Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

'Abbey's Road'.

I think he wrote this one later in his career, after he was famous and various people paid him to travel and write. He's more of a smartass than ever in this book.

His "Fire Lookout" chapter is a bit of a farce. The Forest Service apparently offered him the same lookout job as Kerouac and Snyder had earlier, up in the Cascades, to "maintain their literary reputation", as Abbey put it, but "prudently, he turned it down".

Favorite line from that chapter: "Having injured my knee during the Vietnam War (skiing in Colorado), I was unable to resume my usual summer job...."

Some interesting chapters on Australia, including one in which he rents a Ford Falcon and tries to drive 1200 miles on rough jeep trails across the outback. Good stuff. He sees so much, and captures it in print.

I've read Desert Solitaire, his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, and it's unfortunate sequel, Hayduke Lives!, and Serpents of Paradise, a collection of his work. The only one I really didn't like was Hayduke Lives!, which suffered every problem a sequel could have. His Writer's Credo from Serpents of Paradise is great, though there was a printing problem with my copy, causing it to start on the wrong page and jump several pages into the middle of another essay on illegal immigration. People like Abbey, and Wendell Berry are amazing, and to borrow a Republican catchphrase "true Americans," individualists who don't subscribe to any credo but their own, and while both of their politics often align with mine, they sometimes don't. As I remember reading in an intro to one of Berry's books, "If Wendell Berry was a movement, I wouldn't want to follow it." That goes for Abbey too, and what higher compliment could you pay a writer?

Yeah.... Abbey takes it issue by issue, "right" or "left", as he sees fit. His polemical chapters are interesting. I found his disdain for eastern philosophy rather amusing in this last book.....

"I can understand why so many of the spiritually tired have switched to zen, om, I Ching and tarot. As an approach to effective resistance against the oncoming tyranny of the machine, these worn-out doctrines and obscure little magics will prove as futile as the machine can prove fatal".......

Hmmmm..... There's something about Zen itself being "drafted" to do ideological battle that doesn't seem to fit here. Kinda defeats the point of zen, it would seem.....