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 searches for his voice as a writer and an artist. Using archival material such as journals, notebooks, diaries and letters as … [Read more...]
I Am Nothing: Thoughts on Thoreau
I find much of Thoreau's writings a statement of decay: physical and spiritual. Even with a dead horse, Thoreau finds solace though he must cover his nose with a handkerchief. Let the vultures dig in and have their feast, we should be cheered at such avarice sport."Life—all life—is good, vultures as well as bluebirds, worms as well as butterflies, funky, phallus-shaped … [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 omitted from the Library of America volume of Kerouacʼs Collected Poems, as it signifies Kerouacʼs creative breakthrough 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 mischievous nihilist Lucien Carr and the budding poet, Allen Ginsberg. He titled it The Haunted Life and it was never … [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: His Life and Work; editor Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac) and Stephanie Nikolopoulos bring to … [Read more...]
Love That Loves Us: The Two Loves of To the Wonder
note: Here there be spoilers By now it is cliche to label a Terrence Malick film a "visual poem," but in the case of To The Wonder, that is what it is. Malick's cinematic eye defers to poetry more strongly than that of cinema and though I'm certain that he doesn't regard himself as a poet, he has taken the raw matter of his sensorium and fashioned it into something that … [Read more...]
Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac is reissued
In 2005, Thunder's Mouth Press published my collection of interviews with Jack Kerouac. It was titled Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac. Not long afterwards, the famed publishing house was bought out by DaCapo Press and the book was out a few years later. To fund the documentary I have planned on Jack Kerouac and Lowell, I decided to reissue the book … [Read more...]
