Dayhoff Soundtrack: 20070312 Happy Birthday Jack Kerouac March 12 1922

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

20070312 Happy Birthday Jack Kerouac March 12 1922

Happy Birthday Jack Kerouac

March 12, 1922

I’m not sure I know where my copy of “On the Road” is…

"… nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…"

Of course one of the amusing things about Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” is that I had long understood that he did not know how to drive a car. Although Wikipedia says that he did not learn “to drive until 1956 (at age 34) and he never had a driver's license.”

Whatever.

Baltimore Colt fans will not be amused to know that Mr. Kerouac typed “On the Road” –

“on one long scroll of teletype paper, which Kerouac called "the roll."[1] The roll does exist — it was purchased in 2001 by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.4 million — and it was indeed typed in a blazing three weeks, with no margins, singlespaced, and no paragraph breaks.

But the myth of the story overlooks some of the finer points of the novel's composition. Much of the book was actually written as it happened, over the seven years of Kerouac's travels, in the tiny notebooks that he always carried with him and wrote in during his spare time.

The myth also overlooks the tedious organization and preparation that came before Kerouac's creative explosion, as well as the fact that Kerouac revised the novel several times before Malcolm Cowley of Viking Press agreed to publish it.

Owing to Irsay's ownership of the scroll, it was on display in sections at Indiana University's Lilly Library in mid-2003.

In January 2004, the roll began a 13-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries, starting at the Orange County History Centre in Orlando, Florida. From January through March 2006 it was on display at the San Francisco Public Library with the first 30 feet unrolled. It will spend three months on display at the New York Public Library in 2007, and in the spring of 2008 will be on view at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

_____

Of course, for those of us who are writers, we can understand, “He tended to write constantly, carrying a notebook with him everywhere.”

And – “At the time of his death in 1969, Kerouac's estate was worth little more than ninety-one dollars, but by 2004 had grown to an estimated $20 million.” Is an inspiration for all of us… In a perverse kind of way.

What none of us wants to emulate is that he died at age 47 from complications of a life of chronic alcoholism.

I had always heard about this quote from Truman Capote and found it in the Wikipedia entry…

“Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac's work,

‘That's not writing, it's typing.’”

Despite such criticism, it should be kept in mind that what Kerouac said about writing and how he wrote are sometimes seen to be separate. According to Carolyn Cassady and other people who knew him he rewrote and rewrote.”

_____

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
—from On the Road, which demonstrates Kerouac's use of imagery in a beat style.

Writer, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, USA. He studied at Columbia University (1940–2), and served in the merchant marine (1942–3) and the navy (1943). Later he studied at the New School for Social Research (1948–9). He lived with his mother in Lowell, held a variety of jobs, and traveled throughout the USA and...