Category: Kerouac and Friends
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Be neither Bohemian nor Bourgeois
A Substack short with a scene from "Barfly." Is that Bukowski at the bar?
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The Journals of John Cheever
Arrived yesterday. I open to any page and find good writing. How can such a decadent booze hound write so well? And why is the sauce ink to so many literary pens? One of the mysteries of life, like why so many Jews are leftists. Whole books have been written about this. Prager wrote one.…
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Who Says You Can’t Go Home Again?
A Substack tribute to "Sweet Gone Jack" 55 years gone.
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The Daily Beat
A blog
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Misremembering Kerouac
An article from The Guardian.
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Three American Sophomores
The Restlessness of Thomas Merton, J. D. Salinger, and Jack Kerouac. On balance, a very good essay, but just wrong in places. For example: Due to our separation from God that occurred in the Garden, all men intuitively sense that they are missing something, that they are radically incomplete.3 Aristotle had this incompleteness in mind when…
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The Paradox of Solitude
Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton
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Drive, He Wrote
What the Beats were About. Lewis Menand, The New Yorker.
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Enlisting William S. Burroughs in the War Against Leftist Language-Abusers
I've been fulminating for over 20 years online against the language-abuse of the language-abusing Left, having found it necessary on only a few occasions to take conservatives to task. Although my Beat credentials are impeccable, I never took William Seward Burroughs seriously enough to suppose he could be enlisted on our side. And then I…
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Young Man’s Bible, Old Man’s Bible
When he was a young man he travelled around the country with On the Road, the 'Bible of the Beat Generation,' in his rucksack, just as Kerouac had with Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible in his. Now the young man is old. Now when he travels he carries a different light paperback, the plain old Bible. And he…
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Thomas Merton and the Beat Generation
Here
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Fr. ‘Spike’ Morrissette on Jack Kerouac
Here
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: October Jazz
The 15th already! October's a bird that flies too fast. Time herself's such a bird. I would freeze her flight, but not that of Charley 'Bird' Parker, Ornithology Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, Charlie Parker Kerouac and Allen, October in the Railroad Earth Jack Kerouac, San Francisco Mose Allison, Parchman Farm. This one goes out…
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Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac
Substack latest.
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From Hagiography to Pathography: Yates and Kerouac
I'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve: I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers. Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed…