Birth Name: Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac; Birth Date: March 12, 1922

Date of Death: October 21, 1969 :cry:

Happy Birthday, Jack!

One of my favorite passages in any book is Jack's description of Sal being in love with Mary Lou and listening to Mary Lou and Dean make love while he lay awake on the sofa. Whewf.

Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker looked like Buddha
Here's the poem he wrote for Charlie Parker:

Charlie Parker, who recently died
Laughing at a juggler on the TV
After weeks of strain and sickness,
Was called the Perfect Musician.
And his expression on his face
Was as calm, beautiful, and profound
As the image of the Buddha
Represented in the East, the lidded eyes
The expression that says "All Is Well"
This was what Charlie Parker
Said when he played, All is Well.
You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning
Like a hermit's joy, or
Like the perfect cry of some wild gang
At a jam session,
"Wail, Wop"
Charlie burst his lungs to reach the speed
Of what the speedsters wanted
And what they wanted
Was his eternal Slowdown.

I can drive up to his grave in Lawrence tomorrow and take pics if you want?

And if I can find the cemetary...

My favourite part in On The Road is when Sal hitches a ride with the man who believes in self-starvation. I think the passage is very interesting + thought provoking.

When I was your age, I hadn't even heard of Kerouac and, if I had, I probably wouldn't have been interested. You never cease to amaze me. I don't say this lightly: I hope my daughters turn out like you. Wow!

Geez. You are something else.

:thumbsup: :hi: :hug:

:) thanks guys.

around nineteen...

I haven't read him in a while, perhaps I should give him a good look see...

He did mention my home town in "Vanity of Duluoz"...

It was the first book I ever read that made me want to shake the author's hand and thank him for having written it. Unfortunately, by the time I read "On The Road," Kerouac had been dead for almost 20 years.

During the late '80s and early '90s, I read everything by and about the Beat Generation on which I could lay my hands. Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, DiPrima, you name it.

It's just a shame that politically Kerouac had to be so goddamned right-wing. :(

Wow - it is fun to listen to....And don't blame Jack for being right wing. Look at the time in which he lived. It's a whole different world. He certainly wasn't pro-vietnam war which makes him okay in my book - ya know?

“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..."

...“On The Road”

:toast:

It's the only spoken word stuff I have on my iPod!

;)

the reading! OMG - I have to get that out - right now!

And the "Beat Generation" box that Rhino put out a few years later (on CD) is a very nice compantion piece to it.

Going to play some of it now!

:)

Here's the quote I just sent to my dad (also a big fan, that's who turned me on to him when I was a wee, wee teen!):

"All my life I was fascinated by the first thaws of New England March; not until I was told I was actually born in the midst of one did I vaguely remember the day of my birth, or is this too far-fetched? Not in the least (my darkface protests across the continent to thee.) I remember it, I remember the day of my birth. I remember the red air and the sadness--"the strange red afternoon light" Wolfe also was hung on--with particular eternity-dream vividness, or if not vividness, vastness; some dream of late afternoon. Six years later, on a similar
red afternoon, but in dead of frozen winter, I discovered my soul; that is to say, I looked about for the first time and realized I was in a world and not just myself."

[JK from letter to Neal Cassady, December 28, 1950)

Product Description:
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Johnson's Beat memoir is "the safe-deposit box that contains the last, precious scrolls of the New York '50s" (The Washington Post).

Jack Kerouac. Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. LeRoi Jones. Theirs are the names primarily associated with the Beat Generation. But what about Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman), Edie Parker, Elise Cowen, Diane Di Prima, and dozens of others? These female friends and lovers of the famous iconoclasts are now beginning to be recognized for their own roles in forging the Beat movement and for their daring attempts to live as freely as did the men in their circle a decade before Women's Liberation.

Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Johnson, an aspiring novelist and a secretary at a New York literary agency, fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. While Kerouac traveled to Tangiers, San Francisco, and Mexico City, Johnson roamed the streets of the East Village, where she found herself in the midst of the cultural revolution the Beats had created. Minor Characters portrays the turbulent years of her relationship with Kerouac with extraordinary wit and love and a cool, critical eye, introducing the reader to a lesser known but purely original American voice: her own.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140283579/qid=1110685361/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-9697254-2172658

I found Joyce Johnson's descriptions of Kerouac and those in his orbit to be refreshingly objective. It's a glimpse of the beat poets free from over-romanticization as well as unwarranted criticism. I highly recommend this book.

I hadn't heard of her, but I am a fan of Ginsberg, Ezra Pound and Burroughs.

This is a photo of Keith Olbermann, from his book The Big Show. Apparently, he was doing a mock-record album ad. But we at the KOEB felt it worthy of stealing for our own.

This pic is one of my favorites! :loveya: Keith

I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Happy Birthday Jack

fair. I feel like I missed out on my teen/early twenties years because I was so parochial. Drat.

my dad passed 'on the road' on down to me when i was in middle school...it changed the way i looked a the world as cliche as that sounds...oh well

going to belittle your thoughts on the book. I just wish I had parents who had enlightened me in such a way.

you know him now so why worry? we are all a product of our environments and who knows if you would've been such a sweetheart if you'd had "enlightened" parents...

anyways i am out to party for the night so goodnight everyone and goodnight miss jazz...:*

Thanks for calling me a sweetheart.

you are one of my favoritist people.

:hi:

I think of your mother
and the tears she cried, she cried for none other
than her little boy lost in our little world that hated
and that dared to drag him down.

As much as I loved "On the Road" the book that haunts me the most is "Desolation Angels."

"Visions of Cody" is my favorite.

I was thinking of taking on "Dharma Bums" next. Have you read that one?

And I remember I really liked it. Maybe it's time for a re-read.

"Visions of Cody" isn't much on the linear narrative; it's kind of an extended prose-poem in a way (although there is story to it). It's just total immersion in the music of his prose, which is what I love most. YMMV

But I love his use of language too so I may try "Visions of Cody" after "Dharma Bums."

I often wonder what it says of me that three of my favorite authors (HST, Kerouac, and Jane Austen) I love much more for the words they use than for the stories they tell.

All the authors you mention were pretty good storytellers too -- but that's not why we read the writers we love most, instead of say, pulp thrillers or magazines. :thumbsup:

I also agree that HST, Austen and Kerouac are good story tellers but if you read a small, dry plot summary of the books I love (Fear & Loathing, Pride & Prejudice, Desolation Angels) the books sound almost lame. It's the words they use that bring those tales to life.

From Desolation Angels...

In fact why do I fight myself? Let me begin with a confession of my first murder and go on with the story and you, wings and all, judge for yourself - This is the Inferno - Here I sit upside-down on the surface of the planet earth, held by gravity, scribbling a story and I know there's no need to tell a story and yet I know there's no need for silence - but there's an aching mystery-

Why else should we live but to discuss (at least) the horror and the terror of all this life, God how old we get and some of us go mad and everything changes viciously - it's that vicious change that hurts, as soon as something is cool and complete it falls apart and burns -

Above all, I'm sorry - but my sorriness won't help you, or me - "

He follows with a long story about killing a mouse in his cabin. That story is probably one of the things that contributed to my not eating meat.

:toast:

Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-condident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do -- just start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do --.
--From The Subterraneans


Photo from Rooknet

:bounce:

You're missed.

by Dan Wakefield

I recommend it highly

and re-read lots of them at 17.

Happy Birhtday!

Maybe I will go out and buy a book today. It is nice and I haven't been downtown in a few weeks.

Who's up for Ft Worth this afternoon? I'll buy the first beer at the Saucer.

I liked On The Road, but I really liked Subterraneans, the story of his love affair with Mardou in New York, early 1950's. It reads like one big Prose Poem.

I also have a recording of Kerouac riffing over Steve Allen's piano playing. Beat Poetry at its finest...

Here I am in San Francisco paying homage to the Beats...



RL