Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? -- Jack Kerouac
Sorry I haven't been posting in the last couple of days. Life catches up with you I suppose. I have been to a birthday party, had new shocks installed in my truck and had the speedometer sensor replaced. Yup, life catches up with you.
So where were we? Ah yes, The Beats. The next author I thought of for my list of thirty is Jack Kerouac. I chose him because he is just as influential of a Beat writer as Burroughs was, but for everything Burroughs was, Kerouac was not. Burroughs represented the fringe so to speak, and even though the drug sub-culture is present in Kerouac's work, he seems to me like an all American Boy. I guess it is kind of funny that I think that as his writings are part of the counterculture, but he was an amazing high school athlete (and for a brief time collegiate) and his writing is accessible. He is even credited as being an influence on writers such as Tom Robbins, Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe, and a laundry list of musicians including Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Jerry Garcia.
There is one passage in particular from On The Road, where Kerouac talks about looking out the window at the passing landscape and envisioning himself out there riding a white horse at the speed of the car. It reminded me of being a kid and thinking similar things while on long road trips. I think that lots of people have probably at one point or another thought of that and maybe somehow it is a part of our collective unconscious. Maybe Kerouac could tune into that; which is what made his writing so influential and popular. And I mentioned that he is accessible, but he also sought to make writing accessible. He would ramble on for hours about his technique to anyone who would listen, and in a letter to a friend included this list*:
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside your own house
- Be in love with your life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You're a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Words to consider.
*List taken from wikipedia