Category: Literary Matters
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Kerouac October Quotation #30: The Holes in Jesus’ and Buddha’s Bags
Vanity of Duluoz, Book Thirteen, X, pp. 274-276, ellipses and bold emphases added: . . . .Mad Dog creation has a side of compassionate mercy in it . . . we have seen the brutal creation send us the Son of Man who, to prove that we should follow His example of mercy, brotherly love,…
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You Don’t Know Jack About Kerouac. A Trivia Test
I'll prove it. Take this test. No search engines. 1. Name the one and only Kerouac novel that contains a chess diagram. Extra credit: Does it represent a legal position?2. On which nationally known talk show did Kerouac make a reference to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite?3. Kerouac gave a pretentious literary subtitle to one of his…
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Kerouac October Quotation #27: Jack on Robert Lax
During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do."…
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Kerouac October Quotation #26: Kerouac as Homo Religiosus
When On the Road finally saw the light of day in 1957, fame proved to be Kerouac's undoing. William Plummer writes insightfully: For nearly a decade he hungered for recognition, but when the public at last chose to take notice it would choose to measure the least part of him. In forums and on talk…
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Kerouac October Quotation #25: The Noise in the Void
From a February 1950 journal entry (Windblown World, p. 262): There's a noise in the void I hear: there's a vision of the void; there's a complaint in the abyss — there's a cry in the bleak air; the realm is haunted. Man haunts the earth. Man is on a ledge noising his life. The…
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Kerouac October Quotation #24 : W. C. Fields
How I admire W. C. Fields! — What a great oldtimer he was. None like him. I'll write something about him soon, my personal ideas. "Ain't you got no Red Eye?" "Ain't you an old Follies girl?" "I snookered that one." "Those Grampion hills." "Mocha-java." "The enterprise I am about to embark upon is fraught…
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Kerouac No Role Model
Lest I lead astray any young and impressionable readers, I am duty bound to point out that this month's focus on Kerouac is by no means to be taken as an endorsement of him as someone to be imitated. Far from it! He failed utterly to live up to the Christian precepts that he learned as…
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Kerouac October Quotation #23: How Can You be Clever in a Meatgrinder?
Here is Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus with his mother: Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the…
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Kerouac October Quotation #21: Sweet Gone Jack 41 Years Down the Road
Jack Kerouac was a big ball of affects ever threatening to dissolve in that sovereign soul-solvent, alcohol. One day he did, and died. The date was 21 October 1969. Today is the 41st anniversary of his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of his wish: The wheel of the…
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Kerouac October Quotation #20: The Body So Thick and Carnal
Blaise Pascal says not to look to ourselves for the cure to misfortunes, but to God whose Providence is a foreordained thing in Eternity; that the foreordainment was that our lives be but sacrifices leading to purity in the after-existence in Heaven as souls disinvested of that rapish, rotten, carnal body — O the sweet…
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The New York Times Kerouac Obituary
Tomorrow, October 21, is the 41st anniversary of Jack Kerouac's death. I remember the day well, having noted Jack's passing on a piece of looseleaf I still have in a huge file full of juvenilia from that period. The NYT obituary features a perceptive quotation from Allen Ginsberg: "A very unique cat — a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist…
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Kerouac October Quotation # 19: Vanity of Vanities
Vanity of Duluoz, p. 23: Still I say, what means it? You may say that I'm a braggart about football, although all these records are available in the newspaper files called morgue, I admit I'm a braggart, but I'm not calling it thus because what was the use of it all anyway, for as the…
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This Sex Business
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harvest 1956), p. 102: This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals — minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the…
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Kerouac October Quotation #18: Of Girls and Graves
"Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums)
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Kerouac October Quotation #16: No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission
Some of the Dharma, p. 240: Sunday Jan 30 [1955] . . This is it . . . the day I decide to go forward instead of backward . . . will stop drinking, cold turkey (if I can do it) . . . Drink is the curse of the Holy Life — alcohol is…