by Andrei Codrescu

There’s been some discussion on how many slices can one human be divided into.  As many as you like.  It’s the deli counter: how do you like it sliced?  The slicer is the future and its capital needs. We already have many personalities with desires dictated by the slicing market, 2 new personalities a day, 730 personalities a year. If we live an average of 150 years — which our futurists here are modestly estimating — we will have 266,450 personalities when we are done. Let’s be charitable and deduct the first 5 years because we are too young from 0 to 5 to have a fully developed consumer personality — our parents buy shit for us — but even so, in the first 30 years we will possess 105,850 personalities that will each require 10 gadgets a day to get around, or one App called I / O R, the Inner / Outer Robot. The I / O R will be handling 3,175,500 lifetime prostheses catering to our particular personalities. Will this be any different in this assemblage we now call “us,” or will “human” just be a new thing in the future, a thing that takes itself for granted just like it does now. So those seemingly big numbers are meaningless: we are already an assemblage of billions of genes, molecules, cells, and viruses —many billions of micro-organisms that we can also call “machines,” bio-machines. The App that manages these bio-machines is what we call “human.” “I” am the App that insures the cooperation of billions of bio-machines. Still, the discovery and classification of bio-machines has now visibly deconstructed the human cooperative to the point where it has started to initiate a production-line of personalities with mechanical needs. How and when did this happen, and why? Or is it always happening, simultaneously and without stopping, and I (and you) just noticed? Does it just stop for a second when we switch tracks, like a superfast train? We must be in one of those gear-changing moments when the machinery becomes visible, and we think that the longer we prolong humans the more we destroy this planet and, eventually, the universe. We are right and we are wrong. Eco-systems are harmonious only when they are untranslated.  The   second   we   understand   them   enough  to translate them, they begin self-destroying and requiring the building of a different ecosystem to rebalance. This is that second in a long line of seconds. Life is not possible without catastrophic deconstruction and miraculous reconstruction. We are right that it’s all over but it’s just beginning.

1968 –1969
by Ed Sanders

In late October ’68 there was a surprise visit
from Jack Kerouac
who showed up
at 28 Fort Square in Gloucester
in a black limousine from Lowell
driven by his brothers-in-law

Jack stood at the back steps of
28 Fort Square
shouting up to the second floor apt,
“Olson, the red carpet please!
Get out the red carpet!’

Not having any carpet, Olson
placed pages of the Sunday paper
on each step leading down the stairs

According to Olson’s friend Charles Boer
to whom Olson described Kerouac’s visit
“Kerouac was pleased at the gesture,
especially when he found, going up the
stairs, that one of the pages he was
walking on    contained an article on him, with
his picture.”

Then a year later, October 21, 1969
Jack was watching the “Galloping Gourmet”
TV show in the morning, making notes in a pad
& eating some tuna from a can
when the blood from a burst
vein bubbled from his throat
& he passed from earth

It was the second anniversary of the Fugs’
Exorcism of the Pentagon.
That same day in October of ’69
Allen Ginsberg was just about to leave for a
poetry tour beginning with Yale
& then a teach-in about Vietnam
at Columbia U

He was at his farm in Cherry Valley —
Gregory Corso
had come for a visit

That evening the phone rang
Gregory answered,
it was the writer Al Aronowitz

Gregory turned to Ginsberg —
“Al!  Jack died.”

Early the next morning
Ginsberg and Corso
walked through the early snow
to the woods up the hill
& carved Jack’s name
in a tree

In his book “Charles Olson in Connecticut”
Charles Boer writes about the time
that Olson learned of the passing of Jack:

Boer recalled that Olson
was “startled that he had died so young.”

Olson thought about going to the funeral
but couldn’t determine whether he’d be buried
in Massachusetts or Florida
He told Boer about Kerouac’s
showing up at 28 Fort Square
on a Sunday, shouting up to the
second floor apt,
“Olson, the red carpet please!
Get out the red carpet!’

at which exhortation Olson
placed pages of the Sunday paper
on each step leading down the stairs

one Kerouac stepped upon with
an article about Jack
& his photo too

             As for Olson
a few days later
he went into a hospital
soon to be diagnosed
with his fatal voyage
of liver cancer

                                     •••••

by Ed Sanders

This was the 50th anniversary year of
the passing of Jack Kerouac

I was on the William Buckley show
with Jack Kerouac
on public television
in early September of 1968

It was a memorable event
& hundreds of thousands
have in recent years
watched it on the internet.

Jack was driven from
Lowell, Mass to
NYC for the Buckley show
by his two brothers-in-law

who not long thereafter
drove Jack to Gloucester, Mass
to pay a visit to the
great bard Charles Olson

             •••••