestive fashion—the gesture was not completely ineffective. "Aren't you … curious? In-trigued? Fa-sci-na-ted?"

He looked at her askance. She'd been the one to complain that he was overusing the word interesting and now she was mocking his attempts at other word choices.

She clambered onto Sarek's hoverbike, nearly toppling it before he caught it, and seated herself, examining the dash. No doubt searching for the ignition. Spock was satisfied that she would not find it since everything was labelled in Vulcan script.

"I'll keep your other little secret if we take this one."

"I have no other secrets." He made a quick mental list and came up with one or two things but as far as he was aware she didn't know about any of them.

She watched his face and grinned. "Hah, yes, you do." Changing tack, she appealed to his ego and then to his logic pointing out that Sarek's bike was much more suited to carrying a passenger than Spock's.

That was true. It was one of the main reasons Sarek bought the new bike.

"We would need to be extremely careful not to marr the finish," he said, eyeing the gleaming machine.

"Oh, absolutely." Her tone was suddenly so serious that he could not be sure whether she was being sincere or whether she was mocking him again. Still. She had kept her word not to tell his mother about his excursion, for all the good it had done.

He would be lying if he said that the thought of testing the bike in Sarek's absence hadn't occurred to him.

"You cannot tell my mother."

"Lips sealed," she said, grinning. "Promise."

"Very well," he said, transferring their provisions to Sarek's bike—a process that was only marginally complicated by Jules bouncing excitedly in the driver's seat.

"I am driving," he said pointedly.

"Spoilsport." But she scooted backward onto the passenger seat readily enough.

With their helmets on the neighbours would have to look closely to notice it wasn't Sarek piloting the bike. Nevertheless, Spock immediately headed out over the desert to avoid prying eyes.

The bike handled much smoother than Spock's though a bystander could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Jules' hands looped around Spock's waist and her front pressed to his back made focus more difficult than Spock anticipated. The bike dipped and wobbled a few times more than strictly necessary.

"Where are we going?"

The bike dipped again but Spock quickly regained control.

"There is no need to shout. The helmet intercom is quite sensitive."

"Oh. Sorry," she said, lowering her voice almost too much. "Where are we going?"

"My cave. You will find it more comfortable to eat in the cooler temperature and we can be assured that no predators will be present."

"Oh, okay—wait, did you say predators?"

He winced at the sudden increased pressure around his waist as she tightened her grip.

"If you deprive me of oxygen you will be stranded," he said drily, pulling away but not daring to take a hand from the control column.

"Huh? Oh, sorry." Her grip loosened marginally and he managed to take a deep breath, though not a full one.

"There are large and small predators in the desert. Most of them retire to dark, cool places during the hottest hours of the day. Like caves."

"Um, so what makes your cave so safe?"

"You will see."

Sarek’s bike was more efficient—and more stable at higher speeds. So much so that Spock was lulled into thinking they were travelling slower than they were. Jules rose somewhat in his estimation as she expressed admiration for the scenery and asked questions about the geology, flora, and fauna that they passed. He even deigned to circle around a sehlat cub that had wandered out of its den and into the heat so that she could get a closer look before its mother retrieved it.

He settled the bike at the base of sheer rock and disembarked. Not until he started retrieving their provisions did Jules remove her helmet to ask if, in fact, they were there yet.

"I don't see a cave," she said after she had surveyed their surroundings in every direction.

"Nevertheless, we are here."

Shrugging in acquiescence, she hopped off the hoverbike. Spock slung the pack containing their provisions over his shoulder and grabbed a handhold in the rock.

"You're shitting me," Jules said from the vicinity of his feet when he had ascended barely a metre.

Spock looked over his shoulder as best he could. "I am what?"

"I mean you're kidding me. Joking. Can't possibly be serious." When Spock didn't answer, she added, "I am not climbing that cliff."

Sighing, Spock jumped down from his perch. "Cliff is a misnomer. The cave is only 8.7 metres up."

Jules crossed her arms and stared at him. Spock sighed.

"There is a narrow foot path along the ledge, however the access point is 569 metres northwest."

"I don't know how to climb."

"You need only follow my movements."

Jules looked unconvinced.

"If I did not believe you were capable I would not suggest it."

"Fine, but if I die it's your fault."

Spock frowned but decided not to comment since she seemed inclined to attempt the ascent. While it normally took him less than two minutes to scale the wall, with a tentative Jules in tow it stretched to ten minutes.

Jules leaned against the rock face on the ledge and squuezed her eyes shut. "Don't look down. Don't look down. Don't look down."

Spock glanced at her curiously then set to work shifting the rock slab over the cave entrance. When he had moved it enough that they could squeeze through, he tossed the provisions inside and reached over and grabbed Jules’ leg intending to get her attention. She shrieked loud enough that he grazed his scalp on the cave opening. When they had both recovered their senses and stopped glaring at each other, he ushered her into the cave, sliding a smaller rock slab over the opening from within the cave to keep anyone or anything from following them in.

"Uh, are we eating in the dark?"

"A moment," Spock said, running his hands along the wall until he encountered a familiar nook. Retrieving the matches he had left there, he struck one against the wall and lit a candle sitting on a ledge. Leading her further into the cave he lit several more until a faint glow filled the space.

"Your eyes will become accustomed to the light."

Needing less ambient light, Spock set about checking the cave for signs of intruders since his last visit. Finding none, he unpacked their provisions onto a flat rock about knee height.

"This is kinda cool," Jules said, glancing around the cave. "Still not down with the entrance though."

"The ambient temperature is considerably cooler than outside, particularly if you venture further back."

Jules giggled and he looked over to see if something required his attention.

"When I said it was kinda cool I meant that your cave is, uh, nice. Not the temperature."

"Ah." He was learning rapidly that despite their many similarities, Standard and English were not, in fact, the same language. Jules either didn't or wouldn't speak Standard. "If you wish I will show you the modifications I have made."

The cave was not particularly large so it wasn't a long tour. There was the small area for eating where the ceiling was also high enough to stand up. A small beam of faint light fell through a small hole in the cave ceiling to allow fresh air in and stale air—or smoke from a cooking fire—out. Further back the ceiling sloped leaving a small semi-circular area equipped for sleeping.

"Whoa, you sleep out here? Isn't that, I don't know, dangerous?"

"Less so than travelling after dark," Spock said, heading back to the eating area.

Spock pulled over another flat rock. "You may sit if you wish."

"Thanks." Jules sat down and then after a moment decided to pull her feet up onto the rock as well. "Does Vulcan have spiders or scorpions or anything?"

"There is insect life in the desert, however nothing exactly analogous."

"Yeah, well, I'll just keep my feet up here anyway. Just in case."

"As you wish." Spock handed her the sandwich he had prepared himself and picked up his own.

"Where are you going to sit?"

"I am accustomed to caves," he said, crouching down across from her.

"So, your cave, huh? How did you manage that?"

He told her the story over lunch of how he had spent weeks searching the desert for an unoccupied cave. After several false starts he had decided on this one, lifting the rock slab into place by using his hoverbike as a crane.

"That's pretty cool."

Spock looked at her a moment. "Nice?"

"Yeah, that's what I meant." She grinned at him in the candlelight, "Is that how your hoverbike got all those dents?"

"Several," Spock admitted. "Sarek was not pleased."

"Is Sarek ever pleased?"

"With me?" Spock considered the question a moment. "Rarely, as of late."

"Yeah, well that's normal. I don't think my mother's been happy with me since I was four."

"What did you do?"

"I survived. My mistake, right?" Jules shrugged. "So, why exactly do you need a cave anyway? Is it like some Vulcan treehouse kinda deal?"

Seeing Spock's blank look, she explained the concept of a treehouse.

"I suppose it is analogous. It is peaceful to be alone."

"I guess so. Only if other people are being assholes though, otherwise it's just lonely."

They headed back to Shi'Kahr shortly after their lunch. At a loss for further conversational topics, Spock was eager to be off and Jules was missing the air conditioning of the house. There was also the small matter of returning Sarek's bike before it was missed.

Whether Jules had changed her seating position or whether Spock was simply more attuned to her presence, he found it more difficult to ignore her hands looped around his waist mere centimetres from his lok on the return trip.

The cooling air of the waning day mixed with the residual heat of the desert floor created contrasting thermal layers over the desert. Spock usually rode his hoverbike at either at its peak height or almost skimming the desert surface at these times to avoid the mixing of thermal layers that could cause a hover vehicle to dip or rise unexpectedly. Sarek's hoverbike, however, had a thermal current sensor.

Spock flicked on the display and watched the multi-colour graph of the thermal layers. If he timed it just right … the hoverbike dipped sharply on a cold current and then rose smoothly as it picked up a hot stream of air near the ground. Behind him Jules let out a startled yelp through the intercom and tightened her arms to a vise grip around his waist.

"What the hell was that?"

"Thermal currents. I was testing a theory."

"What theory?" Jules asked, sounding both suspicious yet grudgingly interested. Her grip around his waist loosened slightly as she remembered belatedly that suffocating the driver was unwise—especially when they were floating at this height.

"That it is possible to ride the thermal layers in a way that approximates the Terran sport of surfing." Since his statement only elicited static over the intercom, he added, "The surfboard in this case being the hoverbike."

"I know, I got that. I'm not an idiot," she muttered. "So you did that on purpose."

"Yes."

"A little warning, next time? Unless you want me to lose my lunch all over your back?"

"You do not object to another attempt?"

"As long as you know what you're doing." She scooted forward so that she was snug against him, her legs flanking his thighs and her breasts pressed to his back. He was so distracted by the shift in position that he almost missed her mumbling, "You do know what you're doing, right?"

They continued on, searching out promising thermal currents and becoming increasingly daring with each successful swoop toward the desert floor only to be buoyed at the last moment.

Had Spock been thinking clearly, he might have avoided the Arev Sef where multitudes of dunes made the thermal currents more complex and the uneven terrain made low-level hoverbike skimming unwise. Spock's thoughts, however, were divided between the thermal currents and the erection he was experiencing from having Jules plastered against his back—though part of that may have been attributable to the adrenaline rush of surfing. Her firm grip around his waist was now grazing the head of his lok (or maybe it was the other way around) with every jolt. He did not ask her to move her hands.

On the last thermal wave, Spock miscalculated the ground distance having silenced the collision sensor earlier since it sounded every time they swooped toward the ground anyway. They failed to clear a sand dune on the updraft, skittering over it just enough for the hoverbike to dig in and buck them both off before the bike rolled down the far side of the dune.

Spock lay in the sand dune where he had landed and assessed whether he had been injured. After a moment of cataloguing his body parts (all of which were thankfully still intact, including the one that had been protruding just prior to the mishap), he sat up and looked around. Jules was several metres away and not moving. By the time he scrambled to his feet and ran over to her, she had started to stir.

"Are you injured?" He asked anxiously, crouching down beside her.

"M'okay," she mumbled, sitting up and, after doing what Spock assumed was her own internal assessment, pushed herself to her knees and then stood up. "What happened?"

"We hit a dune."

"Oh." As she started following him over the dune, Spock noticed that she was limping.

"You are injured."

"It's just a sprain." She patted him on the arm. "It's nothing, really."

He helped her climb the dune, the shifting sand closing in around their footsteps. From the air the dunes had seemed small, but now that they were navigating them on foot they became large and looming.

Once they reached the top they could see a fair ways. Shi'Kahr was not yet in sight. If they were to reach it by dark they would need the hoverbike in working condition, particularly with Jules’ injury. For the moment Spock pushed away thoughts of trudging through the desert at night on foot though he did spare a quick glance to see if any predators had come out to investigate their scent.

"Uh-oh."

Spock looked over at Jules and followed her gaze to the base of the sand dune. Sarek's hoverbike lay on its side, a trail of gouges in the dune marking its path to the bottom. Spock's stomach sank as he saw that the rearview mirror was laying in the sand some distance up the dune from where the hoverbike rested. He wasn't certain in this light but he thought the windshield might be cracked as well. Life as he knew it might very well be over in the next 184.72 hours, more or less, depending on whether Sarek's transport was delayed.

A/N: I know crap all about physics, thermal currents or surfing. If you’d like to be tagged for any of my fics,sign up here.

#spock x oc #teenage!Spock #star trek aos fanfiction #spock fanfiction #spock #kum'i: the awakening #trek fest 2017

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groovy-lady · 5 years ago

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I also have never seen Discovery, so I am i trigued by your statement that Ethan Peck is the only portrayal of Spock that is honorable to Leonard Nimoy (I simply have not read/heard this before now). Would you care to elaborate as to why?

Though I’ve never seen Discovery, Ethan Peck is the only portrayal of Spock that’s honorable to Leonard Nimoy

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poketin · 8 years ago

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@ellieofmidnight i was listening to tenacious d throughout the entirety of writing this

enjoy being old enough to drink and vape in the land of burgerbeachland, usa

also hint = clue (the game)

“Ian!”

The guy in question turned in his crappy seat on the crappy school lunch benches to stare at his musical friend, who was jogging towards him with a suspiciously large grin on his chiseled jaw.

Not as chiseled as Paul, the jaw god, but close enough. Maybe. If jaw classifications were baseball leagues, Paul would definitely be in the major leagues. Hard to beat Babe Ruth at jaw chiseling.

Ian blinked. Something about Luke really got him rambling, it seemed.

“What?” He declared irritably, stabbing at his plate with a strange utensil one could only describe as a sporkife.“I was in the middle of important pasta matters.”

Unfortunately, Luke hadn’t heard his half-sarcasm as he had only then removed his blasting headphones and hung them rather stylishly off his neck. Ian cocked his head as he caught some snippets of the song before Luke switched everything off.

Something about squeezing and saying please…?

Ian raised an eyebrow, taking careful note of the action so he could keep it suspended for the appropriate amount of time for skepticism and intrigue. Possible music shaming would have commenced had Luke not plopped down next to him and immediately shoved a question into his ears.

“Forget the awful and boring school food,” Luke purred as he snaked an arm around Ian’s shoulder. “How about we go back to my place? I’ve got board games.”

Ian leaned back so Luke could get the full blast of his neutral expression. Unfazed, that’s how he rolled.

“Is that some kind of euphemism?”

Ian had to duck to avoid the spray of musician spit from the hat wearing funkman as he blew a derisive raspberry.

“I thought moose lived in Alaska or something, not in the gutter.” He boomed out a laugh at his dumb joke before continuing. “I have loads of cool stuff, like Hint.” Luke wiggled his eyebrows. “You like Hint, don’t you Ian?”

Ian grumbled but his growing smile betrayed him. “I like Hint.”

“You like those thinky games, the ones where you have to sleuth stuff. The moose of intrigue, they should call you.” Luke’s eyes lit up and Ian forced down the urge to headbutt him and run. “They should call you...Iantriguing.”

Ian frothed at the mouth, his allergies to horrible wordplay threatening to dissolve his insides like acid. His suppressed sarcasm was becoming a poison, one that melted the crap out of everything he loved, but he endured, lest he turn that poison on the things he loved in the outside world.

He’d let acid destroy him from the inside out as long as Luke’s smile could be preserved, loathe as he was to admit it.

“You know, I’m killing myself for you.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Do you have Good Rodents?”

Luke yanked his hat over his eyes jokingly, nearly stumbling into a wall as Ian watched on. “No one has that horrifying nightmarefest except for you, my friend.”

“It’s a complete masterpiece. Sorry you doubt its glory.”

“That’s not even a board game.” Luke swatted at Ian with his trusty hat. “Let’s just hurry to my dorm, okay? Before I have to sit through your weird gaming experiences.”

A pause.

“That was an invite to invite me to your dorm so I can totally sit through your weird gaming experiences. Please.”

Ian waved a hand.

“We’ll see.”

Ian stood in front of Luke’s dorm door as the latter unlocked his door.

Luke threw open his door with a flourish and a bow, jumping back in fear as it banged against the door stop with such a force that it slammed shut again from the rebound force. His bravado and enthusiasm were doused as he fished out his key again, blushing and apologizing to a few people who poked their heads out in the hall, angry at the loud noise.

Ian smiled as he was ushered inside, happiness flooding his senses for no discernible reason. He turned towards Luke to see a similar expression on his face, albeit with more obvious adoration.

“There’s something stuck in your teeth, Luke.”

Luke’s smile fell for but a moment before it returned. He held his arms bashfully behind his back as he shimmied in place. His specialty shimmy. This couldn’t be good, thought the intelligent and beautiful mooseman.

“Do you think...you could get it out for me?”

Ian dug through that sentence before Luke had even finished, taking the words “get” and “out” and putting them into action as he speed walked to the other end of the room.

“Wait!” After attempting to parkour off the wall, Luke, covered in dirt, scratches, and bad decisions, skidded to a halt in front of Ian. “Okay, okay, no team exercises. Let’s just get to investigating alright?”

He reached below his bed and pulled out Hint’s box. Unfortunately, a silver fish had been on the top and Luke dropped it like a stone, the box exploding open and the contents falling every which way.

They both sighed and began picking everything up, Luke throwing a piece at Ian.

A fatal mistake that soon turned into more piece flinging.

The chosen sport of true champions.

“This is kind of a mess of a first date, isn’t it?” Luke said as rolled the only remaining dice left.

“Don’t worry, everyone and everything’s a mess all the time. Messes can be great.”

“A motivational speaker, you ain’t.”

“Shut up and guess the murder weapon, before it turns into this game board. With the victim being you.”

Luke fell back dramatically. “The horror!” He threw an arm in the air as he bent backwards like a gymnast. Like someone who grinds at 4 am.“It was Ian, in the dorm with the game board.” He sat back up and pulled down the shirt that had began to creep up his stomach, giving someone who may have been watching an excellent view.

“Coincidentally, that may or may not be the title of my next hit single.”

Ian hurriedly switched his attention back to the game. “Be sure to pay me 70/30 of the profits then. You can’t use my likeness without paying me royally.”

“It’s worth it.”

Ian swallowed hard at his sincerity and leaned against Luke’s shoulder. “Let me see your

“Double detectives!” Luke placed a well-coordinated smooch on Ian’s lips before jumping up and sweeping up the board and all its pieces in his arms. “Watch this—!”

With a shout, he threw the bundle of game against his bedroom wall with muscles practically bursting forth with effort, the pieces smacking against the cheap drywall and flying all over the room. The cards fell into an anticlimactic pile as the board hit the wall and frisbeed right to Ian, the sharp rotating deathtrap cutting off a snippet or two of hair before falling onto the floor with a loud slap.

Ian stared at this mess of pieces and cards and simply gently fell backwards onto the hardwood.

A snort escaped him before he could stop it and he covered his face with his hands. He closed his eyes and curled into a ball, laughing into his knees at the absurdity of it all with tears pricking at his eyes.

He heard helpless laughter and heard a dull thump as Luke fell onto the floor beside him. Ian dared to raise his face to wipe away his tears of mirth, stealing a glance at the ball of sunshine beside him.

Luke’s face was flushed pink and his eyes were screwed tight as his mouth froze in choked laughter.

Ian would only admit it after 12 cups of coffee, about the point where he forgot the meaning of the word filter, but it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

#happy fucking birthday ellie!!!#i adore you to pieces #thanks for always being an amazing person and friend #you're the best and i love you #so have some gays #papa bless #also sorry its so short ahhh i just wanted to jam pack a sweet little fucking capsule of gay #there will be more good shit in your future you wonderful fuck #also ellie deserves the world woohoo!!#brutaltown #yungmoose #asagao academy #fanfic #poketin fics #this was based off an old prompt request that she sent me that i never got around to gomen gomen ;w; <3

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spilledreality · 6 years ago

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the hippie phenomenon

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

—Robert Warshow, "E. B. White and the New Yorker"

I wanna take issue with Kerouac and Didion, not so much with their writing’s literary value but as cultural criticism. Chance aside, a prerequisite of good criticism as I see it is a penetrating, upper-percentile comprehension of the subject at hand, coupled with an epistemic humility sufficient to the task of staying open-minded. Both Kerouac and Didion, though they represent opposite sides of the cultural and political coin, seem most primarily in judgment of their subjects, rather than intrigued by them. Both their practices show a dedication to deduction over induction, which is to say the opposite of learning. There is little demonstrated effort to adequately reconcile their worldviews, motivations, and values with that of an other (in Kerouac’s case, PTA moms and nuclear families; in Didion’s, the acidfreaks of Haight-Ashbury). Any good lawyer will tell you, if you don’t adequately understand your opponent’s position, your rebuttal will follow in inadequacy, cf. Ideological Turing Tests.

Here's Kerouac in My Woman describing a job application (one implication being that the American laborer is a drone, a zombie, whose guise Jack and his friends must take on to get hired):

We entered [the office] with our arms stretched out in front of us [drunk] like the zombies we'd seen in a picture the other day; we made our feet go slow and automatic like the ghost of death. We asked the man for a job. The poor idiot said, 'I don't think you boys will do.' We got out of there... laughing at the top of our lungs.

As the 50s turned into the 60s, the Beat ethos into flower power, Kerouac drifted into Long Island alcoholism; Ginsberg adapted, stayed relevant. The transition between decades bridged by the Merry Pranksters’ cross-country quest to "tune out, drop out" in a refurbished 1939 school bus per Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

On assignment for The Saturday Evening Post, Joan Didion traveled to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where she saw posters of Ginsberg hung on the walls and devotees treated his opinions on the Krishna as of equal authority with the Swami. Didion saw a world falling apart, spiritually and socially in crisis. People forget, so it's worth reminding that Didion was not a progressive in this era. She was a National Review contributor and a Goldwater voter. And while I have no problem with her political conservatism, it’s important to link “Slouching” with the general moral hysteria over longhairedness taking place at the time, a hysteria which contributed in large part to Nixon's presidential and Reagan's gubernatorial elections.

The central argument (or assumption, or presumption of “Slouching” is that San Francisco is home to a generation of children (some literally, some relative maturity) who have embarked on an extended bad trip (either literally or figuratively) from which they may not ever return. Affectless and out-of-it, they show emotion only when discussing, acquiring, or ingesting narcotics (peyote, acid, smack, crystal, amps, and a now-mysterious “STP”). “Pathetically unequipped" for the real world, they lack any serious political convictions or critical thinking abilities, instead swimming in self-delusion and macrobiotic diets.

I can't speak of Dideon's intent so I'll stick to her prose, sociopathic in its lack of empathy and interest. The essay’s divided into bits so that each section sports an ominous closing sentence cum punchline-zinger. Interviewees divide into strawmen or caricatures; none are depicted or explored as complex, flesh-and-blood human beings. Juvenile delinquents and drug dealers are picked as the primary representative spokespeople of a sizable neighborhood and subculture. There’s Debbie, 15, a runaway because “[her] parents said she had to go to Church.” There’s John, 16, who has left home because his mother “didn't like boots” and made him help out around the house: “Tell about the chores,” Debbie says. John: “For example, I had chores. If I didn't finish ironing my shirts for the week I couldn't go out for the weekend. It was weird, wow.” Shortly after her wide-eyed relay on chores, Didion recounts Debbie literally chipping a nail, then getting upset that the author isn't carrying extra polish on her. I'd say you can't make this stuff up, but I'm tempted to invoke Richard Bradley:

Some years ago, when I was an editor at George magazine, I was unfortunate enough to work with the writer Stephen Glass on a number of articles. They proved to be fake, filled with fabrications, as was pretty much all of his work. The experience was painful but educational; it forced me to examine how easily I had been duped. Why did I believe those insinuations about Bill Clinton-friend Vernon Jordan being a lech? About the dubious ethics of uber-fundraiser (now Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe? The answer, I had to admit, was because they corroborated my pre-existing biases. I was well on the way to believing that Vernon Jordan was a philanderer, for example—everyone seemed to think so, back in the ’90s, during the Monica Lewinsky time.

I can't say whether Didion fabricated these stories. It doesn't matter either way. A piece which confirms existing biases of its readers, or which confirms its own initial biases at its start, doing little more than elaborate variations on a stereotype for thousands of words, is poor criticism and shoddy historiography.

A generic structure for a given section of “Slouching”: observe events unraveling around her, hazard a guess at (and editorialize heavily on) what is occurring, entertain the possibility of asking a participant or knowledgeable observer for more accurate information, and then—inexplicably—decide not to. In other words, there’s a lack of respect for her subjects’ subjectivity, or for her own ability to be wrong. Equally as incredible as this journalistic practice is Didion’s willingness to admit to it (and in the same breath berate Time and other publications for their own misunderstandings of the hippie phenomenon).

Didion gets haughty at points, seamlessly transitioning from picking on a teenager’s amateur poetry to a bout of philosophical reflection:

As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon mastery of the language and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from a “broken home.”

For myself, I’m not so hot about the idea of a journalist who dedicates forty pages to belittling literal teenage runaways, especially when so many avenues of more substantial cultural interest are ignored. It’s off-handedly mentioned that McLuhan is read by many in the Haight community, as are the Hari Krishna and the writings of Zen Buddhism, but Didion never meaningfully pursues any of the community's beliefs.

Some of the more interesting documents on this subject come from the exchanges between literary, Cold War liberal moderates and the generation of beatniks and hippies who were pulling the country toward a more radical vision. Adam Kirsch’s Why Trilling Matters charts the relationship between Lionel Trilling and his former student at Columbia, Allen Ginsberg. (Kirsch, drawing on Trilling, distinguishes between the Blakean and Wordsworthean impulse, Wordsworth a “representative of wisdom,” Blake as the blazing voice of passion. As Trilling writes, Blake's poetry would be one of the more significant influences on the art and voice of Sixties counterculture: “American undergraduates seem to be ever more alienated from the general body of English literature, but they have for some time made an exception of William Blake... uniquely relevant to their spiritual aspirations” and acting as a model for its “transvaluation of social and aesthetic values.”)

Equally good is the lifelong correspondence between Allen and his also-poet father Louis Ginsberg. Trilling and L.’s sensibilities are of moderation and qualification, both sure only of their own fallibility; the Blakean hubris is an ideology propping up conceits of heroism, a Manichean dualism where only the counterculture keeps it real. “Save me from that mixed-up, confused view of the Beat Generation which maintains it has a blueprint of Truth, obviously handed over to them in a mystic, blinding revelation from Heaven," Louis wrote to his son in ‘58.

An avid communist in the early-to-mid 1960s (before a trip to Cuba changed his mind w/r/t the freedom of its citizens¹) Allen berated his father in letter after letter over Lou's democratic socialist views, and got bit back:

Your holier-than-thou attitude, with your noble intentions, does not prove that you have a Heavenly blueprint of the truth. You may be a great poet, as I believe you are, but you can still have false ideas and false facts, despite your noble intentions. T.S. Eliot and Pound had Fascist ideas.

One more excerpt, for joy:

Dear Allen,

You have a right to your opinion, according to your lights; but I retain my energetic insistence to differ with you... on your whole Beat Generation's views that everything that is, to paraphrase Pope, is wrong. Everything, according to your views, is all wrong, all in ruins, all warmongering, all immoral—except you (plural; i.e., the Beat Generation). Nobody wants “beauty, poetry, freedom” but you (plural)... all is false; all civilization messed up, all progress in the wrong, false track; all doomed... (March 10, 1958)

The truth the Beats claimed to seek or else contain was partly religious, the result of chemical visions, Ginsberg hearing Blake’s voice come to him mid-orgasm, Cassady meditating. But it was also of the writers’ attempted escape from social structure, to chase an idea of the authentic self as the self unencumbered by the social. Trilling “...the idea of... surrendering oneself to experience without regard to... conventional morality, of escaping wholly from the societal bonds, is an ‘element’ somewhere in the mind of every modern person.” Hence the enormous success of On the Road, which functions as simulation, a virtual joyride for those unwilling, unable, or who know better than to take such a trip themselves.

Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden:

Postwar prosperity had provided [sixties radicals] with the freedom to protest, the freedom to run wild, and the luxury of dropping out without worrying about a job. But by the 1970s the economy turned sour and, as I wrote in [the 1977 edition of] this book, “we could see how much the rainbow colors of the culture of the sixties were built on the fragile bubble of a despised affluence, an economic boom that was simply taken for granted.”

This is not to invalidate the legitimacy of radicals’ complaints, but to complicate the picture of inheritance in dissent.

It’s no secret the Beats were a stretch short of sainthood. Cassady and Kerouac were philanderers, promising women marriages only to subsequently abandon them (illegitimate children included). Cars were stolen only to be drunkenly totaled. And Carr, of course, infamously knifed an overly attached romantic pursuer in Manhattan's Riverside Park, dumping his body in the Hudson River under conditions still unclear today.

Tied up in this transgressiveness is the question of privilege, a critique which Diana Trilling, wife of the famous Lionel, launches in her essay for Partisan Review, “The Other Night at Columbia”:

I had heard about [Ginsberg] much more than I usually hear of students for the simple reason that he got into a great deal of trouble which involved his instructors, and had to be rescued and revived and restored; eventually he had even to be kept out of jail. Of course there was always the question, should this young man be rescued, should he be restored? There was even the question, shouldn’t he go to jail? We argued about it some at home but the discussion, I’m afraid, was academic, despite my old resistance to the idea that people like Ginsberg had the right to ask and receive preferential treatment just because they read Rimbaud and Gide and undertook to put words on paper themselves.

Alexander:

The “heroes” of On The Road consider themselves ill-done by and beaten-down. But they are people who can go anywhere they want for free, get a job any time they want, hook up with any girl in the country, and be so clueless about the world that they’re pretty sure being a 1950s black person is a laugh a minute. On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat. But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.

I would hesitate to agree that America in the early 20th century was markedly higher-trust than modern times. Rates of violent crime in the interwar period are comparable to the highs of the 70s crime wave, and despite sagging post-1945, were only slightly lower in Kerouac's time than our own. (Trust != crime, I know.) But the mechanisms of opportunity and exploitation remain in play. It is a phenomenon in which transgressive parties advocate for their transgressive way of life as a replacement to the present social order, without realizing or acknowledging that their transgressions are logistically possible through this very structure. Behavior is advocated as moral in Beat writing which would fall apart as a Kantian imperative.

In Kerouac this is both identitarian and pragmatic; J.K.’s lifestyle is possible because it exploits a trusting industrial society and its hard-earned resources. But in Maggie Nelson’s queer theory, it’s primarily a matter of identity and spirituality, where transgression is an end (autotelic) in itself. This is the paradoxical relationship of hegemony to the queer: it is at once mortal enemy and dearest ally, struggle’s basis in every sense of the word.

The Argonauts is frequently brilliant; its idea of flux (“a constant becoming which never becomes”) is infinitely valuable. But Nelson condemns at every turn the category, the pigeon-hole, the label. Words to her are cages which imprison minds and bodies. And yet both Nelson and Kerouac seem not to acknowledge that the lifestyles and self-images they hold so valuable—the rebellion, transgression, and self-elevation practiced by Kerouac; the queerness valued by Nelson—are possible only through the existence of a majority body or structure from which to self-elevate and self-other. They are advocating for identities of negation as if they were autonomous.

[1] Ginsberg was expelled from Cuba in February of 1965 for "talking too much about marijuana & sex & capital punishment"; he traveled from there to the less oppressive Czechoslovakia.

#jack kerouac #joan didion #allen ginsberg #william blake #adam kirsch #lionel trilling #maggie nelson #scott alexander #slate star codex

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