During the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac stayed on two occasions at the Hotel Stevens in downtown Seattle. His first stay at the venerable old “skid row” hotel was in the latter part of June of that year, his second stay there some eighty days later in … [Read more...]
Memory Babes: The Legends of Proust and Kerouac
It was recently announced that Peter Greenaway’s upcoming art installation would be a fully functioning racetrack with real cars inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The iconic British artist and filmmaker is known for avant-garde works that revisit … [Read more...]
Why Kerouac?
People say I’m obsessed with Jack Kerouac. They point to my blog, to my checked flannel shirts, to my over 140 Kerouac or Kerouac-related books (that I read, not that I wrote), to the one book I have written (about guess who?), to the friendships I’ve … [Read more...]
Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey by Erik Mortenson, reviewed by Marc Olmsted
TRANSLATING THE COUNTERCULTURE The Reception of the Beats in Turkey by Erik Mortenson / Southern Illinois University Press / 978-0809336548 / 2018 The premise is a fascinating one. Erik Mortenson actually was IN Turkey during its attempted coup in … [Read more...]
a toast to ti-jean in a liverpool gloom saloon
12 March 2018 It is said that a woman haunts, she sees everything. An observer, a writer, a siren of dreams. In my heart and mind, I am always searching for slivers of paradise while being silently pulled towards some sort of freedom I can’t quite … [Read more...]
Jack Kerouac: Avatar of American Buddhism
"I have nothing to offer but my own confusion." -- JK It is intriguing that secular, educated Americans often have difficulty with the rituals and story of Christianity, seeing it as irrational, but eagerly read their horoscope or find new age morality … [Read more...]
The Intersection of Buddhism and the Beat Generation
The 1950s in America was not a period known for its religious diversity. The spiritual consumerism that we know today had yet to be established and the post-War era was defined by adherence to familial and traditional values, including a religious … [Read more...]
Book release — I Am the Revolutionary: Young Jack Kerouac by Paul Maher Jr.
Paul Maher Jr.'s new Kerouac biography, I Am the Revolutionary: Young Jack Kerouac, takes the reader from Kerouac's childhood years in Lowell, Massachusetts through his World War II years in New York City and across America, where the hapless writer … [Read more...]
Visions of Cody, a book of martyrdom
"Time is the purest and cheapest form of doom." -- Jack Kerouac Apropos Kerouac, I think that there is nothing more important, more significant today, than reading his books and evaluate them without associating them with the “beat phenomenon." Kerouac … [Read more...]
Five poems on the Beat Generation
Jan Kerouac Baby Driver "Looking for adventure in whatever comes my way I was a true nature's child Born to be wild-----" Steppenwolf Dreams of Hawaiian island paradise home ends up in a hopped up car chase, shotgun seat riding with a mad … [Read more...]
Jack Kerouac’s Creative Birth
Excerpted from manuscript titled I Live In Two Worlds: The Literary Cosmos of Jack Kerouac to be published by Rowman & Littlefield in late 2017 We first read a hand-written time-wheel created by Kerouac documenting the … [Read more...]
Prelude to Big Sur: Kerouac in Spring & Summer 1960
It is sunny, no humidity in the late spring of 1960. A brisk breeze blows in Northport, Long Island where Jack Kerouac has made his home with his mother for two years now. He sits in his yard reading his copy of Suranguma Sutra: What suffers … [Read more...]
This is IT: Van Gogh and Kerouac
"Dat is Het." In Vincent van Gogh’s Dutch tongue, he extolled this triumphant realization, “Dat is Het!” It lay the foundation for a rich flood of work. He was twenty-four years old. The years leading to this triumph had not been kind. Stymied by … [Read more...]
The sardonic pilgrimage of Jack Kerouac
The works of Jack Kerouac constitute a rich branch of the American literary tradition, which -- through the craftiness of such important writers, like Kerouac himself -- managed to escape the swamp of intellectual, expressional, pompousness. Ergo, the … [Read more...]
A Few Far-Flung Fragments of Forgotten Kerouaciana
There are still a few odd jottings and stray scribbles from the pen of Jack Kerouac – elusive bits and bobs published during the author’s lifetime – that remain unrecorded in bibliographies and/or uncollected in compilations of his writings. Admittedly, … [Read more...]
Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s house at 29 Russell St., San Francisco
It’s been about ten years now since I saw Beat legends Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s house. It was such a thrill for me; I can remember it perfectly. My old friends Kirstin and Colin, from Alaska had just moved down to San Francisco the year before in 1998, … [Read more...]
For Beat’s Sake: An Interview with Carolyn Cassady
We all live inside history, and Carolyn Cassady has seen her share. Ms. Cassady was gracious and open when she sat for an interview at her home in Monte Sereno, not far from Los Gatos. Carolyn Cassady, best known for her relationships with husband … [Read more...]
October Ghost
The smudged days of October—when my mood is hand in hand with the weather—remind me of Jack Kerouac. He died in October, on the 21st, and the anniversary of that day always comes and goes like a local subway suddenly gone express. I watch it pass, … [Read more...]
Some Kind of Dharma: Photographs
“to just start at the beginning and let the truth seep out” Grant Street, San Francisco, 2009 You can quite intentionally make a Beat pilgrimage in San Francisco, soaking in the aura, the coffee, the Bohemian spirit in North Beach nooks, bars and … [Read more...]
Book Review – Kenton Crowther’s Kerouac on the Binge
Kenton Crowther's latest short e-book, a 3200-word essay titled Kerouac on the Binge (perhaps rather indelicately), is not an in-depth study of the author and his work, but rather the thoughtful musings of one who has read Kerouac's works in depth, and … [Read more...]
The Road Toward Visions of Cody
In March 2015, Jack Kerouac's masterpiece, Visions of Cody, will be reprinted by Library of America (along with Visions of Gerard and Big Sur). Edited by Todd Tietchen, the novel has been extensively annotated with notes and a number of editorial … [Read more...]
Jack Kerouac’s “Strange Cemetery in Jamaica”
--- from a work-in-progress, I, Duluoz!: An Appreciation of Jack Kerouac If I had to pick my favorite poem of Jack Kerouacʼs, it would be “Strange Cemetery in Jamaica” published in Some of the Dharma (1997). Strangely, or even tragically, it was … [Read more...]
An interview on Jack Kerouac and Library of America
March 2015 will mark the occasion of the publication of the third volume of Jack Kerouac works published by Library of America. I took this occasion to catch up with editor, Todd Tietchen, assistant professor of English at University of Massachusetts … [Read more...]
The Great Consciousness of Life
Reaching in, pulling out. The great divide is conquered; and there lies an ever-evolving mission to extract meaning from chaos. This, then, is where it resides, the theater of the soul and the heart. In rewriting my biography of Jack Kerouac, I found … [Read more...]
Wordsworth and the Beats: The Longevity of Influence
Although William Wordsworth once stated that he was “not a critic” and, in fact, “set little value upon the art” (Leitch 556), in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” he nevertheless proposed and discussed several controversial ideas that would become key … [Read more...]
Two poems by Nick D’Annunzio Jones
Good Morning, God At breakfast, I launch a small pink quasar into a black hole. Minutes later, receptors blocked, serotonin-flooded, my cosmos collapses; heaven-humming, orbiting hypomania, bang – a star is born! I also hear a comet talking: … [Read more...]
October in the Railroad Earth – Jack Kerouac
Every October, I think of Jack Kerouac's short story, "October in the Railroad Earth." Jack recorded it for his album with Steve Allen, Poetry For The Beat Generation; take a listen below. Want to download the track? It's available here. … [Read more...]
At the Carnival of Drunken Poets
I ran into Kerouac at the carnival where those just dead meet those about to be reborn. He and I have wandered through the zodiac again and again, like prodigal suns. Both of us enter this carnival under the 13th sign, which is the sign of … [Read more...]
Paul Maher Jr. considers Kerouac’s Haunted Life
The Haunted Life and Other Writings / Da Capo Press / March 11, 2014 / 208 pp. Seventy years ago, in May 1944, Jack Kerouac toiled over a novella-length work set in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was written at the prompting of his two newest friends, the … [Read more...]
Kerouac Before the Jazz: a review of “The Haunted Life”
There are some great lost manuscripts in American literature and some are truly lost. Ernest Hemingway famously lost the only draft of the first short stories he ever wrote on a French train. Most writers have "lost" manuscripts, conspicuously placed in … [Read more...]
Sleeping by Big Sur
I slept with a copy of Big Sur by my pillow a read of a man charting alcoholic decline I have drunk too much to remember my face I have drunk too much to remember the facts I have drunk too much and forgotten the race here-there-get … [Read more...]
Movie Review – Kill Your Darlings
Long before Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs would be celebrated as the poetical and political figureheads of a 'beat generation,' there was a murder. In the new film, Kill Your Darlings, the crime scene sets itself at Columbia … [Read more...]
Jack Kerouac Eats an Eggroll – Andrea Bates
JACK KEROUAC EATS AN EGGROLL San Francisco, March, 1952 Hey hunger, typewriter scroll of walled up mysteries. Here’s to you, binge three weeks’ wide, dragon hitched to your sleeve. The love letter in a menu’s calligraphy. Hey stained … [Read more...]
Interview – Paul Maher Jr., author of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's On the Road is an accurate, up-to-date, meticulously researched account of how Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel, On the Road came to be written. Kerouac scholars Paul Maher Jr. (author of Kerouac: … [Read more...]
David Handley interviews Paul Rogers about his work & the On the Road illustrations
Chances are that if I said the names Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty or Carlo Marx that you would already know a couple of things about them. You’d know that I was talking about the generation defining novel On the Road and also that I was talking about Neal … [Read more...]
Jim Morrison and Jack Kerouac
“If he (Jack Kerouac) hadn’t written On The Road, The Doors never would have existed.” — Ray Manzarek Manzarek might have added that if Jack Kerouac hadn’t written On The Road, none of the late 60’s might have happened the way they did, … [Read more...]
Excerpt from Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Editor's note: Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's On the Road is an accurate, up-to-date account of the development of Jack Kerouac's groundbreaking 1957 novel, On the Road. Using archival resources as the foundation of this … [Read more...]
BIG SUR Film Preview in Selected Theatres – week of October 14, 2013!
Gathr Films has announced a series of one-day-only showings of Big Sur in indie theatres in selected cities across the USA the week of October 14, 2013. These screenings are in advance of the film's nationwide release on November 1, 2013. Here's your … [Read more...]
Review – The Beats: A Very Short Introduction by David Sterritt
The Beats: A Very Short Introduction by David Sterritt / Oxford University Press / 978-0-19-979677-9 / 126 pages David Sterritt's work might be familiar to Beat or film aficionados through his previous books, which include Mad to be Saved: The Beats, … [Read more...]
Charged Vision: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg
The photographs of Allen Ginsberg recently were on display at the Jewish Contemporary Museum in San Francisco. Walking through the museum is like going on a jaunt through Beat History. A spritely Jack Kerouac followed by the drunk. A youthful William … [Read more...]