Taking Stock
What have we accomplished? Good new poetry, that oughta be enough. –Jack Kerouac, in The Letters, by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, 472
Tag: Allen Ginsberg
Today’s One-Liner (#340)
Everybody should simply make a vow of kindness and let it go at that, try to stay sober too—start new party Vow of Kindness party. –Jack Kerouac, in The Letters, by Jack Kerouac and Allen…
Today’s One-Liner (#325)
I believe in Buddha kindness and nothing else, I believe in Heaven, in Angels, I eschew all Marxism and allied horseshit and psychoanalysis, and offshoot therefrom. –Jack Kerouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, January 1958
Today’s One-Liner (#312)
[Y]ou know the greatest of all Balzac’s novels is Cousin Bette. –Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, The Letters, 392
Today’s One-Liner (#287)
And of course, for your beginning studies of Buddhism, you must listen to me carefully and implicitly as tho I was Einstein teaching you relativity or Eliot teaching the Formulas of Objective Correlation on a…
More Recent Reading
Dear L., Here is a list of some books I’ve read in the past few years. Given my pretty rigid leftist mindset, Simone Weil’s maxim was often on my mind in reading the following……
Today’s One-Liner (#72)
Walking on water wasn’t built in a day. –Jack Kerouac, quoted in Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg
Writing Bliss Class: Fall 2024-Winter 2025
Recently my friend Lindsay Wolff inquired if I was doing a writing class this fall. Giving it some thought, I decided to offer the following just because I thought it could be (1) a fun …
Second Thoughts on Kerouac
But, disconcertingly, Kerouac was as likable in the flesh as he was repellent in print. In contrast to the seething Ginsberg, who went at me with everything he had, Kerouac (in spite of being the…
Today’s One-Liner (#24)
“You have to write your own history, nobody’s going to do it for you.” –Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Anne Waldman, Beats at Naropa