MetaFilter posts tagged with Kerouac

To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

Astro Zombie — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:33:32 -0800

And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?” The unnamed girl in Robert Frank's collection of photographs, The Americans, to which Jack Kerouac wrote those introductory sentences, has come forward after recognizing herself in the iconic photograph, republished in the SF Chronicle. (Previously: 1, 2, 3)

How to Enjoy Reality

digaman — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:07:29 -0800

Rest in peace, Simon Vinkenoog [Dutch blog w/English option], poet, friend of artists like Karel Appel, translator of Beat Generation figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, psychedelic enthusiast and "weed ambassador" of Amsterdam, and author of such guides to hip living as How to Enjoy Reality. One of the European jazz-loving proto-hippies who made the '60s swing and mentored several generations of culture hackers, though he was never widely known in the US.

The Sinister End-of-the-World Homerun

Miko — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:50:03 -0800

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved" .... and mad enough to play fantasy baseball. In the new book Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, a NY Public Library archivist considers documents revealing the author's detailed obsession with the imaginary exploits of players like Pictorial Review Jackson and teams like the "Pontiacs, Nashes, and cellar-dwelling LaSalles" in his finely grained, fictional Summer League.

Gary Snyder, Speaking for the Trees

digaman — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:15:46 -0800

Gary Snyder, sublime and seminal poet of ecological awareness and activism [YouTube link], Zen appreciation of "ordinary mind" and American speech, shamanistic intimacy with the natural world, and surviving member of the Beat Generation (West Coast posse) at age 78, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly poetry prize. "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," said Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman. "His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” Previous recipients of the Lilly prize include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and W.S. Merwin. [Previously mentioned here.]

Beat Generation Cover Scans

dhammond — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:52:17 -0800

Book nerds everywhere will enjoy these scans of cover art from the works of Beat Generation authors William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and John Clellon Holmes. CDN: Burroughs, Kerouac, Cassady, Holmes

The Last Psychiatrist reviews Kerouac’s “On The Road”

jason's_planet — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 07:46:25 -0800

Kerouac's On The Road: The 50th Anniversary Of A Book I Had Not Read I can't be the only one whose impression of the book, from hearing about it but not actually reading it, was that it was about young, potent men, lost in a growing commercial society, two coiled springs ready to pop, looking for adventure-- America style. And this Road Trip that launched a thousand, other boring, useless road trips, was about young men looking to experience the world, really see, really live, really feel, free of the constraints of an artificial post war soulless society . . . That impression is wrong. You know what the book is really about? It's a primer on how to be a narcissist.

HOWL

sluglicker — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:31:01 -0800

Shout, shout, while the dirt continues leaving… Main Page: English | Español

"SeaWorld bespeaks the essence of Orlando, a place whose specialty is detaching experience from context, extracting form from substance, and then selling tickets to it."

wander — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:10:53 -0800

"All over Orlando you see forces at work that are changing America from Fairbanks to Little Rock. This, truly, is a 21st-century paradigm: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing."

"Welcome to the theme-park nation." [more inside]

On the Road meets Web 2.0

drezdn — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 08:58:31 -0800

On The Road meets google maps, thanks to littourature. [link via bookslut]

Jack Kerouac: Raw

nitsuj — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 12:23:10 -0800

Kerouac's essential On The Road is celebrating it's 50th year in publication next September. To commemorate, Viking Press plans to publish the raw, unedited "scroll version" that's been touring around the country. The hardcover -- due out somtime next year -- contains "some sections that had been cut from the novel because of references to sex or drugs" along with real names of characters, and "a different first sentence than the published novel, as well as a more abrupt ending."

The holy relic of Saint Duluoz

xowie — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 07:05:32 -0800

First draft of 'On the Road' arrives in San Francisco. With pic of Jami and Carolyn Cassady viewing the scroll.

Kerouac's The Road Online Musicircus

jessamyn — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 13:35:31 -0800

The Road Online is part of a collaborative project to gather ambient sounds from locations mentioned in Kerouac's "On the Road" in order to create a sonic portrait of the big cities, small towns, backwoods, deserts and mountains that Kerouac visited and wrote about. Feel free to record and contribute your own and become part of the musicircus. [via mefi projects]

Dr Sax Examines Duluoz

digaman — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 20:53:23 -0800

"Without any particular training or background, this patient, just prior to his enlistment, enthusiastically embarked upon the writing of novels. He sees nothing unusual in this activity." Who was the patient? A 21-year-old seaman named Jack Kerouac, who would become the author of On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Dr. Sax, Visions of Cody and many other great novels that you should be reading instead of these gaddam websites. (The diagnosis from the Navy doctors, "schizoid personality," earned Kerouac a discharge.) A hilarious and poignant find from The Smoking Gun.

hipper than you

ITheCosmos — Sun, 10 Apr 2005 11:13:56 -0800

"Stray Prose" of Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth fame. Semicoherent Bob Dylan review, a paean to Kerouac, and an entertaining interview with William Burroughs. Pretentious, but, uh, you know, if you're into that sort of thing... There's some more stuff of his around his official site

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

digaman — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:17:05 -0800

Robert Creeley, one of the most exquisite and influential poets of our era, died this morning at age 78. I'd link to a story, but it's not in the news yet. This is a note from one of Robert's friends: "American poet Robert Creeley passed away this morning at 6:15 am in Odessa, Texas, where he was fulfilling a Residency at the Lannan Foundation. (Mr. Creeley was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.) His wife of twenty-eight years, Penelope, and son Will and daughter Hannah were at his side. The cause of death was complications from respiratory disease." Though a comrade and muse for Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Creeley was much less well-known, and had a style rather unlike theirs, distinguished by extreme economy of words and an understated approach toward emotion. Creeley was often cited as a pioneer by the so-called language poets, and his most creatively generative friendship was with another poet's poet, the late Charles Olson. Creeley's subtlety and balance will be missed.

Origins of the Beatnik

digaman — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 11:05:59 -0800

Do you consider yourself a latter-day "beatnik"? Even young fans of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg proudly christen themselves with the tag beatnik these days, apparently unaware that word was originally coined as a term of ridicule by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. "Beat" was indeed used by Kerouac to denote both "beaten down" and "beatitude" -- a state of revelation. He first heard the word spoken by a Times Square hustler and writer named Herbert Huncke; then another writer, John Clellon Holmes, popularized the term "Beat" in a New York Times article headlined "This is the Beat Generation." But the original Beats did not approve of the term "beatnik" -- combining "beat" with the Russian "Sputnik," as if to suggest that the Beat writers were both "out there" and vaguely Communist -- as this hilarious dialogue [note: MP3 link] between a very young Ginsberg, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and an excruciatingly square talk-radio host makes plain.

Optamystic — Mon, 25 Sep 2000 14:50:56 -0800

Ken Kesey's page, in which: He offers to burn copies of about two hundred minutes of recordings that he made of Neil Cassady, driving the Magic Bus, in 1964. Here's the kicker....no credit cards, no C.O.D.....you order them, they send them, they bill you, you pay them. Trust me, folks, if you're a fan of the Beats, this is amazing stuff. Hearing Kerouac's muse rant into the night while ballin' down the highway is a rare treat indeed.