Kerouac and Friends – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

BEATific October Again

And
no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack' reading from "October in
Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the
wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback
edition. Bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was
travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode
of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked and
talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix. New Orleans proved to be
memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2. It was
there that Lonesome Traveler joined On the Road in my
rucksack. I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries. Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was.

Here is a long excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two
sections of the piece, pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

Recent Writing on Kerouac

October is Kerouac month hereabouts, but aficionados will want to read the recent Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac, a New Yorker piece that raises the question of the contribution of football-induced brain trauma to Kerouac's decline and early death.

In The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer lays into Kerouac's poetry with some justification:

Grimly reconciled though one may be to the annual flood of books by and about the Beat Generation, it’s particularly depressing to see Jack Kerouac’s poetry, of all things, enshrined in the Library of America, that magnificent series designed to preserve for posterity the treasures of our national literature. To read through these seven hundred–odd pages of Kerouac’s staggeringly slapdash effusions set in elegant Galliard, outfitted with the usual meticulous editorial apparatus, and bound—like Twain’s novels and Lincoln’s speeches—in a beautiful Library of America volume is enough to trigger a serious attack of cognitive dissonance.

David Ulin of the L. A. Times responds to Bawer.

56 Years Ago Today: Gilbert Millstein’s Review of Kerouac’s On the Road

Here. Millstein's NYT review brought Kerouac fame, but fame contributed to an early death at age 47 just a bit more than 12 years after the review. Fame brought death, but no fortune, leastways not for Jack. Last I checked, his heirs were battling over his estate.

By the way, the Telegraph article to which I have just linked gives the year of Keroauc's death incorrectly as 1968. Kerouac died in his beloved October, in 1969. I remember the day he died and my annotation in my journal.

Neal Cassady, Keroauc's hero and friend, the Dean Moriarty of On the Road, died in February of 1968, also of substance abuse, having quaffed a nasty concotion of pulque and Seconals, on the railroad tracks near San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Legend has it that Cassady had been counting the ties and that his last word was "64, 928." (Cf. William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady, Paragon, 1981, pp. 157-158.)

Be mad, muchachos, be mad. Be not too mad.

Here’s to You, Jack Kerouac, on the 43rd Anniversary of Your Release . . .

. . . from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of your wish: "The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead." (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

Jack Kerouac's Octoberish Magic

Sunday Events Honor Kerouac

"Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums)

Joyce Johnson on Kerouac

Here. Amazingly, yet another Keroauc biography has been published, this time by Johnson. Just what neither the world nor I need. But being a 'completist' I'll probably acquire this one too.

Related post: Joyce Johnson Remembers Kerouac

Kerouac’s Posthumous Solvency

Some become solvent only after their dissolution. The case of Kerouac. His solvency came long after he had dissolved himself in that sovereign solvent of soul and body, alcohol. But money, though making solvent, is a solvent too, of human ties, as his relatives learned when they fell to fighting over his estate.

October Again

And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with a reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. Bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb, but mostly I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix. New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2. It was there that Lonesome Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack.

Here is a shorter (3:58) excerpt with great images. It includes the first section and about half of the second, pp. 37-39 in the Black Cat edition. Here is the second, longer excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of the piece, pp. 37-40.

Lanzetta Responds re: Kerouac

This is Danny Lanzetta. I saw your blog posting in response to my piece in the Huffington Post last week, "In Defense of Jack Kerouac…" Thanks for reading.

In your reaction, you wrote of my link to that famous OTR passage: "Lanzetta seems to be suggesting that this is a particularly bad specimen of Kerouac's scrivening."

I went back and looked at the passage in question. Your reading of it could not be more correct. That is absolutely what I wrote. However, it is not what I meant. My point was supposed to be that Kerouac's "madness" sometimes led to the most beautiful and ecstatic writing one could ever read (thus, the link), while at other times it led to the mess that became his personal life (such as his terrible treatment of his daughter, Jan). After countless proofreadings and going through my piece with a fine-toothed comb, I simply missed the way that sentence read. A simple adjective, appropriately placed, could've saved me. Alas, I missed it. I apologize for the confusion.

I'd be grateful if you could pass along my apologies to your readers. Luckily, it was only a case of bad writing (my own) and not what would be an egregious denouncement of one of the most beautiful sentences ever put to paper.

Thanks again.

Well, Danny, there is certainly no need to apologize. If you had meant that the famous OTR passage was the sort of purple prose an over-excited sophomore might write, that would have been a defensible claim. But I am glad that is not what you meant. In any case, it is very easy for a writer to fail to say what he means.

I must say I was very impressed at your willingness to accept criticism.

Some Recent Writing on Kerouac

October is Kerouac month hereabouts and she is still a good six weeks off. But Danny Lanzetta's In Defense of Kerouac and Other Flawed Literature should be noted before it scrolls into cyber-oblivion. Excerpt:

Kerouac's work is undoubtedly sophomoric at times. He is hopelessly naïve about people, which sometimes leads to this and other times just comes off as laziness, a selfish desire to write the way he wanted to write and live the way he wanted to live, collateral damage be damned.

The first link is to this OTR passage:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones 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 and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!"

Lanzetta seems to be suggesting that this is a particularly bad specimen of Kerouac's scrivening. But although too often quoted, it is passages like this that grabbed my attention and gave me shivers back in the '60s and that still do now in my 60s. My 'beatitude' is considerably more measured these days, and it's a good thing too: too much 'madness' leads to an early grave. Jack's prodigious quaffing of the joy juice caught up with him in '69 at the tender age of 47, and his hero Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty of On the Road) was found dead on the railroad tracks near San Miguel Allende, Mexico the year before a few days shy of his 42nd birthday.

But it is for the hyper-romanticism and the heartfelt gush & rush that some of us read Kerouac still despite his many literary flaws, not to mention the mess he made of his life and the lives of others. He was no cool beatnik. He was mad to live, to talk, to feel, to know, to be saved. He was a restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears & mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.

Friday Cat Blogging: ‘Cat’ with Cat

Cat Blogging Friday: Kerouac and Cat

Holding up my
purring cat to the moon
I sighed.

—- Jack Kerouac, American Haiku, 1959

Happy Birthday to the King of the Beats, the Saint of the Slackers

At any given time I am reading about 20 books. Yesterday afternoon, while reducing the whole of an Arturo Fuente 'Curly Head' to smoke and ashes, I enjoyed Chapter Seven, "Beats, Nonconformists, Playboys, and Delinquents" of Tom Lutz's Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). The chapter in question contains a penetrating discussion of Jack Kerouac's particular mode of slacking off. It is marred by only one inaccuracy: Lutz (p. 215) confuses Boston College with Boston University. Kerouac received a football scholarship to BC, not BU. (He chose Columbia, however, fatefully as it turned out: had he gone to BC there would have been no meeting of Ginsberg and Burroughs, and no Beat Generation).

My chance reading about Jack yesterday was most auspicious in that today, the 12th, is his birthday. Had his slackery not led him deep into the bottle, he might have been with us today. But he'd be an old coot. Today is the 90th anniversary of his birth.

Does it matter much whether one gets off the "slaving meat wheel" at 47 or at 90? "Safe in heaven dead" is the main thing.

The Monkees are to the Beatles . . .

. . . as Maynard G. Krebs is to Neal Cassady.

(That works, doesn't it? With apologies to Davy Jones, RIP.)

Kerouac’s ‘Lost’ First Novel Published

Being a 'completist,' I will of course secure a copy sooner or later. But I suspect that biographer Nicosia's literary judgment of The Sea is My Brother (reported in the linked story) is just.

Poor Jack barely scraped by while entangled in the mortal coil. But now that he is "free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead," his literary executors grow fat peddling every last remnant of his literary remains.

When fame comes, its sun shines equally on all of one's productions throwing their differential values into the shade.

Story here.

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 Buddhist Bible in his. Now he is an old man. When he travels now he carries a different light paperback, the plain old Bible.