angelheaded hipsters

from a letter written by Allen Ginsberg

2008-09-10T01:36:50Z

So (experiments) are many modern canvasses as you know. The sketch is a fine "Form."]

W.C. Williams has been observing speech rhythms for years trying to find a regular "measure"-

he's mistaken I think.

There is no measure which will make one speech the exact length of another, one line the exact length of another.

He has therefore seized on the phrase "relative measure" in his old age.

He is right but has not realized the implications of this in the long line.

Since each wave of speech-thought needs to be measured (we speak and perhaps think in waves)-or what I speak and think I have at any rate in Howl reduced to waves of relatively equally heavy weight-and set next to one another they are in a balance O.K.

The tenchnique of writing both prose and poetry, the technical problem of the present day, is the problem of transcription of the natural flow of the mind, the transcription of the melody of actual thought or speech.

I have learned more toward capturing the inside-mind-thought rather than the verbalized speech. This distinction I make because most poets see the problem via Worthsworth as getting nearer to actual speech, verbal speech.

I have noticed that the unspoken visual-verbal flow inside the mind has great rhythm and have approached the problem of strophe, line and stanza and measure by listening and transcribing (to a great extent) the coherent mental flow. Taking that for the model for form as Cezanne took Nature.

This is not surrealism-they made up an artificial literary imitation.

I transcribe from my ordinay thoughts-waiting for extra exciting or mystical moments or near mystical moments to transcribe.

This brings up problems of image, and transcription of mental flow gives helpful knowledge because we think in sort of surrealist (juxtaposed images) or haiku-like form.

from a letter written by Ginsberg to his father describing Kerouac's prose style

2008-09-10T01:29:46Z

". . .Entry: Re Jack's prose, well I like it of course, my reason being that it has the same syntactical structure of fast excited spoken talking-this is an interesting event in prose development, and it's no less communicative to me than heard speech, mine, yours, his,-when you speak you also talk a little like that, especially when you're moved, excited, angry, or dizzy with happiness etc. etc.-heightened speech in other words. Normal conversation does not necessarily follow formal syntax, nor need it as long as it's communicative. So written prose. Perhaps you find it uncommunicated or uncommunicating because you expect to see a different written order of syntax. But it actually gets across very well, what he's describing, faithful to his own way of talk. It's obvious from On Road or Town & City that he can write normal prose, simple & straightforward. So if he writes experimentally one has to give credit for it being you know at least sincere & even intelligent, an approach, a try-most people don't even try-and it isn't as if he hasn't personally sacrificed a lot to pursue his sense of craft-that book was written long ag without a hope of publication-as On the Road was written 8 years ago. I do find it interesting though-I know the girl he writes about-who took off her clothes & flipped-I heard her story about it-that was the way she spoke, the syntax even, her style of speaking-a very common style-he's caught her very well-and if you add his interpolations & private thoughts which he records semi-simultaneously with her monologues, & their conversation-you have a very complicated but very real structure of events to try and get down on paper. Hemingway tried simplification & reduction (and was attacked for being too inhumanly stripped down)-Jack trying (as Proust & Celine) to include all the little private thoughts you normally wouldn't mention-so he arrives at a complicated sentence structure. It's not trying to be English sentence structure. It's trying to be American actual speech-and thought-reproduction. So it shouldn't be judged by standards of a high school or college grammar course. It's not meant to be grammatical that way, it's meant to be right another way. Nor can one say that standard English syntax is the fixed and only standard way of transcribing human thought-all languages have different syntax structures-the Latin ones are one group-the German type inflected is another-and many primitive cultures have approaches to syntax that are almost almost incomprehensible to us (but make sense to them-no verbs for instance in some languages, no adjectives in others). And there is Chinese syntax which I'm told is of a totally different order from ours. Sytnax is only a tool to speak with, there are many syntaxes, & many variations possible to our tongue, common in use even, in talk-English grammar is only the formal way tied to fixed habits of feeling & communication-Jack, broken free of these fixed habits of thought, has to think & write his own way, find a mode. Look at the sentence I just wrote-it's crazy, but it followed the spontaneous convolutions of my thought very flexibly-would I change my thought to fit the sentence structure better, or alter my thought & pare it down neat & leave out the hesitations, changes, and halts, interruptions, to make it fit a school copybook? I'd wind up writing gibberish if I tried to halt in midstream & box it up neat to fit some imaginary standard. The ideal is for me a sensitive prose or poetry syntax or metric that is practical & follows the changes actually going on in the process of thinking or writing-where a normal metric or syntax works, fine-but where it doesn't apply, why? I no longer worry about that so much-just go my way-that's all any man can do-live-and do what he thinks practical. And real. See now that that last bit, and real, added on to the sentence. I thought it up next and added it-you can follow my actual process of composition-what I mean is there directly no less and no more-I just thought to say, and real, and added it in, just like that. What freedom-and why not? Language is to use not dicate our thoughts. But so much of our lives & feelings are tied down to the limitations of what we're taught-this is the importance of striking out into variation & experiment-this is not nihilism but courage-not really that-Joy! Well I'll end on elevated note. Love to everyone-wrote Gene tonight-will try Warsaw yet see under skirt of iron curtain perhaps. There is no Beat Generation, it's all a journalist hex. Love Allen." pp. 185-187 from "The Letters of Allen Ginsberg"

Beat Poet

2008-08-31T23:02:04Z

It is 6:13 PM I have been searching through my JS blog for a list of books I have in my Allen Ginsberg collection. To my amazement I have not updated that list since January 2005! I have to go down in the basement soon and dig out all the new Ginsberg books I bought over the last three years. I was sure I had a blog entry with recent Ginsberg books. Strange.

January 7, 2005
Allen Ginsberg Collection
1. "Howl And Other Poems" Introduction by William Carlos Williams
2. "Empty Mirror" Early Poems
3. "Reality Sandwiches Poems 1953-60"
4. "Kaddish And Other Poems 1958-1960"
5. "Planet News Poems 1961-1967"
6. "Allen Ginsberg Journals Mid-Fifties 1954-1958" Edited by Gordon Ball
7. "Allen Ginsberg Journals Early Fifties Early Sixties"
8. "Allen Ginsberg Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996" Edited by David Carter
9. "Allen Ginsberg Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995"
10. "Family Business: Selected Letters between a father and a son Allen and Louis Ginsberg"
11. "Snapshot Poetics" photos by Allen Ginsberg [A Photographic Memior of the Beat era]
12. Allen Ginsberg-Holy Soul Jelly Roll-Poems and Songs 1949-1993 [ Four CD set box set]
13. "Ginsberg: A Biography" by Barry Miles
14. "Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg" by Michael Schumacher
15. "Allen Ginsberg in America" by Jane Kramer
16. "The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg" by Paul Portuges
17. "America Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl And The Making Of The Beat Generation" by Jonah Raskin

August 30, 2008.
18. "Howl: 50th Anniversary Edition" by Allen Ginsberg
19. Howl on trial: The Battle for Free Expression" Edited by Bill Morgan & Nancy J. Peters
20. "I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life Of Allen Ginsberg" by Bill Morgan
21. "The Book Of Martyrdom And Artifice" [First Journals And Poems 1937-1952] by Allen Ginsberg edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton & Bill Morgan
22. "Letters of Allen Ginsberg" edited by Bill Morgan
23. "The Visions of the Great Rememberer"
24. "Collected Poems 1947-1997" by Allen Ginsberg
25. "An Elegy For Allen Ginsberg 1926-1997: No More To Say & Nothing To Weep For" DVD

music: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club "Howl"

Kerouac film

2008-02-28T17:03:35Z

This just popped up on the radar: a new Kerouac documentary produced by Jim Sampas et al.

One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti’s cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. The story unfolds in several synchronous ways: through the narrative arc of Kerouac’s prose, told in voice-over by actor and Kerouac interpreter, John Ventimiglia (of HBO’s The Sopranos); through first-hand accounts and recollections of Kerouac’s contemporaries, whom many of the characters in the book are based on such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson and Michael McClure; by the interpretations and reflections of writers, poets, actors and musicians who have been deeply influenced by Kerouac’s unique gifts like Tom Waits, Sam Shepard, Robert Hunter, Patti Smith, Aram Saroyan, Donal Logue and S.E. Hinton; and by stunning, High Definition visual imagery set to original music composed and performed by recording artist, Jay Farrar of Son Volt, with additional performance by Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie.

Howl

2008-02-14T00:20:51Z

First recording of Allen Ginsberg reading poem 'Howl' found at Oregon college By: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS PORTLAND, Ore.

- What is believed to be the first recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his iconic Beat poem "Howl" has been found at the library of a private Oregon college. For years, it has been thought the first recording of Ginsberg reading "Howl" was on March 18, 1956, at a performance in Berkeley, Calif. But researcher John Suiter has found a recording at Portland's Reed College that predates that by a month, The Oregonian newspaper reports. Suiter was at the college library in May to research a biography of Gary Snyder, a poet who grew up in Portland, graduated from Reed and was a friend of Ginsberg. On Feb. 13, 1956, Snyder and Ginsberg read to about 20 people at Reed, and on Feb. 14, they gave another reading that was recorded on tape. At both readings, Ginsberg read a version of "Howl," a few months before publication of the poem that was to make him famous. At Reed's library, a special collections assistant brought Suiter a box marked "Snyder Ginsberg 1956." In that box he found a 35-minute tape of Ginsberg reading the first section of "Howl" and seven other poems. "It was completely serendipitous," Suiter said. "I had no idea there was a tape." Reed has put the recording of "Howl" and the other poems on its website (www.reed.edu) but it won't be accessible until Friday, when the issue of Reed magazine with Suiter's article is published. "Howl," which was the subject of a landmark obscenity trial after its publication, has sold more than one million copies over the last five decades.

Icons

2008-01-10T06:42:38Z

I made a couple Kerouac icons, and wanted to offer them up to anyone who wants them.

The rest in a multi-fandom post at my icon journal.

Kerouac

2007-12-29T19:59:03Z

I recommend this new book on Jack "Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road" by Isaac Gewirtz.

a single Teletype scroll

2007-08-19T10:37:10Z

'On the Road' takes long route to screen by Paul Clark

Jack Kerouac claimed he wrote "On the Road" in 25 days, banging it out on a single Teletype scroll. But why the novel has taken more than a half-century to hit the screen is a tale with as many turns as Kerouac's own cross-country odyssey.

Producer-director Francis Ford Coppola bought the film rights more than 25 years ago. Over the years he commissioned scripts from at least four writers, including celebrated novelist Russell Banks ("The Sweet Hereafter"). Coppola even attempted one himself, working with his son Roman. But "On the Road" remained parked.

Banks still doesn't know why Coppola rejected his version.

"He seemed to like it," Banks said. "I'm sort of astonished 'On the Road' is being filmed. I never thought it would be made, because it exists in (Coppola's) head. It couldn't be as good as he imagined."

Banks met Kerouac in 1967, when Banks was living off campus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"Kerouac was traveling south to St. Petersburg, where his mother lived," Banks recalled. "He had two Micmac Indians with him, and he picked up a friend of mine who was hitchhiking. My friend called and said, 'Hey, Russ, Jack Kerouac wants to party.' So at my house we had a beatnik party. He stayed there for a week.

"It was strange and interesting and sad. He was a heroic figure to us, but not the man he had been. He was physically ill and mentally ill from alcohol and other forms of abuse. He'd lurch back and forth mentally - at times he'd be this guy with all that gift for words. At other times he was ranting paranoid."

Banks' "On the Road" screenplay reflected that sadness.

"The book is set in '48, a time of innocence," he said. "I looked back from the standpoint of the '60s, and read it as the end of innocence, through the lens of what happened afterward."

Coppola's unofficial consultants have included Carolyn Cassady, whose ex-husband Neal Cassady was the model for "On the Road" hero Dean Moriarty.

"I've seen five 'On the Road' scripts," she said. "Several years ago Francis Ford Coppola invited me to his house to meet his son, who was working on a script. I liked the way Roman Coppola wrote it. Every word was Jack's."

But she hated Banks' script. "I wrote Coppola and said it was awful," she said. "Banks made Neal into this absolutely horrible character."

"And Neal," she added, laughing, "was bad enough in real life."

Kerouac Whole

2007-08-18T15:25:17Z

Luc Sante argues, in his review of the “Scroll” in today’s New York Times that On the Road is a better book without the editing:

The novel that “On the Road” became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/books/review/Sante2-t-1.html

He also insists that the relationship between Dean and Sal is central to the book’s meaning and that that can be more clearly seen in the “Scroll,” which has a more vital depiction of Dean’s presence and rhythm.

the originial scroll

2007-08-18T14:04:42Z

The morning keeps going by. I took Rudy for a walk at Kollen Park. A beauiful morning by the Lake. A morning to lift up your heart in prayer to God the Father. On the way home from our walk we stopped at Reader's World to see if any of my Kerouac books had come in. Two of them had come in and I bought them. I bought these two Kerouac books this morning--- "Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On The Road (They'e re Not What You Think)" by John Leland "On The Road: The Original Scroll" by Jack Kerouac Now I am home listening to Bob Dylan and feeling ok. While at Reader's World I also picked up the new issue of SKYSCRAPER a music magazine that I like to read while going down the road of existence. I like to keep up on the music scene. Do not know why? It is better than keeping up with the war going on in the slums of Grand Rapids. Well I will close to look at the original scroll and pray for universal peace. music: Bob Dylan "Highway 61 Revisited"

America's first king of the road

2007-08-07T18:30:28Z

America's first king of the road

Fifty years ago Jack Kerouac's dazzling novel On the Road became the blueprint for the Beat generation and shaped America's youth culture for decades. It influenced scores of artists, musicians and film-makers, but how does it resonate with young people today?

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday August 5, 2007
The Observer

'Sending countless kids on the road' ... Jack Kerouac

On Wednesday 5 September 1957, the New York Times published a lengthy review of On the Road, the second novel by the 35-year-old Jack Kerouac. The reviewer, Gilbert Millstein, called it 'the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat", and whose principal avatar he is'.
In Minor Characters, her illuminating memoir of life among the Beat writers, Joyce Johnson, who was with Kerouac on that day in New York, captures the seismic resonance of that single review. She had gone with Kerouac to buy an early edition of the newspaper from an all-night newsstand in midtown Manhattan. In a nearby bar, she had watched him read Millstein's article, shaking his head 'as if he couldn't figure out why he wasn't happier than he was'.

Afterwards, they had walked back to Johnson's apartment on the Upper West Side where, as she memorably put it: 'Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The ringing phone woke him next morning and he was famous.' Overnight, the Beat generation had gone overground, and the man who did most to define it suddenly found that his book was now defining him. It would continue to do so for the rest of his short life, and for many decades afterwards.
'Challenging the complacency and prosperity of postwar America hadn't been Kerouac's intent when he wrote his novel,' his first biographer, Ann Charters, later wrote, 'but he had created a book that heralded a change of consciousness in the country.' In the few years following its publication, On the Road became a major bestseller. It also, as Kerouac's friend and fellow Beat writer, William Burroughs, witheringly wrote, 'sold a trillion Levi's, a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road'. Unwittingly, and to his increasing horror, Kerouac had written a zeitgeist book, one that would help determine the course of what would come to be known as youth culture over the following two decades.

'It changed my life like it changed everyone else's,' Bob Dylan would say many years later. Tom Waits, too, acknowledged its influence, hymning Jack and Neal in a song, and calling the Beats 'father figures'. At least two great American photographers were influenced by Kerouac: Robert Frank, who became his close friend - Kerouac wrote the introduction to The Americans - and Stephen Shore, who set out on an American road trip in the Seventies with Kerouac's book as a guide. It would be hard to imagine Hunter S Thompson's deranged Seventies road novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had On the Road not laid down the template - likewise films such as Easy Rider, Paris, Texas, even Thelma and Louise.

Remarkably, On the Road was actually written in 1951 when, so the story goes, Kerouac typed the words over three uninterrupted weeks on to a 120ft scroll of teletype paper, fuelled by Benzedrine and strong coffee. The novel recounts, in a breathless and impressionistic style, his travels to and fro across America, often in the company of his friend and prime influence, Neal Cassady, renamed Dean Moriarty in the book.

In the six years it took for On the Road to be published, American culture changed dramatically: Elvis Presley altered the course of popular music; James Dean and Marlon Brando emerged as a new breed of brooding teenage icon; the painter Jackson Pollock came and went, his action paintings and the intense way he lived some kind of precursor to the 'nowness' that the Beats strived for in both art and life.

'The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time,' William Burroughs wrote later, 'and said something that millions of people all over the world were waiting to hear... The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.'

Though undoubtedly ambitious, Kerouac was utterly unprepared for the fame, notoriety and controversy that followed On the Road. He was hurt by the many negative reviews of the book, and by the parodies of the Beat generation that suddenly started appearing on mainstream televison chat shows. In interviews from the time, he is palpably ill at ease, sometimes inebriated. In the most recent biography of the writer, Kerouac: His Life and Work, Paul Mather writes: 'The obscurity that Kerouac by turn loved and loathed had vanished. He began drinking.'

Twelve years later, Kerouac was dead. The physical cause was cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by years of alcohol abuse. Many of those who knew him intimately, though, suspected that he also died of disillusionment.

'He was just so sensitive,' says Neal Cassady's widow Carolyn, who had a long affair with Kerouac. 'Everything hurt him deeply. He had the thin skin of the artist as well as the guilt that his Catholic upbringing had instilled in him. In the end, he was just so depressed about how he was being misrepresented, how his great and beautiful book was being blamed for all the excesses of the Sixties. He just couldn't take it.'

Had Kerouac lived on into old age, he would have been even more appalled at the ways in which his legacy is currently being misrepresented. Two years ago, a range of Jack Kerouac clothing was launched in America. Later this year, the BBC will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road by sending the comedian, presenter and self-styled dandy, Russell Brand, and his Radio 2 co-presenter, Matt Morgan, on a road trip.

Thankfully, the anniversary will also be marked in a more reverent manner by the book's publishers, Penguin, who on 5 September will publish On the Road: The Original Scroll, the full, uncensored text that Kerouac famously wrote in those three frantic weeks. The cast of characters - Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs, the Cassadys - are no longer hidden behind Kerouac's often wonderful pseudonyms, and that famous opening line, 'I first met Dean not long after my wife and I had split up,' now reads, 'I first met Neal not long after my father died.'

Many of the sex scenes, straight and gay, removed at his publishers' insistence, have been reinstated too, though they are tame by today's standards. The attraction that Ginsberg felt for Neal Cassady, briefly reciprocated, is now acknowledged in the first few pages, though in an almost offhand manner: 'I was in the same room. I heard them across the darkness and mused and said to myself, "Hmm, now there's something started but don't want anything to do with it."'

Fifty years on, the book is being turned into a Hollywood film, scripted by Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford, and directed by Walter Salles who made The Motorcyle Diaries, the story of Che Guevara's road trip across South America. Kirsten Dunst will star as Carolyn Cassady.

Nearly 40 years after his premature death, then, Kerouac lives on - though in some odd and often contradictory ways. As is the case with Guevara, his legacy is contested, his cultural meaning blurred. At the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, where the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is housed, they will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of On the Road with a three-day Kerouac festival. The last remnants of the Beat generation, or at least those fit enough to travel, will be in attendance.

One of the organisers, Junior Burke, chair of writing at Naropa, recently described On the Road as 'one of the truly defining works of American fiction', comparing it to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but adding: 'Instead of two guys on a raft on the Mississippi, it's two guys in a Hudson Hornet on the highways of America. I think it's something that young people still relate to.'

For many young people in America, though, the name Jack Kerouac means nothing at all. In an age where youth culture is increasingly defined by consumerism, where the road trip has been replaced by the gap year, and where it is considered radical to be cool but not cool to be radical, whither Jack Kerouac and his beatific vision?

'It struck me when I was in Thailand last year that no one is even pretending to be beat any more,' says the young British novelist Hari Kunzru. 'You'd quite often see white guys with dreadlocks pulling wheelie cases down Khao San Road. The great adventure that was travelling overland in the Sixties and Seventies has become a middle-class ritual. The notion that you would throw yourself at the mercy of the road, and by doing so, gain some self-knowledge or even maturity, is long gone.'

Carolyn Cassady, the last surviving member of Kerouac's closeknit coterie of friends and fellow Beats, now 84 and exiled in deepest Berkshire, is even more scathing about Noughties youth. 'It's all about money and surface now, the clothes you wear, the things you buy, and no one is the slightest bit ashamed of being superficial. I often thank God that Jack and Neal did not live long enough to see what has become of their vision'.

When I was a teenager, though, On the Road was the bible for any aspiring bohemian, a book that was passed on from one generation to the next almost as a talismanic text. I was given a battered copy by an older friend and, even before I read it, knew that it carried within its pages some deep, abiding truth about youth, freedom and self-determination. On the Road instilled in me a belief that, in order to find oneself, one had to throw caution to the wind and travel long distances with no real goal and very little money.

A few years later, I passed the same copy on to my younger brother, and was incensed when he passed it on to a friend who left it on a bus. I can see the irony now but back then I felt that something bigger than just a battered paperback had been lost. It was in this word-of-mouth way that On the Road, even long after its initial publication, became one of those rare novels that was often read by people who do not read novels as a rule. It may be that this is still the case, but I doubt it. Harry Potter is today's zeitgeist book. The Beats and their wild adventures seem light years away.

And yet, for all that, On the Road continues to be read. What was once a zeitgeist book, though, and one that defined a transformative moment in postwar culture, has become a historical artefact. It may even be the case that today's teenagers read On the Road in much the same way that my generation read Laurie Lee's picaresque rites-of-passage novel As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - as a glimpse into an already distant past when things seemed simpler.

When I asked my 20-year-old niece, Lucy, if she had read it, she nodded. 'I liked parts of it,' she said, 'but it seemed so old-fashioned.' Did she connect with it in any way? 'I suppose it does make you feel like you had missed out on something.' This, she added, was a familiar feeling among her generation. What was that something, though? 'Oh, some kind of meaning. It's set in a time when travelling across America and smoking weed or whatever meant something. It was a statement.'

Hari Kunzru, who 'came to the book late and found it almost cringey in its emotional gushiness,' agrees. 'I was aware of its cultural weight in the canon of alternative literature before I read it, and even though I never had an intense love affair with it, there was no denying that the lives these guys lived was properly edgy in a way that my generation's wasn't. They were transgressing in a very real way and doing dangerous things at a time when the risks were high. To me, the lives were often more interesting than the writing.'

While living in New York, Kerouac met the varied bunch of characters and fledgling writers who would later become the Beat generation, the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, who is said to have coined the term, and, most significantly, Neal Cassady. Kerouac had grown up in a relatively stable family. Cassady, on the other hand, had been brought up by an alcoholic father, and sent to reform school several times in his teens for stealing cars.

To Ginsberg and Kerouac, Cassady was the real thing, an authentic free spirit at a time when authenticity - of experience, expression, vision - was all. 'Neal was an energetic and instinctively brilliant, self-educated guy with a photographic memory,' elaborates Carolyn Cassady. 'But, because of his background, a lot of the more academic Beats didn't like him, didn't trust him. Both Jack and Allen were blown away by him, though, his restless energy, his love of life, the way he talked, the way he lived purely for the moment.'

Cassady epitomised the consciousness that Kerouac had christened 'beat' as early as 1948. The word had two connotations for Kerouac: 'beat' as in worn out by the conventions and constrictions of straight American society; and beat as in 'beatific' - blessed, holy, transcendent. The Beat writers had a shared vision that rejected many of the formal values of the accepted canon, and elevated energy, flow and engagement over reflection, refinement and detachment. In doing so, they also reflected the dissatisfactions of America's postwar young.

Willam Burroughs, who was older and colder than the other Beats, saw the Beat generation as a media construct as much as an organic flowering of a shared transgressive vision: 'Those arch-opportunists, they know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one.' Following the crossover sucess of On The Road, Kerouac became the centre of that story, constantly referred to in the press as 'king of the Beats' and 'spokesman for a generation'. And, though he was eager for literary recognition, he was also the most ill-suited candidate for this kind of canonisation, at least until the similarly elusive Bob Dylan came along a decade later. Dylan, though, managed to reinvent himself continually. Kerouac tried many times and failed.

In the end, Jack Kerouac outlived Neal Cassady by just over a year. Cassady, the man who had truly defined the essence of Beat, whose restlessness, amorality and manic energy had so inspired Kerouac to create his freeform, rhapsodic prose, was found dead by a railway track in Mexico in 1968. He had kept on moving, though, had even stamped his personality on another movement, Ken Kesey's LSD-fuelled Merry Pranksters, whose Day-Glo bus he piloted across America and had ended up in another zeitgeist book, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Kerouac died in 1969 in St Petersburg, Florida. He had lived long enough to be blamed for the excesses of the Sixties generation, for whom he felt no empathy. According to Carolyn Cassady: 'Jack was essentially conservative, patriotic even, but not in any heavy-handed way. He was old-fashioned. I never once heard him swear. People who write about him can never seem to get a hold of the consciousness of that time, which was restless and questing, but also oddly reserved and responsible. His intention was not freedom without responsibility, but freedom of expression in art.'

Which begs the inevitable question, does On the Road stand the test of time? Is it a great work of literature? Ann Charters thinks so, comparing it to both Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, as a novel that 'explores the themes of personal freedom and challenges the promise of the American dream'. Likewise the American novelist, AM Homes, who wrote recently that 'Kerouac was the man who allowed writers to enter the world of flow... his philosophy was about being in the current, open to possibility, allowing creativity to move through you, and you to be one with the process'.

Hari Kunzru disagrees. 'On the Road is such a patchy book, like much Beat writing, in fact. The whole heart-on-the-sleeve romanticism is off-putting, even embarassing. Apart from some really brilliant descriptive passages, it just does not stand up. It's become a different book now, a historical artefact rather than a living, breathing work of literature.'

When I re-read On the Road recently, it did indeed seem to me to be a different book from the one that I had so connected with as a teenager. The gush of emotionalism was apparent, and the narrative no longer held my attention in the same way. And yet there were moments of great descriptive prose about America, about jazz music, about the sheer joy of being young and alive, and about the fleeting freedom of the open road. More surprisingly, there was an undercurrent of great sadness and disillusionment that I had not picked up on, or chosen to overlook, first time around. It seemed, in its final part, to be an elegy for Kerouac and Cassady's youth, for their friendship, which ends in a kind of betrayal, and for the fabled road of the title that had promised so much but, in the end, delivered so little.

Kerouac: On the record

1922 Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents.

1939 Entered Columbia University on a football scholarship but dropped out in 1941.

1944 Arrested for helping Lucien Carr dispose of the body of David Kammerer, whom Carr had stabbed to death. Released on bail, put up by girlfriend Edie Parker after he agreed to marry her.

1950 Published first novel The Town and the City to respectable reviews but poor sales.

1951 Wrote On the Road

1957 Hailed as the voice of the Beat generation, after On the Road was finally published to ecstatic reviews.

1960s Moved to Florida to escape media attention and care for his mother. Wrote a series of lesser-known autobiographical novels.

1969 Died aged 47 from internal bleeding caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

They said 'Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my language.' (Bob Dylan)

'That's not writing, that's typing.' (Truman Capote)

He said 'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.' (From On the Road)

Hugh Montgomery

Looks Kinda Quiet Here...

2007-07-17T07:33:28Z

Well, I just joined. Hi, I'm Renee. I love Kerouac's writing and haven't read enough of his books. My first was, of course, On The Road. I've read Maggie Cassidy, Tristessa, The Town & The City, and part of Visions Of Cody and Desolation Angels.

I think my favorite is The Town And The City. I've never been able to get far into Desolation Angels- though I try again periodically. I'm seriously thinking about reading The Town And The City again...or trying again to read Desolation Angels. I'm not sure. Maybe both.

That's my 330 AM rambling.

a "strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic"

2007-03-10T03:18:15Z

Drama Bum by Ann Douglas
October 1999

In the last decade of his life, Jack Kerouac planned a novel titled Spotlight, about "the fucking HORROR of being a writer in America." He never wrote it. Instead, we have these letters, the second volume of two, both masterfully edited by Ann Charters. They are a rough blueprint for Spotlight, chronicling the years when celebrity catapulted him into a nightmare of television appearances, self-destruction, and despair, climaxing in his tortured death in 1969.
The letters begin in early 1957, nine months before the publication of On the Road. Kerouac had formed and named the Beat Generation with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs in the 1940s. In 1951, a year after the release of his little-noticed first novel, The Town and the City, he discovered "spontaneous prose," an exhaustively autobiographical, "first thought–best thought" style. Although he found no publisher for his new work, in an outpouring of creative excitement between 1951 and 1956, he wrote a series of brilliantly experimental novels, including On the Road, Dr. Sax, Visions of Cody, and The Subterraneans, full of what he described as "the swing, the heartbroke sound, the blues style, the rush of lowdown confession that embarrasses no one but me."

On the Road brought Kerouac fame but not critical approval. His extreme credo of ecstatic, unchecked, and uncensored self-expression found several impassioned defenders, but by and large the Cold War literary establishment responded to his books with a storm of mockery and critical "abuse" (Kerouac's well-chosen term), some of which Charters helpfully includes in her editorial commentary. Kerouac was "a slob running a temperature," a "high school athlete who went from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Skid Row, losing his eraser en route,""a latrine laureate," and "a garrulous drunk drooling into your ear." His books were mere "self-indulgence," the "self-abuse" of a "Simple Simon," "proof of illness," even "psychopathic," and certainly "unreadable." On October 5, 1959, Kerouac sat horrified before his television, as he wrote Ginsberg the next day, watching a parody of himself as "Jack Crackerbox" "leap up (hair pasted on brow) and start screaming...'kill for the sake of killing!'"

Kerouac protested, truthfully, that he was profoundly opposed to violence, that spontaneous prose required more, not less, "discipline" than conventional prose, that he was a "prose-theorist" whose greatest affinities lay with James Joyce, in vain. A shy, self-conscious, intensely unworldly man, devoid of media savoir faire, and already an alcoholic by the time On the Road was published, he devoted himself increasingly to drinking, "self murder," as he called it, destroying various opportunities for career advancement in the process. Because he had no money and a huge backlog of unpublished work, he used his new visibility to rush all his earlier novels into print, glutting his market and strengthening the critical misapprehension that he tossed off a book every few days.

Kerouac's fans upset him almost as much as his detractors. "And the mail!" he wrote his agent, Sterling Lord, in 1959. "It has a frightening intensity that makes me wonder if they simply don't want somebody to crucify or tear apart limb from limb like some sacrificial hero." Never political or even a rebel in the usual sense of the term, Kerouac publicly repudiated the New Left turn the Beat movement took in the 1960s under Ginsberg's leadership, describing himself as a "Catholic Conservative," a "strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic." He restlessly shifted locale, in hopes that the next home might serve as his "monastery" (with his ever present mother in the role of "Reverend Mother"), but his teenaged devotees always found him, invading his yard, shouting up at his windows.

Kerouac was virtually defenseless. A master of the comedy of embarrassment and serendipitous incongruity, Kerouac was incapable of irony, the art of self-protective camouflage that postmodernism, already in the wings by the mid 1960s, would make de rigueur. He saw writing not as a "profession," but as an act of faith in which he laid bare the deepest secrets of his being. "I just want you to accept me as I am and love me," he wrote his editor Robert Giroux in 1962.

Denied approval, Kerouac found himself paralyzed and afraid. After finishing Dharma Bums in 1958, he didn't write a new novel for three years. "I can't be myself anymore," he told Gary Snyder in 1959. The letters collapse into a slapdash fury of pidgin English, as Kerouac takes on the persona the critics have assigned him. "I big tin-eared Canuck....I not really a 'writer,' just a phenomena [sic]." Ever more paranoid, he thought that New York's Jewish critics were plotting against him; he joked bitterly about titling Big Sur (1962), "Another Idea for the Jews To Steal." Not to write had always been death for Kerouac; now writing was death, too. By the mid 1960s, most of his books had been remaindered, and he calculated his weekly income at $65.

On October 21, 1969, 26 blood transfusions failed to stop Kerouac from hemorrhaging to death as the result of internal damage caused by alcohol. Yet the story the letters tell is not entirely unhappy. Although he had little left to offer his last wife, the fiercely loyal Stella Sampas, several of whose letters are included here, she had much to give him. Toward the end, most of Kerouac's friends, shocked and saddened by his disintegration, stayed away, but Stella, a fellow native of Lowell who had known and loved him since childhood, saw the pain, not the monster it had made him. At one moment on the day of Kerouac's funeral, the writer John Clellon Holmes watched Stella, thinking herself unobserved, kneel by Jack's open casket and cover his face with caresses and kisses. Until her own death in 1990, she never spoke in public about Kerouac, vowing, "I'll never use him that way." Kerouac believed in miracles, and though he was too ill always to know it, Stella was his.

Finally, of course, the reader of the letters knows what Kerouac could not. Young people today still buy and fall in love with On the Road; all Kerouac's books are in print, and the serious critical attention for which he longed is beginning to materialize. Just as he predicted, the autobiographical confession, in its various guises from the memoir to talk shows and stand-up comedy, has become a major cultural form. A few weeks before his death, Kerouac wrote a friend, "I'm on my own, and always was on my own." Not anymore.

Ann Douglas teaches at Columbia University; she is the author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, and is at work on a book about Cold War culture.

Blues4Kali- ExperiMental Existentialism for the End Times

2007-01-28T01:57:48Z

What will Winter Solstice bring in 2012?
...an instant of Karma? ...an ethereal spiral dance of the collective soul? ... cosmic judgment leveled against civilization's expanse? ...destruction of the world as we know it? ...a chance for a new start? ...the rise and the revenge of the Goddess? or simply another day in the life of paranoia?
These are the false prophesies that your pastor warned you about!

Reality Exchange Program

"Makes DMT seem like a whip-it."

Crazy Bear said there'd be days like this. As usual, no one believed him. Now, all I want to know is: where IS that lifeboat, and how DO I ditch this ship of fools, without any of these bliss ninnies noticing that I'm already gone?

Captain, my ass. We are equal in this sea of madness.

That iceberg is looking awfully big.

Amana Mission is on a quest to save the world, and the only problem is, she can't remember why she got involved with such an obvious scam in the first place. Jesus saves. Christ. What a loser.

Kali kills first, and recycles later.

Hitchhikers, load up for a ride to the Other Side. You may wish you had gone Greyhound.

"What the...?"

*A cranky band of prankster peace warriors who absolutely cannot resist messing with each other's minds, no matter the cost.

*Cocky alchemy-dabbling quantum surfers, navigating the Ethersphere with hand-held computers, switching timelines to find a better party vibe and swap tips about the best temporary toilets for use as interdimensional portals.

*A burnt-out visionary hippie millionaire on a mission from Gaia to build a better "communitopia" by underwriting a convoy carrying telepathic priestesses.

*A wheelchair-bound mindpilot propelling a crystal-powered Seed Bank toward the post-Apocalyptic Garden, with psychic precision...and a predilection for high-velocity extreme driving.

*Hermaphrodite time-jumper fleeing a fate worse than death.

*Anarchist ghettoes where anything goes-except escape.

*Ancient Principals vying like sweatsoaked carpetbaggers for our loyalty as the Final Vote is tallied.

*Long-haired security patrols collecting a cannabis tribute tax from all pilgrims to the Valley of Fun.

*And an underground meat mafia bringing a black magic revival to a bloodless dreamworld gone bland.

All brought together by a secret psychedelic superdrug that tunes users in to reality through the eyes of another archetypal avatar inhabiting a different state of space and time. Mahayana made easy. Budding Buddha natures are running amuck on a virtual superhighway where all roads lead to the Bo tree and singularity.

Twenty-first century Tantra is about more than sex, drugs, and
rock and roll.Confronting the Karma of every wasted breath is only the first step.

Welcome to the End Times. Kali awaits. She already knows who you are.

Do you?

The 21st century counterculture is even weirder than it appears on the surface. This is not your mommy’s MTV Road Rules.

Ride along on this mesmerizing, metaphor-packed bus trip toward ecstasy and enlightenment, as three real-time guides-Amana, Sissy, and Deva, let you in on what they learned when they asked what It was really all about, after all.

Become them for a multilevel metafictional tour of infinity and awaken yourself to the miracle-a-minute magic of mighty Mother Kali!

Experience the Magic at www.blues4kali.com

wonderland invite xposted

2006-09-01T15:24:49Z

a groovy biscuit before i dance

Karma is not something complicated or philosophical. Karma means watching your body, watching your mouth, and watching your mind. Trying to keep these three doors as pure as possible is the practice of karma.

-Lama Thubten Yeshe, "The Bliss of Inner Fire

get your karma right- come out next weekend to
WONDERLAND FESTIVAL
"a high tea for peace"
benefit for WORLD CAN'T WAIT
(to drive out the Bush Regime!)
www.worldcantwait.org
mulligans bar "home of the hamdog'
630 east lake dr decatur

artists illustrate peace * dj spins * indie flicks
saturday the 9th 2pm-1am
KODAC HARRISON* Breaking Sarah * goddess rocks
Mr. T.H.R.D. highly contagious DHTH STRHK
Mr. Kill * poet Theresa Davis * Sourmash * Barefoot Bill
Amazing Lizardos Collaborative Spectacle

sunday the 10th 2pm- midnight
D'VRG * The Flying Reverends * Liquid EARTH
DONNA HOPKINS * lucky Stray
Wit Hawkins * Hollin Gammage * Barefoot Bill
SEABERG ACROBATIC POETRY * dance by SARAI
THE FLIPS * Sonny & CHER

More merry pranksters to be announced!
$5 donation to world can't wait
or another 9/11 charity of the patron's desire
www.kindhuman.bravehost.com

artists, bellydancers, improv musicians wishing to participate please rsvp by 9/5 to kindhuman2003@yahoo

"Overcome the devils with a thing called LOve"
~ Bob Marley 1975

high tea 4 PEACE

2006-08-16T20:50:38Z

WONDERLAND FESTIVAL SEPTEMBER 9& 10, 2006

we at kindhuman are hosting a high tea for peace!

@ mulligans bar 630 east lake dr decatur ga www.myspace.com/mulligansatl

we will have an amazing array of guests `

*artists illustrating peace

* djs spin in between bands

* saturday from 2pm- 2am & sunday 2pm-midnight with an outdoor stage & inside sensations....like inDependant film!

* poets artists musicians madmeN & other fantastic folks speaking up for peace, something we all need right this minute!

Our desire at kindhuman is to request $5 donation from those who attend, to be donated either to the fine folks at "world can't wait" www.worldcantwait.org

or another charity listed in the ranks of need reguarding this terrible war, should their view not be the same as the sane one world can't wait supports....

our question then, do you want to perform?

please contact me as soon as possible to let me know!

indie filmers, poets, artists are all welcome..

*musicians who like to improv are directed to contact amazing lizardo @ lizardos@mindspring.com

*artists, submit one piece donated or not with the theme of peace~email marty (aka chesh) by 9/7(kindhuman2003atyahoo)
with label 411, install sat 9/9 @ NOON.

we can make anything happen, even Peace.

"overcome the devils with a thing called Love" ~ Bob Marley, 1975

anyone with further questions feel free to call tha chesh @

770-246-9304 or email me here

madlove from wonderland

chesh

Publishing Kerouac's "On the Road" Scroll

2006-07-28T00:07:15Z

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5587618

new here. . .

2006-05-25T19:58:02Z

i was watching the water today, watched it come close, close enough to touch almost or if i wanted to. watched it slide away, away like everything else in this crazy, mad, spinning world. away like the girlfriend i have back in silver springs, new mexico, sitting on her porch, glass of lemonade, hand outstretched, always expecting me. when's a good time to say "never coming back". away like my dear, sweet mother, up north, rhode island where the lobster is best, waiting, waiting, for her only son to pull up in his rumbling car. can't ever say "never coming back," because don't we all go home at least once before we die? away like the fathers and grandfathers i no longer know, easy to say "never coming back" we aren't destined for the same afterlife, they are much better men than i, and here I am on the ocean, breathing salty air, and thinking of all the people i never treated right. what kinds of thoughts are these to be having, beautiful day, beautiful water, and nothing but sadness everywhere. in a minute i have to get up, have to return to the apartment i love, the only thing i've ever loved, i have to put a wall between me and this ever sifting sand, this ever shifting water. always building walls it seems.
there was a girl at the bar last night. she smiled the way i suspect all girls do, when they know that someone somewhere loves them. that "i like you but i like him too" secretive smile, where you feel let in, but really you are further from your goal then you'll ever really know. she talked about old streets in poland, and cell phones and a song on guitar and i found the juxtaposition enthralling or abrasive, can't remember now. annie. she wants a new name, wants one that screams originality, and i found that disturbingly cliché. I have her number, burning a whole in my back pocket, can't bring myself to throw it away.
i am a packrat of acquaintances it seems.

Rambling North Beach

2006-05-18T16:00:10Z

Excerpt #3 of my three volume chapbook in progress, THE RAMBLE NOOSE, incorporating last week's visit to San Fran. Passed right by Jack Kerouac Alley, looking for one with a name.

...and so context is everything. Omniscience itself constantly making deals with nomenclature. Yaweh paid a lump sum In The Beginning, not realizing that the payoff was not forever. The last payment resulted in the Crusades. Once heaven's coffers were drained up there, did we begin in earnest to speak of God in domestic terms. Look where we are now. It is clear the Seraphim did no invest their allowance wisely, so you can easily reckon how long it takes for us to write off their bossman's experiments. The lake, good for a vacation respite, as long as it is not overcrowded and filled with bass. The mountain, overcome by wandering Sisyphi or revered for seconds on end at the souvenir shop in all its 6 by 9 inch wonder. The backstreets of cities, infinite and overlooked. This last instance was made clear to me in a visit to San Francisco, that dizzy fondue pot of intercontinence, by natives and round-tongued cabbies hailing from the other side of earth. "We are not New York. We like people here." Omar shouted over Mozart. "San Fran is a small city, a good city. People like it here." A ridiculous generalization, but one that stood up to my own observations. "I have actually seen that in people's faces. Its very clear. I said ITS VERY CLEAR!" Wolfgang almost won that one. "Yes, it is a special place, with good..." "Good energy" I interrupted. "Exactly! That is it exactly. And because it is so small, everyone gets along. We must. We do not have the luxury of" "of distance." Omar nodded enthusiastically and turned up a violin concerto. And I did see it, too, in the faces of midnight tattoos at the Taqueria. Even the transients seem to find money for Mission Street burritos. On long benches they rock, side-by-side, with members of the next great band as they pay their street dues after rehearsal. Chicas bonsai-sculpted down to the sacred root blast by with their mother's heart-shaped ass, circa 1051. Even the players pay their respects, to all asses in fact, with censored catcalls clothed in Lorca's Deep Song. Of course it is witheringly Romantic to say everyone was happy. San Fran is not Elysium, except for those I saw struck by lightning. The homeless roam and rest in every flat nook, from Catro to Bernal Heights, the worst cut of Tenderloin to the diamonds of Noe Valley (no far cry from the dreams of Jose de Jesus!). However, even here in these visages cassés there emanates a sense of complacence, even if only on account of the temperate climate they have chosen to die in.

The Ramble Noose

2006-05-06T03:19:46Z

exerpt from a three volume chap I am writing...

Burt was going to be generous again. Grand Marnier cut bitter with brandy. Damn that crass clown. "And who gets off with me being drunk?" I said it aloud, like I did driving there, tooling up Robert Street, gateway to West St. Paul, little Mexico. I had to stop for fire. The stars were keeping tabs on the widows and the widows on their broken victories. I took notice of them as I parked and made my way in. Two trucks in the parking lot, doors open, loud music challenging everyone. Of course a comment, loud enough to reach my ear, the kind not clearly directed at anyone, but whose intent is to trick you into making contact. I stare ahead, rummaging my pockets for money. I've lived here long enough to know which streets you cross on the light, if you know what I mean. I had people to meet and stogies to smoke and losing a couple of teeth was just not in the itinerary. But somehow the comment hung in my middle ear, a burr in the mind's pharyngotympanic tube, the way it does when you're young. We might not recall the date, but the first time you feel threatened by your peers, everthing changes. The deflowering sting of malice. The thing your mother could not prepare you for, and your father always tries. But tonight it seemed merely a component of something more expanded, more complete - tailor made for the second bone of the ear, grown for hearing slander and love sounds. The nervous urgency came and went but its trail introduced itself to those widow-minded stars and became friends instantly with my nostalgia. My last failed love affair tried to use it as a reason behind my dismissal. Whereas just a few years earlier such a thing would have smirched an otherwise enjoyable, forgettable night, now the evening would have seemed incomplete without it. Mixing like time, if flowed through and ahead of me, to something Burt would say two hours from now, finishing his third glass of Brand Marnier.

It was over her bed, I hovered

2006-04-29T22:25:09Z

It was over her bed, I hovered with the birth of her first child. Fecund with melons, mangoes and papayas. The stillbirth of her daughter. And the lover in morning who nurses from her breast. I repeat this scene countless times. If she could see me, if I were her father in flesh, I don’t know what I’d do or say. Stroke her temple, pat her hand, simply exit her shack and pray the dream here. That I’d find a quiet bardo or an atheist’s black heaven. But scorpion babies scuttle across the floor and a centipede scurries as fast as being small. She always goes to sleep right before the storm. Eyelids, glimmery in dream, black hair splayed long and tangled across pillow. Could this be my daughter’s dream that I’m trapped inside of? Head, heavy weight more than the shudders can hold. Baton down the hatches! Shudder up the house! A wind whips through the windows. Her white curtain becomes a sail of blind white.

And I’m alone again, in a foreign house before the storm. It smells of fresh tatami and old wood. It’s a house of many windows. A house that shudders and sways in the storm. IT always goes that I forget to crack the windows before the impending storm. The wind assails the side of the house facing the ocean and batters down the doors. The window outside my bedroom bows under the weight of wind. Beads of moisture against, lead-heavy-glass before the panes finally buckle in. Pelting shards down worn-wood steps. Leaves billow in a dance through the hallway and slide themselves beneath my door. Brown and crackled.

I always step inside my bedroom to weather out the storm. I know it’s over when dawn rises in the sky. Then it’s time to walk down to the kitchen and open a can of tuna for mewing litter outside. Tucked safe in the corner of the shed in a bed of old blankets in the stove.

If I stand in the kitchen long enough, the dream dissolves to another point in sleep. I stand in her kitchen and she prepares a roast, her apron wrapped around her waist. And I’m just me, I’m flesh and I don’t have memories, of any of the other dreams. Joyce laughs in the kitchen. I’m in the living room sitting a comfy chair taking a sip of wine. Tigris is in the corner of the kitchen, curled up like a ball of yarn. A vase of sunflowers sits on the windowsill and none of the petals have fallen. I’m completely happy and she’s wearing big love in her eyes. It only takes one moment of gold and I cease to be. I become Tigris curled up like a ball of yarn, sunflowers on the windowsill and the blue of her eyes. Of all the pink thighs I’ve known, I never thought I’d be the color of a woman’s eyes. But I do. And it’s always at this moment that I feel big love like an ocean embrace, swim as far the current will carry me, until there’s the fear of drowning as my heart goes wild. Overloaded and raw. Next, I become still, small, and dry. I’m seeds fallen from the sunflower. This dream ends when the petals fall.

Sometimes my hair is long and tethered to cave wall. Drool collects in a pool in my lap. Sweat runs rivulets down a face that7s not my own, droplets trickle from this chin. They become bees that buzz and fly out cave entrance. Ghosts sluice out of the walls. Unlike me they’re only shadows. I always pace this space, a bull in the heather, a field of oxeye. I try to rein in to the same pasture. To rein rope around the hide of neck but his stubborn, sharp horn never fails to sluice my lass. I imagine the day when I get loop strung taut across his neck. It’s the day that all this comes to a halt.

The dream is different today. I open the tuna for the kittens outside. I slice my finger on the serrated edge of can, watch my blood well on my index finger and drop into the sink. I wipe my finger on a kitchen towel and even find a band-aid in the mirror behind the sink. Today, there’s a reflection the mirror. My eyes are puffy and a little lost,; I’m young and worn around the edges. I wear a red flannel and a pair of jeans. Distrustful of a sudden change in the dreaming, I continue my daily routine and take breakfast to the kittens out back. Suddenly, I think they’ll need some milk. They’re curled up in little balls inside an old black stove. I set the food down on the floor, but today I allow myself to stroke the tiger-striped one behind the ear.

I’m sitting in a big padded chair in Joyce’s living room and Tigris is curled up in my lap. As always, Joyce is in the kitchen preparing us a meal but today she steps out o the kitchen. Without a word she takes my glass of wine pours it down the sink. I move my lips to object but my voice is neither here nor there. I’m like an unplugged radio sitting on a shelf. Tigris jumps off my lap and bats at a moth that has flown in through the window. He jumps and paws at the dusty pepper wings before catching its body in his sharp pink mouth. The room slowly fills with moths as a centipede scurries in this dance of night beneath my chair.

I’m now standing in my daughter’s bedroom looking down on the face of her stillborn child. Her quiet body, the size of a ripe mango. A Kerouac face my daughter had thought. She enters the room in her turquoise, maternity dress, unburdened hair down her back. She sees me and halts mid-step.

“Daddy?”

It’s enough to just hold her before the impending storm.

introduction and 3 poems

2006-04-26T21:59:52Z

Hello everyone. I'm new to the community, but I started to read the Beats seriously about a year ago. I am entranced by the whole lot of them, and I've learned more about writing from them than I did in 4 years of college. Anyway, I thought I'd share some poems with you first, talk more later.

All the best generations are taken--
you can't be lost or beat
without paying a society now,
we're the cheap knockoffs of the world,
like fake Prada or Rolex
$9.95 for a label, brand-name beauty
but a heart of lead painted gold.
if life imitates art imitates life again,
does that make god an artist, or
the artist god?

--

Like a Bashō poem, I am short.
I come to the point before
you realize I am saying something
about cherry blossoms and when they grow,
of rice and gourds and herons, bells,
Or whether a woman should wear swords--
You know nothing.
The quintessential student, you try
Analyzing, symbolizing
The moon must stand for something,
and the crow.
You and Bashō will never share a smile.
The cherry blossom is a cherry blossom.
Enough.

--

chameleon people
can botox really alter the way the world sees you
blend you into the great beautiful batter of humanity
like eggs into a bowl of cookie dough?
what happens when your perfect shell
breaks and falls in?
do you pick it out,
or leave it a surprise
for those who enjoy you,
the unexpected crunch
breaking the monotony
of mindless tasteless munching?
maybe the batch you came from
came out wrong--
put your money down
if the right person bites your shell,
they'll remember your cookie
over all the others.

The day is a parade of slick umbrellas

2006-04-16T05:06:11Z

after Philip Lamantia

The day is a parade of slick umbrellas
This is Japan
I’m sitting here, cranberry tonic, laptop, bubbling chatter
my heart, Amaterasu, asking of sun, supernatural grey
In the absence of rich ray I’m nursing an addiction
I’m half sick from goodbyes
someone made my writer’s hand move.
Michelle a month in Thailand.
Fleur Daisy waiting till April, gave her wings.
I see America upside down
her liver, a growing disease
it’s all static communication
look here- a dead TV

“technically we are all dead”
this is mind, an aggregate of them.
Mother Ameratersu cajoles photosynthesis
last year’s pilgrimage to quiet peace.

funny beat dream

2006-04-06T02:26:37Z

My husband had a dream a couple of nights ago that both him and I met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. We were talking to Jack Kerouac; we found him somehow and were in his house. He was a totally normal guy and wasn't famous yet. We were smiling at each other but they had no idea why we were so excited to be talking to them. At some point, Allen and Jack realized that we were from the future. He can't really remember how, but we went back in time. My husband asked Jack Kerouac something about what he was writing or asked Kerouac about typing up one of Burrough's manuscripts, and Jack said, how did you know about that? Maybe it was about typing up manuscripts or a question about a certain book. It gave it away and freaked them out asking something that normal people wouldn't know about them or their work. Also, my husband was carrying books in his bag, as usual, and had copies of some poems and a photo on the cover from the future. Allen was flipping through one of the books from my husband's bag and found a photo of himself as an older man. Isn't that cool? Or wouldn't that be a great idea for a movie?

Jack Kerouac's Rules of Spontaneous Prose

2006-04-01T07:01:14Z

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never to get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No tie for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming on object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angled in Heaven